Fire hydrant, Venice, 2016.

Quote of the Day

”It’s only the very young girl at her first dinner-party whom it is difficult to entertain. At her second dinner-party, and thereafter, she knows the whole art of being amusing. All she has to do is listen; all we men have to do is to tell her about ourselves.”

• A.A. Milne

There’s real wisdom in that observation. I’m a reasonably sociable chap, but I hate receptions and what used to be called “cocktail parties”. So I evolved a strategy for getting through them. I would find someone (generally a male) who wasn’t engaged in conversation and introduce myself. Then I would ask him about himself — what did he do, where did he work, who were his colleagues, etc. He would happily oblige — and very rarely ask me any questions in return. After a while I discovered that this strategy had an interesting (and unexpected) side-effect. My involuntary interviewees often told third parties (who duly reported back to me) what an interesting chap I was.

When we come out of lockdown and I have to go to receptions again, I will of course, continue this practice. It never fails.

On a related tack… One of the most interesting women I’ve ever known was Patricia Cockburn, wife of Claud, the wonderful rogue journalist. When I was an undergraduate, she and Claud were very kind to me, and I sometimes came to lunch in Brook Lodge, their glorious, rackety, Georgian house just outside of Youghal in Co. Cork.

Patricia came from an Anglo-Irish family, the Arbuthnots, who were horsey, well-connected and pretty broke. They didn’t send their girls to University on the grounds that a better strategy was to try to marry them off to rich Establishment dudes.

So Patricia was a deb, and was often invited to posh dinners. She once told me a great story about being a guest at a dinner of some posh cavalry regiment. She was seated next to a retired Indian Army colonel, a fierce, pop-eyed gent with a luxuriant moustache, who looked like an escapee from an Evelyn Waugh novel and who completely ignored her. Eventually, in an effort politely to gain his attention, she asked him if he would like some water, offering to pour some from the crystal jug placed between them.

“Never touch the stuff” snarled the Colonel, and turned away. Eventually, Patricia plucked up courage and said: “But Colonel, how do you wash your teeth?”

Again, he swivelled round like a gun turret. “A little light Sauterne, madam”, he roared. The remainder of the dinner passed in total silence, at least on her part.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Brothers In Arms | Meistersaal, Berlin | 10 September 2007

Link

Long Read of the Day

Your face is Not Your Own

Terrific essay by Kashmir Hill, who has in her time done great stuff on the dominance of tech companies, among other things. This piece is about the implications of the activities of a company called Clearview AI which has been hoovering up facial images on the Web.

The legal threats to Clearview have begun to move through the courts, and Clearview is preparing a powerful response, invoking the First Amendment. Many civil-liberties advocates fear the company will prevail, and they are aghast at the potential consequences. One major concern is that facial-recognition technology might be too flawed for law enforcement to rely on. A federal agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) periodically tests the accuracy of facial-recognition algorithms voluntarily submitted by vendors; Clearview hasn’t participated. In 2019, the agency found that many algorithms were less accurate in identifying people of color, meaning their use could worsen systemic bias in the criminal-justice system. In the last year, three cases have been unearthed (none involving Clearview) in which police officers arrested and briefly jailed the wrong person based on a bad facial-recognition match. All three of the wrongfully arrested were Black men.

There’s also a broader reason that critics fear a court decision favoring Clearview: It could let companies track us as pervasively in the real world as they already do online.

Facial recognition is a toxic and dangerous technology. This isn’t just a speculative opinion on my part, btw. A good working model is on display every day in Mainland China.

Is online advertising about to crash, just like the property market did in 2008?

My Observer column today:

One of the most interesting developments of the past year or so was the revelation that serious outfits such as the UK Competition and Markets Authority were launching major investigations into the hidden, high-speed advertising auctions run by the social media platforms. This suggests that there’s something rotten in there: the claims of the companies about the effectiveness of targeted advertising are, basically, too good to be true.

If so, then we are mugs to take them at their face value. And it’s time to call their bluff. Which is exactly what Sinead Boucher, the CEO of Stuff, New Zealand’s leading online news and media site, did. In March 2019, she decided to stop advertising on Facebook, a move that her peers regarded as crazy. “That action had zero effect on our traffic,” she told a seminar at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. “We were prepared for a drop in our audience but it had zero effect. It made us realise we should think more about our decisions, instead of buying into the idea that you have to work with all the social media platforms.”

Maybe the social media emperor has fewer clothes than we imagined.

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Look what I found in the garden this morning.

Suez 2.0

That whirring noise you hear is the sound of Gamal Abdel Nasser, erstwhile coup leader and President of Egypt, whirring contentedly in his grave. Readers with very long memories will recall that in July 1956, he abruptly nationalised the Suez Canal company, ostensibly on the grounds that its revenues would enable the construction of the Aswan Dam after the US and the UK had refused to fund the project. Since the canal was a critical conduit for seaborne traffic to India and the Far East, and Britain and France were the prime shareholders in it (and prime recipients of the revenues therefrom), the UK — under the leadership of Prime Minister Anthony Eden — conspired with France and Israel to invade Egypt to teach the upstart an imperial lesson for daring to hold the Western world to ransom and interrupt its supply lines.

The cod ‘invasion’ was what the US Marines would call a clusterfuck. The US refused to support the adventure, the pound dropped like a stone, Eden ‘resigned’ and ‘Global Britain’ suddenly realised that it wasn’t a global power any longer.

Now the canal is blocked by a giant container ship which seems to have run aground.

The Suez Canal handles around 12% of global trade, making it a key conduit in the world’s supply chains. Each day of blockage disrupts more than $9 billion worth of goods, according to Lloyd’s List, which translates to about $400 million per hour.

It’s 1956 all over again, but without the shooting.

Six years after the first Suez fiasco, Dean Acheson, who had been Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, famously observed that “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role”. It’s still looking for one.

The procrastinator’s matrix

Yesterday’s post about the Eisenhower Decision Matrix prompted an email from Johannes Björkman with a link to an elegant blog post by Tim Urban on The Procrastination Matrix, which looks like this:

Quote of the Day

”She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.”

• P.G. Wodehouse

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Norah Jones | Don’t Know Why

Link

Long Read of the day

Scott Galloway: The Sonic (Entrepreneurship) Boom

He’s always interesting. This week he’s thinking about what happens next as the world moves out of pandemic mode. And, as ever, his thinking is counter-intuitive…

Post-crisis periods are among history’s most productive eras. London rebuilt after the Great Fire with grand new architecture, and Europe after the worst of its plagues underwent a commercial revolution. The Marshall Plan turned enemies into allies, fomenting peace and prosperity for over half a century. Leaders also emerge from crises. Ulysses S. Grant was a washed-up soldier without prospects until war broke out, but that war created the opportunity for Grant to save the Union and advance the cause of freedom. This is all to say: In the next 36 months, I believe our economy will birth a new generation of web 3.0 firms and leaders. Why?

I’ve started nine businesses. The best predictive signal for their success has turned out to be the phase of the economic cycle in which they were started. Put simply, the best time to start a business is on the heels of a recession…

Thinker, Tanker, Scholar, Consultant

Every former policymaker in Washington is an academic, a researcher, and an adviser to big business.

Jake Sullivan is now one of the most powerful people in the US — Joe Biden’s national Security Advisor. The White House says that he has “spent the vast majority of his adult life in public service and academia” and “briefly did part-time consulting work for Macro Partners that was centered on his expert analysis of global policy trends.”

Jonathan Guyer of The American Prospect was not terribly impressed:

Newly released ethics forms show that Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, earned $80,000 last year from an academic position at Dartmouth College and $80,000 from Yale. But look to his affiliation with consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners for the less public but more lucrative work. Sullivan earned $138,000 for providing part-time “advisory services.” He worked for Uber, Mastercard, Lego, and big investment groups like Bank of America, Aviva, Standard Life Aberdeen, and Standard Chartered. (The Prospect reached out to all of the companies listed on Sullivan’s forms. Each one declined to comment or didn’t respond.) Separately, Sullivan earned $45,000 from Microsoft for providing advice to its president on policy issues.

Is there something dishonorable about working for big business? Sullivan never mentioned his role at Macro Advisory Partners in his bios on the websites of Yale, Dartmouth, or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was also a researcher. His corporate affiliation never appeared in articles he wrote for Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, The New York Times or The Washington Post.

At the same time as he was advising these companies, Sullivan was also serving as a top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. That’s a seven-days-a-week, 13-plus-hours-a-day job. Yet he still carved out time for the firm.

This seems to be par for the course for many of Biden’s appointees. They’ve spent their busy lives in the revolving doors between elite universities, law firms, tech companies, think tanks, consultancy firms, lobbyists and … government. And they look awfully like the crowd who constituted the ruling elite of the Clinton years.

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Named after the former US President and Supreme Commander of Allied forces in WW2.

Often recommended (to me) as an aid to decision-making.

My problem: I don’t have anyone to whom I can delegate stuff.

Quote of the Day

”Our boiler broke last week, so I skipped the newsletter. How weird must it be to be a plumber? Like that thing with the Queen thinking everywhere smells of fresh paint, plumbers must experience life as a series of smelly people who are thrilled to see you.

• Helen Lewis, who publishes a terrific newsletter, The Bluestocking.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Cello Concerto in B-Flat Major, | I. Allegro moderato

Link

Long Read of the Day

Ben Thompson on “Sovereign Writers and Substack”

As regular readers know, I’ve been puzzled about some of the fury and indignation directed at Substack (the outfit I use to send out this edition of my blog every morning) for allegedly inducing some high-profile writers (or whom the critics disapprove) to publish on Substack.

Ben Thompson has a daily newsletter (for which I pay a hefty annual subscription because he’s a really good analyst of what goes on in the tech industry). On Monday he turned his beady analytical eye on the Substack controversy, and came up with this intriguing concept of the Sovereign Writer as a lens through which to view the changes in our media ecosystem.

Here it is. And it’s worth reading in full.

The Alan Turing £50 note: the nerdiest banknote ever?

From The Register:

Turing’s face will adorn a polymer version, which replaces the familiar paper of old. Noting Turing’s contributions to codebreaking as well as to the fields of mathematics and computer science, Governor {of the Bank of England] Andrew Bailey said: “By placing him on our new polymer £50 banknote, we are celebrating his achievements, and the values he symbolises.”

Bailey also noted of Turing: “He was also gay, and was treated appallingly as a result.”

Indeed he was. Despite his wartime efforts, Turing was persecuted by the state for his homosexuality and was convicted of gross indecency in 1952. He died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning and an inquest determined his death as suicide.

He was eventually granted a posthumous pardon in 2013 following an apology in 2009 from then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

On the note, Turing’s birthday (23 June 1912) is rendered in binary on ticker tape, a medium he thought could be used to enter data into machines. And the table and mathematical formulae come from Turing’s famous 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”

UK Deliveroo riders can earn as little as £2 an hour

According to this report by Sarah Butler on the realities of the gig-economy, a survey of more than 300 riders for the food delivery service reveals that some couriers can earn as little as £2 an hour.

As the company prepares for an £8.8bn stock market flotation next month, analysis of thousands of invoices sent in by riders found that as many as a third of the riders who took part in the survey received less than the legal minimum hourly wage for over-25s of £8.72.

Deliveroo has said riders are paid more than £10 an hour on average, but the analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism of invoices collected via Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain found more than half of the couriers were paid less than that.

It found that one cycle courier in Yorkshire was paid the equivalent of £2 an hour over 180 hours of work.

The food delivery group does not guarantee minimum pay rates, as it argues couriers are independent self-employed contractors not entitled to benefits such as holiday pay and thee national minimum wage.

Couriers are supposed to receive an average £4 to £5 an order but they say that pay rates are complex, making it hard to calculate what they are owed.

Deliveroo says those logged on to its app are not necessarily working for it, as they are free to reject work without penalty and could be working for other apps at that time.

Upton Sinclair 2.0?

This looks like an interesting read. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb:

In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify.

Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.

The New York Times has a good review which puts it in the same league as George Packer’s great book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. For example:

In Alec MacGillis’s urgent book, “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America,” true fulfillment is elusive in Amazon’s America. Through interviews, careful investigative reporting and vignettes from across the country, MacGillis deftly unravels the strong grip Amazon has on the United States, from the ground level — in the inhumane working conditions of the warehouse, in rural towns upended by deindustrialization and subject to the glint of Amazon’s economic promise — to the gilded halls of Washington, D.C., where Amazon’s lobbyists flock.

Rather than the smooth story of innovation that makes Amazon’s rise to power inevitable, MacGillis reminds us that the company’s totalizing influence is one of parasitic opportunism, filling the spaces left by the decline of American manufacturing and taking advantage of industrial consolidation. Through careful detail and deeply humanizing portraits of communities impacted by Amazon, MacGillis gives us a picture of contemporary America as mere survival under precarity — the simple need for shelter, food and a safe workplace. Another one for my reading list.

On being married to a startup

Here’s an aspect of the tech world you rarely hear discussed: what starting a company does to relationships. Nobody who thinks that building a successful company is easy has ever done it. And anybody who’s been a marital or other partner of a founder will confirm how difficult it can be for everyone.

Sifted has an interesting piece by Amy Lewin who went round interviewing founders’ partners. It confirms what you’d expect. But she doesn’t seem to have talked to people whose relationships were vaporised by the stresses of converting a consensual hallucination into a working corporate reality. I wonder what the picture would be like if she had.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Tim Hunkin: the Secret Life of the Vacuum Cleaner — Remastered for HD. This is truly wonderful — a revitalised version of a marvellous old TV series. It’s 30 minutes long, and worth every one of them. 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, 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!

Quote of the Day

”The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact — that is, never say anything.”

• F.R. Leavis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ave Verum | Cello Solo in the Irish countryside | Patrick Dexter

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley 

Nicely barbed essay. The keys to success, apparently, are:

First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of the righteousness of your cause. It is to avoid competition. When competition seeks you out, as it invariably will, your task will be to lose the debate and propose ideas that “seem” (and often are) “shit,” since popular discourse is a test of conventional mindedness; to be truly radical, you must be wrong. Second, there is no absolute moral evil that cannot be playfully reframed on irrelevant grounds as a net historical good. Take, for instance, poverty: what looks to most people like a recipe for social inequality, resentment, division, and violence will be, in your spritely retelling, the most powerful mechanism for income mobility in the history of human civilization. Or consider, say, Pol Pot’s killing fields: bad for the people who got stuck in them, but good for Cambodia’s startup ecosystem? Nazis did bad things to the world in the middle of the twentieth century, but there’s no reason to think they won’t do wonders for agency culture at the Food and Drug Administration in the early 2020s. Your success as a Silicon Valley intellectual will depend on your ability to insert difficult but necessary conversations like these into the public domain. A couple of half-decent ratioed tweets about the beauty of population control or the necessity of transphobia, and you’ll be well on your way to securing your status among the Silicon Valley elite.

Read on. And if you’ve enjoyed it, consider reading Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley.

Facebook guidelines allow users to call for death of public figures

People sometimes look askance at me when I describe Facebook as one of the most toxic corporations in existence. Obligingly, the company keeps delivering confirmations of this proposition.

For example, this from the Guardian:

Facebook’s bullying and harassment policy explicitly allows for “public figures” to be targeted in ways otherwise banned on the site, including “calls for their death”, according to a tranche of internal moderator guidelines leaked to the Guardian.

Public figures are defined by Facebook to include people whose claim to fame may be simply a large social media following or infrequent coverage in local newspapers.

They are considered to be permissible targets for certain types of abuse “because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news”, Facebook explains to its moderators.

So how does the company define a ‘public figure’?

The company’s definition of public figures is broad. All politicians count, whatever the level of government and whether they have been elected or are standing for office, as does any journalist who is employed “to write/speak publicly”.

Online fame is enough to qualify provided the user has more than 100,000 fans or followers on one of their social media accounts. Being in the news is enough to strip users of protections.

“People who are mentioned in the title, subtitle or preview of 5 or more news articles or media pieces within the last 2 years” are counted as public figures. A broad exception to that rule is that children under the age of 13 never count.

And this is the outfit which we now allow to curate the public sphere.

Other, hopefully interesting, links.

• Job Posting: Assistant Professor of Robotics and Animal Husbandry with a Specialization in Dance. by Kate Brennan. You think it’s a spoof? You haven’t been reading job ads in US universities. Link
• Four musicians and one cello. Link

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How do you do?

Quote of the Day

”The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

• Frank Lloyd Wright

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills & Nash (Live) | Teach Your Children

Link

Short and very sweet. I used to play it to the kids when they were small. They understood that it was their job to teach me. And that I was a slow learner.

Long Read of the Day

How to review a book

Watch Scott Alexander take on Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

A masterclass in how to be thorough, fair-minded and critical.

Memoir of a recovering Utopian

I was invited to give a brief talk on March 16 at a (virtual) symposium on the history of UK computing from the 1950s to the 1990s organised by the Royal Society. The video is here if you’re interested. It’s short — just under 5 minutes. (It’d have been longer if I had a Nobel prize, I guess.)

Why a thriving market in used EVs is needed to speed up the decarbonising of transport

Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to this post by Andrew Salzberg:

One of the challenges of turning over the vehicle fleet to 100% electric is that old gasoline cars stay on the road for a long time, as I wrote about in an earlier newsletter and the New York Times explored last week. However, if each new EV can stay on the road longer than their gasoline counterparts, they can help accelerate the retirement of fossil fuel burning cars. That’s one reason to hope that EVs can have long and happy lives in the second hand vehicle market.

Since electric vehicles emit carbon dioxide when they’re made, keeping them on the road longer also spreads those emissions out over a larger number of miles. A thriving market for older EVs could help make them a better climate fighting tool.

Second hand EVs also make electric mobility cheaper and more accessible to lower income consumers. That’s important, since a valid criticism of EVs today is that they’ve mostly ended up in affluent hands. Cheaper second hand electric vehicles could also serve growing ridehail and food service fleets like Uber and Doordash (Uber’s even said so). Those drivers are looking for cheap-to-operate vehicles, and often aren’t in a position to afford the high price tag of new EVs. One way to rapidly electrify those fleets is to funnel a growing pool of second hand EVs into their hands.

In order to speed things up, we also need legislation to enshrine the Right to Repair in English law (as it is, I believe, already in France)

En passant The second-hand car market has always been an instructive place in which to learn about human nature. And also to learn something about the economics of information — as testified, for example, by George Akerlof’s famous 1970 paper, “The Market for Lemons”.

”I Beg to Differ”

Really lovely, insightful essay by Geoff Shullenberger about the interesting role that contrarians play in our media ecosystem.

If you (like me) spend too much time on social-media platforms, especially Twitter, you will have noted the outsized presence of a particular type: the contrarian. By this, I mean someone who nominally belongs to an ideological faction, but consistently dissents. You probably also have strongly positive or negative feelings about contrarians. But such loyalties tend to obscure the pivotal role this figure plays in the current media landscape.

The rise of the self-publishing platform Substack over the past year has highlighted the contrarian’s role, since many newsletters in its top earning tier (including this one) might be understood as contrarian efforts. For example, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are leftists who have attacked Democrats’ allegations against Donald Trump; Matt Yglesias is a liberal who has advocated causes like deregulation and population growth; Andrew Sullivan is a conservative who long advocated for gay marriage and was a vocal opponent of Trump. Other recent additions include castaways from previous perches like Bari Weiss (formerly of The New York Times), Freddie deBoer (formerly of Brooklyn College) and Scott Alexander (formerly behind the influential blog Slate Star Codex).

In investing, contrarianism can be an overt tactic. But you will rarely find an online political contrarian who openly embraces the label. Instead, it tends to be applied by others, often as an insult. The implied criticism is that contrarians only define themselves against the prevailing views of the group, without articulating an independent stance.

Worth reading in full.

Blockchain Democracy

Our Research Centre is holding a Webinar with the author tomorrow (Thursday) at 17:00 GMT. All welcome. Register here.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• What does your filter bubble look like? Interesting tool. Link

Here’s its verdict on me.

• Was Len Sassaman actually Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin? This is the most plausible conjecture I’ve seen. If true, it’s a sad story. The identity of Satoshi is one of the most tantalising puzzles of the digital age. Link.

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Homeward bound

The path back to our hotel in Norfolk. One Summer’s evening long ago.

Quote of the Day

“Well, I made the wave, didn’t I?”

• Ernest (Lord) Rutherford, in answer to the jibe: “Lucky fellow, Rutherford, always on the crest of the wave”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

Long Read of the Day

Gene editing: A potentially catastrophic policy decision

A thoughtful essay by Patrick Holden, an organic farmer and founding director of the Sustainable Food Trust, a body that works to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food systems. He suspects that the regime now in charge of ‘Global Britain’ wants to remove the current regulatory barriers (probably represented as ‘Brussels red tape’) to gene editing.

Thanks to Janet Cobb for the link.

What if it was all a con?

Here’s a disturbing thought for us critics of the tech industry: are we unduly credulous about the capabilities of the technology? An example would be the widespread conjectures that attribute the election of Trump and the Brexit vote to social media and its capacity for targeted advertising? (I’ve argued before many times that anyone who attributes political earthquakes on that scale just to tech companies hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in democratic countries since the 1970s.) But the drum-beat of angst about what networked technology and surveillance capitalism are doing — or are capable of doing — to civilisation as we have known it, continues.

We’re beginning, though, to see interesting indications of a rethink, or at any rate a reconsideration, of these questions. Lee Vinsel, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech, for example, has a really nice essay, “Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype” on Medium.

“Recently”, he writes,

I’ve become increasingly aware of critical writing that is parasitic upon and even inflates hype. The media landscape is full of dramatic claims — many of which come from entrepreneurs, startup PR offices, and other boosters — about how technologies, such as “AI,” self-driving cars, genetic engineering, the “sharing economy,” blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, will lead to massive societal shifts in the near-future. These boosters — Elon Musk comes to mind — naturally tend to accentuate positive benefits. The kinds of critics that I am talking about invert boosters’ messages — they retain the picture of extraordinary change but focus instead on negative problems and risks. It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.

Vinsen points to a nice piece in Scientific American  by the veteran science writer John Horgan in which he argues that “Debates about whether to “improve” our mind and body often exaggerate the feasibility of doing so.” For years, Horgan writes,

I’ve grumbled to myself about an irritating tendency in science punditry. I haven’t written about it before, because it’s subtle, even paradoxical, and I couldn’t think of a catchy phrase to describe it. One I’ve toyed with is “premature ethical fretting,” which is clunky and vague. I’m venting now because I’ve discovered a phrase that elegantly captures my peeve: wishful worries.

The problem arises when pundits concerned about possible social and ethical downsides of a technology exaggerate its technical feasibility. This happens in discussions of psychopharmacology, genetic engineering, brain implants, artificial intelligence and other technologies that might, in principle (that wonderful, all-purpose fudge factor), boost our cognitive and physiological abilities. Warnings about what we should do often exaggerate what we can do.

These are what the technology historian David Brock called “wishful worries” — ie “problems that it would be nice to have”. For example:

“As biotechnology affords dramatically longer human lifespans, how will we fight boredom? With neurotechnology-augmentation rendering some of us essentially superheroes, what ethical dilemmas will we face? How can we protect privacy in an age of tech-enabled telepathy?”

Then there’s Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, a fascinating book by Tim Whang in which he argues that digital advertising – the core business model of the Web – is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. Evidence he cites includes the unreliability of advertising numbers, the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars and the fact that online ads mostly fail to work. The link with the 2008 banking crisis is that in the current online economy the value of consumers’ attention is wildly misrepresented — much as subprime mortgages were in the years leading up to 2008. If online advertising does implode, Hwang maintains, the Web and its ‘free’ services will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it.

Fanciful? Hysterical? Not necessarily. One of the most interesting developments of the past year is to see serious outfits like the UK Competition and Markets Authority launching a major investigation into the hidden, high-speed advertising auctions run by the social media platforms. This suggests to me that there’s something rotten in there because the claims of the companies are, basically, too good to be true.

So maybe history may be repeating itself, this time as farce. In the years preceding the banking crash, the bankers took the world for a ride and screwed us all. Maybe the surveillance capitalist crowd have been doing just the same to us.

And the question we will ask when the penny finally drops? Will their bosses escape gaol just as the bankers did?

Another, hopefully interesting, link

•  I Captured the Iceland Volcano Eruption from Up Close. Astonishing photographs. Shot by a professional landscape photographer, Iurie Belegurschi, with a Sony a7R IV camera and a DJI drone equipped with a Hasselblad 20MP camera. (We photographers are interested in these details.) Link H/T to Charles Arthur, who spotted it.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, 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!

Gravity’s Apple

An apple from the tree in the front garden of Woolsthorpe, Isaac Newton’s home in Lincolnshire.

One year on

On this day, exactly a year ago, I entered lockdown. As an experiment, I started keeping an audio diary, a recording of which appeared on this blog for 100 days. Here’s Day 1.

Link

I stopped after a hundred days, partly because I was becoming increasingly busy and recording and editing a five-minute audio segment every day turned out to involve more work than you’d think. But because I was using a wonderful piece of software called Descript which makes a pretty good transcript as one talks, I wound up with a set of scripts for the 100 episodes. I then edited them into a short volume which is now available as a Kindle book for a modest charge — 100 Not Out! A Lockdown Diary.

Editing the diary for publication was an interesting exercise in repressing the wisdom of hindsight. After all, the whole point of a diary is that you don’t know at any point what the future holds. C’est la vie.

And while we’re on the subject of hindsight. . .

… The Plague Prophets

From Contagion to World War Z to Palm Springs, what the artists who foresaw the pandemic are thinking now.

Nice idea by Alissa Wilkinson on Vox:

To mark the one-year anniversary of lockdowns in the US, and the American death toll having crossed half a million and counting, I talked to seven of those artists — “plague prophets,” as I came to think of them. I wanted to hear about what crossed their minds when the pandemic hit, what they’ve learned in the past year, and what they’re thinking now. Like so many others, they’re sorting through unexpected resistance to mitigation efforts, what they’ve done to survive, and the disastrous consequences of misinformation. In their thoughts I hear echoes of my own — along with some hope for the future, if only we can pay attention.

One of the people to whom she spoke was Scott Z. Burns, screenwriter of Contagion — Steven Soderbergh’s film about a deadly novel virus that spreads around the world with horrifying results. The film was praised by experts for its surprisingly accurate depiction of a hypothetical pandemic. Not surprisingly, in early 2020, with news of a novel coronavirus on the rise, Contagion rocketed back up to the top 10 charts on iTunes.

“I expected that many of the panic-related phenomena we saw would happen,” Burns told her,

— hoarding of goods, fake cures, collapse of health care, and conspiracy theories about the origins and the effects of the disease. I also expected that the internet would become filled with misinformation and once again, science was unable to respond in a compelling way.

One of the problems with science is that it tends to move more slowly than conspiracy, as it relies on facts and experiments and repetition. Many of those things take time, and ideally, that time should be filled with leaders encouraging calm and focusing on what we do know. In the absence of clear information, we need to rely on leadership — and that was woefully lacking.

I did not expect that at all. I did not anticipate that wearing a piece of fabric over your mouth and nose in order to save lives would become so controversial.

Quote of the Day

”Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy”

• Franz Kafka

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Cello Concerto in G Major, Op. 1, No. 6 | II. Siciliana

Link

Long Read of the Day

The end of Silicon Valley as we know it

Link

A fascinating essay by Tim O’Reilly, who is the nearest thing that the tech industry has to a sage. It’s long but worth reading in full if you have the time. If not, Andrew Curry has quite a good dissection of it on today’s edition of his blog.

Sherry Turkle on empathy and tech

Terrific interview with my colleague Ian Tucker on the publication of her new book, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir.

Q: It’s quite unusual for an academic to put themselves central to the story. What was your motivation for writing a memoir? A: I see the memoir as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy – we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here’s a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others.

I also wanted to write this book because I’ve wanted to read this kind of book. That is to say a book where you learn about the backstory of somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story. Many people have this book to write but daren’t because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place. And I knew that in my case, that wasn’t true.

Wonderful woman. And a great scholar.

Much of the Orwellian language that’s endemic in the tech business reminds me of Heidegger’s definition of ‘technology’ as “The art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it.” Just think how Facebook has perverted the word ‘friend’, or how nearly every company has perverted ‘share’. As Sam Goldwyn might have said, in Silicon Valley if you can fake empathy you’ve got it made.

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Shoppers?

At a Christmas market (remember them?) some years ago.

Quote of the Day

”I understand your desire for disruption, but I am tired of picking up the pieces. Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so we can sit down and take tea together.”

• Angela Merkel to Emmanuel Macron (as reported in the New York Times)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindley & Ry Cooder | The Promised Land

Link

Wow!

How two Irish brothers started a £70bn company you’ve probably never heard of

This morning’s Observer column

The most valuable private company in Silicon Valley is an outfit most people have never heard of – unless they are a) Irish or b) tech investors. It’s called Stripe, and this week the latest round of investments in it have given it a valuation of $95bn (£68.5bn). It was founded in 2010 by two smart young lads from rural Ireland – the brothers John and Patrick Collison – who were then aged 19 and 21 respectively. The latest valuation of their company – based on a recent investment of $600m from investors including Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, Fidelity and Sequoia Capital – means that each now has a net worth on paper in the region of $11.5bn.

The Collisons hail from Dromineer, a small town on the shores of Lough Derg in County Tipperary. When they were growing up it was too remote to have an internet connection, and initially the only way they could get decent broadband was via an expensive satellite link. In some ways they look like young prodigies from central casting. As a teenager, Patrick discovered Lisp, the programming language that was once the lingua franca of early AI programmers, and used it to create a conversational system that won him Ireland’s young scientist of the year award in 2005, at the age of 16. His brother, two years younger, got the highest scores ever recorded in the Irish school leaving certificate.

When John was 15 and Patrick 17, they launched their first startups…

Do read the whole thing.

Incidentally… I don’t know much about John, but Patrick Collison is a really interesting guy. See, for example, the reading list on his blog. Or his remarkable conversation with the economist Tyler Cowen. Silicon Valley hasn’t produced many intellectuals, and many of those who aspire to the title are just miming profundity or apeing Peter Thiel. (See What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub for an entertaining takedown of Valley pretensions in this respect.) But Patrick Collison looks to me like the real deal.

Long Read of the Day

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future Link

This is really sobering, even for someone (like me) who is sceptical about our species’s capacity to avoid the coming catastrophe.

Here’s the TL;DR summary:

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

But if you have time, it’s worth reading the whole thing.

(I sometimes think that what we need is a theory of incompetent systems — i.e. ones that can’t fix themselves.)

Books of the Week

It’s been an extraordinary week, with four interesting books hitting the shelves.

Value(s): Building a Better World for All by the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. Will Hutton gave it a near-rave review today.

If 25 years ago anyone had suggested that one of the world’s most prominent ex-central bankers would launch an intellectual broadside at free market fundamentalism for shredding the values on which good societies and functioning markets are based, I would have been amazed. If, in addition, it was suggested he would go on to argue that stakeholder capitalism, socially motivated investing and business putting purpose before profit were the best ways to put matters right, I would have considered it a fairy story.

Me too.

Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Love, Death and the NHS by Michael Rosen. Reviewed by Kate Kellaway.

With a writer’s ability to extract something from misfortune, he has become Covid-19’s frontline spokesperson, go-to survivor, man who nearly did not make it. It is not a role anyone would gladly choose. He has been interviewed on television, been the subject of Radio 4’s The Reunion, has written newspaper articles and now this book. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, Rosen was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme in reaction to a tweet in which he protested that older people’s lives were being undervalued. What he did not know then was that he had already contracted Covid-19 himself.

Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of her Life by Hella Pick.

Reviewed by Fergal Keane. The story of how a girl — number 4672 — who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport that brought around 10,000 Jewish children to safety in Britain after Kristallnacht, turned into one of the world’s great foreign correspondents. Her voice, Keane says, “from before the age of Facebook and Twitter is profound and urgent.” As someone who read her as since I was an undergraduate in the Sixties, I know just what he means.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist who makes a brave attempt to explain quantum mechanics. Brave man. But Rovelli has form. His collection of essays, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold over a million copies and is one of the best-selling science books ever.

My bedside reading list just got longer. Sigh.

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Heave!

Quote of the Day

”You can’t make a better past, only a better future.”

• Nathan Gardels, Noema magazine

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Bird Song

Link

Long Read of the Day

Scott Galloway: America Has Replaced Capitalism With Cronyism** 

This is a great post from Scott’s blog last year. Here’s how it begins.

My father is approaching 90, recently divorced (for the fourth time), and spends his days watching replays of Maple Leafs games and abusing Xanax. His affinity for Xanies is a feature, not a bug, since at the end of one’s life “long-term effects” lose meaning. He’s near the end, exceptionally intelligent, and high. In sum, he’s my Yoda.

Our calls are mostly me yelling short questions and waiting for something profound in return. Occasionally he delivers: When I asked him what he thinks makes America different, he said, “America is a terrible place to be stupid.”

That’s why he immigrated here. A pillar of capitalism is you can’t reward the winners without punishing the losers. I worry our government has been co-opted by the wealthy and is focused on protecting the previous generation of winners, even if it means reducing future generations’ ability to win. Aren’t we borrowing against our children’s prosperity to protect the wealth of the top 10 percent, if not the one percent?

It’s a forceful critique of how the system we’ve been building since the 1970s has been boosting the rich and punishing everyone else, especially the poor. And when you look at the bailouts during the pandemic, we see this accelerating. Companies — like airlines — that have spent decades rewarding executives and doing share buybacks are getting lavish pandemic support. Biden’s stimulus measure is the first reversal of this we’ve seen.

Worth reading in full.

Substack writers are mad at Substack. The problem is money and who’s making it.

I’m not sure that I have a dog in this fight, but just for the avoidance of doubt, the daily newsletter edition of this blog (https://memex.naughtons.org) — is published on Substack, for free. For me, Substack simply provides a reliable way of getting the edition out by email every morning at 7am, UK time.

But according to Peter Kafka, the author of the article in Vox, some people who publish on Substack — including Jude Doyle — have been leaving because

they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle’s list includes some of Substack’s most prominent and recent recruits: Former Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald, my former Vox coworker Matt Yglesias, and Graham Linehan, a British TV writer who was kicked off Twitter last year for “repeated violations of Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation.”

Another take on this comes from Annalee Newitz (writing on Substack, as it happens).

Because Substack’s leadership pays a secret, select group of people to write for the platform. They call this group of writers the “Substack Pro” group, and they are rewarded with “advances” that Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie calls “an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform that’s more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.” In other words, it’s enough money to quit their day jobs. They also get exposure through Substack’s now-considerable online reach.

By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership — let’s call them editors — are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right — Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.

I don’t know why Substack has been offering money to some writers to sign up to the platform. I guess that the people in question have large followings on social media and may bring a proportion of those hordes to Substack, which can then benefit from the 10% cut it levies on the fees the writers earn. (I’m assuming they are all charging a monthly fee to subscribers, which I have no intention of doing.)

So, as far as Substack is concerned, I’m a dead loss as a commercial proposition. I’m no better than a free rider, hitching a ride on a train which has some Big Shots — of whom some people disapprove — in the First Class carriage.

The thing that would worry me more is that Substack might have a strategy (like all tech firms) of building a walled garden (like Medium’s) — which is why everything I publish on it or in any of these walled gardens is always published first — and available free – on my blog on the open Web.

Email scammers are upping their game

This from Chris Nuttall’s invaluable FT notebook:

“Simon! I’m so thrilled we’ve agreed a deal for such an iconic work of art. As I always say, we are not owners; but custodians. New bank details attached, just to be on the safe side. My regards to Amanda — and hope the kids’ colds clear up!”

An email like this nearly cost a wealthy British collector £6m. It had been sent to the family office that managed his finances by criminals impersonating a genuine art dealer, with whom the collector had been negotiating for a year.

“ The client came screen to screen with hackers during a £6m transaction,” recalls Paul Westall, founder of Agreus, a British company that recruits staff for family offices. “All correspondence was via email — back and forth . . . When they had finally reached a conclusion on price, the client received an email to say something along the lines of, I hope the children are recovering from their colds — we have just amended our bank details for security and here they are.”

As it sounded like previous emails, the art-loving client replied. Fortunately, his family office then demonstrated its strength: a structure built on personal accountability. Someone at the office phoned the real dealer to check the transaction before approving a transfer.

Next time I’m shelling out £6m for something I’ll definitely be more careful.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  Stella McCartney shows off the world’s first clothes made from mushroom leather. No, I did not make that up. Link
•  24 Surprising Ways to Injure Yourself When You’re Over 50 by Liz Alterman Link
•  The rich vs the very, very rich: the Wentworth golf club rebellion. Much ado about nothing. But a very entertaining read, nevertheless. 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, 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!

“Streets full of water — please advise.”

From a famous journalistic cable in the Hearst era.

Quote of the Day

“The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.” * George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Sonata #10 in C Major | Andante Cantabile | Glenn Gould |

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Secret Passage: Decoding ten bars in Wagner’s “Ring.”

Wonderful meditation by Alex Ross on the Ring

Wagner’s reputation for gigantism misses the mark. The “Ring” is big, no question, but it is made up of hundreds of intimate moments, through which the mythical squabbles of gods, dwarves, and men take on an almost uncomfortable immediacy. It is an affair of sidelong glances, compassionate shrugs, paralyzing hesitations, callous joys, comforting sorrows, and, beneath it all, endless yearning.

Ross picks on one of those ‘intimate moments’.

Just before Wotan falls to pieces, the orchestra plays a brief interlude—more a “microlude,” to borrow a term from the Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It is couched in E-flat major, which, significantly, is the key in which the “Ring” commenced, the primeval harmony of the Rhine. It consists of a single upward-arcing, gently aching phrase, lasting ten bars and around thirty seconds. It is not part of Wagner’s leitmotif system, the network of themes representing characters, objects, and ideas. It appears just this once, a solitary spasm of regret.

I’ve loved the passage as long as I’ve known the “Ring.” Each time I hear the opera, I wait for it, and try to grasp it as it unfurls. It seems to communicate some essential wisdom that the characters cannot put into words. So I dug into those ten bars—studying the score, reading the literature, talking to musicians—in the hope of gaining a perspective that might elude me if I started with Antigone or Colonel Kilgore. There are, of course, no final answers in the “Ring,” a behemoth that whispers a different secret into every listener’s ear. But I suspect that Willa Cather, in her operatic novel “The Song of the Lark,” was onto something when she had her heroine say, “Fricka knows.”

I’m really a musical ignoramus but I love the way Ross writes about it.

‘It’s a very special picture.’ Why vaccine safety experts put the brakes on AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine

This is the most informative piece I’ve seen on the more detailed reasoning that has led to the (temporary?) suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in EU countries.

Scientists don’t know whether the vaccine causes the syndrome, and if so, what the mechanism is. “Everyone’s scratching their heads: Is this a real signal?” says Robert Brodsky, a hematologist at Johns Hopkins University. But vaccine safety officials say they did not take the decision lightly, and that symptoms seen in at least 13 patients, all between ages 20 and 50 and previously healthy, in at least five countries are more frequent than would be expected by chance. The patients, at least seven of whom have died, suffer from widespread blood clots, low platelet counts, and internal bleeding—not typical strokes or blood clots. “It’s a very special picture” of symptoms, says Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency. “Our leading hematologist said he had never seen anything quite like it.”

The New York Times reported that a somewhat similar blood disorder, called immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), has been seen in at least 36 people in the United States who had received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was investigating these cases, but also said the syndrome did not appear to be more common in vaccinated people, and immunizations in the United States have continued. But it seems that the cases seen in Europe in recent weeks are distinct from ITP, which lacks the widespread blood clots seen in the European patients.

There seem to be all kinds of possible explanations for the European cases. We’re they a product of an immune system over-reaction? Were some of the victims actually infected with Covid-19 when they were vaccinated? It’ll be a while before we get to the bottom of this, and in the meantime some people will catch Covid and die from it.

It’s a very mysterious disease. The remark of Steiner Madsen — about how Norway’s leading hematologist “had never seen anything quite like it” reminded me of the case of a good friend of mine — the fittest person I knew — who caught Covid and nearly died from it, after having two massive strokes (from which he is making an astonishing recovery). The neurologists who dealt with his case likewise said that they had never seen anything like it before.”

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to my second jab.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to the Science article.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Why Mount Everest’s height keeps changing. Something I never thought about. But really interesting. Link Geologists think the Himalayas are rising by 5mm a year.

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