Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry: a brilliant meditation on mortality – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022.... It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring.... Partly, this book works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism with which it recounts a particular, unrepeatable life.... Mostly, though, what makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world of council bin collections and neighbours hanging out their washing. Death, once it has decided to capture us, descends with the inevitability of gravity.... Along the way, the book becomes about something else – the care gifted by strangers who arrive miraculously, via form filling and phone calls, and then vanish for ever.... As a young, aspiring writer, Perry yearned for dramatic, painful experiences to give her something to write about. She wanted, she says, 'to hoard rubies and lose them, and spill ink into the loss'. But here she has written beautifully and compellingly about the life of an unexceptional man, and an experience that is coming to all of us – and shown that there is no such thing as an ordinary life, or an ordinary death."
A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0 – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "[The] social model of stupidity – [as described by Arendt and] crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis. Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The 'stupid' person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the 'smart' person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes. In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for 'big data'...: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition.... Thus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of 'common sense', but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents.... The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators.... In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the 'new conspiracism'.... The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and 'conspiracy entrepreneurs'. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.... Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human.... But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall ... expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism."
Do you know about shitposting? It’s cheap humour, rage bait, and now, it seems, US government policy – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "[The] combination of cheap humour and rage bait is the province of the shitpost, a genre of low-effort social media content designed to amuse insiders and annoy outsiders. Like so much of internet culture, shitposting was pioneered on the message board 4chan – but Donald Trump is a natural. On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, he tweeted: 'I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.' The shitpost forces a choice: undermine public decorum by laughing along, or get offended, outing yourself as a hater and a loser. ... Unencumbered by the establishment strategists who urged decorum during his first administration, Trump has elevated shitposting to a national strategy in his second term. [In September], the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a video of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents hauling civilians into unmarked vans, cut to the opening credits of the Pokémon television series. As the theme song’s refrain has it: 'Gotta Catch ’Em All'. On 4chan, home to the small but significant crossover of anime fans and the extreme right, posters debated whether the video was 'based' (internet slang meaning authentically cool and irreverent) or 'cringe' (shamefully straining for the approval the 'based' attain with ease). But the real target audience was liberals outraged not only by state violence but by its shameless public celebration. If the right dominates meme culture, it is less because the 'left can’t meme' than because it is far easier to 'own the libs' who remain committed to rational political discourse. Where liberals seek earnest debate, the shitpost offers a polemic without a point, an opportunity to indulge in cruelty."
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? – article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. "It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once.... In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification.... Stage 1: good to users. Amazon ... used [its] fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy. This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. ... Stage 2: abusing users, good to business. Amazon was initially very good to ... business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers.... Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls 'the flywheel'. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.... Stage 3: a giant pile of shit. Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself... It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a 'service' in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods."
A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0 – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "[The] social model of stupidity – [as described by Arendt and] crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis. Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The 'stupid' person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the 'smart' person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes. In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for 'big data'...: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition.... Thus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of 'common sense', but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents.... The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators.... In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the 'new conspiracism'.... The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and 'conspiracy entrepreneurs'. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.... Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human.... But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall ... expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism."
Do you know about shitposting? It’s cheap humour, rage bait, and now, it seems, US government policy – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "[The] combination of cheap humour and rage bait is the province of the shitpost, a genre of low-effort social media content designed to amuse insiders and annoy outsiders. Like so much of internet culture, shitposting was pioneered on the message board 4chan – but Donald Trump is a natural. On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, he tweeted: 'I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.' The shitpost forces a choice: undermine public decorum by laughing along, or get offended, outing yourself as a hater and a loser. ... Unencumbered by the establishment strategists who urged decorum during his first administration, Trump has elevated shitposting to a national strategy in his second term. [In September], the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a video of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents hauling civilians into unmarked vans, cut to the opening credits of the Pokémon television series. As the theme song’s refrain has it: 'Gotta Catch ’Em All'. On 4chan, home to the small but significant crossover of anime fans and the extreme right, posters debated whether the video was 'based' (internet slang meaning authentically cool and irreverent) or 'cringe' (shamefully straining for the approval the 'based' attain with ease). But the real target audience was liberals outraged not only by state violence but by its shameless public celebration. If the right dominates meme culture, it is less because the 'left can’t meme' than because it is far easier to 'own the libs' who remain committed to rational political discourse. Where liberals seek earnest debate, the shitpost offers a polemic without a point, an opportunity to indulge in cruelty."
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? – article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. "It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once.... In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification.... Stage 1: good to users. Amazon ... used [its] fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy. This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. ... Stage 2: abusing users, good to business. Amazon was initially very good to ... business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers.... Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls 'the flywheel'. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.... Stage 3: a giant pile of shit. Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself... It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a 'service' in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods."
The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes: wild times with young Tennyson – review by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. "Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul.... In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet’s personae.... What gives his book its exceptional energy ... is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down into the 'boundless deep' of the title, where 19th-century thinkers wrestled with terrible thoughts. In 2008, Holmes published The Age of Wonder, a group biography charting the way that Romantic poets responded to the discoveries of their scientific contemporaries such as Humphry Davy, William Herschel and Joseph Banks. That book was full of exuberant hopes. This one, set a generation later, is its darker, sadder sequel....If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit and enjoyment? 'It is inconceivable,' wrote Tennyson, 'that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.'... These conundrums were repressed. It was hard to confront them in public without being accused of blasphemy, or in private without seeming to give way to despair. ... [Holmes] takes seriously the pain of those living through the crisis of faith, and writes about it with such sympathy that even his most secular-minded modern readers feel the shock of finding oneself alone and unloved in a God-forsaken universe."
‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? – article by Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. "From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere.... But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.... Research into how generative AI affects child development is in its early stages, though it builds upon studies looking at less sophisticated forms of AI, such as digital voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Multiple studies have found that young children’s social interactions with AI tools differ subtly from those with humans, with children aged three to six appearing 'less active' in conversations with smart speakers. This finding suggests that children perceive AI agents as existing somewhere in the middle of the divide between animate and inanimate entities, according to Ying Xu, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Understanding whether an object is a living being or an artefact is an important cognitive development that helps a child gauge how much trust to place in the object, and what kind of relationship to form with it... Children begin to make this distinction in infancy and usually develop a sophisticated understanding of it by age nine or 10. But while children have always imbued inanimate objects such as teddy bears and dolls with imagined personalities and capacities, at some level they know that the magic is coming from their own minds. 'A very important indicator of a child anthropomorphizing AI is that they believe AI is having agency,' Xu said. 'If they believe that AI has agency, they might understand it as the AI wanting to talk to them or choosing to talk to them. They feel that the AI is responding to their messages, and especially emotional disclosures, in ways that are similar to how a human responds. That creates a risk that they actually believe they are building some sort of authentic relationship.'”
Sunder Katwala on race, patriotism and flag-waving: ‘The far right is vocal and angry because it is shrinking’ – interview with Steve Rose in The Guardian. "On the train to meet Sunder Katwala in Dartford, Kent, you pass streets with bright new Saint George’s flags on every lamp-post.... It’s the week after hundreds of thousands of people attended a flag-waving rally in central London led by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, rounding off a summer of protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and portentous warnings that Britain is a 'tinderbox' or even a 'powder keg' about to ignite. This is England in 2025. In Dartford’s pedestrianised town centre, though, it’s a different picture. People of all skin colours peacefully go about their business on a sunny afternoon. A busker is strumming next to the sculpture of local heroes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And crisscrossing the streets overhead are miles of Saint George’s flag bunting.... The bunting has been up since Saint George’s Day, [Katwala] explains. There was a big parade here in April, with local schoolchildren and brass bands. Then it stayed up for VE Day, then the England women’s victorious Euros football tournament this summer, which Katwala cheered on with his daughters, in an England shirt.... This is also England in 2025....If there are two versions of British identity pulling in different directions at the moment, then Katwala is one of the people trying to bring them together.... He laid out his philosophy on British identity in last year’s book, How to Be a Patriot, and his organisation British Future is geared toward finding common ground and constructive solutions when it comes to race and immigration.... The child of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse, born and raised in Britain, Katwala literally has skin in the game – as a product of and advocate for multiculturalism, but also as someone who’s been no stranger to the worst of British racism, not only back in the 1970s and 80s but also, regrettably, in the present day. 'I experienced much, much more racism on a daily basis this year, and in the last three years, than I did 30 years ago,' he says.... It would be easy to read [the recent rally] as 'far-right politics gone mainstream', but the picture is more complex than that. 'Three-quarters of those people wouldn’t think they were on a far-right rally,' he says. 'On the whole, in the long run, [the far right] is becoming more vocal, more angry and more dangerous because it is shrinking, but it definitely doesn’t think it is shrinking.' That makes it all the more concerning that such a large crowd can be drawn to such an event by other factors, such as general discontent over their economic circumstances. 'It’s a very effective strategy for the far right, to blur and try to dissolve all of the boundaries.'.. In surveys, more than half of Britons now see immigration as a concern – the highest level in a decade – but when you break it down into specific types of migrant, the numbers start to change, Katwala explains. Ask about foreign-born nurses and doctors in the NHS, for example, and almost nobody says they are not glad they are here. Then there’s a category of 'good people who work hard' – Polish plumbers, say, of whom most Britons also broadly approve. And 'there’s almost always a refugee you’re in favour of,' he says, such as Ukrainians fleeing the war, or Hongkongers leaving China. That leaves asylum-seekers arriving by boat across the Channel, who dominate the immigration conversation but make up only a small number of the total."
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies – article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. "The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain to revolutionise codebreaking during the second world war – a mind-boggling feat of creative innovation – but Turing wasn’t in the country at the time. Neither was it conceived by the mostly private school and Oxbridge-educated boffins at Bletchley Park. Rather, the machine Park staff called Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers, a cockney bricklayer’s son who for decades was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from acknowledging his achievement. Now, with his 120th birthday approaching and a Tommy Flowers Foundation established to right this historical wrong, he is finally getting some of his due ... Working in his lab at [the Post Office’s Dollis Hill Research Station in north London], visiting Bletchley as needed, Flowers improved [Cambridge mathematician Max Newman's] design for [a machine to break the Germans' post-Enigma 'Tunny' code] and oversaw its manufacture, but still considered it a poor machine. In response, in February 1943, he stunned the boffins with a plan for a fully electronic digital machine that would use thermionic valves as switches to generate and process the zeroes and ones used for binary calculation.... [Valves] had a reputation for constantly failing. Yet, having pioneered their use in automatic telephone exchanges, Flowers knew that if left switched on they were highly reliable. The idea of using valves as switches in a digital system was so new and radical that Flowers may have been the only person in Britain capable of seeing it – and of knowing they would be millions of times faster than the traditional electromechanical switches Newman used: he had already used them to build a prototype digital memory unit for the Post Office, a truly astonishing first. Nonetheless, Flowers later characterised the response he got at BP as 'incredulity'. Nothing like the machine he proposed, using 1,600 valves to perform digital calculations, had ever been contemplated."
Here’s what you need to know about Starmer’s illiberal protest curbs: they would have killed the Labour party at birth – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine a movement arising in this country that seeks to overthrow established power. Imagine that it begins with a series of rebellions, in Scotland and south Wales perhaps, that shut down workplaces, confront police and soldiers (sometimes peaceably, sometimes with crude weapons), set up roadblocks and lay siege to the places where fellow protesters are imprisoned and government officials are meeting. Imagine that this movement goes on to smash or disable machinery across the country. Imagine that it organises a general strike, nixing much of the UK’s economic activity for three months. Imagine that it keeps protesting in the same places by the same means, gradually eroding the resistance of the state. Keir Starmer’s Labour government would doubtless do everything in its power not just to stop these individual actions but to prohibit the movement. What am I describing? The origins and development of the Labour party. The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party. Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement."
A prophetic 1934 novel has found a surprising second life: it holds lessons for us all – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. See also 'English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life'. "Forgotten for decades, Sally Carson’s Bavaria-set Crooked Cross was republished in April by Persephone Books, which specialises in reviving neglected works. Since then, it has been a surprise hit, a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand. Crooked Cross begins in December 1932, and ends at midsummer the following year. The setting is the little, fictional Bavarian town of Kranach, a picture-postcard place in the foothills of the Alps. Its focus is the Kluger family – a modest, middle-class clan of kindly, loving parents and three grown-up children, Helmy, Lexa and Erich – who are gathering to celebrate Christmas with their cousins and Lexa’s fiance, Moritz. Everything is warm and delightful and full of promise: the tree with its glass baubles and candles, the tissue-wrapped presents, the carols, the roasted goose. Everything is gorgeously decorated, 'even' – one reads with a shudder that is deepened by a 21st-century knowledge of where [it] was all headed – 'Helmy’s picture of Hitler which stood on the piano'. One of the remarkable things about this book is its immediacy. It was written in the moment, and published quickly. The six-month period that it covers was one of momentous political change: Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis gained an effective majority in the Reichstag, Dachau was opened, and Jews were barred from public-service jobs. At the start of the novel, the characters greet each other with a cheery Grüss Gott; by the end, Herr Kluger is heil Hitler-ing acquaintances in the street and the local church bells have been altered so that they chime with the notes of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. Also by the end of this short six months, the loving, close circle of the Kluger family has fallen apart. The attentive reader will have noted, even within the first few pages, for example, that Lexa’s fiance Moritz Weissman, a good Roman Catholic emerging from Christmas mass, also happens to have a Jewish surname. Reading this novel, armed with the hindsight that Carson herself lacked, is a remarkable experience, at times painful.... What is so impressive about Carson is, despite the fact she had no idea where Hitlerism would end, the novel has an unshakeable moral core. There is no equivocation. What is being done in Germany to Jews, to communists, is plainly horrific, according to the novel’s worldview. Carson wrote – already in 1933 – of the grim stories emerging from Dachau: 'People had a way of suddenly disappearing, no trial, no explanation'; 'prisoners were half-starved, bullied, inhumanly treated'.... Crooked Cross gets no closer to Hitler than that photograph on the piano. All the politics happen at a distance, in the background, and are understood only as their effects filter down to the Klugers and their little town.... The Kluger family, like millions of families across Germany, is deeply marked by the great war, and shaped by economic collapse. The boys have never found meaningful work. Helmy is unemployed, and Erich has an unsatisfying job as a ski instructor. Carson shows us how extremism, when it takes hold, provides these young men with purpose, work, a narrative, hope and clearly defined roles. It also provides them with a set of people – leftwingers and Jews – to hate, to blame, to punish and, quite quickly, to beat and to kill. Carson’s iron sense of right and wrong runs in harness with her empathy. There is nothing inherently terrible about these young men who turn on other young men and turn violently on those who, months ago, were their friends. But they choose what they choose. The resonances with today are impossible to overlook. Would that we all had Carson’s insight and her moral clarity."
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Around two years ago, [MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna] began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how ... the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving? With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there. The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. 'Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,' Kosmyna says. 'That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.'... Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a 'stupidogenic society', a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?... As humans, we’re very good at what experts call cognitive offloading', namely using our physical environment to reduce our mental load, and this in turn helps us achieve more complex cognitive tasks.... The complication is, if technology is truly making us cleverer – turning us into efficient, information-processing machines – why do we spend so much time feeling dumb?.. One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk."
The Revolutionists by Jason Burke: from hijackings to holy war – review by Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. "In the 70s, ... commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history. Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs.... If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke’s antiheroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What counted was the excitement of the escapade, not the utopia it was meant to bring about. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an interpretative thread running through the disparate material: the failure of the left, Burke argues, left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by Islamism. At the beginning of the period, the prototypical radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian 'Grenade Girl' who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the US as Israel’s armourer. No lives were lost; prisoners were exchanged. By the end, it had become the pious jihadi, unbending and undeterred by the prospect of bodies piling up. Where leftist hijackers wanted publicity for Palestine, among other causes, Islamist suicide bombers embraced the annihilation of infidels. This was less the radicalisation of Islam than it was the Islamisation of radicalism. The fear that tropical communism – revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan – struck into Middle Eastern capitals ensured that oasis communism was nipped in the bud. Islamism, meanwhile, was accommodated as a counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom bankrolled Islamist terror."
Posh, proud and impossible to ignore: the incredible life of Annabel Goldsmith – article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "If the sitting Marquess of Londonderry died tomorrow, and in so doing bestowed a ladyhood on his 15-year-old granddaughter, would you ever know?... Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who died at home on Saturday at 91, lived through an era, by contrast, in which aristocracy and wealth were extremely public.... At the end of the 1940s, when she was 15, she became a lady when her grandfather died, and, believe me, everyone knew about it. When she had her coming-out ball in the 1950s, a young Queen Elizabeth attended, since the whole point was to be presented to the queen – it was social death for a debutante if she wasn’t. In the 1960s, she lent her name to Annabel’s, the nightclub set up by her first husband, Mark Birley, for poshos in London’s Berkeley Square.... Well into the 1970s, the aristocracy still had great cachet, and Annabel’s, the club, drew in a remarkable international A-list – Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Teddy Kennedy, David Hockney, Muhammad Ali. It’s not a given that anyone went there because they wanted to hang out with Princess Margaret and Prince Charles (as was). But certainly today, if you were, say, the singer Gracie Abrams, touching down in Heathrow and asking an underling where was the coolest place to hang out, they would not say, 'So-and-so’s is cool because Prince William goes there.' And non-royal blue bloods wouldn’t even have the name recognition to be considered and then rejected.... The structure of wealth has changed and globalised over the past century in ways we can discuss another day, but the distribution of land in the UK, from which a lot of the wealth and power can be inferred, has not altered as much as you’d think.... What is different is the cultural footprint. The display-case living of the postwar gentry and aristocracy relied on the kind of formulas celebrities have today: dates in the calendar; events that included everyone who was anyone; places from which the unwashed were certainly excluded, but that they were implicitly invited to observe.... Annabel Goldsmith lived through the last of that visibility. And while her death is not the moment to wonder what combination of class self-consciousness and outside scrutiny caused the aristocracy to go underground, it should be noted that, while it was still very much overground, she was the face and spirit of the whole scene."
The crimewave sweeping Britain? Illegal houses in multiple occupation – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Our crime scene is a redbrick townhouse built in the last years of Victoria – tall, battered but undeniably handsome.... Now look closer. Outside our house is a jumble of bags and trolleys and suitcases, while, despite the late-October chill, the front door is wide open. Knock at the very first room, and you meet our victim. Eunice Osei is a proud, reserved woman, but give her time and she will say: 'I’ve not been treated fairly.' Then she’ll cry. The crime is her room, a tiny hutch crammed with a kitchenette, toilet, bed and flimsy chipboard furniture. Clothes, kitchen utensils and suitcases are stacked so high against the grimy windows that light struggles to enter. We are swathed in murk, with nowhere to sit and hardly anywhere to stand. For three years, this holding pen has been her home. By a combination of ingenuity and greed, a family home has been broken down into 11 such cells. It’s become a house in multiple occupation, or HMO... Who’s the criminal: her landlord? Yes – literally. Andreas Stavrou Antoniades bought this house in 1990. How much he paid isn’t recorded by the Land Registry, but going by the local market then it wouldn’t have been much over £100,000. Just over 10 years later, he applied to split it into an HMO. When Haringey council refused, he just bulldozed the law. Without an HMO licence, he rented the rooms illegally.... But how did Eunice end up renting from this villain? Haringey council placed her there.... In one part of Haringey civic centre, officers chased a serial lawbreaker through the courts; in another, they sent him business, most of which will be paid for by the public, through universal credit.... The crime against Eunice is of making her life almost unlivable. What makes it so characteristic of modern Britain is how far the guilt spreads. Yes, there’s private-sector villainy, but there’s also public-sector complicity, by a council into its second decade of austerity. Then there are the courts, whose punishments are little more than 'the cost of doing business'. There is Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy and the failure to build enough social and affordable housing, nodded through again by housing secretary Steve Reed... Even the best achievement of this government, the renters’ protections that gain royal assent next week, will be somewhat blunted by the lack of new money to enforce the new law."
Smart money: family offers £180,000 a year for tutor to get one-year-old into Eton – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "A wealthy family near London is 'searching for a tutor to provide a comprehensive British cultural environment' for their infant, according to an advertisement published by Tutors International... To earn £180,000 [a year], the 'extraordinary' tutor is expected to fulfil a long list of eccentric and class-based criteria: a received pronunciation English accent; 'reasonable' music theory; an understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby, polo and rowing; the ability to foster hand-eye coordination and good manners; familiarity with early years education including Montessori and Reggio Emilia pedagogies; and first aid training.... The ideal candidate will have attended 'the best schools and universities in England' and 'have been raised in a socially appropriate background … educated and polished, with excellent manners and personal values'.... 'In time, the family hope their son will be accepted at a top-flight school such as Eton, St Paul’s, Westminster or Harrow. It is important that [the] boy’s education, even at the early years stage, starts to prepare him for this kind of life.. ...'He should be exposed to a wide range of quintessentially British experiences to help hone his habits, outlooks, tastes and sporting preferences.'"
‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? - interview by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, [Wikipedia] stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build 'a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge'.... Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan 'Wikipedia is an encyclopedia' is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent. It’s a no-nonsense 'lessons learned' book that might otherwise find itself occupying shelf space next to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO (subtitle: The 33 Laws of Business and Life) – but Wikipedia’s ubiquity, and the way it has dramatically bucked the trend of online toxicity – make it potentially far more significant.... Seven Rules is particularly strong on the importance of not taking sides, arguing that if people believe an institution isn’t neutral, trust evaporates. Crucially, that happens even if it’s biased in your favour. Wales cites work by Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania that looked at how people responded to political stands taken by all sorts of organisations, from newspapers to dental clinics to sports leagues. 'When people thought a group was politicised against their own political position, they trusted the group less. No surprise there. But when people thought the group had taken sides and was politically aligned with them … they still trusted them less.'... At the same time, neutrality and civility has its limits, doesn’t it? I mention a clever op-ed by Larry David that made this point, called My Dinner With Adolf, in which the comedian imagines breaking bread with the worst man in history. He ends with the line: 'I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.' What does Wales think about the risk that, in giving a fair hearing to all sides, you can fail in the moral duty to call out real wickedness? 'So I think we can make a distinction here between what I ought to do, what you ought to do, versus what an encyclopedia ought to do,' he says.... 'The Hitler entry doesn’t have to be a rant against Hitler. You just write down what he did, and it’s a damning indictment right there … you don’t need to add "PS, he’s a horrible person". You just say: "These are the facts, draw your own conclusions."' ... This separation of fact and sentiment seems pretty unusual nowadays. It’s no great mystery why: in the book, Wales talks about 'an entire class of "content creators" who have effectively been trained by social media algorithms to play up outrage, fear, and hate at every opportunity'. Part of the reason this has happened is because of the lack of guiding principles among web 2.0’s major players. 'Unlike Wikipedia, social media platforms have no purpose beyond selling eyeballs to advertisers, so there was nothing steering the development of norms toward civility and constructive conversation.'"
Say it, don't show it – Substack post by Neal Stephenson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “For the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows: ‘“Up with you,“ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.‘ If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle. A common bit of advice given to people who want to become writers is ‘show it, don’t say it.‘ Applied to the above scenario it would probably balloon the description to multiple pages. … And at the end, it wouldn’t actually be that funny. Not funny enough to be worth spilling that much ink. It would end up on the cutting room floor. As written, though, it works and it’s funny as hell, precisely because Dickens is just saying what happened, albeit in deliberately over-elaborate prose. He says it quickly and lets the reader play the scene out in their head. The only catch is that you, the reader, do actually have to get the joke. Dickens, or any other writer of the ‘say it‘ school (Jane Austen comes to mind) is implicitly asking the reader to know more and to do more during the act of reading this kind of prose. It’s almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.”
It’s the Internet, Stupid – post by Francis Fukuyama on Persuasion website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes: 1. Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies. 2. Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status. 3. Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts. 4. The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump. 5. The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure. 6. Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda. 7. Failures of leadership of the progressive Left. 8. Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion. 9. Social media and the internet.… I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.… The current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes…. This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. … Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously ‘truth‘ was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information…. There is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.”
‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? – article by Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. "From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere.... But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.... Research into how generative AI affects child development is in its early stages, though it builds upon studies looking at less sophisticated forms of AI, such as digital voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Multiple studies have found that young children’s social interactions with AI tools differ subtly from those with humans, with children aged three to six appearing 'less active' in conversations with smart speakers. This finding suggests that children perceive AI agents as existing somewhere in the middle of the divide between animate and inanimate entities, according to Ying Xu, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Understanding whether an object is a living being or an artefact is an important cognitive development that helps a child gauge how much trust to place in the object, and what kind of relationship to form with it... Children begin to make this distinction in infancy and usually develop a sophisticated understanding of it by age nine or 10. But while children have always imbued inanimate objects such as teddy bears and dolls with imagined personalities and capacities, at some level they know that the magic is coming from their own minds. 'A very important indicator of a child anthropomorphizing AI is that they believe AI is having agency,' Xu said. 'If they believe that AI has agency, they might understand it as the AI wanting to talk to them or choosing to talk to them. They feel that the AI is responding to their messages, and especially emotional disclosures, in ways that are similar to how a human responds. That creates a risk that they actually believe they are building some sort of authentic relationship.'”
Sunder Katwala on race, patriotism and flag-waving: ‘The far right is vocal and angry because it is shrinking’ – interview with Steve Rose in The Guardian. "On the train to meet Sunder Katwala in Dartford, Kent, you pass streets with bright new Saint George’s flags on every lamp-post.... It’s the week after hundreds of thousands of people attended a flag-waving rally in central London led by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, rounding off a summer of protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and portentous warnings that Britain is a 'tinderbox' or even a 'powder keg' about to ignite. This is England in 2025. In Dartford’s pedestrianised town centre, though, it’s a different picture. People of all skin colours peacefully go about their business on a sunny afternoon. A busker is strumming next to the sculpture of local heroes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And crisscrossing the streets overhead are miles of Saint George’s flag bunting.... The bunting has been up since Saint George’s Day, [Katwala] explains. There was a big parade here in April, with local schoolchildren and brass bands. Then it stayed up for VE Day, then the England women’s victorious Euros football tournament this summer, which Katwala cheered on with his daughters, in an England shirt.... This is also England in 2025....If there are two versions of British identity pulling in different directions at the moment, then Katwala is one of the people trying to bring them together.... He laid out his philosophy on British identity in last year’s book, How to Be a Patriot, and his organisation British Future is geared toward finding common ground and constructive solutions when it comes to race and immigration.... The child of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse, born and raised in Britain, Katwala literally has skin in the game – as a product of and advocate for multiculturalism, but also as someone who’s been no stranger to the worst of British racism, not only back in the 1970s and 80s but also, regrettably, in the present day. 'I experienced much, much more racism on a daily basis this year, and in the last three years, than I did 30 years ago,' he says.... It would be easy to read [the recent rally] as 'far-right politics gone mainstream', but the picture is more complex than that. 'Three-quarters of those people wouldn’t think they were on a far-right rally,' he says. 'On the whole, in the long run, [the far right] is becoming more vocal, more angry and more dangerous because it is shrinking, but it definitely doesn’t think it is shrinking.' That makes it all the more concerning that such a large crowd can be drawn to such an event by other factors, such as general discontent over their economic circumstances. 'It’s a very effective strategy for the far right, to blur and try to dissolve all of the boundaries.'.. In surveys, more than half of Britons now see immigration as a concern – the highest level in a decade – but when you break it down into specific types of migrant, the numbers start to change, Katwala explains. Ask about foreign-born nurses and doctors in the NHS, for example, and almost nobody says they are not glad they are here. Then there’s a category of 'good people who work hard' – Polish plumbers, say, of whom most Britons also broadly approve. And 'there’s almost always a refugee you’re in favour of,' he says, such as Ukrainians fleeing the war, or Hongkongers leaving China. That leaves asylum-seekers arriving by boat across the Channel, who dominate the immigration conversation but make up only a small number of the total."
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies – article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. "The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain to revolutionise codebreaking during the second world war – a mind-boggling feat of creative innovation – but Turing wasn’t in the country at the time. Neither was it conceived by the mostly private school and Oxbridge-educated boffins at Bletchley Park. Rather, the machine Park staff called Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers, a cockney bricklayer’s son who for decades was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from acknowledging his achievement. Now, with his 120th birthday approaching and a Tommy Flowers Foundation established to right this historical wrong, he is finally getting some of his due ... Working in his lab at [the Post Office’s Dollis Hill Research Station in north London], visiting Bletchley as needed, Flowers improved [Cambridge mathematician Max Newman's] design for [a machine to break the Germans' post-Enigma 'Tunny' code] and oversaw its manufacture, but still considered it a poor machine. In response, in February 1943, he stunned the boffins with a plan for a fully electronic digital machine that would use thermionic valves as switches to generate and process the zeroes and ones used for binary calculation.... [Valves] had a reputation for constantly failing. Yet, having pioneered their use in automatic telephone exchanges, Flowers knew that if left switched on they were highly reliable. The idea of using valves as switches in a digital system was so new and radical that Flowers may have been the only person in Britain capable of seeing it – and of knowing they would be millions of times faster than the traditional electromechanical switches Newman used: he had already used them to build a prototype digital memory unit for the Post Office, a truly astonishing first. Nonetheless, Flowers later characterised the response he got at BP as 'incredulity'. Nothing like the machine he proposed, using 1,600 valves to perform digital calculations, had ever been contemplated."
Here’s what you need to know about Starmer’s illiberal protest curbs: they would have killed the Labour party at birth – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine a movement arising in this country that seeks to overthrow established power. Imagine that it begins with a series of rebellions, in Scotland and south Wales perhaps, that shut down workplaces, confront police and soldiers (sometimes peaceably, sometimes with crude weapons), set up roadblocks and lay siege to the places where fellow protesters are imprisoned and government officials are meeting. Imagine that this movement goes on to smash or disable machinery across the country. Imagine that it organises a general strike, nixing much of the UK’s economic activity for three months. Imagine that it keeps protesting in the same places by the same means, gradually eroding the resistance of the state. Keir Starmer’s Labour government would doubtless do everything in its power not just to stop these individual actions but to prohibit the movement. What am I describing? The origins and development of the Labour party. The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party. Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement."
A prophetic 1934 novel has found a surprising second life: it holds lessons for us all – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. See also 'English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life'. "Forgotten for decades, Sally Carson’s Bavaria-set Crooked Cross was republished in April by Persephone Books, which specialises in reviving neglected works. Since then, it has been a surprise hit, a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand. Crooked Cross begins in December 1932, and ends at midsummer the following year. The setting is the little, fictional Bavarian town of Kranach, a picture-postcard place in the foothills of the Alps. Its focus is the Kluger family – a modest, middle-class clan of kindly, loving parents and three grown-up children, Helmy, Lexa and Erich – who are gathering to celebrate Christmas with their cousins and Lexa’s fiance, Moritz. Everything is warm and delightful and full of promise: the tree with its glass baubles and candles, the tissue-wrapped presents, the carols, the roasted goose. Everything is gorgeously decorated, 'even' – one reads with a shudder that is deepened by a 21st-century knowledge of where [it] was all headed – 'Helmy’s picture of Hitler which stood on the piano'. One of the remarkable things about this book is its immediacy. It was written in the moment, and published quickly. The six-month period that it covers was one of momentous political change: Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis gained an effective majority in the Reichstag, Dachau was opened, and Jews were barred from public-service jobs. At the start of the novel, the characters greet each other with a cheery Grüss Gott; by the end, Herr Kluger is heil Hitler-ing acquaintances in the street and the local church bells have been altered so that they chime with the notes of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. Also by the end of this short six months, the loving, close circle of the Kluger family has fallen apart. The attentive reader will have noted, even within the first few pages, for example, that Lexa’s fiance Moritz Weissman, a good Roman Catholic emerging from Christmas mass, also happens to have a Jewish surname. Reading this novel, armed with the hindsight that Carson herself lacked, is a remarkable experience, at times painful.... What is so impressive about Carson is, despite the fact she had no idea where Hitlerism would end, the novel has an unshakeable moral core. There is no equivocation. What is being done in Germany to Jews, to communists, is plainly horrific, according to the novel’s worldview. Carson wrote – already in 1933 – of the grim stories emerging from Dachau: 'People had a way of suddenly disappearing, no trial, no explanation'; 'prisoners were half-starved, bullied, inhumanly treated'.... Crooked Cross gets no closer to Hitler than that photograph on the piano. All the politics happen at a distance, in the background, and are understood only as their effects filter down to the Klugers and their little town.... The Kluger family, like millions of families across Germany, is deeply marked by the great war, and shaped by economic collapse. The boys have never found meaningful work. Helmy is unemployed, and Erich has an unsatisfying job as a ski instructor. Carson shows us how extremism, when it takes hold, provides these young men with purpose, work, a narrative, hope and clearly defined roles. It also provides them with a set of people – leftwingers and Jews – to hate, to blame, to punish and, quite quickly, to beat and to kill. Carson’s iron sense of right and wrong runs in harness with her empathy. There is nothing inherently terrible about these young men who turn on other young men and turn violently on those who, months ago, were their friends. But they choose what they choose. The resonances with today are impossible to overlook. Would that we all had Carson’s insight and her moral clarity."
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Around two years ago, [MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna] began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how ... the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving? With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there. The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. 'Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,' Kosmyna says. 'That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.'... Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a 'stupidogenic society', a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?... As humans, we’re very good at what experts call cognitive offloading', namely using our physical environment to reduce our mental load, and this in turn helps us achieve more complex cognitive tasks.... The complication is, if technology is truly making us cleverer – turning us into efficient, information-processing machines – why do we spend so much time feeling dumb?.. One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk."
The Revolutionists by Jason Burke: from hijackings to holy war – review by Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. "In the 70s, ... commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history. Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs.... If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke’s antiheroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What counted was the excitement of the escapade, not the utopia it was meant to bring about. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an interpretative thread running through the disparate material: the failure of the left, Burke argues, left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by Islamism. At the beginning of the period, the prototypical radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian 'Grenade Girl' who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the US as Israel’s armourer. No lives were lost; prisoners were exchanged. By the end, it had become the pious jihadi, unbending and undeterred by the prospect of bodies piling up. Where leftist hijackers wanted publicity for Palestine, among other causes, Islamist suicide bombers embraced the annihilation of infidels. This was less the radicalisation of Islam than it was the Islamisation of radicalism. The fear that tropical communism – revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan – struck into Middle Eastern capitals ensured that oasis communism was nipped in the bud. Islamism, meanwhile, was accommodated as a counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom bankrolled Islamist terror."
Posh, proud and impossible to ignore: the incredible life of Annabel Goldsmith – article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "If the sitting Marquess of Londonderry died tomorrow, and in so doing bestowed a ladyhood on his 15-year-old granddaughter, would you ever know?... Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who died at home on Saturday at 91, lived through an era, by contrast, in which aristocracy and wealth were extremely public.... At the end of the 1940s, when she was 15, she became a lady when her grandfather died, and, believe me, everyone knew about it. When she had her coming-out ball in the 1950s, a young Queen Elizabeth attended, since the whole point was to be presented to the queen – it was social death for a debutante if she wasn’t. In the 1960s, she lent her name to Annabel’s, the nightclub set up by her first husband, Mark Birley, for poshos in London’s Berkeley Square.... Well into the 1970s, the aristocracy still had great cachet, and Annabel’s, the club, drew in a remarkable international A-list – Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Teddy Kennedy, David Hockney, Muhammad Ali. It’s not a given that anyone went there because they wanted to hang out with Princess Margaret and Prince Charles (as was). But certainly today, if you were, say, the singer Gracie Abrams, touching down in Heathrow and asking an underling where was the coolest place to hang out, they would not say, 'So-and-so’s is cool because Prince William goes there.' And non-royal blue bloods wouldn’t even have the name recognition to be considered and then rejected.... The structure of wealth has changed and globalised over the past century in ways we can discuss another day, but the distribution of land in the UK, from which a lot of the wealth and power can be inferred, has not altered as much as you’d think.... What is different is the cultural footprint. The display-case living of the postwar gentry and aristocracy relied on the kind of formulas celebrities have today: dates in the calendar; events that included everyone who was anyone; places from which the unwashed were certainly excluded, but that they were implicitly invited to observe.... Annabel Goldsmith lived through the last of that visibility. And while her death is not the moment to wonder what combination of class self-consciousness and outside scrutiny caused the aristocracy to go underground, it should be noted that, while it was still very much overground, she was the face and spirit of the whole scene."
The crimewave sweeping Britain? Illegal houses in multiple occupation – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Our crime scene is a redbrick townhouse built in the last years of Victoria – tall, battered but undeniably handsome.... Now look closer. Outside our house is a jumble of bags and trolleys and suitcases, while, despite the late-October chill, the front door is wide open. Knock at the very first room, and you meet our victim. Eunice Osei is a proud, reserved woman, but give her time and she will say: 'I’ve not been treated fairly.' Then she’ll cry. The crime is her room, a tiny hutch crammed with a kitchenette, toilet, bed and flimsy chipboard furniture. Clothes, kitchen utensils and suitcases are stacked so high against the grimy windows that light struggles to enter. We are swathed in murk, with nowhere to sit and hardly anywhere to stand. For three years, this holding pen has been her home. By a combination of ingenuity and greed, a family home has been broken down into 11 such cells. It’s become a house in multiple occupation, or HMO... Who’s the criminal: her landlord? Yes – literally. Andreas Stavrou Antoniades bought this house in 1990. How much he paid isn’t recorded by the Land Registry, but going by the local market then it wouldn’t have been much over £100,000. Just over 10 years later, he applied to split it into an HMO. When Haringey council refused, he just bulldozed the law. Without an HMO licence, he rented the rooms illegally.... But how did Eunice end up renting from this villain? Haringey council placed her there.... In one part of Haringey civic centre, officers chased a serial lawbreaker through the courts; in another, they sent him business, most of which will be paid for by the public, through universal credit.... The crime against Eunice is of making her life almost unlivable. What makes it so characteristic of modern Britain is how far the guilt spreads. Yes, there’s private-sector villainy, but there’s also public-sector complicity, by a council into its second decade of austerity. Then there are the courts, whose punishments are little more than 'the cost of doing business'. There is Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy and the failure to build enough social and affordable housing, nodded through again by housing secretary Steve Reed... Even the best achievement of this government, the renters’ protections that gain royal assent next week, will be somewhat blunted by the lack of new money to enforce the new law."
Smart money: family offers £180,000 a year for tutor to get one-year-old into Eton – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "A wealthy family near London is 'searching for a tutor to provide a comprehensive British cultural environment' for their infant, according to an advertisement published by Tutors International... To earn £180,000 [a year], the 'extraordinary' tutor is expected to fulfil a long list of eccentric and class-based criteria: a received pronunciation English accent; 'reasonable' music theory; an understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby, polo and rowing; the ability to foster hand-eye coordination and good manners; familiarity with early years education including Montessori and Reggio Emilia pedagogies; and first aid training.... The ideal candidate will have attended 'the best schools and universities in England' and 'have been raised in a socially appropriate background … educated and polished, with excellent manners and personal values'.... 'In time, the family hope their son will be accepted at a top-flight school such as Eton, St Paul’s, Westminster or Harrow. It is important that [the] boy’s education, even at the early years stage, starts to prepare him for this kind of life.. ...'He should be exposed to a wide range of quintessentially British experiences to help hone his habits, outlooks, tastes and sporting preferences.'"
‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? - interview by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, [Wikipedia] stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build 'a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge'.... Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan 'Wikipedia is an encyclopedia' is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent. It’s a no-nonsense 'lessons learned' book that might otherwise find itself occupying shelf space next to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO (subtitle: The 33 Laws of Business and Life) – but Wikipedia’s ubiquity, and the way it has dramatically bucked the trend of online toxicity – make it potentially far more significant.... Seven Rules is particularly strong on the importance of not taking sides, arguing that if people believe an institution isn’t neutral, trust evaporates. Crucially, that happens even if it’s biased in your favour. Wales cites work by Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania that looked at how people responded to political stands taken by all sorts of organisations, from newspapers to dental clinics to sports leagues. 'When people thought a group was politicised against their own political position, they trusted the group less. No surprise there. But when people thought the group had taken sides and was politically aligned with them … they still trusted them less.'... At the same time, neutrality and civility has its limits, doesn’t it? I mention a clever op-ed by Larry David that made this point, called My Dinner With Adolf, in which the comedian imagines breaking bread with the worst man in history. He ends with the line: 'I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.' What does Wales think about the risk that, in giving a fair hearing to all sides, you can fail in the moral duty to call out real wickedness? 'So I think we can make a distinction here between what I ought to do, what you ought to do, versus what an encyclopedia ought to do,' he says.... 'The Hitler entry doesn’t have to be a rant against Hitler. You just write down what he did, and it’s a damning indictment right there … you don’t need to add "PS, he’s a horrible person". You just say: "These are the facts, draw your own conclusions."' ... This separation of fact and sentiment seems pretty unusual nowadays. It’s no great mystery why: in the book, Wales talks about 'an entire class of "content creators" who have effectively been trained by social media algorithms to play up outrage, fear, and hate at every opportunity'. Part of the reason this has happened is because of the lack of guiding principles among web 2.0’s major players. 'Unlike Wikipedia, social media platforms have no purpose beyond selling eyeballs to advertisers, so there was nothing steering the development of norms toward civility and constructive conversation.'"
Say it, don't show it – Substack post by Neal Stephenson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “For the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows: ‘“Up with you,“ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.‘ If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle. A common bit of advice given to people who want to become writers is ‘show it, don’t say it.‘ Applied to the above scenario it would probably balloon the description to multiple pages. … And at the end, it wouldn’t actually be that funny. Not funny enough to be worth spilling that much ink. It would end up on the cutting room floor. As written, though, it works and it’s funny as hell, precisely because Dickens is just saying what happened, albeit in deliberately over-elaborate prose. He says it quickly and lets the reader play the scene out in their head. The only catch is that you, the reader, do actually have to get the joke. Dickens, or any other writer of the ‘say it‘ school (Jane Austen comes to mind) is implicitly asking the reader to know more and to do more during the act of reading this kind of prose. It’s almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.”
It’s the Internet, Stupid – post by Francis Fukuyama on Persuasion website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes: 1. Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies. 2. Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status. 3. Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts. 4. The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump. 5. The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure. 6. Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda. 7. Failures of leadership of the progressive Left. 8. Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion. 9. Social media and the internet.… I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.… The current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes…. This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. … Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously ‘truth‘ was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information…. There is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.”
