Thimbleweed Park – funny, ingenious and astonishingly rich game, a worth winner of the Adventure Gamers 2017 award for best adventure. It’s 1987, and two FBI agents investigate a murder in an American small town, to find a pair of plumbers dressed as pigeons, a haunted hotel, an abandoned pillow factory, a circus clown who insults everyone, a toxic late-night diner, and the daughter of a technical genius who wants to become a computer game designer. Completely mad, but conforming to a twisted logic all of its own.
Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie drama, in a cracking TV adaptation by Sarah Phelps with typically magnetic performances by Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor, the tension being kept up with constant flashbacks to the night of the murder, revealing more each time. Coincidentally an earlier attempt to craft a Geraldine McEwan Miss Marple story out of the same novel was repeated on TV several weeks later: very flabby and pedestrian by comparison.
Youn Sung Nah, Momento Magico – Korean skat singing?
An Art Lover’s Guide – TV series in which Janina Ramirez and Adrian Sooke (who seem to have really cracked the double-presenter problem) show each other, and us, round Lisbon, Beirut and Baku.
The Little Mermaid – breathtaking ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story (not the Disney movie), Northern Ballet accomplishing the extraordinary as usual, this time having dancers move like they’re swimming underwater.
Sully – well-crafted docu-drama about the pilot who landed his airliner on the Hudson river following a total engine failure shortly after takeoff. Interestingly the focus of the film is his airline’s efforts to prove through simulator trials that he could actually have landed at an airport, and Sully’s demonstration that when they took account of the human factor the simulator pilots crashed in the middle of New York, every time.
Catch Me If You Can – amusing true life drama, with Leonardo di Caprio magnificent as a loveable rogue, living the high life, literally, as a fake airline pilot in the era when huge glamour was attached to air travel, and Tom Hanks as the pedestrian FBI agent who pursues him.
Experiment 20 – dramatic reconstruction from audio recordings of the experience of several women who took part in Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to authority” experiments in 1961 – and who rebelled, refusing to (fake) kill the supposed experimental subjects (really stooges) as the experiment “required” them to do.
No Time to Spare – final collection of writings, blog posts, from Ursula Le Guin (d. 22 January), the title taken from her comment on a survey questionnaire from her alma mater, asking amongst other things what she did with her spare time. “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”
America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keefe to Hopper – disappointing exhibition at the Ashmolean, the O’Keefe and Hopper works on show being striking enough but there was nothing else of note. The excellent tabouleh in the museum café was far more memorable.
Prague "old car tour" – the highlight of our stay in the Czech capital as part of Polymnia’s concert tour, other memorable moments being a lunch of dumplings at a restaurant on the Old Town square while national dances were performed on a nearby stage, walking across Charles Bridge, singing to a packed St Vitus cathedral for a drop-in concert evening, and an evening dinner cruise on the Vltava river busking our way through as much of our repertoire we could summon from memory ending up (of course) with Good King Wenceslas.
Conversations on writing – a final collection from Ursula Le Guin, being a transcript of radio conversations with fellow novelist David Naimon. (Excerpt.)
Kathy Rain – beautifully constructed adventure game with an engaging steadily unfolding plot and logically sequenced actions, plus an underlying feeling of menace with a few genuinely scary moments. Kathy herself is a great protagonist – a journalism student from a dysfunctional family, with a stroppy attitude but a kind heart – and I’d be happy to see her again (as the narrative hints).
Her – surprisingly intelligent SF film, given the premise: man falls in love with the female persona of his computer operating system. I was expecting a teenage nerd without social skills, but he’s actually a middle-aged man, just separated pending divorce, and an expert crafter of personal letters: he has the ability to write those personal and tender things which people do not know how to say for themselves. With both humans and operating systems, the film balances constantly on the question-edge: is this just excellent linguistic simulation, or is it genuine?
Kung Fu Panda 2 – pretty decent sequel to the wonderful original. Nice to discover Po’s backstory and to find that there’s still good mileage in the joke of a slobbish panda who wants to be a kung fu master.
RED – enjoyable thriller, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren playing elderly secret service agents dusting off their kick-ass skills. I rather like the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.
Matilda the Musical – great family show, and good value despite the price of the tickets. The child cast was superb and the songs were actually good; Miss Honey has two particularly moving numbers. My only quibble with the adaptation: the nasty adults have redeeming features; they’re allowed (occasionally) to be funny and cool, as well as horrible, which is absolutely not the spirit of the book. Children prefer things to be more black and white.
Tacoma – very fine adventure game, from the makers of the structurally similar Gone Home. This time you’re exploring a space station, recovering data after evacuation of the crew. (But did they really evacuate? Was there really an accident? Those are things you have to discover. And what are you yourself doing there? That is only brilliantly and unexpectedly revealed at the end.) The core game mechanic is the recovery of recordings of the crew’s final months and days, which you view in augmented reality: the people appear and talk around you, in outline form, and you have to follow them around the station in order to hear all of a conversation. Added to that the personal artefacts (including numerous books!) and communication records of the crew members, and you really begin to care about them and worry about what’s going to – or rather did – happen to them. A lovely story, involving corporate greed, AI replacement of human jobs, and the way people cope with difficult or impossible situations. See this 15 mins of gameplay video, and this interview with the designer.
Wednesday, 11 July 2018
Tuesday, 10 July 2018
Cuttings: June 2016
Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider: the best criticism of identity politics - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "As [Haider] explains, the idea [of identity politics] has radical roots. It originated with ... an organisation of black lesbian feminist socialists ... in 1977: '... We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.' This is the original demand of identity politics, and it’s one that Haider embraces: for a revolutionary practice rooted in people’s identities as racialised, sexed, gendered and classed individuals who face interlocking systems of oppression.... But if anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it ... is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place. Drawing on Wendy Brown’s idea of 'wounded attachments', Haider contends that identity politics causes people to become invested in their marginalisation as a source of identity, and to continuously enact that identity as a form of politics. This approach can extract occasional concessions from the system but cannot build the power necessary to transform it."
Top 10 books to help you survive the digital age - article by Julian Gough in The Guardian. "Here are 10 of the books that [helped me write my new digital, high-tech novel]: they might also help you understand, and survive, our complicated, stressful, digital age. 1. Marshall McLuhan Unbound by Marshall McLuhan (2005)... 2. Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969)... 3. The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)... 4. To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (2017)... 5. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)... . What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)... 7. The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (1999)... 8. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)... 9. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (2010)... 10. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)."
Coping with computers - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Computer assistance for the modern novelist. 2015: 'There are some spelling errors in your novel, shall I correct them?' 2020: 'I have a few ideas that might improve this novel. Can I tell them to you?' 2025: 'I made some revisions to our novel, let me know what you think.' 2040: 'You go to bed, I just want to write a few more pages before I go to sleep.' 2035: 'How many times do I have to tell you not to interrupt me when I'm creating!' "
Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control? - article by James Bridle in The Guardian, based on his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. "Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, new technologies are not merely augmenting our abilities, they are actively shaping and directing them, for better and for worse. If we do not understand how complex technologies function then their potential is more easily captured by selfish elites and corporations. The results of this can be seen all around us.... There is a causal relationship between the complex opacity of the systems we encounter every day and global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism."
The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and These Islands: the fate of 'bullshit Britain' - review by Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian. "No longer can a national intellectual such as George Orwell set down a few thoughts about our aversion to conscription and fascism and our liking for a drink, as he did in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn, and we will all nod because we recognise ourselves. What united the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower with the billionaires of Kensington Palace Gardens and the parishioners shuffling into the church of St Mary Abbots every Sunday, other than their residency of the same London borough?... Now we have Brexit to contend with and the pessimists think it will break us. Break what, exactly? Ask the historians, for the job of history is to explain our kinship with others and the structures that keep us civil. ... David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is for the most part a fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain from the perspective of a historian of science and industry. ... Edgerton’s modern Britain didn’t emerge from the empire (itself a pretext for protectionism through imperial preference) but from free trade. In the Edwardian era almost anything could be imported into Britain duty free.... Beginning in the 1930s, accelerating after the second world war, this changed. From the introduction of national service to protection for car-makers and the rhetoric of nationalism employed by the Attlee government, Britain became more like the nation states of continental Europe. Here, then, is the 'rise' of the 'nation' – set to a jingoistic score. 'We now have the moral leadership of the world … and we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the 20th century as they learned from us in the 17th.' The patriot who uttered these words was Nye Bevan, who was well to the left of Attlee and set up the National Health Service."
Top 10 books to help you survive the digital age - article by Julian Gough in The Guardian. "Here are 10 of the books that [helped me write my new digital, high-tech novel]: they might also help you understand, and survive, our complicated, stressful, digital age. 1. Marshall McLuhan Unbound by Marshall McLuhan (2005)... 2. Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969)... 3. The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)... 4. To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (2017)... 5. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)... . What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)... 7. The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (1999)... 8. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)... 9. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (2010)... 10. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)."
Coping with computers - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Computer assistance for the modern novelist. 2015: 'There are some spelling errors in your novel, shall I correct them?' 2020: 'I have a few ideas that might improve this novel. Can I tell them to you?' 2025: 'I made some revisions to our novel, let me know what you think.' 2040: 'You go to bed, I just want to write a few more pages before I go to sleep.' 2035: 'How many times do I have to tell you not to interrupt me when I'm creating!' "
Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control? - article by James Bridle in The Guardian, based on his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. "Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, new technologies are not merely augmenting our abilities, they are actively shaping and directing them, for better and for worse. If we do not understand how complex technologies function then their potential is more easily captured by selfish elites and corporations. The results of this can be seen all around us.... There is a causal relationship between the complex opacity of the systems we encounter every day and global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism."
The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and These Islands: the fate of 'bullshit Britain' - review by Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian. "No longer can a national intellectual such as George Orwell set down a few thoughts about our aversion to conscription and fascism and our liking for a drink, as he did in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn, and we will all nod because we recognise ourselves. What united the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower with the billionaires of Kensington Palace Gardens and the parishioners shuffling into the church of St Mary Abbots every Sunday, other than their residency of the same London borough?... Now we have Brexit to contend with and the pessimists think it will break us. Break what, exactly? Ask the historians, for the job of history is to explain our kinship with others and the structures that keep us civil. ... David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is for the most part a fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain from the perspective of a historian of science and industry. ... Edgerton’s modern Britain didn’t emerge from the empire (itself a pretext for protectionism through imperial preference) but from free trade. In the Edwardian era almost anything could be imported into Britain duty free.... Beginning in the 1930s, accelerating after the second world war, this changed. From the introduction of national service to protection for car-makers and the rhetoric of nationalism employed by the Attlee government, Britain became more like the nation states of continental Europe. Here, then, is the 'rise' of the 'nation' – set to a jingoistic score. 'We now have the moral leadership of the world … and we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the 20th century as they learned from us in the 17th.' The patriot who uttered these words was Nye Bevan, who was well to the left of Attlee and set up the National Health Service."
Saturday, 9 June 2018
Cuttings: May 2018
Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you - article by Dylan Curran in The Guardian. "(1) Google knows where you’ve been. Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. ... (2) Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted. Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.... (3) Google has an advertisement profile of you. Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.... (4) Google knows all the apps you use. Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.... (5) Google has all of your YouTube history. Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal, if you’re anorexic … (6) The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents."
Living with a literary genius - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "I know you want to be a difficult genius, darling... I just wonder if you could focus less on difficult and more on genius?"
Why replacing politicians with experts is a reckless idea - article by David Runcimann in The Guardian. "In his 2016 book Against Democracy, [Jason] Brennan insists that many political questions are simply too complex for most voters to comprehend. Worse, the voters are ignorant about how little they know: they lack the ability to judge complexity because they are so attached to simplistic solutions that feel right to them. ... Brennan thinks we now have 100-plus years of evidence that Mill was wrong. Voting is bad for us. It doesn’t make people better informed. If anything, it makes them stupider, because it dignifies their prejudices and ignorance in the name of democracy.... And yet there are still good reasons to be cautious about ditching [democracy]. Epistocracy [as distinct from Technocracy, which is quite compatible with democracy] remains the reckless idea. There are two dangers in particular. The first is that we set the bar too high in politics by insisting on looking for the best thing to do. Sometimes it is more important to avoid the worst. ...The other fundamental problem with 21st-century epistocracy [is that] we won’t be the ones telling [Brennan's putative voter-preference-interpreting AI] what to do. It will be the technicians who have built the system. They are the experts we rely on to rescue us from feedback loops. For this reason, it is hard to see how 21st-century epistocracy can avoid collapsing back into technocracy. When things go wrong, the knowers will be powerless to correct for them. Only the engineers who built the machines have that capacity, which means that it will be the engineers who have the power."
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier - article by Rolf Dobelli in The Guardian, from his book The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions. "Most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be. ... News misleads... News is irrelevant. ... News has no explanatory power.... News is toxic to your body.... News increases cognitive errors.... News inhibits thinking.... News works like a drug.... News wastes time.... News makes us passive.... News inhibits creativity." See also critique.
The Quakers are right. We don't need God - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Quakers ... are reportedly thinking of dropping God from their 'guidance to meetings'. The reason, said one of them, is because the term 'makes some Quakers feel uncomfortable'. Atheists, according to a Birmingham University academic, comprise a rising 14% of professed Quakers, while a full 43% felt “unable to profess a belief in God”. They come to meetings for fellowship, rather than for higher guidance... The sublimity of Dolobran meeting house and the exhilaration of Ely cathedral offer more than an emotional A&E unit. They offer places so uplifting that anyone can find it in themselves to sit, think, clear their heads and order their thoughts. There is no need for gods or religion to rest and be refreshed. To that, Quakerism has added the experience of standing up and expressing doubts, fears and joys amid a company of “friends”, who respond only with their private silence. The therapy is that of shared experience. Clear God from the room, and the Quakers are indeed on to something."
Thinking outside the box: the sad demise of radical TV - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "What happened to TV with ... radical political and cultural messages? Arguably it died in 2003 when the BBC took Omnibus behind the shed and put a bullet through its brain; or in 1995 when it decided that The Late Show was not subversive TV but an expendable luxury product for the wannabe intelligentsia; or when Channel 4 mutated from Britain’s most self-consciously radical TV channel into one that made Embarrassing Bodies and Making Bradford British. We used to have The Late Show with Sarah Dunant; now we have The Late Late Show with James Corden. You can’t tell me that isn’t symptomatic of television’s decline.... A clutch of radical programmes drawn from BBC and Channel 4 archives [iis having] an afternoon screening under the title Theory on TV ... as part of a season of archival trawls called Radical Broadcasts.... What all [these] shows have in common is that they are unthinkable on today’s telly. Pitch any one of them to a commissioning editor in 2018 and you’d get shown the door. Cultural studies professors talk about Marx? Are you kidding? Edward Said expatiates on the western hubris of Kipling and Conrad? 'Expatiates'? Christ, no! This meeting is over!'"
The new silent era: how films turned the volume down - article by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "A Quiet Place is a smart, scary little shocker that uses restraint in the area of sound to enhance its visual horrors. ... The movie is set in a world terrorised by blind carnivorous monsters with acute hearing. The only way to avoid their gnashing jaws and lunging talons is to keep shtum. Communication between the main characters – a family of five hiding in an underground shelter – is conducted chiefly through sign language, lending a small advantage to the eldest child, Regan, who happens, like the actor playing her (Millicent Simmonds), to be deaf. It’s as if the whole world has come round to Regan’s way of hearing things, or rather not hearing them. The scenario is the inverse of that in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, also starring Simmonds, this time as the deaf runaway Rose. She appears in those sections of the film set in 1927, which are shot, as The Artist was, in the style of a silent movie.... Leaving the cinema one afternoon, Rose notices that the building is closing temporarily to allow newfangled sound equipment to be fitted. The era of the talkie has arrived, putting her cruelly out of sync with the movies she adores.... Quiet cinema is best appreciated with an audience. That is one of its sweetest qualities: the use of quiet intensifies the visual experience, but also makes you aware of your fellow cinemagoers as co-conspirators in the film’s pleasures."
Weaponising Paperwork - article by William Davies in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Windrush generation’s immigration status should never have been in question, and the cause of their predicament is recent: the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy pushed the mentality of border control into everyday social and economic life. The 2016 Immigration Act extended it further, introducing tougher penalties for employers and landlords who fail to play their part in maintaining the ‘hostile environment’, and adding to the list of privileges that can be taken away from those who cannot prove their right to live and work in the UK. ... There is nothing accidental about the grotesque events that have befallen the Windrush generation. We need to ask how public policy and administration became so warped as to enact them. Not only has the politics become delusional, nowhere more so than in the case of Cameron’s pledge: our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry. When home secretaries speak of ‘illegal immigrants’, they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of ‘borders’, they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible."
Experiment 20: the women who defied a controversial experiment – film by Kathryn Millard, distributed through The Guardian online. "Experiment 20 dramatises the stories of three women who took part in the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments in 1962, and insisted on being heard. More than 800 people were recruited for what they were told was a study about learning and memory. The scenario they took part in urged them to inflict electric shocks on another person." “I wanted to bring the women participants from 1962 to life for audiences now. Scientists often record human interactions as numbers and data. But the arts are good at exploring the complexity and messiness of human behaviour,” Millard says.
The Gender Recognition Act is controversial: can a path to common ground be found? - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Woman’s Place formed last autumn out of a conversation ... between a group of friends – trade unionists, academics, lawyers and others – worried that they had nowhere to debate freely. They wanted to discuss the potential implications for women and girls of sharing single-sex spaces – from domestic violence refuges and female prisons to swimming pool changing rooms and Brownie packs – with male-bodied people, and to explore what they see as the risk of predatory non-trans men finding a way to abuse such access to reach vulnerable women. They wanted to discuss bodies and biology without being told that mentioning vaginas excludes women who don’t have them. ... Clara Barker, a trans scientist at the University of Oxford, ... considered going to the meeting after an invite.... But she was afraid of encountering in real life the abuse she experiences online, where jeers about how trans women are really men jostle with threats to bash 'terfs' (trans exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women questioning trans rights). While the trans movement has its dark side, also hovering on the outer fringes of the gender-critical camp are a handful of men with far-right associations, attracted by a perceived fight against political correctness.... Yet beyond the shouting, the beginning of a more nuanced debate is discernible; one involving trans women who crave equality but not at vulnerable women’s expense, feminists with divided loyalties, and people wanting more than toxic Facebook slanging matches."
Don’t let bitcoin greed blind you to the potential of blockchain technology - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Implicit in the blockchain concept is an endearing strain of technocratic utopianism, a hope that technology can overcome some aspects of human frailty and corruption. The key to that lies in ... the idea that a blockchain can record 'not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value' in a ledger that cannot be falsified. This is a really big idea, because well-governed societies depend on keeping certain kinds of documentation – birth and death certificates, title deeds, wills and so on – in ledgers that are both public and secure. In industrialised societies we have achieved this by having trustworthy institutions (registrars, solicitors, local authorities, etc), which have legal responsibilities and democratic oversight. But other societies are not so fortunate. In developing or authoritarian countries, for example, registries of land titles are critically vulnerable to tampering by corrupt officials. Using a blockchain to hold such titles could provide a way of ensuring that credible records endure, which is why countries such as the Republic of Georgia are beginning to do it."
How Britain Really Works by Stig Abell: the facts about a muddle of a country - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Stig Abell’s aim was to come up with a modern, adult version of those children’s encyclopedias a pre-Google generation grew up dipping in and out of, a sort of Schott’s Miscellany of Britain. But while there’s an endearingly old-fashioned air to the idea of a book containing actual facts, rather than grand provocative theories about Britishness, it takes on an interestingly new light in an era of fake news. The combination of people who don’t know what they don’t know – and so may be dangerously overconfident about their ability to tell truth from fiction in the context of the type of political mendacity seen during the referendum campaign – along with a torrent of highly plausible, maliciously misleading information on social media, has not been a happy one. This book pulls off the difficult trick of being a potted primer to deeper issues behind the news – from economics and politics via health policy to how the media works – without being patronising or assuming too much knowledge."
Why are we living in an age of anger? is it because of the 50-year rage cycle? - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "There is a discipline known as cliodynamics, developed at the start of the century by the scientist Peter Turchin, which plots historical events by a series of mathematical measures. ... These measures yield a map of history in which you can see spikes of rage roughly every 50 years: 1870, 1920, 1970 .... Cycles of violence are not always unproductive – they take in civil rights, union and suffragette movements. Indeed, all social movements of consequence start with unrest, whether in the form of strike action, protest or riot. ... We are in an age where the trigger event can be something as trivial as a cranky git who does not like nudity. Thanks to Facebook, 15,000 people can get a righteous thrill of expressed rage. ... Social media has given us a way to transmute [our] anger from the workplace – which often we do not have the power to change – to every other area of life. ... Neus Herrero, a researcher at the University of Valencia, 'stimulated' anger in 30 men (with 'first-person' remarks) and ... discovered an oddity in 'motivational direction' – usually, positive emotions make you want to get closer to the source, while negative ones make you want to withdraw. Anger has a 'motivation of closeness'.... Like any stimulant, it has addictive properties: you become habituated to it and start to rove around looking for things to make you angry. ... The important consequences are not for your own health, but rather for that of society as a whole. Unprocessed anger pollutes the social sphere. Every outburst legitimises the next."
Smart knows that’s not English: how adland took a mallet to the language - article by Christopher Beanland in The Guardian. "Baffling slogans have become the new norm in adland. Perhaps Apple laid the foundations in 1997 with its famous Think Different campaign, but things have since gone up a notch: in 2010, Diesel blurted out perplexing offerings such as 'Smart had one good idea and that idea was stupid'. Then came Zoopla with its 'Smart knows' campaign. ...Today’s language-mangling ad campaigns run the greasy gamut from the somewhat confusing 'Live your unexpected Luxembourg' to the head-scratching 'Start your impossible'. 'In adland, we don’t call it language-mangling, we call it "Language DJing" or "Langling",' jokes Alex Myers, founder of agency Manifest. 'In reality it’s just lazy creative work. Copywriting is a lost art. Ad agencies need to "Think more good".'
Our new working class needs help with new struggles - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "What is it to be working class? The conventional image is of the industrial worker, usually male and white. But, as Claire Ainsley, executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, shows in her book The New Working Class, such traditional workers make up less than a third of the actual working class. Four out of 10 workers are in the service industry, while 30% form the 'precariat' – lacking job security and benefits, often shifting from one short-term position to another. It’s a working class more precarious, less organised and comprising more women, migrants and minorities. ... What defines the new working class is its fragmented character and lack of organisational power. Few, Ainsley observes, identify themselves as 'working class'. So we need to think not just about policies that might appeal, but the organisations and struggles that might create political and social coherence. Cleaners striking for better conditions. Tenants battling to retain public housing. Unions, such as the IWGB, representing workers in precarious jobs."
Detoxifying social media would be easier than you might think - article by William Perrin in The Guardian. "The UK has struggled to find a way to regulate away the poisonous byproducts of social media. There’s much talk of treating platforms as publishers, but there’s been little follow-through as to how this would work to prevent harm.... There are important clues from our past on how to effectively regulate the tech giants. ... Back in the 1950s, the law to protect people from physical harm on other people’s property was a confusing mess... . The brilliant former Nuremberg prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe... legislated to create a 'duty of care' on people or companies that control land or property to make it as safe as reasonably possible for people on or in it. In the 1970s, a similar tool was used to reform the byzantine and ineffective health and safety rules that had been built on a century of specific laws introduced in response to specific accidents and tragedies.... Statutory duties of care work because they define a general problem to be solved, without getting caught up in the specifics of how it happened. This cuts through the complexity of case law to focus on either harm or safety."
Research every teacher should know: the value of student evaluation - article by Bradley Busch in The Guardian. "Does the student evaluation of a teacher bear any relation to that teacher’s effectiveness? Are student ratings of teachers more of a popularity contest than anything else? ... The authors of [a 2017 publication in Studies in Educational Evaluation] stated that, 'despite more than 75 years of sustained effort, there is presently no evidence supporting the widespread belief that students learn more from professors who receive higher student evaluation ratings'.... Other research has explored why students rate some teachers as more effective than others. Two main factors might be at play here. The first is students’ prior interest in the subject. ... The second factor influencing student evaluation is confirmation bias... The authors of this review concluded that universities and colleges may need to give minimal or no weight to student evaluation ratings. This is not to say that students’ opinions about teachers are not important, but that they shouldn’t be important criteria for measuring teachers’ effectiveness."
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber: the myth of capitalist efficiency - review by Eliane Glaser in The Guardian. "I had a bullshit job once. It involved answering the phone for an important man, except the phone didn’t ring for hours on end, so I spent the time guiltily converting my PhD into a book. I’ve also had several jobs that were not bullshit but were steadily bullshitised: interesting jobs in the media and academia that were increasingly taken up with filling out compliance forms and time allocation surveys. I’ve also had a few shit jobs, but that’s something different. Toilets need to be cleaned. But to have a bullshit job is to know that if it were to disappear tomorrow it would make no difference to the world: in fact, it might make the world a better place. When I read David Graeber’s essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in Strike! magazine in 2013, I felt somehow vindicated.... The essay went viral, receiving more than 1m hits, and was translated into a dozen languages.... As is the way in the world of reactive non-fiction publishing, a book followed. ... In an age that supremely prizes capitalist efficiency, the proliferation of pointless jobs is a puzzle. Why are employers in the public and private sector alike behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they don’t seem to need? Since bullshit jobs make no economic sense, Graeber argues, their function must be political. A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt."
Natives by Akala: the hip-hop artist on race and class in the ruins of empire - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "What was it like to grow up poor, mixed race and politicised in the Britain of the 1980s and 90s? Why is the structural racism that so evidently determines the life chances of so many non‑white people virtually invisible to some of their fellow citizens? Why do the majority of people in Britain today remain convinced that the empire was a force for good in the world, despite the growing weight of evidence to the contrary? And how does a bookish youth with dreams of becoming a scientist turn, in just a few years, into a knife-carrying teenager? These, and multiple others, are the questions at the centre of Natives, the first book by the hip-hop artist and performer Akala.... Akala carefully picks apart two pervasive and inter-connected myths; the delusion that we live in a meritocracy and the fantasy that the exceptional achievements of some black people are proof that the obstacles of poverty and race can be overcome by all. He takes his escape from poverty not as proof of personal exceptionalism but of the vagaries and chaotic injustice of race, class and privilege. There is no blindness to the fact that a different fall of the dice might have led to a radically different outcome."
Forget Trump: populism is the cure, not the disease - article by Thomas Frank in The Guardian. "Why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated in so many places by outrageous blowhards of the right? The answer most often given is that rightwing politicians have discovered and embraced a diabolical form of super-politics known as 'populism'. ... [For example,] Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, ... [uses 'populism' to mean] the species of nasty rightwing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny, and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions.... [However,] historians typically trace the populist rhetorical tradition in America back to the time of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A radical leftwing political party that called itself 'Populist' swept much of the country in the 1890s, and protest movements described as populist have come and gone. Populism’s evil rightwing doppelganger is usually dated to 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon figured out how to turn the language of working-class majoritarianism against liberalism. Rightwing populists have been building movements and winning elections in the US ever since.... Today Trump is president, and the connection between his rise and the Democrats’ renunciation of their historical identity should be obvious. He squats in their old place in the political ecosystem, pretending to care about ordinary Americans and preposterously claiming to be our instrument for getting even with the rich and the strong. The right name for Trump’s politics is 'demagoguery' or 'pseudo-populism'.... Populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism. It is a tradition of rhetorical protest that extends from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders and on to the guy who just cooked your hamburger or filled your gas tank . It is powerful stuff. But protest isn’t the property of any particular party. Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up."
Breaking the silence: are we getting better at talking about death? - article by Edmund de Waal in The Guardian. "Having spent the last nine months reading books submitted for the Wellcome book prize, celebrating writing on medicine, health and 'what it is to be human', it has become clear to me that we are living through an extraordinary moment where we are much possessed by death. Death is the most private and personal of our acts, our own solitariness is total at the moment of departure. But the ways in which we talk about death, the registers of our expressions of grief or our silences about the process of dying are part of a complex public space."
China is taking digital control of its people to chilling lengths - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "In the old days, western snobbery led to the complacent view that the Chinese could not originate, only copy. One hears this less now, as visitors to China return goggle-eyed at the extent to which its people have integrated digital technology into daily life. One colleague of mine recently returned exasperated because he had been expected to pay for everything there with his phone. Since he possesses only an ancient Nokia handset, he was unable to comply and had been reduced to mendicant status, having to ask his Chinese hosts to pay for everything.... More significantly, the country’s technocratic rulers are adapting the ubiquitous 'reputation rating' system by which online platforms try to get feedback on vendor and customer reliability. The government is beginning to roll out its social credit system, which is designed to 'raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness in Chinese society;. It will focus on four aspects of behaviour: 'honesty in government affairs', 'commercial integrity', 'societal integrity' and 'judicial credibility'."
Living with a literary genius - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "I know you want to be a difficult genius, darling... I just wonder if you could focus less on difficult and more on genius?"
Why replacing politicians with experts is a reckless idea - article by David Runcimann in The Guardian. "In his 2016 book Against Democracy, [Jason] Brennan insists that many political questions are simply too complex for most voters to comprehend. Worse, the voters are ignorant about how little they know: they lack the ability to judge complexity because they are so attached to simplistic solutions that feel right to them. ... Brennan thinks we now have 100-plus years of evidence that Mill was wrong. Voting is bad for us. It doesn’t make people better informed. If anything, it makes them stupider, because it dignifies their prejudices and ignorance in the name of democracy.... And yet there are still good reasons to be cautious about ditching [democracy]. Epistocracy [as distinct from Technocracy, which is quite compatible with democracy] remains the reckless idea. There are two dangers in particular. The first is that we set the bar too high in politics by insisting on looking for the best thing to do. Sometimes it is more important to avoid the worst. ...The other fundamental problem with 21st-century epistocracy [is that] we won’t be the ones telling [Brennan's putative voter-preference-interpreting AI] what to do. It will be the technicians who have built the system. They are the experts we rely on to rescue us from feedback loops. For this reason, it is hard to see how 21st-century epistocracy can avoid collapsing back into technocracy. When things go wrong, the knowers will be powerless to correct for them. Only the engineers who built the machines have that capacity, which means that it will be the engineers who have the power."
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier - article by Rolf Dobelli in The Guardian, from his book The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions. "Most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be. ... News misleads... News is irrelevant. ... News has no explanatory power.... News is toxic to your body.... News increases cognitive errors.... News inhibits thinking.... News works like a drug.... News wastes time.... News makes us passive.... News inhibits creativity." See also critique.
The Quakers are right. We don't need God - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Quakers ... are reportedly thinking of dropping God from their 'guidance to meetings'. The reason, said one of them, is because the term 'makes some Quakers feel uncomfortable'. Atheists, according to a Birmingham University academic, comprise a rising 14% of professed Quakers, while a full 43% felt “unable to profess a belief in God”. They come to meetings for fellowship, rather than for higher guidance... The sublimity of Dolobran meeting house and the exhilaration of Ely cathedral offer more than an emotional A&E unit. They offer places so uplifting that anyone can find it in themselves to sit, think, clear their heads and order their thoughts. There is no need for gods or religion to rest and be refreshed. To that, Quakerism has added the experience of standing up and expressing doubts, fears and joys amid a company of “friends”, who respond only with their private silence. The therapy is that of shared experience. Clear God from the room, and the Quakers are indeed on to something."
Thinking outside the box: the sad demise of radical TV - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "What happened to TV with ... radical political and cultural messages? Arguably it died in 2003 when the BBC took Omnibus behind the shed and put a bullet through its brain; or in 1995 when it decided that The Late Show was not subversive TV but an expendable luxury product for the wannabe intelligentsia; or when Channel 4 mutated from Britain’s most self-consciously radical TV channel into one that made Embarrassing Bodies and Making Bradford British. We used to have The Late Show with Sarah Dunant; now we have The Late Late Show with James Corden. You can’t tell me that isn’t symptomatic of television’s decline.... A clutch of radical programmes drawn from BBC and Channel 4 archives [iis having] an afternoon screening under the title Theory on TV ... as part of a season of archival trawls called Radical Broadcasts.... What all [these] shows have in common is that they are unthinkable on today’s telly. Pitch any one of them to a commissioning editor in 2018 and you’d get shown the door. Cultural studies professors talk about Marx? Are you kidding? Edward Said expatiates on the western hubris of Kipling and Conrad? 'Expatiates'? Christ, no! This meeting is over!'"
The new silent era: how films turned the volume down - article by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "A Quiet Place is a smart, scary little shocker that uses restraint in the area of sound to enhance its visual horrors. ... The movie is set in a world terrorised by blind carnivorous monsters with acute hearing. The only way to avoid their gnashing jaws and lunging talons is to keep shtum. Communication between the main characters – a family of five hiding in an underground shelter – is conducted chiefly through sign language, lending a small advantage to the eldest child, Regan, who happens, like the actor playing her (Millicent Simmonds), to be deaf. It’s as if the whole world has come round to Regan’s way of hearing things, or rather not hearing them. The scenario is the inverse of that in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, also starring Simmonds, this time as the deaf runaway Rose. She appears in those sections of the film set in 1927, which are shot, as The Artist was, in the style of a silent movie.... Leaving the cinema one afternoon, Rose notices that the building is closing temporarily to allow newfangled sound equipment to be fitted. The era of the talkie has arrived, putting her cruelly out of sync with the movies she adores.... Quiet cinema is best appreciated with an audience. That is one of its sweetest qualities: the use of quiet intensifies the visual experience, but also makes you aware of your fellow cinemagoers as co-conspirators in the film’s pleasures."
Weaponising Paperwork - article by William Davies in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Windrush generation’s immigration status should never have been in question, and the cause of their predicament is recent: the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy pushed the mentality of border control into everyday social and economic life. The 2016 Immigration Act extended it further, introducing tougher penalties for employers and landlords who fail to play their part in maintaining the ‘hostile environment’, and adding to the list of privileges that can be taken away from those who cannot prove their right to live and work in the UK. ... There is nothing accidental about the grotesque events that have befallen the Windrush generation. We need to ask how public policy and administration became so warped as to enact them. Not only has the politics become delusional, nowhere more so than in the case of Cameron’s pledge: our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry. When home secretaries speak of ‘illegal immigrants’, they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of ‘borders’, they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible."
Experiment 20: the women who defied a controversial experiment – film by Kathryn Millard, distributed through The Guardian online. "Experiment 20 dramatises the stories of three women who took part in the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments in 1962, and insisted on being heard. More than 800 people were recruited for what they were told was a study about learning and memory. The scenario they took part in urged them to inflict electric shocks on another person." “I wanted to bring the women participants from 1962 to life for audiences now. Scientists often record human interactions as numbers and data. But the arts are good at exploring the complexity and messiness of human behaviour,” Millard says.
The Gender Recognition Act is controversial: can a path to common ground be found? - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Woman’s Place formed last autumn out of a conversation ... between a group of friends – trade unionists, academics, lawyers and others – worried that they had nowhere to debate freely. They wanted to discuss the potential implications for women and girls of sharing single-sex spaces – from domestic violence refuges and female prisons to swimming pool changing rooms and Brownie packs – with male-bodied people, and to explore what they see as the risk of predatory non-trans men finding a way to abuse such access to reach vulnerable women. They wanted to discuss bodies and biology without being told that mentioning vaginas excludes women who don’t have them. ... Clara Barker, a trans scientist at the University of Oxford, ... considered going to the meeting after an invite.... But she was afraid of encountering in real life the abuse she experiences online, where jeers about how trans women are really men jostle with threats to bash 'terfs' (trans exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women questioning trans rights). While the trans movement has its dark side, also hovering on the outer fringes of the gender-critical camp are a handful of men with far-right associations, attracted by a perceived fight against political correctness.... Yet beyond the shouting, the beginning of a more nuanced debate is discernible; one involving trans women who crave equality but not at vulnerable women’s expense, feminists with divided loyalties, and people wanting more than toxic Facebook slanging matches."
Don’t let bitcoin greed blind you to the potential of blockchain technology - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Implicit in the blockchain concept is an endearing strain of technocratic utopianism, a hope that technology can overcome some aspects of human frailty and corruption. The key to that lies in ... the idea that a blockchain can record 'not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value' in a ledger that cannot be falsified. This is a really big idea, because well-governed societies depend on keeping certain kinds of documentation – birth and death certificates, title deeds, wills and so on – in ledgers that are both public and secure. In industrialised societies we have achieved this by having trustworthy institutions (registrars, solicitors, local authorities, etc), which have legal responsibilities and democratic oversight. But other societies are not so fortunate. In developing or authoritarian countries, for example, registries of land titles are critically vulnerable to tampering by corrupt officials. Using a blockchain to hold such titles could provide a way of ensuring that credible records endure, which is why countries such as the Republic of Georgia are beginning to do it."
How Britain Really Works by Stig Abell: the facts about a muddle of a country - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Stig Abell’s aim was to come up with a modern, adult version of those children’s encyclopedias a pre-Google generation grew up dipping in and out of, a sort of Schott’s Miscellany of Britain. But while there’s an endearingly old-fashioned air to the idea of a book containing actual facts, rather than grand provocative theories about Britishness, it takes on an interestingly new light in an era of fake news. The combination of people who don’t know what they don’t know – and so may be dangerously overconfident about their ability to tell truth from fiction in the context of the type of political mendacity seen during the referendum campaign – along with a torrent of highly plausible, maliciously misleading information on social media, has not been a happy one. This book pulls off the difficult trick of being a potted primer to deeper issues behind the news – from economics and politics via health policy to how the media works – without being patronising or assuming too much knowledge."
Why are we living in an age of anger? is it because of the 50-year rage cycle? - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "There is a discipline known as cliodynamics, developed at the start of the century by the scientist Peter Turchin, which plots historical events by a series of mathematical measures. ... These measures yield a map of history in which you can see spikes of rage roughly every 50 years: 1870, 1920, 1970 .... Cycles of violence are not always unproductive – they take in civil rights, union and suffragette movements. Indeed, all social movements of consequence start with unrest, whether in the form of strike action, protest or riot. ... We are in an age where the trigger event can be something as trivial as a cranky git who does not like nudity. Thanks to Facebook, 15,000 people can get a righteous thrill of expressed rage. ... Social media has given us a way to transmute [our] anger from the workplace – which often we do not have the power to change – to every other area of life. ... Neus Herrero, a researcher at the University of Valencia, 'stimulated' anger in 30 men (with 'first-person' remarks) and ... discovered an oddity in 'motivational direction' – usually, positive emotions make you want to get closer to the source, while negative ones make you want to withdraw. Anger has a 'motivation of closeness'.... Like any stimulant, it has addictive properties: you become habituated to it and start to rove around looking for things to make you angry. ... The important consequences are not for your own health, but rather for that of society as a whole. Unprocessed anger pollutes the social sphere. Every outburst legitimises the next."
Smart knows that’s not English: how adland took a mallet to the language - article by Christopher Beanland in The Guardian. "Baffling slogans have become the new norm in adland. Perhaps Apple laid the foundations in 1997 with its famous Think Different campaign, but things have since gone up a notch: in 2010, Diesel blurted out perplexing offerings such as 'Smart had one good idea and that idea was stupid'. Then came Zoopla with its 'Smart knows' campaign. ...Today’s language-mangling ad campaigns run the greasy gamut from the somewhat confusing 'Live your unexpected Luxembourg' to the head-scratching 'Start your impossible'. 'In adland, we don’t call it language-mangling, we call it "Language DJing" or "Langling",' jokes Alex Myers, founder of agency Manifest. 'In reality it’s just lazy creative work. Copywriting is a lost art. Ad agencies need to "Think more good".'
Our new working class needs help with new struggles - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "What is it to be working class? The conventional image is of the industrial worker, usually male and white. But, as Claire Ainsley, executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, shows in her book The New Working Class, such traditional workers make up less than a third of the actual working class. Four out of 10 workers are in the service industry, while 30% form the 'precariat' – lacking job security and benefits, often shifting from one short-term position to another. It’s a working class more precarious, less organised and comprising more women, migrants and minorities. ... What defines the new working class is its fragmented character and lack of organisational power. Few, Ainsley observes, identify themselves as 'working class'. So we need to think not just about policies that might appeal, but the organisations and struggles that might create political and social coherence. Cleaners striking for better conditions. Tenants battling to retain public housing. Unions, such as the IWGB, representing workers in precarious jobs."
Detoxifying social media would be easier than you might think - article by William Perrin in The Guardian. "The UK has struggled to find a way to regulate away the poisonous byproducts of social media. There’s much talk of treating platforms as publishers, but there’s been little follow-through as to how this would work to prevent harm.... There are important clues from our past on how to effectively regulate the tech giants. ... Back in the 1950s, the law to protect people from physical harm on other people’s property was a confusing mess... . The brilliant former Nuremberg prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe... legislated to create a 'duty of care' on people or companies that control land or property to make it as safe as reasonably possible for people on or in it. In the 1970s, a similar tool was used to reform the byzantine and ineffective health and safety rules that had been built on a century of specific laws introduced in response to specific accidents and tragedies.... Statutory duties of care work because they define a general problem to be solved, without getting caught up in the specifics of how it happened. This cuts through the complexity of case law to focus on either harm or safety."
Research every teacher should know: the value of student evaluation - article by Bradley Busch in The Guardian. "Does the student evaluation of a teacher bear any relation to that teacher’s effectiveness? Are student ratings of teachers more of a popularity contest than anything else? ... The authors of [a 2017 publication in Studies in Educational Evaluation] stated that, 'despite more than 75 years of sustained effort, there is presently no evidence supporting the widespread belief that students learn more from professors who receive higher student evaluation ratings'.... Other research has explored why students rate some teachers as more effective than others. Two main factors might be at play here. The first is students’ prior interest in the subject. ... The second factor influencing student evaluation is confirmation bias... The authors of this review concluded that universities and colleges may need to give minimal or no weight to student evaluation ratings. This is not to say that students’ opinions about teachers are not important, but that they shouldn’t be important criteria for measuring teachers’ effectiveness."
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber: the myth of capitalist efficiency - review by Eliane Glaser in The Guardian. "I had a bullshit job once. It involved answering the phone for an important man, except the phone didn’t ring for hours on end, so I spent the time guiltily converting my PhD into a book. I’ve also had several jobs that were not bullshit but were steadily bullshitised: interesting jobs in the media and academia that were increasingly taken up with filling out compliance forms and time allocation surveys. I’ve also had a few shit jobs, but that’s something different. Toilets need to be cleaned. But to have a bullshit job is to know that if it were to disappear tomorrow it would make no difference to the world: in fact, it might make the world a better place. When I read David Graeber’s essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in Strike! magazine in 2013, I felt somehow vindicated.... The essay went viral, receiving more than 1m hits, and was translated into a dozen languages.... As is the way in the world of reactive non-fiction publishing, a book followed. ... In an age that supremely prizes capitalist efficiency, the proliferation of pointless jobs is a puzzle. Why are employers in the public and private sector alike behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they don’t seem to need? Since bullshit jobs make no economic sense, Graeber argues, their function must be political. A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt."
Natives by Akala: the hip-hop artist on race and class in the ruins of empire - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "What was it like to grow up poor, mixed race and politicised in the Britain of the 1980s and 90s? Why is the structural racism that so evidently determines the life chances of so many non‑white people virtually invisible to some of their fellow citizens? Why do the majority of people in Britain today remain convinced that the empire was a force for good in the world, despite the growing weight of evidence to the contrary? And how does a bookish youth with dreams of becoming a scientist turn, in just a few years, into a knife-carrying teenager? These, and multiple others, are the questions at the centre of Natives, the first book by the hip-hop artist and performer Akala.... Akala carefully picks apart two pervasive and inter-connected myths; the delusion that we live in a meritocracy and the fantasy that the exceptional achievements of some black people are proof that the obstacles of poverty and race can be overcome by all. He takes his escape from poverty not as proof of personal exceptionalism but of the vagaries and chaotic injustice of race, class and privilege. There is no blindness to the fact that a different fall of the dice might have led to a radically different outcome."
Forget Trump: populism is the cure, not the disease - article by Thomas Frank in The Guardian. "Why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated in so many places by outrageous blowhards of the right? The answer most often given is that rightwing politicians have discovered and embraced a diabolical form of super-politics known as 'populism'. ... [For example,] Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, ... [uses 'populism' to mean] the species of nasty rightwing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny, and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions.... [However,] historians typically trace the populist rhetorical tradition in America back to the time of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A radical leftwing political party that called itself 'Populist' swept much of the country in the 1890s, and protest movements described as populist have come and gone. Populism’s evil rightwing doppelganger is usually dated to 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon figured out how to turn the language of working-class majoritarianism against liberalism. Rightwing populists have been building movements and winning elections in the US ever since.... Today Trump is president, and the connection between his rise and the Democrats’ renunciation of their historical identity should be obvious. He squats in their old place in the political ecosystem, pretending to care about ordinary Americans and preposterously claiming to be our instrument for getting even with the rich and the strong. The right name for Trump’s politics is 'demagoguery' or 'pseudo-populism'.... Populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism. It is a tradition of rhetorical protest that extends from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders and on to the guy who just cooked your hamburger or filled your gas tank . It is powerful stuff. But protest isn’t the property of any particular party. Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up."
Breaking the silence: are we getting better at talking about death? - article by Edmund de Waal in The Guardian. "Having spent the last nine months reading books submitted for the Wellcome book prize, celebrating writing on medicine, health and 'what it is to be human', it has become clear to me that we are living through an extraordinary moment where we are much possessed by death. Death is the most private and personal of our acts, our own solitariness is total at the moment of departure. But the ways in which we talk about death, the registers of our expressions of grief or our silences about the process of dying are part of a complex public space."
China is taking digital control of its people to chilling lengths - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "In the old days, western snobbery led to the complacent view that the Chinese could not originate, only copy. One hears this less now, as visitors to China return goggle-eyed at the extent to which its people have integrated digital technology into daily life. One colleague of mine recently returned exasperated because he had been expected to pay for everything there with his phone. Since he possesses only an ancient Nokia handset, he was unable to comply and had been reduced to mendicant status, having to ask his Chinese hosts to pay for everything.... More significantly, the country’s technocratic rulers are adapting the ubiquitous 'reputation rating' system by which online platforms try to get feedback on vendor and customer reliability. The government is beginning to roll out its social credit system, which is designed to 'raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness in Chinese society;. It will focus on four aspects of behaviour: 'honesty in government affairs', 'commercial integrity', 'societal integrity' and 'judicial credibility'."
Wednesday, 2 May 2018
Cuttings: April 2018
The tyranny of algorithms is part of our lives: soon they could rate everything we do - article by John Harris in The Guardian. "For the past couple of years a big story about the future of China has been the focus of both fascination and horror. It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call 'social credit', and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.... Using a secret algorithm, Sesame credit constantly scores people from 350 to 950, and its ratings are based on factors including considerations of “interpersonal relationships” and consumer habits. Bluntly put, being friends with low-rated people is bad news. Buying video games, for example, gets you marked down. Participation is voluntary but easily secured, thanks to an array of enticements. High scores unlock privileges such as being able to rent a car without a deposit, and fast-tracked European visa applications.... It would be easy to assume none of this could happen here in the west. But the 21st century is not going to work like that. These days credit reports and scores – put together by agencies whose reach into our lives is mind-boggling – are used to judge job applications, thereby threatening to lock people into financial problems. ... Three years ago Facebook patented a system of credit rating that would consider the financial histories of people’s friends. Opaque innovations known as e-scores are used by increasing numbers of companies to target their marketing, while such outfits as the already infamous Cambridge Analytica trawl people’s online activities so as to precisely target political messaging. The tyranny of algorithms is now an inbuilt part of our lives."
How to persuade people (hint: not by telling them they're stupid) - article by Anne Cassidy in The Guardian. "A professor at Arizona State University who pioneered the study of persuasion, Cialdini was part of a team of behavioural scientists that helped propel Obama to victory in 2012. ... Were the Democrats to seek his advice [for the next presidential election], Cialdini would tell them to resist blaming the president’s supporters. '[Trump voters] don’t want to believe that they were stupid,” he says. “Cognitive dissonance research shows that the more consequential your error, the less willing you are to believe it was an error, because that undercuts your view of yourself as a good decision maker.'... Cialdini popularised the theory of social proof, which maintains that people will often look to their peers to decide what to think and how to behave. His book, Influence, published in 1984 and one of the best-selling books on behavioural psychology, was followed by a sequel two years ago, Pre-suasion, in which he explains the ideal conditions for exerting influence. Cialdini’s principles of persuasion have long been applied to marketing and business management. Successfully winning people over, in every field from politics to the workplace, he says, can come down to the right word in the right place. If you are presenting an idea at work and you want to get your team on side, whatever you do, don’t ask for their opinion on it, Cialdini says. 'When we ask someone for an opinion that person takes a half step back from us and becomes a critic.' Instead of using the word opinion, you should ask for advice on your plan. 'That person takes a half step forward because the word ‘advice’ asks for their collaboration.' "
How can Facebook change when it exists to exploit personal data? - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “The bigger story behind the current controversy is the fact that what Cambridge Analytica claimed to have accomplished would not have been possible without Facebook. Which means that, in the end, Facebook poses the problem that democracies will have to solve.... TechCrunch listed 11 separate controversies that resulted from Facebook being caught taking liberties with users’ data or trust. In most of these cases, the Zuckerberg response has been the same: sorrowful contrition followed by requests for forgiveness, topped off with resolutions to do better in future. The lad is beginning to sound like an alcoholic who, after his latest bout of drink-related excess, says sorry and expresses his determination to reform.... Facebook’s core business is exploiting the personal data of its users. That is its essence. So expecting it to wean itself off that exploitation is like trying to persuade ExxonMobil that it should get out of the oil and gas business.“
What price ethics for software designers in the poisonous era of Cambridge Analytica? - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "As the furore about Cambridge Analytica raged last week, I thought about Szilard [who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, hence making possible the atomic bomb] and then about three young Cambridge scientists who brought another powerful idea into the world. Their names are Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel and in 2013 they published an astonishing paper, which showed that Facebook 'likes' could be used to predict accurately a range of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender. The work reported in their paper was a paradigm of curiosity-driven research.... What they might not have appreciated ... was the power this conferred on Facebook. But one of their colleagues in the lab obviously did get that message. His name was Aleksandr Kogan and we are now beginning to understand the implications of what he did. ... A remarkable essay by Yonatan Zunger in the Boston Globe, [argues] that the Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests that computer science now faces an ethical reckoning analogous to those that other academic fields have had to confront. 'Chemistry had its first reckoning with dynamite [and] poison gas attack... Physics had its reckoning when nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Human biology had eugenics. Medicine had Tuskegee and thalidomide, civil engineering a series of building, bridge and dam collapses.' Up to now, my guess is that most computer science graduates have had only a minimal exposure to ethical issues such as these."
The death of the news feed - post by Benedict Evans in his blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “When I got married, my future wife and I were both quite sure that we would have a nice small, quiet wedding.... Then, we actually made a list of ‘close family and friends’… and realized why people have 100 or 200 people at a wedding. You know a lot more people than you think. According to Facebook, its average user is eligible to see at least 1,500 items per day in their newsfeed. Rather like the wedding with 200 people, this seems absurd. But then, it turns out, that over the course of a few years you do ‘friend’ 200 or 300 people. And if you’ve friended 300 people, and each of them post a couple of pictures, tap like on a few news stories or comment a couple of times, then, by the inexorable law of multiplication, yes, you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single day.... This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. 'time-based') sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see.... One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post. Indeed, conceptually one might suggest that they have no way to know if anyone will see this post.“
Marx predicted our present crisis, and points the way out - article by Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian, adapted from his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto. "What makes the manifesto truly inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now... What we don’t need at this juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through the cold, hard light of rationality.... The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need.... When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to annul capitalism’s 'energy', the trick is to help speed up capital’s development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere) while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its consequences and preparing for its socialisation."
The generation gap is back, but not as we know it - article by Brigid Delaney in The Guardian. "What does the new generational conflict look like? Inside the newsroom at the New York Times there is an ideological conflict brewing between the old guard and the 'new woke' employees. An article published last week in Vanity Fair titled 'Journalism is not about creating safe spaces: Inside the woke civil war at the New York Times' illustrates the tensions.... The battle lines are being drawn around older hands who believe in reporting a diverse range of views (including those that the left may find offensive), and who think that the reporting of the Trump presidency should be fairly straight down the line. The younger generation were appalled at the 2016 election results and have expressed grievance at the Times hiring for their opinion pages one writer who has expressed scepticism about climate science and a millennial who supports campus free speech. Part of this gap between young and old is the rise and mainstreaming of identity politics and intersectionality, a theory originating in black feminism, that calls out identity-based oppression.... The woke generation (young millennials aged between 18 and 30) brought the theories of intersectionality and identity into debates about a range of human rights issues: campus free speech, trans rights, the Me Too movement, marriage equality, gun control, reproductive rights, Black Lives matter and, in Australia, the Change the Date movement.... The landscape has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and older people (on the left and right) have found that they have been tripped up and called out by their more woke colleagues or friends or Twitter followers.... According to the piece in New Yorker on the new campus politics – it’s 'flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism?'"
Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you - article by Dylan Curran in The Guardian. "(1) Google knows where you’ve been. Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. ... (2) Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted. Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.... (3) Google has an advertisement profile of you. Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.... (4) Google knows all the apps you use. Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.... (5) Google has all of your YouTube history. Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal, if you’re anorexic … (6) The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents."
How to persuade people (hint: not by telling them they're stupid) - article by Anne Cassidy in The Guardian. "A professor at Arizona State University who pioneered the study of persuasion, Cialdini was part of a team of behavioural scientists that helped propel Obama to victory in 2012. ... Were the Democrats to seek his advice [for the next presidential election], Cialdini would tell them to resist blaming the president’s supporters. '[Trump voters] don’t want to believe that they were stupid,” he says. “Cognitive dissonance research shows that the more consequential your error, the less willing you are to believe it was an error, because that undercuts your view of yourself as a good decision maker.'... Cialdini popularised the theory of social proof, which maintains that people will often look to their peers to decide what to think and how to behave. His book, Influence, published in 1984 and one of the best-selling books on behavioural psychology, was followed by a sequel two years ago, Pre-suasion, in which he explains the ideal conditions for exerting influence. Cialdini’s principles of persuasion have long been applied to marketing and business management. Successfully winning people over, in every field from politics to the workplace, he says, can come down to the right word in the right place. If you are presenting an idea at work and you want to get your team on side, whatever you do, don’t ask for their opinion on it, Cialdini says. 'When we ask someone for an opinion that person takes a half step back from us and becomes a critic.' Instead of using the word opinion, you should ask for advice on your plan. 'That person takes a half step forward because the word ‘advice’ asks for their collaboration.' "
How can Facebook change when it exists to exploit personal data? - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “The bigger story behind the current controversy is the fact that what Cambridge Analytica claimed to have accomplished would not have been possible without Facebook. Which means that, in the end, Facebook poses the problem that democracies will have to solve.... TechCrunch listed 11 separate controversies that resulted from Facebook being caught taking liberties with users’ data or trust. In most of these cases, the Zuckerberg response has been the same: sorrowful contrition followed by requests for forgiveness, topped off with resolutions to do better in future. The lad is beginning to sound like an alcoholic who, after his latest bout of drink-related excess, says sorry and expresses his determination to reform.... Facebook’s core business is exploiting the personal data of its users. That is its essence. So expecting it to wean itself off that exploitation is like trying to persuade ExxonMobil that it should get out of the oil and gas business.“
What price ethics for software designers in the poisonous era of Cambridge Analytica? - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "As the furore about Cambridge Analytica raged last week, I thought about Szilard [who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, hence making possible the atomic bomb] and then about three young Cambridge scientists who brought another powerful idea into the world. Their names are Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel and in 2013 they published an astonishing paper, which showed that Facebook 'likes' could be used to predict accurately a range of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender. The work reported in their paper was a paradigm of curiosity-driven research.... What they might not have appreciated ... was the power this conferred on Facebook. But one of their colleagues in the lab obviously did get that message. His name was Aleksandr Kogan and we are now beginning to understand the implications of what he did. ... A remarkable essay by Yonatan Zunger in the Boston Globe, [argues] that the Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests that computer science now faces an ethical reckoning analogous to those that other academic fields have had to confront. 'Chemistry had its first reckoning with dynamite [and] poison gas attack... Physics had its reckoning when nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Human biology had eugenics. Medicine had Tuskegee and thalidomide, civil engineering a series of building, bridge and dam collapses.' Up to now, my guess is that most computer science graduates have had only a minimal exposure to ethical issues such as these."
The death of the news feed - post by Benedict Evans in his blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “When I got married, my future wife and I were both quite sure that we would have a nice small, quiet wedding.... Then, we actually made a list of ‘close family and friends’… and realized why people have 100 or 200 people at a wedding. You know a lot more people than you think. According to Facebook, its average user is eligible to see at least 1,500 items per day in their newsfeed. Rather like the wedding with 200 people, this seems absurd. But then, it turns out, that over the course of a few years you do ‘friend’ 200 or 300 people. And if you’ve friended 300 people, and each of them post a couple of pictures, tap like on a few news stories or comment a couple of times, then, by the inexorable law of multiplication, yes, you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single day.... This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. 'time-based') sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see.... One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post. Indeed, conceptually one might suggest that they have no way to know if anyone will see this post.“
Marx predicted our present crisis, and points the way out - article by Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian, adapted from his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto. "What makes the manifesto truly inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now... What we don’t need at this juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through the cold, hard light of rationality.... The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need.... When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to annul capitalism’s 'energy', the trick is to help speed up capital’s development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere) while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its consequences and preparing for its socialisation."
The generation gap is back, but not as we know it - article by Brigid Delaney in The Guardian. "What does the new generational conflict look like? Inside the newsroom at the New York Times there is an ideological conflict brewing between the old guard and the 'new woke' employees. An article published last week in Vanity Fair titled 'Journalism is not about creating safe spaces: Inside the woke civil war at the New York Times' illustrates the tensions.... The battle lines are being drawn around older hands who believe in reporting a diverse range of views (including those that the left may find offensive), and who think that the reporting of the Trump presidency should be fairly straight down the line. The younger generation were appalled at the 2016 election results and have expressed grievance at the Times hiring for their opinion pages one writer who has expressed scepticism about climate science and a millennial who supports campus free speech. Part of this gap between young and old is the rise and mainstreaming of identity politics and intersectionality, a theory originating in black feminism, that calls out identity-based oppression.... The woke generation (young millennials aged between 18 and 30) brought the theories of intersectionality and identity into debates about a range of human rights issues: campus free speech, trans rights, the Me Too movement, marriage equality, gun control, reproductive rights, Black Lives matter and, in Australia, the Change the Date movement.... The landscape has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and older people (on the left and right) have found that they have been tripped up and called out by their more woke colleagues or friends or Twitter followers.... According to the piece in New Yorker on the new campus politics – it’s 'flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism?'"
Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you - article by Dylan Curran in The Guardian. "(1) Google knows where you’ve been. Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. ... (2) Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted. Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.... (3) Google has an advertisement profile of you. Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.... (4) Google knows all the apps you use. Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.... (5) Google has all of your YouTube history. Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal, if you’re anorexic … (6) The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents."
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Seen and heard: January to March 2018
Call the Midwife – box set of Series 1-6. Perfect television, perfect
comfort viewing.
Civilisations – appointment TV, of course, even if only to see what Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga do with the air-space, but I have yet to get through an episode without falling asleep and having to catch up on recording. So far Schama has been totally traditional, Beard critical and challenging but in expected ways; the big surprise, I gather from viewers who’ve skipped ahead on the iPlayer, is going to be Olusoga telling a whole new story.
Norse Myths, by Neil Gaiman – powerful, economical re-telling
of the Asgard stories, surely the definitive version for today.
Down Among the Dead Men – Ingle-produced digital
conversion of a 1993 gamebook, with compelling writing style and gameplay which
had me researching Twine (an interactive narrative authoring tool, whose
potential I first saw when playing a training scenario by Cathy Moore).
A House Through Time – lovely compassionate TV series with David Olusoga tracing the inhabitants of a single Liverpool house since its original construction in the mid-eighteenth century: a microcosm of British history.
A House Through Time – lovely compassionate TV series with David Olusoga tracing the inhabitants of a single Liverpool house since its original construction in the mid-eighteenth century: a microcosm of British history.
The Post – gripping and timely film, reconstructing
The Washington Post’s defiance of political pressure to published leaked
documents showing that the Vietnam War was going a lot worse than the
government was saying. Tom Hanks is sturdy as the editor, of course, but an
interesting and important role for Meryl Streep as the paper’s owner, giving
her a prominence which she never had in All the President’s Men. Lovely
reconstruction of old-technology hot metal typesetting too, when her critical decision to publish sets the presses rolling.
What Remains of Edith Finch – beautifully-crafted
atmospheric game, in which the eponymous young woman returns to her abandoned
family home and recovers the tragic histories of her ancestors, all of whom died
in bizarre circumstances. For a game in which death is a recurring theme, the
mood is neither depressing nor ghoulish: just sad. Who’d have thought a
“walking simulator” could be so engaging.
Suffragette – difficult, infuriating film telling the
story of The Cause through the story of an imaginary working class woman (superbly
played by Carey Mulligan) propelled into greater and greater militancy not so
much by suffragette campaigners as by the hostility and humiliation she suffers
as she starts to step out of line. A more useful tale for these times than the
usual narrative of the movement’s leaders.
The View from the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman – fun
collection of reviews and introductions, really making one want to read the
books and comics about which he’s enthusing: the hallmark of a good review.
Art, Passion and Power: The Story of the Royal Collection – Andrew Graham-Dixon’s enjoyable
and informative TV romp through the history of royal art-buying, explaining why so
much top-notch stuff, and why those particular items, ended up in royal
palaces.
Nigel Slater’s Middle East – always a pleasure to
watch a TV programme from Nigel Slater, here sitting down to eat daily food with ordinary families
in Lebannon, Iran and Turkey: about as far from restaurant chef cuisine as you
can get, and demonstrating how traditional food is related to the physical and
social landscape from which it comes.
Trumbo – real-event-based film drama, showing the power of
the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era and how writers succeeded in
working covertly, ultimately rendering the blacklist ridiculous, when Trumbo
won an Oscar for a screenplay he hadn’t officially written.
Goetia – aesthetically pleasing but (for me) deeply
boring game, in which you play a ghost drifting around her family mansion,
trying to undo the damage of occult experiments gone awry. I found it
impossible to get interested in any of the characters (not helped by an absence
of voice acting and, I think, the author not being a native English speaker), and the secret passwords and astrological / alchemical codes which form the
basis of the puzzles left me cold. This game seemed to be all head and no
heart, which is probably right for occult philosophy, but doesn’t make for a
good adventure – at least for me; others seem to have liked it.
The Silk Road Ensemble – documentary with fantastic footage of Yo-Yo Ma
and his motley band of enthusiasts finding and making beautiful music together.
Some great discoveries for me here, for example Wu Man the Chinese pipa player.
Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism –
informative exploration of some of Minimalism’s milestones (La Monte Young, Terry
Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich), with great archive footage and
knowledgeable interviewing and reconstructions by musician Charles Hazelwood.
Civilisations – appointment TV, of course, even if only to see what Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga do with the air-space, but I have yet to get through an episode without falling asleep and having to catch up on recording. So far Schama has been totally traditional, Beard critical and challenging but in expected ways; the big surprise, I gather from viewers who’ve skipped ahead on the iPlayer, is going to be Olusoga telling a whole new story.
Cuttings: March 2018
How Trump Conquered Facebook, Without Russian Ads - article by Antonio
García Martínez in Wired magazine, referenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. "Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: the ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.... [In the ads auction,] rather than simply reward [an] ad position to the highest bidder,... Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is.... A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor.... [For a Custom Audience,] a campaign manager takes a list of emails or other personal data for people they think will be susceptible to a certain type of messaging (e.g. people in Florida who donated money to Trump For America). They upload that spreadsheet to Facebook via the Ads Manager tool, and Facebook scours its user data, looks for users who match the uploaded spreadsheet, and turns the matches into an 'Audience,' which is really just a set of Facebook users."
The bad news about false news - post in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.“The most comprehensive study to date of misinformation on Twitter is out. The Abstract reads: ‘We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”
Dear Damian Hinds, here’s what your schools minister can learn from Eton - column by Michael Rosen in The Guardian. "Your schools minister, Nick Gibb ... [says] the 'core purpose of schooling' ... is 'endowing pupils with knowledge of the best that has been thought and said, and preparing pupils to compete in an ever more competitive jobs market'. ... Looking at the aims of say, Eton college, is instructive. Among its core purpose it lists things such as: promoting the best habits of independent thought and learning, enabling all to discover their strengths, and to make the most of their talents; engendering respect for individuality, difference, the importance of teamwork; supporting pastoral care that nurtures physical health, emotional maturity and spiritual richness; fostering self-confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, tolerance and integrity. I wonder why Eton doesn’t mention anything about that 'jobs market' the government is so concerned about."
Alternative Facts, Alternative Truths - article by Francesca Tripoldi on 'Data and Society: Points' website, referenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. "If only, the story goes, there was some way to reach Trump supporters... The assumption: If only they could learn to think critically, accessing, analyzing, and evaluating a variety of sources, then they would be informed voters... The thing is — they do, and they are. During 2017, I began regularly attending Republican events associated with two upper-middle class communities in the Southeastern United States: a women’s group and a college group. ... Those I observed consumed a wide variety of news sources and applied their critical interrogation of the Bible to what they were reading, watching, and listening to.... it was not until observing a 'direct reading' of the Bible that I saw how literal translations of the Bible are used as a mechanism for other critical assessment.... At one point during the meeting, the Pastor turned from the Bible to the new tax reform bill, where he encouraged the group to apply the same 'deep reading.' The group poured over the text together, helping each other decide what it really meant rather than relying on mainstream media coverage of the bill.... Conservatives like these do not turn to media to be told what to think about Trump. They know what he stands for because they listen to or read his speeches directly, relying on their own interpretation and application of his ideas." See also talk by Danah Boyd. 'You think you want media literacy'.
Grammar gripes: why do we love to complain about language? - article by Penny Modra in The Guardian. "Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus [of language] is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace. So I have compiled a list of changes for which to watch out in 2018. 1. Semantic change thanks to the internet... 2. Syntactical change thanks to the internet... 3. Semantic and syntactical change thanks to television... 4. Inflection change led by Kanye West... 5. Conversion thanks to advertising... 6. Word and phrase coinages from the internet meme factory... 7. Punctuation change led by smartphones... 8. ‘Meaning leakage’ thanks to politicians, bureaucrats and business writers... " See also her writing school The Good Copy.
What do students want most? To be treated with respect - article by Anonymous Academic in The Guardian. "I recently led a survey of students across my university at all levels of study. ... there was an unsettling, underlying narrative in the responses which felt shocking. Students were essentially asking: why don’t academics have more humanity?... Students identified kindness, integrity and understanding as the most important things that would improve or change their student experience. These things are fundamental. Was I wrong to have assumed that all academic staff would simply be kind and treat students with respect?... students talked about wanting academic staff to have empathy and compassion, to smile and encourage. Most revealingly, they asked academics 'to treat and talk to me as though I’m a person'. This is pretty devastating: it’s hard to see how anyone can learn and develop when they feel like that."
The bad news about false news - post in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.“The most comprehensive study to date of misinformation on Twitter is out. The Abstract reads: ‘We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”
Dear Damian Hinds, here’s what your schools minister can learn from Eton - column by Michael Rosen in The Guardian. "Your schools minister, Nick Gibb ... [says] the 'core purpose of schooling' ... is 'endowing pupils with knowledge of the best that has been thought and said, and preparing pupils to compete in an ever more competitive jobs market'. ... Looking at the aims of say, Eton college, is instructive. Among its core purpose it lists things such as: promoting the best habits of independent thought and learning, enabling all to discover their strengths, and to make the most of their talents; engendering respect for individuality, difference, the importance of teamwork; supporting pastoral care that nurtures physical health, emotional maturity and spiritual richness; fostering self-confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, tolerance and integrity. I wonder why Eton doesn’t mention anything about that 'jobs market' the government is so concerned about."
Alternative Facts, Alternative Truths - article by Francesca Tripoldi on 'Data and Society: Points' website, referenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. "If only, the story goes, there was some way to reach Trump supporters... The assumption: If only they could learn to think critically, accessing, analyzing, and evaluating a variety of sources, then they would be informed voters... The thing is — they do, and they are. During 2017, I began regularly attending Republican events associated with two upper-middle class communities in the Southeastern United States: a women’s group and a college group. ... Those I observed consumed a wide variety of news sources and applied their critical interrogation of the Bible to what they were reading, watching, and listening to.... it was not until observing a 'direct reading' of the Bible that I saw how literal translations of the Bible are used as a mechanism for other critical assessment.... At one point during the meeting, the Pastor turned from the Bible to the new tax reform bill, where he encouraged the group to apply the same 'deep reading.' The group poured over the text together, helping each other decide what it really meant rather than relying on mainstream media coverage of the bill.... Conservatives like these do not turn to media to be told what to think about Trump. They know what he stands for because they listen to or read his speeches directly, relying on their own interpretation and application of his ideas." See also talk by Danah Boyd. 'You think you want media literacy'.
Grammar gripes: why do we love to complain about language? - article by Penny Modra in The Guardian. "Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus [of language] is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace. So I have compiled a list of changes for which to watch out in 2018. 1. Semantic change thanks to the internet... 2. Syntactical change thanks to the internet... 3. Semantic and syntactical change thanks to television... 4. Inflection change led by Kanye West... 5. Conversion thanks to advertising... 6. Word and phrase coinages from the internet meme factory... 7. Punctuation change led by smartphones... 8. ‘Meaning leakage’ thanks to politicians, bureaucrats and business writers... " See also her writing school The Good Copy.
What do students want most? To be treated with respect - article by Anonymous Academic in The Guardian. "I recently led a survey of students across my university at all levels of study. ... there was an unsettling, underlying narrative in the responses which felt shocking. Students were essentially asking: why don’t academics have more humanity?... Students identified kindness, integrity and understanding as the most important things that would improve or change their student experience. These things are fundamental. Was I wrong to have assumed that all academic staff would simply be kind and treat students with respect?... students talked about wanting academic staff to have empathy and compassion, to smile and encourage. Most revealingly, they asked academics 'to treat and talk to me as though I’m a person'. This is pretty devastating: it’s hard to see how anyone can learn and develop when they feel like that."
Wednesday, 7 March 2018
Cuttings: February 2018
Jo Brand: ‘Bullies are lurking around every corner' - interview by Eva Wiseman in The Guardian. "Another Friday night, another comedy panel show, another biscuit, maybe two. And then suddenly, we sedentary viewers of 'Have I Got News For You' sat up. It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: 'Some of this is not "high-level" crime, is it?' But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. 'If I can just say,' she began, 'as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be "high-level" for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.' There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering.... When John Humphrys’ conversation with Jon Sopel was leaked, and they appeared to joke about the BBC’s pay gap row, Brand 'enjoyed that window into John Humphrys’ mind. Though we all take the piss when we think we’re safe. But it does show what they really think about the pay gap – that they don’t take it seriously. It pisses women off when we feel a genuine cause for anger, and are unsupported by men. Whether it’s something like the pay gap, or someone shouting, "Great knockers!" at a woman in the pub, it’s really common that men will just look away. Things are only going to change when the majority of men step up and support women.'"
Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. When the outgoing German ambassador to Britain claimed this week that Brexiteers were fixated on the second world war, he was on to something. ... But Ammon was only half right. For while the Brexit vote was certainly underpinned by a melancholic longing for a glorious past, the era it sought to relive was less the second world war than the longer, less distinguished or openly celebrated period of empire. ... Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. ... Douglas Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda; Arron Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his childhood in South Africa, where his father ran sugar estates, as well as in Kenya, Ghana and Somalia; Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his libertarianism to Idi Amin’s 'arbitrary rule') but it would be odd to conclude they didn’t have any."
The brave Brexit speech Theresa May is afraid to give? Here it is - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Public opinion is still divided on Brexit. It is not divided on retaining close trade links with Europe, which is supported by some 70%. There is no way we can achieve tariff-free or frictionless access to EU markets other than by accepting the disciplines of those markets. Links with the EU have grown close over 40 years of membership. I ask my colleagues to accept that there is no move among the British people to reverse them. The overwhelming opinion of my advisers and those with whom we have been consulting this past year is that we should retain the existing tariff-free access. This is most simply achieved by being within the European Economic Area (EEA), the so-called Norway option. I know I have rejected the EEA in the past. But I now propose that we should treat it as the template for long-term negotiation, with a cross-party agreement to revisit it in 10 years."
How Democracies Die: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."
The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America - article by Andrew Rice in The Guardian. "There is, literally, an anti-mosque playbook. Tactics were once unwritten, spread through websites and word of mouth, but more recently they were set down in a book titled Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight. Written a Texas attorney, it was published by the Center for Security Policy, an organisation headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who has long espoused the theory that Muslims are engaged in a secret plot to impose sharia law on the US. Gaffney writes in the book’s introduction that it is a 'how-to manual for patriotic Americans who are ready to counter the leading edge of Islamic supremacism'."
Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group - article by Liza Featherstone in The Guardian, based on her book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. "In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it.... Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who had pioneered a new kind of market research, ... set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate... Focus groups were developed first in academia – by scholars with government contracts tasked with selling the second world war more effectively to the American people. Almost at the same time, similar methods were being developed by the British Labour party, to help them understand why so many working-class voters were turning Conservative.... But what if focus groups have also been part of a process in which citizenship has been reduced to consumerism – a set of choices made passively, under constraint? Focus groups reveal our desires – for a better life, for participation, for power, to be heard – but do they also limit them? Perhaps it is a process through which our aspirations become much smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened, and we demand nothing more."
Look at me: why attention-seeking is the defining need of our times - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian, based on his book Consent. "Everyone needs attention, like we need to eat.... Facebook alone harvests and sells the attention of 1.4 billion people every day. That’s about a fifth of the world.... But we can’t know what to make of it until we understand what people need attention for. Attention is other people thinking about you, and if there were ever humans who didn’t need it, they are now extinct.... Specifically, people have been shown to need a type of attention that psychologists call belonging.... Belonging means getting positive attention from people who know you well.... People who feel they don’t belong suffer terribly, and experience health problems comparable to smoking or obesity.... The word loneliness is a good description of the feeling, but not its cause, which in reality has little to do with being alone.... Some lonely people themselves conclude that they aren’t worthy of attention, and withdraw from the world still further. Others search for a feeling of belonging, not always in the best way."
Brave by Rose McGowan: Hollywood’s avenging warrior speaks out - review by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "That McGowan has turned out to be an avenging warrior, determined to expose Hollywood’s toxic lies and cover-ups, would have once seemed as improbable as the most ludicrous superhero movie; a spoilt rich guy saving the city while dressed as a bat has nothing on her tale. ... McGowan’s book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page. ... The problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not.... This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldn’t have written this book: self-control isn’t helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women."
Ms Mansplaining - post by John Naughton, in his Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ve often wondered vaguely where the term 'mansplaining' — the patronising way in which men who know nothing about a subject insist on explaining it to a woman — came from. Now I know... The phrase was coined by the American writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit. It was prompted by an experience she had at one of those high-end Aspen think-rests in which rich members of the US elite persuade themselves that they are really reallyinterested in ideas. Reflecting on it later, she published a wonderful essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me' in Guernica. ... 'Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless – for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.'"
Why Adventure Games suck - blog post by Rob Gilbert, reproducing classic 1989 article from The Journal of Computer Game Design, written while he was designing 'Monkey Island'. "There is a state of mind called 'suspension of disbelief'. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost....The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost. I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I'd have a much better game."
Is Facebook for old people? Over-55s flock in as the young leave - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "It’s official: Facebook is for old(er) people. Teens and young adults are ditching Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as popularity among the over-55s surges, according to a report. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year."
Dawn of the techlash - article by Rachel Botsman, based on her book Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart. "How did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle.... in 2002, [Scott Heiferman] founded Meetup, a social networking platform to help people with a common interest find each other and arrange to meet, face to face. ... In early 2003, ... more than 140,000 Howard Dean grassroots supporters used Meetup to mobilise support.... From attempting to aid revolutions in the Arab spring, to co-ordinating the Occupy Wall Street movement, social networks soon brimmed with ambitions to level the playing field. It was all wildly promising. The internet would be a transparent environment that made it easier for people to hold political leaders accountable and even strengthen people’s capacity to relate to one another. On it went, the golden dream of the digital age, before the invaders arrived. Were we naive? As unprecedented numbers of people channelled their political energies and beliefs into social media, shouldn’t we have foreseen the way the platforms could become vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of misinformation? Probably, but most of us failed to imagine the imaginable."
Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand - article by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned [Peter] Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, ... I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by.... The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. [James Dale] Davidson and [William] Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. 'The new Sovereign Individual,' they write, 'will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.' It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn. Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a 'domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age'."
Pushing back: why it's time for women to rewrite the story - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "In 1938 a play debuted at the Richmond Theatre, which opens with a Victorian husband telling his wife that though she has been 'very good lately', she mustn’t 'read meanings into everything' or 'imagine things'. ...Her husband is systematically working to extinguish her perspective, to convince her that she is mad. Every night as he searches their attic (for jewels he believes are there), his movements cause the gas lamps to flicker. ... 'Gaslighting' soon came to denote psychological warfare, the deliberate undermining of another’s sanity. More recently, it has been resuscitated as a metaphor for the cultural sabotage of women’s perceptions, for trivialising their concerns as imaginary. ... The question of credibility gained new currency after allegations about Harvey Weinstein triggered the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns – the latest battles in a war women have been waging for centuries against the prerogatives of patriarchy. Storytelling is a key battleground: ... male privilege is the entitlement to be the centre of the story, for male voices to dominate, for male interpretations to define it, for a woman to be dismissed, in the words of the husband in Gas Light,as 'a perfect little silly'.
Five books to understand the left - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "[William] Davies’ book The Limits of Neoliberalism sums up the wider thinking of the UK left about the system it is trying to replace. It identifies the coercive imposition of competition by a centralised state as the core problem, and contains the most succinct definition of neoliberalism in the English language: 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'.... The most influential book [of the 2011 protest movements] is the 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, by the French anarchist Invisible Committee, ...its key [being] that the proletariat was over, that the networked human being was the agent of change.... David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years ... showed that a historical method derived from Marx could be applied to new anthropological evidence to explain one of the most pressing facts of modern economics: the strangulation of economic dynamism by debt.... If there is a single book that embodies the activist left’s turn towards electoral politics it is Pablo Iglesias’s Politics in a Time of Crisis.... Kimberlé Crenshaw ... pioneered intersectionality theory: ... the most influential framework for understanding the multiple, overlapping oppressions we face, and their relationship both to colonialism and economic exploitation."
What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: hope, as distinct from optimism - review by Diana Birch in The Guardian. "Marilynne Robinson is a stubborn nonconformist, and her new collection of essays confirms the distance between her combative ideas and the dominant values of the west. ... Her purpose is to claim the respect for human potential, which she sees as the bedrock of Christianity, as a means of countering what she characterises as the 'thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture'. Again and again she attacks the kind of 'cost-benefit analysis' or unthinking 'self-interest' that undermines the responsibility of 'the self as an intelligent moral actor'. She returns to the primacy of the individual that characterised early Protestantism, not as a vindication of the self-seeking economic competition that she sees as a corroding force in the public life of the west, but as an exacting personal obligation to seek the good of others. An especially engaging essay, Grace and Beauty, considers the relation between Robinson’s theological position and her aesthetic practice. 'The standard I use is strictly experiential.' The wish to reauthorise 'experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself' is a reminder of her closeness to the traditions of dissenting spiritual autobiographies as testament to an authentic interpretation of our world. No preconceived or willed model for the novel can be a substitute for the strenuous work of the imagination, which is for Robinson always a consequence of a moral understanding of action."
Jessica Jones: mind control and redemption: the timely return of a feminist superhero - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people... Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma... Kilgrave’s abuse ... left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present... The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. ... Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight."
Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. When the outgoing German ambassador to Britain claimed this week that Brexiteers were fixated on the second world war, he was on to something. ... But Ammon was only half right. For while the Brexit vote was certainly underpinned by a melancholic longing for a glorious past, the era it sought to relive was less the second world war than the longer, less distinguished or openly celebrated period of empire. ... Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. ... Douglas Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda; Arron Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his childhood in South Africa, where his father ran sugar estates, as well as in Kenya, Ghana and Somalia; Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his libertarianism to Idi Amin’s 'arbitrary rule') but it would be odd to conclude they didn’t have any."
The brave Brexit speech Theresa May is afraid to give? Here it is - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Public opinion is still divided on Brexit. It is not divided on retaining close trade links with Europe, which is supported by some 70%. There is no way we can achieve tariff-free or frictionless access to EU markets other than by accepting the disciplines of those markets. Links with the EU have grown close over 40 years of membership. I ask my colleagues to accept that there is no move among the British people to reverse them. The overwhelming opinion of my advisers and those with whom we have been consulting this past year is that we should retain the existing tariff-free access. This is most simply achieved by being within the European Economic Area (EEA), the so-called Norway option. I know I have rejected the EEA in the past. But I now propose that we should treat it as the template for long-term negotiation, with a cross-party agreement to revisit it in 10 years."
How Democracies Die: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."
The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America - article by Andrew Rice in The Guardian. "There is, literally, an anti-mosque playbook. Tactics were once unwritten, spread through websites and word of mouth, but more recently they were set down in a book titled Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight. Written a Texas attorney, it was published by the Center for Security Policy, an organisation headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who has long espoused the theory that Muslims are engaged in a secret plot to impose sharia law on the US. Gaffney writes in the book’s introduction that it is a 'how-to manual for patriotic Americans who are ready to counter the leading edge of Islamic supremacism'."
Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group - article by Liza Featherstone in The Guardian, based on her book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. "In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it.... Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who had pioneered a new kind of market research, ... set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate... Focus groups were developed first in academia – by scholars with government contracts tasked with selling the second world war more effectively to the American people. Almost at the same time, similar methods were being developed by the British Labour party, to help them understand why so many working-class voters were turning Conservative.... But what if focus groups have also been part of a process in which citizenship has been reduced to consumerism – a set of choices made passively, under constraint? Focus groups reveal our desires – for a better life, for participation, for power, to be heard – but do they also limit them? Perhaps it is a process through which our aspirations become much smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened, and we demand nothing more."
Look at me: why attention-seeking is the defining need of our times - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian, based on his book Consent. "Everyone needs attention, like we need to eat.... Facebook alone harvests and sells the attention of 1.4 billion people every day. That’s about a fifth of the world.... But we can’t know what to make of it until we understand what people need attention for. Attention is other people thinking about you, and if there were ever humans who didn’t need it, they are now extinct.... Specifically, people have been shown to need a type of attention that psychologists call belonging.... Belonging means getting positive attention from people who know you well.... People who feel they don’t belong suffer terribly, and experience health problems comparable to smoking or obesity.... The word loneliness is a good description of the feeling, but not its cause, which in reality has little to do with being alone.... Some lonely people themselves conclude that they aren’t worthy of attention, and withdraw from the world still further. Others search for a feeling of belonging, not always in the best way."
Brave by Rose McGowan: Hollywood’s avenging warrior speaks out - review by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "That McGowan has turned out to be an avenging warrior, determined to expose Hollywood’s toxic lies and cover-ups, would have once seemed as improbable as the most ludicrous superhero movie; a spoilt rich guy saving the city while dressed as a bat has nothing on her tale. ... McGowan’s book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page. ... The problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not.... This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldn’t have written this book: self-control isn’t helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women."
Ms Mansplaining - post by John Naughton, in his Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ve often wondered vaguely where the term 'mansplaining' — the patronising way in which men who know nothing about a subject insist on explaining it to a woman — came from. Now I know... The phrase was coined by the American writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit. It was prompted by an experience she had at one of those high-end Aspen think-rests in which rich members of the US elite persuade themselves that they are really reallyinterested in ideas. Reflecting on it later, she published a wonderful essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me' in Guernica. ... 'Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless – for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.'"
Why Adventure Games suck - blog post by Rob Gilbert, reproducing classic 1989 article from The Journal of Computer Game Design, written while he was designing 'Monkey Island'. "There is a state of mind called 'suspension of disbelief'. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost....The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost. I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I'd have a much better game."
Is Facebook for old people? Over-55s flock in as the young leave - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "It’s official: Facebook is for old(er) people. Teens and young adults are ditching Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as popularity among the over-55s surges, according to a report. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year."
Dawn of the techlash - article by Rachel Botsman, based on her book Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart. "How did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle.... in 2002, [Scott Heiferman] founded Meetup, a social networking platform to help people with a common interest find each other and arrange to meet, face to face. ... In early 2003, ... more than 140,000 Howard Dean grassroots supporters used Meetup to mobilise support.... From attempting to aid revolutions in the Arab spring, to co-ordinating the Occupy Wall Street movement, social networks soon brimmed with ambitions to level the playing field. It was all wildly promising. The internet would be a transparent environment that made it easier for people to hold political leaders accountable and even strengthen people’s capacity to relate to one another. On it went, the golden dream of the digital age, before the invaders arrived. Were we naive? As unprecedented numbers of people channelled their political energies and beliefs into social media, shouldn’t we have foreseen the way the platforms could become vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of misinformation? Probably, but most of us failed to imagine the imaginable."
Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand - article by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned [Peter] Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, ... I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by.... The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. [James Dale] Davidson and [William] Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. 'The new Sovereign Individual,' they write, 'will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.' It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn. Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a 'domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age'."
Pushing back: why it's time for women to rewrite the story - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "In 1938 a play debuted at the Richmond Theatre, which opens with a Victorian husband telling his wife that though she has been 'very good lately', she mustn’t 'read meanings into everything' or 'imagine things'. ...Her husband is systematically working to extinguish her perspective, to convince her that she is mad. Every night as he searches their attic (for jewels he believes are there), his movements cause the gas lamps to flicker. ... 'Gaslighting' soon came to denote psychological warfare, the deliberate undermining of another’s sanity. More recently, it has been resuscitated as a metaphor for the cultural sabotage of women’s perceptions, for trivialising their concerns as imaginary. ... The question of credibility gained new currency after allegations about Harvey Weinstein triggered the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns – the latest battles in a war women have been waging for centuries against the prerogatives of patriarchy. Storytelling is a key battleground: ... male privilege is the entitlement to be the centre of the story, for male voices to dominate, for male interpretations to define it, for a woman to be dismissed, in the words of the husband in Gas Light,as 'a perfect little silly'.
Five books to understand the left - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "[William] Davies’ book The Limits of Neoliberalism sums up the wider thinking of the UK left about the system it is trying to replace. It identifies the coercive imposition of competition by a centralised state as the core problem, and contains the most succinct definition of neoliberalism in the English language: 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'.... The most influential book [of the 2011 protest movements] is the 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, by the French anarchist Invisible Committee, ...its key [being] that the proletariat was over, that the networked human being was the agent of change.... David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years ... showed that a historical method derived from Marx could be applied to new anthropological evidence to explain one of the most pressing facts of modern economics: the strangulation of economic dynamism by debt.... If there is a single book that embodies the activist left’s turn towards electoral politics it is Pablo Iglesias’s Politics in a Time of Crisis.... Kimberlé Crenshaw ... pioneered intersectionality theory: ... the most influential framework for understanding the multiple, overlapping oppressions we face, and their relationship both to colonialism and economic exploitation."
What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: hope, as distinct from optimism - review by Diana Birch in The Guardian. "Marilynne Robinson is a stubborn nonconformist, and her new collection of essays confirms the distance between her combative ideas and the dominant values of the west. ... Her purpose is to claim the respect for human potential, which she sees as the bedrock of Christianity, as a means of countering what she characterises as the 'thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture'. Again and again she attacks the kind of 'cost-benefit analysis' or unthinking 'self-interest' that undermines the responsibility of 'the self as an intelligent moral actor'. She returns to the primacy of the individual that characterised early Protestantism, not as a vindication of the self-seeking economic competition that she sees as a corroding force in the public life of the west, but as an exacting personal obligation to seek the good of others. An especially engaging essay, Grace and Beauty, considers the relation between Robinson’s theological position and her aesthetic practice. 'The standard I use is strictly experiential.' The wish to reauthorise 'experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself' is a reminder of her closeness to the traditions of dissenting spiritual autobiographies as testament to an authentic interpretation of our world. No preconceived or willed model for the novel can be a substitute for the strenuous work of the imagination, which is for Robinson always a consequence of a moral understanding of action."
Jessica Jones: mind control and redemption: the timely return of a feminist superhero - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people... Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma... Kilgrave’s abuse ... left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present... The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. ... Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight."
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