Today, 48 state attorneys general, plus Trump’s Federal Trade Commission, filed antitrust suits against Facebook.
There are two complaints, one from the states and one from the FTC. The state AG complaint is stronger, but both tell the same story. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp to stop nascent competitors from challenging its monopoly power in social networking. It also used a variety of other tactics to foreclose competitors it could not buy from entering the market and challenging its dominance. Then, after it became a monopoly, it increased prices or downgraded user experiences to profit from the conspiracy it had arranged.
The narrative comes from legal scholar and former ad executive Dina Srinivasan’s remarkable 2019 paper on Facebook. In her analysis, Srinivasan showed that Facebook actually beat out MySpace by offering users a product differentiated with better privacy guarantees. But after monopolizing the market and killing its competitors, Facebook immediately started degrading the quality of the product with intrusive surveillance of its users, contra their wishes.
This could conceivably be a big moment in the move to bring big tech companies back under some kind of control. But Matt Stoller could be a tad over-optimistic about the likelihood of this suit succeeding any time soon.
Chris Nuttall on the Facebook antitrust suit
Writing in today’s FT, Chris observes that
Facebook looks exposed and unprepared in the face of a concerted attack launched on Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and 46 US states aimed at breaking up its empire.
Its problem is the lack of integration of the social network with the photo-sharing service Instagram and WhatsApp messaging platform it acquired. They are distinctive brands that can be used without recourse to Facebook itself and thus can be easily separated if the FTC gets its way and forces Facebook to divest the two services.
That would be deeply damaging. Facebook has failed to reinvent its core service to stay relevant to changing user habits. Its social network has been short on innovation, either copying or buying services tapping the latest trends. Its pivots towards photos and mobile messaging groups were well-timed. They are faster-growing businesses, but it may now be forced to cash out those strong bets on the future…
How Apple is organised
Fascinating article in the Harvard Business Review.
The secret is simple really: don’t have general managers.
Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert. At Apple, hardware experts manage hardware, software experts software, and so on. (Deviations from this principle are rare.) This approach cascades down all levels of the organization through areas of ever-increasing specialization. Apple’s leaders believe that world-class talent wants to work for and with other world-class talent in a specialty. It’s like joining a sports team where you get to learn from and play with the best.
Worth reading in full.
Other, hopefully interesting, links
64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney. By Ian Leslie Link.
The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year for 2020. Amazing photographs. Link. (HT to Jason Kottke, who is always spotting beautiful things.)
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A large part of the American public has distrusted “science” since the early 20th century, seeing it variously as a threat to religious beliefs, a disruptor of moral values, and a slippery slope towards a totalitarian state. “A tendency to trace social ills to the cultural sway of an ideologically infected science continues up to our own day, even as the details of the indictment have changed.”
There was only one Brexit deal — ever
It was always wealth vs sovereignty: how much loss of the former in return for how much gain in the latter. Fabulous Guardian column by Rafael Behr.
Short read, and well worth it.
Now we know what went on in Matt Hancock’s secret meeting with Mark Zuckerberg
Great reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Mark Zuckerberg threatened to pull Facebook’s investment from the UK in a private meeting with Matt Hancock, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.
The minutes, from May 2018, show that an obsequious Hancock was eager to please, offering “a new beginning” for the government’s relationship with social media platforms. He offered to change the government’s approach from “threatening regulation to encouraging collaborative working to ensure legislation is proportionate and innovation-friendly”.
Hancock sought “increased dialogue” with Zuckerberg, “so he can bring forward the message that he has support from Facebook at the highest level”.
Zuckerberg attended the meeting only days after Hancock – then the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) – had publicly criticised him for dodging a meeting with MPs. Civil servants had to give Zuckerberg explicit assurance that the meeting would be positive and Hancock would not simply demand he attend the Select Committee, and noted that the meeting began with an ambience of “guarded hostility”.
The government fought tooth and nail to prevent the Minutes of the meeting being released. In the end, the Information Commissioner ordered their release.
“In the Commissioner’s view the requirement for due transparency and openness is particularly acute in the present case given Mr Zuckerberg’s absence in the UK public domain… In view of the high level of personal control which the Facebook founder and CEO enjoys over some of the most influential and powerful social media platforms in the UK, the Commissioner considers that the demand for such transparency is correspondingly high.”
The Christchurch mass killer was radicalised by YouTube
The New Zealand mosque shooter was radicalised on YouTube: Among the findings of a New Zealand government investigation into the 2019 mass killing in Christchurch was that the shooter had been radicalized more on YouTube than he had in the darker corners of the internet. The Times technology columnist Kevin Roose also has a good Twitter thread on the missed opportunities to take YouTube’s dangers seriously.
But the NZ authorities also came in for criticism, as the New York Timesreports:
Still, the Royal Commission — the highest-level inquiry that can be conducted in New Zealand — faulted the government on several counts. It found that lax gun regulations had allowed Mr. Tarrant to obtain a firearms license when he should not have qualified. And it said that the country’s “fragile” intelligence agencies had a limited understanding of right-wing threats and had not assigned sufficient resources to examine dangers other than Islamist terrorism.
A system mired in bureaucracy and unclear leadership was ineffective. But the two independent commissioners who conducted the inquiry stopped short of saying that the disproportionate focus on Muslims as a potential source of violence had allowed Mr. Tarrant’s attacks to happen.
A page from my Lockdown audio diary
Sunday 29 March — Day 8
There’s a cynical academic joke that you hear in every university. It goes like this: Q: Why are academic disputes so acrimonious? A: Because the stakes are so low.
The point of the joke, I suppose, is to emphasise that professors argue about issues which are of no interest to any normal person — and so in that sense, they’re just contemporary manifestations of those fabled medieval disputes about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. That is to say, arguments about stuff that doesn’t really matter, where the stakes are very low.
As it happens, though, we now find ourselves in the middle of an academic dispute where the stakes could not be higher. The question at issue is how best to combat the Coronavirus — and millions of lives may depend on getting the right answer.
The current contestants in this battle of ideas are teams of researchers from two of Britain’s best universities — Imperial College, London and Oxford. Both have constructed mathematical models of the pandemic which, they hope, enable them to understand the dynamics of its contagion, and also enable them to simulate the likely impact of various policies to manage the outbreak.
A few weeks ago, after the Johnson administration had its “Oh shit this could be really serious moment” you may recall that the Prime Minister started to give daily Press Conferences flanked by two eminent knights who embodied the “scientific advice” that he was determined assiduously to follow. This blogger — and thousands of observers overseas — watched incredulously as these eminences laid out a strategy based on the concept of herd immunity: the idea was that about 60 per cent of the population would need to get the virus first, after which this supposed immunity would kick in.
A quick session with a calculator confirmed the hunch that this idea looked bonkers. Just think about the numbers. The UK currently has nearly 70m inhabitants. 60% of 70m is 42m, most of whom, it was assumed, would only get a mild dose, recover and thereby acquire herd immunity. But if the mortality rate of the virus was one per cent (which was one of the guesses at the time) then that meant that the UK government policy was assuming that 420,000 people might die. At which point even those of us who know nothing about epidemiology but can do simple arithmetic began to wonder what these eminent scientific knights had been smoking.
Clearly, the modellers at Imperial College wondered the same thing, and they spent a frantic weekend running simulations to determine what a less crazy strategy would be — and concluded that ‘containment’ would be not only the best bet, but the only sensible thing to do. Their conclusions seemed to convince Johnson and his advisers, and so over a weekend the government pivoted on a sixpence to a new policy — containment and lockdown in order to prevent our beloved NHS with its 8,000 ventilators from being overcome. Which is how we came to be where we are now and why I am composing this from deepest quarantine.
At this point Oxford University enters the fray. According to a report in last Tuesday’s Financial Times, the Oxford model suggested that the virus may already have infected far more people in the UK than anyone had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population. If the results are confirmed, the FT report continued, they would imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment. The vast majority would develop very mild symptoms or none at all.
The research, observes the FT, presented a very different view of the epidemic to the Imperial College modeling which had such a dramatic influence on government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Professor Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, who led the study. Experts in the semiotics of academic warfare will be able to decode that genteel observation. The professor is, er, surprised. It’s a bit like when lawyers say “with the greatest possible respect…”
I have no idea which group of modellers is right. Perhaps neither is. But the interesting thing about the Oxford hypothesis is that it is testable in a way that would have appealed to Karl Popper.
If people have acquired immunity through having had a mild dose of the disease, then they will have antibodies in their blood. There are, I think, recognised tests for detecting these antibodies. So all that is needed is for a research team (it could be from a polling firm like YouGov) to administer this test to a random sample of the UK population. The results would tell us not only if the Oxford conjecture is accurate but also what proportion of the population has immunity. And when we know that maybe we’ll be getting somewhere.
(Oh, and by the way, if you heard the sound of someone clapping, it’ll be the ghost of Karl Popper.)
From 100 Not out! – a Lockdown Diary. If you liked this you can get the book on the Kindle store
Mount Everest is higher than we thought, say Nepal and China.Link
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“I would suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”
Terrific account by Cade Metz of how researchers at DeepMind think they have solved “the protein folding problem,” a task that has bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years.
Some scientists spend their lives trying to pinpoint the shape of tiny proteins in the human body.
Proteins are the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all living things. They begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define what they can do — and what they cannot.
For biologists, identifying the precise shape of a protein often requires months, years or even decades of experimentation. It requires skill, intelligence and more than a little elbow grease. Sometimes they never succeed.
Now, an artificial intelligence lab in London has built a computer system that can do the job in a few hours — perhaps even a few minutes…
Great read. And a nice accompaniment to the astonishing achievement of the Covid vaccine development effort.
Peter Alliss RIP
The Guardian carried the obit that had been written by the late Frank Keating (who died in 2013). It concludes thus:
To the end, he could be outrageously and sharply pointed but also poetically, tellingly simple at the microphone, like this sotto running-commentary advice at Sandwich in 2011 as the young Irishman Rory McIlroy came into view down the fairway: “Just keep playing nicely, gently, m’boy … keep finding the fairways, keep finding the greens … You can’t force this game … some people think you can … some players think they can … but you can’t … Golf is all about patience … Good old-fashioned word ‘patience’ … ask kids today about ‘patience’ and they pull out their iPhones, whatever they are, and say it don’t say anything here about ‘patience’ but I can tell you the population of Madagascar … ”
Alliss was, by all accounts, a born raconteur (in the same genre as his predecessor Henry Longhurst). Mark Townsend in Golf Monthly included Alliss’s anecdote about Bobby Locke, who won the British Open four times:
One of his favourite memories was, again, something quirky rather than the norm. To set the scene the great Bobby Locke had joined him on a patch of rough ground to the right of the 1st fairway at the Old Course to hit a few balls ahead of his opening round in 1957.
“He had about eight balls and he sent his caddy, Bill Golder, who was about 65 then, down on to the beach. We spent the next five minutes chatting about this exhibition match and that exhibition match before I said ‘Well, I must be off’.
“He asked what the time was, I told him it was twenty to and he replied ‘Oh God, I must be off.’ He never hit a ball, he waved to his caddy and he was off. It is bizarre to think these days that there are rows of Titleists and there’s his caddie, who has clambered down across the beach, and he never hit a ball. He went to the 1st tee and went on to win the championship by three shots.”
As someone who was a keen golfer in my undergraduate days, Alliss is a figure from my past. I remember once walking round with him in a tournament — something you could do occasionally in those days, before golf became a TV-dominated sport. He struck me as a handsome, amiable, right-wing buffer who also happened to be a terrific golfer. And he was a terrific commentator on the game.
When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.
From the start, Uber’s “blitzscaling” strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.
But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank – a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts – with $80B as part of his “Vision 2030” plan.
Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.
These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies – with staggering debt-overhangs – on investors who’ve been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.
I particularly like his payoff lines…
Every long con needs a “store” – a place where the con plays out, like a fake betting shop where the scammers rope in the mark and fleece them of every dime. But once the con is done, the store has to shut down amid a “blow-off” that lets the grifters escape.
Uber’s shutting down the AV part of its store: they “sold” the division to a startup called Aurora, but the “sale” involves Uber “investing” $400,000,000 in Aurora. That is, they’ve paid someone else to take this bit of set-dressing off their hands.
If you want to learn more about how Uber will never, never, ever, ever be a real business, be sure to tap into transport economist Hubert Horan’s series on the company, which he calls a “bezzle.”
Great stuff.
Another, hopefully interesting, link
The best of the ‘Best Books of 2020’ lists. Curated by Jason Kottke. Link
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The year I abandoned my Nikon, it popped up in a surprising place: cognitive science. That year, Joshua D. Greene published Moral Tribes, a work of philosophy that draws on neuroscience to explore why and how we make moral judgments. According to Greene, we make them using two different modes — not unlike a digital camera. “The human brain,” he writes, “is like a dual-mode camera with both automatic settings and a manual mode.” Sometimes, the analogy goes, you want to optimize your exposure time and shutter speed for specific light conditions — say, when faced with a big life decision. Other times, probably most of the time, tinkering with the settings is just too much of a hassle. You don’t want to build a pro-and-con list every time you order at a restaurant, just like you don’t want to adjust the aperture manually for each selfie you take.
Strange goings-on at Google
From this morning’s FT:
How did Google get itself into this mess? A company that is widely seen as having deeper capabilities in artificial intelligence than its main rivals, and which is under a microscope over how it wields its considerable economic and technological power, just had an acrimonious parting of the ways with its co-head of AI ethics.
Timnit Gebru left claiming she was fired over the suppression of an AI research paper. Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, said the paper wasn’t fit for publication and Dr Gebru resigned.
Except that she didn’t resign, it seems. She was fired — or, as they say in Silicon Valley without a hint or irony, “terminated”.
So let’s backtrack a bit. Dr Gebru was the joint-leader of Google’s ethical AI team, and is a prominent leader in AI ethics research. When she worked for Microsoft Research she was co-author of the groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of colour — a flaw which implies that its use can end up discriminating against them. She also co-founded the ‘Black in AI’ affinity group, and is a champion of diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is believed to be one of the most diverse in AI (not that that’s saying much) and has produced critical work that often challenges mainstream AI practices.
A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articles showed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she coauthored. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, told colleagues in an internal email (which he has since put online) that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” and that Gebru had said she would resign unless Google met a number of conditions, which it was unwilling to meet. Gebru tweeted that she had asked to negotiate “a last date” for her employment after she got back from vacation. She was cut off from her corporate email account before her return.
More detail is provided by an open letter authored by her supporters within Google and elsewhere. “Instead of being embraced by Google as an exceptionally talented and prolific contributor”, it says,
Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing. In an email to Dr. Gebru’s team on the evening of December 2, 2020, Google executives claimed that she had chosen to resign. This is false. In their direct correspondence with Dr. Gebru, these executives informed her that her termination was immediate, and pointed to an email she sent to a Google Brain diversity and inclusion mailing list as pretext.
In that email, it seems that Gebru pushed back against Google’s censorship of her (and her colleagues’) research, which focused on examining the environmental and ethical implications of large-scale AI language models (LLMs), which are used in many Google products. Gebru and her team worked for months on a paper that was under review at an academic conference. In late November, five weeks after the article had been internally reviewed and approved for publication through standard processes, senior Google executives made the decision to censor it, without warning or cause.
Gebru asked them to explain this decision and to take accountability for it, and to that responsibility for their “lacklustre” stand on discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Her supporters see her ‘termination’ as “an act of retaliation against Dr. Gebru, and it heralds danger for people working for ethical and just AI — especially Black people and People of Color — across Google.”
As an outsider it’s difficult to know what to make of this. MIT’s Technology Review obtained a copy of the article at the root of the matter — it has the glorious title of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — from one of its co-authors, Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. However, she asked the magazine not to publish it in full because it was an early draft.
Despite this pre-condition, Tech Review is able to provide a pretty informative overview of the paper. On the basis of this summary, it’s hard to figure out what would lead senior Google executives to pull the plug on its publication.
Its aim, says Bender, was to survey the current landscape of research in natural language processing (NLP).
First of all, it takes a critical look at the environmental and financial costs of this kind of machine-leading research. It finds that the carbon footprint of the research has been ‘exploding’ since 2017 as models are fed more and more data from which to learn. This is interesting and important (I’ve even written about it myself) but there’s nothing special about the paper’s conclusions, except perhaps the implication that the costs of doing this stuff can only be borne by huge corporations while climate change hits poorer communities disproportionately.
Secondly, the massive linguistic data sets required inevitably contain many varieties of bias. (We knew that.) But they also capture only past language usage and are unable to capture ways in which language is changing as society changes. So, “An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms. It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.” Well, yes, but…
And then there are the opportunity costs of prioritising NLP research as against other things with potentially greater societal benefit. “Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them.
This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost, Gebru and her colleagues maintain. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully-curated data sets (and thus also use less energy).
Finally, there’s the risk that that because these new NLP models are so good at mimicking real human language that it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases of this, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog — which then went viral.
”The dangers are obvious: AI models could be used to generate misinformation about an election or the covid-19 pandemic, for instance. They can also go wrong inadvertently when used for machine translation. The researchers bring up an example: In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.”
All of this is interesting but — as far as I can see — not exactly new. And yet it seems that, as Professor Bender puts it, “someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests”.
And my question is: why? Is it just that the paper provides a lot of data which suggests that a core technology now used in many of Google’s products is, well, bad for the world? If that was indeed the motivation for the original dispute and decision, then it suggests that Google’s self-image as a technocratic force for societal good is now too important to be undermined by high-quality research which suggests otherwise. In which case, it suggests that there’s not that much difference between big tech companies and tobacco, oil and mining giants. They’re just corporations, doing what corporations always do.
Another, hopefully interesting, link
One in Six Cadillac Dealers Opt to Close Instead of Selling Electric Cars. When told to get with the times or get out of the way, 150 out of 800 dealers reportedly took a cash buyout and walked away. Link They’ve figured out that there’s much less money in selling EVs which require very little follow-up care and maintenance. Once you’ve sold someone an EV, you won’t see them that often. No more expensive oil-changes and spark-plug changes.
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My eye was caught by the title of a working paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER): How to Talk When a Machine Is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the the Age of AI. So I clicked and downloaded, as one does. And then started to read…
Since March, the news — and the medium-term outlook — has been persistently depressing. Rupert Beale’s piece in the London Review of Books is the first essay I’ve read that holds out rational grounds for hope.
The virus’s genetic code has been available since January. We knew precious little about the subtleties of coronaviruses, but we did already know that they rip their way into host cells using a protein complex known as Spike. Block Spike, with a vaccine that raises antibodies to it, and you block the virus. There are plenty of ways to do this. You might use a killed authentic Sars-CoV-2 virus; or a different, live but innocuous virus with Spike bolted on; or the Spike protein plus an adjuvant (something that promotes an aggressive immune response); or the messenger RNA that codes for a piece of Spike, so your own cells make the protein. Two vaccines of this last type have proven blessedly effective. The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are about 95 per cent likely to prevent symptomatic infection. To put this in context, we are content if the annual and very well understood seasonal influenza vaccine is 60 per cent effective. The deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, compared it to your team scoring two consecutive goals in a penalty shootout. Penalties are too prosaic; in footballing terms these are goals only Maradona could have scored. But even that falls short of conveying quite how remarkable it is to have created a vaccine, using hitherto unproven technology, that’s 95 per cent effective against a novel virus – in less than a year.
The good news doesn’t stop there…. Beale is a clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, The UK’s leading institute for the relevant science. So his assessment of the potential of the vaccines is worth playing attention to. His article is long and detailed. And here’s the payoff:
The end is in sight. Effectively deployed testing may be able to ameliorate social distancing until the vaccines arrive. We were woefully prepared for a coronavirus pandemic in March, but were another similar virus to emerge in 2022 we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. We should be wary of learning the wrong lessons, however. To have several highly effective vaccines for this horrible virus after less than a year is a quite astonishing achievement, among the greatest things that we – by which I mean both humanity in general and molecular biologists in particular – have ever accomplished. We’ve been skilful, but we have also been lucky. A Sars-CoV-2 vaccine turns out to be relatively easy to develop. The virus that causes the next pandemic may not be so forgiving.
Other, hopefully interesting, Links
24 high-quality Covid illustrations. Free for commercial and personal use.Link
How and when will life go back to normal? Answer from epidemiologists. Link
Faraday Cages for Wi-Fi Routers are the latest 5G conspiracy racket. Why do people believe pseudo-scientific nonsense? Link
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The internet is not ready for the flood of AI-generated text
Christopher Brennan’s essay on the way that many of our systems currently focus on engagement makes them particularly vulnerable to the incoming wave of content from bots like GPT-3.
We don’t need hyper-intelligent machines to dramatically change the way that the internet works. In my recent conversations, we talked about the issue of what happens when AI text-generation capabilities are more widespread and can generate what Winston calls “10,000 Wikipedias” worth of text in a very short time. You might have already gotten weary of our current state of “too much content,” but it is about to get far, far worse.
Some of the closest possibilities are commercial. OthersideAI has just raised millions in seed money for a use of GPT-3 that will write automatic emails for salespeople in the style of their choice. Porr, after revealing his blog as automated, wrote about automated copywriting, which could generate several options and then automatically A/B test them to see which gets the most engagement.
Boris says he wants to see me at the end of the day. I go into his office and he is sitting behind his desk with Carrie standing next to him.
“What is this, the Pride of Britain awards?” I ask.
“Very good, Dom, very drole,” says Boris, looking shifty.
“Tell him, Boris,” Carrie says.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this. The thing is, if I can speak freely, reductio ad absurdum, and get to the point, ergo propter hoc, as it were. Just to be perfectly clear…” he says.
“Stultus est sicut stultus facit,” I tell him.
“Eh?” he asks.
“Have you not seen Forest Gump, prime minister?” I ask.
“We haven’t got time for that now, let me get straight to the point…” he trails off.
“Tell him, Boris,” says Carrie.
“I will, stop interfering,” he says.
“Me?” I say, surprised.
“No, it’s your job to interfere,” he says.
“Not anymore,” says Carrie.
“Look, I’m dealing with this,” says Boris.
“What? Brexit? Coronavirus? The economy? Levelling-up? China? Barnier? Biden? You aren’t dealing with any of it,” I tell him.
“That’s your job,” he says.
“So, you want me to stop interfering?” I say confused.
“No, I want you to keep on interfering,” he says, now confused himself.
“Tell him Boris,” says Carrie.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this…” stutters Boris.
“You’re fired,” says Carrie.
“I wanted to say that,” says Boris.
“Fired?” I say, incredulously.
“Not fired exactly, it’s more that we are going to have to let you go, Dom,” says Boris, looking at his shoes.
The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.
This is what it looks like:
The really clever thing about this is how familiar it looks. Just like an ordinary service station. Except it isn’t ordinary: all those pump-like devices are electric charging points. There isn’t a litre of petrol anywhere. Making new things look ordinary is the way to get beyond the early adopters of any new technology to reach the mainstream, small-c conservative masses. That was the brilliance of the Toyota Prius hybrid. It looked normal — even boring and safe. Not in the least daring. But in its time it was revolutionary. Now the time has come for fully-electric EVs. And the same applies.
Other, hopefully interesting, links
An Open Letter to Santa Claus Regarding His Travel Plans. “While I understand that your home is melting and you do not have many Christmases left, it is most imperative that you stay in the North Pole this year. Until the COVID-19 vaccine is released to the public, unnecessary travel for anyone is gravely irresponsible… Link.
Rusty but intact: Nazi Enigma cipher machine found in Baltic Sea.Link.
NSF releases footage from the moment Arecibo’s cables failed. Video from two different cameras, with one capturing a close-up of the cables snapping. Link.
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Zeynep Tufecki is one of the smartest people I follow. In recent times she has written some of the most insightful stuff about the pandemic. Now she has a newsletter on Substack where today she writes about a striking, informative study just released from South Korea, examining a transmission chain in a restaurant. “It is”, she writes, “perhaps one of the finest examples of shoe-leather epidemiology I’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s worth a deeper dive.”
If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (about 21 feet) and 4.8m (about 15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.
That’s the quick and dirty of it. But there’s a lot more detail here, and like many stories, it is best told through a picture:
First, just reading the study is an exercise in what it means to do a study really, really well, with the resources of a government that’s committed to generating useful information…
Great piece if you want to understand why some of us are not going to be dining indoors in restaurants for a while yet. And it raises one intriguing puzzle: why have there been no recorded cases of infections recorded from cinemas?
Other, hopefully interesting, links
Beavers build first Exmoor dam in 400 years. Awww. Link.
Steve Jobs pitching for planning permission for his company’s new HQ. Vintage Jobs. 20-odd riveting minutes. Unmissable. Link
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This will not be to everyone’s taste. But if you’re interested in Keynes (as I am) and if you’ve read Zachary Carter’s splendid new biography then you’ll love it. What’s particularly good is the fact that Cowen is pretty critical of Keynes, so it’s very much an anti-hagiographical conversation.
Here’s a little sample:
COWEN: I have at least 20 different friends who studied The General Theory, Keynes’s book from 1936, the big famous one. I ask them, “What’s the central message of The General Theory?” They all give me different answers, so I’d like to know, what’s your answer? There’s so much in the book, right? Incredibly rich and multifaceted, but what’s the bottom-line core of The General Theory?
CARTER: You love the hard questions. I wrote in the book that the bottom-line core message of The General Theory is that prosperity is not hardwired into human beings, that it has to be guided through political leadership. I think that traces back, to some extent, to what you were just talking about about India. He views the state and the government, from a very early age, as this sort of guiding hand. In the case of India, it’s a bit paternalistic, but also, domestically, he believes that government is a necessary force to organizing human affairs.
The General Theory — it’s a complicated book. In certain respects, it’s not always consistent with itself, but I think that there’s a political message, which is that political guidance is needed for prosperity to exist, for markets to function. There’s also a reevaluation of what economics is doing and how economics functions. Keynes is not focused on scarcity at this point, and I think Michał Kalecki has written about this.
I think this idea that Keynes is refocusing the nature of economics and economic humanity, from competition for scarce resources towards the idea that uncertainty about the future is the most important psychological condition for economics. If you believe in scarcity as the overriding issue, you’re going to come to different conclusions about how the world works than if you believe uncertainty is the overriding issue. I’m not sure which one of those is the most important, but those are the two that I think are key.
Great stuff.
Digital health passports should not be rolled out on a mass basis until COVID-19 vaccines are available to all, report warns
Digital health passports, sometimes also referred to as ‘immunity passports’, are digital credentials that, combined with identity verification, allow individuals to prove their health status (such as the results of COVID-19 tests, and eventually, digital vaccination records).
As the move to ‘return to normal’ strengthens immunity passports will become valuable and sought after for obvious reasons — like enabling you to travel, get a job, go to the theatre or a film perhaps. So you can write the script for what will happen next — and who will get the lion’s share of the certificates. (Hint: it won’t be the deserving poor.) Which is why an interesting new report from Exeter University is timely. It warns that digital health passports should not be introduced on a mass basis until coronavirus tests are available and affordable to everyone in the country. The same considerations apply to vaccines once these are approved and ready for widespread use.
The Report’s central findings are:
Digital health passports may contribute to the long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• However, digital health passports pose essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights, given that they:
• use sensitive personal health information;
• create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status;
• can be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights one may enjoy.
• Measures supporting the deployment of such digital health passports may interfere with the respect and protection of data and human rights, in particular the rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and the freedoms of movement, assembly, and to manifest one’s religion or beliefs.
• While public health interests may justify such interferences, policymakers must strike an adequate balance between protecting the rights and freedoms of all individuals and safeguarding public interests when managing the effects of the pandemic.
The research was carried out by Dr Ana Beduschi, from the University of Exeter Law School and is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research & Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19.
Stripe: the most important company you’ve never heard of
Private financial technology business Stripe Inc. is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it higher than its last private valuation of $36 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The valuation being discussed could be more than $70 billion or significantly higher, at as much as $100 billion, said one of the people, who asked not be identified because the matter is private. That would make it currently the most valuable venture-backed startup in the U.S., according to CB Insights.
Stripe was co-founded in 2010 by two Irish lads — brothers John and Patrick Collison. The pair sold their first company for $5 million when they were teenagers and are now worth about $4.3 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their company currently has more than 2,500 employees and 14 global offices. An ad on its website suggests that it is poised to become much bigger and more important.
Stripe’s software, which competes with Square Inc. and Paypal Holdings Inc., is used by businesses to accept payments (including payments to Substack authors who charge subscriptions for their blogs). But that turned out to be just the boys’ first act.
Basically, Stripe now aims to become the central platform for financial transactions on the Internet. This is how the shrewd analyst Ben Thompson graphically summarises it on his daily subscription newsletter.
Watch this space. And, no, you can’t buy shares in it. It isn’t a public company.
Other, hopefully interesting, links
Think really big bridges don’t vibrate in high winds? Think again.Link
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Terrific Columbia Journalism Review essay by Clio Chang about the company that runs the platform on which this (email) edition of my blog, Memex.1.1, is published. It’s a well-informed, nicely critical and beautifully-written piece, well worth your time if you’re interested in media ecology and what is happening to journalism.
Sample:
Substack, established in 2017 by three tech-and-media guys—Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi—is a newsletter platform that allows writers and other creative types to distribute their work at tiered subscription rates. Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative. And, for many, it’s a viable source of income. In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, on the climate crisis, told me that her gross annual income surpassed $200,000—and among paid-readership Substacks, she’s ranked fifteenth. “I literally opened my first savings account,” she said.
Rising seas predicted to flood thousands of affordable housing units by 2050
Researchers mapped where coastal homes could flood in the US
Coastal cities in the US could find themselves grappling with a new housing crisis in the coming decades. The number of affordable housing units vulnerable to flooding could triple by 2050 as the planet heats up, according to a new study. That amounts to more than 24,000 homes that could flood at least once a year by 2050, compared to about 8,000 in 2000.
The study, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, ranks the states and cities at greatest risk. Its authors also unveiled a new interactive map that people can use to see how their hometown might be affected.
I tried to use the interactive map to see if Mar-a-Lago might be inundated, but I’d have needed to get my VPN to switch to a server in the US first and it was early in a busy morning and I concluded that life was too short. S
Ever since the referendum I have said the UK will leave without a deal, the fantasies of the ultras trumping any sensible negotiations in the public interest. But for the first time I see the possibility of a deal because of the Daily Mail and Telegraph, no less.
It will be a bad deal and ignores the pleas, lobbying, research and interests of almost every industry in the UK. But for almost the first time the papers have started noticing that no deal also means; holiday homes can only be used for 3 months at a time, car insurance will soar in price and pet passports will be an expensive pain in the derriere. Those are just three consequences of Brexit, there are many others and although these are similar issues to those hitting business, this time they hit people with votes.
The EU negotiating strategy, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” has led to this, far cleverer than “give us a deal or we break the law.” But all still depends on whether the PM will realise what is happening and stand up to the ultras. Will he notice in time that people don’t seem to care about other people’s jobs but care deeply about fido’s holidays? Ignoring that would as they say in Yes Minister, be a “brave decision”.
I wonder.
Facebook is still stumped by WhatsApp
How can it monetise it without destroying what makes it work?
Perhaps never before has an online property been so popular and made such little money. More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp regularly to text or make phone calls, but it scarcely generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014.
That’s because WhatsApp is mostly a personal communications app, and Facebook doesn’t make money from that group chat with your cousins. This looks set to change. Haltingly, including by agreeing to buy a customer service start-up on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its trademark playbook to remake WhatsApp into an inescapable way for businesses to interact with us.
If Facebook figures it out, WhatsApp could change how we shop and use the internet forever — as the company’s main social network and Instagram did. If not, Facebook will own a spectacularly popular failure. The outcome will set trends for our digital lives and determine which businesses thrive or don’t.
To understand WhatsApp, you need to know about Facebook’s three-step playbook and why it’s breaking down…
What I love about WhatsApp is that it costs Facebook a tone of money to keep it going and yet it can’t wring a cent out of it. My hunch is that if they try to ‘monetise’ it, then a sizeable proportion the masses of people who love and use it will become disenchanted and drift to something else.
Nothing lasts forever.
Other, hopefully interesting, links
Google Reveals Major Hidden Weakness In Machine Learning. It’s called underspecification, but it’s just the latest of the fundamental problems that the current feeding-frenzy with the technology conveniently ignores. Link.
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In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating – but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one ‘subject’, this one ‘area’: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am ‘interested’, for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would want to read me on it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word ‘intellectual’ I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral…
Wonderful. And bloggers are also guilty as charged — of ‘imposing’.
Apologies in advance.
How should journalism be supported? Who should pay for it? And who should get the money?
The headline over my column in last Sunday’s Observer was “For the sake of democracy, social media giants must pay newspapers.” Since columnists never get to write the headlines over their compositions I winced a bit, though I also had to concede that it was a fair summary of the column. The peg for the piece was the decision of a French court to uphold the ruling of a regulator that Google must enter into negotiations with newspaper publishers to determine what recompense the search giant should pay publishers for picking up their headlines. A similar regulation is now heading for the statute book in Australia. Many people in the tech industry regard this as incomprehensible or unfair, or both, given that many newspapers benefit from the fact that Google diverts reader’s attention to their papers.
In his invaluable weekly newsletter, Benedict Evans, one of the most perceptive commentators on the tech industry, had pointed out the apparent absurdity of this — expecting Google to pay for the privilege of directing traffic to traffic to one’s site when it should obviously be the other way round. “This is a fascinating logical fallacy”, Ben wrote, “ it makes perfect sense as long as you never ask why no-one other than Google pays to link either, and never ask why it should only be newspapers that get paid to be linked to. “ (Emphasis added).
It was the italicised passage that sparked my attention, because newspapers are not quite the same as other enterprises because — as enablers of reporting and investigation and ‘news’ — they play an important role in democracy. “The survival of liberal democracy,” I wrote,
requires a functioning public sphere in which information circulates freely and in which wrongdoing, corruption, incompetence and injustices can be investigated and brought to public attention. And one of the consequences of the rise of social media is that whatever public sphere we once had is now distorted and polluted by being forced through four narrow apertures called Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, services in which almost everything that people see, read or hear is curated by algorithms designed solely to increase the profitability of their owners.
One sees the effects of this transformation of the public sphere at all levels, but one of the most disturbing is in the decline of local newspapers. In many regions of democratic states what goes on in the courts, council chambers, planning committees, chambers of commerce, trade union branches, community centres, sports clubs, churches and schools now goes unreported because local newspapers have gone bust or shrunk to shadows of their former selves. Citizens of most UK towns and cities now have much less information about what’s happening in their localities than their grandparents did, no matter how assiduously they check their Facebook or Twitter feeds. And the quality of local democratic discourse has been accordingly impaired.
The tech companies are not wholly to blame for these changes of course. But they have played a significant role in undermining the institutions whose business model they vaporised. Looked at from that perspective, it seems wholly reasonable that societies should require social media companies to contribute to the support of news organisations that democracies require for their functioning and survival.
On his blog yesterday, Dave Winer begged to differ. “One thing we disagree on,” he wrote,
is public funding for news orgs. He’s a believer, and I’m a fervent opponent. For so many reasons. But the main one is, if we fund them now, we forever freeze journalism as being no more than it is now.
The world has radically changed, and continues to change, journalism hasn’t. And btw, also politics, because unfortunately the two go hand in hand. Politics can only go where journalism will let it go. We’ve learned that hard lesson during the Trump presidency. They have power to stop honorable people, but have no power over people who don’t care. #
Journalism blames Facebook and the rest of the web for the problems. Meanwhile their inability to build a functional two-way idea flow on the web has created the opportunity for all kinds of junk to flow in to take its place. This must not be where evolution stops.
Both journalism and politics have to stop seeing the web as “over there” and put themselves fully in the middle of it. We are participants, we want to help, that’s their job, to help us. If they do, we’ve proven we will flood them with money. So far, neither politics or journalism has accepted that as the basic change.
Dave has been a trenchant critic of newspapers in particular for as long as I can remember. His main point has always been that they never conceded that their privileged position in the media ecosystem as ‘broadcasters of truth’ (or approximations thereto) was no longer tenable in a networked world which was perfectly capable of answering back. In part, this arrogance was probably a reflection of the fact that, in the US for nearly a century, many newspapers enjoyed local monopolies, which enabled them to persist in delusions of public service, high-mindedness and the crackpot idea that journalism was a ‘profession’. But they never really understood (in Dave’s view) that the game was up unless they realised that from now on they were just one voice in the big conversation. Given that, I can understand why he thinks using taxation to replace the income streams they used to have from advertising is misguided.
Brooding on this today, I came to the conclusion that what was wrong with my column was that it confused form with function. The function that’s important for democracy is “a public sphere in which information circulates freely and in which wrongdoing, corruption, incompetence and injustices can be investigated and brought to public attention”. Newspapers just happen to have been the form that that function had to take in pre-Internet times. There are other ways of providing that function now, but we haven’t yet found a business model to support it.
So it sticks in one’s craw that the newspapers that Google will have to negotiate with in Australia are rapacious media corporations owned by, inter alia, Rupert Murdoch, when the money should really be going to support and enable new ways of providing the essential democratic function of journalism rather than lining Murdoch’s bulging pockets.
With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, then, maybe a better headline for my column would be ““For the sake of democracy, social media giants must support local journalism.”
Other, hopefully interesting, links
How a Vibrating Smartwatch Could Be Used to Stop Nightmares. You want a good-news story? Well, this is one.
52 things I learned in 2020. Tom Whitwell’s annual delight.
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