The Man Himself

© National Portrait Gallery.

This portrait, oil on canvas by Jacques-Emile Blanche, painted in 1935, is my favourite picture of Joyce

Quotes of the Day

”My considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted to the United States.”

• John M. Woolsey, US District Judge, in his judgment after the prosecution of Ulysses for obscenity.

Or this:

”Ulysses… I rather wish I’d never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.”

• George Orwell, in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, September 1934.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Love’s Old Sweet Song | John McCormack

Link

As you can tell, this is a very old recording. McCormack, a bel canto tenor, was a contemporary and friend of Joyce — who was himself a promising young singer. McCormack persuaded him to enter the national singing competition in 1904 (the year in which Ulysses is set). The story is taken up by this blog post by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin:

On 16 May 1904 Joyce participated in the Feis Ceoil singing competition.

The Feis Ceoil is an annual celebration of Irish musical talent with competitions in various categories including singing. In 1903, the Feis Ceoil tenor singing competition was won by John McCormack. The prize was a year-long scholarship to study in Italy. Shortly after his return to Ireland in 1904, McCormack persuaded his friend Joyce to enter the Feis Ceoil.

In preparation, Joyce started taking lessons from Benedetto Palmieri, the best singing teacher in Dublin, but he soon switched to Vincent O’Brien who was less expensive than Palmieri. Joyce had moved into rooms at 60 Shelbourne Road where he hired a piano to rehearse for the competition. Joyce sang in a concert given by the St Brigid’s Panoramic Choir on Saturday 14 May 1904, and two days later he sang at the Feis Ceoil.

The set pieces for the singing competition in 1904 were ‘No Chastening’ by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), and ‘A Long Farewell,’ a traditional song arranged by Moffat. According to the review of the competition in the Irish Daily Independent on 17 May, “Mr. Joyce showed himself possessed of the finest quality voice of any of those competing…”

Part of the competition was to sing at sight from a previously unseen music score, and at that point Joyce simply walked off the stage. It seems that the judge, Professor Luigi Denza, had intended to give Joyce the gold medal but, when Joyce refused the sight-reading test, Denza could not place him among the medal-winners. However, at the end of the competition, the second-placed singer was disqualified and Denza awarded the third-place medal to Joyce. Joyce gave the medal to his Aunt Josephine and today it is owned by the dancer Michael Flatley.

I first learned of this from Fr. O’ Brien, my wonderful Jesuit English teacher — whose father, Vincent’ had been Joyce’s singing tutor!

Small world.

Long Read of the Day

 Virginia Woolf’s Reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, 1918-1920

Virginia Woolf’s brusque and disdainful dismissal of Ulysses (“merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges“) is often quoted. But actually she was obsessed with Joyce and with the book, as this wonderful scholarly essay by James Heffernan demonstrates. This is how it concludes:

The startling diversity of Woolf’s comments on Joyce make one thing clear. None of them–not even the relatively complex assessment in “Modern Novels”– tells the whole truth about her response to his work. But a major clue can be found in her diary for September 26, 1920, where she writes again of the visit paid by T.S. Eliot a week before. Coming just after she had run aground in the middle of the party chapter about halfway through Jacob’s Room (on which she had been working for two months without a break), his visit–she writes– “made [her] listless” and “cast shade” upon her. Since she has already noted that Eliot praised the brilliance of Ulysses for its rendering of “internals,” of the inner lives of its characters, we might well guess the reason for her listlessness. She herself recalls: “He said nothing–but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce”. This strikes me as a revelation. By “he said nothing,” she presumably means that he said nothing about her own work in progress to accompany his extraordinary praise of Ulysses. What then could she conclude? That her own efforts to liberate the novel from the material solidity of the railway carriage and to focus its energies on the irrepressible life of the mind were probably being surpassed by Joyce, who was almost her exact contemporary? Praise him or damn him, she knew only too well that she had to reckon with him. The following April, when a “thin-shredded” cabinet minister asked her over lunch “who are our promising litterateurs?” she answered simply, “Joyce”.

But do read the whole thing. Especially today. It’s a model of how to do literary scholarship.

En passant: Woolf was such an incurable snob (which, I suppose, is one reason why she was such a terrific diarist).

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

A wild rose, spotted yesterday on a walk.

Quote of the Day

”I do think it would speed things up if you followed my social media.”

• Patient to psychotherapist in a New Yorker cartoon.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Blackbird (Lennon and McCartney) | Guitar adaptation | Soren Madsen

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Algorithmic Communism

Long, thoughtful and interesting review by Ian Lorrie of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work.

While neoliberal capitalism has been remarkably successful at laying claim to the future, it used to belong to the left — to the party of utopia. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future argues that the contemporary left must revive its historically central mission of imaginative engagement with futurity. It must refuse the all-too-easy trap of dismissing visions of technological and social progress as neoliberal fantasies. It must seize the contemporary moment of increasing technological sophistication to demand a post-scarcity future where people are no longer obliged to be workers; where production and distribution are democratically delegated to a largely automated infrastructure; where people are free to fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. It must combine a utopian imagination with the patient organizational work necessary to wrest the future from the clutches of hegemonic neoliberalism.

In other words, accept the emerging realities of digital capitalism and learn from the Neoliberal Thought Collective on how to change the ideological weather.

Worth reading.

UK to abandon the backward glance

A thought experiment: Imagine putting a blackout screen over the windscreen of your car and then setting off to drive through a violent storm guided entirely by what you can see through the rear-view mirror and shouts from passengers who are leaning out of the side windows trying to see what’s ahead through the driving rain.

Well, basically, that’s how governments have traditionally been trying to manage their economies.

Now the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Alan Turing Institute have teamed up to do something about this. The press release has just dropped into my inbox:

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) and The Alan Turing Institute have today announced a new strategic partnership to produce close to real time economic statistics to help track changes in the economy while preserving privacy.

The collaboration, which will initially run for two years, between the UK’s national statistics institute and the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence will see ONS economists, analysts and data scientists working closely with a team of Turing researchers.

The first three projects set for delivery are:

Understanding Economic Networks – This project will utilise a variety of cutting-edge data science techniques to provide new insights about transactions between firms in near real time, allowing the ONS to better understand the impact of seasonal patterns and major events such as the Covid-19 pandemic or Brexit on the UK economy.

Economic nowcasting – By rapidly bringing together a range of new data, we aim to create economic models in close to real time that track changes in retail prices, household spending and income at a detailed local level, allowing us to measure the pulse of the economy.

Synthetic data and privacy preservation – This project will develop tools to allow the sharing of private datasets with a wider range of stakeholders, while preserving privacy. This can be done using synthetic data generators which offer a private way to generate data, whilst preserving statistical features in the original data set. Applying this methodology to sensitive data held by ONS would allow greater flexibility for collaboration between ONS and researchers in the wider community and government.

The Age of Combustion

Because of my decision to buy a Tesla last year, and the decision of governments everywhere to outlaw fossil-fuel-powered cars, I’d been searching for a term to describe the now-doomed era of the Internal Combustion Engine. I’d thought of calling it the ‘ICE Age’ but I’m sure many others have already thought of that. Stephen Bayley has come up with a much better term: ‘The Age of Combustion’, is the title of his new book (with the subtitle ‘Notes on Automobile Design’). I’ve pre-ordered it on the basic of an extract published (behind a paywall) in the Financial Times. Here’s a sample:

Tom Wolfe said that cars are “freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour… everything”. And indeed, from Huckleberry Finn to Grand Theft Auto, via Kerouac and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, America reads like a road epic. Consider F Scott Fitzgerald, the great poet of ruined glamour and wasted promise. In 1920, flush with the advance from This Side of Paradise, he fired up his 1918 Marmon, bundled his wife into the passenger seat and drove from Connecticut to Alabama, so Zelda could rediscover the peaches and biscuits of her southern youth. They were looking for a lost Golden Age, a quest which later became the subject of The Great Gatsby. (In the book, a yellow Rolls- Royce plays an important part.) Fitzgerald turned this eight-day journey into a series of articles, which appeared in the US Motor magazine, in 1924, eventually published in book form, in 2011, as The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.

The reality was one of bust axles, blow-outs and misdirections, since Zelda could not read a map. Scott and Zelda never found their Golden Age, but Fitzgerald could not let the fantasy go. He described “an ethereal picture of how we would roll southward along the glittering boulevards of many cities, then, by way of quiet lanes and fragrant hollows whose honeysuckle branches would ruffle our hair with white sweet fingers”. That’s what a Marmon could do for you. On return, Zelda icily wrote “the joys of motoring are more-or-less fiction”.

En passant Bayley has been obsessed with cars for a long time — see, for example, his Cars Mini: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything and Sex, Drink and Fast Cars. So he’s spent ages thinking about the automobile culture that has shaped most of our lives. His new book peers forward to a time when self-driving cars will take the thrill out of motoring and replace it with drab mobility-as-a-service provided by fleets of autonomous vehicles owned by tech companies. So we’ll move from an era where owning a car was once a badge of adulthood to one where it’ll be such an inconvenience that only elderly boomers with more money than sense will want one.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Remembering Zoombini

A thousand thanks for the dozens of lovely emails sympathising with us on the loss of our precious cat. I’ve tried to reply individually to everyone who wrote. The overwhelming message of the responses is that the relationships we have with our pets are often more intense and more important to us than we generally admit or realise.

Another thing: Zoombini’s sibling, Tilly, came with her to us on the same day 17 years ago. After Zoombini’s heart had stopped on Thursday, Tilly went to her, sniffed around and licked her ear in the way she often did, and then left the room. Since then she’s clearly been unmoored. It’s as if life has suddenly become boring for her. Hopefully this will fade and she will settle into a new routine.

When we came down stairs on Friday morning, we found her sitting on the doormat by the cat-flap, looking out. Was she wondering when her sister would return? Or just looking out? Who knows?

These are deep waters, Holmes.

Quote of the Day

”The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.”

• Rosamond Lehmann on Ian Fleming

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Visions of Johanna

Link

First time I’ve heard this version. Lyrics are hard to make out, so here they are.

Long Read of the Day

There is nothing so deep as the gleaming surface of the aphorism

A lovely — aphoristic almost — essay on the aphorism by Noreen Masaud.

The critic Susan Sontag underlined the point in her diary of 1980: ‘Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.’ But this isn’t quite right. Part of the charm of the aphorism, and mystery, is that it doesn’t really expect its audience to ‘get it fast’, or even get it at all. Its slick form sets out to confound and stymie as much as educate.

Big Brother is still watching you and he goes by the name Facebook

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The security guru Bruce Schneier once famously observed that “surveillance is the business model of the internet”. Like all striking generalisations it was slightly too general: it was strictly true only if by “the internet” you meant the services of a certain number of giant tech companies, notably those of Facebook (including WhatsApp and Instagram), Google (including YouTube), Twitter and Amazon.

The trouble is (and this is what gave Schneier’s aphorism its force) that for a large chunk of networked humanity, especially inhabitants of poorer countries, these walled gardens are indeed what people regard as “the internet”. And that’s no accident. Although Chinese smartphones are pretty cheap everywhere, mobile data tends to be prohibitively expensive in poor countries. So the deal offered by western tech companies is that data charges are low or zero if you access the internet via their apps, but expensive if you venture outside their walled gardens.

Of all the companies, Facebook was the one that first appreciated the potential of this strategy…

Read on

New York Senate Passes Electronics Right-to-Repair Legislation

The legislation still has to pass the Assembly, but the Senate became the first legislative body in the US to pass a bill that would make it easier to fix your things.

From Matthew Gault’s report:

The New York State Senate has overwhelmingly voted to pass electronics right-to-repair legislation, becoming the first legislative body in the country to do so. It is a major step forward for a movement that has overwhelming public support and has been working toward getting a law done for the last several years.

“It protects consumers from the monopolistic practices of manufacturers,” Senator Phil Boyle said on the floor. “We all have computers, laptops, and smartphones that we repair once in a while. Many times we have to send them back to the manufacturer for simple repairs that cost a lot more. Now people can repair their own computers, laptops, and smartphones, and farm equipment. We don’t have to send them back to the manufacturers.”

The Senate passed the bill with 51 Senators voting for and only 12 voting against. The bill still has to pass the Assembly on an extremely tight deadline—New York’s legislative session ends Thursday. If enacted, New York’s Digital Fair Repair Act would be the first of its kind in the United States. One of its strengths is its simplicity. According to the text, it “requires OEMs to make available, for purposes of diagnosis, maintenance, or repair, to any independent repair provider, or to the owner of digital electronic equipment manufactured by or on behalf of, or sold by, the OEM, on fair and reasonable terms, documentation, parts, and tools, inclusive of any updates to information or embedded software.”

Also — See Cory Doctorow’s blast on this subject — “Monopolists are winning the Repair Wars”.

Ed Yong wins a Pulitzer

Well deserved. Here’s his Editor’s letter to the staff of The Atlantic :

It is with great happiness that I share the news that Ed Yong has won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. This is a wonderful moment for Ed, for his editors, and for the entire Atlantic.

Ed has become the indispensable reporter of the pandemic, and I’m so pleased that the Pulitzer Board is recognizing him for his outstanding achievements. Through his writing, Ed has illuminated pathways of understanding for tens of millions of our readers; he has been a sentinel, a source of brilliant analysis, a beacon of moral clarity; and he has provided comfort when it was needed the most. It is an enormous pleasure for me to count Ed as a colleague and friend. Ed is part of the best team covering the pandemic (and science more broadly) in our industry. One reason for their great success is that they lift one another up, and all of us are beneficiaries of this team’s selflessness and hard work.

The Pulitzers were opened to magazine entries five years ago. This is The Atlantic’s first win, and so an historic day for the magazine.

Seems to me that the only serious competition to Ed for the Explanatory Reporting prize was Zeynep Tufecki — who also writes for The Atlantic.

Dream on, Brexiteers

From Jonty Bloom’s blog

The latest Brexiteer fantasy is that the solution to the Northern Ireland Protocol is to place the border between Ireland and the rest of the EU. It tells you a great deal about the mindset of these people that they think their problem is so important that others will destroy themselves to help them but let’s just look at the facts.

Ireland is in the EU and the Single Market, is an independent country and regards Brexit as a very inconvenient mess, caused by the British government. Its huge economic successes have been built on being in the EU and it knows it. It is also best mates with the new American President, who like international law and thinks states should comply with the treaties they sign.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Zoombini RIP

Our beloved cat, Zoombini, was — as the euphemism goes — put to sleep yesterday. After 17 years of vibrant life she suffered a stroke early on Tuesday morning which had left her pretty incapacitated. At first we hoped that she would slip quietly into oblivion but yesterday morning it became clear that she was in real distress and that the most humane thing to do was to put her out of her misery, which a wonderfully compassionate Vet then did. She died at home, in our bedroom, surrounded by those who loved her. And we buried her last night in our garden after a small, communal, Irish wake – which is why this edition arrives in your inbox later than usual.

She was a remarkable animal — the most intelligent cat I’ve ever known. She was wily, perceptive, affectionate, needy and could be imperious, so much so that we used to joke that she conformed to PG Wodehouse’s explanation of why cats are different from dogs — they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods. She could never understood why we — her servants — never rose at daybreak, and made her displeasure vocally plain. Although we had a perfectly good cat-flap, she would on occasion sit outside the back door yowling insistently — and of course I would eventually cave in and open the door, at which point she would strut in, purring ostentatiously at the triumph of the feline will.

Her passing leaves a big gap in our lives. People who haven’t had pets will doubtless scoff at this. After all, she was “only” an animal. But in thinking that they are ignoring a fundamental truth: so are we.

(The photograph, taken over a year ago, shows her sitting on the keyboard of my Raspberry Pi, having (possibly?) inadvertently pressed a keystroke sequence bringing up the ‘install’ dialogue for the Thunderbird email client! And — in case you’re wondering — her name comes from an ancient computer game.)

Quote of the Day

”My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.”

• W.H. Auden

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart |  Le nozze di Figaro | Voi Che Sapete (Cherubino’s aria) | Marianne Crebassa and the Dutch National Opera

Link

Short but very sweet.

Long Read of the Day

The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox

The use of the term “cloud” for what is actually a global mesh of giant, air-conditioned sheds filled with computer servers, started innocently — it was the symbol that geeks would use on whiteboard diagrams to indicate something that was happening on the Internet rather than on a local network. But it morphed into a pernicious metaphor for concealing the environmental and security implications of putting all our eggs into a particular technological basket (just to square metaphors!). When the move to the ‘cloud’ had begun in earnest, Nicholas Carr, in his (fine) book  The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, dignified it with the logic of inevitability. After all, the smartphone revolution would be impossible without cloud computing.

But now one can see stirrings of doubt about this ‘inevitability’ proposition, which is why this perceptive piece by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado is interesting. Their argument is that while cloud computing clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Zoom with a view

Killarney, viewed from Aghadoe Heights.

Quote of the Day

”The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence”

• Art Linkletter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Mr. Tambourine Man | Live at the Newport Folk Festival | 1964

Link

Gosh! This old recording was a discovery for us ageing hippies.

Long Read of the Day

Why do people feel like their academic fields are at a dead end?

Terrific long blog post by Noah Smith who says that, in recent years, he’s noticed a lot of thinkpieces in which people talk about their academic fields hitting an impasse.

Maybe academics just always tend to think their fields are in crisis, until the next big discovery comes along. After all, some people thought physics was over in the late 19th century, just before relativity and quantum mechanics came along. Maybe the recent hand-wringing is just more of the same?

Perhaps. On the completely opposite side, there’s the “end of science” hypothesis — the idea that most of the big ideas really have been found, and now we’re sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel for the Universe’s last few remaining secrets. This is the uncomfortable possibility raised by papers like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, by Bloom et al. (2020).

But in fact, I have a third hypothesis, which sort of strikes a middle ground. My conjecture is that the way that we do academic research — or at least, the way we’ve done it since World War 2 — is not quite suited to the way discovery actually works.

Aha! Now we’re onto something. He’s an amazing blogger, always original, always worth reading.

So… read on.

Life Expectancy Could Rise a Lot. Here’s What it Means 

Interesting column by David Brooks.

Sample:

Even if you beat lung cancer or survive a heart attack, your body’s deterioration will finish you off before too long. The average 80-year-old suffers from around five diseases.

That’s why even if we could totally cure cancer, it would add less than three years to average life expectancy. A total cure for heart disease would give us at best two extra years.

To keep the longevity train rolling it may not be enough to cure diseases…

Endow Jones index crashes to Earth

Nice rant from Dave Pell in his daily newsletter

It was called the sharing economy. But what really being shared was billions of investment dollars from tech venture capital firms looking to use money as a weapon in the race to the top. What it meant for consumers was that our rides, resorts, and refreshments were all being subsidized by investors as part of a customer acquisition land grab. The prices seemed too good to be true because they were. “For years, these subsidies allowed us to live Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets. Collectively, we took millions of cheap Uber and Lyft rides, shuttling ourselves around like bourgeois royalty while splitting the bill with those companies’ investors. We plunged MoviePass into bankruptcy by taking advantage of its $9.95-a-month, all-you-can-watch movie ticket deal, and took so many subsidized spin classes that ClassPass was forced to cancel its $99-a-month unlimited plan. We filled graveyards with the carcasses of food delivery start-ups — Maple, Sprig, SpoonRocket, Munchery — just by accepting their offers of underpriced gourmet meals.” But at a point, even the winning companies have to charge more than they spend. And in many cases, that point appears to be now. In short, your allowance just got cut off.

This was triggered by an interesting NYT piece by Kevin Roose on how chickens have come home to roost for the sovereign-wealth-funded unicorns.

A few years ago, while on a work trip in Los Angeles, I hailed an Uber for a crosstown ride during rush hour. I knew it would be a long trip, and I steeled myself to fork over $60 or $70.

Instead, the app spit out a price that made my jaw drop: $16.

Experiences like these were common during the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy, which is what I like to call the period from roughly 2012 through early 2020, when many of the daily activities of big-city 20- and 30-somethings were being quietly underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

But guess what? The laws of economic gravity are beginning to assert themselves.

Now, users are noticing that for the first time — whether because of disappearing subsidies or merely an end-of-pandemic demand surge — their luxury habits actually carry luxury price tags.

“Today my Uber ride from Midtown to JFK cost me as much as my flight from JFK to SFO,” Sunny Madra, a vice president at Ford’s venture incubator, recently tweeted, along with a screenshot of a receipt that showed he had spent nearly $250 on a ride to the airport.

“Airbnb got too much dip on they chip,” another Twitter user complained. “No one is gonna continue to pay $500 to stay in an apartment for two days when they can pay $300 for a hotel stay that has a pool, room service, free breakfast & cleaning everyday. Like get real lol.”

Sigh. Never having used Uber or Airbnb in those venture-funded days, I missed out on all those discounted treats.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Welcome, Ol’ Timer

The ad Apple ran in 1981 when IBM introduced its PC.

(Thanks to Dave Winer)

Quote of the Day

”Though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you”

• Ian McEwan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cherish the Ladies | Lord Inchiquin Medley

Link

Cherish the Ladies is an interesting and talented group.

Long Read of the Day

Between Golem and God: The Future of AI

An illuminating essay by Ali Minay, who is Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Faculty at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on complex adaptive systems, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Maybe it’s because I’m an engineer, but what I really liked about this piece is the elegant way he structured his analysis round a simple diagram:

Anyway, it’s well worth your time.

The physical reality of ‘AI’

Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI:Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence is a landmark book which challenges the glib way in which ‘AI’ (a polite and misleading term for machine-learning) is regarded as an abstruse abstraction.

Last Sunday, the Observer carried an excellent interview of her by Zoë Corbyn. Here’s a sample:

What’s the aim of the book?

We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.

.What should people know about how AI products are made?

We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, “Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,” invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Worth reading in full.

Italy’s fading digital democracy dream

Interesting Wired piece by Michele Barbero.

The Five Star Movement (5SM), launched one of the most interesting experiments in using tech to revitalise democracy by reconciling thousands of disenfranchised citizens with democratic processes by giving them a say on strategic decisions and in the selection of candidates by means of frequent online votes. But, writes, Barbero,

over the past two months its internal processes have been disrupted by a painful divorce with the association that owns Rousseau, the web platform (named after the Genevan political philosopher and theorist of direct democracy) where the 5SM used to hold its ballots and debates. The end of a long stalemate between the party and the platform, this week, provided some respite – but questions remain on whether the party’s online democracy utopia can ever be revived.

In many ways, the row resembled an Italian opera buffa rather than a political showdown over the future of participatory democracy. The Rousseau association, founded by Gianroberto Casaleggio and his son Davide – now the president following Gianroberto’s death in 2016 – had long been complaining that many Five Star elected officials had stopped paying, with the blessing of their leaders, the €300 (£260) monthly quotas that accounted for much of its revenue. The organisation claimed that the total back fees amounted to about €450,000 (£388,000), a figure that the 5SM rejected, arguing that it had been calculated including representatives that had long left the party, and billing for services it had never asked for.

The billing fiasco will doubtless be used by opponents of digital experiments as proof that this kind of ‘direct democracy’ can’t work. But the interesting thing about the 5SM experiment is that it was the biggest experiment of its kind to date. It shows that governing is a difficult business, that deliberative democracy is hard and that the problems highlighted by Edmund Burke in his famous letter to the electors of Bristol are still relevant. The fact that there’s no magic tech solution doesn’t mean that we can’t use the technology creatively to reduce the distance between the governors and the governed.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Puffin island: a voyage to one of Scotland’s remotest habitats A wonderful photo-essay by Murdo MacLeod. They are the most beautiful birds. Link

• US recovers millions in cryptocurrency paid to Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers So much for the idea that crypto kept the Feds at bay. Link

ERRATUM The link to yesterday’s Long Read was missing. It’s https://fivebooks.com/best-books/industrial-revolution-sheilagh-ogilvie/. Apologies for the omission.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

After the party

We had a nice family gathering in the garden one night last week. After everyone had departed I sat at the table, admiring the little Hay light that I got as a present. It’s a really lovely piece of kit.

Quote of the Day

”It’s fairly common to say that Google is the new Microsoft, but from a regulatory perspective Apple is the new Microsoft and Google is the new AT&T. (Amazon is the new Walmart and Facebook perhaps the new Murdoch.)”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Lindley | Promised Land

Link

Recorded in the Vienna Opera House (not what one usually associates with that staid institution).

Beautiful Reggae number. If it doesn’t improve your breakfast, then nothing will.

Long Read of the Day

The best books on the Industrial Revolution

Recommended by historian Sheilagh Ogilvie. Plus an interview in which she talks about the topic and the books.

Link

Annoying, though, that Humphrey Jennings’s wonderful  Pandaemonium, 1660-1886: Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers wasn’t mentioned. Maybe it’s because it’s just an anthology.

What We Leave Behind

Wonderful blast from Scott Galloway from a year ago, as the extent of the pandemic was beginning to become clear (at least to those who were disposed to think about it.)

Essential workers. The term essential means we’re going to treat you like chumps but run commercials calling you heroes. Just stop it. We lean out our windows and applaud health-care workers, as we should. We don’t, however, lean out our windows to salute other front-line workers — the guy or gal delivering your groceries or dropping Indian food through the window in your back seat.

Why? Because, deep down, we’ve been taught to believe that we live in a meritocracy and that billionaires and minimum wage workers all deserve what they get. We’ve conflated luck and talent, and it’s had a disastrous outcome — a lack of empathy.

There is so much that’s jarring about American exceptionalism. An enduring American image of the pandemic is a makeshift morgue in a refrigerated tractor-trailer in Queens. Worse? We idolize the founder of Tesla, who’s added the GDP of Hungary to his wealth (all tax-free/deferred) during this crisis, even as we discover 25% of New Yorkers are at risk for becoming food insecure. This isn’t a United States, it’s The Hunger Games.

This country was built by titans of industry even wealthier than today’s billionaires — Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan. But 1 in 11 steel workers didn’t need to die for bridges and skyscrapers to happen. We are a country that rewards genius. Yet no one person needs to hold enough cash to end homelessness ($20 billion), eradicate malaria worldwide ($90 billion), and have enough left over to pay 700,000 teachers’ salaries. Bezos makes the average Amazon employee’s salary in 10 seconds. This paints us as a feudal state and not a democracy.

Our lack of empathy for fellow Americans is vulgar and un-American. We can and should replace the hollow tributes with a federally mandated $20/hour minimum wage. This “outrageous” lift in the hourly wage would vault us from the 1960s to the present. As of 2018 the federal minimum was worth 29% less than in 1968.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• China’s WeChat bans nose-picking, spanking in bid to clean up livestreams Reuters report. Link
•  Government Report Finds No Evidence U.F.O.s Were Alien Spacecraft Damn. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

From the Preface to my copy of Keynes’s General Theory.

What caught my eye was the point that his readers will have difficulty not with the new ideas they will encounter in the text, but in sloughing off the old ideas with which they have been conditioned and reared. I see this all the time at the moment, as our governing elites can’t escape from their neoliberal conditioning.

Quote of the Day

”A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

• Richard Bach

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Concerto for Violoncello Nº 2 in B flat Major

Link

Lessons from Trump’s short career as a blogger

‘From the Desk of Donald J. Trump’ lasted just 29 days. It’s tempting to gloat over this humiliating failure of a monster hitherto regarded as an omnipotent master of the online universe.

Tempting but unwise, because Trump’s failure should alert us to a couple of unpalatable realities.

The first is that the eerie silence that descended after the former President was deplatformed by Twitter and Facebook provided conclusive evidence of the power of these two private companies to control the networked public sphere. Those of us who loathed him celebrate his silencing because we saw him — rightly — as a threat to democracy. But nearly half of the American electorate voted for him. And the same unaccountable power that deprived him of his online megaphones could easily be deployed to silence others of whom we approve.

The other unpalatable reality is that Trump’s failure to build an online base off his own bat should alert us to the way the utopian potential of the early Internet — that it would be the death of the couch potato, the archetypal passive consume — has not been realised. Trump, remember, had 80m followers on Twitter and God knows how many on Facebook. Yet when he starts his own blog they didn’t flock to it. In fact they were nowhere to be seen. Indeed his blog, as reported Forbes, had “less traffic than pet adoption site Petfinder and food site Eat This Not That.” And he shuttered it because “low readership made him look small and irrelevant”. Which it did.

What does this tell us? The answer, says Philip Napoli in an insightful essay in Wired,

lies in the inescapable dynamics of how today’s online media ecosystem operates and how audiences have come to engage with content online. Many of us who study media have long distinguished between “push” media and “pull” media. Traditional broadcast television is a classic “push” medium, in which multiple content streams are delivered to a user’s device with very little effort required on the user’s part, beyond flipping the channels. In contrast, the web was initially the quintessential “pull” medium, where a user frequently needed to actively search to locate content interesting to them. Search engines and knowing how to navigate them effectively were central to locating the most relevant content online. Whereas TV was a “lean-back” medium for “passive” users, the web, we were told, was a “lean-forward” medium, where users were “active.” Though these generalizations no longer hold up, the distinction is instructive for thinking about why Trump’s blog failed so spectacularly.

In the highly fragmented web landscape, with millions of sites to choose from, generating traffic is challenging. This is why early web startups spent millions of dollars on splashy Super Bowl ads on tired, old broadcast TV, essentially leveraging the push medium to inform and encourage people to pull their online content.

Then social media helped to transform the web from a pull medium to a push medium…

He’s right. See today’s Long Read for Cory Doctorow’s expansion of this idea.

Long Read of the Day

 Recommendation engines and “lean-back” media

Typically perceptive essay by Cory Doctorow.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

Worth reading in full. Our media ecosystem has profoundly changed. And that means our culture is changing too.

Why a silicon chip shortage has left carmakers in the slow lane

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, cars were made the Henry Ford way, revolutionary in its time, but involving holding huge stocks of components to feed a relentless mechanised production line. As Japan started to rebuild after the war, its leading carmaker, Toyota, came up with a more efficient way of making them. It came to be called the “lean machine” and a key feature of it was to hold very small inventories of components and instead have the necessary parts delivered just when they were needed for a particular assembly task. It was the beginning of just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing and it eventually became the way all cars were made because lower inventories meant lower manufacturing costs, better quality and higher profit margins.

But JIT critically relies on an efficient, reliable and robust supply chain. If the chain falters, then everything grinds to a halt. This applies whether the part is a gearbox or a silicon chip and over the last two decades chips, particularly in engine management units (EMUs), have become vital to the functioning of even the humblest petrol or diesel vehicle. We’re heading towards a future when cars will essentially be computers with wheels. But even now, if the relevant chips don’t arrive, then it’s crisis time.

The current distress of the car industry stems from the fact that the chips aren’t arriving – for several reasons…

Read on

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Ice-skating Robot Also Swims No, I don’t need one. But interesting nonetheless. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

A polite request in the grounds of Dartington Hall in Devon.

Quote of the Day

”When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

• W.H. Auden

Nice, but it smacks a bit of what is now called “humblebragging” on social media.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brian McGrath, Cathal Hayden & Steve Cooney | Banjo Duet | Gradam Ceoil TG4 | 2000

Link

Note that it’s a ‘duet’, not a duel.

Long Read of the Day

How clothing and climate change kickstarted agriculture

An intriguing Aeon Essay by Ian Gilligan, a prehistorian at the University of Sydney and the author of Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory: Linking Evidence, Causes, and Effects.

(With thanks to Andrew Curry, who spotted it first and wrote a nice commentary on it.)

Remembering Paul Feyerabend

Chancing on this video was an example of the blissful serendipity offered by the Web. It’s an extended interview of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend on Italian TV. And it’s in English.

What was striking about it was the way it suddenly reminded me of a thinker who had streaked like a comet across the sky when I was a young academic. I have always been interested in the philosophy of science, and spent much of the 1970s oscillating between the views of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and the attempts of Imré Lakatos to find some way of bridging the chasm between the two.

And then in 1975 came Feyerabend’s remarkable book, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, an intellectual grenade lobbed into those austere controversies.

It was one of those books which forever changes the way one thinks. Certainly it had that impact on me. And there have been interesting echoes of the issues it raised in current controversies about “following the science’ in the Covid crisis. When the book appeared in the 1970s it met with predictable responses from the philosophical establishment, which interpreted it as a frontal attack on ‘science’. What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was the personal toll that this hostile reaction took on Feyerabend. I knew very little about him as a person, and I assumed from his wonderfully insouciant style that he wouldn’t give a damn what these people thought.

But he did, and was deeply depressed for a time. Later on, he wrote movingly in his autobiography about it:

The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen—Is it here or isn’t? No sign of it. Perhaps it’s asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV—Good Morning America—, David What’s-his-name, a guy I can’t stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk—and here she is, my faithful depression: “Did you think you could leave without me?”

He was, by all accounts, an unforgettable lecturer. The entry for him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes a memoir of one of his students which brilliantly conveys that.

Sussex University: the start of the Autumn Term, 1974. There was not a seat to be had in the biggest Arts lecture theatre on campus. Taut with anticipation, we waited expectantly and impatiently for the advertized event to begin. He was not on time—as usual. In fact rumour had it that he would not be appearing at all that illness (or was it just ennui? or perhaps a mistress?) had confined him to bed. But just as we began sadly to reconcile ourselves to the idea that there would be no performance that day at all, Paul Feyerabend burst through the door at the front of the packed hall. Rather pale, and supporting himself on a short metal crutch, he walked with a limp across to the blackboard. Removing his sweater he picked up the chalk and wrote down three questions one beneath the other: What’s so great about knowledge? What’s so great about science? What’s so great about truth? We were not going to be disappointed after all!

During the following weeks of that term, and for the rest of his year as a visiting lecturer, Feyerabend demolished virtually every traditional academic boundary. He held no idea and no person sacred. With unprecedented energy and enthusiasm he discussed anything from Aristotle to the Azande. How does science differ from witchcraft? Does it provide the only rational way of cognitively organizing our experience? What should we do if the pursuit of truth cripples our intellects and stunts our individuality? Suddenly epistemology became an exhilarating area of investigation.

Feyerabend created spaces in which people could breathe again. He demanded of philosophers that they be receptive to ideas from the most disparate and apparently far-flung domains, and insisted that only in this way could they understand the processes whereby knowledge grows. His listeners were enthralled, and he held his huge audiences until, too ill and too exhausted to continue, he simply began repeating himself. But not before he had brought the house down by writing “Aristotle” in three-foot high letters on the blackboard and then writing “Popper” in tiny, virtually illegible letters beneath it!

Feyerabend later in life. Photograph by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend 

Another thing I hadn’t known was that his health was very poor. He was in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the Second World War and while directing military traffic during the German retreat he was shot three times, with one bullet hitting his spine, leaving him with chronic pain and difficulty in walking. And, in a way, his iconoclastic attitude towards establishment worship of ‘science’ may have been at least partly influenced by personal experience. The Stanford enclopedia entry hints at that:

Because his health was poor, Feyerabend started seeing a healer who had been recommended to him. The treatment was successful, and thenceforth Feyerabend used to refer to his own case as an example of both the failures of orthodox medicine and the largely unexplored possibilities of “alternative” or traditional remedies.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Our local Canada Geese family, photographed late yesterday. All eight fluffballs have grown into gawky teenagers.

Quote of the Day

”There was clearly no need for a war to lay waste to the biosphere; all that was needed was business as usual.”

• Francis, a character in Edward St Aubyn’s new novel, Double Blind.

(I’m reminded of it by this morning’s news about Republican opposition to Joe Biden’s ‘pause’ on the Alaskan exploration licences awarded by Trump to oil companies.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Cello Concerto No 6 in D Major

Link

Long Read of the Day

Sport loves athletes with mental health issues – if they just shut up and play

Well, perhaps not long, but definitely today’s best read. Marina Hyde on the ludicrous hypocrisy of the bodies that run professional tennis.

You do have to admire tennis’s position on health. The women’s No 2 has been pushed into withdrawing from a grand slam for having the temerity to take a small step to protect her own mental equilibrium, while the men’s No 1 has spent the past 14 months continually honking out anti-Covid vaccine messages . Novak Djokovic has not been officially censured for that, nor for the ridiculous super-spreader tournament he hosted across the Balkans last summer against all advice, which saw several players (including him) catch Covid.

Lots more where that came from. Enjoy (as faux-friendly waiters say in faux-posh restaurants), apparently unaware that ‘enjoy’ is a transitive verb.

The UK’s recipe for disaster: keep taking the tabloids

Britain has a few good newspapers, and some of the world’s worst — its ‘tabloids’ or ‘red tops’. Take, for example, yesterday’s ‘news’ headlines as reported by Politico, after the country had its first day without a Covid-related death :

A major milestone: Most papers lead on yesterday’s brilliant news that there were zero COVID deaths reported in the U.K. for the first time since March 11, 2020 — 447 days ago. The Mail says the stat shows there is “nothing to fear from freedom” and blasts what it calls an “insidious campaign to keep curbs.” The Telegraph says Johnson is now “under pressure not to stall” his reopening, and the Times reckons there is “fresh hope for June 21 as deaths fall to zero.”

Then…

A weary Whitehall official put it slightly more strongly after the front pages came out: “I would politely point out that we have been in this pandemic for 15 months and everyone should know by now that there is a lag between cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Today is obviously very good news but as the health secretary said, cases are rising and it always takes some weeks to know the effect of that on hospitalizations and deaths.”

There are numerous reasons why the UK is such a badly-governed state (a dysfunctional first-past-the-post electoral system, a patchwork ‘constitution’, class divisions, inequality, over-centralisation, imperial afterglow, etc.) But the country’s tabloid media have to shoulder a good deal of the blame.

And, of course, while things may appear to be getting better in the UK and the US, in the rest of the world (terra incognito to British tabloids) things are actually getting much worse. And so long as the virus exists anywhere in the world, nowhere is really safe.

”We know what you did during lockdown”

An FT Film written by James Graham.

And a graphic introduction to the dystopia into which we’re heading.

18 minutes long. Unmissable and disturbing.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!