Icy leaf

Sometimes, frost is beautiful.

Quote of the Day

”There is such a thing as ostentations humility, and it is all over Twitter. It won’t save your reputation that you yourself don’t tweet the twee stuff. You’ll be tainted by association on a platform where 812,000 people follow someone pretending to be the Downing Street cat. What is worse, you might join them over time.”

• Janan Ganesh, “The real reason to get off Twitter”, Financial Times, 12/13 November, 2022.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | performed at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest in 2011

Link

I’ve always loved this. It’s the 10th movement in The Brendan Voyage, Shaun Davey’s first major orchestral suite, composed for uilleann pipes played by Liam O’Flynn. It depicts Tim Severin’s adventure in reconstructing Saint Brendan’s 6th century Atlantic crossing to America in a 36-foot, two-masted boat built of Irish ash and oak, hand-lashed together with nearly two miles (3 km) of leather thong, wrapped with 49 traditionally tanned ox hides, and sealed with wool grease. The voyage ended on June 26, 1977 when Severin and his crew reached Peckford Island, Newfoundland. Hence the title of the movement.

Long Read of the Day

 Nostalgia for decline in deconvergent Britain

This is the less-than-compelling headline on a compelling analysis by the historian Adam Tooze of the real extent of the UK’s decline. And although Brexit obviously figures in the story, it really only plays a walk-on part in the longer narrative.

We need to talk about the state of Britain, the situation is dire. But the evocation of earlier debates about decline, debates which stretch back to the 1950s and beyond, is not just beside the point. It distracts from alarming novelty of the current situation. If you don’t engage with the data, the incoherence and repetitive structure of those earlier debates about decline, can seem to justify a relativistic or downright apologetic stance. Ding-dong exchanges between Brexiteers and Remainers have not helped to clarify the situation. Whilst Brexiteers chase the vanishing dream of “global Britain”, the national economic collapse that, according to “Project Fear”, was supposed to follow Brexit, never arrived either. That is not to say that the economic impact of Brexit will not be severe. The latest predictions are nasty. See for instance the CER. But the Brexit effects have not yet been fully felt.

More importantly for our purposes, the shock of 2016 cannot by itself explain what really ought to alarm us, namely the astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes that now stretches back over more than a decade. This stagnation, and this is the essential point, does not fall into the pattern familiar since the 1950s, of stop-start, of repeated currency crises and of more or less disappointing cycles of growth. Though it takes place at a high level of average income, the current stagnation is unlike anything in the last quarter millenium. The prospect of future damage from Brexit, only renders the outlook more bleak. In light of the UK’s situation and its likely future prospects, to indulge in the familiar back and forth between declinism and anti-declinism is to indulge in escapist nostalgia.

This is not a story about the last 20 or 30 years, btw. It’s about 120 years of decline. Here’s one of the charts that tells the story of the rate of growth of productivity in the UK — I.e. of the economic factor which ultimately determines how well the economy is doing.

On the more recent past, just after I put that chart in, I came on a striking quote from an essay in The Economist:

“Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power. Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.”

Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain Day

Sunday’s Observer column…

Here’s a reason to be cheerful this morning: it’s Public Domain Day, ie the day on which a new batch of hitherto copyrighted works comes out of copyright and enters the US public domain – the zone that consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy…

Do read the whole piece.

Can Elon Musk’s Tesla Really Last?

Following the vertiginous drop in its share price, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and NYT columnist, is sceptical. The column seems to be behind the paywall, but this is the gist:

I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.

So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.

He’s right. Tesla’s just an automobile company that was first off the block in the EV business — and had the nous to realise that its USP would be that it also had its own charging infrastructure available only to those who owned its cars.

The recent drop in Tesla’s share price signals that the stock market has finally recognised that it’s just another car company. Which is progress of a sort.

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A winter seascape

I love this picture by John Darch (Whom God Preserve) taken the other day on the beach at Ballybunion in Kerry. It’s a beach I knew well as a child, because my father (a keen golfer) was a member of the golf club there and the rest of the family sometimes decamped to the beach while he and his three regular playing partners tackled the fairways, rough, bunkers and greens of what the great Tom Watson (who won five British Opens) once called “the best golf course in the world”.

Later on, members of the club commissioned this plaque in his honour.

Quote of the Day

”I think this is what’s wrong with our political system. It’s organized to get people elected, then the people we elect do the work of big companies. And their work is to squeeze every bit of value they can out of the natural and intellectual resources of the world, and keep it for themselves. If they can kill something that’s worth $100 to reap $1 of value from the corpse, they see that as good business. That’s the approach that has got our species into the climate change corner we’re in. If you burn everything all you’ll have left to breathe are smoking corpses. That’s where we are in everything humans do. That’s why we feel a void for ourselves, collectively. We blame the government, but we’re the ones who believe the lies. We know they’re lying but we believe them anyway.

• Dave Winer, as part of a blog post explaining why he was so disappointed by Obama’s Presidency, despite having supported him in every way he could.

Seemed like an appropriate quotation to start the year.

Musical alternative to the radio news of the Day

Mozart | 12 Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, maman KV 265 | Clara Haskil

Link

Such a show-off, that Mozart kid. The piece reminds me of the film Amadeus and Peter Shaffer’s portrayal of him as “the John McEnroe of music” (as some critic put it.)

Long Read of the Day

 Greta Thunberg ends year with one of the greatest tweets in history

Lovely piece by Rebecca Solnit on the connection between machismo, misogyny and hostility to climate action.

On 27 December, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.

Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

Her reply gained traction to quickly become one of the top 10 tweets of all time…

Read on. It’s a great story.

Books, etc.

As an experiment, we’re reading E.M.Forster’s novels and then watching the movies that have been based on them. We started with Room with a View, and then moved on to Howards End. A Passage to India is obviously the next on the list, but Christmas intervened, so that one is for 2023.

It’s been an interesting journey. First of all, it’s nice to re-engage with the books and to observe Forster’s writerly strengths and foibles; but most importantly to appreciate their significance in the era when they were first published. On that last criterion, he comes out of it well, tackling issues (sexism, imperialism, misogyny, class, sexuality) that were mostly taboo in his time.

It’s also interesting to see how screenwriters and directors like the Merchant Ivory team take a story one has come to know well and tell it in a different medium. Sometimes the book does it better; sometimes vice versa. And occasionally the film has to fill in gaps that the novelist has glossed over. In Howard’s End, for example Leonard Bast’s heart disease is not mentioned in the novel until after his violent death, whereas Merchant Ivory go to some lengths to set it up in the film.

I have a soft spot for Forster because — in one of those serendipitous accidents that shape a life — I attended his 90th birthday party. I was there because one of the first things my late wife Carol and I did when we arrived in Cambridge in 1968 was to join the Cambridge Humanists, of which he was then the Patron. The society decided to celebrate his birthday in his rooms in King’s and all members were invited. And there he was, in a wheelchair, but very much present. What struck me was how small and modest he looked: there was nothing of the ‘great man of literature’ about him. Which was reassuring but also slightly disappointing to an impressionable lad like me.

The event was hosted by Francis Crick, who six years earlier had (with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.

As you can imagine, it was a heady experience for a scholarship boy (and an engineering student) who had just arrived from Ireland. Afterwards I read several of Forster’s novels followed by Aspects of E.M. Forster, a nice collection of essays by friends of his which had been given to me by John Fenton (also a member of the Cambridge Humanists). I’ve just re-read it with renewed pleasure, and re-learned things from it (such as how Forster had wound up as a Fellow of King’s) that I had forgotten.

But the book of Forster’s that I liked best was his collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy which somehow better evoked the quiet, undemonstrative, uncharismatic liberal I had seen on his birthday.

I’ve always liked his adage that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” And Two Cheers is full of evocations of that quiet, undemonstrative, liberal temperament of his. Think of, “I do not believe in Belief… Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.” Or, “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” Or, “The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

My one quibble with Forster is that he was wrong about Joyce’s Ulysses, which — in Chapter 6 of Aspects of the Novel — he described as

a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the Interests of Hell.

But then even Virginia Woolf got Ulysses wrong, so Forster was in good company.

My commonplace booklet

For the Brexiteer in your life

God Save Private Eye!

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Quintessentially English

A parish church seen on a walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”A committee is an animal with four back legs.”

• John Le Carré

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Arrival of the Queen of Sheba | Academy of Ancient Music

Link

Can’t think of a better way to greet the arrival of a New Year!

Long Read of the Day

The Deep Structure of Democratic Crisis

Talk to any (continental) European who is interested in politics and soon or later you will find yourself talking about the radical difference between the ‘Anglosphere’ and the rest of Europe. And that’s because such a difference really exists. The UK and the US have more in common than most people seem to realise. Just to list three examples: both have dysfunctional electoral systems which produce un-representative legislatures; both are two-party states in which the two dominant political parties have been hollowed out by sectional interests; and both are now scarred by alarming levels of socio-economic inequality. And of course they also share a common language and ruling elites heavily invested in neoliberal ideologies.

All of which is a long way of explaining why this review essay by Ruth Berins Collier and Jake Grumbach about the underpinning structural features of post-industrial political economy that constitute a challenge to democracy is interesting. It’s primarily about the US, but it has resonances on this side of the Pond also. What’s most striking about it is the way it tries to get at the seismic shifts that underpin the chaos of the present moment in both societies.

First, to use a term of art from political science, the structure of mass politics shifted from a single dominant “cleavage”— a conflict between owners and workers organized by labor unions — to a pattern in which politics is organized around many different competing cleavages. Second, there was a shift in the balance of power between capital and the state, which reduced the capacity of the government to respond to social and economic upheaval. Both of these developments present a challenge to democracy, and technology has only accelerated each.

Worth a read, IMO.

Books, etc.

Just reflecting on the best books I read in 2022…

The ones that particularly stand out are:

• Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. I found it a compulsive read — and sometimes a salutary one because it forced me to contemplate the errors of my casual assumptions! For example, for many years after I’d read Rodgers’s ‘The Age of Fracture’ and Mirowski on Hayek, Von Mises and the stealthy rise of the ‘Neoliberal Thought Collective’ I’d come to regard Ronald Reagan not as a prime motive force but as a kind of genial cheerleader of economic forces that were already under way as he climbed to the Presidency. Indeed, when I was the Observer’s TV critic during his presidency, I made a point of always referring to him as “the Acting President of the United States” and revelled in the stories of how he watched a re-run of ‘The Sound of Music’ instead of reading James Baker’s Briefing Book the night before chairing the Williamsburg summit. In other words, I underestimated him — saw him as the useful idiot of people smarter than him. But the most valuable thing about the book is the way it clarified the process by which an ideology gets translated into actual power. That’s where Gerstle’s idea of a political ‘order’ is such a masterstroke, especially the criterion that, to qualify, it has to be a mindset that infects not just one particular political party but also its opponents! That’s very illuminating in relation to Tony Blair’s ’New Labour’! Also, as I read the book I kept thinking about Thomas Kuhn and his view of how scientific disciplines work. You know the model: in any discipline, normal life revolves around stable intellectual frameworks that he eventually called ‘paradigms’. But then there comes a moment where there’s a realisation that a dominant paradigm is running into trouble and a rival one appears. And then, suddenly, the discipline is plunged into crisis because the old and new paradigms are ‘incommensurable’ — there exists no neutral language by which the relative merits of each can be objectively assessed. (Think Newtonian dynamics and quantum mechanics.) The thought that occurred to me as the book drew to a close is that we are now entering the political equivalent of a paradigm shift. Which means a period of chaos!

• Roy Foster’s On Seamus Heaney — a moving and sensitive exploration of Heaney’s poetic journey, written by a great scholar who both understands the cultural context in which the poet evolved and loves his work. As do I.

• Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century. A fine book by a great scholar that was long in the making, but worth waiting for. Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) wrote a really perceptive review of it alongside the Gerstle book.

• Jamie Susskind’s  The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century. The most refreshing thing about this fine book is its ideological stance. The reason why most current attempts to rein in tech power are doomed to fail is because its critics implicitly accept its legitimacy rather than being outraged by its arrogant effrontery. That because they’ve been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid for nearly half a century. Ideology, after all, is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. It’s time for a change, and ‘The Digital Republic is a good place to start.

My commonplace booklet

Just what your favourite Instagram Influencer needs

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve).

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England’s green and pleasant land…

Millfield under snow

… under snow.

Quote of the Day

”He who hesitates is sometimes saved.”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Norah Jones | Come Away With Me

Link

Long Read of the Day

Who Broke American Democracy?

An insightful essay by Angus Deaton on Project Syndicate which widens the perennial focus from the usual suspects (polarisation, the GOP and social media) onto the way the country’s political and electoral systems have catered to the interests of elites and the well-off at the expense of those without a college degree. Obvious, really, but it takes a Nobel laureate to point it out.

The current mainstream narrative in the United States holds that democracy is under threat from MAGA zealots, election deniers, and Republicans who are threatening to ignore unfavorable results (as well as recruiting loyalists to oversee elections and police polling places).

That narrative is true, but only up to a point. There is another, longer-running story with a different set of malefactors. It’s a story in which, for more than 50 years, Americans without college degrees have seen their lives deteriorate over a range of material, health, and social outcomes.

Although two-thirds of the adult US population does not have a four-year college degree, the political system rarely responds to their needs and has frequently enacted policies that harm them in favor of corporate interests and better-educated Americans. What has been “stolen” from them is not an election, but the right to participate in political decision-making – a right that is supposedly guaranteed by democracy. Viewed in this light, their efforts to seize control of the voting system are not so much a repudiation of fair elections as an attempt to make elections deliver some of what they want…

Read on. It’s good.

Books, etc.

Two interesting books coming in 2023.

1. Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Democracy and capitalism have always been uneasy bedfellows, but to date they have managed to find ways of getting along. But there’s a real crunch coming and Martin Wolf is someone who has been thinking about this for a long time. It’s out in February.

2. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington have an interesting book on the stocks — The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. For decades I’ve been amazed by the global consulting racket and the way that firms like PwC, KPMG, Bain, the Boston Group, McKinsey et. al. get away with it. I enjoyed Duff McDonald’s revealing profile of that last outfit, btw, so not surprisingly, Mazzucato’s and Collington’s book is on my list.

My commonplace booklet

Emma Thompson’s tribute to Alan Rickman.

Truly wonderful short video. Do watch it.

My New Year’s Resolution: read his diaries.

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Quote of the Day

”Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

Hmmm… One day, many years ago, I gave a keynote talk to a large audience (300 or so). It went well, I thought — good questions, lots of applause at the end, etc. Smugly, I gathered my papers and headed for the exit when I noticed one of my academic colleagues who had been sitting — unnoticed by me — at the back. “Very good lecture”, he said. “Just the right number of half-truths.”

Out of the mouths of babes and academics…

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joachim Cooder | When The Train Comes Along

Link

New to me, but striking.

Long Read of the Day

Martin Rees on the future, existential risks and a good many other things besides

Martin Rees (Whom God Preserve) published another book this year — If Science is to Save Us — and John Mecklin, Editor-in-Chief of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interviewed him about it and a number of related topics. I found the transcript of the interview fascinating, and hope you do too.

Here’s how it begins…

Martin Rees: Can I just say, at the start, that my book is not very homogeneous; the first half is concerned with big global issues, and the second half is the more personal perspective of a scientist, and interaction with the scientific community, with the public, with the government and politicians, etc. So the book’s really in two halves, and those who don’t like it say it is a dog’s breakfast; those who like it more will say it’s a smorgasbord.

John Mecklin: I enjoyed both parts of it. But could you quickly for our readers summarize the part at the beginning that is less personal: What was the main point you were trying to make with If Science is to Save Us?

Rees: I was making the point that more and more of the issues which concern us or determine our future have a scientific dimension…

Reflections on Generative ‘AI’: #2

(A thoughtstream on a current obsession.)

The last couple of years have seen an explosion of new ‘tools built on machine-learning technology which the tech industry brands as “AI” (i.e. artificial intelligence) in an attempt to give them a veneer of respectability. After all, “Machine-learning” isn’t exactly a sexy term. While these tools are certainly artificial, they are only ‘intelligent’ in an extremely limited, focussed sense.

The tools that have mainly captured public and media attention recently are so-called ‘generative’ ones because they are able to create artefacts (graphical objects and written compositions) that humans also create (or aspire to create).

This note is about the graphical tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. (If you’re puzzled about the names, then join the club, but I’m sure that are rationales for them somewhere.)

Public interest has been ignited by the images that these tools can create in response to a verbal prompt from a user. For example: “Draw a picture of J.K. Rowling as an astronaut.” The results are often amusing, unexpected and/or dramatic.

Recently, one of these images — labelled Théâtre D’opéra Spatial — won first prize in Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition.

It’s a very striking work and was created by a games-maker, James Allen, using Midjourney, one of the ‘generative’ tools. Mr Allen’s Blue Riband sparked a controversy among artists and others which left him unmoved. Their anger should be directed at the companies that make the tools, he said, not at people like him who merely use them. And he topped it off with an incendiary closing line: “Art is dead, dude”, he said to the New York Times, “It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

This rings a bell, does it not, for anyone interested in the history of media? It brings to mind the moment in 1839 when the French painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype (an early type of photograph) for the first time and promptly declared, “From today, painting is dead!”

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we know that Delaroche was wrong. He had fallen into the trap that the great cultural critic Neil Postman identified many decades ago — believing that new media technology is additive (or subtractive) when in fact its main impact is ecological. A new communications technology doesn’t wipe out its predecessors. The Internet didn’t kill broadcast TV, for example, but it certainly changed the media ecosystem in which broadcast media have to operate.

Or, as L.M. Sacasas puts it,

Powerful new tools can restructure the complex techno-social ecosystem we call art in sometimes striking and often unpredictable ways. Even if we don’t think a new tool “kills” art, we should be curious about how it might transform art, or at least some of the skills and practices we have called art.”

Of course, in one limited sense Delaroche was right: photography undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on some kinds of painting — ‘realism’ — and photography made that particular activity more or less pointless in a few years.

But, as another critic, Federico Alegria put it,

painting was not going to surrender, and that’s when many of the now known “isms” (abstractionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dadaism, and TOO MANY others) became alive. And that’s one of the great beauties of this tragicomedy, photography took a lot from painting, but by doing that, painting was capable of truly reinventing itself from scratch.

Besides, Delaroche’s hyperbolic prediction rather overlooked the extent to which, for centuries, painters had been using photographic ideas to help them in their work. Years ago, David Hockney wrote a terrific book — Secret Knowledge – Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in which he demonstrated how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to develop perspective and chiaroscuro. And, in another remarkable book, my former colleague, Phil Steadman, explored Jan Vermeer’s possible knowledge of 17th-century optical science, and outlined the history of the camera obscura which projected an accurate image for artists to trace. The clincher for me was Phil’s meticulous reconstruction of Vermeer’s studio, complete with a camera obscura, which provided intriguing evidence for his conjecture that Vermeer did indeed use the device.

The moral is one that is generally lost on the tech industry. Because its practitioners know no history, they invariably think that everything they come up with is de novo. Sometimes, perhaps, it is. But the lesson from history is that however disruptive something novel appears to be, humans will find a way of using it, often in ways that its inventors never envisaged. The street finds its own use for things.

Part of an ongoing series…

My commonplace booklet

My friend Quentin had an interesting post on his blog yesterday. He had come on this juxtaposition and wondered if it was a spoof, so he investigated — and it wasn’t.

The whole post is worth reading.

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2 x 8 Star Street

Quote of the Day

”Cricket is full of theorists who can ruin your game in no time.”

• Ian Botham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Narrow Daylight

Link

Selection prompted by the slowly-lengthening daylight hours.

Long Read of the Day

Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon

Perceptive rant by George Dillard.

I was prompted to write this post when I ran across the following post on Mastodon by Annalee Newitz:

Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.” First of all, it’s an app. C’mon. Second of all, aren’t these the same people who write breathless explainers about the wonder of cryptocurrencies, which are not only impossible to understand but literally built from bullshit?

Like Newitz, I’m an increasingly enthusiastic adopter of Mastodon, and, like them, I’ve been kind of confused by the press coverage around the platform. The media seems to be regarding Mastodon as a bizarre curiosity, something that the general public couldn’t possibly grasp. Sure, the guys with a Linux server in their basement might geek out on it, but this thing isn’t for the masses…

The problem — as Dillard acutely observes — is that Mastodon doesn’t fit the standard tech narratives.

He’s right. Do read it.

Reflections on Generative ‘AI’: #1

(A thoughtstream on a current obsession.)

2023 looks like being more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. In Spring of that year Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released Mosaic, the first modern Web browser and suddenly the non-technical world understood what this strange ‘Internet’ thing was for.

We’ve now reached a similar inflection point with something called ‘AI’, which is really the tech industry’s name for an arcane technology called machine-learning. Until now, most people hadn’t a clue what it was about, or indeed what it was for (except perhaps automating jobs). But in 2022 a new variant of this ‘AI’ arrived. It’s called ‘Generative AI’ — machine-learning systems that can ‘generate’ plausible artefacts. Midjourney, for example, can create interesting and/or amusing graphics in response to text prompts like “Draw a picture of J.K Rowling as an astronaut”.

Up to now, most people have regarded them as interesting toys (though graphics artists fear them as threats to their jobs). But the first killer-app of Generative AI has just arrived in the form of ChatGPT, a system that can often (though not always) generate plausible text in response to a prompt. It’s become wildly popular almost overnight — going from zero to a million users in five days. Why? Because everyone can intuitively get that it can do something that they feel is useful but personally find difficult to do themselves. Which means that — finally — they understand what this ‘AI’ thing is for.

Well, maybe they do. But my guess is that they don’t understand what it might mean. Hence this series…

More tomorrow.

My commonplace booklet

What we don’t say in Silicon Valley anymore

From the blog of Om Malik (Whom God Preserve)…

In my time writing about Silicon Valley, it has gone from being a place of naive curiosity to a place where posturing is everything. And the reason we have this state of affairs is that, with extreme success, the denizens of the valley have ostracized these four phrases from their vocabulary:

• I’m sorry
• I don’t know
• I was wrong
• I need help.

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Spot the snapper

Quote of the Day

” It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

• Fredric Jameson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Anarchy in the UK | The Ukulele Orchestra

Link

I was much cheered by this. Thanks to Ian Low for pointing me towards it.

Long Read of the Day

The missing profile of a crypto Wunderkind

Some time ago Adam Fisher wrote a remarkable — and compulsively readable — profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX crypto exchange which went belly-up recently, who is now out on $250m bail in the US. The spectacularly enthusiastic profile was originally written for Sequoia Capital, a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invested in SBF’s activities. But once FTX imploded it suddenly disappeared from Sequoia’s site.

Fortunately it was archived (that’s the Internet for you) and here it is for your delectation.

It’s a long but (IMO) a striking — and also salutary — read. Someone said that it looked like something that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written in his day. And I can see why.

From the closing paragraphs, though, you can see why it suddenly disappeared.

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

We shouldn’t be too hard on Mr Fisher. We’ve all written daft things in our time. But what of the allegedly sober Venture Capitalist which commissioned the piece, and invested in SBF?

My Commonplace Booklet

A novel sales pitch for a literary magazine

From the London Review of Books yesterday…

You will know the tune, so here are the lyrics:

Rudolph the well-read reindeer
Had a love for stunning prose.
Rudolph the well-read reindeer
Wanted to be in-the-know.

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and read the Sun.
They never let poor Rudolph Give a gift to anyone.

Then one dreary Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
Rudolph with your mind so bright
What gifts should I give tonight?

Then all the other reindeer
Opened up the LRB,
And Rudolph the well-read reindeer
He went down in history!

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The World Wide (Cob)web

Quote of the Day

”My Twitter feed has essentially become a television tuned to a channel only showing 24/7 programs about what should and shouldn’t be on TV.”

• Austin Carr, writing in Bloomberg’s  Tech Daily

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss | The Wexford Carol

Link

A change from the usual Xmas fare.

Long Read of the Day

O Holy Crap

Wonderful guest post by Walter Kirk on Bari Weiss’s blog.

About five years ago, for seven dollars, I bought an old citrus juicer at a thrift shop. It was one of those vintage small appliances which seem built to survive gas explosions and hammer attacks. When I turned on the motor with a metal toggle switch, a drive shaft spun a heavy ceramic knob that gouged out the hearts of lemon and orange halves, leaving not a scrap of pulp uncrushed. The thing worked beautifully, almost like new, so I looked up its serial number on the internet to see when the unit was manufactured, guessing it might be almost 40 years old. 

Wrong. It dated to the 1940s. It was 70, the stubborn monster, still giving satisfaction with every use.

I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill. 

I have a whole ghost kitchen in this landfill, and soon I will need to reserve a bigger plot…

You get the drift.

Time to Close Down the Elon Musk Circus

Jack Shafer writing on the way Uber-trolls like Musk and Trump lead journalists everywhere by the nose. At the moment Musk is making monkeys of the world’s mainstream media.

In addition to being the world’s second richest person, Elon Musk is now the greatest press manipulator since Donald Trump inhabited the White House. Daily, often hourly, frequently minute-by-minute, Musk intercepts the news cycle and rides it like a clown on a barrel to the astonishment of all. Should he fall, he always gets back on and rides some more as the press corps records and transmits his every gyration.

…

Given Musk’s track record, reporters should put little stock in what he says. Instead, the press continues to chart and publish nearly every bold utterance he makes and every tweet he types into his account. This tendency, already severe, has exploded into full flower over the past month, ever since Musk rolled his barrel into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and established residence there to remake the service. Why does the press keep falling for this circus act?

I’ve been asking that question for several years. To no avail. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

The Military-Industrial complex is alive and well and living in the Pentagon

From The Register…

The US Air Force has awarded $334 million to defense contractor Leidos to develop the next phase in its hypersonic arsenal: An unmanned craft meant for super-speed spying dubbed “Mayhem.” 

This latest contract award comes less than a week after the USAF announced the successful test of its first service-ready hypersonic weapon (defined as able to travel faster than Mach 5 while maintaining maneuverability), the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW.

Unlike ARRW, Leidos’ Mayhem award isn’t just about building a weapon – it’s for “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike craft.” A warhead will fit, but this is more like a photon torpedo/probe/space coffin from Star Trek: customizable to meet the needs of the mission.

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Dickensian Xmas

A doorway in Doughty Street, London, the street where Charles Dickens once lived, photographed one December when I was on my way to an Observer lunch. Further down the street I passed the house which was the office of the Spectator magazine, then edited by one Boris Johnson. I stopped, thinking that I would photograph that door also, when it opened and out stepped a posh floozie of the kind favoured by Johnson. The conversation went like this:

Floozie: “What do you think you’re doing?”

Me: “I’m thinking of taking a photograph.”

Floozie: “Why?”

Me: “Because I’ve always wondered what a den of iniquity looked like?”

As I raised the Leica to my eye she turned on her heel and went back into the building, slamming the door behind her.

After which I went to lunch in high good humour, though without the pic I was after.

Quote of the Day

”There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.”

• Anthony Trollope

(Who used to write a thousand words an hour before breakfast.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Patti Smith performs Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” | Nobel Prize Award Ceremony 2016

Link

It’s not often you see a veteran performer overcome by the lyrics she’s singing. Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup

Fabulous essay by Laura Preston

For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person.

Gripping, illuminating, nicely written and a good antidote to the kind of gig-work she was doing.

Books, etc.

A classic laid bare

Lovely review by Alex Clark of Matthew Hollis’s  The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem.

Sample:

One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. “‘Oh!’ said Joyce faintly, and sat down.” That night the Château Latour flowed, and subsequently a humiliated Joyce settled every bill…

My commonplace booklet

Dave Winer’s not going to allow Musk get between him and his car

Lovely rant by Dave (Whom God Preserve):

As a Tesla owner I find all the press about people dumping their Teslas because Musk is a brat pretty fucked up. Like going to a diner in Ohio to find out what Trumpsters are up to as if that were measuring anything credible.

I am an extreme liberal, esp when it comes to the web. My creds are excellent. And I love my Model Y. I feel like its a privilege to drive it every time I get in the car. And I’ve owned some terrific cars in my life. There are some cars that are just great to drive. So great that their flaws are not relevant. That Elon Musk is tied to the product is unfortunate. But until I drive a car that’s equal to the car I have, I’m not going to bend to the bullshit the press is putting out there.

I also still use Twitter. I’m not going to let Musk chase me off. He’ll have to suspend me if he wants me off. I would regret that. I’ve been on Twitter since 2006. Musk can do whatever he wants, Twitter is big enough for both of us.

I voted for Obama twice, Hillary and Biden. So fuck you if you think driving a Tesla is like being a MAGA.

Yep. As a fellow Tesla owner I agree with every word of this. One of the strangest things about getting the car was the way people started to hold me personally responsible for Musk.

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