Cuttings: May 2014

Net Neutrality in pictures - referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. 'Valiant attempt to explain something that most politicians don’t appear to get.'

Thomas Piketty's Capital: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller - Paul Mason article in The Guardian 29 April 2014  ‘That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US.... Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank / ministry / TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally. If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.’

The Big Beasts who Shaped the BBC, Charlotte Higgins article in The Guardian, 15 May 2014,  ‘It was Reith's great achievement to shape the pragmatic decisions that went into the creation of the BBC into an ideology, which he outlined in 1924 in his book Broadcast Over Britain. The BBC's powers as an educative tool were sketched out ("to have exploited so great a scientific invention for the purpose and pursuit of 'entertainment' alone would have been a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people"). It was activated as an equalising, democratic force: "It carries direct information on a hundred subjects to innumerable men and women who will after a short time be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment." (Reith importantly invoked women, newly enfranchised.) "The whole service … may be taken as the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man," he wrote, a wonderfully hopeful thing to say. Its purpose was, he declared, to carry "the best of everything into the greatest number of homes". This ringing statement has been refined and rethought over the years – as in Huw Wheldon's famous chiasmus about making the good popular and the popular good. As a founding idea, it lies deep in the BBC's psyche. Hall himself referred to it in his first speech as DG in October 2013. "At the core of the BBC's role is something very simple, very democratic and very important – to bring the best to everyone," he said.’

The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades - article by Christopher Fox in The Guardian, 17 May 2014.  '[Today] listening [to music] at home is ... trouble-free, a laptop and headphones doing away with the need for all those records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, amplifiers, wires and speakers. So much time filled, so much space saved; never before has music been so available and yet so immaterial. Perhaps it's this immateriality that has provoked a revival of interest in older audio technologies, in ways of recording and listening that involve something more tangible than a stream of digital code. Tellingly, this is a revival led by people too young to have used these technologies when they were state of the art.... It's this generation that is buying vinyl, and it's musicians of the same generation who are making the records, experimenting with tape recorders and enthusing about analogue sound.'

How people spend their time online, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. Chart, based on 2013 data from 5000 Americans, age 18-64. 'Some interesting aspects: note how important email still is, despite all the talk about social networking. Note that online newspapers and magazines together only add up to the same time consumption as blogs or internet radio.'

Diary: first person account of psychosis - referenced in MindHacks blog. 'I met a woman called Margaret in Fairmile hospital. I assumed she was my link to the politician with the same first name. She explained periods to me. I wondered if the PM was angry with me for writing a story saying she deserved to hang for sinking the Belgrano. I tried to manoeuvre Margaret around to the front of the hospital so that a Rolls could pull in off the main road and take me to Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t seem very willing to comply. The shrink had been watching me and asked why I looked up at the sky when helicopters flew over. They were sent by Francis Pym to rescue me. Despite the massive grounds around the Victorian building the choppers never seemed to land. I soon realised I would do six months unless I staged a recovery. I stopped looking at helicopters and after only three months I was free.'

Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain) - article in The Atlantic, referenced in MindHacks blog.  'Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There's something a little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. Ah! That's not a vine, that's a snake! That's an LG logo. NO—it's Pac-Man! But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. What's going on here?'

Still running Windows XP? That's the way Bill Gates planned it - Observer article by John Naughton, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. 'On 8 April this year Microsoft released its final free security patch for XP. From now on, anyone wishing to obtain security upgrades for the system will have to enter into an expensive ($200 a desktop) deal with Microsoft.... In this country, the government has hundreds of thousands of PCs running XP. And of the 800,000 PCs in the NHS about three-quarters are running it. In those circumstances, the news that Her Majesty's government has forked out £5.5m for one year's cover looks like a rare example of government doing the prudent thing. But in reality it has just bought time: the awful moment when the public sector has to upgrade its computers is approaching inexorably. Think of it as technology's equivalent to the Scottish referendum.'

Politics or technhology – which will save the world? - article by David Runciman in The Guardian 23 May 2014, being extracts from his book Politics, from a series Ideas in Profile. 'The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world's poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange…. But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won't rescue anyone from civil war. …. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.' 'In the developed world, impatience with politics takes another form. We don't look to technology to rescue us from failed states. We look to it to rescue us from overbearing ones. Politics in the west can appear bloated and stale. By contrast, the tech world looks dynamic, flexible and exciting. It invents stuff all the time.... These failures [of government IT projects] help breed contempt for politicians not only among citizens but from the tech industry, which often assumes that government is simply an obstacle to be overcome, an analogue annoyance in a digital world. But there are some things the tech industry doesn't understand very well. Its blind spots include the story of its own origins. There would be no tech industry on the scale we know it today without government. This is not simply because every industry needs stable and reliable political institutions to uphold the property rights on which its dynamism depends…. It is because government investment is what made the information technology revolution possible in the first place.'

Twelve ways to fix British politics – column by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, 28 May 2014. '3. The so-called "professionalising" of politics is widely despised. No one should become an MP without having done other jobs. The media doesn't count as a job!... 4. No one should stand for a seat in a place to which they have no connection. Why on earth should ambitious Londoners be helicoptered into safe seats? I have heard talk that the standard of MPs would drop if it were left to local talent alone. Yes, really. 5. Language: the terrible fear of actually saying something results in verbless slogans and expensive logos. Hardworking Britain Better Off, for instance, appears as if it were the result of a brainstorming session that had to be abandoned halfway through as a fire alarm went off. The making up of new phrases should always ring alarm bells. If you can't tell voters who you are and what you want to do with the pre-existing vocabulary and vernacular of the entire English language, surely that's not good.'