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.

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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!

Quote of the Day

“If Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, the could nationalise Amazon and call it a day.”

• Franklin Foer, in The Atlantic

H/T to Alina Utrata

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Linley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhor | Vienna Opera House

Link

A real discovery this (for me, anyway). The pair take on an ancient Irish tune.

Long Read of the Day

What comes after Zoom fatigue?

You know the answer: more Zoom. But this is an interesting exploration of why it makes us exhausted.

‘Global Britain’ is happy to do business with human-rights violators

From the Huffington Post:

Dominic Raab has told officials in a leaked video call that Britain will seek trade deals with countries around the world that violate international standards on human rights.

The foreign secretary told staff in his department that only trading with countries that meet European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) standards would mean the UK missing out on trade with future “growth markets”.

In a question and answer session with Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff, a recording of which has been heard by HuffPost UK, Raab said: “I squarely believe we ought to be trading liberally around the world.

“If we restrict it to countries with ECHR-level standards of human rights, we’re not going to do many trade deals with the growth markets of the future.”

So, within Europe, who might these new trade partners be?

Source: Statista

It will, of course, also be imperative to strike a big trade deal with China. And of course Saudi Arabia.

And while we’re on the subject of China, the Economist points out in a sobering assessment that it’s not just states that are afraid of annoying the Chinese Communist Party.

You might think the death of liberalism in Asia’s financial centre, which hosts $10trn of cross-border investments, would trigger panic, capital flight and a business exodus. Instead Hong Kong is enjoying a financial boom. Share offerings have soared as China’s leading companies list there. Western firms are in the thick of it: the top underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Last year, the value of us dollar payments cleared in Hong Kong, a hub for the world’s reserve currency, hit a record $11trn.

The same pattern of political oppression and commercial effervescence is to be found on the mainland. In 2020 China abused human rights in Xinjiang, waged cyber-warfare, threatened its neighbours and intensified the cult of personality surrounding President Xi Jinping. Another purge is under way. Yet when they talk to shareholders about China, global firms gloss over this brutal reality: “Very happy,” says Siemens; “Phenomenal,” reckons Apple; and “Remarkable,” says Starbucks. Mainland China attracted $163bn of fresh multinational investment last year, more than any other country. It is opening the mainland capital markets to foreigners, who have invested $900bn, in a landmark shift for global finance.

The West has no way of boycotting the Chinese regime into submission.

In the short run, if forced to take sides, many countries might choose China over the West. After all, China is the largest goods trading partner of 64 countries, against just 38 for America. Instead of isolating China, America and its allies could end up isolating themselves. In the long run, unlike the oil-soaked Soviet Union, China is big, diverse and innovative enough to adapt to outside pressure. It is testing a digital currency, which could eventually rival the dollar as a way to settle trade. It aims to be self-sufficient in semiconductors.

We’re back in a bi-polar world, in other words, and this time the West doesn’t look in great shape.

How to avoid being live-streamed without your consent

It’s well-known in some circles that if you don’t want your photograph spread all over social media, then arrange to have a t-shirt printed with an image copyrighted by a small number of powerful media firms like Getty, ideally with “© Getty Images” also prominently displayed. This will ensure that it’ll be taken down automatically by the automated IP-infringement detection algorithms used by the companies.

But now there’s an ingenious adaptation of this trick — this time by American police forces who want to make sure that live-videos of them abusing protestors and other awkward customers do not get streamed live by social media companies. Vice has an interesting story about how police officers in Beverly Hills have been playing music while being filmed, seemingly in an effort to trigger Instagram’s copyright filters.

Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned.

Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. Devermont also happens to be a well-known LA area activist, who regularly live-streams protests and interactions with the police to his more than 300,000 followers on Instagram.

So, he streamed this visit as well—and that’s when things got weird.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, “Enough.”

Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around — and that’s when the ska music starts playing.

Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we’re a good way through Sublime’s “Santeria.”

The officer is banking on Instagram’s copyright algorithm detecting the music, and either ending the live stream outright or muting it.

Or, continues Vice

even if the algorithm does not detect the song immediately, someone — for example, a disgruntled police officer—could simply wait until a user posts an archive of the live video on their page, then file a complaint with Instagram that it contains copyrighted material.

What this suggests, among other things, is that surveillance capitalist companies are more assiduous about protecting the IP of large media corporations than they are about, say, controlling hate speech on their platforms. Maybe their excuse is that IP-infringing content is easier to spot.

Cash for Clunkers

Joe Biden is preparing a major new infrastructure bill for renewing America’s crumbling roads, bridges, etc. According to The Verge Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is straining at the leash to switch the citizenry from gas-guzzlers to EVs.

As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.

“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”

Similarly ambitious plans are being touted by governments everywhere. But what nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is what is to be done about the Everests of scrapped petrol and diesel cars that this transition will produce? For various reasons I had to drive around town today. And all I saw were diesel and petrol-fuelled vehicles. The only EV in town was the one I was driving. Maybe this is why Elon Musk is so obsessed with Mars. He sees it as an ideal place to dump the scrapped detritus of the transition to electric vehicles.

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Memories of a monochrome Summer

The Orchard, Grantchester

Quote of the Day

”I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

B B King & Eric Clapton – Riding With The King

Link

Long Read of the Day

Thoughts on 2050 and beyond

Great essay by Martin Rees, one of the wisest people I know. Famously, he also only gives us a 50% chance of making it into the next century — though that sobering thought isn’t mentioned in this essay. Link

Uber bows to reality sort-of (in UK, anyway).

There’s good news and bad news in this CNN report. On the plus side, the company has bowed to the inevitable and reclassified all of its 70,000 UK drivers.

Uber is reclassifying its 70,000 drivers in the United Kingdom after the UK Supreme Court upheld a ruling last month that they should be classified as workers and not independent contractors.

The company said Tuesday that as “workers” — a classification unique to employment law in the UK that falls short of “employee” — drivers will be entitled to minimum wage, vacation time, and a pension. Uber did not apply the changes to its Uber Eats food delivery workers, only ridehail drivers.

But… (there’s always a but with companies like this)

Uber said the minimum wage will be based on engaged time after a trip is accepted and after expenses — a definition that received push back from drivers on Wednesday. The court determined last month that drivers are working from the time they turn on Uber’s app, rather than only when transporting passengers as the company has argued.

This looks as though Uber isn’t complying with the Court’s judgment. Not a wise move IMO.

Uber’s policy changes following the ruling mean that “drivers will be still short-changed to the tune of 40-50%,” Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar, the former drivers who led the legal action against Uber, said in a statement. “While Uber undoubtedly has made progress here, we cannot accept anything less than full compliance with legal minimums,” they added.

Tulips to Tesla | Scott Galloway on booms and busts

Scott is always good value, and this week’s post is no exception.

Financial crises have many causes, but generally they boil down to a few key elements:

• easy money
• poor regulation
• consensual hallucination that the market always goes up

The crisis is preceded by a cocaine-fueled party, where everything and everyone looks and is great. The party creates an asset bubble — a wave of optimism that lifts prices well above levels warranted by fundamentals — ending in a crash. The first documented asset bubble was the Dutch tulip mania in 1636, when speculation drove the value of the rarest tulips to six times the average salary at the time.

His point is that what he calls “story stocks” are the new tulips de nos jours. And the trading app Robinhood is the E-Trade of our age.

I was very struck by this chart which suggests a close correlation between the number of Robinoood users holding Tesla shares and the Tesla share price. (Tesla being a classic ‘story stock’.).

His recommendation: if you want to know what the Tesla share price will do next, check out how many Robinhood users have joined the service.

And yes we are currently in a crazy asset-bubble.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Yo-Yo Ma plays cello in vaccine waiting room in Massachusetts Lovely. Link

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Temperamental optimists

Fishermen on the beach at Cley-next-the-Sea in Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

”This person was a deluge of words and a drizzle of thought.”

• Peter De Vries

Remind you of anyone? (Hint: Carefully tousled blond with a posh accent.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Voi Che Sapete | Marianne Crebassa | Le nozze di Figaro | Dutch National Opera

Link

Utterly sublime nonsense. And if you have time, compare it with the 2012 Glyndebourne version.

Long Read of the Day

Margaret Mitchell’s letter about the ‘firing’ of Timnit Gebru

This letter relates, in a way, to my column in Sunday’s Observer about Google’s ethics-theatre. Dr Mitchell was co-director with Dr Gebru of Google’s Ethical AI team.

This is how it begins:

When diving deep into operationalizing the ethical development of artificial intelligence, one immediately runs into the “fractal problem”. This may also be called the “infinite onion” problem. That is, each problem within development that you pinpoint expands into a vast universe of new complex problems. It can be hard to make any measurable progress as you run in circles among different competing issues, but one of the paths forward is to pause at a specific point and detail what you see there.
Here I list some of the complex points that I see at play in the firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru, and why it will remain forever after a really, really, really terrible decision.

The Punchline. The firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru is not okay, and the way it was done is not okay. It appears to stem from the same lack of foresight that is at the core of modern technology, and so itself serves as an example of the problem. The firing seems to have been fueled by the same underpinnings of racism and sexism that our AI systems, when in the wrong hands, tend to soak up. How Dr. Gebru was fired is not okay, what was said about it is not okay, and the environment leading up to it was — and is — not okay.

Do read the whole thing.

(Thanks to Sheila Hayman for reminding me of it.)

Doc Searls: the Eventual Normal 

Characteristically thoughtful reflection on what might lie ahead:

There will be a new normal, eventually. It will be a normal like the one we had in the 20th Century, which started with WWI and ended with Covid. This was a normal where the cultural center was held by newspapers and broadcasting, and every adult knew how to drive.

Now we’re in the 21st Century, and it’s something of a whiteboard. We still have the old media and speak the same languages, but Covid pushed a reset button, and a lot of the old norms are open to question, if not out the window completely.

Why should the digital young accept the analog-born status quos of business, politics, religion, education, transportation or anything? The easy answer is because the flywheels of those things are still spinning. The hard answers start with questions about how we can do all that stuff better. For sure all the answers will be, to a huge degree, digital.

The vaccine programme had one key thing Test and Trace didn’t. And it wasn’t money

Terrific piece by Robert Colville in the Sunday Times. It’s paywalled but Charles Arthur has the key extract in his wonderful Overspill.

Something almost no one outside government appreciates is that the British state, like all its modern counterparts, is essentially a collection of databases. Throughout the pandemic, its policy successes have largely come where there are good databases, and its failures where there are not.

The furlough scheme worked because of PAYE. The expansion of universal credit relied on the existing benefits system. The “shielding list” of vulnerable patients was compiled by blending six data sets from NHS Digital.

Good data is also the secret sauce of the vaccination rollout. The jabbers could move seamlessly down the age and risk cohorts, because GPs had the appropriate patient lists. There have still been huge challenges in distributing the vaccines and tracking down the unregistered, but the data gave us an enormous head start.

The central problem with Test and Trace, by contrast, was that it didn’t have a database. When the pandemic hit, Apple and Google developed a joint framework for contact-tracing apps, which would ping you if someone you met later tested positive. But they wouldn’t let your phone share those details with the government — hence Matt Hancock’s abortive attempt to develop a homegrown alternative.

The trackers and tracers therefore had to map out the nation’s social network from a standing start, getting individual contact lists from every person who had tested positive to find out who else needed testing and quarantine. Public Health England even managed to lose 16,000 cases because it built its database with a stone-age version of Microsoft Excel and the file grew too large.

So the key discriminator between success and failure was not (as I had assumed) public sector vs (bloated and incompetent) private contractors, but who had a database and who didn’t.

The Fantasy Island that is ‘Global Britain’

This from Jonty’s Blog hits the nail on the head:

“The Brexit fantasy combines brilliantly in the final story from the weekend. The government is being urged to permanently station a frigate in Australia as a “warning” to China. That is a warning to a country with a navy which is expanding so rapidly that it is building the equivalent of the whole French navy every three years. What possible difference would one frigate make, except to hack off Beijing? The country we apparently want a trade deal with. “

Reminiscent of the famous story about Stalin who, upon being told that the Pope was opposed to something he was doing, inquired “And how many Divisions has the Pope?”

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Nudes for rent

Quote of the Day

”We have long passed the Victorian era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

• Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Grace Kelly Blues

Link

Google might ask questions about AI ethics, but it doesn’t want answers

My Observer column this morning.

If I told you that an academic paper entitled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” had caused an epochal row involving one of the most powerful companies in the world, you’d have asked what I’d been smoking. And well you might: but stay tuned.

The paper has four co-authors, two from the University of Washington, and two from Google – Dr Timnit Gebru and Dr Margaret Mitchell. It provides a useful critical review of machine-learning language models (LMs) like GPT-3, which are trained on enormous amounts of text and are capable of producing plausible-looking prose. The amount of computation (and associated carbon emissions) involved in their construction has ballooned to insane levels, and so at some point it’s sensible to ask the question that is never asked in the tech industry: how much is enough?

Which is one of the questions the authors of the paper asked…

Read on

Amazon’s S3 is 15 years old

From Protocol:

S3, or Simple Storage Service, made its debut 15 years ago this weekend. It would be years before “the cloud” became one of the most disruptive forces in the history of enterprise computing. Amazon didn’t even use the term when it announced S3 on March 14, 2006. But the storage service’s launch instantly solved some very tricky problems for entrepreneurs like Alvarez, and would come to change the way all businesses thought about buying information technology.

Basically, Amazon was making infinite disk-space available to anyone with a credit-card. Which meant that start-ups didn’t have to deal with the problem that bugged (and often bankrupted) start-ups in the doc-com boom. It was easy to use and you only paid for what you needed.

S3 was really what kicked off the cloud computing boom which is still going on and shows no sign of slowing. Initially it was just online storage, but the killer application came when Amazon added rentable-by-the-minute computing power the offer — the service that became Amazon Web Services — AWS.

Last year AWS provided Amazon with more than $45 billion in revenue. In the process — as some of my colleagues have noted — it also became part of the critical infrastructure not just of tech companies, but also of departments of the US government. The CIA, for example, has a contract with Amazon to build and operate its ‘private’ cloud. Which leads to the question of other Amazon could, in effect, shut down those departments and therefore the Federal government.

Way back in 2012 my friend Quentin discovered one Monday morning that his credit card account had been charged a hefty sum over the weekend. On inspection it turned out that he had forgotten to terminate the processes he was running on AWS after finishing on Friday. To avoid this happening again, he built a little system using a Raspberry Pi with a green button and a red button which made it simple to connect to, and disconnect from, AWS.

Underestimating Joe Biden

In the run-up to the election — and afterwards — most of those in my (slightly-left-of-centre) echo chamber seemed rather dismissive of Joe Biden. His main merit, they felt, was that he wasn’t Donald Trump, but apart from that he was a dozy, old-style, touchy-feely, traditional politician who wasn’t particularly bright and might even be prone to ‘senior moments’. And so they had very low expectations of Biden as President on the grounds that he hasn’t had a big idea since 1946, and besides the Republicans in the Senate would stop him doing anything serious. Zzzzz…

I’m wondering whether they still think that. From where I sit, Biden is getting some amazing things done.

That’s not just my opinion. For example, here’s Noah Smith observing that

In his first few weeks in office, Biden executed on a large number of progressive priorities — rejoining the Paris climate talks, canceling the Keystone pipeline, ending the Muslim Ban, and much more. Then he passed a huge $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill (or “stimmy”, as the kids are now calling it), which also contained an incredibly generous unconditional child allowance that will transform American’s welfare state (assuming it becomes permanent at the end of the year, which many expect). But that’s only the beginning — Biden’s next moves include a big immigration bill with a path to citizenship, minimum wage, and a green infrastructure bill that’s not called a “Green New Deal” but certainly has some similarities.

In other words, Biden is bringing the most transformational progressive agenda since LBJ. And this presents the Left with a bit of a dilemma, because one of their core bedrock beliefs during the campaign season was that Biden was a basically Clintonite centrist. The fact that their predictions have been hilariously wide of the mark, and Biden is governing more like FDR, presents leftists with a choice: They can either admit (however grudgingly and provisionally) that Biden is a lot better than they thought, or they can find reasons to denounce Biden in spite of all he’s doing.

Or, here’s the NYT on what he’s been up to.

Its first major legislative act under President Biden was a deficit-financed, $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” filled with programs as broad as expanded aid to nearly every family with children and as targeted as payments to Black farmers. While providing an array of benefits to the middle class, it is also a poverty-fighting initiative of potentially historic proportions, delivering more immediate cash assistance to families at the bottom of the income scale than any federal legislation since at least the New Deal.

Behind that shift is a realignment of economic, political and social forces, some decades in the making and others accelerated by the pandemic, that enabled a rapid advance in progressive priorities.

This is remarkable, not just because it’s the polar opposite of the sordid and venal chaos of the Trump regime, but also that it seems pretty radical. I guess that my sceptical echo-chamber dwellers will now change their refrain from ‘no he won’t because he can’t’ to ‘yeah, but can it last?’

As regular readers know, I was concerned that the burgeoning move to bring the tech companies under control bight be compromised by the inrush of ex-Silicon-Valley people into the Biden administration. And then last week he appoints Tim Wu to the national economic council with a brief to oversee antitrust action, and nominates Lina Khan as.an FTC Commissioner. These are really serious appointments, and a sign of a President who knows that he’s doing.

The current rethinking that I cited above summons up echoes of FDR. But the under-estimation of Biden calls to my mind a different historical parallel — Clement Attlee, the best Prime Minister the UK has had since the war. He too was greatly under-estimated, including by Churchill, for whom he ran the country while Churchill ran the war. (Churchill observed of him that “he was a modest man with much to be modest about”.)

These misjudgements never seemed to bother Attlee, who famously mocked them in a little ditty towards the end of his career :

There were few who thought him a starter.
And many who thought themselves smarter.
But he finished PM,
CH, and OM,
An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.

In praise of Haynes Manuals

My post yesterday about the usefulness of the Haynes Manual for our little Toyota Aygo prompted a lovely note from my friend and Open University colleague, David Vincent.

“I don’t like mending cars”, he writes, “but when young and poor, I had no choice. One of my proudest memories of my Cambridge PhD time was replacing the entire engine of a Ford Popular, with the help of three friends, one now an FBA. On the roof of the car throughout the operation was an open Haynes manual, which guided us through the task.

Decades later, David became the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, and as such one of the senior members of the university who had the responsibility for conferring degrees.

On one occasion, he recalls, “the ceremony was held in Cheltenham, where I discovered that the Honorary Graduand was none other than John Haynes. He was now well on in years, and in wealth, arriving for the event in a Rolls. He was an absolutely appropriate person for an OU degree. Few people did more to extend the technical learning of the British public”

Yep.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• I’m the package you impulse-ordered three days ago and no, I’m not going to make you feel any better. Lovely, imaginative rant by Paula Aceves. Link
• How I earn a living selling my open source software. Interesting and open. And an honest business model. Link

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