Thursday 13 October 2016

Cuttings: September 2016

Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook - column by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: 'Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.'... What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more 'connected' but less open.... An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It’s what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world.... The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But – guess what? – the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need."

How to actually talk to a woman wearing headphones - article by Martha Mills in The Guardian's Brain flapping blog. "An article has surfaced from the quagmire of bilge that is The Internet and it has caused, not without reason, a small tornado of outrage. Written as dating advice for 'The Modern Man' (a misnomer if ever there were one), it promises a solution to the hot ‘n’ horny down-on-their-luck young bucks of the world who face the tedious obstacle of a woman wearing headphones, because how dare she. ... Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors: Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem. Her: Please leave me alone. Him: F*** YOU, YOU STUCK UP B****, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY. With 'advice' like this out there, it’s hardly any surprise, is it? These lonely men so desperately in search of conquests have been given permission, blessed with the entitlement to go forth and pluck their bounty using but five humble steps. So imagine their horror and indignation when that which has been promised doesn’t want to be plucked and tells them to sling their greasy hook."

Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy - article by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian, extracted from his book What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania). "Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the 'masses' who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in 'revolt'. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people.... The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.... The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad."

David Hare on writing nothing but the truth about a Holocaust denier - article by David Hare in The Guardian, concerning his screenplay for the film 'Denial'. "In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of the second world war from the Nazi point of view, had sued Lipstadt in the high court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book Denying the Holocaust had done damage to his reputation.... In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and by Participant Media to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen... It was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to interpret facts differently, they do not have the right knowingly to misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were 32 days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-fascist critic later to claim that I had re-written the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim.... During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that’s my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."

Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor - article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian. "The author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was only 22 years old when it was published and just four years earlier he had barely been able to speak a word of English. His name was Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann – subsequently anglicized to Ernest Borneman – and he had arrived in London as a communist refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. In Berlin he had already made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and worked for Wilhelm Reich’s Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research. Somewhere along the way, either in Germany or London or both, he also worked as a film editor and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso of the cutting room.... Graham MacInnes’s memoir One Man’s Documentary gives a vivid portrait of Borneman at work as a film editor. Watching him make sense of the vast mass of footage assembled for a naval documentary called Action Stations, MacInnes [wrote:]... 'To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping “outs” of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of “takes” from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation."

Are the rules better off broken? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war.... The manual is a guide to the art of 'purposeful stupidity' – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered. 'Insist on doing everything through "channels",' one section advises. 'Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.' When possible, 'refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.' Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead. ... The really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out [in their 2015 book also called Simple Sabotage], is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. ... Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do."

So who put the cyber into cybersex? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Where did the 'cyber' in 'cyberspace' come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer.... But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948....As a 'transdiscipline' that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day. ... Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing.... For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s. From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunner’s capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent – but often overlooked – theme in the evolution of computing."

We're the Superhumans: meet the stars of Channel 4’s Paralympics trailer - article by Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian. "The extraordindary clip, which has been watched by millions, pays tribute to 140 people with disabilities – from a man who drums with his feet to a record-breaking wheelchair racer..."

Writing for an audience: doing history in public - article by Carys Brown (First Year PhD student) in [Cambridge University] History Faculty Newsletter Issue 7 August 2016. "When I joined the editorial team of the Faculty’s graduate blog, Doing History in Public (https://doinghistoryinpublic.org), in 2015, it was mainly because of an interest in public history. What I did not expect was that editing and writing for an online blog would change the way I thought about my academic writing.... The most frightening difference for me, to start with, was the absence of footnotes.... Without them I felt like I was making it all up. I wasn’t, but my reaction did make me reflect more carefully on the power of claims I was making.... A further temptation in academic writing is the use of complex language.... Even specialist readers have a low tolerance for unnecessarily long or complex sentences. Personally, I know that the more subordinate clauses my sentences have, the more confused I am.... For me, ... trying to write outside my academic comfort zone continues to be a great help as I undertake my research, and one which I would recommend to anyone."

A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’ - interview article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "An intensive inquiry into the nature and structure of narrative, McKee’s 'Story seminar' has been running in one form or another since he first gave the lecture at the University of Southern California in 1983. McKee credits himself with inventing the language of Hollywood – with its talk of the 'mid-point climax', the 'inciting incident' and the 'negation of the negation', a phrase that originated with Hegel, but in movies means something like “the ultimate negative”: a fallen hero who is not merely defeated but wants to die, or a character who doesn’t simply lose faith in God but begins to hate God. His claim is not an empty boast. So prominent is McKee in film-making circles that he had the rare honour, for a writing teacher, to be depicted at some length – satirically, but not without tenderness – by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman-written film Adaptation. Kaufman, not incidentally, also distrusts 'craft'...."

Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the 'freedom to choose what is always the same'. 'Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies,' argues Ross. 'Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive.' In the late 1990s, as an arts editor at the Guardian, I commissioned an article to explore the perils of customised culture. The idea was to question the tailoring of cultural products to your tastes, the whole 'If you liked that, you’ll love this' thing. Wasn’t the point of art, I thought then, to blast through the continuum of one’s tastes rather than pander to them? John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, once said that good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need. When the piece came in, several of my colleagues wondered: what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."

Play All by Clive James: how box sets saved us from reality TV and Hollywood - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "With this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form.... James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.... What he loves about box-set drama is that, even though it isn’t always great, it is made by people who believe in the product. 'There never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism,' he writes – a description that could also apply to his own work. He shares with these serial dramas a fiercely intelligent populism, a willingness to play to the crowd while trusting that they will be able to keep up without too much plot summary or hand-holding. To despise the crowd-pleasing impulse of Game of Thrones, he writes, 'you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the 20th century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught.'"

Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it can imagine a technological futurity where whatever it is that makes us human not only survives, but flourishes. In Space Seed, Khan, a eugenically-engineered superman cryogenically frozen since the 1990s, declares, 'I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little Man himself has changed!' Well, good. In The Ultimate Computer, Kirk faces the prospect of being replaced as captain by artificial intelligence. The future’s automated world looks set to lose its last human element. Only, of course, it doesn’t: the new supercomputer turns murderous; the human touch remains indispensable. Out there, in eternity, the human version of living stands as one of the richest, valuable in its capacity for imagination and spontaneity, gentleness and courage."

The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers - interviews by Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Peter Saville on the cover to Autobhan (1974) by Kraftwerk: "Autobahn was the first album I ever bought, after I heard the single on the radio. In 1974, as a teenager who had never been abroad, listening to the full 22-minute title track while staring at the autobahn symbol on the sleeve felt like being taken on a journey. I was on a European highway, in a soundscape crafted by classically trained musicians, seeing cathedrals and power stations, villages and skyscrapers, ancient and modern, in time as well as distance. It was a continental tour – from gothic to postmodern, from the dark ages to Brigitte Bardot – with the pulsebeat of a speeding vehicle. All defined in a simple symbol. As a fledgling visual artist, this was my first lesson in semiotics. I realised that visual codes acted as keys to unlock the huge range of potential awareness in an audience."

Missing the Zeitgeist - article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life. The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being 'more objective'. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the 'objectivity' of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet."

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