Riverbank
By the Rhone, Arles.
Quote of the Day
”When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
- Steve Jobs
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Elvis Costello | I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came
Long Read of the Day
TikTok is deploying platform power in unprecedented ways
A characteristically insightful essay by Henry Farrell on a major shift in the power of tech platforms. It builds on an argument about that kind of power expressed in an academic paper by two political scientists (Culpepper and Thalen) which is linked to in the essay, but which you don’t have to read to understand what Henry is on about. What his piece suggests is a truly delicious irony — that TikTok has exploited Trump rather than the other way round! This, he contends,
“amounts to a new kind of exercise of platform power. Rather than using platform power against regulations, in the ways that Culpepper and Thelen describe, TikTok is putting this power at the service of a politician, presumably in order to gain his favor. TikTok has built up a powerful relationship with its users, who weave the app and its content into their lives. TikTok is now using its ability to communicate directly with those users to create a narrative in which the incoming U.S. president has saved these users’ ability to create, share, and discover as they want to. This radically expands on Culpepper and Thelen’s logic.”
It does. Enjoy.
Cringing before tech giants is no way to make Britain an AI superpower
My Observer OpEd on Keir Starmer’s aspirations to harness AI to Make Britain Great Again.
Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as “the defining opportunity of our generation”. The UK, he declared “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing”, not to mention the country “that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”
Stirring stuff, eh. Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about “how we seize the opportunities of AI”. Clifford came up with a 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan that Starmer accepted in its entirety, saying that he would “put the full weight of the British state” behind it. He also appointed Clifford as his AI Opportunities Adviser to oversee implementation of the plan and report directly to him. It’s only a matter of time before the Sun dubs him “the UK’s AI tsar”.
Clifford’s appointment is both predictable and puzzling…
Do read the whole thing
My commonplace booklet
How to survive being online in a Trump era Some sound advice from Mike Monteiro
The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source…
One of my techniques is to have the radio tuned to a music station (in my case BBC Radio 3) so that when you come down in the morning to make a cup of tea, all you hear is music. That’s also why this blog has a ‘Musical Alternative’ section.
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