Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari: the truth about language – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining.... Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life.... This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English. Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. ... Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land... Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used.... But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that 'decimate' comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)" See an extract from the book.
Britain’s infrastructure is breaking down. And here’s why no one’s fixing it – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Politicians bemoan the loss of community, but that resonant word is not precise enough. A large part of what’s missing is social infrastructure. It can be public or private. It is often slightly dog-eared and usually overlooked. But when it vanishes, the social damage can be huge.... When it comes to transport or energy or sewage, Britain has a National Infrastructure Commission that monitors the country’s needs and guides parliament on where to direct spending. After all, the quality of such hard infrastructure influences where multinationals set up shop: it is money-making. But parks and libraries don’t generate cash. Social infrastructure has no lobby, no registry of assets and certainly no government agency. No Whitehall official monitors how much of it has closed or withered away – that relies on civil society groups to file freedom of information requests or badger town halls with survey. Everyone knows we need it, yet just as our economic model prizes shareholder returns over investment in the National Grid, so our politics relies on drawing in the voters with unfeasibly low taxes. Until one day, something breaks and all hell breaks loose."
This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev: quietly frightening – review by Steve Bloomfield in The Guardian. "Part memoir, part investigation, part cry for help, This Is Not Propaganda tours the world and delves into archives, telling the stories of the new information wars, interwoven with passages about Pomerantsev’s parents’ lives. Igor and Lina were Soviet dissidents, harassed by the KGB and eventually deported, for 'the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted'. Those rights now exist almost everywhere, but more information has not necessarily meant more freedom. While autocratic regimes once controlled the narrative by silencing opponents, they now seek to confuse their populations by bombarding them with false information, half truths and competing narratives. It’s a strategy that Pomerantsev describes as 'censorship through noise', or as one of his interviewees, law professor Tim Wu, puts it, states have moved from 'an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance'."
Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell – quote from a software engineer in a New Yorker article by Anna Wiener, reproduced in this blog post by John Naughton."These are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail. They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with."
The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour: our descent into a digital dystopia – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Technology, as Richard Seymour says, always boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary paranoia.... The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no innate morality, but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our attention and modify our behaviour.... The title of Seymour’s inflamed polemic comes from a painting by Paul Klee, in which a row of avian predators 'squawk discordantly', enticing victims into a bloody pit." See an extract from the book.
There’s an idea that could transform Britain, but Brexit won’t let it be heard – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "An idea that would utterly transform the public services we rely on from cradle to grave[,] an idea so bold and innovative it is winning admirers all over the world, its author summoned to address governments from Scandinavia to Latin America, [is] all but ignored by the national government of the author’s home country, whose bandwidth is consumed entirely by Brexit. It comes from a social entrepreneur by the name of Hilary Cottam.... In Radical Help – a book that’s been published from Denmark to South Korea – she describes five “experiments” in different areas of public provision, touching on every stage of life: adolescence, work, healthcare, social care for the elderly and social work for so-called troubled families. ... Take Circle, a scheme aimed at the elderly. Much of the current discussion about elderly care focuses on budgets and structures, imagining a new multibillion-pound institution on a par with the NHS. But Cottam started with the most fundamental unit of all: a single human being. ... Circle connected older people with each other in similar ways, seeing the elderly not as a burden to be managed but as a vast potential resource: one might help another with the shopping, someone else might do a bit in the garden or just pop by for a chat. ... The core insight of Radical Help [is] that what can turn lives around is not a hulking bureaucracy of targets and tick-boxes, but simple, human relationships. ... Some will hear this as a David Cameron-style, 'big society' shift away from state provision. But Cottam is clear. The state is essential, both as a financial provider and to set a lead. It’s just that it needs to do its work differently. This, she insists, is not a project of the right but the left. Not for nothing did one Scandinavian newspaper ask if Cottam’s vision was 'the antidote to neoliberalism'."
The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk – interview by Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. "What if the spread of hate is less like the spread of cancer through the proverbial body politic and more like … the formation of bubbles in a boiling pot of water? That is the contention of Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University and the lead author on a study published this week in Nature analyzing the spread of online hate. ... Johnson’s unusual approach has resulted in some surprising conclusions – he says all online hate globally originates from just 1,000 online 'clusters' – as well as counterintuitive policy proposals. ... 'We looked at the behavior of the data, of the numbers, and saw that it is similar [to chemical bonding].... If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, you’re getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities.... [The first policy proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones – and we showed this mathematically – rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply. Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart."
Can too much bad TV lead to populism? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "Researchers studied the growth of the Italian broadcaster Mediaset, and found that those heavily exposed as children to its pabulum of cartoons, soap operas and quiz shows were almost 10% more likely to support populists, because poorer cognitive skills left them more susceptible to politicians peddling simplistic arguments.... it’s crucial to grasp that this sort of 'dumbing down' doesn’t happen because bad TV somehow injects stupidity into people’s heads. It’s about the opportunity cost: every hour you’re sitting in front of a rubbish cartoon is an hour you’re not reading, exploring the physical world, or watching educational programming. The same is true of video games, social media and so on. They don’t have to be bad to be bad; they just have to get in the way of your doing something better.... [Media theorist] Neil Postman’s most famous book, Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985), is unsettlingly prescient on the modern attention economy, which, far from keeping us informed, 'leads [us] away from knowing'."
This reckless confrontation with parliament is just what millions of voters want – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament is outrageous are beyond doubt. But ... too much of the country remains uninterested, and plenty of other people have concluded that Johnson has done the right thing.... In the 21st century, representative democracy is a very tough sell. When people spend half their lives online and can experience at least the sensation of agency and instant gratification, the idea that we elect MPs to exercise their own judgment and then eventually submit their record for approval or rejection can easily seem woefully old-fashioned. I have lost count of the number of people I have met over the last few years who have angrily told me that the function of the Commons was to simply 'do our bidding'.... It is no accident that, like so many populist forces, Nigel Farage’s Brexit party claims to be in favour of direct democracy. ... In contrast to the forces on the other side who are currently running rampant, so far, we have neither the ideas nor the language to even start – so, in the meantime, politics is going to carry on channelling awful division and opening up profound dangers.... Their opportunity lies in the chasm between this week’s protests and the millions of people who either avert their eyes or see them as so much liberal, remainer nonsense; it is also our side’s greatest challenge, whose urgency, even now, has yet to sink in."
