Crossing point

London’s Millennium Bridge, in the days when people could casually be outdoors.

Quote of the Day

“Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.”

P.J. O”Rourke

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Wildflowers | Live

Link

Tech corporations as sociopathic machines

This morning’s Observer column:

A few years ago, during a period when there was much heated anxiety about “superintelligence” and the prospects for humanity in a world dominated by machines, the political theorist David Runciman gently pointed out that we have been living under superintelligent AIs for a couple of centuries. They’re called corporations: sociopathic, socio-technical machines that remorselessly try to achieve whatever purpose has been set for them, which in our day is to “maximise shareholder value”. Or, as Milton Friedman succinctly put it: “The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximise its profits.”

Given that, it doesn’t really matter whether those who sit at the top of giant tech corporations are saints, sinners or merely liars and hypocrites. Facebook could be staffed entirely by clones of St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic organisation, relentlessly pushing to achieve the purpose assigned to it by Professor Friedman. So if we want to make things better, our focus has to be changing the machine’s purpose and obligations, not on trying to persuading its helmsman to attend to the better angels of his nature.

Later. The point about corporations being sociopathic, superintelligent machines prompted an interesting email from Ross Anderson (Whom God Preserve), gently pointing out that he had made a similar point to the philosopher Daniel Dennett during a lecture Dennett gave in Cambridge in June 2019, which of course led me into an interesting dive back through diaries and notebooks.

Tracing the genesis of an idea can be a fool’s errand, especially if it’s a powerful idea. But this one proved more fruitful than I expected.

On the chronology, the Dennett lecture that Ross mentioned was in June 2019, but I had come across the ‘sociopathic’ idea before then in one of four seminars that David Runciman ran for the Centre for the Future of Intelligence in 2017-8 and I attended. It came up because he’s an expert on Hobbes and he argued at one point that Hobbes’s Leviathan was, essentially, an AI. The political philosopher, Philip Pettit, who was also at the seminar took up the idea and argued that corporations are intrinsically sociopathic — which is what I took away from that particular conversation (so I may have been wrong in attributing the sociopathy attribute to David rather than to Philip).

But it seems that the question of corporate sociopathy was been around a long time in American constitutional discourse. In part this seems to have been about the (ancient) legal doctrine that companies were granted “legal personhood” long ago. In 2003 Joel Bakan, a legal scholar, published The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, a book which was accompanied by a documentary film, The Corporation (which I haven’t seen — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/) but which gave rise to lots of commentary about psycho/socio-pathy (e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201605/are-corporations-inherently-psychopathic). And then, of course, there was the 2010 ‘Citizens United’ judgment of the US Supreme Court which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. Which effectively means that in the US these sociopaths have free speech rights and can fund politicians who advance their interests.

I’m sure there’s a lot more but the bottom line is that this is an older idea than I had thought and it’s been been around for quite a while.

And then I remembered a joke that my friend Larry Lessig cracked a long time ago. “I’ll believe a corporation is a person”, he said, “when Texas executes one.”

Options for our future

I was out in the front garden this morning when two young women, out on their brisk, daily-exercise walk passed the front gate. “When this rubbish is over…”, one of them was saying and went on to outline some elaborate plan or other she had for when the Covid crisis is over.

Which brought to mind Simon Kuper’s column in the weekend edition of the Financial Times. In terms of where we might be a year from now, he writes, two main scenarios emerge.

The first is the good news one. Covid-19 keeps circulating, but gradually loses its sting. Most people, at least in rich countries, get vaccinated this year. The vaccines prevent disease caused by all strains of the virus and it becomes no worse than a nasty cold.

The second scenario is the bad news one — “less likely”, says Kuper, “yet so momentous that we need to think it through”. It is that the world gets “Long Covid” with vaccine-resistant mutations causing years of mass deaths, repeated lockdowns, economic meltdown and political dysfunction or collapse.

While we’re on the subject, there is, alas, an even worse scenario — outlined by Ian Goldin, Professor of globalisation and development at Oxford. He thinks that a new pandemic is actually a more likely possibility than Long Covid. His argument, as summarised by Kuper, is based on “the growing frequency of pandemics this century, as habitats of animals and humans become compressed, and global travel increases transmission”.

So let’s hope that young woman passing my gate this morning is right, and that “when this rubbish is over” we can go back to some kind of life.

100 Not Out!

My Lockdown Diary is out as a Kindle eBook. You can get it here

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!

Those Bloody Brits

Nice joke on the current Private Eye cover.

100 Not Out!

My Lockdown Diary is out on Kindle. You can get it here.

Quote of the Day

“Out of the kitchen, to stew is to fret, to worry, to agitate. In the kitchen, however, to stew is to have great expectations”.

• Molly O’Neill, New York Times, 1994.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Symphony #94 in G (‘Surprise’) | 2nd movement | Andante

Link

Just to make sure that nobody sleeps at the back.

Long Read of the Day

Dan Wang’s annual letter

Dan Wang is one of the best-informed and thoughtful China analysts I read. At the end of every year he writes a charming annual letter which is full of insights.

This is the one for 2020. Sample:

Steady engagement with the (Communist Party’s )journal throughout the year has forced me to think more deeply about the Chinese Communist Party. There are many things that Xi wants to do, I believe that his most fundamental goal is to make this Marxist-Leninist party an effective governing force for the present century. His patient work to reshape the bureaucracy is aided by a distinctive feature of the Chinese system: the use of propaganda to create centralized campaigns of inspiration. Some of Xi’s efforts have borne fruit: the country’s governance capabilities have markedly improved, a trend that is apparent in daily life. At the same time, the state has grown much more repressive. A focus on repression shouldn’t neglect the improvement in the country’s institutional and commercial strengths; and appreciation of this improvement ought to be tempered by the party center’s growing mania for control.

When foreign commentators discuss the experience of reading state media, they rarely fail to attach a reference to its “turgid prose.” While some partyspeak is indeed unreadable, I’ve always seen that dismissal as a signal of contempt for the party’s pronouncements, thus deterring people from taking it seriously. But there is reason to treat its content with care. Propaganda might not matter to you, but it matters to the party…

Long read, but worth it.

Our emerging surveillance state

An unnamed source provided the New York Times‘s reporters Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson with an amazing data set, based on tracking the digital trails of the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Trump’s political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol and a huge law-enforcement operation is in progress to arrest and prosecute the insurrectionists. And of course a key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event’s digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing.

“The data we were given”, write Warzel and Thompson,

showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. Times Opinion is only publishing the names of people who gave their permission to be quoted in this article.

About 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege — a clear link between those who’d listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building.

While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance. In one instance, three members of a single family were tracked in the data.

The source shared this information, in part, because the individual was outraged by the events of Jan. 6. The source wanted answers, accountability, justice. The person was also deeply concerned about the privacy implications of this surreptitious data collection. Not just that it happens, but also that most consumers don’t know it is being collected and it is insecure and vulnerable to law enforcement as well as bad actors — or an online mob — who might use it to inflict harm on innocent people. (The source asked to remain anonymous because the person was not authorized to share the data and could face severe penalties for doing so.)

If you know about how surveillance capitalism works, nothing in this story will surprise you. But that’s largely because we’ve become wearily familiar with the way the tech industry has gone its lawless way. “The data presented here”, say Warzel and Thompson,

is a bird’s-eye view of an event that posed a clear and grave threat to our democracy. But it tells a second story as well: One of a broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation, and of a tacit agreement we’ve entered into that threatens our individual privacy. None of this data should ever have been collected.

It shouldn’t. And now we need to contemplate the question of whether this massive enclosure movement can be stopped.

We’re now back in a bi-polar world in which two rival systems are heading into a new Cold War. There’s us in the West, huddled under a faltering American hegemony; and China, representing an alternative way of having technological and economic progress without the inconveniences of democracy. But underpinning this emerging geopolitical divide, there’s also a paradoxical convergence — for both blocs are committed to using digital technology for comprehensive surveillance of their populations. The only difference is that in China it’s driven by the state, whereas in the West it’s a public-private collaboration, involving companies with a toxic business model, operating under the tacit aegis of a state that needs the surveillance capabilities of the companies to augment its own formidable powers.

Footnote The two reporters have done great earlier work in documenting this stuff – see, for example, here.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Airstream’s new $100,000 trailer is a remote work paradise. Link
• Your selfie stick not long enough? Try a mini drone instead. Leading-edge uselessness department. Link
• Elon Musk may be Tesla’s CEO. But he wasn’t the company’s founder. Who knew? 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 your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

College at dusk

Wolfson College, Cambridge. A shot that came from testing the low-light capability of the Nikon D700 a few years ago.

Side-effects and misconceptions

In yesterday’s edition I wrote about feeling oddly reassured by the mild side-effects of my Covid jab. They were, I felt, signs that the vaccine was also doing its stuff: waking up my immune system.

This prompted a nice email from Jonathan Rees, a reader who knows about this stuff:

John, better to say priming rather than waking . Immunology is about ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. Your immune system has just recognised something as a bit of ‘non-self’ — it doesn’t like it. It has noted it, seen it off, and kept its data on file (the fact that the non-self bit is ‘castrated’ allows this to be a pure learning experience)

On your second jab —or real infection —it will wake very quickly, jump out of bed, and launch the troops who are tanking up with engines ready to go.

Sort of like: starting a non M1 mac (priming) compared with starting an iPad — the latter is ready to go ‘instantaneously’. My only consolation is that I’m writing this on an M1 Mac! And I like Jonathan’s metaphor-switch.

Quote of the Day

In 2004, the New York Times asked Stephen Hawking: what is your IQ? He replied: “I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”

HT to Helen Lewis

Hmmm… maybe that makes me a winner? I have no idea what my IQ is, though there are days when I wonder if it even reaches into double digits.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | You’ve Got a Friend in Me | Live with Chris Thile and friends

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Capitalist Case for Overhauling Twitter

Scott Galloway is one of the smartest observers of the online world. This essay about Twitter’s failings is acutely perceptive, but goes beyond the usual critiques — it comes up with suggestions for how to both fix Twitter as a company and also to make it into a positive force for society. Galloway has skin in this game. As well as being an academic, he’s a tech investor. And he owns $10m of Twitter stock.

The basic problem is the business model — surveillance capitalism. Some service like Twitter would undoubtedly be a good thing for society. But it needs an honest business model. Subscriptions. I’d pay for a cleaned-up, non-bot-infested version. And I bet a lot of others would too.

Also, I’d enable people to block all retweets.

But, anyway, read Prof Galloway’s analysis and prescriptions.

Britain’s battery problem

A post-Brexit realisation has dawned on carmakers in the UK that their real challenge now is replacing traditional engine plants with battery factories. The immediate problem is that tariff-free trade with the EU relies on rules of origin of components in your product. If everything is made either in the UK or the EU, then no problem. If not.., big problems.

The difficulty is that the internal combustion engine is now doomed as a propulsion system for motor vehicles. By 2030 — or 2035 at the latest, ICE-propelled vehicles will be illegal. So an entire huge industry has to pivot to producing electric vehicles – EVs. But these need massive batteries — which are not manufactured in the UK, except in small quantities and power denominations. Accordingly, British car manufacturers who wish to continue making cars will have to build EVs. But if they wish to sell them to the EU, they will incur serious tariffs.

The only solution is for the UK to develop — pronto — massive battery-manufacturing capacity. That’ll take time and Britain is a late starter. As far as I can see, there’s only one factory making EV batteries in any quantity — the factory near Nissan’s car manufacturing plant in Sunderland. It makes the batteries for the short-range version of Nissan’s Leaf EV (but not for the latest, longer-range Leaf, which at the moment come from the US, I think).

And a start-up called — yes, you guessed it, Britishvolt — is planning to spend £2.6B on a ‘gigafactory’ (cliché du jour in the industry at the moment) at Blyth in the North East. First batteries are scheduled to roll off the production line in 2023. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Organic fascism?

Cory Doctorow has an interesting post prompted by Luke Carneal’s question, “Why Are Some Organic Farmers Turning to Reactionary Politics?”.

Carneal is an organic farmer with an interest in ideology and politics. He says he’s noticed a shift recently among some of his peers toward right-libertarian attitudes.

I don’t intend to suggest that a right wing perspective sways the majority of my fellow ecological farmers, but that underneath the sometimes true-to-life stereotypes of the socially liberal small-scale organic farm world, there is a marginal but growing tendency toward conservative views. If we look more closely at the philosophical motivations underpinning the modern back-to-the-land movement and the economic positioning of small organic farm operator-owners, it becomes clear that the emergence of libertarian attitudes amongst some members of this demographic is far from surprising – and should be expected to grow in coming years.

What’s driving this? Lots of things, probably. But,

The spiritual-philosophical ideology of the reactionary homesteader or small organic farmer shows itself in a number of recognizable modern anxieties – prepper subculture, government mistrust, a turn to new age medicine, anarcho-primitivism, and other manifestations of the scarcity feelings that find a home in both hippie lifestylism and right wing politics. Perhaps the individual who best embodies the ex-urbanite turn to new age homestead conservatism is Curtis Stone, a YouTube blogger who first rose to familiarity in the farm scene as an innovator of hyper-small-scale backyard vegetable farming. Going back to 2015 and 2016, a viewer will find his video channel populated exclusively by informative videos on no-till cropping systems, customer management, and other topics pertinent to the nuts and bolts of running a small farm venture near an urban center. I certainly gained much from these videos on my own path into bio-intensive small-scale agriculture. Stone also published a book, The Urban Farmer, in 2015, which still sits on my bookshelf. It contains helpful diagrams of irrigation sprinkler setups, soil amendment recommendations, and not a word on politics.

Jump forward to 2021, and half of Stone’s videos are now uploaded exclusively to BitChute, a right wing video hosting website, and contain titles such as “Refuge from the NWO (New World Order) within Private Societies,” “Don’t let fear and anxiety wear you down!” and “Talking collapse with Jack Spirko.”

Other links

• Observation of the day: Statusq.org “During lockdown, the frequency with which one needs to shave is inversely proportional to the quality of one’s webcam.” Link
• Bill Emmott interviews Alex Tabarrok. Genuinely interesting podcast. Link
• David Edgerton on Boris Johnson’s fatuous obsessions with ‘moonshots’. 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!

danah boyd

danah, one of the foremost scholars of Cyberspace, particularly social media, speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Vaccine news

I’ve become (temporarily) a minor celebrity because I work with (mostly) much younger people and am therefore the first person they know who has actually had a vaccine jab. The most common question they ask is about side-effects.

I’ve had flu jabs for years and never experienced any side-effects. With the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab (the one I had) the most common side-effects (according to the NHS leaflet) are:

• a painful, heavy feeling and tenderness in the arm where you had the injection. This tends to be worse around 1-2 days after the vaccine
• feeling tired
• headache
• general aches, or mild flu-like symptoms

I had a few of these – specifically:

• a light headache for a couple of days
• a tired feeling for a day (which my workaholic superego regarded as sheer laziness)
• one bout of a flu-like chill for a couple of hours
• and one bout of mild overnight sweating

Otherwise situation normal (and not FU,for those who know about SNAFU).

The odd thing is that I felt rather reassured by all this. It suggested to me that my body was having to do some work. Which meant, I guess, that the vaccine was also doing its stuff: waking up my immune system.

Quote of the Day

”I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.“

• Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Nimrod | Barenboim | Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way

Historian Jill Lepore’s review of Nicole Pelroth’s  This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race.

Perlroth reports (and it’s hard to tell if this is hyperbole) that the N.S.A. has a hundred analysts working on cyber offense for every analyst working on cyber defense. In the fall, CISA dedicated itself to protecting the election. On Election Day, the agency issued updates every three hours. The goal, as CISA’s head, Chris Krebs, said, was for November 3rd to be “just another Tuesday on the Internet.” On November 17th, after Krebs again publicly declared the election to have been free and fair—he tweeted, “59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims (of fraud) either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent’ ”— Trump fired him. The feared Election Day attacks never came, not only because CISA worked well but also, Perlroth suggests, because they were no longer necessary. “Our candidate is chaos,” a Kremlin operative told a reporter in 2016. That candidate stalked the nation in 2016 and again in 2020.

Lepore’s most recent book,  If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future, about how we got to targeted advertising in elections, is also pretty good.

Democracy in decline

From today’s Washington Post…

Across the world, democracy is in decline. The Economist Intelligence Unit, the London-based research and analysis group, quantified the decline with a report released Wednesday. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on measures including electoral processes and civil liberties, found that just 8.4 percent of the world lived in a full democracy last year, while more than a third lived under authoritarian rule. The global average score fell to 5.37 out of 10 on the democracy index — the lowest rating since the EIU began the index in 2006.

Others have come to similar conclusions. Freedom House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization established in 1941, released a report in October that found that the state of democracy and human rights had worsened in at least 80 countries since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

There is no question that democracy is declining, but it’s harder to explain exactly why. One reason is the still-raging pandemic, a public health crisis that saw many nations impose unprecedented restrictions. “Confronted by a new, deadly disease to which humans had no natural immunity, most people concluded that preventing a catastrophic loss of life justified some temporary loss of freedom,” the Economist wrote this week in a summary of its sister organization’s index.

But the threat to democracy did not emerge with the coronavirus. Data from Freedom House shows that more than 100 countries have seen their levels of freedom decline since 2016, while only a handful have seen gains. The EIU’s global democracy index, meanwhile, has been dipping each year since 2015. What’s happening to democracies right now looks like less of blip — and more of a trend.

Grim news that rather reinforces my conviction that instead of regarding the post-war surge in democracy as confirming Fukuyama-type confidence in the triumph of the system, we should realise that historians may eventually come to see that what we complacently regarded as normal was, in the longer view of history, just a blip. Liberal democracy may turn out to have been a fragile creation, the product of a lucky convergence of historical circumstances. We were lucky to have it, and didn’t take sufficient care of it.

Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?

Yes they are. But probably far less hot than when they’re on Facebook and YouTube. This exchange between Brian X. Chen and Kevin Roose of the New York Times is a useful exploration of whether it’s good that many unsavoury characters from the dregs of the internet are disappearing from big social platforms, or whether it’s dangerous to have them congregating in spaces where researchers, journalists and law enforcement can’t keep tabs on them as easily. It’s not long and worth reading in full.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• New study cracks the case of why food sticks to centre of nonstick pans. Just in case you were wondering. Link
• Why You Should Take Any Vaccine. By Zeynep Tufecki, consistently one of the wisest writers on the pandemic. Link
• Does this video ring any bells for you? Sure did for me. 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!

Forgive me if I find this chart particularly interesting. This is the vaccine I had on January 30.

Alex Tabarrok has a useful commentary on it.

Quote of the Day

”In 1969 I published a small book on Humility. It was a pioneering work which has not, to my knowledge, been superseded.”

• Lord Longford (known to the British tabloids as ‘Lord Porn’ because of his campaign to stamp out pornography).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mary Bergin with Tony Linnane and Mick Conneely | Three reels

Link

The reels are The Banks of the Ilen, The Scartaglen and The Belles of Tipperary

Mary Bergin is an extraordinary musician who works magic with the simplest instrument imaginable.

Long Read of the Day

The Science of reasoning with unreasonable people

By Adam Grant, who teaches organisational psychology at Wharton. (Trump’s alma mater, by the way. Not that that’s anything to do with anything.)

TL;DR summary: Don’t try to change someone else’s mind. Instead, help them find their own motivation to change. Link

I found it interesting but not entirely convincing. Maybe I’m just being unreasonable!

Game On: the GameStop saga, contd.

It gets more and more interesting. For example…

1 – Nicholas Colin had a go at it in his weekly newsletter:

Everyone Wants To Be a Capitalist

The one thing I’m quite sure of regarding the GameStop story is that we haven’t seen the end of it yet. One reason why is because it has been driven (even without falling into the facile idea of “little guys vs. hedge funds”, which has been pretty well shown to not be the case) by the ‘multitude’: those billions of networked individuals who can now exert power in the Entrepreneurial Age.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that many members of the multitude were drawn towards trading over the past year. After all, while much of the world’s market economy has been effectively halted by COVID-19, it’s been only too evident that the capitalist side of things has been doing quite well. That left a ripe environment for what my friend Martin Gurri calls “The Revolt of the Public” to make its way to the heart of Wall Street (which, as it turns out, is located less in Zuccotti Park and more in Bloomberg terminals 😉).

In the end, it’s not simply that barriers to information have been taken away. It’s that without those barriers, the multitude is able to coordinate in ways that were never before possible. It’s no guarantee that ‘the people’ will win against hedge funds; but at the very least, it’s a guarantee that there’s a new player in the game who must be accounted for.

And it is a game.

2 – Linsey McGoey in the LRB joined in with an interesting post which started with Alexis de Tocqueville and George Sand in 1848 and eventually got to GameStop:

It may sound like a classic case of David v. Goliath, but that’s not the whole story. The WSB players on Reddit are not all small-scale. One post noted drily that one of the moderators of the forum used to be Martin Shkreli, a notorious ‘pharma bro’ who has drawn rage over the years for price-gouging on lifesaving medicines. According to this version, it isn’t exactly a good guys v. bad guys story. It’s more about less bad guys ripping off worse guys – all the while exposing the most naive investors to heavy losses which they can’t afford.

Yes and no. Behind Shkreli, there are legions of other men and women with different and even noble agendas.

We don’t yet know what the regulatory ramifications of GameStop will be. Nor do we know its emancipatory potential, its capacity to level the market aristocracy. Years ago, old-guard leftists would scoff at the idea of ‘socialist hedge fund’, dedicated to buying up distressed debt and cancelling it, or using the profits for a strike fund. Now such ideas are on the table, embraced by a new generation who know all too well how powerful and rigged the market really is.

When it comes to the great financial ‘casino’, as Susan Strange dubbed it in 1986, today’s young are tired of being manhandled like plastic chips, scattered by ‘invisible hands’ that may be hard to see, but are clearly good at hoarding. It would be prudent not to underestimate the young. The chips have eyes, they can see the market is rigged, and they are taking notes on its vulnerabilities.

For decades, powerful hedge funds have derailed post-Depression financial reforms, while private equity buccaneers dodge the levels of income tax that any mid-level office or health worker pays. The market is not a democracy, it’s feudalism, and the lords expect subservience from well-pampered regulators.

With GameStop, we don’t know, and will probably never know, who threw the first stone. Maybe it was someone like Shkreli, or maybe it was a young girl, pulling an even faster one. And why not?

3 – Which provoked this lovely Comment by P Eluard:

An interesting factor that plays into your argument has been the blatant double standard of treatment when it came to how retail investors (like me, and potentially anyone else with a smartphone and a bank account) were treated relative to the hedge funds and legacy financial institutions. The platforms which are the big new thing in this series of events, like the ‘robinhood’ app in the US or the ‘freetrade’ app in the UK (which I piled in on as soon as I heard about what was going on, inveterate redditor here) were forced by their guiding institutions to limit the buying power of their users during the squeeze. They said this was to protect their users from volatility. Robinhood has a stakeholder of some sort in Melvin capital, the hedge fund that lost 53% of its value in January. So people were rather surprised when they finally seemed to have the chance to ‘steal from the rich, and give to the poor’, and found that actually they were dealing with the sheriff of Nottingham the whole time, the truth being in the small print.

After sinking a very small sum I could afford to lose into GME stocks on freetrade, I was surprised to wake up on friday and find my trade wouldn’t be quite as free as I thought, and I wouldn’t be able to buy any more, due to their American partner institution declining to offer any American stocks for buying and selling on Friday. The story is that, due to the massive volume of trading that happened on Thursday when the first peak was reached in the price, the clearing house raised the amount that the platforms would have to put up to process the purchase. The clearing houses being unable to process purchases was a key fact in the 2008 crash, I believe (feel free anyone to correct me.) So that’s a justification. But, limiting the buying power of retail investors allowed the institutions, free of limitations, to cover their losses over the next couple of days, as the upwards momentum was drained, and the retail investors left confused as to why their stellar peaks never arrived. Still, seeing billionaires panicking about how much money they were losing and blaming their extremely stupid gambling losses on the poor hating the rich was payment enough for some. I had a blast.

This one will run and run. Or should that be ruin and ruin?

I agree with Nicholas Colin: what this caper has usefully revealed (to those who didn’t know it) is that the stock market (especially the US one) is indeed a game. The thing about Robinhood, Freetrade & Co is that they reduce the friction for small players to get into the game. In the process, they have also introduced some interesting new dynamics into it.

What the Woke Don’t Get About the Old

Nice essay by Sahil Handa

If you’re young like me, you have heard that putdown for our elders, “OK, boomer.” But perhaps also like me, you’ve been a little confused by what it meant. According to an explanation on Vox, “the older generation misunderstands millennial and Gen Z culture and politics so fundamentally that years of condescension and misrepresentation have led to this pointedly terse rebuttal.” Urban Dictionary is more direct, describing “OK, boomer” as “a simple way to tell old people to fuck off.”

What both sources miss is that “OK, boomer” says more about our generation than theirs.

I tend to dislike analysis of generations, partly because I do not feel any particular tie to my own. I was always the kid who liked to spend time with adults. Most of my cousins are twice my age, and I spent my first 16 years trying to be considered their equal. I hated when the parents would sit in a separate room, and leave the kids to play videogames: I was desperate to be taken seriously.

But aged 22 now, I see that the current generational stereotyping isn’t just the old frowning at the young, but my generation frowning at the old. According to the idea prevalent among young progressives, old liberals are self-indulgent and morally compromised. Their use of words like “civility” and “patience” is nothing but a way to preserve the status quo. They are transphobic, complacent about the climate, and make a habit of glossing over Western atrocities. And they do it all with a smug smile (while stockpiling cash from the youngsters who need it).

It’s a nice piece, worth reading in full. He also has a companion essay “What the Old don’t get about the Woke”.

I do hate that term “Woke”, though. Can’t we think of a more elegant one?

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Robert Caro interviews Kurt Vonnegut. Unmissable. Often, it’s not clear who’s interviewing whom. Link
• Jeff Bezos’s email to Amazon employees. Link
• Google Cloud lost $5.6B in 2020. No wonder Jeff Bezos was grinning today. Link

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Orchid in a window

Quote of the Day

“Baseball is a Lockean game, a kind of contract theory in ritual form, a set of atomic individuals who assent to patterns of limited co-operation in their mutual interest.”

• Michael Novak, writer and philosopher

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel | Giulio Cesare | Va tacito e nascosto. Link

Thanks to Janet Cobb for the suggestion. This modest version makes an interesting comparison with the full-on Glyndebourne version.

Long read of the Day

The miracle that is OpenStreetMap. Link

You can think of OSM in several ways:

• A distributed community of mappers contributing information about the geography of the world to a common repository
• A free web map hosted at https://www.openstreetmap.org/
• A loosely affiliated collection of free and open source tools for mapping the world
• A real-time stream of instructions representing how to add, change, or remove cartographically projected geometries and associated metadata based on a prior state
• Google Maps, but openly licensed

Or you could say that Open StreetMap is to atlases as Wikipedia is to an encyclopedia but that annoys both OSM and Wikipedia supporters who think it’s like saying that baseball is like cricket for fat people.

This is a long but fascinating piece about an important collective effort which should remind people that it’s the kind of thing that the Internet enables (and the walled gardens of Facebook et al do not).

An Airbnb Listing Written by My Mom to Me

by Jenny Crowley

I loved this. Sample:

There’s no place like home. This private basement bedroom is perfect for long weekends, holiday stays, or extended visits. Departure dates are flexible yet completely unnecessary. We can discuss them later.

THE SPACE

Relax and unwind from the stresses of working too much by staying in this charming Wisconsin oasis with all the comforts of home. Because it is your home. And will always be your home.

And this:

You also have access to the fully stocked kitchen, so help yourself. There’s chili, tater tot hotdish, homemade chicken noodle soup, beef stew, apple pie, and butterscotch oatmeal cookies in the freezer for when you get hungry. Or Smart Pop, Funyuns, Bugles, Cheez-Its, and Peanut Butter M&Ms in the cupboard for when you get bored.

A wide range of refreshments are available as well, like bottled water, Folgers coffee, hot chocolate, Lipton Iced Tea, Diet Pepsi, and one bottle of Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero I bought by mistake.

No need to pack any clothes either because the bedroom closet is still bursting with your late ’90s high school fashions. I wasn’t sure what you wanted to keep. Like your prom dress. You only wore it once and just looked so beautiful in it. I didn’t have the heart to give it away. Maybe you’ll need it for a wedding or a date or a festive costume party.

Reporters as brands

Ben Smith, the Media Editor of the New York Times (and formerly of Buzzfeed) has a long piece in the Times about the thorny question of whether journalists employed by traditional news outlets should have a significant (and sometimes combative) presence on Twitter. As far as I can see — in the best tradition of old-style American monopoly journalism — he manages to avoid taking a position, this this is how he concludes:

I suspect that successful news organizations of the future will find ways to align these dynamics: to share in their employees’ success and to add enough value that their stars stick around. Twitter’s recent acquisition of a newsletter company, Revue, could point in that direction. Revue has been focused on tools for publishers, as well as for individuals, and you could imagine a situation in which both journalists and publishers can share in the value of that promotion.

In the meantime, I will conclude simply by thanking you for reading me each week, and, if you do, for subscribing to The Times. And please follow me on Twitter at @benyt.

Personally, I don’t think professional journalists shouldn’t be prominent tweeters. Apart from anything else, they’re just feeding the troll-engine.

Rich countries have botched the pandemic, big time

Just before the pandemic, Johns Hopkins University, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and the Economist Intelligence Unit released a World Health Preparedness Report ranking every country in the world on its pandemic preparedness. The highest-ranked country was the U.S. — but now, only eight of the 153 countries in the study have a worse death rate than the U.S. The U.K. came in second for preparedness; its death rate is even worse than America’s. Thailand and Sweden were ranked equally on preparedness, but Thailand has seen only 1 death per million people, while Sweden has seen 1,078.

So much for preparedness reports, then. Mind you, if the investigators had just looked at who was in charge of the US or the UK in 2019 they might have made more astute assessments.

Nowhere in the US Constitution are idiots disbarred from being members of Congress. Who knew?

Nice column by Jack Shafer.

Nowhere in the Constitution — and this is excellent news for freshly sworn-in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—does it stipulate that a House member must have the mental capacity to cook on all four burners.

This is in keeping with the Framers’ general idea that only the lowest bars should be set for officeholders. But…

As CNN, the Washington Post, POLITICO and a score of other outlets have reported, Greene is a shambles of a human being. She subscribes to or has promoted an awful bunch of irrational and absurd ideas and positions, so irrational and absurd that you’d be doing her a favor by calling them merely “fringe.” She has trafficked in false QAnon claims of a global pedophilic-satanic cabal involving top Democrats and Hollywood celebrities; she “liked” a comment suggesting the Parkland school massacre was a “false flag” operation and asserted much the same about the Sandy Hook killings; she appeared to support the execution of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi (also accusing Pelosi of treason); suggested the Las Vegas shooting was part of a plot to abolish the Second Amendment; claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen; and asserted the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats took the House, represented “an Islamic invasion of our government.” On Jan. 21, shortly after Joe Biden took the oath, Greene filed, as she had promised, articles of impeachment against him. Her articles of impeachment won’t go anywhere, but they gave us a pocket preview of her flagpole-sitting skills.

And the funny thing is that if the House tried to unseat her (or if she resigned and stood again) the voters in her gerrymandered seat would probably re-elect her.

Reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s argument that one of the merits of democracy was that an MP could never be stupider than his constituents “because the more stupid he is the more stupid they are to elect him”. (MPs were overwhelmingly male in thos days.)

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How to stop your spectacles fogging up when you wear a mask. Useful research by Elias Visontay for the Guardian. And he seems to have found a solution. Link
• How to stop elephants trampling your crops: put bee-hives round the perimeter. Neat and humane idea. And you can sell the honey too. 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!

Art and Illusion

A mural in Brignoles.

Click and collect

We’ve been in lockdown since last March. This hasn’t been a particular hardship (as I explain in my Lockdown diary) because we can both work from home, have a spacious house and garden and can go for a cycle every day. But from the beginning we have avoided supermarkets. We tried to get home deliveries early on but found that all the local supermarkets didn’t have delivery capacity to match the demand, and only once succeeded in getting a delivery within a reasonable time-frame. Some of our (grown-up) children live locally and they generously stepped into the breach and did the shopping for us.

But with the arrival of the new variant on the virus we felt increasingly concerned about them being exposed to greater risk on our behalf, and so looked around for a manageable alternative. We found that Morrisons, a supermarket in a small nearby town, did a click-and-collect service with a 24-hour turnaround and have been using that ever since.

It’s terrific. We’re offered a collection slot, drive the 3 or 4 miles to the shop, open the boot and our shopping is loaded into the car. It’s safe — but, more importantly, it’s not exposing our family to unnecessary risk.

Quote of the Day

“Every generation revolts against it fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

• Lewis Mumford

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Notting Hillbillies | Feel Like Going Home

Link

This morning’s Observer column

 The PR exercise that is Facebook’s ‘supreme court’ Link

This board (originally talked about within Facebook as a “supreme court”) is both a manifestation of preposterous hubris on the part of what is, after all, merely a commercial company and a cunning stunt by said company to avoid taking corporate responsibility for difficult decisions. It consists of up to 40 bigwigs, allegedly carefully chosen (“six in-depth workshops and 22 round tables, attended by more than 650 people from 88 different countries”) but who look awfully like the kind of longlist that might be produced by a high-end corporate headhunter. It includes, for example, a former prime minister of Denmark, nine professors, one vice-chancellor and a former editor of the Guardian. Such eminent worthies, of course, cannot be expected to work for nothing, so, according to the New York Times, they receive at least $100,000 (£73,000) a year for a commitment of 15 hours a week.

Inspection of linguistic clues on the board’s website does not inspire confidence in its supposed collective IQ or independence…

Do read the whole thing.

The GameStop saga, and its wider implications

As someone who regards hedge funds as only marginally less malign than so-called ‘private equity’ I’ve been much amused by the GameStop saga. GameStop is a struggling, mid-size retailer stuck in a legacy business — selling physical video games. In that sense, it didn’t appear to have a great future ahead of it. A number of prominent hedge funds took that view, and engaged in ‘shorting’ its stock.

How does that work? Here’s a simple example:

Let’s say you had chosen to short-sell Rio Tinto shares via CFDs. Rio Tinto is trading at £40, which means that you could open a position to sell 100 share CFDs at £40 (factoring in a 0.10% commission charge1), which would give you a market exposure of £4000. As CFDs are leveraged, you would not have to put up the full value of the trade, instead you would only need to put up a deposit – if the margin was 20%, you would put up £800.

If the market did fall as you’d predicted, you would close your position by buying 100 shares at the new price of £35 (factoring the commission charge mentioned above). You would then calculate the difference between the opening price and closing price, and profit from the difference: in this case, £40 – £35 = £5 x 100 shares = £500. Any profit to a CFD trade is calculated using the full value of your exposure, not just the deposit, which means that profits can be magnified.

Then a group of jokers on the r/Wallstreetbets subreddit (which has 2 million subscribers) decided to have some fun and started buying GameStop shares while also leveraging the viral possibilities of Reddit to spread the idea. In no time at all, there was a feeding frenzy in the shares and they went through the roof.

Which meant that the hedge funds that had reckoned on being able to return the shares they’d borrowed by buying them at the bottom of the market, suddenly discovered that they’d been caught in a ‘short squeeze’ and were staring at substantial losses. In the process, one of the biggest hedge funds, Melvin Capital, nearly folded. What was going on, wrote Matt Piepenburg, a former hedge fund manager, was that

an informed mob of social-media linked, Reddit-savvy and small-time investors got together and decided to do what the big boys on Wall Street have exclusively been doing for years—namely pump a stock.

Only this time the joke was on the big boys, not the little guys of the retail universe, whom the Fancy Lads like to call “suckers.”

A wave of small investor buy-orders rushed across the exchange (which had to temporally halt trading) in a concerted effort to send GME to record highs, thereby front-running themselves while saving Game Stop from a fatal Wall Street short-position and another Amazonian slaughter.

In my mind, part of what we are witnessing this week is a civil war (or war of attrition) between a socially-linked and large class of small investors against a small and exclusive circle of Wall Street short-sellers, like Citron Research or Melvin Capital.

In essence, a band of small retail investors—who are typically the one’s the Wall Street short-sellers crush, turned the table and squeezed the fancy lads while simultaneously trying to save a small business chain.

So you can see why I was amused. “Going after heavily shorted stocks”, writes James Surowiecki, whom I’ve always regarded as a found of wisdom on these matters,

is also smart because it taps into the long-standing distaste for short sellers, and gives meme-stock traders an enemy to focus on. Short selling is an essential component of any healthy stock market: Myriad studies have found that the presence of short sellers makes stock prices more accurate. But investors generally don’t care about whether stock prices are correct — they want stocks to go up. So anyone who is betting that stocks will go down is seen as a killjoy at best and an enemy of the state — or, in this case, of the community — at worst. That’s why, when well-known short seller Andrew Left of Citron Research said last week that GameStop’s stock price would fall to $20, he was savaged on social media and effectively cowed into silence.

The point, then, is that even though GameStop’s current stock price is utterly irrational — it will never make enough money to justify a $6 billion market cap — the way Redditors and others have driven its price up has been quite smart. They’ve shown, in a sense, that if you pick the right stocks, a self-organized community of small investors can make them rise, almost entirely by an act of collective will. In an odd way, it’s a remarkable testament to the internet’s ability to facilitate collective action. The challenge, of course, is that once that collective will begins to erode — either because people want to cash out or just get bored — there are going to be no fundamentals supporting the stock price, which means once these stocks start falling, it’ll be look out below. But by the time that happens, much of the crowd will have moved on. There are always going to be crappy, heavily shorted stocks out there—which means there’s always going to be a chance for more lolz.

Gosh! Who said the stock market is boring. Interestingly, Surowiecki doesn’t share my low opinion of short selling.

Does this have any wider significance? Yes. The techniques used by the Redditers against hedge funds can be used in elections. Indeed, in a way, they were used in 2016, as Surowiecki points out:

Perhaps more interestingly, it also looks a lot like what happened during the 2016 presidential election. Over the course of that campaign, a loosely organized community of alt-right meme lords and their followers, centered on sites like 4chan and Reddit, adeptly used social media to elevate Donald Trump’s candidacy while barraging Hillary Clinton with an endless flow of memes targeting her supposed inauthenticity and corruption. What they did, in effect, was exploit the opportunities created by social media to disrupt the normal workings of the political system, at least in part for the lolz. The traders on r/Wallstreetbets — which describes itself, tellingly, as “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal” — are trying to do the same thing to Wall Street.

This is the kind of thing Americans have to look forward to in 2024.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Why are webcams so bad? (And why they won’t ever improve) Useful (and exhaustive) advice in a Zoomed-out age. Link
• Fried eggs a la Jacques Pépin. Never thought of doing then this way. I will from now on. Link
• Review: Lupin updates classic French gentleman thief for the 21st century. That’s my Netflix viewing decided for the next few weeks. 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!