Where I’d like to be today.

Vox and the higher bullshit

Here are the first two sentences of a lazy piece by Peter Kafka on Vox.

Apple more or less invented podcasting. Now it’s finally going to try to make money from it.

The first sentence is completely wrong. The second is possibly true. Dave Winer is rightly infuriated by this kind of journalistic laziness, and points to Walter Isaacson’s terrific podcast episode on the actual history of the technology. It’s baffling how media people continually get things like this wrong. Invincible ignorance is a necessary but not a sufficient explanation; it’s also because they don’t know that most things in tech have a history.

Quote of the Day

“Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.”

• Napoleon Bonaparte

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivace from Bach’s double concerto — but sung!

Link

Magical. Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

Everyone On Facebook’s Oversight Board Should Resign

Lovely *Wired piece by Jessica Gonzalez and Carmen Scurato on Facebook’s ludicrous ‘Supreme Court’.

It’s beyond comprehension why all those supposedly eminent people agreed to serve as Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘useful idiots’ (to use Lenin’s phrase about Western intellectuals). Could it have been the money?

I liked Charles Arthur’s summing-up on his Overspill blog:

The board is, very evidently, a very expensive (viewed from outside Facebook; cheap, inside it) figleaf. I suspect if anyone does resign, there will be a certain dambreaking effect. But it also means giving up a fat paycheque for doing very occasionally what content moderators do, for far less money, all day long.

Why anonymisation of personal data is a pipe-dream

Wonderful post by Cory Doctorow.

“Wanting it badly is not enough” could be the title of a postmortem on the century’s tech-policy battles. Think of the crypto wars: yeah, it would be super cool if we had ciphers that worked perfectly except when “bad guys” used them, but that’s not ever going to happen.

Another area is anonymisation of large data-sets. There are undeniably cool implications for a system that allows us to gather and analyse lots of data on how people interact with each other and their environments without compromising their privacy.

But “cool” isn’t the same as “possible” because wanting it badly is not enough…

It’s a great piece. We continue to see the planned releases of large datasets with assurances that they have been anonymised. And it’s standard practice to demand your “consent” to have your data shared once it has been de-identified.

This is, as Cory points out, a meaningless proposition. The ‘anonymised’ dataset that cannot be re-identified has yet to be invented.

To show just how easy re-identification can be, why not visit The Observatory of Anonymity, a web-app that shows you how easily you can be identified in a data-set?

Try it.

Click on the link, give your country and region, birthdate, gender, employment and education status and it tells you how many people share those characteristics.

I’ve just tried it. Conclusion: “If a record were to be found in any anonymous dataset matching your attributes, there is a 25% chance that this record actually belongs to you”.

And the moral? In Cory’s inimitable style: “You are far less of a haystack-needle than you think.”

Lina Khan’s Senate confirmation appearance

If you haven’t heard of Lina Khan before, then can I suggest that you take note. She’s a remarkable young woman who has done more to reshape how we think about antitrust than anyone since Robert Bork did (to malevolent effect) in 1978. And Joe Biden has nominated her as one of the five members of the US Federal Trade Commission, a wilfully somnolent body in recent years but one with great powers if it chooses to use them.

Matt Stoller watched her confirmation hearing and has this to say.

The most important thing to know about Lina Khan is that she is at heart an investigative journalist. When she was 15, she did a story on Starbucks for her school newspaper, and it got picked up by the New York Times. Before she became a lawyer, she did investigations on everything from the rise of big chocolate to airlines to poultry to banks to Monsanto’s appetite for data.

Her law review piece on Amazon came out of research she did on the economy as a news gatherer, and the investigation of big tech for the Antitrust Subcommittee was basically just high-quality journalism. Khan has what is necessary in a great enforcer and regulator, which is a sense of curiosity about how the world works. She starts with empirical reality, asking what’s happening in business and how it is shaped by the law.

Khan will be just one of five votes, so she won’t be able to run the commission herself. But her nomination is a huge deal. The FTC used to be an afterthought agency, a place to stack cronies with a nice cushy job flying off to Europe to attend privacy conferences, with the need to occasionally vote to permit a massive mega-merger. If nothing else, Khan’s nomination shows that is no longer the case.

Correction

I wrongly attributed the lovely Peatlands essay that was yesterday’s Long Read to Richard Gibbons rather than to Sami Emory. Richard was the photographer, but the words are Sami’s.

Apologies to both. And many thanks to Carrie Fitton for spotting it.

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Tulip mania

Shot on Tuesday in the college garden. Sometimes, you can see why the Dutch went nuts about them.

Opening up — for whom?

Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) had a thoughtful essay in the FT at the weekend about economists’ hopes that consumer spending will bounce right back and drive a recovery. And maybe it will: the pile of household savings, she says, is estimated at about £180 billion (who estimates these things?) and a lot of this is just bursting to be spent.

Yeah, maybe. But…

We are two nations, and only one will have scope for a roaring 2020s. To point out the obvious, people who have been able to work from home, spending less, for months will for the most part welcome the chance to get out and enjoy themselves. But many others do not have the money to do so, and indeed have amassed debts instead.

For those freelancers who fell through the gaps in furlough and self-employment support schemes, or those on low incomes, the headache will be how to climb back out of a financial hole. The Resolution Foundation has reported recently on the surge in universal credit claims and evidence that many of these new claimants are further in debt than they were before the pandemic, or behind on essential bills.

I got my second AstraZeneca jab yesterday. (Plus a little badge to stick on my sweater.) As before, a beautifully organised operation. A well-oiled machine working like clockwork. And not a single corrupt, outsourced company in sight.

And nobody from Accenture, KPMG, PwC or McKinsey either.

Memoir of a Recovering Utopian

A short (5 minute) video I recorded for a Royal Society online event recently.

Link

Quote of the Day

”TV is a medium, because it is neither rare nor well-done.”

• Ernie Kovacs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | My Girl Josephine

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why do bogs get such a bad press?

Conserving peatlands is a cheap climate change win. So why’s it a hard sell?

Lovely essay by Sami Emory.

Peatlands often appear to the untrained eye as a bland swatch of greys, browns, oranges, and green. What we do not see is what they really are: robust ecosystems of flora and fauna—such as wetland birds, sphagnum moss, heather, and several species of quite crafty carnivorous plants. Furthermore, much of what makes these habitats so special exists beneath the surface. Peat stores, which can reach down into the earth for upwards of thirty-two feet, are dense with carbon, making the peatland a Goliath of sequestration. And with their regulatory effect on a region’s water table, peatlands also help improve water quality, reduce flooding and fires, and keep at bay rising sea levels.

What really matters to Boris Johnson

From Politico:

It took days for the prime minister to issue a tweet about violence in Northern Ireland and he missed the first five government coordination meetings about the emerging coronavirus pandemic. Yet Boris Johnson was super quick to jump on the crisis in European football. What gives? The explanation comes down to simple politics, writes my POLITICO colleague Emilio Casalicchio: “Politicians care about voters, and voters — including a large chunk of the core Red Wall group the two main parties are fighting over — care about football.”

Emilio’s great piece is here.

The Tech industry will eventually be a regulated one.

In the heat of the fray it’s always hard to take the long view. But when historians of tech come to look back at this period in the evolution of the digital world they will see that it was — in the long view — inevitable that the industry would be regulated. And we’re beginning to see the first beginnings of that phase-change.

Today’s FT ($) reports that antitrust regulators in the UK, Germany and Australia on Tuesday mounted a unified attack against the domination of internet giants on Tuesday, warning that the pandemic was not an excuse to approve deals.

The three regulators, which have been at the forefront of global attempts to rein in big tech companies such as Facebook and Google, said the pandemic had accelerated the concentration of power in the hands of a few, and warned they would take an increasingly sceptical view of tie-ups.

The head of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, Andrea Coscelli, said he expected “tremendous pressure” from companies citing the need to rebuild after the pandemic as a reason to justify mergers and investment.

“We’re clearly in a difficult economic situation, and it’s attractive, someone coming to you with plans for investment. But . . . this is really about the medium term, it’s about having market structures that are going to deliver day in, day out for consumers.”

The three regulators said the pandemic “should not be used to bring about a relaxation of the standards against which mergers are ultimately assessed”.

Amen to that. Now let’s see if they really mean business.

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Salad-dressing as art object

The things you can do with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Quote of the Day

”A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Miles Davis | So What

Link

Long Read of the Day

Ferment is Abroad: Techlash, Legal Institutions, and the Limits of Lawfulness

Thoughtful post by Salomé Viljoen on the LPE Blog.

On the one hand, we have the “techlash.” Over the past several years, enthusiasm for Silicon Valley’s California Ideology as a source of hope and vigor for the Western capitalist imaginary has begun to fade. No longer does the tech industry enjoy unquestioned goodwill and enthusiastic popular support for their narratives of technological determinism and profitable do-goodery. On the contrary, the industry has been the focus of increased public distrust, civil and worker activism, and regulatory scrutiny—a collective curdling of goodwill referred to as the “techlash.” There is a growing recognition that technology is deeply political and a growing distrust of the neoliberal politics our current political economy of technological innovation materializes.

In near parallel, ferment is (once again) abroad in the law. In the face of highly controversial court appointments and clear failures of justice in how the law responds to challenges like climate change, mass incarceration, and growing economic inequality, methods that separate out the task of legal reasoning from its political urgency and distributive consequences ring increasingly false. Both popular and scholarly commentators challenge the incapacity of our legal institutions to protect against (or even to acknowledge as legally relevant) the worst abuses of our time. These critiques emphasize the limits of (anti-democratic) progressive political strategies that rely too heavily on appeals to existing legal institutions and methods rather than developing strategies to democratically re-invigorate (or replace, or abolish) those institutions.

It’s good, even if it’s predominately about what has happened to the American legal system.

Haven’t we got our ideas about wearing masks the wrong way round?

Answer: yes we have. Nice piece by Derek Thompson

Last week, I covered my nose and mouth with close-fitting fabric like a good citizen and walked to a restaurant in Washington, D.C., where I de-masked at a patio table to greet a friend. I sat with my chair facing the entrance and watched dozens of people perform the same ritual, removing a mask they’d worn outside and alone. It seemed like the most normal thing in the world. Until, suddenly, it seemed very weird. The coronavirus is most transmissible in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where the aerosolized virus can linger in the air before latching onto our nasal or bronchial cells. In outdoor areas, the viral spray is more likely to disperse. One systematic overview of COVID-19 case studies concluded that the risk of transmission was 19 times higher indoors than outside. That’s why wearing a mask is so important in, say, a CVS, but less crucial in, say, the park. At the restaurant, however, I saw an inversion of this rule. Person after person who’d dutifully worn a mask on the uncrowded street took it off to sit still, in close proximity to friends, and frequently inside. I felt like I was watching people put on their seatbelts in parked cars, then unbuckle them just as they put the vehicle in drive.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  Take a Flying Leap, but Bring Your Paper Parachute How to make a parachute with paper and tape. Warning: it only carries tiny payloads. Link
•  How Fit Can You Get From Just Walking? Pretty fit, actually. Link
• Herman Miller is buying Knoll So fancy office chairs will all come from the same place. Link

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

The way the wind blows

Quote of the Day

”You’re not a celebrity until they can spell your name in Karachi.”

• Humphrey Bogart

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Arty McGlynn & Rod McVey | Two reels – O’Rourke’s & Colonel Fraser’s

Link

Long Read of the Day

The real scandal of the David Cameron affair

By James Ball, writing in The New European:

If he were a more sympathetic figure, David Cameron would have a certain air of pathos about him – the longer he lives, the worse his reputation gets. Born to riches and elected to the highest office in the UK, everything since has shattered whatever self-esteem he had.

Cameron built a reputation in opposition as a reforming Conservative, a change from ‘the nasty party’. Hoodies and huskies alike would be hugged. Gay people would no longer be condemned. The Conservatives would match Labour on public spending. There was even such a thing as ‘society’.

And, of course, Tory sleaze and corruption would be a thing of the past…

Oh yeah. Read on.

The normalisation of Facebook delinquency

John Waters has a timely piece in the FT (and therefore behind a paywall) in which he asks the kind of weary question that most of us have asking for quite a while: “Is there anything left to be revealed about the extent and the frequency with which large volumes of personal data leak from Facebook?”

In a way, the answer is ‘no’.

A collective yawn seemed to be the appropriate response this month at the latest news. If the information about users’ social networks that leaked out in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was like the plutonium of social media, then this latest slip involved a decidedly low-grade fuel. Details such as names, phone numbers and birth dates of more than 530m people had been scraped from the site, in what amounted to a mass harvesting of data that was already publicly available.

The regulators, on cue, said they would investigate, as regulators must. Irish data protection officials, who take the lead in overseeing Facebook in Europe, now have 15 different reviews going on into the company’s apps.

But while this might look like a misdemeanour without any real victims, it raises more troubling questions. It does — apart altogether from the fact that some of the people whose data has been leaked might be real victims. The resigned approach to Facebook’s toxic behaviour reminds one of the way in which intolerable behaviour of people like Harvey Weinstein was passively tolerated because of the “Oh, that’s just Harvey”, or “that’s the casting couch syndrome” shrug. And we know how long that intolerable behaviour persisted before it was called out and punished.

So how long will it take until Facebook is brought to heel? And how many more billions of dollars will Zuckerberg & Co have amassed until that happens?

Jeff Bezos has begun writing his epitaph

Nice piece by Spencer Soper in Bloomberg’s Fully Charged, about Jeff Bezos’s efforts to secure his legacy during his closing months as Amazon’s CEO.

Bezos wants you to feel as good about Amazon the company as you do about its lickety-split delivery of phone chargers and paper towels.

One result of this push is that Jassy, who is slated to take over as CEO in the third quarter, will have an even more difficult job—both running one of the fastest-growing companies in American history, and fulfilling Bezos’ pledges to do it in a more humane and sustainable way. Trying to fill Bezos’ shoes would be tough enough without the executive cramming shoe trees in them to stretch them a size or two before passing them over.

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Cascade

Quote of the Day

”There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they could scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names nowadays would be associated nowadays with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.”

• H.H. Munro (aka ‘Saki’)

(One thinks, perhaps, of the St Leger Stakes and St Julien claret — though nobody in their right mind would call that cheap.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Blues for Jimmy Yancey | Andrew Campbell

Link

Long Read of the Day

This Must Be the Place

Thoughtful meditation by Drew Austin on what the Internet is doing to our sense of place.

In an environment of nearly infinite variety, we seem to hunt more eagerly than ever for shared territory and common experience, however fleeting. Earlier this month a house in Santa Monica, currently on the market for $5 million, became available to TikTok influencers, who can apply to spend two hours filming amid its pool and amenities as long as they help market the house in their videos. The process by which Airbnb transformed shelter into a liquid commodity might similarly transform content creation sites, which is to say that humans and content will soon have to compete for housing. The next time you enter a new place and instantly recognize its layout, it might be that you’ve been in a similar one before, but you probably just saw it on the internet.

Tech giants are happy to do Modi’s bidding in return for access to the Indian market

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Looking at his record, Modi seems to have been following the playbook of Viktor Orbán, that country’s prime minister, except that Modi has added religious and ethnic dimensions to his programme. But the formula seems pretty similar, based as it is on a thumping electoral majority and weak parliamentary opposition. The formula is to promise economic reform and then, when that falters, suppress opposition, control mainstream – and then social – media and undermine the judicial system. To this Modi has added his own distinctive flourish: radical and sustained use of internet shutdowns to hamper the mobilisation of opposition. And, so far, the strategy seems to be working: last year, Freedom House, an organisation that continually monitors the health of democracies, had judged India to be a “free” society. This year, the country’s rating is “partly free”.

All of which impales American tech giants, especially Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix, on the horns of an ethical dilemma. Read on.

Tim Harford: What have we learnt from a year of Covid?

Great piece.

We are now about a year into the ohmygosh-this-is-for-real stage of the pandemic. A time, perhaps, for taking stock of the big decisions — and whether they were wise.

To my mind, there were two big calls to be made. The first: was this virus a deadly enough threat to merit extraordinary changes to life as we know it? The second: should those changes be voluntary or a matter for politicians, the courts and the police?

Well worth reading in full. His summary at the end captures it well:

I’ll remember to trust the competence of the government a little less, to trust mathematical models a little more and to have some respect for the decency of ordinary people.

I love Harford’s writing. He’s a model of clarity and informed common sense.

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

As I intimated yesterday, there won’t be a newsletter on Saturdays or Sundays from now on. So if you find it missing from your inbox at weekends, it won’t be because your spam filter has dumped it. Next edition will arrive as usual on Monday morning.

John

Mirror, mirror…

Venice, November 2010

Quote of the Day

“Men are most likely to believe what they least understand.”

• Montaigne

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Last Stop this Town

Link

Ignore the daft video.

Long Read of the Day

Economics in nouns and verbs by W. Brian Arthur

Brian Arthur is a really formidable thinker and writer. His book, The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves is a classic. But basically he’s a distinguished economist, which is why this new essay by him is so beautiful.

Here’s the Abstract.

Standard economic theory uses mathematics as its main means of understanding, and this brings clarity of reasoning and logical power. But there is a drawback: algebraic mathematics restricts economic modeling to what can be expressed only in quantitative nouns, and this forces theory to leave out matters to do with process, formation, adjustment, and creation—matters to do with nonequilibrium. For these we need a different means of understanding, one that allows verbs as well as nouns. Algorithmic expression is such a means. It allows verbs—processes—as well as nouns—objects and quantities. It allows fuller description in economics, and can include heterogeneity of agents, actions as well as objects, and realistic models of behavior in ill-defined situations. The world that algorithms reveal is action-based as well as object-based, organic, possibly ever-changing, and not fully knowable. But it is strangely and wonderfully alive.

Look out for the lovely comparison between how Alfred Marshall expressed his theory of industrial agglomeration and Paul Samuelson explaining international trade.

How to get at ‘the truth’

Public truths cannot be dictated-neither by a pure, all-knowing science nor unilaterally from the throne of power. Science and democracy, at their best, are modest enterprises because both are mistrustful of their own authority. Each gains by making its doubts explicit. This does not mean that the search for closure in either science or politics must be dismissed as unattainable. It does mean that we must ask and insist on good answers to questions about the procedures and practices that undergird both kinds of authority claims. For assertions of public knowledge, the following questions then seem indispensable:

• Who claims to know?

• In answer to whose questions?

• On what authority?

• With what evidence?

• Subject to what oversight or opportunity for criticism?

• With what openings for countervailing views to express themselves?

• And with what mechanisms of closure in cases of disagreement?

If those questions can be raised and discussed, even if not resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, then factual disagreements retreat into the background and confidence builds that ours is indeed a government of reason. For those who are not satisfied, the possibility remains open that one can return some other day, with more persuasive data, and hope the wheel of knowledge will turn in synchrony with the arc of justice. In the end, what assures a polity that knowledge is justly coupled to power is not the assertion that science knows best, but the conviction that science itself has been subjected to norms of good government.

From “Back from the Brink: Truth and Trust in the Public Sphere” by Sheila Jasanoff, (Issues in Science and Technology Washington, Vol. 33, Iss. 4, (Summer 2017): 25-28.)

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• How People Get Rich Now Interesting essay by Paul Graham. Link

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Small changes ahead…

Just a heads-up to let you know that after tomorrow this daily version of the blog will switch from seven days a week to five (Monday to Friday). The conspiracy-theory interpretation of this change will attribute it to sheer laziness on the part of the blogger. While plausible, this is a more entertaining explanation than the more mundane reality, which is that what are laughingly called his ‘day jobs’ have become more demanding as the academic world emerges cautiously from lockdown.

On a positive note, though, consider the upsides. Firstly, I have not used the abominable phrase “going forward”. And now you will have more free time at the weekends and not feel twinges of guilt when deciding that life is too short to click on Long Read of the Day!

(If you are curious about what I might be getting up to at the weekends, you can always check the online version of the blog.)

As ever, thank you for subscribing.

Quote of the Day

”The only man who really needs a tail coat is a man with a hole in his trousers.”

• John Taylor (Editor of Tailor and Cutter)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | At the Window

Link

This is one of my favourite recordings ever. It’s very old and so you may need to turn up the volume a bit.

Long Read of the Day

Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world

If they do it, it won’t be for the microchips

Fascinating blog post by Jon Stokes about the geopolitics of silicon chip manufacture.

U.S. Imposes Stiff Sanctions on Russia, Blaming It for Major Hacking Operation

Pardon me while I yawn. According to the New York Times,

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Thursday announced tough new sanctions on Russia and formally blamed the country’s premier intelligence agency for the sophisticated hacking operation that breached American government agencies and the nation’s largest companies.

In the broadest effort yet by President Biden to give more teeth to financial sanctions — which in recent years have failed to deter Russian activity — the actions are aimed at choking off lending to the Russian government.

In an executive order, Mr. Biden announced a series of additional steps — sanctions on 32 entities and individuals for disinformation efforts and for carrying out Moscow’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. Ten Russian diplomats, most of them identified as intelligence operatives, were expelled from the Russian Embassy in Washington. The United States also joined with European partners to impose sanctions on eight people and entities associated with Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

For the first time, the U.S. government squarely placed the blame for the hacking, known as SolarWinds, on the Kremlin, saying it was masterminded by the S.V.R., one of the Russian intelligence agencies that was also involved in the intrusion of the Democratic National Committee six years ago. The finding comports with the findings of private cybersecurity companies.

Yeah, yeah. But what we’d like to know is what the retaliation in kind is. After all, that’s what Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s National Security Advisor, was calling for before the election. It’s a racing certainty that the US has mounted a cyber-attack on Russian facilities where it will really hurt. I wonder how long it will take before we find out what form it took. And whether the Solarwinds attack has provided the Russians with opportunities for serious retaliation.

‘All I need is a pen, paper and the First Amendment’

This, from the Columbia Journalism Review, is truly extraordinary.

During the covid-19 pandemic, CJR received a submission, via the Empowerment Avenue Writer’s Cohort, from an incarcerated writer, Kevin D. Sawyer, who explained what it’s like to be a journalist in San Quentin State Prison, in Northern California. We felt it needed no editing, and that even the means of submission—typewritten, with corrections by hand—helped tell his tale. So we have reproduced it below as we received it.

You’ve got to read it. Deeply moving. But also an exhilarating confirmation of the value of reading — and writing. And of the usefulness of a battered typewriter.

Do click on the link to see it.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• The Last Time a Vaccine Saved America Yes — it was the Salk polio vaccine. Interesting to reflect on that experience. 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, Monday through Friday, at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

One of our cats, who always looks at me as if whatever’s happening is my fault.

Quote of the Day

”The Swiss managed to build a lovely country round their hotels.”

• George Mikes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Overture | Marriage of Figaro

Link

Prelude to glorious nonsense.

Long Read of the Day

 The geopolitical fight to come over green energy

Truly fabulous essay by Helen Thompson. Salutary read for those of us who tend to think that the tensions with China are about tech and data. Those are small beer compared with energy.

(And if you’re interested in this, there’s Adam Tooze’s post about what it would mean to face up realistically to arresting climate change.)

Is content moderation a dead end?

Really interesting essay by Ben Evans on the Sisyphean task of ‘moderating’ content on social media.

I wonder how far the answers to our problems with social media are not more moderators, just as the answer to PC security was not virus scanners, but to change the model – to remove whole layers of mechanics that enable abuse. So, for example, Instagram doesn’t have links, and Clubhouse doesn’t have replies, quotes or screenshots. Email newsletters don’t seem to have virality. Some people argue that the problem is ads, or algorithmic feeds (both of which ideas I disagree with pretty strongly – I wrote about newsfeeds here), but this gets at the same underlying point: instead of looking for bad stuff, perhaps we should change the paths that bad stuff can abuse. The wave of anonymous messaging apps that appeared a few years ago exemplify this – it turned out that bullying was such an inherent effect of the basic concept that they all had to shut down. Hogarth contrasted dystopian Gin Lane with utopian Beer Street – alcohol is good, so long as it’s the right kind.

Of course, if the underlying problem is human nature, then you can still only channel it.

Two thoughts about this. The first is that if a task really is Sisyphean — i.e. endless and impossible to complete, then isn’t it time to stop it and try something else?

The second is that Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety in cybernetics suggests that, to be viable, a system has to be able to cope with the complexity of its environment. There are only two ways of doing that: the traditional way we’ve used up to now — to reduce the complexity of the environment (mass production and standardisation was one way of doing that. The other is to find ‘variety amplifiers’ that will increase the system’s ability to manage the complexity that being thrown at it. If you listen to the discourse of Zuckerberg & Co about the ‘moderation’ challenge they face, it’s clear that they see ‘AI’ (by which they mean machine learning) as that variety amplifier.

I’m sceptical that it is. There’s no computational way of dealing with the infinite variety of human ingenuity.

So, in a nutshell, I think that the answer to Ben’s question is “Yes

The wider implication of Ashby’s Law in a networked world is that an increasing proportion of our organisations are no longer viable.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Who has your face? Interesting interactive quiz to determine if a US government database has your picture. Link
• Watch BB King keep singing while simultaneously replacing a broken guitar string Link. Now that’s real multitasking.

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This photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson is my favourite picture. It was taken in 1954 on Rue Mouffetard in Paris, and shows a cheeky eight-year-old lad heading homeward with two bottles of wine that he’s been sent to collect. I love it because in 1954 I was eight too, (and wearing the same kind of clothes) and I often wonder where this boy is now — or indeed whether he’s still going.

The photograph hangs in our living room, and I looked up at one moment today to see that reflected in it was the top of the gazebo in the back garden that’s been our outdoor living room during lockdown.

And as I pressed the shutter I suddenly remembered that we’re clean out of red wine.

Quote of the Day

”To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it”

• E. M. Forster

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | Across the Track Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Great Protest Wave

What lessons can we draw from the global demonstrations that began in 2019?

Absorbing essay by Noah Smith.

In 2019, the world exploded in protest. There were massive, prolonged demonstrations in Hong Kong, in Chile and Venezuela and Bolivia and Colombia and Ecuador, in Russia and Spain and France, in Iraq and Iran and Lebanon and Algeria, in Indonesia and Haiti. We in the chattering classes spent much of the latter part of that year thinking about the protests, writing about them, theorizing about them, even visiting or joining them. We asked why this was happening. Was it a revolt against inequality? Or authoritarianism? Or was it just a fad enabled by new social media technologies? We felt like we were witnessing something historic, but we couldn’t tell what we were looking at.

Even the arrival of a once-in-a-century pandemic didn’t douse the flames of unrest for long. The U.S. saw the biggest eruption of protests in its history in the summer of 2020, and those demonstrations were echoed across much of the world. The people of Belarus and Myanmar have poured into the streets in existential struggles against their dictatorial governments. India has had two entirely separate massive waves of demonstrations — one by farmers over agricultural policy, another against a discriminatory citizenship law. Overall, 2020 has seen even more protests than 2019.

So what does this portend? Read on…

Put away the bleach: you can stop playing in the hygiene theatre

It’s official — even the CDC agrees. Nice piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:

Last week, the CDC acknowledged what many of us have been saying for almost nine months about cleaning surfaces to prevent transmission by touch of the coronavirus: It’s pure hygiene theater.

“Based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors,” the CDC concluded, “surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low.” In other words: You can put away the bleach, cancel your recurring Amazon subscription for disinfectant wipes, and stop punishing every square inch of classroom floor, restaurant table, and train seat with high-tech antimicrobial blasts. COVID-19 is airborne: It spreads through tiny aerosolized droplets that linger in the air in unventilated spaces. Touching stuff just doesn’t carry much risk, and more people should say so, very loudly. At last!

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Domino’s pizzas now delivered with autonomous cars in Houston This is progress? Link
• Earthrise in 4k UHD Eerily beautiful. by Seán Doran. Based on JAXA / NHK Kaguya Orbiter archive. Source is denoised, repaired, graded, retimed & upscaled. We live on that lovely sphere. And we’re busy screwing it up. Link

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Painting with light

Someone once said that photography is “painting with light”. A bit pretentious, perhaps, but it’s certainly the case that if you’re a serious photographer you’re slightly obsessed with light. I vividly remember the first time I went to Provence: we flew in to Montpelier late in the evening, arriving in total darkness. Picked up a rental car, got hopelessly lost (partly because of an eccentrically-located Autoroute toll) and arrived at our destination in the middle of the night. Climbed into bed exhausted but was woken very early by sunlight flooding into the bedroom. Went sleepily to the window and looked out over the valley (the house was on a hill). And — whoosh! — I suddenly understood why Van Gogh & Co came to this part of the world. And it was all to do with the ineffable quality of the light.

If you’re a landscape photographer you’ll also be obsessive about air-quality. I grew up in the West of Ireland where there was very little dust in the atmosphere (largely because it was regularly washed clean by rain!) So, in later life, coming off a plane from grain-harvesting East Anglia in August made one blink — it was as if a veil had been lifted from one’s eyes. The air suddenly seemed so clean.

The other thing that’s special about Irish light (and I guess about light anywhere that’s located on an ocean coast) is that it’s mostly sunlight filtered through clouds. When I was growing up I never thought about clouds, except perhaps as harbingers of rain. And then one day my family and I ran into an English tourist who was a serious photographer. My father asked her what she liked about Ireland and she replied — without hesitation — “Oh, the cloudscapes”. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word, but I date my obsession with photography from that day. (The full story is told here if you’re interested.)

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining the photograph above. On our cycle today I was struck by how clean the air seemed and how good the visibility was. And the clouds were particularly dramatic. Hence this picture, taken on a construction site.

Quote of the Day

”One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.” * Robert Kennedy

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dubliners | The Wonder Hornpipe The Swallow’s Tail | Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Link

I think it may have been their final performance.

Long Read of the Day

The 1910 time traveller – the next wave

Lovely essay by Andrew Curry — from 11 years ago.

Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack

That’s the headline on an interesting but IMHO slightly overwrought NYT piece by Ben Smith about Substack’s (the outfit that delivers the email version of this blog) supposed disruption of the media industry.

Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

I don’t see what the fuss is about. A rich and diverse media ecosystem requires intellectual biodiversity, and Substack as well as the blogosphere provides that. Which is good. But serious journalism also requires the institutional heft of serious organisations like the NYT, WSJ, New Yorker, Guardian, BBC et al which can back investigations with legal and other resources.

Which is why I’m not ‘freaking out’ about Substack.

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