The Years by Annie Ernaux – well-reviewed and Nobel Prize-winning French autobiographical novel in translation. The thing which attracted me to this reminiscence of the years 1941 to 2006 is that it’s written not in the first person singular (I) but the first person plural (we) or third person (she) - presumably some of these at least are translations of the French on, which sounds less pretentious than the English equivalent (one). Supposedly this makes it more general, the story of her generation, but I didn’t buy it. When she says “We couldn't wait to take Confirmation,” I think, what, everyone? Everyone in France of that age? It came over to me not as socialised but as uncritically ego-centric. A big disappointment, though the details of French life across the years are interesting enough.
His Dark Materials, series 3 – The mighty story winds its way to its sad conclusion in the BBC adaptation. The visual realisation is as stunning as ever – they even managed to make sense of the roller-skating elephants – but Daphne Keen as Lyra, who was an excellent child actor in the first two series, as an adult is only good. But as before, the show is taken into the stratosphere by the wonderful performance of Ruth Wilson as Marissa Coulter, whose wordless reactions to the puerile war preparations of her sometime lover Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) justifies the price of admission on its own.
'Spearhead from space', 'Terror of the autons' – Doctor Who four-episode stories from 1970 and 1971, being the openers of the first and second seasons of Jon Pertwee’s tenure: for my money the best of all the classic Doctors except the first. Stylish and in colour (showing off nicely his scarlet-lined cape), aristocratic (possibly even posh), full of action (featuring stuntmen from fight-arrangement-company Havoc), and decidedly scary, with plastic mannequins coming to life, killer plastic daffodils, and a man-eating inflatable plastic chair. And The Master, played as never-subsequently-equalled by the wonderfully satanic Roger Delgado. These episodes have aged very well, the only sour note being Pertwee’s frequent calling women “my dear” – and that was more of an issue with Katy Manning’s sweet-but-dim Jo Grant; nobody patronised the wonderful Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John), who was a fellow scientist and The Doctor’s colleague rather than his assistant, but who alas only lasted a single season. See also the fanfilm 'Dr Who Review, Part 4, the Jon Pertwee era'.
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez – well-reviewed, and great fun to read, as one would expect from such a good TV historian, though a possibly misleading subtitle: it’s not a systematic history but rather a series of case studies of individual women, exploring what each tells us about the possible places for women in the medieval world. In my opinion, these are best when she is on her home territory of archaeology, as with the Birka warrior, rather than when she is doing history of ideas (my former territory), as with Hildegaard of Bingen, when some of the shortcoming are more evident to me. (So this woman wrote this stuff, but what significance did that stuff have in the context of the time?) There’s also an excellent Introduction on the history of views of medieval women, taking in the impact of the Reformation, Victorian “great man” history and Pre-Raphaelite painting, which starts with a highly plausible reconstruction of the likely intentions of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who died after collision with the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby.
Embracelet – well-reviewed and award-nominated, beautiful and moving adventure game, from the maker of Milkmaid of the Milky Way. What’s unusual is that relationship-building is to the fore, as you take 17-year-old Norwegian Jesper to the island of Slepp in pursuit of his grandfather’s dying wish: that he returns a magical bracelet to its rightful owner. While on Slepp, he makes friends with cousins Karoline and Hermod – intimacy being built through skilfully-written dialogue choices. I found myself falling in love with Karoline, even as Jesper did under my playing, despite the low-polygon graphics with which everything is rendered and absence of voice acting. Interestingly, it’s also possible to fall in love with Hermod, or to decide that you’re not ready for a relationship. When the game was over, I missed Slepp and its beautiful soundtrack, though surely Norwegian islands can’t really be as warm and sunny all year round.
Tryin' Times – song by Roberta Flack, performed at the 2022 Cheltenham Jazz Festival by Adi Oasis (starts at 16:30). A key feature of the song is the lilting bassline, a steady pulsing repeated figure, and the unique thing about this performance is that Oasis is BOTH playing the electric bass, maintaining the rock steady pulse, AND singing the wild and free vocals. Massively impressive isolation, which somehow gives this song an almost spiritual level: it’s what you have to do, balance both elements in your life. (Note: this needs to be heard on a system with good bass response, otherwise it's just ordinary.)
Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear – another great Masie Dobbs detective novel; here she’s tracking down what happened to two people who served in the Great War, her investigation complicated by the discovery that both were involved in secret intelligence work, and that one was keeping a secret of his own (homosexuality). Oh yes, and somebody’s trying to kill her.
Babel by R F Kuang – well-reviewed thrilling, powerful, thought-provoking novel, set in an alternative early 19th century, in which four young people (two boys, Chinese and Indian, and two girls, Creole and white British) are recruited to the prestigious Babel Institute at the University of Oxford, housed in (of course) a large tower located just behind the Radcliffe Camera. The premise is that Britain’s industrial power is dependent on a kind of linguistic magic – word pairs in different languages, engraved on silver bars – which provides technical enhancements: engines are more efficient, structures are stronger, weapons are deadlier. The young people have effectively been co-opted to the furtherance of the British Empire, which creates personal conflict for at least three of them, especially the Chinese principal character, when they are sent to Canton in the lead up to what will become the first Opium War. Unsettling questions, especially for those of us who are intellectuals and racially non-white: whose interests does our work really serve? Have we too been co-opted?
The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day – decently-reviewed, interesting but thin and awkward-to-operate adventure game, set in a world in which humans have apparently destroyed themselves through war, with the robots they created continuing to keep some kind of society going. The playable character, a robot designated RT-217NP (Artie for short), is quite fun, especially in his wry and uncomprehending comments at the relics of human technology, but the story is very short and frustratingly ends just he encounters a living human – one of the survivors being rounded up and killed by the robot bosses. Well, there's a sequel. I will see where that leads.
Ice Cold in Alex – old (1958) Second World War film, watched when I was isolating having tested positive for Covid. Great performances, and I was struck by how little (if any) music is used; the same film made today would use music frequently in every scene of tension to point up the emotion. Also the ending makes an interesting statement about Britishness: here, the willingness of the British characters to break the rules and save the life of a nominal enemy (a German) because of the relationship they have forged with him through shared hardship and reciprocal saving of lives. I think the majority of a cinema audience today would find that incomprehensible. "What? He's an enemy. Why are you protecting him?" But the film uncompromisingly stands up for what we used to call decency, which includes doing the right thing even if it's against the rules and it's to your disadvantage. I'm afraid it's quite gone out of fashion.
The Godfather – another old (1972) film watched during my Covid isolation. Definitely deserves its classic status, and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in particular are superb and convincing.
Wednesday, 26 April 2023
Friday, 14 April 2023
Cuttings: March 2023
The Moral Economy of Tech: Remarks at the SASE Panel – conference talk from 2016 by Maciej Ceglowski, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. … Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale. Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing. Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life…. We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support. Democratic societies sometimes adopt terrible policies. … My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country…. What we've done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.”
Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed – article by Alexander Hanff in The A Register, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: ‘Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.’ … The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering. The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn: ‘Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.’”
Roald Dahl's books further reworked by cautious publishers – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Employee-Owned Organic Kale Factory. The Witches The Strong, Confident Women Who Did Things Their Own Way. George's Marvellous Medicine George's Many Years of Safely Studying Medicine. The BFG The BRG (Boundary-Respecting Giant). James and the Giant Peach Normal-Sized Peaches Equitably Distributed Across the Entire Community.” (See article 'Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive' by Hayden Vernon.)
‘Keir Starmer just ordered an alpaca airstrike!’ The game that holds up a dystopian mirror to the UK
– article by Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the [Daily Mail] printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as 'queen painting' and 'kiss door'. ... For Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration. 'It reminded me of a map from a video game,' he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. ... So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the 'big society'.”
The Patriarchs by Angela Saini: the roots of male domination – review by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian. “Science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable.... Simone de Beauvoir spent the introduction and the first eight chapters of The Second Sex discussing how sex and gender had been constructed through science and history, demolishing notions of essentialism. Saini builds on De Beauvoir’s approach, again viewing the question from a scientific and a historical perspective. Nearly 75 years on, there is plenty more to say. While elite male power might seem universal, it’s not.... Even within patriarchal societies, patriarchy isn’t consistent. It manifests in different forms, which change over time. It’s logical, and worth noting in the current climate, that many of the societies where women enjoyed more power and greater equality were also more relaxed about gender identity: either recognising multiple or mutable genders, or differentiating little between masculine and feminine roles, or both. The strict division of people at birth into two distinct sexes – supposedly on the basis of biology, but with the intent to determine their social and cultural roles – is a hallmark of patriarchy.... De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had 'dethroned' women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point. 'The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.'” See interview of Angela Saini by Katy Guest, 'Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy'.
You are not a parrot – article by Elizabeth Weil in Intelligencer, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Emily M. Bender ... is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. ... In 2020 [she published a paper] with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller ... to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. The setup is this[.] Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: 'I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.' The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud.... 'We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.' In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.”
Dormant volcanoes and working monorails: the grand designs of Ken Adam, master of the Bond-villain lair - article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "As the creative mind behind seven James Bond films across the 60s and 70s, and numerous other movies, from Dr Strangelove to Addams Family Values, Adam dreamed up the look of nuclear submarine bases, mountain laboratories, hi-tech space stations, glamorous Las Vegas penthouses, and missile launchers hidden inside volcanoes. In doing so, he built some of the most memorable and influential spaces, not only in the history of cinema but also in the history of architecture, real or imagined. Today, his influence can be felt whenever you walk into a soaring office atrium, take a vertiginous escalator ride into a cavernous subway station, or even get shuttled through a tunnel between airport terminals. He was the master of a style he termed 'heightened reality', taking everyday spaces and giving them a theatrical, supercharged glamour.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.”
Weight Watchers wins when our diets fail: it won’t change society’s broken thinking around food –article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. “It's no surprise that shares in Weight Watchers International surged more than 70% earlier this month after its acquisition of Sequence, a US telehealth service linking patients with doctors who can prescribe semaglutide medications, which suppress appetite and are being used for weight loss. I’d argue that Weight Watchers is not so much in the weight-loss business. It is in the money-churning business. Repeat customers and subscription customers fuel business. Studies have shown that 97% of dieters regain everything they have lost within three years – the ideal backdrop for Weight Watchers and big diet companies, who see their customers returning again and again. There will be a stream of repeat customers as long as we have a culture of inducing in people a feeling that they risk being that hated state, 'fat'; a feeling that starts anywhere up from being tiny.”
Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin: A playful tribute to a remarkable spirit - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "In this sampler of the great SF author’s writings on gender and feminism, the space crone is an older woman taken onboard an alien spaceship as an ambassador for our planet: 'only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition - the essential quality of which is Change - can fairly represent humanity'. This 1976 essay on facing up to the menopause - again a hot topic today - kicks off a selection of fiction and essays spanning four decades in which Le Guin is always wry, witty and radically open to changing her mind. The book includes her notable 70s essay 'Is Gender Necessary?', looking back on her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.... A decade later she overhauled the piece; elsewhere, considering female writers, she explains how long it took her to realise that 'internalised ideology' had shaped her assumptions about language and gender and driven her decision to write outside the canon, in fantasy and YA. A bravura piece from the 90s that begins 'I am a man' - even though 'my first name ends in a, and I own three bras' - effortlessly dismantles the myth of male universality along with the generic 'he' pronoun. Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have 'let themselves be silenced' by eschewing the 'mother tongue' of conversation and story for the 'father tongue' of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the 'dead end' of Ulysses. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker.”
Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri: the Kafkaesque ordeal faced by refugees – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court. When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a ‘code’ that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. ‘As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,’ she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to ‘bullshit gracefully’ in order to build trust with her clients. Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. ‘The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.’”
The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle: the lives and loves of George Eliot – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation of 'the double life', meaning not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going ... and instead takes a more soulful look at what 'the marriage question' meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.... In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch, Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but also with the 'imagined otherwise' of ghostly roads not taken and lives unlived.... In her introduction ... , Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot’s own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. As Carlisle shows, philosophy in the abstract meant little to Eliot. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it – she was the first English translator of texts by Feuerbach and Spinoza – but until that theory came clothed in warm and breathing flesh, it remained inert. The question of marriage mattered to George Eliot not as a rhetorical device or a question of law or custom, but as a series of lived possibilities that needed to be tested and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle of renewal and self-healing.”
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life: one from the heart – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man…. ‘When I studied philosophy at university,’ writes Carlisle, ‘most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.’ They feared, she suspects, that marriage in general and kids in particular would hamper the serious business of philosophy. But that lack of experience, Carlisle implies, has made philosophy as dry-balled and fruitless as Rev Casaubon. ‘Its habitual modes of rationalism and empiricism will not do,’ writes Carlisle of philosophy near the end. ‘Marriage resists these lines of enquiry not because we have failed to think clearly or to gather sufficient evidence but because of the complexity and aliveness of the human heart.’ Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.”
Time to Think by Hannah Barnes: inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The book traces [the] evolution [of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)] from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.… Only 5% of Gids patients in the 1990s reported growing up to be trans (most identified as gay in adulthood). But, by contrast, a 2016 study of Gids patients on blockers found virtually all medically transitioned once adults. Were the drugs unwittingly influencing outcomes? Or might a greater proportion of the 1990s children have transitioned if they had grown up in a more tolerant era? Without a contemporary control group of children denied blockers, it was impossible to be certain. The book revolves around bigger unanswered questions about what it means to be trans. Are some people just born trans, in which case making them jump through psychiatric hoops to prove it could be cruelly pathologising? Or are some children’s identities still fluid, which might favour keeping options open and exploring any underlying issues? Barnes contacted almost 60 former Gids clinicians, and, of those willing to be interviewed, most leaned to the latter position; they tend to argue that trans children certainly exist, but probably in smaller numbers than those referred, and that the clinic became overreliant on blockers at the expense of more difficult, lengthy exploration of what exactly was going on. These doctors, too, wanted more time to think.”
The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti: somewhere towards the end – review by Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. “In Hold On, a gentle rallying cry, she urges the writing of poems ‘raw as sandpaper’ – something hers never have been – and urges: ‘Fine-tune your ear to subtext.’ Never afraid to speak out, subtext was second nature to Satyamurti. Her greatest quality as a poet is discretion.” “Hold on. Hold on to the real news, / to what you know is of good report. / Hold on to what you know of fakery / nail a lie when you hear one, / spot bluster on the public highway. // Fine-tune your ear to subtext, / manipulation and duplicity. / Ask yourself who benefits, / whose hopes are cruelly raised, / who dares get away with what. // Don’t be afraid to make a poem / raw as sandpaper. And even though / a million protests, twice as many feet, / couldn’t stop a war, get out there / with your small voice, your light tread.”
2022 [China] newsletter – by Dan Wang, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest…. Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. … Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed… Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.”
Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’ – interview by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. “A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: ‘At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?’ And what’s that, for you? ‘I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,’ she says. ‘If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?’ The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how ‘the capacity to do violence’ gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took…. And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking… There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting.”
Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language – article by Rachel Hall in The Guardian. “Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.… Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.…The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that ‘they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children’. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: ‘They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.’”
Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery – article by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.
The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders. It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.”
How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today – article by Katharine Viner (editor) in The Guardian. “I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.… The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery. Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. … We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? …Why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”
Slavery and The Guardian: The ties that bind us – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.… It marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance. It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them…. I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it.… None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.”
Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed – article by Alexander Hanff in The A Register, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: ‘Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.’ … The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering. The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn: ‘Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.’”
Roald Dahl's books further reworked by cautious publishers – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “
‘Keir Starmer just ordered an alpaca airstrike!’ The game that holds up a dystopian mirror to the UK
– article by Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the [Daily Mail] printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as 'queen painting' and 'kiss door'. ... For Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration. 'It reminded me of a map from a video game,' he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. ... So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the 'big society'.”
The Patriarchs by Angela Saini: the roots of male domination – review by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian. “Science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable.... Simone de Beauvoir spent the introduction and the first eight chapters of The Second Sex discussing how sex and gender had been constructed through science and history, demolishing notions of essentialism. Saini builds on De Beauvoir’s approach, again viewing the question from a scientific and a historical perspective. Nearly 75 years on, there is plenty more to say. While elite male power might seem universal, it’s not.... Even within patriarchal societies, patriarchy isn’t consistent. It manifests in different forms, which change over time. It’s logical, and worth noting in the current climate, that many of the societies where women enjoyed more power and greater equality were also more relaxed about gender identity: either recognising multiple or mutable genders, or differentiating little between masculine and feminine roles, or both. The strict division of people at birth into two distinct sexes – supposedly on the basis of biology, but with the intent to determine their social and cultural roles – is a hallmark of patriarchy.... De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had 'dethroned' women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point. 'The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.'” See interview of Angela Saini by Katy Guest, 'Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy'.
You are not a parrot – article by Elizabeth Weil in Intelligencer, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Emily M. Bender ... is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. ... In 2020 [she published a paper] with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller ... to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. The setup is this[.] Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: 'I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.' The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud.... 'We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.' In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.”
Dormant volcanoes and working monorails: the grand designs of Ken Adam, master of the Bond-villain lair - article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "As the creative mind behind seven James Bond films across the 60s and 70s, and numerous other movies, from Dr Strangelove to Addams Family Values, Adam dreamed up the look of nuclear submarine bases, mountain laboratories, hi-tech space stations, glamorous Las Vegas penthouses, and missile launchers hidden inside volcanoes. In doing so, he built some of the most memorable and influential spaces, not only in the history of cinema but also in the history of architecture, real or imagined. Today, his influence can be felt whenever you walk into a soaring office atrium, take a vertiginous escalator ride into a cavernous subway station, or even get shuttled through a tunnel between airport terminals. He was the master of a style he termed 'heightened reality', taking everyday spaces and giving them a theatrical, supercharged glamour.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.”
Weight Watchers wins when our diets fail: it won’t change society’s broken thinking around food –article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. “It's no surprise that shares in Weight Watchers International surged more than 70% earlier this month after its acquisition of Sequence, a US telehealth service linking patients with doctors who can prescribe semaglutide medications, which suppress appetite and are being used for weight loss. I’d argue that Weight Watchers is not so much in the weight-loss business. It is in the money-churning business. Repeat customers and subscription customers fuel business. Studies have shown that 97% of dieters regain everything they have lost within three years – the ideal backdrop for Weight Watchers and big diet companies, who see their customers returning again and again. There will be a stream of repeat customers as long as we have a culture of inducing in people a feeling that they risk being that hated state, 'fat'; a feeling that starts anywhere up from being tiny.”
Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin: A playful tribute to a remarkable spirit - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "In this sampler of the great SF author’s writings on gender and feminism, the space crone is an older woman taken onboard an alien spaceship as an ambassador for our planet: 'only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition - the essential quality of which is Change - can fairly represent humanity'. This 1976 essay on facing up to the menopause - again a hot topic today - kicks off a selection of fiction and essays spanning four decades in which Le Guin is always wry, witty and radically open to changing her mind. The book includes her notable 70s essay 'Is Gender Necessary?', looking back on her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.... A decade later she overhauled the piece; elsewhere, considering female writers, she explains how long it took her to realise that 'internalised ideology' had shaped her assumptions about language and gender and driven her decision to write outside the canon, in fantasy and YA. A bravura piece from the 90s that begins 'I am a man' - even though 'my first name ends in a, and I own three bras' - effortlessly dismantles the myth of male universality along with the generic 'he' pronoun. Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have 'let themselves be silenced' by eschewing the 'mother tongue' of conversation and story for the 'father tongue' of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the 'dead end' of Ulysses. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker.”
Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri: the Kafkaesque ordeal faced by refugees – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court. When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a ‘code’ that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. ‘As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,’ she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to ‘bullshit gracefully’ in order to build trust with her clients. Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. ‘The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.’”
The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle: the lives and loves of George Eliot – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation of 'the double life', meaning not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going ... and instead takes a more soulful look at what 'the marriage question' meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.... In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch, Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but also with the 'imagined otherwise' of ghostly roads not taken and lives unlived.... In her introduction ... , Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot’s own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. As Carlisle shows, philosophy in the abstract meant little to Eliot. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it – she was the first English translator of texts by Feuerbach and Spinoza – but until that theory came clothed in warm and breathing flesh, it remained inert. The question of marriage mattered to George Eliot not as a rhetorical device or a question of law or custom, but as a series of lived possibilities that needed to be tested and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle of renewal and self-healing.”
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life: one from the heart – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man…. ‘When I studied philosophy at university,’ writes Carlisle, ‘most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.’ They feared, she suspects, that marriage in general and kids in particular would hamper the serious business of philosophy. But that lack of experience, Carlisle implies, has made philosophy as dry-balled and fruitless as Rev Casaubon. ‘Its habitual modes of rationalism and empiricism will not do,’ writes Carlisle of philosophy near the end. ‘Marriage resists these lines of enquiry not because we have failed to think clearly or to gather sufficient evidence but because of the complexity and aliveness of the human heart.’ Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.”
Time to Think by Hannah Barnes: inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The book traces [the] evolution [of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)] from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.… Only 5% of Gids patients in the 1990s reported growing up to be trans (most identified as gay in adulthood). But, by contrast, a 2016 study of Gids patients on blockers found virtually all medically transitioned once adults. Were the drugs unwittingly influencing outcomes? Or might a greater proportion of the 1990s children have transitioned if they had grown up in a more tolerant era? Without a contemporary control group of children denied blockers, it was impossible to be certain. The book revolves around bigger unanswered questions about what it means to be trans. Are some people just born trans, in which case making them jump through psychiatric hoops to prove it could be cruelly pathologising? Or are some children’s identities still fluid, which might favour keeping options open and exploring any underlying issues? Barnes contacted almost 60 former Gids clinicians, and, of those willing to be interviewed, most leaned to the latter position; they tend to argue that trans children certainly exist, but probably in smaller numbers than those referred, and that the clinic became overreliant on blockers at the expense of more difficult, lengthy exploration of what exactly was going on. These doctors, too, wanted more time to think.”
The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti: somewhere towards the end – review by Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. “In Hold On, a gentle rallying cry, she urges the writing of poems ‘raw as sandpaper’ – something hers never have been – and urges: ‘Fine-tune your ear to subtext.’ Never afraid to speak out, subtext was second nature to Satyamurti. Her greatest quality as a poet is discretion.” “Hold on. Hold on to the real news, / to what you know is of good report. / Hold on to what you know of fakery / nail a lie when you hear one, / spot bluster on the public highway. // Fine-tune your ear to subtext, / manipulation and duplicity. / Ask yourself who benefits, / whose hopes are cruelly raised, / who dares get away with what. // Don’t be afraid to make a poem / raw as sandpaper. And even though / a million protests, twice as many feet, / couldn’t stop a war, get out there / with your small voice, your light tread.”
2022 [China] newsletter – by Dan Wang, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest…. Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. … Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed… Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.”
Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’ – interview by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. “A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: ‘At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?’ And what’s that, for you? ‘I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,’ she says. ‘If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?’ The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how ‘the capacity to do violence’ gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took…. And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking… There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting.”
Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language – article by Rachel Hall in The Guardian. “Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.… Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.…The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that ‘they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children’. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: ‘They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.’”
Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery – article by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.
The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders. It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.”
How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today – article by Katharine Viner (editor) in The Guardian. “I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.… The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery. Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. … We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? …Why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”
Slavery and The Guardian: The ties that bind us – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.… It marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance. It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them…. I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it.… None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.”
Friday, 3 March 2023
Cuttings: February 2023
Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on – article by Jeremy Reimer on Ars Technica, refrenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. “GUIs [Graphic User Interfaces] were invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) in the early 1970s. ... Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple II, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine.... By early 1982, the Lisa hardware was mostly finalized. However, the software was still in flux. ... The main question ... was: How should the Lisa’s GUI actually work? In an article in Interactions magazine, designers Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith, and Frank Ludolph described how the Lisa’s interface changed from early prototypes to a familiar desktop with icons, then away from that model, then finally back to an icon-based, document-centric approach. The goal was to make the Lisa powerful and fun to use. At long last, the Lisa was ready to be unveiled to the public. On January 19, 1983, Apple announced the computer, which it accurately described as 'revolutionary.'”
“Computers enable fantasies”: On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings – article on the LibrarianShipWreck blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “1983 was a long time ago for computers, yet for some figures who were paying attention, figures like Weizenbaum, it was already possible to see the direction that the eager embrace of computers was putting societies on—and though such figures spoke out in hopes that the direction would be changed, it is likely that many of them would not be too surprised with the messes we find ourselves in at present.… What largely transformed Weizenbaum into an outspoken critic of AI and computers was his revelation that even once the processes were explained many people still bought into the 'illusion.' And what’s more that even many people who understood the inner workings of computers quite well could still get swept away as well. Weizenbaum observed that ELIZA demonstrated 'if nothing else, how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgement deserving of credibility' an observation he followed up by noting 'A certain danger lurks there.'... A moment where his frustration with others in the computing field was particularly on display was in a lengthy review [of] Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck’s book The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World..... [It] encapsulates several key components of Weizenbaum’s overall critical stance towards computing. These included: a skepticism towards the promises being made by “computer enthusiasts” about what computers could do (or were about to be able to do), a rejection of the idea that a certain version of the computerized future was inevitable (and being driven by the computer itself), and a call for a real sense of responsibility. Weizenbaum rejected the idea that computers were an autonomous force, he was keenly aware that what was driving computers were people and institutions, and the particular values of those people and institutions.”
What’s your story? Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks – review by Terry Eagleton in London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete.... Brooks wants to retain the narrativity thesis while encouraging people to be more alert and analytical about which stories are life-threatening and which are not. He clings to the concept because he can’t see an alternative source of value. ‘We have fictions,’ he writes, ‘in order not to die of the forlornness of our condition in the world ... the reason of fictions [must be asserted] against the darkness.’ If all that stands between us and the darkness is Huck Finn and Emma Woodhouse, our condition must be dire indeed. Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight. It doesn’t seem quite the right way to describe Iranian women protesters or striking railway workers. The book speaks of the need for storytelling as protection from the chaos of reality, but for whom is reality chaotic? For disillusioned intellectuals, but probably not for merchant bankers and military planners. It may be a rough old place, but that’s different. Virginia Woolf seems to have seen the world as chaotic, but one doubts the same was true of her servants. In any case, you could just as easily see reality as stiflingly rule-bound and constrictive, and fiction as a playful relief from this straitjacket.”
Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by – article by Julian Baggini in The Guardian. “Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think – and live – well. (1) Be sincere. 'A wrangler is one who aims only at victory, being indifferent whether the arguments which he employs support his own contention or that of his opponent.' Akapāda Gautama.... (2) Be charitable. 'People’s real reasons for reaching their practical conclusions are so often not the ones they give in their arguments.' Janet Radcliffe Richards. ...(3) Be humble. 'I’m not clever, I don’t find arguments easy to follow.' Philippa Foot.... (4) Keep it simple, but not simplistic. 'It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.' William of Ockham.... (5) Watch your language. 'What is necessary is to rectify names.' Kongzi.... (6) Be eclectic. 'I suspect I’ve always been an awful trespasser.' Onora O’Neill.... (7) Think for yourself, not by yourself. 'No culture has a monopoly on wisdom, no culture embodies all the great values, and therefore each culture has a great deal to learn from others, through dialogue.' Bhikhu Parekh.... (8) Seek clarity not certainty. 'Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.' Ludwig Wittgenstein.... (9) Pay attention. 'Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality.' Iris Murdoch.... (10) Follow the mean. 'Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.' Aristotle.”
What Women Want by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung: the depths of desire – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. “Sigmund Freud famously asked 'What does a woman want?' and the question has been posed repeatedly across every medium ever since. Now Maxine Mei-Fung Chung re-examines it in the context of 21st-century women’s lives in her new book, a distillation of 15 years’ work as a psychotherapist.... One of the criticisms frequently levelled at [Ruth] Taddeo’s [2019 hit Three Women] was that her subjects hardly represented a spectrum of female experience: all were white and predominantly straight; two of the three were Catholic. Chung, who is British-born Chinese and has won awards for her work supporting people from minority communities, redresses this imbalance in her choices; she uses seven case studies covering a range of ages, ethnicities and orientations, 'a collection of true, intersectional stories that examine women’s lives and their relationships with desire'. This is not exclusively sexual desire: Marianna is desperate for motherhood; Ruth wants to take back control of a body ravaged by eating disorders; Tia longs to accept and unite both sides of her dual racial heritage; Beverly wants to make sense of her son’s suicide.... Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book is the way Chung portrays the therapist-patient relationship as a two-way connection, sometimes described as a 'dance'. ... Modern therapy is far more relational [than the popular view of a psychotherapist suggests], and nowhere is this clearer than in her conversations with Tia, who specifically sought a therapist of colour who could identify with her experiences, and Beverly, who needed her therapist to be a mother.... The conversations begun through the courage and determination of these women ... make a valuable contribution to a wider debate about how women are permitted to own and express their desires in a patriarchal culture that still prefers us quiet and non-disruptive. 'One of the great gifts in beginning these conversation [writes Chung] is that they transcend the question from what do women want? to the premise that women want. Period.'”
Controversial books and social media – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “[Neutral] Read the controversial book. [Troubled] Read a review of the controversial book. [Irritated] Read an online critique of the review of the book. [Angry]. Read the headline of the online critique of the review of the book. [Very angry] Read a tweet about the headline of the critique of the review of the book. [Apoplectic] Hasn't read a word but not letting that get in the way of a good rant.”
‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’ – article by Alaina Demopoulos in The Guardian. “Garrett Bemiller, a 25-year-old New Yorker, has spent his entire life online. He grew up in front of screens, swiping from one app to the next. But there’s one skill set Bemiller admits he’s less comfortable with: the humble office printer. 'Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,' says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. 'It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.'... Gen Z workers .. grew up using apps to get work done and are used to the ease that comes with Apple operating systems. Their formative tech years were spent using software that exists to be user-friendly. But desktop computing is decidedly less intuitive. Things like files, folders, scanning, printing, and using external hardware are hallmarks of office life. ... The tech company HP coined the phrase 'tech shame', to define how overwhelmed young people felt using basic office tools.”
“Computers enable fantasies”: On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings – article on the LibrarianShipWreck blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “1983 was a long time ago for computers, yet for some figures who were paying attention, figures like Weizenbaum, it was already possible to see the direction that the eager embrace of computers was putting societies on—and though such figures spoke out in hopes that the direction would be changed, it is likely that many of them would not be too surprised with the messes we find ourselves in at present.… What largely transformed Weizenbaum into an outspoken critic of AI and computers was his revelation that even once the processes were explained many people still bought into the 'illusion.' And what’s more that even many people who understood the inner workings of computers quite well could still get swept away as well. Weizenbaum observed that ELIZA demonstrated 'if nothing else, how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgement deserving of credibility' an observation he followed up by noting 'A certain danger lurks there.'... A moment where his frustration with others in the computing field was particularly on display was in a lengthy review [of] Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck’s book The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World..... [It] encapsulates several key components of Weizenbaum’s overall critical stance towards computing. These included: a skepticism towards the promises being made by “computer enthusiasts” about what computers could do (or were about to be able to do), a rejection of the idea that a certain version of the computerized future was inevitable (and being driven by the computer itself), and a call for a real sense of responsibility. Weizenbaum rejected the idea that computers were an autonomous force, he was keenly aware that what was driving computers were people and institutions, and the particular values of those people and institutions.”
What’s your story? Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks – review by Terry Eagleton in London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete.... Brooks wants to retain the narrativity thesis while encouraging people to be more alert and analytical about which stories are life-threatening and which are not. He clings to the concept because he can’t see an alternative source of value. ‘We have fictions,’ he writes, ‘in order not to die of the forlornness of our condition in the world ... the reason of fictions [must be asserted] against the darkness.’ If all that stands between us and the darkness is Huck Finn and Emma Woodhouse, our condition must be dire indeed. Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight. It doesn’t seem quite the right way to describe Iranian women protesters or striking railway workers. The book speaks of the need for storytelling as protection from the chaos of reality, but for whom is reality chaotic? For disillusioned intellectuals, but probably not for merchant bankers and military planners. It may be a rough old place, but that’s different. Virginia Woolf seems to have seen the world as chaotic, but one doubts the same was true of her servants. In any case, you could just as easily see reality as stiflingly rule-bound and constrictive, and fiction as a playful relief from this straitjacket.”
Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by – article by Julian Baggini in The Guardian. “Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think – and live – well. (1) Be sincere. 'A wrangler is one who aims only at victory, being indifferent whether the arguments which he employs support his own contention or that of his opponent.' Akapāda Gautama.... (2) Be charitable. 'People’s real reasons for reaching their practical conclusions are so often not the ones they give in their arguments.' Janet Radcliffe Richards. ...(3) Be humble. 'I’m not clever, I don’t find arguments easy to follow.' Philippa Foot.... (4) Keep it simple, but not simplistic. 'It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.' William of Ockham.... (5) Watch your language. 'What is necessary is to rectify names.' Kongzi.... (6) Be eclectic. 'I suspect I’ve always been an awful trespasser.' Onora O’Neill.... (7) Think for yourself, not by yourself. 'No culture has a monopoly on wisdom, no culture embodies all the great values, and therefore each culture has a great deal to learn from others, through dialogue.' Bhikhu Parekh.... (8) Seek clarity not certainty. 'Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.' Ludwig Wittgenstein.... (9) Pay attention. 'Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality.' Iris Murdoch.... (10) Follow the mean. 'Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.' Aristotle.”
What Women Want by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung: the depths of desire – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. “Sigmund Freud famously asked 'What does a woman want?' and the question has been posed repeatedly across every medium ever since. Now Maxine Mei-Fung Chung re-examines it in the context of 21st-century women’s lives in her new book, a distillation of 15 years’ work as a psychotherapist.... One of the criticisms frequently levelled at [Ruth] Taddeo’s [2019 hit Three Women] was that her subjects hardly represented a spectrum of female experience: all were white and predominantly straight; two of the three were Catholic. Chung, who is British-born Chinese and has won awards for her work supporting people from minority communities, redresses this imbalance in her choices; she uses seven case studies covering a range of ages, ethnicities and orientations, 'a collection of true, intersectional stories that examine women’s lives and their relationships with desire'. This is not exclusively sexual desire: Marianna is desperate for motherhood; Ruth wants to take back control of a body ravaged by eating disorders; Tia longs to accept and unite both sides of her dual racial heritage; Beverly wants to make sense of her son’s suicide.... Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book is the way Chung portrays the therapist-patient relationship as a two-way connection, sometimes described as a 'dance'. ... Modern therapy is far more relational [than the popular view of a psychotherapist suggests], and nowhere is this clearer than in her conversations with Tia, who specifically sought a therapist of colour who could identify with her experiences, and Beverly, who needed her therapist to be a mother.... The conversations begun through the courage and determination of these women ... make a valuable contribution to a wider debate about how women are permitted to own and express their desires in a patriarchal culture that still prefers us quiet and non-disruptive. 'One of the great gifts in beginning these conversation [writes Chung] is that they transcend the question from what do women want? to the premise that women want. Period.'”
Controversial books and social media – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “[Neutral] Read the controversial book. [Troubled] Read a review of the controversial book. [Irritated] Read an online critique of the review of the book. [Angry]. Read the headline of the online critique of the review of the book. [Very angry] Read a tweet about the headline of the critique of the review of the book. [Apoplectic] Hasn't read a word but not letting that get in the way of a good rant.”
‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’ – article by Alaina Demopoulos in The Guardian. “Garrett Bemiller, a 25-year-old New Yorker, has spent his entire life online. He grew up in front of screens, swiping from one app to the next. But there’s one skill set Bemiller admits he’s less comfortable with: the humble office printer. 'Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,' says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. 'It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.'... Gen Z workers .. grew up using apps to get work done and are used to the ease that comes with Apple operating systems. Their formative tech years were spent using software that exists to be user-friendly. But desktop computing is decidedly less intuitive. Things like files, folders, scanning, printing, and using external hardware are hallmarks of office life. ... The tech company HP coined the phrase 'tech shame', to define how overwhelmed young people felt using basic office tools.”
Friday, 3 February 2023
Cuttings: January 2023
‘Why can’t anyone make a decision?’ My first time as a D&D Dungeon Master – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. “For those who’ve never played, the Dungeon Master is basically a storyteller, an umpire and a game designer rolled into one; they’re the person who invents the quest that players experience. Rulebooks and world-building encyclopedias give you the outline of a story, and an adventure book tells you what possible enemies and treasures players will discover, but that’s it: everything else is down to the DM.... Now my sons Zac and Albie are really into D&D and for Zac’s 17th birthday last week, I promised to finally DM a game. I was definitely not prepared. I went with a new starter-pack campaign called Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.... This adventure begins with the player characters arriving on the shores of a mysterious island, where rival dragon clans once did battle. Up on top of the jagged cliffs, there is a cloister populated by humanoid lizards and their religious leader....I anticipated that once my players arrived on the beach, they would immediately go for the stairway leading up the cliffs, but they just stood around for ages, asking me questions about what time of day it was and what the weather was like. When the zombies started shuffling out of the ocean, they had a long debate about what to do. 'Can they be affected by normal weapons?' asked Albie. 'Can I see them clearly enough to throw a harpoon?' asked Cole. 'Can I make a molotov cocktail out of some oil and a bottle?' enquired Zac. This led to a long discussion about whether zombies are affected by fire damage.... When we eventually reached the cloister, the debates started again. Should the group attack the inhabitants? If not, what questions should they ask? Should they trust the food they were offered? It was fascinating. All the little details I thought would be completely secondary – a statue in the temple, a shrub being tended to by a gardener, the cave they were offered as accommodation – were pored over for hours. We hadn’t even got to the dreaded owlbear monster, or the harpy lurking in the crow’s nest of the sunken galleon. These were the bits I’d actually planned. Instead, I was spending a lot of time improvising the exact contents of a garden. This, it turns out, is the first rule of being a good DM: your players will confound you, even if they don’t mean to, and you have to work with that. The mortal sin of DMing is 'railroading', when you make it impossible for your players to do what they want, continually shoving them towards the story you have prepared. But at the same time, you need to try to keep them on track. In the end, I had the gardener character give the party some advice: 'It’s getting late. Perhaps you should go to bed and begin exploring the island tomorrow. There’s a lot to see and many terrors to face.' The adventurers nod sagely and then … go to the library to hassle a character named Varnoth, who is trying to read a book on cave maintenance. Zac decides to give her a crowbar.”
No one is safe until everyone is safe: we applied it to the pandemic, but why not our economy? – article by Rowan Williams in The Guardian. “A friend reminded me of that old song, All My Trials: ‘If living were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.’ Which, of course, they do. … It is not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; it is also that all those things financial security makes possible – the freedom to celebrate, to plan for your children, to give gifts to people you love – become monstrously complicated. Living with any fullness or imagination recedes over the horizon when choices are all about survival…. In a society that prioritised security for everyone, the ‘cost’ of living would be virtually invisible. The systems and rhythms of exchange that support us – work, wages, welfare – could be taken for granted…. A ‘cost of living’ crisis is a sign that something basic about how we imagine society has gone fantastically wrong. When ‘living’ becomes a commodity that some can afford and some can’t, the assumption that we ought to be able to trust one another to sustain our security is being challenged at the root. We are being lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is as an individual purchaser acquiring desirable goods – not a contributor to the building of a trustworthy network of relations, dependable enough to allow more people to become active and generous contributors…. The story we heard in the carol services is about a moment in human history when it was confirmed, once and for all, that the deepest force and pressure within all reality ‘bends toward justice’, in Martin Luther King’s phrase… It is a story about what human living might be if we finally turned our backs on our addiction to commodifying everything we touch, reducing things and people to calculations of cost. If living were a thing that money could not buy, all might be free to live. The refusal to see this is the real crisis. The forgetting of this is the real religious and moral sea change.”
Nothing is Real: Craig Brown on the Slippery Art of Biography – article by Craig Brown on Literary Hub, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Biography as a form is necessarily artificial. In the end, all biography is a form of fiction.... The real life of anyone takes place largely in the mind, yet it is only the secondary, external stuff—people met, places visited, opinions expressed, and so forth—that is accessible to the biographer. Unless they are spoken or written down, an individual’s thoughts evaporate into nothing. The subject’s head is, you might say, a closed book. This has not, of course, prevented certain biographers from counterfeiting entry into the heads of their subjects. In the very last sentence of her vast biography of Mao Tse-Tung, Jung Chang somehow finds access to Mao’s dying thoughts: 'His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.' To which one is bound to ask: how do you know? Royal biographers regularly follow the same practice.... in the first paragraph of his biography of the Queen, Robert Lacey describes Her Majesty at Balmoral on the Thursday after the death of Princess Diana, reading the newspapers. 'Digesting their angry sermons with the long-practised pensiveness which caused her eyes to narrow, her jaw would firm slightly as her thought processes started, shifting her chin forward a fraction—a signal to her staff to think one more hard thought before they opened their mouths.' This passage raises any number of questions. Was the intrepid Mr Lacey in the Balmoral breakfast room that September morning, perhaps hiding under the table with a periscope to hand? If not, how could he know that the Queen’s reading 'caused her eyes to narrow?' And how does anyone, let alone the Queen, set about practising pensiveness? And—since, presumably, Lacey was crouching in her brain, like one of the Numbskull cartoon characters in The Beezer, could he please explain what, if anything, was going on in The Queen’s brain before she firmed her jaw and 'her thought processes started'?... Of course, more scrupulous biographers eschew such conjecture, relying on first-hand accounts: what do those who were there at the time remember? But this method raises problems. Are first-hand accounts reliable? In real life, people change their memories almost as often as they change their minds.... What of those who wrote it all down at the time, without a view to public show? Surely they can be trusted? I wonder. Who is to say that Pepys’s memory never played tricks on him, or that he never misheard a conversation, or that his interpretation of events was not warped by his own imagination, or his desire to shape a good story?”
Job discrimination faced by ethnic minorities convinces public about racism – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. “A groundbreaking project exploring how better to boost public support for action against systemic racism tested which messages best move people towards a more anti-racist position. Reframing Race, a charity, tested dozens of arguments on almost 20,000 people and found highlighting research from 2019 showing ethnic minority applicants received less positive responses to job applications than white people, was the “blockbuster” in terms of making people more likely to agree that all races and ethnic groups are equally as capable as one other. By contrast using well-trodden language about people 'suffering' from 'inequality' was less likely to convince people of the systemic problem and even sometimes backfired.”
On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock: a whole new world – review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “Like other historians writing about the age of encounter and conquest that swept across the Americas from the late 15th century, [this book begins] with an account of a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. What is different is that this journey, of 1519, was from west to east – from the so-called 'New World' back towards Europe.... The focus here [is] not the European conquistadors but the indigenous people, in this case a group of Totonac men and women from what is now Mexico. The Totonacs, who were later presented to the court of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, were not the first indigenous Americans to arrive in Europe. In his early transatlantic voyages in the 1490s Christopher Columbus abducted dozens of Taíno people from what today are the Bahamas and Cuba. Over the course of his long and disturbing career he was to enslave thousands more. On Savage Shores is a work of historical recovery. It paints these marginalised figures back on to history’s canvas, complicating familiar narratives of 'exploration' and 'discovery'. It introduces us to the Brazilians who met Henry VIII and the Inuit man who was brought to late 16th-century Bristol and hunted ducks on the River Avon. We learn of the thousands of others who arrived as intermediaries and translators, diplomats and servants.”
Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud: spyware hiding in plain sight – review by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. “Pegasus originally arrived in the form of a text message from an unfamiliar number. If the recipient clicked on it, the phone would be infected. Later versions didn’t even need that interaction: the text message alone could be the agent of infection. The phone then became a portal for the government controllers: they could download any content, surreptitiously turn on the camera or microphone, listen to any call. The infection persisted until the phone was restarted – at which point the controllers would notice, and send another infecting message. The fundamental problem with Pegasus is that ... it’s too easy, and tempting, to misuse. NSO, and especially its chief executive, have publicly insisted that sales are conditional on the software being used only to target criminals. (And never American phone numbers; NSO knows not to anger the biggest beast.) But plenty of authoritarian states, and those wobbling on the edge, see telling the truth as a criminal act – and thus target journalists and lawyers too.”
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution – article by Tania Branigan in The Guardian. “It is impossible to understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. It shapes the country’s politics, economy and culture; its scar runs through the heart of society, and the soul of its citizens. It is the pivot between socialist utopianism and capitalist frenzy, between merciless uniformity and pitiless individualism. Its end marked the decisive turn away from Maoism, so thoroughly discredited by the toll it had taken. ... Subtract it and today’s China makes no sense: it is Britain without its empire, the US without the civil war.... In parts it looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century, though in China people killed their own kind – the line between victims and perpetrators shifted moment by moment. In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation. Unlike other tragedies under the Chinese Communist party, it was all-encompassing. No workplace remained untouched. No household remained innocent. ... Yet this era, which forged modern China, exists today largely as an absence. In the past it was discussed more widely, although never freely. Accounts of its horrors helped to justify the turn away from socialist orthodoxy to the market. Over time, fear, guilt and official suppression have pushed it into the shadows.”
‘A contentious place’: the inside story of Tavistock’s NHS gender identity clinic – article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian. “Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust [is] a specialist centre for mental health therapies. Within it is the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), one of the longest running services for gender-diverse children and young people in the world, founded 33 years ago, but whose work here as a national centre will be wound up within months.... [The] interim report [by leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass] highlighted the lack of agreement 'and in many instances a lack of open discussion' on the nature of 'gender incongruence' in young people – and whether it is 'an inherent and immutable phenomenon for which transition is the best option for the individual, or a more fluid and temporal response to a range of developmental, social, and psychological factors'. Whistleblowers – and some parents – have also accused Gids of fast-tracking troubled young people on to under-researched medical interventions and failing to consider other factors, such as autism and abuse. Meanwhile, young transgender people who spoke to the Guardian are clearly fearful of losing a space to explore their gender identity.... With so much at stake, and amid so much uncertainty, the Guardian has spoken to specialists in the field, including some who are still at Gids, who have never spoken before. They talk about how the service evolved, the intense pressure they have been under and the divisions among colleagues. They also give detailed accounts of what happens when a young person seeks treatment there.”
The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner: Chaucer’s feminist hero – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. “Will any literary character written this decade still be as famous in the 27th century as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is today? The most memorable pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales, with her five husbands, her gap teeth and her big red hat, is still inspiring novels and plays, bars of soap and even organic cheeses.... If you’re wondering why this 14th-century figure is considered so much fun, then Marion Turner, a Chaucer biographer and Oxford professor of English literature, is here to tell you. And happily, she puts all the rude bits back in. Referring to her heroine by her first name throughout, Turner tells us that 'Alison' was 'the first ordinary woman in English literature'. Unlike the allegorical princesses and sorceresses who preceded her, she is a 'mercantile, working, sexually active woman', like many of her time. Turner explains that the plague, like the first world war, created huge opportunities for women. They did go on pilgrimages, as the 14th-century Pilgrimage Window in York Minster shows. They also remarried – 'Chaucer’s own mother had been widowed sometime after January 1366 and was married again before June.' They wrote books, joined guilds and hired apprentices. The Wife of Bath, a clothmaker by trade, would have been entirely familiar to Chaucer’s audience as they listened to her story about 'what women want'.”
In Defence of Mean Girls – article by Sarah Haque on The Fence, referenced in First Edition Daily Bulletin in The Guardian. “Challney (Chawl-nee) High School for Girls is a short walk from the motorway, Junction 11 on the M1.... The year is 2009. Kate Moss has convinced us all to starve ourselves. We fry our hair every morning between hot tongs, then fashion it into long, side-swept fringes and backcombed nests.... Luton-born Tommy Robinson has just founded the EDL. For some inexplicable reason, the height of chicness is owning a middle-aged businessman’s phone, the BlackBerry.... We are in the impenetrable membrane of an all-girls school and the world starts and ends here.... Inside, life hums within the sensory meridian of any girls’ school: the toilets. There, the fog of fruity Victoria’s Secret perfume barely masks the smell of menstrual blood. The place has its own microclimate – it is damp and muggy all year round. This is where girls come to see out their panic attacks. They come to pinch their stomach rolls in the mirror and hike up the waistbands of their skirts. They come to sit in cubicles and press the razor blades they’d smuggled in their bag into their forearms. They flock here to peruse leaked nudes, to listen to that voice note of that one girl masturbating. Build a girls’ toilets and they will come. To cry, to make each other cry. It is sanctuary for friends to find comfort and praise. And it is wilderness, a watering hole in the Savanna, for enemies to lock eyes and pounce.”
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie. Review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Guardian. “Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia.... In her debut novel Victoria MacKenzie has distilled this chaotic, episodic rampage of a life into a beautifully lucid account of a spiritual adventure.... But hers is not the only story. Margery’s wandering quest orbits a very still centre – the life of the anchorite Julian of Norwich, confined to a tiny cell and effectively living out her days in her own tomb.... If MacKenzie distills Margery’s adventures to their essence, here she does the opposite, entering a body narrowly confined so that the soul and mind can play across a cosmic landscape, and opening up for us Julian’s giant intellect." Review by Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian. "In 1413, two of the most important women in the history of literature met. They were the anchoress (or religious hermit) Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography is the first ever to have been written in English by man or woman. Their encounter, in Norwich at the cell in which Julian had by then been willingly incarcerated for more than 20 years, provides the climax to Victoria MacKenzie’s transfixing debut novel. As alternating first-person accounts of their lives reveal, they could scarcely be more different. Kempe is a mayor’s daughter, fashion-conscious and often comically unfiltered. Having wed a man entirely lacking in business sense and borne 14 children, she’s also exhausted. When Christ first appears before her he is the 'handsomest' man she’s ever seen; their subsequent encounters are intimate, physical – carnal, even.... About Julian considerably less is known, allowing MacKenzie to imagine for her a beloved husband and baby daughter, both lost to the plague. When she herself falls ill with a fever, she experiences 16 'shewings', or visions, and is persuaded to retreat from the world.”
No one is safe until everyone is safe: we applied it to the pandemic, but why not our economy? – article by Rowan Williams in The Guardian. “A friend reminded me of that old song, All My Trials: ‘If living were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.’ Which, of course, they do. … It is not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; it is also that all those things financial security makes possible – the freedom to celebrate, to plan for your children, to give gifts to people you love – become monstrously complicated. Living with any fullness or imagination recedes over the horizon when choices are all about survival…. In a society that prioritised security for everyone, the ‘cost’ of living would be virtually invisible. The systems and rhythms of exchange that support us – work, wages, welfare – could be taken for granted…. A ‘cost of living’ crisis is a sign that something basic about how we imagine society has gone fantastically wrong. When ‘living’ becomes a commodity that some can afford and some can’t, the assumption that we ought to be able to trust one another to sustain our security is being challenged at the root. We are being lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is as an individual purchaser acquiring desirable goods – not a contributor to the building of a trustworthy network of relations, dependable enough to allow more people to become active and generous contributors…. The story we heard in the carol services is about a moment in human history when it was confirmed, once and for all, that the deepest force and pressure within all reality ‘bends toward justice’, in Martin Luther King’s phrase… It is a story about what human living might be if we finally turned our backs on our addiction to commodifying everything we touch, reducing things and people to calculations of cost. If living were a thing that money could not buy, all might be free to live. The refusal to see this is the real crisis. The forgetting of this is the real religious and moral sea change.”
Nothing is Real: Craig Brown on the Slippery Art of Biography – article by Craig Brown on Literary Hub, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Biography as a form is necessarily artificial. In the end, all biography is a form of fiction.... The real life of anyone takes place largely in the mind, yet it is only the secondary, external stuff—people met, places visited, opinions expressed, and so forth—that is accessible to the biographer. Unless they are spoken or written down, an individual’s thoughts evaporate into nothing. The subject’s head is, you might say, a closed book. This has not, of course, prevented certain biographers from counterfeiting entry into the heads of their subjects. In the very last sentence of her vast biography of Mao Tse-Tung, Jung Chang somehow finds access to Mao’s dying thoughts: 'His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.' To which one is bound to ask: how do you know? Royal biographers regularly follow the same practice.... in the first paragraph of his biography of the Queen, Robert Lacey describes Her Majesty at Balmoral on the Thursday after the death of Princess Diana, reading the newspapers. 'Digesting their angry sermons with the long-practised pensiveness which caused her eyes to narrow, her jaw would firm slightly as her thought processes started, shifting her chin forward a fraction—a signal to her staff to think one more hard thought before they opened their mouths.' This passage raises any number of questions. Was the intrepid Mr Lacey in the Balmoral breakfast room that September morning, perhaps hiding under the table with a periscope to hand? If not, how could he know that the Queen’s reading 'caused her eyes to narrow?' And how does anyone, let alone the Queen, set about practising pensiveness? And—since, presumably, Lacey was crouching in her brain, like one of the Numbskull cartoon characters in The Beezer, could he please explain what, if anything, was going on in The Queen’s brain before she firmed her jaw and 'her thought processes started'?... Of course, more scrupulous biographers eschew such conjecture, relying on first-hand accounts: what do those who were there at the time remember? But this method raises problems. Are first-hand accounts reliable? In real life, people change their memories almost as often as they change their minds.... What of those who wrote it all down at the time, without a view to public show? Surely they can be trusted? I wonder. Who is to say that Pepys’s memory never played tricks on him, or that he never misheard a conversation, or that his interpretation of events was not warped by his own imagination, or his desire to shape a good story?”
Job discrimination faced by ethnic minorities convinces public about racism – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. “A groundbreaking project exploring how better to boost public support for action against systemic racism tested which messages best move people towards a more anti-racist position. Reframing Race, a charity, tested dozens of arguments on almost 20,000 people and found highlighting research from 2019 showing ethnic minority applicants received less positive responses to job applications than white people, was the “blockbuster” in terms of making people more likely to agree that all races and ethnic groups are equally as capable as one other. By contrast using well-trodden language about people 'suffering' from 'inequality' was less likely to convince people of the systemic problem and even sometimes backfired.”
On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock: a whole new world – review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “Like other historians writing about the age of encounter and conquest that swept across the Americas from the late 15th century, [this book begins] with an account of a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. What is different is that this journey, of 1519, was from west to east – from the so-called 'New World' back towards Europe.... The focus here [is] not the European conquistadors but the indigenous people, in this case a group of Totonac men and women from what is now Mexico. The Totonacs, who were later presented to the court of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, were not the first indigenous Americans to arrive in Europe. In his early transatlantic voyages in the 1490s Christopher Columbus abducted dozens of Taíno people from what today are the Bahamas and Cuba. Over the course of his long and disturbing career he was to enslave thousands more. On Savage Shores is a work of historical recovery. It paints these marginalised figures back on to history’s canvas, complicating familiar narratives of 'exploration' and 'discovery'. It introduces us to the Brazilians who met Henry VIII and the Inuit man who was brought to late 16th-century Bristol and hunted ducks on the River Avon. We learn of the thousands of others who arrived as intermediaries and translators, diplomats and servants.”
Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud: spyware hiding in plain sight – review by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. “Pegasus originally arrived in the form of a text message from an unfamiliar number. If the recipient clicked on it, the phone would be infected. Later versions didn’t even need that interaction: the text message alone could be the agent of infection. The phone then became a portal for the government controllers: they could download any content, surreptitiously turn on the camera or microphone, listen to any call. The infection persisted until the phone was restarted – at which point the controllers would notice, and send another infecting message. The fundamental problem with Pegasus is that ... it’s too easy, and tempting, to misuse. NSO, and especially its chief executive, have publicly insisted that sales are conditional on the software being used only to target criminals. (And never American phone numbers; NSO knows not to anger the biggest beast.) But plenty of authoritarian states, and those wobbling on the edge, see telling the truth as a criminal act – and thus target journalists and lawyers too.”
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution – article by Tania Branigan in The Guardian. “It is impossible to understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. It shapes the country’s politics, economy and culture; its scar runs through the heart of society, and the soul of its citizens. It is the pivot between socialist utopianism and capitalist frenzy, between merciless uniformity and pitiless individualism. Its end marked the decisive turn away from Maoism, so thoroughly discredited by the toll it had taken. ... Subtract it and today’s China makes no sense: it is Britain without its empire, the US without the civil war.... In parts it looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century, though in China people killed their own kind – the line between victims and perpetrators shifted moment by moment. In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation. Unlike other tragedies under the Chinese Communist party, it was all-encompassing. No workplace remained untouched. No household remained innocent. ... Yet this era, which forged modern China, exists today largely as an absence. In the past it was discussed more widely, although never freely. Accounts of its horrors helped to justify the turn away from socialist orthodoxy to the market. Over time, fear, guilt and official suppression have pushed it into the shadows.”
‘A contentious place’: the inside story of Tavistock’s NHS gender identity clinic – article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian. “Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust [is] a specialist centre for mental health therapies. Within it is the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), one of the longest running services for gender-diverse children and young people in the world, founded 33 years ago, but whose work here as a national centre will be wound up within months.... [The] interim report [by leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass] highlighted the lack of agreement 'and in many instances a lack of open discussion' on the nature of 'gender incongruence' in young people – and whether it is 'an inherent and immutable phenomenon for which transition is the best option for the individual, or a more fluid and temporal response to a range of developmental, social, and psychological factors'. Whistleblowers – and some parents – have also accused Gids of fast-tracking troubled young people on to under-researched medical interventions and failing to consider other factors, such as autism and abuse. Meanwhile, young transgender people who spoke to the Guardian are clearly fearful of losing a space to explore their gender identity.... With so much at stake, and amid so much uncertainty, the Guardian has spoken to specialists in the field, including some who are still at Gids, who have never spoken before. They talk about how the service evolved, the intense pressure they have been under and the divisions among colleagues. They also give detailed accounts of what happens when a young person seeks treatment there.”
The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner: Chaucer’s feminist hero – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. “Will any literary character written this decade still be as famous in the 27th century as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is today? The most memorable pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales, with her five husbands, her gap teeth and her big red hat, is still inspiring novels and plays, bars of soap and even organic cheeses.... If you’re wondering why this 14th-century figure is considered so much fun, then Marion Turner, a Chaucer biographer and Oxford professor of English literature, is here to tell you. And happily, she puts all the rude bits back in. Referring to her heroine by her first name throughout, Turner tells us that 'Alison' was 'the first ordinary woman in English literature'. Unlike the allegorical princesses and sorceresses who preceded her, she is a 'mercantile, working, sexually active woman', like many of her time. Turner explains that the plague, like the first world war, created huge opportunities for women. They did go on pilgrimages, as the 14th-century Pilgrimage Window in York Minster shows. They also remarried – 'Chaucer’s own mother had been widowed sometime after January 1366 and was married again before June.' They wrote books, joined guilds and hired apprentices. The Wife of Bath, a clothmaker by trade, would have been entirely familiar to Chaucer’s audience as they listened to her story about 'what women want'.”
In Defence of Mean Girls – article by Sarah Haque on The Fence, referenced in First Edition Daily Bulletin in The Guardian. “Challney (Chawl-nee) High School for Girls is a short walk from the motorway, Junction 11 on the M1.... The year is 2009. Kate Moss has convinced us all to starve ourselves. We fry our hair every morning between hot tongs, then fashion it into long, side-swept fringes and backcombed nests.... Luton-born Tommy Robinson has just founded the EDL. For some inexplicable reason, the height of chicness is owning a middle-aged businessman’s phone, the BlackBerry.... We are in the impenetrable membrane of an all-girls school and the world starts and ends here.... Inside, life hums within the sensory meridian of any girls’ school: the toilets. There, the fog of fruity Victoria’s Secret perfume barely masks the smell of menstrual blood. The place has its own microclimate – it is damp and muggy all year round. This is where girls come to see out their panic attacks. They come to pinch their stomach rolls in the mirror and hike up the waistbands of their skirts. They come to sit in cubicles and press the razor blades they’d smuggled in their bag into their forearms. They flock here to peruse leaked nudes, to listen to that voice note of that one girl masturbating. Build a girls’ toilets and they will come. To cry, to make each other cry. It is sanctuary for friends to find comfort and praise. And it is wilderness, a watering hole in the Savanna, for enemies to lock eyes and pounce.”
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie. Review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Guardian. “Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia.... In her debut novel Victoria MacKenzie has distilled this chaotic, episodic rampage of a life into a beautifully lucid account of a spiritual adventure.... But hers is not the only story. Margery’s wandering quest orbits a very still centre – the life of the anchorite Julian of Norwich, confined to a tiny cell and effectively living out her days in her own tomb.... If MacKenzie distills Margery’s adventures to their essence, here she does the opposite, entering a body narrowly confined so that the soul and mind can play across a cosmic landscape, and opening up for us Julian’s giant intellect." Review by Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian. "In 1413, two of the most important women in the history of literature met. They were the anchoress (or religious hermit) Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography is the first ever to have been written in English by man or woman. Their encounter, in Norwich at the cell in which Julian had by then been willingly incarcerated for more than 20 years, provides the climax to Victoria MacKenzie’s transfixing debut novel. As alternating first-person accounts of their lives reveal, they could scarcely be more different. Kempe is a mayor’s daughter, fashion-conscious and often comically unfiltered. Having wed a man entirely lacking in business sense and borne 14 children, she’s also exhausted. When Christ first appears before her he is the 'handsomest' man she’s ever seen; their subsequent encounters are intimate, physical – carnal, even.... About Julian considerably less is known, allowing MacKenzie to imagine for her a beloved husband and baby daughter, both lost to the plague. When she herself falls ill with a fever, she experiences 16 'shewings', or visions, and is persuaded to retreat from the world.”
The writer who burned her own books – article by Audrey Wollen in The New Yorker, referenced in First Edition Daily Briefing in The Guardian. “[Rosemary] Tonks was born in 1928. By the age of forty, she had accomplished what many strive for: opportunities to publish her work and critical respect for it. Her Baudelaire-inflected poems were admired by Cyril Connolly and A. Alvarez, and her boisterous semi-autobiographical novels had some commercial success.… At the parties that she hosted at her home in Hampstead, the bohemian literati of Swinging London were spellbound by her easy, unforgiving wit.…After a series of harrowing crises in the nineteen-seventies, culminating in temporary blindness, she disappeared from public life, in 1980, leaving London for the small seaside town of Bournemouth, where she was known as Mrs. Lightband; she made anonymous appearances in the city to pass out Bibles at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. She felt a calling to protect the public from the sinfulness of her own writing by burning her manuscripts, actively preventing republication in her lifetime, and destroying evidence of her career. There are tales of her systematically checking out her own books from libraries across England in order to burn them in her back garden. This is a level of self-annihilation that can be categorized as transcendent or suicidal, or a perfect cocktail of both, depending on who you ask.”
Monday, 9 January 2023
Seen and heard: October to December 2022
Syberia: The World Before – Oh how frustrating. I was able to play just enough of this third-sequel adventure game to confirm that it was just as great as the reviews suggested (sumptuous graphics, great voice acting, heart-rending plot moments) before it gave out on me. Turns out it’s not fully compatible with my laptop (a graphics card issue: needs to be NVidia or AMD, mine is Intel). I suppose this one will have to wait until I get my next laptop, which I wouldn’t expect to be for another five years or so.
Your Money Or Your Life – famous (apparently) American self-help guide “to transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence”. The basic idea is to treat money as the equivalent of time - the life energy you expend to earn it - and then track your outgoings, evaluating everything against the criteria of whether it gives sufficient fulfilment and satisfaction for the life energy it costs and whether the expenditure of life energy is in alignment with your values. Not so relevant to me now, surviving on a pension during a cost of living crisis and having already pretty much pared expenditure back to what gives fulfilment and satisfaction, but a decent system (if itself demanding of time to make the calculations) and a corrective to consumerism.
Worlds Apart: An Experiment – Interesting short (4’25”) film, posing the question of what happens if you take pairs of people with violently opposing views and build a connection between them before you reveal their disagreement. It turns out to be an advertisement for Heineken beer, but I can forgive them that for the hopeful message.
Kentucky Route Zero – sad and melancholy (though not depressing) game – if game is the right word, because there’s no challenge, no puzzles, not even any goal. Your choices make no difference at all to the story; what you choose are characters’ reactions. Once you adjust your expectations, it’s quite beautiful. Over five episodes, released between 2013 and 2020, you follow Conway, an old lorry driver, making one final delivery for a failing antiques business. His search for the elusive 5 Dogwood Drive takes him onto the mythical Route Zero and into a world of people damaged by debt, unemployment and corporate control. Along the way, he meets Shannon, whose hobby is repairing old television sets; Lula, a clerk in a government bureaucracy who has a sideline as a conceptual artist; a small boy either orphaned or abandoned (his parents went out one day and never came back), who seems to have a brother who is an eagle; the singer Junebug and keyboardist companion Jimmy. Many of these characters travel along with Conway, the viewpoint shifting from person to person. In the final episode, the remaining characters – without Conway, who has started drinking again and been forced to become a wage slave to a distillery company – emerge into the daylight (all previous episodes having taken place at night or underground) and find themselves in a dying company town, wrecked by storm and flood. The future for them, and the town’s inhabitants, is left open. You can suggest that they abandon the town and seek a living somewhere else, or that they stay and try to rebuild. But at the very end, you discover the newly-built and empty 5 Dogwood Drive, the perfect home for Conway’s antique furniture, which is a hopeful sign. (See reviews of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 4 and Act 5, and discussion of the story and discussion of the ending.)
Lucy Dreaming – fun, witty and well-made indie adventure game, which I helped to Kickstart. Lucy is a small girl, with big specs and unfeasibly large pigtails, and a no-nonsense attitude. When she suffers from nightmares, she determines to get to their cause: first by detective investigation of the ten-year-old events which may have traumatised her, and second by taking control of her dreams (the title is a pun on "lucid dreaming") to obtain tools to deal with her nightmares. (A key game mechanic is that objects acquired in one dream are retained in her inventory for use in all other dreams.) I liked Lucy; she's a brassy northern lass with a keen eye and a blunt way of talking. (Example, when trying to check her email: "I'm buggered if I can remember me password.") I also found it nice to see a thoroughly British game, down to the village fete where it is permanently raining (everywhere else is dry), the grimy pub, and the charity shop selling worthless tat. I wonder what Americans make of it. (Here's one example; see also the developer interview.)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson – very readable survey of the effects of “cognitive dissonance”: the way we all tend to minimise the effect of incompatible beliefs, in particular those that contradict our own sense of pride and self-worth. They call cognitive dissonance “the engine of self-justification”, and in numerous case studies they show how this works with prophets predicting the end of the world, business people involved in corruption and bribery, people expressing racist views while denying that they are racist, psychologists who recover memories of child abuse and who will not admit they might have constructed them, police officers and prosecutors who refuse to accept that they might have got the wrong guy, and partners, organisations and countries which put other parties down to justify their own anger and hurt. There’s a final chapter on how to get out of the psychological trap (“Letting go and owning up”), but it’s too brief.
The Secret Genius of Modern Life – very enjoyable BBC TV series with Hannah Fry, in which she has great fun taking apart pieces of high technology (a bank card, a fitness tracker, an electric car, a pair of trainers, a virtual assistant) to explain how they work and how and why the various components were developed. She really lets herself go in this series, and the production team indulge her wild and waky ways; I wonder if having survived her cervical cancer (see her Horizon documentary) she’s come to the conclusion that life is too short to waste.
If You Knew, poem by Ellen Bass – short, simple, powerful meditation on mortality.
The Soldier's Tale – great TV film of the Stravinsky pocket ballet, with Mark Elder conducting musicians of the Hallé Orchestra, in a zippy English translation by Jeremy Sams. A pity that the soldier and the devil aren’t dancing characters, though they act their way around contemporary Manchester locations very persuasively, but the sole remaining dancing character – the Princess – more than makes up for that with her one stupendous dance.
Masie Dobbs / Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear – well-written detective novels, set in the 1920s, our heroine being a bright independent woman with an East End ex-soldier sidekick and a formidable sense and understanding of psychology. Recommended by both Mary Beard and Hilary Clinton (when the former interviewed the latter, see partial transcript), these books make great reading - and we still have 15 more to go!
Br Herbert Kaden OSB: Some Memories of My Life – autobiography of Turvey Monastery’s venerable monk, who died in October aged 101. Fascinating details of his escape from Nazi Germany, internment as an “enemy alien” during the War, working as a gardener at St Edmund’s House in Cambridge, and becoming a monk first at Prinknash and then Turvey. All outward details, though, and not much about his inner life or how he became the great soul we knew and loved (as testified in his obituary by Br John Mayhead).
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – excellent but creepy sequence of puzzle games, each effectively a single escape room. Extraordinary how much challenge can be delivered through a very simple design and touch interface. I badly needed a walkthrough, until I got the hang of the puzzle-setter's thinking.
Your Money Or Your Life – famous (apparently) American self-help guide “to transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence”. The basic idea is to treat money as the equivalent of time - the life energy you expend to earn it - and then track your outgoings, evaluating everything against the criteria of whether it gives sufficient fulfilment and satisfaction for the life energy it costs and whether the expenditure of life energy is in alignment with your values. Not so relevant to me now, surviving on a pension during a cost of living crisis and having already pretty much pared expenditure back to what gives fulfilment and satisfaction, but a decent system (if itself demanding of time to make the calculations) and a corrective to consumerism.
Worlds Apart: An Experiment – Interesting short (4’25”) film, posing the question of what happens if you take pairs of people with violently opposing views and build a connection between them before you reveal their disagreement. It turns out to be an advertisement for Heineken beer, but I can forgive them that for the hopeful message.
Kentucky Route Zero – sad and melancholy (though not depressing) game – if game is the right word, because there’s no challenge, no puzzles, not even any goal. Your choices make no difference at all to the story; what you choose are characters’ reactions. Once you adjust your expectations, it’s quite beautiful. Over five episodes, released between 2013 and 2020, you follow Conway, an old lorry driver, making one final delivery for a failing antiques business. His search for the elusive 5 Dogwood Drive takes him onto the mythical Route Zero and into a world of people damaged by debt, unemployment and corporate control. Along the way, he meets Shannon, whose hobby is repairing old television sets; Lula, a clerk in a government bureaucracy who has a sideline as a conceptual artist; a small boy either orphaned or abandoned (his parents went out one day and never came back), who seems to have a brother who is an eagle; the singer Junebug and keyboardist companion Jimmy. Many of these characters travel along with Conway, the viewpoint shifting from person to person. In the final episode, the remaining characters – without Conway, who has started drinking again and been forced to become a wage slave to a distillery company – emerge into the daylight (all previous episodes having taken place at night or underground) and find themselves in a dying company town, wrecked by storm and flood. The future for them, and the town’s inhabitants, is left open. You can suggest that they abandon the town and seek a living somewhere else, or that they stay and try to rebuild. But at the very end, you discover the newly-built and empty 5 Dogwood Drive, the perfect home for Conway’s antique furniture, which is a hopeful sign. (See reviews of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 4 and Act 5, and discussion of the story and discussion of the ending.)
Lucy Dreaming – fun, witty and well-made indie adventure game, which I helped to Kickstart. Lucy is a small girl, with big specs and unfeasibly large pigtails, and a no-nonsense attitude. When she suffers from nightmares, she determines to get to their cause: first by detective investigation of the ten-year-old events which may have traumatised her, and second by taking control of her dreams (the title is a pun on "lucid dreaming") to obtain tools to deal with her nightmares. (A key game mechanic is that objects acquired in one dream are retained in her inventory for use in all other dreams.) I liked Lucy; she's a brassy northern lass with a keen eye and a blunt way of talking. (Example, when trying to check her email: "I'm buggered if I can remember me password.") I also found it nice to see a thoroughly British game, down to the village fete where it is permanently raining (everywhere else is dry), the grimy pub, and the charity shop selling worthless tat. I wonder what Americans make of it. (Here's one example; see also the developer interview.)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson – very readable survey of the effects of “cognitive dissonance”: the way we all tend to minimise the effect of incompatible beliefs, in particular those that contradict our own sense of pride and self-worth. They call cognitive dissonance “the engine of self-justification”, and in numerous case studies they show how this works with prophets predicting the end of the world, business people involved in corruption and bribery, people expressing racist views while denying that they are racist, psychologists who recover memories of child abuse and who will not admit they might have constructed them, police officers and prosecutors who refuse to accept that they might have got the wrong guy, and partners, organisations and countries which put other parties down to justify their own anger and hurt. There’s a final chapter on how to get out of the psychological trap (“Letting go and owning up”), but it’s too brief.
The Secret Genius of Modern Life – very enjoyable BBC TV series with Hannah Fry, in which she has great fun taking apart pieces of high technology (a bank card, a fitness tracker, an electric car, a pair of trainers, a virtual assistant) to explain how they work and how and why the various components were developed. She really lets herself go in this series, and the production team indulge her wild and waky ways; I wonder if having survived her cervical cancer (see her Horizon documentary) she’s come to the conclusion that life is too short to waste.
If You Knew, poem by Ellen Bass – short, simple, powerful meditation on mortality.
The Soldier's Tale – great TV film of the Stravinsky pocket ballet, with Mark Elder conducting musicians of the Hallé Orchestra, in a zippy English translation by Jeremy Sams. A pity that the soldier and the devil aren’t dancing characters, though they act their way around contemporary Manchester locations very persuasively, but the sole remaining dancing character – the Princess – more than makes up for that with her one stupendous dance.
Masie Dobbs / Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear – well-written detective novels, set in the 1920s, our heroine being a bright independent woman with an East End ex-soldier sidekick and a formidable sense and understanding of psychology. Recommended by both Mary Beard and Hilary Clinton (when the former interviewed the latter, see partial transcript), these books make great reading - and we still have 15 more to go!
Br Herbert Kaden OSB: Some Memories of My Life – autobiography of Turvey Monastery’s venerable monk, who died in October aged 101. Fascinating details of his escape from Nazi Germany, internment as an “enemy alien” during the War, working as a gardener at St Edmund’s House in Cambridge, and becoming a monk first at Prinknash and then Turvey. All outward details, though, and not much about his inner life or how he became the great soul we knew and loved (as testified in his obituary by Br John Mayhead).
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – excellent but creepy sequence of puzzle games, each effectively a single escape room. Extraordinary how much challenge can be delivered through a very simple design and touch interface. I badly needed a walkthrough, until I got the hang of the puzzle-setter's thinking.
Wednesday, 4 January 2023
Cuttings: December 2022
‘No one had seen anything like it’: how video game Pong changed the world – article by Kyle MacNeill in The Guardian. “Its beauty stemmed from its clarity, easy enough to be explained in a heaving bar after a few beers. ‘It was the first time anyone had seen anything like it and they knew instantly how to play it,’ [Atari founder Nolan Bushnell] says. After some deliberation, a sticker was stuck on to the cabinet explaining the rules, just in case it was required. To retro game enthusiasts, they now read like holy commandments: ‘Insert quarter. Serves automatically. Avoid missing ball for high score,’ [game designer Al Alcorn] reels off automatically. ‘I want it on my tombstone,’ he laughs.”
‘There was an explosion, and I had to close my eyes’: how TV left 12,000 children needing a doctor – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “At precisely 6.51pm on 16 December 1997, hundreds of children across Japan experienced seizures. In total, 685 – 310 boys and 375 girls – were taken by ambulance to hospital. Within two days, 12,000 children had reported symptoms of illness. The common factor in this sudden mass outbreak was an unlikely culprit: an episode of the Pokémon cartoon series.... Twenty minutes into the cartoon, an explosion took place, illustrated by an animation technique known as paka paka, which broadcast alternating red and blue flashing lights at a rate of 12Hz for six seconds. Instantly, hundreds of children experienced photosensitive epileptic seizures – accounting for some, but far from all, of the hospitalisations.... The mystery persisted for four years, until it piqued the attention of Benjamin Radford, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in the US... Along with Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, he set about examining the timeline of events, and unearthed a key detail. ‘What people missed was that it wasn’t just a one-night event but instead unfolded over several days, and the contagion occurred in schools and over the news media.’ What Radford and Bartholomew discovered was that the vast majority of affected children had become ill after hearing about the programme’s effects.... The symptoms (headaches, dizziness, vomiting) were, says Radford, ‘much more characteristic of mass sociogenic illness [MSI] than photosensitive epilepsy’. MSI, also known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), and more colloquially as mass hysteria, is a well-documented phenomenon ... According to Radford: ‘MSI is complex and often misunderstood, but basically it’s when anxiety manifests itself in physical symptoms that can be spread through social contact. It is often found in closed social units such as factories and schools, where there is a strong social hierarchy. The symptoms are real – the victims are not faking or making them up – but the cause is misattributed.’ The condition is perhaps best understood as the placebo effect in reverse. People can make themselves ill from nothing more than an idea.”
Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup – article by Laura Preston in The Guardian. “Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off-script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realise the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. ... Before my first shift, I had imagined the operators were like ventriloquists. Brenda would carry on a conversation, and when she started to fail an operator would speak in her place. In reality, I rarely spoke for Brenda. Most of her missteps were errors of comprehension. She would seize on the wrong keyword and cue up a non-sequitur, or she would think she did not know how to answer when she actually had the right response on hand. In these situations, all I had to do was fiddle with the classifications – just a mouse click or two – and Brenda was moving along. In [other] cases, I softened her aggressive recitation of facts with line breaks and merry affirmations. I wasn’t so much taking over for her as I was turning cranks behind the curtain, nudging her this way and that. Our messages were little collaborations. We were a two-headed creature, neither of us speaking on our own, but passing the words between us. But there were moments when a full takeover was necessary. When Brenda did not understand a message, and knew she did not understand, she tagged the message with HUMAN_FALLBACK[:] Brenda ceded the conversation to me, and I had to assume her voice and manner.... Eventually I reached a level of virtuosity where I could clear the inbox without much mental effort. ... My eyes would apprehend the web of critical words – pets, rent, utilities – and my hands would hit keys like notes in a musical passage. I stopped worrying about Brenda’s tone and began letting any message through as long as it was factually accurate. I realised that when Brenda sounded odd and graceless, people were less likely to get intimate, which meant less HUMAN_FALLBACK, which meant less effort for me. Months of impersonating Brenda had depleted my emotional resources. I no longer delighted in those rambling, uninhibited messages, full of voice and human tragedy. All I wanted was to glide through my shifts in a stupor. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really training Brenda to think like a human, Brenda was training me to think like a bot, and perhaps that had been the point all along.”
Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson: the power and pitfalls of prediction – review by Felix Martin in The Guardian. “‘The only function of economic forecasting,’ wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘is to make astrology look respectable.’ It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modelling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. The medieval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section that embodies her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using models to guide policy.... The central common challenge is working out how much of what we learn in pristine but artificial models remains valid in messy but concrete real life. One way of figuring this out is quantitative: you compare the predictions of the model against new, incoming data. A critical obstacle here is that predictions based on modern mathematical models, no less than those based on medieval horoscopes, usually depend on an extensive hinterland of assumptions. That makes testing the validity of their forecasts intrinsically difficult: were the assumptions wrong, or was it just that not enough assumptions were included?... A second, qualitative way of determining the success of predictions is much more common: reliance on expert judgment. The pitfalls of this route were also well known to the medieval courts. Only those versed in the most cutting-edge mathematical knowledge were skilled enough to interpret medieval horoscopes. As such, it was in practice impossible for the client to come to their own conclusions. The result was that an exclusive guild, whose true competence remained unknown, ended up marking their own homework. The same could be said today.... It’s not all bad news. Thompson is a data scientist and mathematical modeller herself, and her book is far from an exercise in model-bashing. It is instead a nuanced and constructive critique of what remains an invaluable analytical method – just not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. For example, even though the astrologers’ models of natural forces and human behaviour were wrong, the practice of casting horoscopes could still be a useful aid to policymaking. They brought systematic thinkers into the orbit of otherwise impulsive rulers; it allowed the discussion of important, otherwise taboo subjects in the safe context of interpreting the stars; and it could give decision-makers the public narrative they needed in order to act. The same applies today. As Thompson shows, mathematical model-building can still be a constructive tool, even if the models themselves are flawed. As Dwight D Eisenhower said: ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’.”
Machine-learning language model fails Politics 101 – blog post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ChatGPT ... so I was interested that when Ben Thompson’s daughter was doing her homework on a politics course she requested that her Dad ask ChatGPT this question: ‘Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers?’ This was its reply: ‘Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book “Leviathan,” Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to maintain order and prevent conflict in society. However, he also believed that a single ruler or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having specific responsibilities and powers. ...’ The most polite thing one could say about this is that it is baloney. But it’s confident-sounding baloney. As Ben puts it: ‘Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.’” (For more on the alarming power of ChatGPT, and the prediction that it will lead to the death of the student essay, see references in John Naughton’s column and blog here, here, here and here.)
‘There was an explosion, and I had to close my eyes’: how TV left 12,000 children needing a doctor – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “At precisely 6.51pm on 16 December 1997, hundreds of children across Japan experienced seizures. In total, 685 – 310 boys and 375 girls – were taken by ambulance to hospital. Within two days, 12,000 children had reported symptoms of illness. The common factor in this sudden mass outbreak was an unlikely culprit: an episode of the Pokémon cartoon series.... Twenty minutes into the cartoon, an explosion took place, illustrated by an animation technique known as paka paka, which broadcast alternating red and blue flashing lights at a rate of 12Hz for six seconds. Instantly, hundreds of children experienced photosensitive epileptic seizures – accounting for some, but far from all, of the hospitalisations.... The mystery persisted for four years, until it piqued the attention of Benjamin Radford, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in the US... Along with Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, he set about examining the timeline of events, and unearthed a key detail. ‘What people missed was that it wasn’t just a one-night event but instead unfolded over several days, and the contagion occurred in schools and over the news media.’ What Radford and Bartholomew discovered was that the vast majority of affected children had become ill after hearing about the programme’s effects.... The symptoms (headaches, dizziness, vomiting) were, says Radford, ‘much more characteristic of mass sociogenic illness [MSI] than photosensitive epilepsy’. MSI, also known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), and more colloquially as mass hysteria, is a well-documented phenomenon ... According to Radford: ‘MSI is complex and often misunderstood, but basically it’s when anxiety manifests itself in physical symptoms that can be spread through social contact. It is often found in closed social units such as factories and schools, where there is a strong social hierarchy. The symptoms are real – the victims are not faking or making them up – but the cause is misattributed.’ The condition is perhaps best understood as the placebo effect in reverse. People can make themselves ill from nothing more than an idea.”
Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup – article by Laura Preston in The Guardian. “Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off-script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realise the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. ... Before my first shift, I had imagined the operators were like ventriloquists. Brenda would carry on a conversation, and when she started to fail an operator would speak in her place. In reality, I rarely spoke for Brenda. Most of her missteps were errors of comprehension. She would seize on the wrong keyword and cue up a non-sequitur, or she would think she did not know how to answer when she actually had the right response on hand. In these situations, all I had to do was fiddle with the classifications – just a mouse click or two – and Brenda was moving along. In [other] cases, I softened her aggressive recitation of facts with line breaks and merry affirmations. I wasn’t so much taking over for her as I was turning cranks behind the curtain, nudging her this way and that. Our messages were little collaborations. We were a two-headed creature, neither of us speaking on our own, but passing the words between us. But there were moments when a full takeover was necessary. When Brenda did not understand a message, and knew she did not understand, she tagged the message with HUMAN_FALLBACK[:] Brenda ceded the conversation to me, and I had to assume her voice and manner.... Eventually I reached a level of virtuosity where I could clear the inbox without much mental effort. ... My eyes would apprehend the web of critical words – pets, rent, utilities – and my hands would hit keys like notes in a musical passage. I stopped worrying about Brenda’s tone and began letting any message through as long as it was factually accurate. I realised that when Brenda sounded odd and graceless, people were less likely to get intimate, which meant less HUMAN_FALLBACK, which meant less effort for me. Months of impersonating Brenda had depleted my emotional resources. I no longer delighted in those rambling, uninhibited messages, full of voice and human tragedy. All I wanted was to glide through my shifts in a stupor. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really training Brenda to think like a human, Brenda was training me to think like a bot, and perhaps that had been the point all along.”
Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson: the power and pitfalls of prediction – review by Felix Martin in The Guardian. “‘The only function of economic forecasting,’ wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘is to make astrology look respectable.’ It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modelling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. The medieval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section that embodies her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using models to guide policy.... The central common challenge is working out how much of what we learn in pristine but artificial models remains valid in messy but concrete real life. One way of figuring this out is quantitative: you compare the predictions of the model against new, incoming data. A critical obstacle here is that predictions based on modern mathematical models, no less than those based on medieval horoscopes, usually depend on an extensive hinterland of assumptions. That makes testing the validity of their forecasts intrinsically difficult: were the assumptions wrong, or was it just that not enough assumptions were included?... A second, qualitative way of determining the success of predictions is much more common: reliance on expert judgment. The pitfalls of this route were also well known to the medieval courts. Only those versed in the most cutting-edge mathematical knowledge were skilled enough to interpret medieval horoscopes. As such, it was in practice impossible for the client to come to their own conclusions. The result was that an exclusive guild, whose true competence remained unknown, ended up marking their own homework. The same could be said today.... It’s not all bad news. Thompson is a data scientist and mathematical modeller herself, and her book is far from an exercise in model-bashing. It is instead a nuanced and constructive critique of what remains an invaluable analytical method – just not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. For example, even though the astrologers’ models of natural forces and human behaviour were wrong, the practice of casting horoscopes could still be a useful aid to policymaking. They brought systematic thinkers into the orbit of otherwise impulsive rulers; it allowed the discussion of important, otherwise taboo subjects in the safe context of interpreting the stars; and it could give decision-makers the public narrative they needed in order to act. The same applies today. As Thompson shows, mathematical model-building can still be a constructive tool, even if the models themselves are flawed. As Dwight D Eisenhower said: ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’.”
Machine-learning language model fails Politics 101 – blog post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ChatGPT ... so I was interested that when Ben Thompson’s daughter was doing her homework on a politics course she requested that her Dad ask ChatGPT this question: ‘Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers?’ This was its reply: ‘Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book “Leviathan,” Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to maintain order and prevent conflict in society. However, he also believed that a single ruler or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having specific responsibilities and powers. ...’ The most polite thing one could say about this is that it is baloney. But it’s confident-sounding baloney. As Ben puts it: ‘Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.’” (For more on the alarming power of ChatGPT, and the prediction that it will lead to the death of the student essay, see references in John Naughton’s column and blog here, here, here and here.)
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