Social media firms face a safety reckoning after the Molly Russell inquest –
Guardian Techscape newsletter by Dan Milmo. “Molly, from north-west London, died in 2017 after viewing extensive amounts of online content related to suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety. In what the NSPCC described as a global first, the senior coroner said social media had contributed to Molly’s death, ruling that that Molly had died from 'an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content'.... If there was one point during the two-week hearing when the case for tougher online regulation became overwhelming, it was during Meta executive Elizabeth Lagone’s testimony. The head of health and wellbeing policy at Mark Zuckerberg’s company was taken through a selection of the Instagram posts the teenager had viewed in the six months before her death – deeming many of them to be 'safe' for children to view. It was not an opinion shared by many in the room at North London coroner’s court.... Molly’s father, Ian, was scathing about the 'safe' assessment. Speaking at the end of the two-week hearing, he said: 'If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive and instead of being a bereaved family of four, there would be five of us looking forward to a life full of purpose and promise that lay ahead for our adorable Molly.'... The impact of Lagone’s two-day appearance, and of what happened to Molly, was to damage faith that a major social media platform could be relied on to police its content and systems without a wider regulatory framework to ensure it is done properly.”
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins: anecdotes, elephants and ‘an embuggerance’ –review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in
The Observer. “Caring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before; here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia.... After hearing Jilly Cooper talk about her invaluable PA, Pratchett was filled with staff envy and hired Wilkins as an assistant. Over the years, the role grew into that of amanuensis and 'keeper of the anecdotes'. The first half of this book is Wilkins curating these stories.... As Pratchett needed more and more assistance, his personal assistant became more important to him. ...Towards the end, Wilkins had to hold Pratchett’s hand and guide him through his last explorations of the Discworld. Outside family, Wilkins probably knew Pratchett better than anyone else and it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer’s working life, with its arguments and doubts, naps and negotiations. This is not a hagiography. The Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain, and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him.”
Britain is learning a painful lesson: what happens in ‘emerging markets’ could also happen here - article by Kojo Koram in
The Guardian. "It has become fashionable among experts to compare Britain’s economy, once a global superpower, to that of an 'emerging market'.... For those who live in Britain, it can be shocking to hear such labels applied to a 'developed' country like our own. It runs counter to the history we were taught and the belief we were raised with: that as Britain was the birthplace of industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, it sits at the forefront of a linear path of development.... But what does it mean to be described in the language of an emerging market?... On face value, the descriptor of being an emerging market seems to be a compliment – you are emerging, realising your potential, one for the future. In reality, the label of 'emerging' is a shorthand for volatility and political instability. Ten years ago, emerging markets were 'developing' nations; 30 years before that, they were 'third world' nations. Now, instead of talking about civilisational hierarchies, different countries have instead been grouped together and rechristened by economists in the bloodless language of 'emerging markets'. It provides a hopeful narrative of history as a one-way road for all of humanity towards a happy destination.... These assumptions have been upturned of late. Across the country, communities have seen their living standards collapse beyond the point they assumed was possible in a 'developed' country like Britain. In the midst of this economic crisis, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng embarked on a fiscal gamble that rested on their belief that Britain still possessed an inherent trustworthiness in the eyes of global investors.”
‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive – article by Simon Usborne in
The Guardian. “The BBC’s attitude towards preserving and using its broadcasts has transformed in the 100 years since it was formed in October 1922. The technology didn’t exist to record the earliest programmes, which were all broadcast live. When recording television became possible, starting in 1947 with a variety show at Alexandra Palace, the cost of tape made keeping programmes too expensive. Most tapes were overwritten and eventually binned. Where it happened, archiving could be haphazard. Some recordings were kept only long enough for repeats to be aired in the days when film reels were used to play out recorded programmes. ... As the cost of archiving came down with new technology in the 1970s, the BBC also came to realise the value of preserving more. In 1981, the corporation added to its charter a requirement to keep everything. Digital archiving began with all radio in 2007, and all TV from 2015. Today, thousands of hours of TV and radio are constantly – and automatically – uploaded and preserved.... But the real value in the digitisation process has been the capacity to mine the archive for treasures that had become lost within it. Major recent advances in automated transcription technology have been vital. Machine learning – the practice of teaching computers to make improvements by themselves – is helping the speech-to-text system identify speakers and cope with accents and obscure words. Until recently, you couldn’t search the archive for much more than programme names. Now it can be searched for anything.”
Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works - article by Catherine Taylor in
The Guardian. "For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature ....
The Years covers six decades of social and personal history, from Ernaux’s working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy – where she was born in 1940 – through the 1968 student uprisings, initial joy and later disillusionment during the long presidency of François Mitterand in the 1980s and 90s and on into the new millennium. It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans – all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word 'I'. The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as 'uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.'”
A Locus of Care: Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022) – post by Justin E.H. Smith, referenced in John Naughton's
Memex 1.1 blog. “If we had had the sad task of writing an elegy for Bruno Latour in, say, 1985, he would indeed have been principally distinguished for his role in the emergence of 'science and technology studies'... This tendency generally took the scientific discovery of new truths to be largely narrative, and took all the other stuff that goes on in the course of scientific discovery —competition, infighting, networks, ideology— to be just as relevant to our understanding of what science is as are the discoveries on which the scientists themselves would invariably prefer that we focus.... Latour, in any case, certainly understood that construction is not the same thing as deconstruction, that to explain the social dimensions of a given object of our scientific ontology is not to explain that object away. In this light, Latour’s much-discussed 2004 article, “
Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, easily appears not so much as a road-to-Damascus moment, or as a radical conversion away from everything he had promoted before, but rather simply as a refinement, an honest update to a general and consistent approach in light of lessons learned from a changing world.... it is not so hard to see why, around 2004, it could easily have seemed to an honest and lucid theorist such as Latour that this was a very good moment indeed to take a break from warning about the danger of premature naturalization of what an institutionally elite class of people uses its power to anoint as 'facts', and instead to start to think, but really hard, about how facts and values might be brought together again, or perhaps not again, but for the first time, in such a way as to contribute to human flourishing. This then is where we start to see the full significance of the second part of the 2004 article’s title: 'From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern'. ... We are left with the surprising realization that 'things' are, in their original and most archaic sense, political.... So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern).... In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of 'objectivity' has led us ... it might be better to retrain our focus on 'things'. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal.”
Bruno Latour – obituary by Stuart Jeffries in
The Guardian. “For many years, [Latour] was treated as a typically irresponsible French postmodern theorist, scandalously arguing that science did not discover truths, but constructed them. He was one of the French philosophers indicted for intellectual charlatanism in the physicist Alan Sokal’s 1997 book Intellectual Impostures. Sokal charged that Latour was a pernicious anything-goes relativist who believed that facts were social constructions.... Latour denied he was a relativist, but rather that he was drawing attention to how day-to-day lab research worked. It was hardly a progression towards unveiling facts or truth but a disorderly mass of observations, inconclusive results and fledgling theories that were systematically erased when research results were presented as facts. What Sokal failed to grasp, Latour argued, is that 'facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media'. With the rise of alternative facts, he argued, whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” – that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible. Latour did not produce our post-truth age, but foresaw how it could arise."
‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: how stories teach empathy – article by George Saunders in
The Guardian. “I once wrote a story called The Barber’s Unhappiness. In the town where we were living, there was a barber who spent a lot of time out front of his shop, smoking and ogling women. He ogled in an obnoxious but egalitarian way: old women, young women, women whose faces were passing by on the sides of buses – it didn’t matter. I was a new husband, the father of two baby daughters, and a freshly minted feminist, so decided to, in prose, crucify him... But soon the humour started wearing thin and the story flatlined. I kept writing different versions (hundreds of pages’ worth) of the same scene, in which my barber (once again, still, over and over) kept being wrong in exactly the same way.... The problem was, I’d made my barber a concept: The Terrible Sexist. It was as if I’d built a robot and trained it to walk only in a straight line, then was unhappy because it never went around corners. Also, I noted, I didn’t like him. Why would I? It’s hard to like a robot as he keeps robotically doing the obnoxious thing you’ve programmed him to do.... One way to make a character more likable is to make him more vulnerable. (Give the robot a bad wheel.)... For my barber, ... I lopped off all the toes on one of his feet. He was still a jerk (still harsh, still sexist, still went around rejecting women for not being attractive enough, although, even factoring out the foot thing, he wasn’t all that attractive himself) but now he had no toes on that foot, poor bastard. And was self-conscious about his feet in his private moments, like I’d been, and, as I’d done, he dreaded going to the beach, which of course, in the story, I immediately made him do. Before this, I’d known what I thought of him. Now I wasn’t sure. I’d confused myself. Did I like this guy or not? Was I for him or against him? ... I didn’t know what to think of him and neither did the reader. What resulted was increased dramatic tension. The reader found herself doing a sort of mental squinting, wondering whether I meant for her to like this barber or not, walking forward into the mist of the story alongside me, trying to figure it out.”
‘Unlike anything you’ve ever played’: Immortality, the video game that’s actually three movies – article by Keza MacDonald in
The Guardian. “The first thing you see when you load up Immortality is a talkshow clip from the late 1960s, in which a bright-eyed, red-haired young actor is being interviewed about her recent starring role in a film called Ambrosio, an adaptation of a 1796 novel about a devil temptress who draws a monk down the path of sin. This is Marissa Marcel, who was at this point on the brink of stardom – but this film she appears in, with an eminent but slimy director, is never released. Her next picture, an erotic thriller about art and murder, also never makes it into theatres. She retreats into obscurity for a long time, before emerging for a comeback in the 1990s in a Lynchian thriller about artifice and celebrity – but that film, too, is lost, and after that she disappears entirely. The question of what happened to Marissa is an irresistible mystery – and you, the player, now have access to a full archive of clips, rushes and behind-the-scenes footage from her career. Somewhere within these segments, you can find the answer. Freezing the footage and zooming in on any detail – a plant, a mug, a director’s slate – will transport you to another clip in which that same thing appears. You time-travel through the decades, jumping between all three films, following motifs or particular actors, slowly piecing together not just what happens in the movies, but what happens to the people who are making them. Put together, these three films tell a story about film-making, about the price of art, and about Hollywood’s exploitation of women. But it is in the way that you experience them – recreating them piecemeal by following your intuition, noticing something in an actor’s face or an off-camera comment, diving down rabbit holes and discovering that they are deep and branching – that the true story of Immortality is told. It is a delicate and multilayered mystery that you unravel yourself, scrubbing through these scenes and searching for clues. As a player, you reach a turning point after maybe an hour, maybe two, when you’ll be watching a scene and think, wait – did I just see what I thought I saw? You’ll wind it back. Watch again. Follow the thread. And an extraordinary mystery starts to reveal itself at the centre.”
The big idea: is cooperation always a force for good? – article by Nichola Raihani in
The Guardian. “We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. ... Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering.... But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. ... Cooperation is, at heart, a means by which entities – be they genes, cells or individuals – improve their own position in the world. It’s important to note that this doesn’t imply that all cooperation is strategic and calculated. But cooperation is essentially a form of competition and, therefore, frequently has victims.... Oil and gas giants, for example, work together via powerful trade associations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on lobbying aimed at watering down or blocking climate crisis policies. Cooperation of this sort wields the potential for destruction on a planetary scale.... Cooperation has carried us this far in our journey, but if we don’t find ways to be better at it – to scale it to the global problems we face – we risk becoming the victims of our own success.”
The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas: why it pays to talk in a polarised world – review by Emma Brocks in
The Guardian. “The Persuaders [identifies] strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause.... Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: 'Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.'... By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning.... 'Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to "Boy, have I got a problem for you!”' – proven to be a big downer at the polls. 'You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.'”
My small, doomed stand against Thatcher’s war on truth – article by Simon Petherick in
The Guardian. “Six years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called the Central Office Of Information.... The department’s role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party.... Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government was doing. I liked that.... By the time I left, seven years later, the COI was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t 'objective information'. During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Advertising and public relations and lobbying agencies now clustered around Number 10 like flies over treacle, and the idea of truth had evaporated. Something got lost in those years. It is difficult to imagine the administrations of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss without the preparatory demolition of the foundations that Thatcher carried out. Never again would our governments allow us the dignity of knowing the facts and drawing our own conclusions from them.”
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen review: damning account of deregulation – review by Rowan Moore in
The Guardian. “A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned.... Apps traces the tale of deregulation back to the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary Michael Heseltine, citing builders’ complaints of 'delays and costs', made 'radical changes' to the building regulations. This and successive administrations would then progressively loosen the system. Prescriptive rules were replaced by 'performance-based' guidance. Builders gained the right to 'self-certify', which means that they themselves can determine whether they are meeting regulations rather than ask a publicly appointed inspector. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.”
What’s the shortest joke? What’s the smallest possible ratio of words to laughter? – readers' replies to 'Notes and Queries' in
The Guardian. “Free briefcase, no catches.... Budgies, going cheap.... What's brown and sticky? A stick.... Two elephants fall off a cliff. Boom! Boom!... Cork man drowns.... Truss.”
