The “people’s car”

Hitler being shown the Volkswagen on its launch. Next to him, in civilian clothes, is its designer, Ferdinand Porsche. I’ve often wondered if the photographer — behind Hitler focussing a Leica — might be Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer. Against that is the thought that although Hoffmann sometimes wore a military uniform, it seems unlikely that he was in the SS.

Quote of the Day

”Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue”

• A.E. Housman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Miss You Blues

Link

Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

Dinner with Queen Elizabeth

Unmissable 1996 New Yorker essay by Paul Theroux.

Subscriber slump may be bad news for Netflix, but better for the planet

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In the early 1930s, when Claud Cockburn worked on the Times, the subeditors had a competition to see who could compose the dullest headline. Cockburn claimed that he won with “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”. Alas, subsequent factcheckers have failed to unearth such a headline in the archives, but it came to mind last week when Netflix announced, in a quarterly earnings report, that for the first time in a decade it had lost subscribers – 200,000 of them, to be exact. In North America, it had lost 640,000 and suffered additional losses in every other region except for Asia-Pacific area, where it added a million.

This didn’t seem very interesting to this columnist, especially as it included the period when Netflix had pulled out of Russia, where it had 700,000 subscribers, which to my mind meant that the reported loss would have been a gain of half a million had Putin not invaded Ukraine.

Still, the negative 200,000 figure seemed to spook Wall Street. Netflix’s stock price collapsed by nearly 40% in two days, taking more than $50bn off the company’s market value in the blink of an eye…

Read on

Dave Winer on what a better Twitter could be

Dave (Whom God Preserve and whose birthday is today!) is one of the smartest software developers around. His ThinkTank outliner for the Apple Mac was one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and it hooked me on outliners for life. I once used it to write the first draft of an entire book.

But Dave is also one of the wise Elders of our online world. He’s a tireless campaigner for the open Web — which is why every word he’s ever written is available, for free, on his blog — even if has also been published inside some paywalled or corporate silo. I’ve followed his example: I’ve written a lot of stuff that has appeared behind paywalls and other enclosed spaces (like Substack), but it’s always also been available on Memex, hosted on my own server.

He is also a fierce critic of mainstream media, which he believes has still not properly adjusted to the possibilities of a networked world.

On Saturday, like everyone else, he was musing about Musk buying Twitter:

People often ask if when I talk about having our own TWTRs that means Mastodon. It could, if that’s your thing. But the center of this space will host all kinds of apps. Just like vehicles with wheels aren’t all Chevies and Hondas. Some are buses, trucks, Teslas or eBikes. There will be a lot of variety in the middle.

There was a time when all computers were basically the same. Big honkers in air conditioned rooms with raised floors. You had to have a degree to run one.

Then we got personal computers. Steve Jobs had a term for this. He called them “fractional horsepower” computers, to compare it to large mainframes.

I loved the idea of the Mac because it made the power of the mainframe usable by independent and free individuals. People who had ideas, and wanted to organize and share them…

ps: If you’re interested in Mastodon, see here.

My commonplace booklet

Joe Biden’s speech to the annual White House Correspondents dinner

Transcript is here. Some good jokes too. For example in the opening salvo:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Steve, for that introduction. And a special thanks to the 42 percent of you who actually applauded. (Laughter.)

I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have. (Laughter.) That’s hard to say after what we just saw. (Laughter.)

This is the first time a President attended this dinner in six years. (Applause.) It’s understandable. We had a horrible plague followed by two years of COVID. (Laughter and applause.)

Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year. Now, that would really have been a real coup if that occurred. (Laughter.) A little tough, huh? (Laughter.)

But I’m honored to be here at such an event with so much history…

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Seeds of glory

If you have a lawn, dandelions are a curse. But their mechanism for propagating is magical. Each of the tiny seeds in this diffuse sphere has its own parachute.

Quote of the Day

”For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson, in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, one of my favourite books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Neil Martin, Seán Keane, Matt Molloy & Arty McGlynn

Link

Recorded in 1999. Lovely reminder of the great piper, Liam O’Flynn. Tunes are: *An Buachaill Caol Dubh, Caisleán an Óir (Hornpipe 1:54), Paddy Fahey’s (Reel 3:47), The Pinch of Snuff (Reel 5:05) & The Fair-Haired Boy (Reel 5:48). Liam (Uilleann Pipes), Neil Martin (Cello), Seán Keane (Fiddle) and Matt Molloy. Also unusual to have a cello in such an ensemble.

Long Read of the Day

 The Internet is Made of Demons

Absolutely fascinating review essay by Sam Kriss, triggered by Justin E.H. Smith’s new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning.

I’m reading (and enjoying) the book, and was very struck by the way Kriss’s essay ends:

Thinkers of the past have plenty to teach us about the internet, and the world has indeed been doing vaguely internetty things for a very long time. But as I suggested above, our digital internet marks a significant transformation in those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine. If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.

Lludd and Llefelys, one of the medieval Welsh tales collected in the Mabinogion, is a vision of the internet. In fact, it describes the internet twice. Here, a terrible plague has settled on Britain: the arrival of the Coraniaid, an invincible supernatural enemy. What makes the Coraniaid so dangerous is their incredibly sharp hearing. They can hear everything that’s said, everywhere on the island, even a whisper hundreds of miles away. They already know the details of every plot against them. People have stopped talking; it’s the only way to stay safe. To defeat them, the brothers Lludd and Llefelys start speaking to each other through a brass horn, which protects their words. Today, we’d call it encryption. But this horn contains a demon; whatever you speak into it, the words that come out are always cruel and hostile. This medium turns the brothers against each other; it’s a communications device that makes them more alone. In the story, the brothers get rid of the demon by washing out the horn with wine. I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.

More on hypersonic missiles

Apropos the essay I posted yesterday, Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to two pieces in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — who would be quick to be concerned — that have taken a more relaxed view. They can be found here and here. The second of these articles is particularly scornful of media commentary on the implications of hypersonic missiles:

Many articles report, or exclaim, that there is no defense against hypersonic gliders. The word “unstoppable” pops up often. Again, compared to what? The United States cannot now defend against even modest ballistic missile attacks. One of Saudi Arabia’s most critical oil refining facilities was attacked by subsonic cruise missiles using decades-old technology that the Saudis, with a $180 billion defense budget, were not able to defend against at all. When headlines convey the message that the new thing about hypersonic gliders is that they are unstoppable, this implies that ballistic missiles are stoppable—that is, ballistic missile defense is easy, a done deal, and these new hypersonic weapons are undoing all that with revolutionary consequences. This is a major, dangerous distortion. Defending completely a huge area like the continental United States is an impossible task, whether against hypersonic weapons, ballistic missiles, or even subsonic cruise missiles. More limited point defense against intermediate-range ballistic missiles is extremely challenging but not impossible, but missile designers still have tricks that can make even that defense more difficult.

And, as Andrew points out, with tongue firmly in cheek,

It’s also possible that the capabilities and threat posed by hypersonic missiles have been hyped by those involved in their development to ramp up funding. Although no-one in the defence world would ever do such a thing, obviously.

Obviously.

My commonplace booklet

The trailer for Alex Winter’s forthcoming film, The YouTube Effect.

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The grapes of wrath

Seen in an upmarket Norfolk greengrocer’s one Halloween afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The trouble, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.”

• George Bernard Shaw, when declining to sell the movie rights to his plays to Sam Goldwyn.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement | Allegro | Alison Balsom | BBC Proms, 2009.

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip

This is a long, long read — but worth it if you’re puzzled why the post-Covid world is suddenly short of silicon chips, the tiny miniaturised circuits that now run the world. They’re amazingly difficult to make, and more than 90% of the really sophisticated ones are currently manufactured in Taiwan. Which is why Intel, the huge American semiconductor firm, is spending $20 billion on two factories at its chip-making complex in Arizona that will take three years to complete, with others to come in Ohio and Germany.

There’s a dramatic contrast between the tiny size of these silicon circuits and the enormity of the fabricant plants (fabs) needed to manufacture them. This New York Times report does a pretty good job of explaining and conveying that.

It also provides a compelling reminder that chip-fabrication has massive environmental downsides. Intel’s two fabs in Arizona draw 11m gallons of water a day from the local utility — in a drought-plagued state. The company claims that 82% of the water it consumes is reclaimed through filtration systems, settling ponds, etc. and sent back to the nearby city of Chandler, which operates treatment facilities (funded by Intel) and redistributes it for irrigation and other non-drinking uses.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was 40 last Friday

Photo by Bill Bertram

Nice piece of nostalgia from The Register:

The ZX Spectrum, replete with rubber keyboard, debuted at £125 for the 16KB version and £175 for the 48KB incarnation. A 32KB RAM pack could be plugged into the rear expansion slot of the former, and this writer well remembers the joy of an unexpected reset caused by a wobbly bit of hardware.

Over five million of the Z80A-based devices were sold, and its impact cannot be overstated. While over 1.5 million BBC Micros (made by Acorn) may have also been sold during its lifetime, it was the ZX Spectrum that found its way into far more homes across Europe, and its impact continues to resonate in the IT world of today.

Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton was more on the Acorn side of things, but recalled the effect of the plastic slab: “As a much more affordable alternative to the Beeb, and with roughly 3x the lifetime sales, the Spectrum probably had a greater role in promoting the accidental route into engineering careers in the ’80s and early ’90s.”

Gosh, was that really 40 years ago. Time really does fly. Wonder if mine is still in the attic, along with my first Nokia phone (the one as big as a house-brick).

Mikhail Gorbachev had one too!

My commonplace booklet

This City Pledges to Be Carbon-Neutral by the Time It’s Too Late

Nice spoof by Matthew Brian Cohen.

Thanks to decades of inaction, climate change is now an inevitable reality. However, there is still time to mitigate the brunt of the damage, and in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, we must be bold. That’s why, as mayor, I’ve set an ambitious (but achievable!) goal for our city to be carbon-neutral by the time it’s already too late.

The time for action is now, and by now, I mean twenty to thirty-five years from now. The window to push this back is rapidly closing. I fear that history will look back and ask us why we didn’t delay acting any sooner. That’s why my administration is committed to doing everything we can to kick the can down the road and tackle this looming existential threat at some vague point in the future.

The science is clear: to meet our climate goals, we need to radically transform both our societal infrastructure and our individual behaviors. And since we’re not willing to do that, the hope is that someday, when it’s one hundred thirty degrees in the middle of March, we will. In the meantime, we’re just going to stay the course as the oil and gas industry continues to see record profits from exciting new products like inner-city fracking and zero-use plastics…

It is a spoof — honest.

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The History Man

My friend, the historian Peter Clarke, at the launch of his book on Keynes in 2009.

Quote of the Day

”I always say beauty is only sin deep.”

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Albert Ammons | Boogie Woogie Stomp | Ladyva live in Germany.

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this kind of music is played.

Long Read of the Day

Last week Josh Simons and I had a conversation with Alina Utrata about Elon Musk and Twitter on her splendid Anti-Dystopians podcast. At that point all we knew was that Musk had rejected the Twitter Board’s offer of a seat on the Board in return for an undertaking not to increase his shareholding beyond a certain point, and our conversation was largely about: Twitter’s key role in the networked public sphere; various aspects of Musk’s enthusiasm for “free speech”; and the implications of his declared interest in buying the whole company and taking it private.

Since we recorded the podcast, the story moved on, and yesterday the announcement came that the Board had accepted Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share. So Twitter’s second-biggest troll has now bought the platform he relentlessly trolled. Nobody knows how this will play out — or indeed what Musk is playing at — but my gut instinct is that ‘free speech’ is not the top of his agenda.

In the meantime, Ranjan Roy, a canny observer of these things, has put together the widest range of speculations that I’ve seen, which is why I recommend it as today’s Long Read. Here’s the gist:

My mini-grand theory is that this entire sequence of events: The Twitter purchase, the SEC escalation, Tesla’s blowout quarter – it’s all about the next giant package. Musk saw an opportunity at the beginning of the year. Tesla’s business was on a roll, his pay package was almost complete, the SEC was threatening his Twitter account, and Tesla’s stock had stalled out for six months. Every great entrepreneur understands the importance of momentum and he decided to capitalize on this confluence of events.

But there’s lots more.

The key takeaway is that this is only incidentally about free speech. It’s really about democracy, power and naked capitalism.

How democracies spy on their citizens

Generally they use Pegasus, a fiendish piece of spyware for compromising iPhones which was developed — and is marketed — by an Israeli company, NSO. This New Yorker piece provides a readable introduction to the ways it’s being used (including infecting a phone or phones in Boris Johnson’s office). The only good news in this story is that NSO now appears to be struggling.

The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO. The company said in its statement that it had been “targeted by a number of politically motivated advocacy organizations, many with well-known anti-Israel biases,” and added that “we have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports, and improved the safeguards in our technologies.”

If NSO is indeed in trouble, it is thanks mainly to amazing forensic work by the Citizen Lab, a terrific research group based at the University of Toronto that focusses on high-tech human-rights abuses.

My commonplace booklet

 How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff. Who knew? Link

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Quote of the Day

“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it. But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.”

• Kathryn Schulz, in her new book, Lost and Found: A Memoir.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 3 in A-Flat Major, H 26

Link

Long Read of the Day

Kevin McCarthy Will Live to Lie Again

Terrific, coruscating column by Jack Shafer on the House Minority Leader, whose spine has been surgically removed by Trump.

McCarthy, whose relationship with the truth perpetually veers toward the squishy, suffered two mortifications at the hands of the press on Thursday. First, New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported from their forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, that in a Jan. 10, 2021 call to top Republicans, McCarthy had said Donald Trump should resign from the presidency. “‘I’ve had it with this guy,’ he told a group of Republican leaders,” Burns and Martin wrote.

“Totally false,” McCarthy immediately protested in a statement, and his office denied that he had said Trump should resign. Then came McCarthy’s second indignity as that night MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow played an audio recording, provided by the Times, of McCarthy that proved the Burns and Martin report. Sensing McCarthy’s political corpse was aflame, the press bore down on the House minority leader this morning. “Is Kevin McCarthy toast?” asked my POLITICO colleagues. “The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy,” gloated the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes. McCarthy got it in the neck from both members of the commentariat and from Capitol Hill legislators. Trump sycophant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) went so far as to blast his colleague on Twitter over the disclosure.

You can guess what happened next. A trip to Mar-a-Lago to bow and scrape to the man who now appears to own the Republican Party. Shafer exhumes the whole sordid story. I wish more hacks wrote like this.

A self-driving revolution? We’re barely out of second gear

Yesterday’s Observer column:

“Britain moves closer to a self-driving revolution,” said a perky message from the Department for Transport that popped into my inbox on Wednesday morning. The purpose of the message was to let us know that the government is changing the Highway Code to “ensure the first self-driving vehicles are introduced safely on UK roads” and to “clarify drivers’ responsibilities in self-driving vehicles, including when a driver must be ready to take back control”.

The changes will specify that while travelling in self-driving mode, motorists must be ready to resume control in a timely way if they are prompted to, such as when they approach motorway exits. They also signal a puzzling change to current regulations, allowing drivers “to view content that is not related to driving on built-in display screens while the self-driving vehicle is in control”. So you could watch Gardeners’ World on iPlayer, but not YouTube videos of F1 races? Reassuringly, though, it will still be illegal to use mobile phones in self-driving mode, “given the greater risk they pose in distracting drivers as shown in research”.

As usual, the announcement comes coated in three layers of prime political cant. This “exciting technology” is “developing at pace right here in Great Britain” (but apparently not in Northern Ireland; could it be that the DUP doesn’t approve of such advanced technology?). The government is “ensuring we have strong foundations in place for drivers when the technology takes to our roads”, which will be great once it has attended to the crumbling physical foundations of the roads in my neighbourhood. And of course it’s all happening “while boosting economic growth across the nation and securing Britain’s place as a global science superpower”…

Read on

Optimism 2.0

 The experiment has started so let’s make it work

Diane Coyle’s illuminating review of Yascha Mounk’s new book,  The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work:

The final part starts with “reasons for optimism” – one of which is that actually, most of the diverse democracies are slowly making progress toward better integration, accepting that people have diverse and multiple identities. The book also argues that optimism is important because it will affect actions and outcomes. It acknowledges what it terms the ‘Chapter 10 problem’ – the generally unsatisfying list of policies at the end of a book, as demanded by publishers and indeed readers. It doesn’t really provide this so much as a few general reflections, concluding: “Constructing diverse democracies that command the enthusiastic support of the great majority of their citzens is going to be hard.” But what choice do we have other than to try? The Great Experiment is already well under way.

So I liked the upbeat message. I don’t think there’s much that’s new here for readers of the death of democracy genre, but the arrangement of the argument into an optimistic outlook is very welcome.

Thinner on paper

Delicious evocation by Peter Hitchens of his early days at the Daily Express:

An air of decline and lost empires pervaded the surprisingly shabby building, whose sleek 1930s exterior concealed dingy offices where filthy, yellowish windows gave us a dreary view of the equally unlovely cigarette-stained newsroom of our rivals next door. The shabby, shouty newsroom, heart of the beast, looked as if the invention of the telephone had come as a complete surprise. Sticky black cables hung from the ceiling in thick clumps like jungle creepers, leading to black dial phones covered in a strange crusty film which I think must have been the congealed breath of a thousand reporters. Typewriters, now only to be found in museums, were everywhere. There was even carbon paper, for making copies. There were men in black waistcoats, endlessly whispering into receivers, who looked as if they had been there since 1936. Compressed-air tubes propelled edited material to the forbidden zones where the compositors worked, giving the corridors the look of those in a large warship…

Hitchins is the only living British journalist who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh, not least because the Express was the model for the Daily Beast in Waugh’s wonderful novel, Scoop.

As admirers of the book will know, Waugh had a low opinion of journalists. His hapless hero, William Boot, for example,

“had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephones to tape machines, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.”

Technology’s Mindfulness Racket

Lovely by essay Evgeny Morozov (Whom God Preserve).

In yet another sign that the new age lingo of the 1960s is still very much with us, “mindfulness” has become the new “sustainability”: No one quite knows what it is, but everyone seems to be for it. It recently made the cover of Time magazine, while a long list of celebrities—Arianna Huffington, Deepak Chopra, Paolo Coelho—are all tirelessly preaching the virtues of curbing technology-induced stress and regulating the oppressiveness of constant connectivity, often at conferences with titles like “Wisdom 2.0.”

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. Consider Huffington, whose eponymous publication has even launched a stress-tracking app with the poetic name of “GPS for the Soul”—a new app to fight the distraction caused by the old apps—and turned the business of mindfulness into a dedicated beat.

This is from 2014. I love his acerbic style and share his aversion to tech hubris.

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Carnations

Found in an old photo archive.

Quote of the Day

”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

• George Bernard Shaw

In that context, Elon Musk (see Commonplace Booklet below) is clearly an unreasonable man. The key question therefore, is whether in the end he represents progress, and if so of what kind.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Don McLean | American Pie (Live in Austin)

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to stay optimistic in these dark times

I’m temperamentally an optimist with a fairly sunny disposition. On the other hand, the more I understand about the way our societies are evolving, the bleaker the future begins to look. I often think that what is needed now is a theory of incompetent systems — i.e. systems that cannot fix themselves. The two examples that come immediately to mind are: democracy in America (and possibly elsewhere too); and global warming, but there are probably others. Pessimism seems a logical result of such ‘realistic’ assessments of the state the world is in.

But pessimism if a disabling emotion, and in looking for other ways of thinking about the future I keep coming back to Gramsci’s idea of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. So you can imagine how pleased I was to come on this thoughtful blog post by Noah Smith in which he explores what adopting that philosophy might mean for us now.

Hope you like it.

On Jonathan Haidt’s essay yesterday…

Graham Minenor-Matheson wrote:

Just wanted to draw your attention to a Twitter thread by the media scholar Daniel Kreiss responding to that article . Essentially Kreiss sees a number of problems with Haidt’s article notably that it is ahistorical and gets a lot wrong about social media and how politics happens through it. Hope you read it!

I did, and it’s good. My hope in highlighting the Haidt essay was that it would spark a productive debate, and that seems to be happening. The Kreiss thread is a much better response than the one I mentioned yesterday. I hope there’ll be more.

The core problem with an essay like Haidt’s is that it’s very difficult to attempt a big-picture or long-sweep view without skating over thin ice to keep the narrative going. Which is why many academics now eschew the essay as a form.

One of my heroes was the late Neil Postman, the great cultural critic. He was always being attacked by scholars on similar grounds. And yet he got some important things right — and in the process shaped the way I think about our information environment.

It’d be interesting to do an annotated version of Haidt’s essay at some stage.

My commonplace booklet

• The Musk TED interview Link

Live, unedited and revealing. The only historical parallel for Musk that I can think of is Henry Ford. Which is why this interview might be worth an hour of your time.

• How to survive a ‘tactical’ nuclear explosion.

Never thought I’d see this kind of thing again in my lifetime. Link

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