Cuttings: November 2023

Absolute PowerPoint – article by Ian Parker in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Forty years ago, a workplace meeting was a discussion with your immediate colleagues. Engineers would meet with other engineers and talk in the language of engineering. A manager might make an appearance—acting as an interpreter, a bridge to the rest of the company—but no one from the marketing or production or sales department would be there….But the structure of American industry changed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Clifford Nass, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Stanford, says, ‘Companies weren’t discovering things in the laboratory and then trying to convince consumers to buy them. They were discovering—or creating—consumer demand, figuring out what they can convince consumers they need, then going to the laboratory and saying, “Build this!”’… America began to go to more meetings. By the early nineteen-eighties, when the story of PowerPoint starts, employees had to find ways to talk to colleagues from other departments, colleagues who spoke a different language… In this environment, visual aids were bound to thrive. In 1975, fifty thousand overhead projectors were sold in America. By 1985, that figure had increased to more than a hundred and twenty thousand.“

The big idea: why we should spend more time talking to strangers – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, whose course on the science of wellbeing, the most popular in Yale’s 300-year history, is now available for free online[,]... teaches that the pursuit of happiness is often counterintuitive. The things we think will make us feel happier – acing exams, securing a dream job, buying that dress – usually don’t, but small habits can make a big difference. One of them is talking to strangers. While we tend to focus on our close relationships, psychologists have noticed that even what they call 'minimal social interactions' can make us feel happier and more connected. One study found that people who had a brief chat with their barista, or simply made eye contact and smiled, felt happier and experienced a greater sense of belonging than those who treated the human being in front of them as an extension of the coffee machine. A 2014 paper poignantly titled “Mistakenly seeking solitude” found that people who were instructed to talk to fellow passengers on Chicago public transport felt more positive about their commute than those who didn’t. The researchers observed that we consistently underestimate how much we will enjoy speaking to a stranger, and how much a stranger will enjoy speaking to us... We assume that among strangers it’s best to stick to small talk, but when people in studies are instructed to go deep with someone they don’t know, they surprise themselves with how enjoyable – and unawkward – it is."

‘The good guys don’t always win’: Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him – Salman Rushdie's acceptance speech for the German peace prize, reproduced in The Guardian. "What I have always found attractive about the [animal fables of the] Panchatantra ... is that many of them do not moralise. They do not preach goodness or virtue or modesty or honesty or restraint. Cunning and strategy and amorality often overcome all opposition. The good guys don’t always win. (It’s not even always clear who the good guys are.) For this reason they seem, to the modern reader, uncannily contemporary – because we, the modern readers, live in a world of amorality and shamelessness and treachery and cunning, in which bad guys everywhere have often won.... I have always been inspired by mythologies, folktales and fairytales, not because they contain miracles – talking animals or magic fishes – but because they encapsulate truth.... The storehouse of myth is rich indeed. There are the Greeks, of course, but also The Norse Prose and Poetic Edda. Aesop, Homer, the Ring of the Nibelung, the Celtic legends, and the three great Matters of Europe: the Matter of France, the body of stories around Charlemagne; the Matter of Rome, regarding that empire; and the Matter of Britain, the legends surrounding King Arthur. In Germany, you have the folktales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. However, in India, I grew up with the Panchatantra, and when I find myself, as I do at this moment, in between writing projects, it is to these crafty, devious jackals and crows and their like that I return, to ask them what story I should tell next. So far, they have never let me down. ... What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it broadly. We should of course defend speech that offends us, otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. To quote Cavafy, 'the barbarians are coming today', and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilisation, and in a culture war it may be that artists of all sorts – film-makers, actors, singers, writers – can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates."

‘Israeli talking points in Carrie Bradshaw’s voice’: what we can learn from two Israel-Palestine bestsellers – reviews by Jonathan Guyer in The Guardian. "The war between Israel and Hamas did not start on 7 October. But when did it begin? Two books that have shot to the top of national bestseller lists in recent weeks attempt to answer that question, through divergent histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict.... Both writers bring in personal and family histories to show readers how viscerally Palestinians and Israelis relate to a conflict both groups view as existential. Where the authors differ most is in how willing they are to engage with the other side’s perspective and narratives.... [Rashid] Khalidi engages in nuanced self-criticism, interviewing former diplomats to understand how Israel outmaneuvered the PLO in the 1990s, during the Oslo peace process that followed from Madrid, and how Arafat and the old guard had grown out of touch with a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He uses the framework of settler colonialism to explain the success of the Zionist movement in taking the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. He reads primary sources and documents conveying displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, to demonstrate how Israel has prevented an independent Palestine through six historical periods that constitute a century-long war against Palestinians.... [Noa Tishby's] writing is strongest when describing the formative roles her grandparents played in the Zionist movement in Europe and in the early days of the state of Israel. Her book begins by cementing the Jewish people’s biblical and religious connections to 'their tiny piece of ancestral land', and then recounts in detail antisemitism in Europe. In this book, Mandatory Palestine was 'mostly empty' and the Arabs were always trying to 'wipe the new Jewish state off the map'. She spends more space censuring the United Nations and its refugee aid work for Palestinians than in understanding how and why Israel displaced Palestinians. It’s only toward the end of her book that Tishby’s goal becomes clear: this is a guide to countering Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activism and the swelling of anti-Zionist perspectives on US college campuses — all told in the voice of Carrie Bradshaw.... For many audiences, especially those who didn’t receive these pro-Israel messages through Hebrew school or on a Birthright trip, it’s useful to see the Hasbara handbook updated for the 21st century, and the maps, bullet points and highly abridged timelines show how Israel sees itself in the world.... Tishby’s narrative can’t engage with actual Palestinians because it would undermine her entire perspective.... Most offensive is how she describes 1948, the catastrophe Palestinians call the Nakba. She emphasizes the Nakba’s 'sudden rebranding' that gained currency a couple of decades ago when the PLO inaugurated it as an annual occasion in 1998. She relies on passive voice to convey the official Israeli mythic version of Israel’s war of independence: 'blood was spilled, and atrocities were committed' and Arabs 'got pushed out'. Khalidi, for his part, goes into great depth on the 'violent transformation' of that year, notably the ethnic cleansing and land theft that would shape Israel’s establishment. He details the 'post-Nakba political vacuum' of Arab disunity and complex intra-Palestinian politics, which Tishby tends to dismiss as a hot mess and indicative of the absence of a real Palestinian identity or a claim on the land."

A discussion with Naomi Klein on wellness culture: ‘We really are alive on the knife’s edge’ – interview by Katherine Rowland in The Guardian.  Rowland: "You’ve noted that there are a number of people who are in the business of bodies who appear to have been especially seduced by the mirror world. Chiropractors, juice enthusiasts, yogis – they’ve portaged their interests in health towards rabid, far-right belief systems." Klein: "First of all, we have to be clear that it’s not everyone – but fitness really was kind of on the front line. I was in New Jersey for the first few months of the pandemic and the two groups that were organizing most in those early days were the very religious, and the very fit. Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms? And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray.... I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: 'Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.' And the answer from one worshipper was: 'No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.' I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming."

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: the astronaut’s view – review by Alexandra Harris in The Guardian. "Harvey has long been a fearless explorer in wild places. She started with The Wilderness, accompanying a man with Alzheimer’s into regions far out beyond the usual signposts of today’s date and the prime minister’s name. Each book since then has been as conceptually rugged as it is stylistically honed. In her 2018 novel The Western Wind, troubled parishioners make their confessions in a remote 15th-century village where the river breaks its banks and facts slip from their moorings. Then came a work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease, a bracing study of insomnia and its murky terrains. Space, by comparison, or at least the nearest region of space – 'Earth’s back garden”' – seems more knowable and less lonely. With this slender and stretchy fifth novel, Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye.... The astronauts go about their laboratory tasks, monitoring microbes or the growth of cabbages. They work with a sense of vocation that is unabated after months on the mission. Nothing has dimmed for them. Earth is newly ravishing every moment as it moves with 'ringing, singing lightness' through the 'ballroom of space'. Sometimes the observers want to see the planet’s most theatrical displays, but often it’s the small things ('the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia') that most affect them. Even the atheists ponder whether those lucky enough to live on Earth might already have died and be in a heavenly afterlife.... Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom. We might miss the restless anger that tossed about in The Shapeless Unease, and the acerbic, downright forms of expression it found for itself. But Orbital offers vehement appreciation of the world in a range of tones and situations."

The traditional Chinese dance troupe China doesn’t want you to see – 2017 article by Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Guardian. "If you live in a major city in the western hemisphere, you have probably seen the image: a Chinese woman floating through the air, dress billowing out behind her, with the caption “Shen Yun – Art That Connects Heaven and Earth”. The adverts are for a company based in upstate New York that presents spectacles of Chinese traditional dance, in which a large cast performs intricate, synchronised routines to the pop-eastern sounds of a live orchestra.... According to the Chinese government, however, Shen Yun is the singing, dancing face of Falun Gong – which the government describes as a malevolent 'anti-society cult' that leads its followers to self-mutilation, suicide and murder.... It’s easy to dismiss Shen Yun as a campy curiosity, but Falun Gong practitioners have become some of the most outspoken opponents of the Beijing government. And so a kitschy dance show has become a preoccupation for the Chinese government – one of the battlegrounds on which the fight for the hearts and minds of westerners and overseas Chinese will be won, one ribbon dance at a time.... Since its inception, Shen Yun has gone out of its way to minimise its connection to Falun Gong.... The real story of Shen Yun, however, begins as a story of religious repression. Falun Gong (sometimes called Falun Dafa) is a spiritual movement that emerged out of the 'qigong boom' in China in the early 90s – an explosion of tai chi-like practices that claimed to promote health through specific movements and breathing.... Despite Beijing’s insistence, Falun Gong is not a cult; it’s a diffuse group without strong hierarchies, and there is no evidence of the kind of coercive control that the label suggests. But it is strange. Without the ballast of tradition, all new religions can feel absurd, and some of Li’s stranger comments have given the group the aura of an eastern version of Scientology. Falun Gong has moralistic, socially conservative beliefs, preaching against homosexuality and sex out of wedlock.... All of this has made them feel alien and less than sympathetic to the liberal westerners who would be their natural allies. Falun Gong practitioners were being repressed, sure, but there was something unnerving about the group’s bizarre worldview. At a certain point, persecution doesn’t breed sympathy – it breeds a kind of contempt. The tenth time someone hands you a pamphlet about the Chinese government oppressing Falun Gong, your impulse isn’t to write to your local representative, it’s to cross the street. It is in this context – with Falun Gong persecuted in China, and treated increasingly warily in the west – that Shen Yun emerged."

The therapy session – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Client: I feel like I've finally learned to silence my inner critic when I'm writing. Therapist: And yet you're still having difficulties? Client: I think that's down to my outer critic. Critic (shouting in his ear): No, it's cos you're a rubbish author!

A Shining by Jon Fosse: a spiritual journey – review by Lauren Groff in The Guardian. "One day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him. This could be the beginning of a horror story; it is, instead, the opening of A Shining, a slim new novella by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, our 2023 Nobel laureate in literature, whose fiction rather astonishingly dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds.... And though a thick, monologuing, metaphysical novel may seem daunting to a casual reader, one of Fosse’s peculiarities is how accessible his work is to nearly anyone who’ll allow themselves to simply succumb and let the gentle waves of his prose break over them. Some of this accessibility is surely due to Fosse’s translator into English, the great Damion Searls, whose intelligence, subtlety and attention to rhythm are again evident in A Shining. ... A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance."

I am so lonely and so isolated, I feel I’m living like a zombie – advice column by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. Reader: "I’m a 70-year-old guy who, for a long time, has been single and living alone. I took early retirement and volunteered full-time for a charity for several years before walking out in disgust in 2019. I’ve never had that many close friends and in the past five years I have been bizarrely abandoned/rejected by just about all the 'friends' I thought I had, including school friends, plus my only brother.... I’ve tried evening classes, speed dating, etc, in the past and they have made no difference. I’ve never recovered from my grammar school forcing me to give up languages – which I loved and was top in – and do science A-levels.... I feel I’ve wasted my life. I see no way out and fear succumbing to dementia, like my father, followed by a grisly end." Philippa replies: "You seem to be falling out with everyone, yet you are nice to me and don’t come over as a curmudgeon in your email.... It sounds as though you have brooded for a long time about having to give up languages and being made to study science. When you were a child, you did not have full agency over your life – other people made decisions for you. This lack of agency seems to have stuck somehow, so that your relationships and your life are still happening to you as though you don’t know how to make things happen for yourself. You love languages and yet what is not listed in the ways you spend your time is reading in any language. We all need to discover what it is we love and then go and do it. Not to do it for any future self, but to do it because it is enjoyable, interesting, absorbing and makes the best of now. Maybe languages feel like a lost love and to reignite that love may bring up sadness for the lost years. Don’t fear this sadness. It is telling you what you need to do now. It is surprising how hard it can be to indulge ourselves in the things that matter most. Our wishes, our hopes and dreams make us feel vulnerable. We may unconsciously shy away from them because there is a feeling somehow that if we fail at the things that matter most to us, we will then be truly lost."

Silicon Valley Fairy Dust – online article by Sherry Tuckle, referenced in John Naughton's Observer . column.  "When we are online, our lives are bought and sold in bits and pieces. From early on, pointing out this harm was most often met with a shrug. It was the cost of having social media 'for free,' then of having Gmail 'for free.' In the early years of Facebook, one young woman told me she wasn’t much concerned that Facebook was looking at her data. She said: 'Who would care about me and my little life?'... Well, Facebook did. Social media evolved to sell our private information in ways that fractured both our intimacy and our democracy. But even after so many people knew this, conversations about this, such as conversations about climate change, tried to not talk about its reality. Here is how Lana, who just graduated from college, talked about how she organizes herself to not think about the realities of online privacy: "On Facebook, I try to keep it light. So I don’t use Facebook for conversations of real consequence. And I’m glad not to have anything controversial on my mind because I can’t think of any online place where it would be safe to have controversial conversations." Now, in fact, Lana had no lack of controversial opinions. But we can hear her convincing herself that they are not worth expressing because her medium would be online, and there is no way to talk 'safely' there. This is Foucault brought down to earth. The politics of Facebook is a politics of tutelage in forgetting. Lana is learning to be a citizen in an authoritarian regime. Lana says she’ll worry about online privacy 'if something bad happens.' But something bad has already happened. She has learned to self-censor. She does not see herself as someone with a voice. In this small example, we see how our narrowed sense of privacy undermines the habits of thought that nurture democracy. The former chairman of Google once said that if you’re worried about privacy, don’t be a Luddite, 'Just be good.' In a democracy, we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected no matter what your techno-enthusiasms. You need space for real dissent. A mental space and a technical space. It’s a private space where people are free to 'not be good.' This conversation about technology, privacy, and democracy is not Luddite, and it is never too late to remember to have it."

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus – blog post by Charlie Stross, based on talk given for Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2021, writer and game designer Alex Blechman inadvertently created a meme: ‘Sci-Fi Author: "In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale."’ ‘Tech Company: "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus!"’ Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer... And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real…. The science fiction genre that today's billionaires grew up with—the genre of the 1970s—has a history going back to an American inventor and publisher called Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback founded the first magazine about electronics and radio in the United States, Modern Electrics, in 1908, but today he's best remembered as the founder of the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1926.… American SF was bootstrapped by a publisher feeding an engineering subculture with adverts for tools and components. There was an implicit ideology attached to this strain of science fiction right from the outset: the American Dream of capitalist success, mashed up with progress through modern technology, and a side-order of frontier colonialism…. Hugo Gernsback didn't consciously bring fascism into American SF, but the field was open to it by the 1930s. Possibly the most prominent contributor to far right thought in American science fiction was the editor John W. Campbell. Campbell edited Astouding Science Fiction, one of Amazing Stories rivals, from 1937 until 1971. (Astounding is still with us today, having changed its name to Analog in 1960.) Campbell discovered or promoted many now-famous authors, including Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and Jack Williamson. But Campbell was also an anti-communist red-baiter. He was overtly racist, an anti-feminist, and left his imprint on the genre as much by what he didn't publish as by what he did… Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.”

Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most – article by Roger Harding in The Guardian. Many of Rishi Sunak’s political decisions are baffling, but one that’s easy to understand is his recent rowing back from the UK’s climate commitments: he, like many creatures of Westminster, thinks working-class people don’t care much for climate action. This is a lazy stereotype and, predictably, did nothing for his poll numbers. The simple truth is this: when it comes to the climate crisis, working-class people are often the first to spot the changes occurring because even slight fluctuations can make or break family finances. That doesn’t mean this is the first subject working-class people raise when a canvasser knocks at the door or a pollster asks, but it is there in the background when deciding who to trust with our futures…. This isn’t abstract or something to worry about in the future: the implications are showing up right now in everyday life. Last year, for example, research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found the average food bill was £400 higher thanks to climate impacts and fossil-fuel costs. Working-class communities are significantly more likely to be flooded, and have less money and insurance to weather the storms…. Given all of this, we shouldn’t be surprised that polling last month … found what the group calls ‘loyal nationals’ (a term for ‘red wall’ voters) had the climate crisis and the environment fourth on their list of priorities. Politicians have got it wrong if they think attacking climate action presents an easy path to popularity.

‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros – article by Douglas Rushkoff in The Guardian. “Their words and actions suggest an approach to life, technology and business that I have come to call ‘The Mindset’ – a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. It’s a belief that with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals and exist on an entirely different level, or planet, altogether. By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while ‘God is dead’, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world ‘in his own interests’. … The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures. Musk and Zuckerberg challenge each other to duels as a way of advertising their platforms. Musk is less X’s CEO than its troll in chief. They are not gods; they are entertainers. Instead of emulating them, we should first laugh at them, and then dismiss them…. It’s time to turn off this show, this car accident of a tech future, and get on with reclaiming the world from this new generation of robber barons rather than continuing to fund their fantasies. These are not the demigods we’re looking for.”