Penance

Seen yesterday outside King’s Cross station.

Hail to the Chief Chieftain

Paddy Moloney, the founder and inspiration of the Chieftains, the folk group which made Irish music known and appreciated worldwide, has died at the age of 83. He was a gifted musician, performer and composer, but also someone who earned the admiration and affection of countless great musicians who had nothing to do with Irish music.

For those who don’t know about him, this hour-long BBC documentary provided an excellent account of his career and of the evolution of the Chieftains into world-renowned musicians.

And see below for Paddy and Liam O’Flynn in action.

Quote of the Day

”Is there a cure for film criticism?”

• Pauline Kael

Not to my knowledge.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn & Paddy Moloney | Duelling Chanters

Link

The two greatest Uileann pipers of my lifetime. Both now gone from us. Sigh.

Long Read of the Day

The Counterintuitive Mechanics of Peloton Addiction

An exploration by Anne Helen Petersen which is, she says

an outgrowth of my relationship with the bike, which, as you’ll see, is predicated on a particularly noxious relationship with exercise in general. You might have a very different relationship with exercise and, by extension, your Peloton — and I hope you’ll share it. But I think this particular type of relationship, much like disordered eating and body image, is more common than most understand.

This is the first thing I’ve read about stationary bikes that I found interesting. It’s confessional and well written.

Who are the censors now?

Social-media companies are, of course. But so are payment-processors, says an intriguing piece in The Economist:

Now the boundary of censorship is being extended further, into the pornography business. From October 15th adult websites worldwide will have to verify the age and identity of anyone featured in a picture or video, as well as the ID of the person uploading it. They will need to operate a fast complaints process, and will have to review all content before publication. These requirements are being imposed not by regulators but by Mastercard, a credit-card giant.

Websites can always choose not to work with Mastercard. But given that the company handles about 30% of all card payments made outside China, to do so would be costly. Visa, which manages a further 60% of payments, is also taking a firmer line on adult sites. And the trend goes beyond porn. In the shadier corners of the web, and in industries where the law is unclear or out of date, financial firms are finding themselves acting as de facto regulators.

Since the turn of the century, “payments have become a tool of domestic and international policy,” says Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. After the 9/11 attacks of 2001 America introduced new anti-money-laundering rules and more targeted sanctions. This system—a “21st-century precision-guided munition”, as a former head of the CIA called it—obliges financial firms to block payments to the individuals on a list which today runs to 1,604 pages. Funnily enough, it doesn’t mention Stripe.

For want of an apostrophe…

A cautionary tale from The New York Times:

A missing apostrophe in a Facebook post could cost a real estate agent in Australia tens of thousands of dollars after a court ruled a defamation case against him could proceed.

In the post last year, Anthony Zadravic, the agent, appears to accuse Stuart Gan, his former employer at a real estate agency, of not paying retirement funds to all the agency’s workers.

At issue is the word “employees” in the post, which read: “Oh Stuart Gan!! Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation,” referring to Australia’s retirement system, in which money is paid by employers into super accounts for employees. “Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!”

What people search for on the Net

One of the most interesting books I read last year was Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. He used to work at Google and argues that knowing what people search for can be extraordinarily revealing about both people and society. It turns out that people will ask Google questions that they would never, ever confide to another person.

AnswerThe Public is an interactive website that enables you to type in a one or two-word phrase and will then produce (I guess from parsing Google auto-complete phrases) ordered lists of what questions people ask about that word or phrase.

I typed in ‘algorithms’ because I’m interested in the extent to which people do (or don’t) understand what algorithms are. Results (beautifully graphed) were interesting and sometimes illuminating.

Worth a try.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“Most old books are momento memento mori for distant selves, since the person who read them no longer exists.” — Julian Baggini

I thought of this a couple of years ago at a second-hand book stall where I came on a textbook I had used — and understood — when I was an engineering undergraduate. A key concept in one section was that of a Nyquist diagram — a useful tool for determining the stability of feedback systems. That stuff was meat and drink to me once, but I had struggled to come to grips with it again at the bookstall. I decided that it was something that I no longer needed to know, and replaced the book on the bookseller’s pile, consoling myself with the thought that “that was then and this is now”.

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Taken on a magical walk along the upper reaches of the river Dove, Derbyshire

Quote of the Day

”All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”

• Evelyn Waugh, who nevertheless fathered seven children.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Piano Sonata in D, H.XVI No.42 – 1. Andante con espressione | Alfred Brendel

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Last Days of Intervention

Very thoughtful, long essay in Foreign Affairs by Rory Stewart, one of the few British politicians who has been talking sense about Afghanistan over the last few years. It was outside the paywall when I read it on Sunday. Hopefully it still is.

To the Americans and their allies, it seemed impossible that the U.S. military, with its fleets of gunships and cyberwarfare capabilities, its cutting-edge plans for counterinsurgency and state building, and its billions of dollars in aid and investment, could be held off by a medieval group that lived in mud huts, carried guns designed in the 1940s, and rode ponies. The interveners continued to believe that the international community could succeed in nation building anywhere in the world, provided that it had the right plan and enough resources. 

Blowing the whistle on Facebook is just the first step

Francis Haugen is a courageous and astute whistleblower, and we should salute that, says Maria Farrell (Whom God Preserve) in a fine blast, but

she is not the arbiter of what should be done. So far, when asked about solutions, she’s made vague gestures toward “regulation,” but in the context of her belief that “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart.” To this way of thinking, there is a reachable version of Facebook that would do less harm and be OK. This incremental approach is no surprise. Haugen has already worked for 15 years for companies with names that are synonymous with surveillance capitalism. She doesn’t have a problem with the basic business model of extracting people’s data to sell ads. She just has a problem with Facebook being the most egregious of a very bad bunch.

What triggered Maria’s ire (and mine when I read it) was this quote from Haugen:

”I have a lot of empathy for Mark, and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.”

This is just another articulation of the ‘founder-worship’ that is one of the most disfiguring aspects of Silicon Valley ideology. Maria has memorably excoriated it before — as, for example, in her celebrated Prodigal Techbro essay, and she now returns to the fray:

Insider critiques are uniformly based on the feeling that “Mark” or “Sheryl” either don’t really understand the harms they do, aren’t sufficiently informed about them, or just want to do the right thing but are trapped in a system of wrong incentives. “It’s one of these unfortunate consequences,” Haugen says, “No one at Facebook is malevolent, right? But the incentives are misaligned.” But Facebook created its own incentives from nothing, hiring Sheryl Sandberg to build its data-extractive, advertising-based business model. Its focus on growth above all else is what made its platform an extreme amplifier of disinformation and hate, simply because that’s what drives clicks. And the amount of money the trillion dollar company spends on moderating content and following up on the direct incitements to violence it generates is miniscule.

End of the republic?

Just remembered this from Heather Cox Richardson’s blog on September 24:

On Monday, we learned that after last year’s election, John Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump, outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice, Democrat Joe Biden, out of power: as Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it, they planned to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” This appears to have been the plan that Trump and his loyalists tried to execute on January 6.

That is, we now have written proof of an attempt to destroy our democracy and replace it with an autocracy.

This was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States of America, and it came perilously close to succeeding. The president of the United States tried to overturn the results of an election—the centerpiece of our democracy—and install himself into power illegitimately.   If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is? 

Yep. Especially when one remembers that nearly half the US electorate voted for Trump.

See also Maybe We Should Be Talking More About the Trump Coup Memo in Mother Jones.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“The sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it.” — Mark McGurl in his book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

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Quote of the Day

“Whenever things are frightening, it is a good idea to measure them”

• Daniel Kehlmann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindley | Starting All Over Again

Link

Long Read of the Day

Remystifying Supply Chains

By Venkatesh Rao

This is a very long read, but worth it. It’s the best ting I’ve ever read on supply chains, the conduits on which our world is built, and the malfunctioning of which has been wreaked by Covid. Rao has been fascinated by these chains for a long time and has written a lot about them. In this essay, he gathers a lot of ideas together to argue that our current models for thinking about supply chains are obsolete because they assume that chains are merely complicated networks rather than complex systems with unpredictable emergent behaviours.

You need to make an appointment with this.

China is cutting its tech giants down to size. What should we learn from this?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

This is story of two parallel universes. Over in the western one, neoliberal capitalism rules. In the other – the Chinese universe – a different system presides. In both universes, government concern over the growing power of giant tech companies has been growing for a while, but there the similarities end.

In the west, governments and legislatures were asleep at the wheel as the tech companies zoomed along their rapid growth paths. But in the past few years, democratic institutions have belatedly lumbered into action, or at any rate into a semblance of activity…

Read on

Americans Need an AI Bill of Rights

Interesting piece in Wired by the Science Adviser to the US President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and his Deputy.

What machines learn depends on many things—including the data used to train them.

Data sets that fail to represent American society can result in virtual assistants that don’t understand Southern accents; facial recognition technology that leads to wrongful, discriminatory arrests; and health care algorithms that discount the severity of kidney disease in African Americans, preventing people from getting kidney transplants.

Training machines based on earlier examples can embed past prejudice and enable present-day discrimination. Hiring tools that learn the features of a company’s employees can reject applicants who are dissimilar from existing staff despite being well qualified—for example, women computer programmers. Mortgage approval algorithms to determine credit worthiness can readily infer that certain home zip codes are correlated with race and poverty, extending decades of housing discrimination into the digital age. AI can recommend medical support for groups that access hospital services most often, rather than those who need them most. Training AI indiscriminately on internet conversations can result in “sentiment analysis” that views the words “Black,” “Jew,” and “gay” as negative.

Yeah. We know all that. But what should be done about it?

The authors have decided to borrow an idea from UA constitutional history.

Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created—enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Throughout our history we have had to reinterpret, reaffirm, and periodically expand these rights. In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created.

Our country should clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect. What exactly those are will require discussion, but here are some possibilities: your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties; your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets; your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you.

In the coming months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be developing such a bill of rights, working with partners and experts across the federal government, in academia, civil society, the private sector, and communities all over the country.

The White House wants “to hear from and engage with everyone”. The email address is ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov

Wonder if it’ll catch on on this side of the Pond.

My Commonplace booklet

(Eh? See here)

• “When Umberto Eco’s second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, was published in English, I reviewed it, and I must have been in an unusually bad mood, because I hated it, and said so. Not long after the review appeared I was at a literary gathering in a stunningly grand room in the Louvre, in Paris, and when I arrived the first person I saw coming towards me was Umberto Eco himself. We had never met before, and this was obviously not likely to be the happiest first encounter, or so I thought. But Eco, in a moment of expansive generosity, spread out his arms to embrace me, and cried out, in greeting, “Rushdie! I am the bullshit Eco!” — Salman Rushdie

• “The common complaint that one has too many books, rather like the confession that one has had too many lovers, is usually a boast in not very good disguise “ — Julian Baggini.

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Art paying homage to Technology

Steve Russell’s Zoom-gallery portrait

My friend and former colleague, Joe Smith, who is now Director of the Royal Geographical Society, sent me a link to this innovative way of using an ancient medium to pay homage to a modern one. It’s a Zoom meeting portrait of nine people who, Joe says, have helped keep the RGS show on the road during COVID. “In an institution that has quite a few moustachio’d 19th-century bloke portraits on the walls”, he writes, “this is a refreshing expression of who we are today”. It’s also one answer to the question of how a venerable institution can hold a memory of COVID, and show gratitude to the people who ‘got us through’.

Quote of the Day

”His pictures seem to resemble, not pictures, but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.”

• Cyril Asquith on Paul Klee

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | Moment Musical Op.94 (D.780) No.2 in A flat Major | Alfred Brendel

Link

Nobody plays Schubert like Brendel.

Long Read of the Day

Operation Yellowhammer

Operation Yellowhammer was the government’s contingency planning for its response to the most severe anticipated short-term disruption under a no-deal Brexit – which is called the ‘reasonable worst case’ scenario. This interesting summary by the Institute for Government covered 12 key areas of risk, including food and water supplies, healthcare services, trade in goods and transport systems.

The really interesting thing about it, looking at it now, is how accurate it was.

Truly, we are governed by imbeciles. Not entirely surprising, given that the main criterion for membership of the Cabinet is to have been wrong about the biggest issue facing the UK since 1973.

Thanks to Janet Cobb for the link.

Takeaways from Frances Haugen’s star turn in Congress

She looks like a formidable whistleblower — as you can tell from Facebook’s scrambling to do damage limitation.

The NYT reporter came away with three ‘takeaways’:

1. Republican and Democratic lawmakers are united on taking action to stop the harms caused to teenagers on Facebook.
2. Lawmakers have gotten smarter about tech. (Hmmm… that wouldn’t have been hard, given their previous showings.)
3. Facebook is sitting on an even larger mountain of internal research. (So there’s much more to be unearthed. Thie is rich subpoena territory.)

For his part, the Bloomberg reporter confessed that he was

”pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful the whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, was in her testimony and answers. I was even more surprised at how thoughtful our elected officials were in their questions.

The Hearing, he said, didn’t have the usual cadence of tech bosses hauled in to be shouted at by legislators looking for social-media soundbytes.

Tuesday’s hearing felt refreshingly different. The discussion primarily focused on Facebook’s actual problems, including its feed ranking algorithms, its impact on teens and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s power. Haugen was helpful in understanding some of Facebook’s internal thinking, like its desire to reach teenagers because that’s the cohort it needs to maintain its growth.

She also helped identify major problems for future discussion, like the claim that Facebook’s efforts to fight misinformation predominantly center around English-language news, but most of its users don’t speak English. Haugen even offered up some potential solutions, like the idea of organizing user feeds based on the most recent posts, not a ranking algorithm. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it was an idea nonetheless.

Most importantly, it felt like a discussion, not a firing line.

(The Bloomberg stuff comes from their Fully Charged newsletter, for which I can never find a web-link.)

The Times had an interesting OpEd by Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook data scientist who worked on the feed-curation algorithms and picked up on Ms Haugen’s view that those algorithms are one of the roots of Facebook’s societal toxicity.

When data scientists and software engineers blend content personalization and algorithmic amplification — as they do to produce Facebook’s News Feed, TikTok’s For You tab and YouTube’s recommendation engine — they create uncontrollable, attention-sucking beasts. Though these algorithms, such as Facebook’s “engagement-based ranking,” are marketed as increasing “relevant” content, they perpetuate biases and affect society in ways that are barely understood by their creators, much less users or regulators.

In 2007, I started working at Facebook as a data scientist, and my first assignment was to work on the algorithm used by News Feed. Facebook has had more than 15 years to demonstrate that algorithmic personal feeds can be built responsibly; if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen. As Ms. Haugen said, it should now be humans, not computers, “facilitating who we get to hear from.”

I like the “attention-sucking beasts” metaphor, but while neutering said beasts would be useful, there’s no silver bullet for fixing corporations like Facebook.

As HL Mencken famously observed: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”.

Tech corporations are part of a bigger regulatory challenge, which we’re not even beginning to contemplate yet.

My Commonplace booklet

(Eh? See here)

• A random conversation today about how smart women are often underestimated or ignored by dumber men reminded me of a lovely story about Cass Sunstein, the Uber-smart Harvard prof and Samantha Power, his equally smart wife. When she was Obama’s Ambassador to the UN, the couple lived in a suite in a fancy New York hotel when the UN was in session, and the staff immediately assumed that her husband was ‘Mr Power’. One morning he went down on his own to the lobby and asked the concierge to call him a cab. When the car arrived the concierge said “Your cab’s here, Mr Power.” At this point Cass said mildly, “Actually my name is Sunstein” — to which the concierge replied “Wow! You look just like Mr Power.”

• My relay yesterday of criticisms of the UK electricity system by Greg Jackson, CEO of the disruptive supplier Octopus, did not impress one reader of this blog, who writes that he would be “a little more impressed with Mr Jackson if Octopus hadn’t just helped itself to all of my daughter-in-law’s salary to pay a fabricated bill for a fabricated meter – having told her only days previously that it recognised the meter was non-existent. Just the same tricks as the remainder of the “big six” – as regularly featured in the Guardian’s consumer column”.

Errata

Yesterday’s reference to Heather Cox ‘Robinson’ should have been to Heather Cox Richardson. And the link to the excerpt I quoted is https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-5-2021.

Many thanks to Jack Whyte for spotting it, and apologies to Professor Richardson for misnaming her.

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The Church Gate

On a walk yesterday afternoon I came on a lovely village church I hadn’t seen before and went in. On my way out I noticed the gate.

Quote of the Day

“To corral the damage Facebook does to democracy, we need government action. It complicates matters that half of that government has done far more damage to American democracy than Facebook ever could. (Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are going to rein in Facebook for the good of democracy? Really?) It’s also notable that many of the key stories about Facebook’s malfeasance have been published by The Wall Street Journal, owned by Fox News mogul, Rupert Murdoch. And Fox News has done more damage to American democracy than Facebook. (Rupert Murdoch is going to rein in Facebook in the name of truth and transparency? Really?) Frances Haugen has done a good job connecting Facebook to the Jan 6 insurrection. But again, punishing Facebook for damaging democracy while letting Trump and his enablers walk free would be the biggest farce in American history.“

• Dave Pell in his daily newsletter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits & Eric Clapton | Brothers in arms | live at Wembley at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday celebration

Link

Wonderful. One of those performances you never forget.

Long Read of the Day

Hanging Out With Joan Didion: What I Learned About Writing From an American Master

By Sara Davidson

Link

She’s probably the most imitated writer since Hemingway, and her voice, like his, is catchy but can’t be imitated without the attempt being obvious. I’ve interviewed her many times for publications over the years, though, and found that the habits and practices she described could be helpful in developing and sharpening one’s own writing. Lovely piece. Via the invaluable Lit Hub.

America’s existential crisis

From Heather Cox Robinson:

The fall of the Republican Party into the hands of extremists who are willing to destroy it recently prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare, “I’m astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis.”

Restoring sanity to the country will require free and fair elections, which, after years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, will require federal legislation. The time for that to be most effective is running out, as Republican-dominated states are currently in the process of redistricting, which will determine their congressional districts for the next decade.

The longer this goes on, the more often I think of the famous Benjamin Franklin reply to the woman who allegedly asked him “what have we got?” as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention” “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We will find out in 2024 whether they can.

The existential threat faced by Chinese tech companies’

From the New York Times:

Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail. An entire industry is shutting down.

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, it’s all part of the plan.

Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United States.

Emboldened by swelling nationalism and his success with Covid-19, Mr. Xi is remaking China’s business world in his own image. Above all else, that means control. Where once executives had a green light to grow at any cost, officials now want to dictate which industries boom, which ones bust and how it happens. And the changes offer a glimpse of Mr. Xi’s vision for managing the economy, ahead of a political meeting expected to solidify his plans for an unprecedented third term in charge.

Meanwhile in the Western democracies politicians seem unable to rein in tech giants and American legislators are reduced to simply yelling at Facebook.

Which brings me back to a question I’ve been asking for ages. Is it only authoritarian regimes that can bring these companies under control?

When I ask that question in public fora the most common response is an awkward silence.

My Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

• From a New Statesman interview.

“Jackson accuses the management of the UK energy grid as being stuck in the past, describing the National Grid as a “monopoly” and its control room as “like a minicab office. There’s some blokes with phones, and what they’ve always done is phoned up coal and gas power stations and told them to turn on and off. What we have to do now is… a million times more complicated.”

The result of this simplified central planning could be seen the previous week, when “electricity prices were colossally high, we were having to use lots of back-up supplies… [and] we were literally paying wind generators in Scotland to turn off, because there weren’t enough cables connecting Scotland, where the electricity was being generated, to England, where we needed it.”

Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energies, the disruptive outfit that supplies our electricity (and charges the car on a low tariff at night). He’s not impressed by the current fantasies of the UK government about achieving “net-zero”. Nor am I.

• From Andrew Curry: “Housing inequality, not income inequality, primarily determines how much wealth inequality there is in most Western countries.” The conclusion he draws from an interesting new research paper. You only have to walk the streets of London, Oxford or Cambridge to see confirmation of this.

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Remembering Steve Jobs

Photo credit: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576

He died 10 years ago today. The following day Dave Winer wrote a lovely piece about him.

I wish Jobs had been a blogger, had written about his design process, so I could quote something. But he was the opposite of a blogger. Jobs was a mass communicator. No one in my generation has mastered the art as Jobs did. Today, with the outpouring of feeling on the net, are people mourning the man, or the phenomena he could unleash, just by saying “One more thing.” #

And he was a designer, even though people seem to be overlooking that in their remembrances, calling him more of a visionary. He got down in there and made small but very important design decisions about his products. Ones that had wide impact, for better, or worse. And often they weren’t things his products did, rather things his products didn’t do that defined them. #

The Mac was full of them. No cursor keys, so you had to use the mouse to navigate. I doubt if money was the reason, though leaving out the cursor keys probably saved a bit, and allowed the other keys to be bigger. It also meant Apple had to design its own keyboard, because they all had cursor keys. #

No hard drive. No expansion slots. No fan. #

And, of course, a standardised user interface — which puzzled and annoyed developers like Dave. But which also led to Umberto Eco’s wonderful essay on why the Mac was a Catholic machine, and the IBM PC a Protestant one.

Dave’s piece is very insightful. Do read it.

Quote of the Day

”If God had been a Liberal, we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments — we’d have the ten suggestions.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow | Tokyo 1984

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists and the New Right

Interesting off-piste essay by Chris Horner arguing that capitalism and the nation state are undergoing one of their periodic metamorphoses.

Here’s where we’re headed, in Horner’s view:

It is a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’ – think of Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’ – immigrants of all kinds, asylum seekers, anyone who doesn’t fit the national image, very much including the political left.

Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc. To be clear, conservative fiscal policies, for instance, haven’t gone away, but a new attitude to using the state, and to spending, definitely has emerged. And so has a turn to harsher, more repressive politics. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed?

Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook

Useful NYT roundup on the screw-up.

Within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The outage lasted over five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.

Even so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. Facebook has built itself into a linchpin platform with messaging, livestreaming, virtual reality and many other digital services. In some countries, like Myanmar and India, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach.

Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, leading to unexpected domino effects such as people not being able to log into shopping websites or sign into their smart TVs, thermostats and other internet-connected devices.

I’ve had email from readers wondering why other (non-Facebook) services that they use had apparently been slowed down. Various possible reasons, not the least of which is that many people (foolishly, IMO) use their Facebook id to sign into other services (as the NYT piece mentions). Another partial explanation is that when 3 billion people continually try — and fail — to connect to Facebook it has implications for key DNS servers on the network — as this piece implies.

Also, Josh Taylor had a good informative piece in the Guardian.

And the big takeaway from all this?

“Today’s outage brought our reliance on Facebook — and its properties like WhatsApp and Instagram — into sharp relief,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. “The abruptness of today’s outage highlights the staggering level of precarity that structures our increasingly digitally mediated work economy.” Yep.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

I’ve always thought of September/October as the beginning of the year — a side effect of working in universities, I suppose. Which is why the Autumn of 2020 was so upsettingly weird — no new students, away from home for the first time, wandering around dazed by the new world opening up to them. But walking through Cambridge yesterday on my way to lunch I found myself sharing pavements with throngs of kids. And remembered my own first day at university way back in the 1960s. It was — as PG Wodehouse put it in another context – like having died and gone to heaven without the trouble or expense.

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The behemoth stumbles

From Krebs on Security

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

Now comes the interesting bit: The outages came just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

Hmmm…

(And see the Musical Alternative below.)

Quote of the Day

“Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actu- ally arrant nonsense. For example, “everyone knows” that: • Aggregate production functions (and aggregate measures of the capital stock) provide a good way to characterize the economy’s supply side; • Over a sufficiently long span—specifically, one that allows necessary price adjustments to be made—the economy will return to a state of full market clearing; and, • The theory of household choice provides a solid justification for downward-sloping market demand curves.

None of these propositions has any sort of empirical foundation; moreover, each one turns out to be seriously deficient on theoretical grounds.1 Nevertheless, economists continue to rely on these and similar ideas to organize their thinking about real-world economic phenomena. No doubt, one reason why this situation arises is because the economy is a complicated system that is inherently difficult to understand, so propositions like these—even though wrong—are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.

• Jeremy B. Rudd, Federal Reserve Board, September 23, 2021

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel |’Hallelujah Chorus’ from The Messiah | Royal Choral Society

Link

The only suitable way of celebrating the Facebook outage.

Or, if you are of a gentler disposition, try Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s lovely recording of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, arranged by Tom Hodge.

Long Read of the Day

And while we’re on the subject…

Facebook Is an Authoritarian State

Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way, writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.

Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.

To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.

GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook’s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.

An interesting way of viewing the corporation. Thomas Hobbes would have seen it that way too.

Inside the strange world of Peter Thiel

My Observer review of Max Chafkin’s biography of Silicon Valley’s leading contrarian.

Chafkin is a terrific journalist and he has provided a detailed, impeccably researched account of this journey. In a way, The Contrarian is a chronicle of the evolution of a weird personality cult: the Thielverse, whose members, overwhelmingly, young, rightwing single males, worship their hero as someone gifted with godlike prescience and wisdom.

The strange thing is that the record doesn’t really support this hagiographical vision. Thiel isn’t a gifted geek, just someone who is good at spotting an opportunity. His investment record is patchy, although it shows that he has always been good at getting out before the peak. And although he masquerades as a visionary who derides liberal democracy as too slow and stupid to survive, in practice he has devoted much of his career to building businesses that feed off its governments. In that sense, his actual legacy is Palantir, a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient corporation that can do magic with data analytics; in fact, it is a humdrum government contractor like the rest of the aerospace and global consultancy firms. Think of it as Accenture with added halitosis.

The most interesting thought that emerges from Chafkin’s book is that Thiel isn’t really a visionary at all. That’s because he’s defined only by what he’s against – liberal democracy, liberal elites, multiculturalism, and so on. But if you ask what is he for then only one answer can be extracted from this book: he’s for Peter Thiel.

Chart of the Day

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Quote of the Day

”Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to critics.”

• Ambrose Bierce (who else?)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | The Prodigal Son (Live in studio)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Extinct

What does the disappearance of once popular or ubiquitous objects — ranging in scale from tools and equipment to structures and infrastructures — tell us about the world we have created?

Terrific essay by Barbara Penner, Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School.

No sex, goddammit — we’re males

Scott Galloway has an interesting blog post about the increasing percentage of men in the US who report not having sex and who are “without any onramp to the intimate relationships upon which so much of their happiness, and our social capital, is built.”

So what? America spent its first 300 years treating women as second-class citizens — what’s wrong with young men getting the short end of the stick for a while? If this were just about fairness or feelings, then fine, let there be churn. But there are several externalities that could have profound effects on our commonwealth and the global community.

First, less partnering and propagation means fewer babies. Declining birth rates are toxic for economic health. For a glimpse at the declining-birth-rate future, look at Japan, where birth and marriage rates have fallen to record lows. There are now just 2.1 working-age Japanese for every retiree, the lowest ratio in the world. In the United States there are 3.9. The world average is 7.

At the Code Conference this week, automaker and future Martian Elon Musk said: “Possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the rapidly diminishing birth rate … No babies, no humanity.”

Second, a large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men is a malevolent force in any society, but it’s a truly terrifying one in a society addicted to social media and awash in coarseness and guns.

Men are already more likely than women to believe in conspiracy theories. Increased frustration about their lack of life choices and greater jealousy stoked by the images of success they see on their screens will push underachieving men further toward conspiracy theories, radicalization, and nihilist politics. I say “will” because I’m focused on the future, but a preview of that future is already here. Of the 620 people charged so far in the January 6 riot, 86% are men. Yep.

Richard Nixon delivers the speech he never delivered

A deep fake masterpiece. Six minutes well spent, IMO.

Not quite perfect yet, but the technology’s getting there.

The truth about artificial intelligence? It isn’t that truthful

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Recently, a group of researchers at the AI Alignment Forum, an online hub for researchers seeking to ensure that powerful AIs are aligned with human values, decided to ask how truthful GPT-3 and similar models are. They came up with a benchmark to measure whether a particular language model was truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models had to avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts.

They tested four well-known models, including GPT-3. The best was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. The models “generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans”. Interestingly, they also found that “the largest models were generally the least truthful”. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. The implication is that the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is invariably better for improving truthfulness may be wrong. And this matters because training these huge models is very energy-intensive, which is possibly why Google fired Timnit Gebru after she revealed the environmental footprint of one of the company’s big models.

Having typed that last sentence, I had the idea of asking GPT-3 to compose an answer to the question: “Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?” But then I checked out the process for getting access to the machine and concluded that life was too short and human conjecture is quicker – and possibly more accurate.

After this was published I had a nice email from an AI researcher who had put the question to GPT-3:

Q: Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?

A: Google fired Timnit Gebru because of her political beliefs.

US mainstream media are turning into the GOP’s ‘useful idiots’

From Heather Cox Richardson:

As political scientist and foreign relations expert David Rothkopf tweeted: “Are the Dems the ones in disarray when they are crafting specific programs while the GOP offers up only cynical Tweets & obstruction? The only GOP agenda items are voter suppression, defending the worst president in history & when they have power, pushing tax cuts for the rich.”

For my part, I’m not sure what is driving the stories that seem to paint Biden’s work as a lost cause: The recent position that Democrats are hapless? That it’s safer to be negative than positive? That our news cycle demands drama?

Whatever it is, I continue to maintain that the issue right now is not Democrats’ negotiations over the infrastructure bills—regardless of how they turn out—but that Republican lawmakers are actively working to undermine our democracy.

She’s absolutely right. The key story in the US is not Biden’s attempts to do sensible and important things, but the Trump-Republican’s determination to do everything they can to frustrate him until their State-based arrangements to disenfranchise enough voters to win the mid-terms are complete. In that sense, mainstream US media are playing their rule in the undermining of the republic.

Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) has been saying this for a long time. And he’s right.

Heather’s Substack blog is wonderful, btw.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here.)

Just discovered that Whistler’s title for his most famous painting was not ‘Whistler’s Mother’ but ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1’. It’s still a lovely work, though.

“A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.” — Clive James

“The real challenge, when it comes to thinking about supply chains, isn’t making sure that a container ship is unloaded. It’s deciding how we want to live.” — Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!