Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark: the revolts that reshaped Europe – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s magnificent new history of the revolutions, ... rejects the historians’ consensus that the insurrections failed, arguing that to talk of 'success' and 'failure' is to miss the point. We can, he insists, only judge uprisings by their impact... The uprisings were initially strikingly successful, bringing in their wake new parliaments, new freedoms and new constitutions. Within a year, though, the old order had begun to reassert itself, often with great ferocity, and many of the newly gained political and social freedoms were rolled back. The moral of the story, Clark writes, is that revolutionaries were unable to build sufficiently robust international solidarity that could withstand 'the threat posed by the counter-revolutionary international'. Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals. This was a period in which the meanings of both liberalism and radicalism were still being fashioned, and 1848 played an important role in helping delineate the two. Liberals were mainly bourgeois writers, thinkers and politicians who viewed themselves as trapped between 'revolution and despotism' and wished 'to trace a middle path' between the privilege and hierarchies of the traditional ruling order and what they saw as the authoritarianism and social extremism of the radicals, exemplified by the Jacobin terror unleashed during the French Revolution. Liberals, in Clark’s words, 'rejected privileges of birth' while 'affirming the privilege of wealth', demanded 'political equality without insisting on social equality', asserted 'the principle of popular sovereignty' while also 'limiting that sovereignty, lest it come to endanger liberty'. They were not democrats, because while they 'aspired to speak for the people', what they really meant by 'the people' was 'a small proportion of educated male taxpayers.' They were, at best, 'reluctant revolutionaries'."
The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder – article by James Fox in The Guardian, based on his book The World According to Colour. "In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.... The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour... For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. ... Every person’s visual system is unique and so, therefore, are their perceptions.... [Another] cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language.... People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else.... The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. Many people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, but only a hundred years ago baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue.... Colour is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a pigment of our imaginations."
Greed, eugenics and giant gambles: author Malcolm Harris on the deadly toll of Silicon Valley capitalism – interview by Lois Beckett in The Guardian. "Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between ... patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy [Silicon Valley and Chinese tech manufacturers]. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates. The book is ambitious. Its full title is Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and it examines the global spread of what Harris terms the 'Palo Alto System', a strategy to achieve fast growth and big returns for investors at any cost, with a focus on exploiting young talent and new technologies. Since the late 19th century, as Harris tells it, the Anglo settlers of California have operated on the principle of Facebook’s infamous slogan, 'move fast and break things', which has also meant moving fast and breaking people.... You originally pitched Palo Alto as part history, part memoir, but in the writing of it, you ended up taking out most of the personal stories. What are some of the memoir pieces that you cut? One of my first jobs was working at Score!, a for-profit tutoring center in Palo Alto. It was so sad. The tutoring was automated through computers, based on a behaviorist system. The employees weren’t teaching anything. You’re acting as a reinforcer, not as a teacher: checking stuff off, making sure the students stayed sitting at their desks, controlling the reinforcement system, which was about points, and pieces of plastic. It was awful for the students and pretty miserable for the employees, and it paid minimum wage."
I took anger management classes. Here’s what they get wrong about the world – article by Olivia Wilson in The Guardian. "Anger management courses focus on a participant’s triggers, offering a standardized set of guidelines for coping with situations in which they feel the rage rising. Such an approach glosses over the sources of anger – particularly those that might spring from unfair or imbalanced social dynamics – and places responsibility for anger squarely on the shoulders of the angry individual, seeking to treat the symptoms rather than addressing the disease. As essential as such techniques may be, in particular for those prone to physical aggression, I can’t help but wonder, during the 10 weeks of the course, who else might be benefiting from the 'management' of all this anger. Without exception, everyone on the course is dealing with huge stressors – that is to say, they are angry for a reason. Marriages are collapsing, jobs are on the line, money is short. As we rattle through the introductions, it strikes me that it is stress – specifically the almost unbearable demands placed on us all – rather than anger that unites us.... Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boom in anger management courses dovetails neatly with the historical moment in the early 1980s in which a new economic model began to restructure lives at work and in the home. That model of neoliberalism – favored first by the west and today’s dominant global ideology – gave rise to a new social sphere in which government support shrank and inequality grew, and competition became the key tenet of the social order. Since then, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has soared, and the workplace has become king. And nowhere is maintaining control over anger more crucial than in the workplace.... In this context, anger management begins to look like something that doesn’t have the good of the individual at heart, but instead plays an important supporting role in molding acquiescent employees and submissive citizens. This focus on individual behavioral change, to the exclusion of a more socially focused understanding of an individual’s problem, is a key concern in Bessel van der Kolk’s pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, in which Van der Kolk repeatedly laments the use of therapeutic techniques and medication aimed at controlling a person’s behavior, rather than addressing the 'undeniable social causation of much psychological suffering'."
Three days that proved the radical right has a hold on the Tory party – First Edition daily newsletter by Archie Bland in The Guardian. "Terms like 'populism', 'far right', 'radical right', 'extreme right', and 'fascism' get thrown around so much as to be useless at best, and actively confusing at worst. But they aren’t the same, and knowing how they differ is helpful to understanding what’s going on. Many people associate populism with the far right, but [Cas] Mudde says while that can be true, it’s also too simple: he is renowned for his argument that populism is a 'thin' ideology. (Here’s a great 2019 long read setting out the history of debate over the term.) 'It has a narrow scope,' he said. 'It sees society as divided between two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. But that can be combined with socialism, as in Venezuela, or nativism, as it is on the right.' Whether it’s populist or not, there are some consistent features across the far right: it tends to oppose immigration, fear threats to security and national identity from – among others – migrants and the left, believe in a hidden corrupt establishment, and worry that transnational bodies threaten national sovereignty. 'Within that, you have the extreme right – which is the opposite of populism, which believes in a small elite that is pure and is fundamentally opposed to democracy – and the radical right, which does believe people should elect their leaders, but has problems with aspects of liberal democracy and the rights of minorities.' When people call Tory MPs 'fascists', who would be categorised on the extreme right, that’s wrong: they do still believe in democracy. But there are many whose stated views place them firmly in the radical right category."
Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. "Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough."
‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases – interview by John Harris in The Guardian. "As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed 'intelligence' is based on huge data sets that 'overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations'. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired.... After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time.... Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard. 'That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,' she says. 'That means you can abdicate responsibility: "It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do." Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.'”
ChatGPT versus a human editor – blog post by Harriet Power on the blog of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). "[1] How does ChatGPT fare with the CIEP’s proofreading test? This test is available here; it’s a 270-word piece of text with 20 ‘common’ errors. I pasted the text into ChatGPT with the prompt ‘Please point out the proofreading errors in this text’... ChatGPT caught 15 out of 17 errors. It did well at spotting spelling mistakes (such as ‘peaking’ rather than ‘peeking’) and repeated words (‘There had certainly had been one or two eccentric characters’). It spotted that Anne’s cup of tea had morphed into a cup of coffee three paragraphs later, which according to my programming boyfriend is an impressive catch to make. It missed a hyphen that should have been an en dash, and didn’t change ‘Jones’ geraniums’ to ‘Jones’s geraniums’, although that’s arguably just a style choice (as the test itself acknowledges). Another thing it didn’t do was query how Ann spells her name: it assumed ‘Anne’ was right (probably because it was spelled this way where it first occurs in the text).... [2] How about writing posts for the CIEP blog? ChatGPT is certainly much quicker at this than us slow and plodding humans, taking under a minute to write a post. The results are quite bland and generic, but are also pretty serviceable.... [3] I amused myself with writing some terrible fiction, then asked ChatGPT to improve it... I was impressed that ChatGPT could take my original text and rewrite it while still keeping the essential bits of the narrative, and present them in a coherent way. It’s an example of how powerful ChatGPT can potentially be when it comes to simplifying text. [4] I took a list of references, introduced a bunch of mistakes, and then asked ChatGPT to edit them so they were consistent. ChatGPT did pretty well. It made corrections like replacing ‘and’ with ‘&’, moving the year to the correct place, changing the volume and issue number from ‘18:2’ to ‘18(2)’, and deleting the word ‘pages’ before the page range. The thing that impressed me was when I gave it a reference where I’d deleted one of the author’s initials, and ChatGPT filled them in correctly. It managed to do that correctly a couple more times, so it didn’t feel like a fluke. (Though if ChatGPT is simply making educated guesses about how to fill in the blanks then this is far from infallible.) If ChatGPT could track changes (and my guess is that it will be able to do this in Microsoft’s Copilot) then I’d happily use it to help me edit references."
End Times by Peter Turchin: can we predict the collapse of societies? – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In 2011 Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut and leader of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, established a project called Seshat [which] involves scores of expert collaborators – anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – in building the world’s largest collection of data on the prosperity and demise of societies from upper Egypt to lower Manhattan.... His model attempts to weight certain factors to predict this social meltdown. Key among them are rapidly growing inequality of wealth and wages, an overproduction of potential elites – children of wealthy dynasties, graduates with advanced degrees, frustrated social commentators – and an uncontrolled growth in public debt.... The driving forces of negative trends in all societies are broadly twin-engined, he argues. One is the presence of a perverse 'wealth pump' which, after years of more equitable wealth distribution, takes from the poor and gives to the rich.... The second major destabilising factor [is] what Turchin defines as the 'overproduction of elites', in which an ever greater number of people compete over a finite and increasingly corrupt structure of privilege and power. He offers four factions between which this competition for status is perennially played out: militaristic, financial, bureaucratic and ideological. As societies decline the balanced equation of these factions falls wildly out of balance. The forces of capital seek to destroy the voices of ideology – one 'elite' arms itself against another in a series of real wars or culture wars – and things fall apart.... If he trades in apocalypse, however, his hope is to identify the means by which some societies faced with these existential threats have managed to mitigate or dodge them. He examines the ways Britain escaped revolution with the 1832 Reform Act, and how the extreme indicators after the Great Depression led to 'a prosocial faction' within America’s ruling elite, giving away a large proportion of its wealth in taxes to prevent catastrophe.... 'Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well,' Turchin writes. 'We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.' Sadly, however, that particular algorithm is still under construction."
How Choose Your Own Adventures helped me win the Booker prize – article by Shehan Karunatilaka in The Guardian. "The Choose Your Own Adventure books appealed to nerdy kids in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I grew up in the 80s; they were read by kids around the world. First in school libraries and then bookshops, where you’d find them on the shelf next to the Enid Blytons our parents would recommend. The adventures had provocative titles, intriguing cover art and the promise that you could choose from up to 33 endings." "You, the reader, addressed in the second person, make choices every few pages, to find out who killed Harlowe Thrombey, to seek the lost jewels of Nabooti, uncover the secret of the pyramids, or escape being a prisoner of the Ant People. And while some endings can be deemed happy, in most scenarios you end up dead. You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters. You fall down mineshafts, off cliffs, into wormholes, and perish in every conceivable natural catastrophe.... The unnamed 'You' in each book was originally meant to be a gender-neutral figure that could be equipped with specialist skills – such as archery in The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, or computer wizardry in Supercomputer – but largely remained a blank slate for the reader to imbue with character traits. The illustrations depicted a young, predominantly male, somewhat androgynous hero, as successive publishers bowed to the age-old wisdom that girls may read stories with boy heroes but never vice versa.... The demise of the franchise was predictable. It had occupied a cultural sweet spot in the 80s, just before the rise of role-playing gamebooks such as Dungeons and Dragons, and before our hand-held game consoles became fully immersive and interactive narrative machines. But for this writer, there remains far more than nostalgia and gruesome deaths. When attempting my last book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I was confronted with the challenge of getting a dead man to narrate an entire novel in the second person. While some claimed it to be a fool’s errand, and asked why I’d draw inspiration from a franchise written in the second person, I boldly replied, 'Why ever not?'"
‘Social mobility is a fairytale’: Faiza Shaheen on fighting for Labour and hating Oxford – interview by Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. "Know Your Place [is] a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that 'anyone can make it with hard work' results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. 'Social mobility is a fairytale,' Shaheen concludes. 'In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.' She is, of course, one of these shining examples herself. She grew up in a working-class, low-income household. Her family moved often, and in one place she had to share a bed with her sister to keep warm in a room in which there were snail trails on the floor in the morning.... Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement.... On her experience of studying PPE at Oxford – the degree of prime ministers – she is unequivocal. 'I hated Oxford with a passion,' she says. 'I don’t think I was able to articulate that I was a socialist until I went there.' In her book, she writes: 'I can tell you that in my experience, many of the people who studied PPE are among the worst, most arrogant and entitled people around. I would go as far as saying that reading PPE at Oxford should be seen as a red flag.' What Oxford did give her was a class education. 'I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,' she says. 'It was atrocious.' ... Know Your Place offers a bleak assessment of inequality, but Shaheen believes change is possible if we reconsider what we are valuing. 'I don’t think aspiration should be limited to this idea of going to Oxford and getting a high-paying job,' she replies. 'The whole idea needs flipping.' She wants to bin the idea of 'the top'. The final section of the book lists the ways in which she believes the system can be changed. These range from valuing collective social impact over economic wealth, and a solidarity tax to pay for the policies she will fight for if she wins in the next general election. 'The book is called Know Your Place,' she says, 'but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: "We are not going to be put in our place any more."’"
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