As readers of this blog (and my Observer column) will know, Erik Brynjolfsson’s and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine
So every time you see a manager or administrator proudly unveiling a new paper or online form for imposing bureaucratic order on an organisational process that hitherto had been entrusted to human judgement, you will know where the targets are being affixed.
Beautiful piece in the New Yorker by Mark Slouka about the death of his father. Stopped me in my tracks today. Maybe this will explain why:
It needs to be said: in some strange way, my father’s death has made the thought of dying easier. The door opened, and he walked through it successfully; the land of the dead is a peopled place for me now because he’s there, somewhere. And, because he’s done it, because he’s pulled this thing off, it’s become conceivable for me as well. Hell, if the old man can do it, I can do it.
It’s an unexpected gift, this release from fear—it’s like a gentling touch, a father’s voice. He lifts you onto his lap, presses your head to his chest, pets your hair. You can hear his heart. Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, it’s O.K., it’s O.K., it’s O.K., he says as your sobs begin to slow, then catch, then slow some more. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. We all must die. Accept, accept.
And I just might, except that this is not my father’s voice, which is as alive to me as anything in this world. This is something very different, a flowering as deceptive as cancer, blooming in the light of his loss. A flowering fed on self-pity and orphaned love.
Accept? My father was irritated by death, chafed at and ignored it. It was an annoyance, an inconvenience. He fought it to a standstill, refused the morphine of the ages. Harps and virgins? Please. Oblivion would do fine, thank you. In the meantime, there was injustice and stupidity to perforate, cruelty to expose, the absurd and gorgeous carnival of the world to watch going by.
“What is this sickly sentimentality?” he’d say to me, “this weakening at the knees? I was old. I died. It’s to be regretted—certainly by me—but so what? Think of me when you need to, that’s more than enough. Now pour me another and get out of here—don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Six months in, the heart, the soul, the spine, begin to regenerate. Slowly. In moments of weakness, his voice saves me, which is appropriate. He was my father. Is.
The New York Times had a splendid editorial the other day, arguing the case for clemency for Edward Snowden, among other things.
Among the NSA violations unearth by the controversy, the editorial pointed out that the Snowden leaks
“revealed that James Clapper Jr, the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)”
According to the Guardian_, this prompted Robert Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to write to the _Times to deny the allegation. In his letter Litt refers to one of the key Senate advocates of NSA reform, Senator Ron Wyden, and continues:
“Senator Wyden asked about collection of information on Americans during a lengthy and wide-ranging hearing on an entirely different subject. While his staff provided the question the day before, Mr Clapper had not seen it. As a result, as Mr Clapper has explained, he was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications. In that context, his answer was and is accurate.
“When we pointed out Mr Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed. I spoke with a staffer for Senator Wyden several days later and told him that although Mr Clapper recognized that his testimony was inaccurate, it could not be corrected publicly because the program involved was classified.”
Litt concluded: “This incident shows the difficulty of discussing classified information in an unclassified setting and the danger of inferring a person’s state of mind from extemporaneous answers given under pressure. Indeed, it would have been irrational for Mr. Clapper to lie at this hearing, since every member of the committee was already aware of the program.”
If you wanted a case study in why this kind of surveillance threatens democracy, then this is it.
This morning’s Observer column.
Cloud computing is a good illustration of why much media commentary about – and public perceptions of – information technology tends to miss the point. By focusing on tangible things – smartphones, tablets, Google Glass, embedded sensors, wearable devices, social networking services, and so on – it portrays technology as gadgetry, much as earlier generations misrepresented (and misunderstood) the significance of solid state electronics by calling portable radios “transistors”.
What matters, in other words, is not the gadget but the underlying technology that makes it possible. Cloud computing is what turns the tablet and the smartphone into viable devices.
So the next phase begins. This Billboard report confirms that we’re on track to reach David Bowie’s prophetic insight (made in 2002) that one day music would be like water — available everywhere by turning a tap.
For the first time since the iTunes store opened its doors, the U.S. music industry finished the year with a decrease in digital music sales.
While the digital track sales decline had been expected due to weaker sales in the first three quarters, the digital album downturn comes as more of a surprise as the album bundle had started out the year with a strong first quarter.
Overall for the full year 2013, digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from the previous year’s total of 117.7 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
While industry executives initially refused to attribute the early signs this year of digital sales weakness to the consumer’s growing appetite for streaming, in the second half of the year many were conceding that ad-supported and paid subscription services were indeed cannibalizing digital sales.
Strange what one finds on the Net.
From David Runciman’s LRB review of Alex Ferguson’s fourth shot at autobiography.
Alex Ferguson is a conspiracist, which is not quite the same as being a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracists see patterns of collusion and deceit behind everyday events. Their default position is that someone somewhere is invariably plotting something. Conspiracy theorists go further: they want to join up the dots and discover the overarching pattern that makes sense of seemingly unrelated happenings. They are looking for the single explanation that underwrites everything. A conspiracist thinks that nothing is entirely innocent. A conspiracy theorist thinks that nothing is entirely incidental. Conspiracists can be devious, suspicious, confrontational and difficult to be around but they are also capable of making their way in the world, leveraging their paranoia into real power. Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts.
Interestingly, though, Fergie and Gordon Brown share an obsessive interest in the assassination of JFK.
Interesting snippet from the Mayor’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture:
Like it or not, the free market economy is the only show in town. Britain is competing in an increasingly impatient and globalised economy, in which the competition is getting ever stiffer.
No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.
Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.
And for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.
My colleague Andrew Rawnsley picked up on this in his Observer column, and perceives a link to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision.
Aldous Huxley called Brave New World, his dark depiction of a future for humankind in which everyone is conditioned to know their place, a “negative utopia”. Children are born into various castes, which are sub-divided into “Plus” and “Minus” members. Each caste is designed to serve predetermined roles in society from which they can never break free. There are the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons who are bred to do the menial tasks and chemically manipulated to prevent them from wanting to be anything more than they are. At the top sits a tiny elite of Alphas who wield the power.
I don’t know whether the mayor of London is familiar with Huxley’s novel. He might like one of its conceits: to sustain the placidity of the population, recreational and promiscuous sex is strongly encouraged by the state. I am sure he would protest that this was not his intention, but the vision of society that he promotes is not entirely remote from Huxley’s chilling dystopia. The mayor, who presumably regards himself as an Alpha Plus, is effectively telling the person who cleans his office, whom he dismisses as an Epsilon Minus, that their unequal fates are preordained at birth.
“Why on earth enter this territory?” asks one close ally of David Cameron. “Anything that has the whiff of eugenics is just not smart. A lot of people read that and thought, ‘Oh, fuck, Boris. Do you really want to say that?'”
The good news, as Rawnsley observes — and doubtless Tory strategists agree — is that Johnson is doing sterling work reinstating the Tories as the Nasty Party. Long may he continue in this important work.
I’m reading John Kay’s terrific book, Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly
Here’s his TEDx talk, which neatly fits the bill.