Just fancy that!

From the current Private Eye.

Quote of the Day

”Play Hemingway — be fierce.”

• Gertrude Stein — speaking to her dog

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Richard | Good Golly Miss Molly | On Muhammad Ali’s 50th Birthday

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Battlestar Galactica Lessons from Ransomware to the Pandemic

A truly wonderful long essay by Zeynep Tufecki which is about network insecurity and hacking but is really about why we never learn, even though we’re supposedly the smartest animals on the planet. It starts with the pipeline hack and ends … well, where would you expect? Covid-19.

Unmissable.

The Dead contd.

Many thanks to the readers who emailed about the ‘redevelopment’ of No 15 Usher Island in Dublin. And Mick Fealty (Whom God Preserve) found the YouTube link for the complete version of John Huston’s wonderful movie of the Joyce story, for which link I am deeply grateful, and I hope you will be too.

Well, that didn’t take long

From Axios:

📚 Apple parts ways with author

After an employee uproar over his writing demeaning women and others, Apple cut ties with new hire Antonio García Martínez, the former Facebook employee who wrote “Chaos Monkeys,” Axios’ Ina Fried learned.

Employees circulated a petition yesterday calling for Apple to explain its hiring of García Martínez. It’s not known what he was going to do.

It’s rare for Apple employees to organize publicly on any issue, let alone an individual hiring.

In a passage of “Chaos Monkeys,” García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as “soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness.”

Apple confirmed to Axios that García Martínez was no longer employed, and said in a statement that it has “always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace.”

I read his book — Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley years ago, and wasn’t over-impressed. It was essentially a tech-bro miming Hunter S. Thompson — full of stuff that you’d have got away with in Hunter’s time but which looks pretty dodgy after #MeToo and #BLM. Gonzo journalism seems less impressive now. I’m surprised that Apple hired him: must have been because they saw his social-media advertising experience as a boon at a time when the company is aiming to grow its own advertising business. My conclusion is that Apple needs rapidly to improve the ethnic and gender diversity of its panels that hire people (and do more sophisticated due diligence on potential hires).

We get the ‘heroes’ we deserve

The only drawback I’ve discovered since we bought a Tesla last December is that people hold me personally responsible for Elon Musk, who is by any standards a flake of Cadbury proportions. If pressed, I’d say he was a gifted lunatic, and what’s really depressing is the legions of fanboys he seems to have attracted.

(Here’s how to spot a fanboy at 50 paces, btw: he — and it’s generally a male — refers to Musk as ‘Elon’, as if he were a personal friend. At that point the sensible precaution is to check for the nearest exit.)

Musk’s exploitation of his celebrity status would be nauseating if he were just a normal celebrity. But the really insidious thing is the way he’s using it (a) to move markets and (b) to disguise the realities of Tesla’s financial performance.

Scott Galloway has a terrific essay on all this. Lots of great things in it, but a few stood out for me.

Tesla posts an accounting profit, but in its most recent quarter, it was emissions credits (a regulatory program that rewards auto companies for making electric rather than gas vehicles) and — wait for it — $101 million in bitcoin trading profits that morphed earnings from a miss to a beat. What Tesla did not do last quarter was produce a single one of its two premium cars, the Model S or the Model X. Promised redesigns have apparently snarled production. On this topic, Musk has been uncharacteristically CEO-like (that is, discreet).

So this is what it looks like:

Part of the reason Tesla is dominant in the higher-end of the EV market is that it had very little competition for a long time. But now, as Galloway points out, that’s changing. “The innovation gap is closing”, he writes.

And it’s not just car companies coming for Tesla’s fat margins. The industry’s shape-shift from a $100 billion low-margin manufacturing business to an $800 billion high(er)-margin software business has attracted some enormous sharks. The first overnight $100 billion-plus transfer of shareholder value will occur in 2022, when Tim Cook stands onstage in front of an automobile bearing an Apple logo.

Galloway’s explanation for some of Musk’s publicity stunts is that he needs to keep investment and talent flowing into his company as the competition hot up. (The new electric Mercedes S-class limo, for example, is not all that more expensive than a Tesla Model S.) The stunts, Galloway says, help to distract public attention from

anything regarding fundamental analysis (P/E ratios) or sobriety (it’s a car company). The embrace of crypto serves both needs: It’s consistent with his techno-utopian vibe, and it directs the conversation away from the Mercedes EQS or Apple car while providing a shock absorber for earnings misses. The SNL appearance, Dogecoin tweets, Elvish-letter-named kids, tickling of our senses with 420 references and suggestive emojis: It’s David Copperfield, plus 60 IQ points.

The big question (for me, anyway) is: why is Musk’s reality distortion field so powerful?

Galloway is similarly puzzled:

One in five U.S. households with children is food insecure, and we have a man telling his 53 million acolytes to purchase a digital currency so he can sell it at a profit to pad the earnings of a company that’s worth more than automakers producing 60 times the vehicles. And why wouldn’t he? When you tell an innovator he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. Once we idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now we worship tech innovators that create billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

We do.

But here’s the really strange thing. The Tesla we have (the Model 3) is a terrific car. It’s a delight to drive, is as agile as any roadster, goes from zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds and yet is quiet and undemonstrative. If you charge it with electricity from renewable sources it’s also reasonably environmentally friendly. So the only question that comes repeatedly to mind is: how did a certifiable fruitcake manage to make such a good product?

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Lilac patterns

One of the trees in our front garden this evening.

Quote of the Day

”An expensive way of playing marbles.”

• G.K. Chesterton on golf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil | TG4 2007

Link

The late, great Liam O’Flynn (Uilleann Pipes) plays The Humours of Carrigaholt (Reel 0:00), Mayor Harrison’s Fedora (Reel 1:13) & Tommy Peoples’ (Reel 2:26) with Seán Keane (Fiddle), Paddy Glackin (Fiddle), Arty McGlynn (Guitar), Paul Brady (Guitar) and Rod McVeigh (Keyboard).

Tommy People’s reel is one of my favourite tunes.

Long Read of the Day

Book Review: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

I love Scott Alexander’s blog for all kinds of reasons, among them his thoughtful intelligence, intellectual stamina and the range of his interests. A while back he embarked on an interesting experiment — inviting people to submit a review of a book (any book they chose). He’s publishing the entries a couple of times a week, and will ask readers to vote for the winner at the end of the experiment.

The other day he published this review of Robert Caro’s The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson which is the most unusual book review I’ve seen in years. Hope you enjoy it.

Triumph of the Gombeen Men

A gombeen man, Wikipedia helpfully reminds us is “a pejorative Hiberno-English term used in Ireland for a shady, small-time ‘wheeler-dealer’ businessman or politician who is always looking to make a quick profit.” Every Irish town has had at least one (and often numerous) members of the species. It comes from the Irish word gaimbín, meaning monetary interest, which is probably a reference to those 19th-century shysters who prospered during the potato Famine by selling food and goods to their starving fellow-countrymen and women at blackmarket prices.

For most of the 20th century there has been an informal and cosy relationship between the gombeen wing of the property development racket and local authority planning departments (and their political overlords). Indeed, during the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ period, the ruling Fianna Fáil party effectively functioned as the political wing of the construction industry, with consequences that were only fully appreciated in 2008 when the country was brought to bankruptcy by its zombie banks.

All of which is by way of context to the news that Dublin’s planners have now given permission to two property developers to transform No 15 Usher Island, the Georgian house which was the setting for James Joyce’s great short story, ‘The Dead’, into a tourist hostel.

I hadn’t known about this until Andrew Arends (Whom God Preserve) sent me a link to the New York Times story:

Last month, despite vigorous opposition from prominent writers, artists, academics and heritage groups, Ireland’s planning authority approved a proposal to convert one of Dublin’s most beloved Joycean landmarks into a tourist hostel, dashing hopes that it could be preserved as a museum and cultural space.

Located on the banks of the Liffey river near the Guinness brewery, the 18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island was the setting for “The Dead,” the final story in Joyce’s collection “Dubliners,” often cited as the greatest short story written in English.

If you don’t know it, ‘The Dead’ is an entrancing short story, of which John Huston made a lovely film — his last — which got an Oscar nomination. Joyce’s two great aunts ran a music school in the Usher Island house, and every January 6 — the Catholic feast of the Epiphany — they held a party, with food and music, for friends and family. ‘The Dead’ tells the story of one such evening.

The house’s original room plan had been restored by its previous owner, but he went bust, after which it was bought by the developers who plan to turn it into space for 56 beds and a cafe.

There’s been a petition from many distinguished Irish writers and artists to save the house and transform it into a cultural centre, but to no avail. The Times reports that the Irish Department for Tourism and Culture “said in a statement that it had considered the house’s cultural value when the proposal was before Dublin City Council in 2019 and that it had no further comment”.

That figures. Gombeen men value tourism but have little use for culture.

If you’d like to see the official trailer for the Huston film, it’s here.

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Seen on our walk last last evening.

Quote of the Day

”He is forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.”

• Harold Macmillan on Anthony Eden

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Michael Haydn | Trumpet Concerto No.2 in C-major

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why Joe Biden Punched Big Pharma in the Nose Over Covid Vaccines

Terrific explanatory piece by Matt Stoller on why vaccines are being withheld from poor countries by the pharma monopolies.

Trump Abused the System. Facebook Created It

Good piece by Virginia Heffernan on the fact that Facebook regarded Trump not as president but simply as a mega-‘influencer’. The company’s ‘oversight’ board failed to mention one thing in its ruling this week: Facebook’s responsibility for making the tools to wield undue influence and power.

The decision about Donald Trump, was neither here nor there. In the end, the result of the exercise was to distract from Facebook’s own culpability in much broader damage to democracy.

Heffernan is (rightly) struck by this passage in the ‘oversight’ board’s statement:

“As president, Mr. Trump had a high level of influence. The reach of his posts was large, with 35 million followers on Facebook and 24 million on Instagram.” The board went on: “It is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users, recognizing that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm.”

What’s so shocking? Just this:

To Facebook, the American president is clearly not a public servant or even a commander-in-chief. He’s an influencer. And he gets his power not from the people but from Facebook and its business model of influencers and followers.

But power established on Facebook is not “legitimate” in the same way that the power of a schoolteacher or elected official is, because they exercise that’s regarded as just and appropriate by those over whom it is exercised.

“Influence” on Facebook, however,

is based on nothing but a (cheatable) point system in Facebook’s highly stylized massively multiplayer role-playing game. But that does not get mentioned by anyone on this committee, which has been blinded, in the McLuhan sense, to the game’s contrivances. Influence on Facebook is closer to influence in World of Warcraft than it is to legitimate power. But instead of calling out Facebook for creating a system that confers unregulated and dangerous “influence” on people, they speak of the abuse of that system by a designated bad actor.

I’ve never understood why apparently serious people agreed to participate in the farce of this ‘oversight’ board. Are they just in it for the money? Is it is the aphrodisiac effect of the illusion of being close to power? Or are they content to be ‘useful idiots’, as Lenin would have called them?

Ransomware-as-a-service

When the news of the hacking of Colonial, the quaintly-named corporation that runs one of the US’s most important energy pipelines, was announced, I assumed it was Russian retaliation for the unspecified cyber-attacks unleashed by Biden as punishment for the Solarwinds and other exploits.

Turns out I was wrong. Or, at any rate, according to the NYT, the FBI has confirmed an outfit called DarkSide as the attacker. That name, I have to say, raises my suspicion-level by several notches. (As in “I fear they’ve gone over to the Dark Side, Watson”.) And then there’s their pathetic bleat that they are only interested in making money “and not creating problems for society”. Just like Facebook, in other words — except that Facebook doesn’t give a monkey’s about societal problems so long as the money rolls in.

The most interesting aspect of the whole story is its confirmation that ransomware has now becoming a rentable service that any tech-illiterate gangster can hire — just as you can now rent a botnet to do DOS attacks on your enemies.

Simon Beard on Derek Parfit

A lovely bio by one philosopher of another. I particularly liked this bit:

“Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do.” This was the opening sentence of Derek Parfit’s philosophical masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. He believed that it was the best way to begin his book because it showed something important about people. Often we are not as special as we think we are. For instance, when people simply do what they want to do they appear to be utilizing no ability that only people have. On the other hand, when we respond to reasons, we are doing something uniquely human, because only people can act in this way. Cats are notorious for doing what they want to do, and the sense of proximity between a cat and its owner pleasingly heightens our sense of their similarity. Hence, there could be no better way for this book to begin.

However, there was a problem. Derek did not, in fact, own a cat. Nor did he wish to become a cat owner, as he would rather spend his time taking photographs and doing philosophy. On the other hand, the sentence would clearly be better if it was true. To resolve this problem Derek drew up a legal agreement with his sister, who did own a cat, to the effect that he would take legal possession of the cat while she would continue living with it.

Reasons and Persons was far from being Derek’s final word on the philosophical problems that had consumed him for the previous 17 years. Indeed, it has been said that Derek only agreed to publish it under pressure from All Souls College who were threatening not to renew his fellowship, and he insisted the publisher accept it in 154 individual instalments so that he could submit each one at the last possible moment, mere days before the book went to press. Yet, the book has become one of the most influential, and heavily cited, works of philosophy published since the Second World War. It consists of four sections, each of which considers a different set of arguments for why people matter less than we might suppose, and why our reasons for action might be otherwise than they seem.

He was an extraordinary man. Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a lovely profile of him in the New Yorker in 2011.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Before we canonise Liz Cheney for attacking the way Republicans have been indulging Trump, maybe read this. Fortunately, Maureen Dowd has a good memory. Link

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Quote of the Day

”Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

• T.S. Eliot

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Farewell to Stromness | LAGQ

Link

Nice arrangement for guitar. Interesting to compare it with the traditional piano arrangement

Long Read of the Day

The unstoppable Mr Higgins

My review of We are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People, by Eliot Higgins.

On the face of it, this book tells an implausible story. It’s about how an ordinary guy – a bored administrator in Leicester, to be precise – becomes a skilled Internet sleuth solving puzzles and crimes which appear to defeat some of the world’s intelligence agencies. And yet it’s true. Eliot Higgins was indeed a bored administrator, out of a job and looking after his young daughter in 2011 while his wife went out to work. He was an avid watcher of YouTube videos, especially of those emanating from the Syrian civil war, and one day had an epiphany: “If you searched online you could find facts that neither the press nor the experts knew.”

Higgins realised that one reason why mainstream media were ignoring the torrent of material from the war zone that was being uploaded to YouTube and other social media channels was that these outlets were unable to verify or corroborate it…

(Forthcoming in British Journalism Review, June, 2021)

The meltdown at Basecamp shows even small tech firms are sociopathic

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Basecamp is a plucky little (57-person) tech company that makes useful and imaginative project-management software and innovative email software. Or, rather, it was until a fortnight ago, when it suddenly became embroiled in a traumatic internal row between its employees and its two cofounders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, a row that has transformed Basecamp into a much smaller company bearing the scars of collateral damage from a firefight in the culture wars.

Although Basecamp is a minnow in the world of tech giants, what happened there reflects what is already commonplace in its bigger counterparts. This is because, at base, the company’s internal dissension highlighted that the conflict was actually between the sociopathic imperatives of a corporation and the feelings of skilled employees concerned about the racism and sexism that is endemic in both US society and in an industry that for decades pretended that it was above such sordid concerns.

The first indication to the outside world that something was awry came on Monday 26 April when Fried, the company’s CEO, published a blogpost entitled “Changes at Basecamp”…

Read on

Last Thursday’s election results

Mostly predictable, I’d say. The Tories got some kind of ‘vaccination boost’. The voters aren’t much interested — yet — in the corruption, sleaze and incompetence of the government. And anyone who owns assets — which mostly means houses — has done just fine out of the pandemic. (Coincidentally, Hartlepool — where Labour lost a seat they’d held for generations — has a lot of owner-occupiers.) And then there was the fact that a Tory government — a Tory government! — has been paying furlough wages and spending public money like drunken Marxists.

So one wonders what are the implications for Labour? The results reminded me of what happened to the Democrats in the US after the Obama ‘Hope’-boost ran out of steam. Keir Starmer’s frank admission — that “Labour has lost the confidence of working people” — made me think of Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank’s sobering book about how the Democrats lost their way in the US. Here we are, he wrote (in 2016),

“eight years post-Hope. Growth that doesn’t grow; prosperity that doesn’t prosper. The country, we now understand, is simply no longer arranged in such a way as to make its citizens economically secure.”

I think that’s broadly the case for large swathes of the UK. If so, it’s difficult just now to see what kind of party Labour needs to become if it’s to find new audiences and revived electoral support.

Last week the FT ran a feature about the so-called ‘Red Wall’ of Labour seats that fell to Johnson in the last general election . The headline was: “Labour’s lost heartlands. Can it win them back?”

“No it can’t”, wrote an online commenter.

“Lovely people, but conservative (with a small c), despite traditionally voting Labour. I simply can’t see how Labour can be a modern, progressive party of the sort you find in most Northern European countries and serve the red wall at the same time.”

Me neither.

Later: Good piece in the Observer by Professor Robert Ford which reminded me that I had forgotten about the ‘Brexit effect’.

“Under Starmer”, Ford writes,

the party has sought to move on from Brexit. This, it seems, is not yet something English voters are willing to do. In seat after seat in Leave-voting parts of England, the Conservatives surged and Labour slumped. Leave voters, it seems, remain keen to reward the prime minister who “got Brexit done”.

Ford thinks that the results indicate significant changes under way in British politics. First of all,

traditional class-politics patterns are being turned upside down by a realignment around divides by age, education and – most of all – Brexit choices. On every available measure of socioeconomic conditions, the Conservatives prospered most in the most deprived places and Labour did best in the most prosperous areas. This inversion of class politics has already been evident for several years but it has continued, and perhaps intensified, in the first post-Brexit local elections.

Secondly, the post-Brexit education divide has intensified.

There were major swings to the Conservatives in the wards with the highest shares of voters with few or no formal qualifications, while there were modest swings to Labour in the wards with the largest concentrations of university graduates. There was less evidence of the generational divide seen in the last two general elections and Labour’s traditional advantage in more ethnically diverse areas was more muted than usual.

And here’s the sting in the tail that rang that bell for me about the US Democrats:

In 2021, as in 2019, Labour’s core electorate was graduates, well-off professionals and Remainers.

In other words, the people whose counterparts in the US voted for Hilary Clinton.

Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley

Nice photo essay in The New York Times making the point that levels of inequality in the epicentre of the tech industry are mind-blowing.

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New arrivals

There’s a new family in the village. There are eight goslings, but two are hidden behind their mother in the picture. Amazing to think that these little fluffballs will turn into formidable geese.

Dave’s Artshow

Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) has just done another magical thing — Artshow.

It’s a growing collection of great art, collected from art lovers’ feeds on Twitter. Dave wrote an app that scans the tweet streams, collects the images and displays them as a slide-show. The collection can also be downloaded for use in a screen saver. And of course the app is provided as open source.

Try it: it’s wonderful.

Quote of the Day

”Should Heaven send me any son
I hope he’s not like Tennyson.
I’d rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | Mournful Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Two Centuries of ‘The Guardian’ by Alan Rusbridger

This is a nice essay by the paper’s second-greatest Editor (C.P. Scott takes first place) in The New York Review of Books to mark the bicentenary of the paper. Its survival — and its current financial health — is nothing short of a miracle, given what has happened to most of journalism, and Rusbridger’s piece takes the reader through the good times and the bad.

I’m biased, of course, partly because I’ve written for the Observer (which the Guardian rescued in 1993 after its bruising experience with a corrupt proprietor, Tiny Rowlands) since 1982 (and as a columnist since 1987). But mostly because it was the paper which, for me, opened my eyes to what a newspaper should be like. I was the first member of my family to go to university, and as an undergraduate in 1964 my walk to college took me passed a rather seedy but (for Ireland) rather adventurous newsagent. And it was from there that I took to buying the Guardian every weekday and reading it from cover to cover.

Rusbridger often rubs people up the wrong way as great leaders often do. But I will never forget his steely courage during the Snowden revelations when he was confronted by the full might of the vindictive British state and didn’t flinch. Nobody who saw his performance before a seething Parliamentary Committee that year will ever forget his uncompromising fortitude. It was grace under real pressure, and then some.

The Daily Mail is 125

It seems to be the week for newspaper anniversaries. Unherd has a nice piece by Ed West about it:

The paper is 125 years old today, and for most of that time has represented the soul of a particular kind of England, read in the golf courses of Surrey, the semis of suburban Essex, the pub gardens of Dorset. It is the most popular paper in Britain — it overtook the Sun last year — and easily the most hated. It’s guaranteed to get a laugh, or a sneer, when a comedian mentions its name.

The Daily Mail is not exactly the conscience of Middle England, but it is certainly a guiding spirit, a collection of all its fears and hopes, although more of the former than the latter. It represents people overwhelmingly conservative in their cultural tastes while also having a prurient interest in other people’s sex lives and bodies, and in particular their failures.

The way it covers sex scandals is quintessentially English, with just enough information to both titillate and disgust, a dose of moralising and concluding the story with a description of the property in which the disgusting actions took place and an estimated market value. (“MP’s sordid sex sessions with rent boy in £600,000 maisonette”.)

I’ve never knowingly read the Daily Mail, and indeed I don’t know anyone who does (that’s my liberal bubble for you!) But it’s remarkable is how afraid British politicians are of the paper. Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff, once observed — when talking about how the Blair government ‘managed’ the news agenda — that “the best way to bury bad news was to get it onto the front page of the Guardian.” After the laughter had died away, he explained, “Because if it was the lead in the Guardian the Daily Mail wouldn’t touch it”!

How Internal Combustion Engines work

Wonderful explanation by Bartosz Ciechanowski.

I can imagine my great-great-grandchildren saying: “Mom, is it really true that in the BTE our ancestors propelled themselves around using a series of controlled explosions?”

Footnote: BTE = Before Tesla Era.

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It’s over there!

Quote of the Day

”A newspaper editor is someone who knows precisely what he wants but isn’t quite sure.”

• Walter Davenport

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Auf dem Wasser zu singen | Camille Thomas and Beatrice Berrut

Link

Long Read of the Day

Paid in Full

The emerging dream of an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

An insightful essay by Drew Austin on the end of Web 2.0 and the beginnings of Web 3.0 as represented by the Substack boom. Reminds me of Tim O’Reilly’s famous essay on Web 2.0.

Facebook’s ‘Oversight’ Board makes a decision on Trump

Much to my surprise, the Board decided that the ban should be retained — at least for the time being.

Shira Ovide has some shrewd observations about what transpired.

Facebook’s Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body that the company created to review some of its high-profile decisions, essentially agreed on Wednesday that Facebook was right to suspend Trump. His posts broke Facebook’s guidelines and presented a clear and present danger of potential violence, the board said.

But the board also said that Facebook was wrong to make Trump’s suspension indefinite. When people break Facebook’s rules, the company has policies to delete the violating material, suspend the account holder for a defined period of time or permanently disable an account. The board said Facebook should re-examine the penalty against Trump and within six months choose a time-limited ban or a permanent one rather than let the squishy suspension remain.

Facebook has to make the hard calls:

A big “wow” line from the Oversight Board was its criticism of Facebook for passing the buck on what to do about Trump. “In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities,” the board wrote.

But also…

The meat of the board’s statement is a brutal assessment of Facebook’s errors in considering the substance of people’s messages, and not the context. Facebook currently treats your neighbor with five followers the same as Trump and others with huge followings.

(Actually, at least when he was president, Trump had even more leeway in his posts than your neighbor. Facebook and Twitter have said that the public should generally be able to see and hear for themselves what their leaders say, even if they’re spreading misinformation.)

The Oversight Board agreed that the same rules should continue to apply to everyone on Facebook — but with some big caveats.

“Context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm,” the board wrote. “What is important is the degree of influence that a user has over other users.”

Trump now has a blog, even though he doesn’t know what a blog is

(He thinks it’s a ‘platform’, which suggests that he doesn’t know what a platform is, either. But its appearance at this juncture suggests that he anticipated continuation of the ban.)

It’s here, in case you’re interested.

The Instagram ads you’ll never see

Really ingenious experiment by Signal. They tried to run Instagram ads like the ones shown above.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.

So…

Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.

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The Guardian is 200 today!

And if you’re puzzled by this, read Robert Shrimsley’s wonderful satirical piece that appeared in Saturday’s Financial Times, which explains all.

Quote of the Day

”After 27 years, Melinda Gates finally gets to use a Mac.”

• Dave Pell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | If Walls Could Talk

Link

Ry Cooder was the kind of guy my mother warned me about. She was right!

Long Read of the Day

 The Computers Are Getting Better at Writing

Yeah I know that all the stuff about GPT-3 seems a bit iffy, but this long piece in the New Yorker by Stephen Marche is something else. He starts with Kafka’s famous unfinished novel.

The second section of “The Metamorphosis” continues the story this way:

As soon as Gregor was alone, he began to feel ill. Turning around was an effort. Even breathing was an effort. A thin stream of blood trickled from his flank down his fuzzy belly. He wanted to crawl away from it, but there was no place to go. He lay still on the spot where he had come to rest just in order to get his breath back and to stop the bleeding. “I’m in a bad way,” said Gregor. It had never occurred to him before that he could really become ill. He had seen sick animals—a dove once in a while, which had fallen out of the nestling into the gutter and could not fly any more, or the weak infants of the woman next door who had to be picked up with the tongs and thrown into the dustbin, or the bugs his father used to bring to him when he was still a young boy and which he had liked so much.

Except the second section of “The Metamorphosis” doesn’t begin that way. An artificial-intelligence application called Sudowrite wrote the paragraph above. I inputted the text of the first section of “The Metamorphosis” and then pressed a button called Wormhole. The computer composed the continuation.

Sudowrite is an interesting idea. Basically, it accesses GPT-3’s interface and turns it into a legible tool that any writer can use. It’s currently in beta but its founder sees it product turning into a resource that writers will pay fifteen to twenty dollars per month to use.

Fascinating essay — at least for those of us who write for a living — even if it doesn’t mention the horrendous environmental cost of the initial training of GPT-3.

Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more

From Techcrunch:

Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced today it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, support for co-hosting, accessibility improvements and more.

Along with the expansion, Twitter is making Spaces more visible on its platform, too. The company notes it has begun testing the ability to find and join a Space from a purple bubble around someone’s profile picture right from the Home timeline.

Hmmm… I have 7,652 followers at the time of writing, so I should be entitled to ‘a live audio room’. But what would I do with it? This is clearly a pre-emptive strike to make sure Clubhouse doesn’t make too many inroads.

Hypocrisy on stilts?

From Benedict Evans’s indispensable weekly newsletter:

In January, the CEO of Axel Springer wrote an impassioned essay claiming that the web should be totally private and no ‘big company’ should collect any kind of personal data at all. He published this on Business Insider (which he owns), on a page with no less than 68 different third party trackers. Now, Axel Springer is part of a group of German publishers complaining about Apple’s privacy changes in iOS 14.5. Pick one, please.

When I opened the Business Insider page on my machine, the Ghostery ad-tracker found 23 trackers rather than the 68 that Ben mentions; but that could be a reflection of the fact that I use a VPN which also blocks stuff. Still, 23 reinforces his point.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Do You Live in a Bubble? Just enter your address to find out. Link Neat idea, but this version only works for the US. It’d be nice to have one for the UK. Hmmm…

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