Rooftop view

In my favourite Provencal village. And I didn’t use a drone to get the shot!

Quote of the Day

”I don’t think there was ever a piece of music that changed a man’s decision on how to vote.”

• Artur Schnabel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Billy Taylor Trio | I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Link

Long Read of the Day

Deja Vu all over again.

I know history isn’t supposed to repeat itself, but sometimes one can’t help feeling that it does.

Exhibit A: Readers with long memories will remember that in October 1956, Anthony Eden, a Tory prime minister, launched an invasion of Egypt after cooking up a conspiracy with the French and the Israelis. His aim: to show how the British Empire dealt with an upstart Arab Colonel and coup leader who had the temerity to nationise the Suez Canal (a critical strategic waterway owned by the British and the French). The Eisenhower administration, which had opposed the invasion, threatened to start selling America’s holdings in British government bonds. The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, told Eden that the Yanks were serious and that the country’s foreign exchange reserves would be unable to sustain the value of the pound sterling if the threat was carried out. British, French and Israeli troops were withdrawn. Egyptian sovereignty and ownership of the canal was confirmed by the United States and the United Nations. Eden resigned in January 1957, and Britain discovered that its days as a great imperial power were over.

What brings this to mind is a fine column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland which suggests that that particular message hadn’t got through to some people in the Tory party. Here’s the money quote:

This week Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist of Deutsche Bank, told a Commons committee that Britain was facing a unique form of trade shock: “We haven’t seen this kind of trade deficit since 1955, since national account records began.” It was odd, because I too had been thinking about the mid-1950s, specifically the Suez crisis of 1956. The failure of that military adventure is now seen as the moment when a bucket of cold reality was thrown into Britain’s face, a humiliation that stripped the country of its imperial delusions, forcing it to accept that it was no longer a global superpower that could act alone. For a while, Britain learned that lesson: just five years after Suez, the country was knocking on Europe’s door, asking to join the club.

But some, especially in the Conservative party, never shook off the old delusion. By 2016, it was back, the Tories high on Brexit talk of a global Britain once again sailing the world’s oceans, free of the constraining hand of the EU, ready to return to its rightful grandeur. The Tories have been breathing those fumes for six years, and the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget was the result: the Suez of economic policy, a disastrous act of imagined imperial sovereignty.

As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the world’s reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britain’s place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it. Yep.

Exhibit B: The US has declared economic war on China. Not your old-fashioned kind of war, mind, but a modern one in the field of semiconductors, i.e. the core technology of the digital world. The Biden administration announced sweeping export controls on China’s entire chip sector. There are three main planks to the policy:

1. A ban on the export to China of specialised chips used for AI, or equipment to make these chips
2. Restrictions on exports of high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China
3. Making a new list of Chinese companies that can be quickly banned from buying various U.S. exports without a special licence.

“The primary purpose of these export controls,” writes Noah Smith, in a fine analysis of them,

is not to protect U.S. industry or to stop the leakage of intellectual property to economic competitors. Their purpose is to kneecap China’s semiconductor industry — to slow down the country’s push for technological self-sufficiency.

Well, well. Now spool backwards to the Cold War, when the policy of the US and its allies was to deny the Soviet Union access to cutting edge technologies of the day, especially those involving digital technology. The tool for doing this — CoCOM (the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls — was established in the early years of the Cold War and maintained until at least 1994. And, funnily enough, it mostly worked, though it had some counter-intuitive effects.

The one that struck me most forcibly involved cryptographic software. When in 1991 Phil Zimmermann came up with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) a program that used public-key cryptography to enable anyone to protect the privacy of their emails with military-grade security, it was initially defined as a munition under CoCOM rules, which meant that anybody seeking to export it from the US would require a special licence. But one day I was in the stacks of the university library looking for a reference on cryptography when I stumbled on a thick blue hardback volume with the letters ‘PGP’ on the spine. It turned out to be a facsimile of a lineprinter printout of Zimmermann’s code! It seems that while nobody in the US could export a magnetic tape or computer disk with the code, nobody had thought that it would be just as effectively exported via Gutenberg’s ancient technology!

In retrospect, trying to ban the export of computer code might have had a Canute-like charm. But, as Noah Smith explains, doing what the Biden Administration has decided on will have a really damaging impact on the targeted adversary. “For the past two or three years”, he writes,

China has been embarked on an all-out effort to build a domestic chip industry that can rival that of the U.S. and its East Asian allies (Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan). China’s effort has involved plenty of waste and mismanagement, but also some startling successes. China analysts have expressed confidence that the country would eventually be able to achieve its goal of self-sufficiency, probably more quickly than scoffing Americans expected.

This was probably why Biden took action now. If he had withheld the threat of semiconductor export controls as insurance against a possible future invasion of Taiwan, there’s a good chance that by the time China was ready to attack, it would have largely immunized itself against this economic weapon.

Interestingly, the US measures seem to involve not just the export of kit but also the export of know-how that resides in the brains of US citizens. Smith says that the new export bans include a rule that U.S. citizens aren’t allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry. They have been given a bleak choice: give up your job or lose your US citizenship. It seems that many have already made their decision. Smith’s hunch is that the rationale for this is because working for Chinese companies is deemed to represent an export of intellectual property to those companies.

It’ll take time to figure out how this new kind of economic warfare will pan out. But for now it looks awfully like going back to the early years of the Cold War. History repeating itself. Somehow, though, I can’t see Xi’s China imploding like the Soviet empire did.

My commonplace booklet

Harvard’s endowment fund has lost money for the first time in six years

From Quartz…

Harvard University’s endowment is worth $2.3 billion less than last year.

The Harvard Management Company (HMC)—a nonprofit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University that has managed the University’s endowment portfolio since 1974—posted a 1.8% loss on its investments in the year ending June 30, 2022, a financial report released Thursday (Oct. 13) shows.

One’s heart bleeds for the poor dears.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

A rose by any other name…

On our kitchen windowsill yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been.”

• Lytton Strachey on Dr Arnold in Eminent Victorians

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Variations on a Theme of Mozart | Alrio Diaz

Link

This has been on my ‘Favourites’ playlist for years.

Long Read of the Day

A Locus of Care

Justin E. H. Smith’s tribute to his late colleague Bruno Latour is a thing of beauty. It is also an insightful and generous reflection on his work.

This is how it opens…

Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the eastern Mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. Legends of her late-life migration to Southern Gaul had already been circulating for some time when the discovery of her skeletal remains in Saint-Maximin was announced in 1279, and the basilica was subsequently built up around this gravesite. In the fourteenth century the Genoese Dominican author Jacobus de Voragine tells the full story of Mary Magdalene’s shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, and of her subsequent long career of miracle-working throughout Provence. Europe was made Christian not just by real-time conversion, but also a great deal of retroactive inscription of Biblical personages, apostles, and early Church Fathers into the ancient history of what was not yet a well-delineated cultural-geographical sphere.

In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour.

“It’s nice, they give us a choice.” With this simple, gentle affirmation, our beloved old master, so often derided in the Anglosphere for his role in landing us in the current “post-truth” desert, seemed to sublate all the irony of the contrasting accounts of the skull’s origins, into something that was, well, true — and not only true, but good: a good and true method for navigating the perilous terrain on which the truth-claims of these only purportedly non-overlapping magisteria have done their best to coexist for the past five centuries or so…

Do read the whole thing. It had a particular resonance for me because many years ago my wife and I had been astonished by seeing the (hideous, IMO) skull and the rival interpretations of it. We had been staying in the former monastery next to the basilica and had wandered into the building as casual tourists wondering why such an impressive church had been constructed in a relatively modest Provençal town.

Smith’s summing up of Bruno’s significance seems to me to be spot on:

Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism. I am convinced that his comment about the skull in the crypt provides a key to his whole way of thinking. We have a choice — that’s what it all comes down to. Constructionism was never a matter of “just saying whatever”, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments, or out of our data, like a new sort of Divine Law. We have a choice as to how read the world, and it’s going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good.

It’s a great read and worth your time.

What are tech billionaires’ text messages like? Just as petty as ours, it turns out

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Most of the documents relevant to the case come varnished with three coats of prime legal verbiage, but one set turned out to be delightfully clear: the text messages exchanged between Musk and his buddies that had to be disclosed during the “discovery” process of the hearing. They come in exhibits H and J of his lawyers’ 151-page submission as 35 pages of messages, averaging 21 texts per page. That’s roughly 735 instances of pure, unadulterated billionaire-talk.

On the grounds that life is too short to be reading Musk’s text messages as well as his interminable Twitter stream, I’m ashamed to say that I had shirked the job of diving into the Delaware trove. But Scott Galloway, a prominent blogger, podcaster and NYU professor, is made of sterner stuff and took the plunge, seeking, as he put it, “a glimpse into the bowels of tech power”. And his conclusion from analysing private conversations between “some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world”? Simply that “bowels” was the correct metaphor…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

 Trump Outmaneuvers New York Lawsuit By Changing Name To Donald 2

Breaking news from The Onion:

PALM BEACH, FL—In a cunning attempt to outmaneuver the fraud lawsuit brought against him by the New York state attorney general, Donald Trump reportedly changed his name on Friday to Donald 2. “I’m not sure who these charges are referring to, as there is no such person named Donald Trump—I’m Mr. 2,” said 2, the former president, who confirmed that his driver’s license as well as his passport and all official personal documents now read “Donald J. 2.” “I’m Mr. 2, that’s me. I have no connection to this case. It’s an entirely different guy, though I do have it on good authority that if there were a Donald Trump, he’d be totally innocent.” At press time, 2 added that perhaps the lawsuit was referring to a certain 44-year-old businessman named Donald Trump Jr.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Always On

France, July 2022

Quote of the Day

”The cruellest lies are often told in silence.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and The Band | Forever Young

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Photographers in the 1970s Redefined the Medium

Nice anniversary essay in Aperture by Geoff Dyer.

I became interested in photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and looking at these old issues of Aperture, I see how much my sense of photography was a direct consequence of what was happening before then, in the 1970s. Photographers were busy taking photographs, making work, but interesting photographs are always being taken, great work is always being made, whatever the decade. In the ’70s, though, photography was being examined and defined in a way that harked back to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering inquiries into—and tireless lobbying on behalf of—the “idea photography” at the beginning of the century.

Books by Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Roland Barthes (whose Camera Lucida was published in French in 1980) were intended for the intellectually curious general reader rather than the specialist, and certainly not for practicing photographers. As Tod Papageorge later remarked, “Garry Winogrand never read Roland Barthes, and found whatever he’d seen of (Janet) Malcolm’s and Sontag’s original articles about photography in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books grimly laughable.” (How about photography curators? Well, there weren’t many back then, a point we’ll return to shortly.) These back issues of Aperture show the cultural texture and grain of the times, the work being done at the coal face of photographic life. As revealed in discussions and portfolios of documentary photography, color photography (as exemplified by William Eggleston), snapshot aesthetics, and so on, what we see, close-up and from a distance (of forty to fifty years), is a landscape of awareness…

It’s basically a hymn of praise for John Szarkowski, head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography, and the man who really shaped the perception of photography as a major artistic medium in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Musk, the budding diplomat

Jack Shaffer on Musk’s ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine:

This month, Musk dialed in additional attention to himself. Presumably, there haven’t been enough headlines about his on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter, his alleged romantic interludes, his dope smoking on Joe Rogan, his Tesla overpromising and all the other publicity stunts to stoke his sense of self-importance, so he’s drafted himself as a citizen-diplomat to end the Russian war on Ukraine. What better venue to promote his plan than on Twitter, where on Oct. 3 he proposed a 43-word peace plan that essentially sounded as if it had been scripted by Vladimir Putin, an HPD case if ever there was one, while sitting at his long table.

Great stuff. Worth reading.

Cliff edge looms for UK’s financial system

If you are — as I am — the lucky beneficiary of a supposedly gold-plated pension, you may be thinking that the market chaos triggered by the Truss administration economic ‘plans’ is nothing to do with you, then it might be wise to think again — as Richard Partington explains in yesterday’s Guardian.

It has a rather interesting graph:

Kwarteng’s mini-budget is widely seen as the trigger which set off a “doom loop” in bond markets last month as pension funds became snarled up in complex derivatives they had bought to guard against rising interest rates.

Schemes responsible for the money of pensioners across the UK had ploughed more than £1tn into so-called liability driven investment (LDI) funds. The schemes in question are the gold-plated defined benefit pension schemes, where the employer has promised a set level of pension each year, regardless of the fund’s performance.

Many used hedging arrangements to help ensure against shortfalls. Pensions are among the biggest buyers of government bonds, and as the value of those bonds fell, they faced demands for extra cash to cover the hedges. To raise that cash, they sold government bonds, sending the value of those assets even lower, requiring them to sell more bonds.

In the four days after Kwarteng’s ill-fated speech – before the Bank’s emergency intervention – 30-year bond yields rose by more than the annual increase in 23 out of the last 27 years. Some funds came close to the point of collapse.

And, as far as I can see, those hedging arrangements that some (many?) of the pension funds made are almost entirely unregulated. We’re back in pre-2008 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO) territory.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Miss Potter’s view

The view from one of the first-floor rooms in Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s cottage in the Lake District. It’s an nteresting house.

Quote of the Day

”Applause is a receipt, not a bill.”

• Artur Schnabel, explaining why he never did encores.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ladysmith Black Mambazo | Homeless Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

The internet is already over

This long piece by Sam Kriss is quite something. His style reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson, so fasten your seatbelt. Here’s a sample to get you in the mood.

You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but so will everything I despise. These days, it repeats itself whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive. Meet The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending…

I enjoyed it. But then I always enjoyed Hunter’s journalism.

Remembering Bruno Latour

Tuesday’s piece about him prompted a few people to ask “Yes, but what was he like? in person” One answer is provided by this video of his Inside lecture/performance that he did in New York in 2018. It’s just under an hour long, so you need to make an appointment with it.

Sciences Po, where he had a Chair (and was a dean for years) has a nice tribute to him on its website.

My commonplace booklet

‘The Owner of This iPhone Was in a Severe Car Crash’— or Just on a Roller Coaster

If, like me, you have an Apple Watch then, if you have a fall or are in a serious car crash, the watch will call emergency services if you don’t display signs of life or activity immediately after the event. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. But what if you’re one of those masochists who like going on heart-stopping funfair rides? The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about a woman who did just that.

On a sunny September Sunday, Sara White and her family headed to Kings Island amusement park outside Cincinnati.

The 39-year-old dentist zipped her two-day-old iPhone 14 Pro securely in her fanny-pack (‘bum’ for British readers), buckled into the Mystic Timbers roller coaster and enjoyed getting hoisted 109 feet in the air and whipped around at over 50 mph.

Afterward, she looked down at her phone. The lock screen was lined with missed calls and voice mails from an emergency dispatcher asking if she was OK.

During the ride, Apple’s new car-crash detection triggered and automatically dialled 911. The call to the Warren County Communications Center featured an automated voice message from Ms. White’s iPhone: “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash and is not responding to their phone.”

The message is repeated seven times during the call. As the phone made the call and played the automated message, it also picked up background audio from the scene—in this case cheers, music and other amusement-park sounds.

According to the 911 report, a team was sent to the ride but didn’t locate an emergency. When Ms. White realized what happened—ironically, when in line for the bumper cars—she called back the number to tell them she was OK.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Autumn leaves

Seen on a walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”

• David Sarnoff

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Concerto for two violins in D minor BWV 1043 | Sato and Deans | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Dose of Rational Optimism

That’s the title of Zachary Carter’s review in Dissent of Brad DeLong’s magisterial  Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which I’m currently reading — and learning a lot in the process. Carter describes it as “a rise-and-fall epic” but thinks that “it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall”. I’m not far enough in to know whether that’s a fair judgement, but since I loved his book on Keynes and Keynesianism, which came out during the lockdown, I’m taking his review seriously.

This is how it opens:

Humanity, the Berkeley economist argues, spent nearly the entirety of its history condemned to poverty by an insufficient supply of calories and a chronically excessive birth rate. But in the “long twentieth century”—the period between 1870 and 2010—an almost miraculous transformation took place: more and more people lived longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before. Arenas of intellect and creative expression that were once accessible only to the most privileged of elites became the common experiences of mass cultures. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction.

In the grim morass that has followed the financial crisis of 2008, it is refreshing to receive a dose of rational optimism—however tempered—from a serious intellectual examining our place in the grand scheme of history. DeLong does not avert his readers’ eyes from the brutalities of imperial conquest, genocide, and revolution gone awry, which define the political milieu of the era under his microscope. But his narrative is fundamentally hopeful: people can accomplish amazing things on a colossal scale. Not that long ago, we did so all the time.

This perspective is refreshing precisely because everyone, DeLong included, knows that something has gone terribly wrong…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

The TINY cheap EV you (might) actually want!

Who said the bubble-car was dead? Nice video.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

On reflection…

Seen in the lake on a walk yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilised forms.”

• Bruno Latour

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | Across the Tracks Blues

Link

Magical (IMHO)

Long Read of the Day

Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts

Absolutely fascinating blog post from Public Books explaining why audio books are a strangely interesting product (or should I say ‘service’?) I don’t use them, but I have friends who do. And there are lots of interesting observations in the post, which is why I thought it would make an admirable Long Read, but not a Long Listen!

Bruno Latour RIP

One of the most interesting thinkers of our era has died. I knew him only slightly — through a mutual friend, the eminent Dutch philosopher Gerard de Vries — but admired him greatly; indeed, tbh, I was slightly in awe of him, and always sat up when the occasional email from him arrived in my inbox.

Gerard knew Latour long before he was cool, and after he had retired from his Chair at the University of Amsterdam he wrote a magnificent introduction to his friend’s work. Given the scope of that work, it was quite an achievement to encompass it in a single volume, and I was so impressed by it that we invited the author — and his subject — to come to a public launch of the book in CRASSH, the Cambridge research institute in which our Centre for Technology and Democracy is based.

The event was a sellout, and in the end we had to arrange a live relay to several other rooms in the building to cope with the crowd. The only other speaker I can remember having such a powerful magnetic impact was Noam Chomsky many moons ago.

Among other things, Bruno was a formidable multitasker, with a baffling capacity to do several difficult things simultaneously: attending a seminar, for example, while writing a paper on his laptop — and yet suddenly asking a pertinent question to a speaker who had foolishly assumed that his mind was elsewhere. In that sense, he was reminiscent of Norbert Wiener, who used to have a similarly discombobulating effect on seminar speakers at Harvard in the 1940s.

Stuart Jeffries wrote a nice obituary of Bruno in yesterday’s Guardian. “His big idea,” Jeffreys writes,

developed in more than 20 books, theatrical performances and art installations, as well as his 2013 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, entitled Facing Gaia, was not that difficult to grasp. We should realise we are not the selfish individuals predicted by neo-liberal economic theory, but social beings living interdependently with other organic life, and that, like his favourite insects, we must productively recycle our waste and consume little.

His ideas were profoundly influenced by the Gaia theory of the maverick British scientist James Lovelock, wherein the Earth is a self-regulating organism. Latour’s sense was that it is the critical zone, rather than the whole of our planet, that should be the object of human concern and care, in order to reverse the despoiling impact of what he and others called the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humanity has become tantamount to a geological force and presided over the sixth mass extinction event.

He was a life-enhancing thinker and a very nice man. May he rest in peace.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The most glorious Main Street in the world

The Grand Canal, Venice. Not quite as Canaletto saw it. Still…

Looking forward to being there again next year.

Quote of the Day

”In America, journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain as an extension of conversation.”

• Anthony Sampson, in The Anatomy of Britain Today. ‘Today’ was 1965.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindsey | Starting All Over Again | Reggae USA

Link

Lovely.

Long Read of the Day

 Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

A striking NYT column by Pamela Paul on Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time. In “Buddenbrooks” fashion, the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

The essay continues with a list of the tragically mistaken assumptions Feuchtwanger took on in 1933 that continue to threaten democracies today. Worth reading just for that list.

Tech firms: EU laws to avoid bad AI will limit their ‘innovation’. Spot on!

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The new liability bill, says MIT’s Technology Review journal, “would give people and companies the right to sue for damages after being harmed by an AI system. The goal is to hold developers, producers and users of the technologies accountable and require them to explain how their AI systems were built and trained. Tech companies that fail to follow the rules risk EU-wide class actions.”

Right on cue, up pops the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the lobbying outfit that represents tech companies in Brussels. Its letter to the two European commissioners responsible for the two acts immediately raises the concern that imposing strict liability on tech firms “would be disproportionate and ill-suited to the properties of software”. And, of course, it could have “a chilling effect” on “innovation”.

Ah yes. That would be the same innovation that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian online meddling in 2016’s US presidential election and UK Brexit referendum and enabled the livestreaming of mass shootings. The same innovation behind the recommendation engines that radicalised extremists and directed “10 depression pins you might like” to a troubled teenager who subsequently ended her own life…

Do read the whole thing

Twitter Will Tame Elon Musk, Not the Other Way Around

Jack Shafer’s Politico column. My response: Oh Yeah? But Jack’s argument is that “the expert bloviator isn’t about to run a $44 billion purchase into the ground”.

Assuming Elon Musk and Twitter can iron out their legal differences in the next couple of days, he will take ownership of Twitter very soon. Will he wreck it by turning it into a disinformation playground, as some critics fear, based on his vow to lift the permanent ban on Donald Trump’s account? Or will he transform it into something that rivals the other triumphs in his portfolio, Tesla and SpaceX?

Knowing Musk, he could possibly do both, constructing a sewer that poisons you with lies and hate while making it an essential part of consumers’ lives. But you’ve really got to doubt that. Nobody, not even Elon Musk on his most perverse day, would buy a property for $44 billion — 20 percent of his net worth, by the way — and then rebuild it as the world’s largest sewage treatment facility. All the fretting about the “harm” Musk might cause as Twitter’s owner is misplaced: It will be in his financial interests to make Twitter as wholesome and welcoming a place as Starbucks, even if he changes the way the site works…

We’ll see. Full marks for trying, though, Jack.

My commonplace booklet

”We Have To Make It Big Enough For All Of Us!”

Lovely story from a lovely blog

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Chateau Naughton 2022

We have an amazing elderly vine which runs the entire front of the house. And every year, without fail, it produces a rich harvest of grapes, which we eat and make delicious grape juice from. One year, long ago, I toyed wit

h the idea of learning to make wine from them, but having done the research, assessed the expenditure on kit and the steepness of the learning curve I decided that it would be cheaper and easier to go out and buy a few bottles of Chateau Lafite! And ever since, I’ve been content to be a mere fruit-juice manufacturer.

Quote of the Day

”Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

• J.D. Salinger, in The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Die Zauberflöte, ’O Isis und Osiris’ | Kurt Moll

Link

One of my favourite arias.

Long Read of the Day

 The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time

Fascinating New Yorker essay by Nate Hopper on the genius who, many years ago, created the arcane software system that synchronises the network’s clocks. The question for now: who will keep the system running?

Many thanks to James Miller for alerting me to it.

Dave Winer and Doc Quixote

Dave Winer and Doc Searls are two of the Elders of the Net. Among many other achievements they both played a role in composing the Cluetrain Manifesto. They are also old friends, so sometimes it’s nice to be able to eavesdrop on their conversations. Dave had a nice blog post about such an exchange the other day.

I had a longish phone talk with Doc Searls a couple of days ago. Then he wrote a post about a series of photos he took over 17 years, on airplanes approaching LAX, of a famous horse track as it changed over the years, and eventually was torn down and a football stadium was built in its place.

I’ve known Doc for a long time, and I’ve seen at least two sides of the man. On one side is Doc Quixote who is ranting about windmills. He’s great with words so he comes up with memorable ways of expressing the ideas. And Doc is the most affable person I’ve ever known, so they love him as he rants at them. And the things Doc rants about are what we need to do now to start to be free. In other words he’s right. But as we’ve grown old as friends I’m pretty certain that Doc will not live to see his ideas become reality. And nor will I, for my dream. I spent great time, energy and money, over many years to create the writing and programming environment I wanted to use and I wanted my peers to use, so we could work together to create species-saving communication tools, and just beauty — nothing wrong with that.

My commonplace booklet

Andrew Curry on the damage inflicted on roads by different kinds of vehicle.

This from yesterday’s edition of his Substack blog.

When I wrote about cars on Saturday, I underestimated the impact of the weight of a vehicle on the road surface. It’s the fourth power of the weight, not the cube. Memo to self: don’t write quickly late in the evening, even when sober, since your memory plays tricks on you.

Harry Rutter at Bath University kindly put me right, even sending me a spreadsheet comparing the impact of a bicycle with a Ford Focus and with a truck. The green cells show the ratio of damage between each of the pairs of vehicles…

If you’re interested, follow the link to see the table. It’s sobering. And also confirms that the most ecologically-responsible form of transport is the bicycle, closely followed by the electric bike!

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!