Finished reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. Published in 1975 in West Germany, it is the story of the closure of a Soviet prison camp in the late 1950s, told from the perspective of one of the camp’s guard dogs. The foreword to the first English edition, written by Michael Glenny, gives just the right amount of context. I went back and re-read the foreword after finishing the book in order to understand the events and characters a little better.

At the end of World War II, Stalin imprisoned all returning Soviet prisoners of war as well as civilians who had been deported to work in Germany during the war. Most hadn’t committed any crimes. In the year after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, “an estimated eight million prisoners were released from the camps, and about six million who had perished there were ‘posthumously rehabilitated.’” The camps were brutal; Glenny says:

Soviet prison regulations stated that at temperatures below −40 °C prisoners could not be made to do outdoor work, but this rule was not always observed by prison-camp commandants.

However, the book doesn’t focus much on the experience of the prisoners beyond the picture you create in your mind through the eyes of the dog.

The closure of the camp is confusing to Ruslan and his colleagues, animals who had spent their whole lives in the service of the Soviet guards. The story follows his life after the camp lets the dogs go.

It’s an excellent novella and you really feel that you are inside Ruslan’s head.

Finished reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.

Early in the book the author herself says that:

…you’ll find that this book is a bit oddly shaped. The arguments and observations I’ll make here are not neat, interlocking parts in a logical whole. Rather, I saw and experienced many things during the course of writing it—things that changed my mind and then changed it again, and which I folded in as I went. I came out of this book different than I went in. So, consider this not a closed transmission of information, but instead an open and extended essay, in the original sense of the word (a journey, an essaying forth). It’s less a lecture than an invitation to take a walk.

And that’s how it felt as I read it. ‘Doing nothing’ is defined by the author as disengaging from the attention economy, and there are some profound reflections here. As I read the book, I found myself consciously trying to be more aware of my surroundings, and particularly the people within them. I had the feeling that I had stopped noticing everyday things, and just through reading about the author’s experiences I felt more tuned into them. Which is exactly what she described happening to herself on a number of occasions as she wrote the book:

Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

Odell has also got me thinking about the crazy level of context-switching within a social media feed. It keeps things trivial and without any depth:

For example, let’s take a look at my Twitter feed right now, as I’m sitting inside my studio in Oakland in the summer of 2018. Pressed up against each other in neat rectangles, I see the following:

• An article on Al Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed at school by ISIL
• An article about the Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year
• An announcement that @dasharezøne (a joke account) is selling new T-shirts
• Someone arguing for congestion pricing in Santa Monica, California
• Someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson
• A video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate onstage
• Photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dumped in a forest
• A job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University
• An article on protests as the Pope visits Dublin
• A photo of a yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains
• Someone’s data visualization of his daughter’s sleeping habits during her first year
• A plug for someone’s upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago
• An Apple ad for Music Lab, starring Florence Welch
  

Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.

I can’t remember the last time that a book had such an impact on my everyday existence, making me take stock of my approach to the things I consume and how I behave as I go throughout my day. I am not sure how much I want to radically change — I’m not about to stop listing to podcasts as I wander — but it has made me more aware of what I’m doing.

Serendipitously, as I read the book I also came across Derek Sivers’ About page where he writes about his approach to how he spends his time, which felt as though it made a connection Odell’s writing. He says:

I hate to waste a single hour. I feel the precious value of time, most of the time. I imagine my time as worth $1000 an hour, and ask myself what’s worth $1000. Watching a TV show? Absolutely not. (“Game of Thrones” was 70 hours, so would have cost $70,000 to watch.) Social media? Absolutely not. Focused learning or creating? Yep! Being with my kid? Always.

I don’t think I will ever be able to take the same approach. I do like some downtime, where I am enjoying things just because I enjoy them, and seem to get a good balance between being productive and recharging my batteries. Watching TV with my wife is a thing we’ve grown into doing together and I love it, so I’m not going to give that up. But I do understand and agree with the sentiment. Life is too short to spend on things that don’t bring you joy or, in your own opinion, are a waste of time. And your time and attention are exactly what the modern ‘social media’ platforms are tuned to exploit.

I recently finished reading Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment by Mary Anne Franks. There’s a lot in this book. The central thesis is the author reframing the concept of ‘free speech’ into:

• Fearless speech, where a person speaking ’truth to power’, despite risks to themselves from doing so, and
• Reckless speech, where the person speaking puts other people in danger, typically those with less power than themselves.

Franks looks at two key texts that are often referred to in today’s world by people who claim to be ‘defending free speech’. The first and most famous example is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Here’s the full text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment restricts what the Government can do to curtail freedom of speech. It has absolutely nothing to do with public or private companies, and doesn’t dictate what they can and cannot do. When we look at social media platforms, for example, there is no obligation under the First Amendment to allow their users to post anything they like without moderation in order to preserve their ‘free speech rights’.

In fact, the law says that these platforms can moderate their content. The second key text referred to in the book is Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. People who have heard of ‘Section 230’ may generally be aware that it stops platforms from being treated as publishers. Platforms are not responsible for anything horrible that their users post. This is in contrast to traditional media. Newspaper owners, for example, are liable for the content on their pages. However, Section 230 also includes a ‘Good Samaritan clause’. In the same way that someone acting in good faith to try to resuscitate a stranger who has had a suspected cardiac arrest is not liable if they break that person’s rib when they administer CPR, platforms are immune from liability if they act in good faith by removing harmful or obscene content from their platform. The relevant text is here:

47 U.S. Code § 230 – Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

…

(b) Policy
It is the policy of the United States—
…
(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and
(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
…

So, not only do corporations not have an obligation to let people say whatever they like on their platforms, there is even legal protection for them to remove ‘bad’ content. Hosting hate speech is therefore a choice, not an obligation under some notion of ‘free speech’.

The book was published in October 2024, prior to the most recent Presidential election. Events from Trump’s first term as president are referred to throughout the book, and I suspect that there could easily be a bumper second edition just based on what has happened in the six months since publication.

In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will scale back their content moderation on Facebook and Instagram, leaving much of the work of fact-checking and flagging objectionable content to their users. It’s very convenient and beneficial for Meta to have more ‘free speech’ and less moderation on their platform as it drives engagement. From the book:

Doing nothing is always cheaper than helping, and harmful content can be very profitable. As long as tech platforms are allowed to enjoy the benefits of doing business without any of the burdens, they will have little incentive to take care and every incentive to be reckless in their pursuit of profit.
…
It must first be noted that whether an online platform leaves content up or takes it down, it makes a choice—there is no neutral position. Platforms already make choices about whether to leave content up or take it down, and they make that choice primarily based on their corporate bottom line.

Trump’s election victory, and the administration’s rhetoric on ‘free speech’, has given Zuckerberg the cover he needs to dial down the moderation and dial up the angry exchanges on his platforms. More eyeballs, more clicks, more monetisation, all under the cover of being a champion of free speech. But the action of a private company has nothing to do with the First Amendment as defined in the constitution. Franks calls it ‘consumerist constitutionalism’:

This consumerist constitutionalism—the conflation of a commercial product with a constitutional right—serves corporate interests in multiple ways. First, given the deep emotional attachment Americans have to their constitutional rights, convincing them that they need a particular product in order to exercise those rights is sure to be a lucrative enterprise. This is especially true if the public believes that they are always on the verge of losing those rights and that the only way to avert this crisis is to consume more of the product. Consumerist constitutionalism leads individuals to not only acquire but also to identify with certain products and services, creating an endowment effect that makes any interference with access feel like an existential threat.

Not all ‘free speech’ is equal in the eyes of the Trump administration. Peaceful protests on university campuses about the war in Gaza are a form of free speech that are clearly protected in the First Amendment. Government intervention to shut them down is the opposite. Members and supporters of the administration preach free speech but this is blatant hypocrisy, as this recent Jon Stewart piece on The Daily Show illustrates. Watch from 3m11s in:

The book’s distinction between ‘fearless speech’ and ‘reckless speech’ is incredibly insightful, and has stayed with me as a way of looking at the actions of people speaking out. Every year, on International Women’s Day (IWD), I look forward to reading Sharon O’Dea’s comments on LinkedIn. She comments on posts from well-known organisations where they celebrate IWD in some fashion, calling them out with data and facts about how they are really doing. Sharon has a form where people can submit stories about their companies anonymously so that she can follow up with research ahead of their IWD posts.

Here she is responding to Foxtons, Metro Bank, and Rio Tinto. This year, I found myself thinking about these comments for longer than usual. Shamefully, perhaps, one of my first thoughts when I read them was something along the lines of, “Doesn’t Sharon sell her freelance services to companies like these?” It makes what she’s doing even more poignant. This is fearless speech. I’m not as brave as she is.

I’ve barely scratched the surface in this post of what is covered by this book. I’m going to be thinking about it for a very long time.

A few weeks ago I was making my way into work, catching up with the overnight news of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Things that Trump did on inauguration day had a whiff of fascism. But seeing Elon Musk make multiple Nazi salutes on stage left me aghast. It fascinated me to see people and institutions bend over backwards to accommodate alternative interpretations of what Musk did, including the Anti-Defamation League which said “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute“, and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who said that Musk “is being falsely smeared“. It’s as if calling it what it clearly was — a fascist salute — would cross a line.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who didn’t see the Musk gesture in the same way. However, in our discussion he suggested that people going to jail in the UK for what they said on social media was fascist. I wasn’t so sure. Believing in ‘free speech’ as a principle doesn’t necessarily mean you get to say anything you like to anyone whenever you feel like it. There have to be rules. I’m definitely not a free-speech absolutist. As I wrote in my recent weeknotes:

At the forefront of my mind this week was the concept of free speech, given the widely-reported changes at Meta. A conversation with a friend and a Stratechery post by Ben Thompson challenged my thinking, which led me to try to find resources that would help me to refine my understanding. I’ve bought Regulating Free Speech in a Digital Age by David Bromell as recommended by Heather Burns, as well as Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks. I lean towards free speech, but having this week learned about the paradox of tolerance, I know that I’m not a ‘free speech absolutist’. But I don’t know where or how the line should be drawn.

On one level, putting people in prison for writing a post on Twitter or Facebook seems extreme. But it doesn’t seem right that people can publish posts encouraging others to burn down hotels and religious buildings without consequence. Is jailing people for their posts fascist? I didn’t think so. But I wasn’t completely sure.

By chance, I saw that Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey had posted an ‘emergency’ episode of their Origin Story podcast, called Trump’s inauguration: Can we call it fascism yet? The fact that the title was pitched as a question, while the image for the episode is a picture of Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute, shows that this wasn’t something straightforward to answer. On the podcast, Ian Dunt decided that yes, we can call this fascism, and explained why:

Dorian Lynskey: …it has to be said that Elon Musk throwing what appears to be a fascist salute more than once doesn’t require the historian Richard J. Evans to decode that one. Ian, obviously one does not like to be hysterical about this. We were talking about how not to cry fascism and everything. What did you make of the inauguration?

Ian Dunt: Oh, I would really like to cry fascism now.

DL: OK.

ID: I mean, there’s a certain… I know that you’ve discovered that apparently the frog’s in water and it’s bollocks, and apparently the frog does jump out of the water, but you do sort of feel because it’s like an everyday degree by degree by degree increase, you feel trapped by it. There is a point when you have to take a step back or deal with… I mean, I could do all of this list with Trump, obviously, but you have to do it with Musk. It’s like just over the last couple of months, this is a guy that is explicitly telling people, go out and vote and support Tommy Robinson, Alternative for Deutschland, extremist street thugs. These are the people who support him. He’s interacting with far right accounts. He’s using all of the modern day online far right imagery, Pepe the Frog and all of his nonsense monikers that he’s adopted. The accounts that he interacts with, the conspiracy theories that he spreads, they’re all on the far right. So then when he gets up and repeatedly does something that looks like a Nazi salute, if that was someone else, if it was George Bush who did it, you’d think like, “he got that all funny and it came out weird and don’t be weird about it.” But it takes so much generosity that you have really reached the point of being fundamentally irrational to not interpret it in this way, given the series of actions that led up to it. Years ago, when we did our episode on fascism, we were like, you need the alarm to be pulled when things get really sketchy. Well, to me, honestly, yesterday, that’s what really sketchy looks like.

The episode also had a reading from their most recent Origin Story book, called Fascism, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for. So I picked up a copy and dived in.

The book explores fascism primarily through the history of the two classic examples where it was indisputably how the countries were run — Italy under Mussolini (whose political party was literally called the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party) and Germany under Hitler. There is general consensus that these were both fascist dictatorships, but they were very different to each other. Part of the problem with calling anything ‘fascist’ today is that you are immediately drawing a comparison to these two regimes, both of which precipitated extreme suffering through their actions in World War II:

If you invoke 1930s Germany to criticise a draconian right-wing policy, you will be widely understood. But if, for the sake of accuracy, you reference modern Hungary, 1970s Chile, 1940s Spain, or even 1920s Italy, most people will not have any idea what you are talking about. This narrow band of shared knowledge erases most of the history of authoritarianism and creates a false binary: either a country is a healthy, tolerant democracy or it is on the road to Nazism. The vast middle ground must be understood, now more than ever, because that is where the populists operate. Even if we are in the business of sounding the red alert about them, we must have a sense of the precise threat they pose if we are to effectively challenge them.

Using the word ‘fascist’ for something ‘less’ than Nazi Germany seems to either be too over-the-top, or has the effect of diluting the meaning and impact of the word. (This is echoed by Dorian Lynskey’s tentative approach in the podcast episode to the question of whether to “cry fascism” or not about Trump and Musk.)

And now, in the early twenty-first century, we seem surrounded by figures who can’t reliably be called fascists but who trade in similar feelings and inspire similar anxieties in their opponents. That makes us want to call them fascists – to shake people by the collar and tell them that we’ve played this game before and it did not end well. But it deprives us of the confidence to do so, because we’re never quite sure if we’re using the word correctly, or if deploying it will make us look like hysterics.

But trying to pin down exactly what we mean by fascism is inherently difficult. It isn’t the same as other ideologies:

There is no flawless, objective test for fascism. This is not due to any weakness in scholarly analysis, but to the weakness of fascism itself. We can define socialism very easily, as the collective ownership of the means of production. We can define liberalism as the belief in the freedom of the individual. That is because these are both meaningful political traditions with a huge body of intellectual contributions. We struggle to define fascism because it is not a meaningful political tradition and it has few, if any, intellectual contributions.

The authors suggest that something does not need to be ‘fully fascist’ for the word, or a derivative of it, to be useful in pointing out something that is on the road to fascism:

One solution is semantic: terms that allude to someone or something having fascist elements without necessarily satisfying the full definition. President Biden referred to Trump’s philosophy as ‘semi-fascism’, a term also used by the historian Stanley Payne. There are many other variants: proto-fascism, quasi-fascism or borderline fascism. And there is the term ‘fascistic’, to describe a particular element of a populist movement. These phrases can seem slightly cowardly and evasive, but they’re actually very helpful. They provide options. They let you point to worrying elements of a movement or party without having to go all the way. They add nuance while retaining the capacity for historical comparison and political warning.

The rise of populism across the worldis something to be concerned with in the same way that we should have been concerned about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s:

Fascism and populism share a conceptual root. They both feature an all-encompassing insistence on the ‘will of the people’ as the only source of political legitimacy, unlike liberalism, which places a strong emphasis on individual rights, diversity and the separation of powers.

Ultimately, there is no easy checklist that you can use to define whether something is fascist, although Umberto Eco tried with his list of the 14 common features of fascism.

This, then, is the moral lesson of the story of fascism. It is not necessarily about precise definitions, or watertight checklists, or strictly policed usage. It is about recognising that fascism appeals to some of the darkest instincts of human nature: the hatred of difference, the yearning for order, the sublimation of the individual to the group, the enchantment of violence. At heart, Orwell suggested, fascism meant ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist . . . almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”’. The story of fascism shows us what happens when these instincts are given free rein and reach their ultimate expression. It therefore serves as a reminder to treat with extreme vigilance any individual or group that seeks to encourage those ideas, and to dedicate oneself to stopping them.

Having read the book, I don’t see how jailing people for social media posts that incite hatred and violence can be considered to be fascist. Being the bully, hating the differences that refugees, asylum seekers, people of colour or LGBTQ+ people represent and promoting violence towards them is fascist. For a tolerant society to thrive, paradoxically my belief is that it needs to be intolerant of this kind of world view and behaviour.

It took some weeks for me to finish this very large book. I was given this as a very thoughtful Christmas gift, but ended up buying and reading an ebook version of it as there was no way I was going to lug this around with me.

The authors started writing with the intention of creating a McCartney solo-specific version of Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but found that they couldn’t avoid telling a story at the same time. The text of the book is punctuated by distinctive sections for each recording session, in a consistent format, informing us of what songs were worked on. They also include a little narrative to add some colour to the events:

This book was a great read. I’ve consumed so many Beatles-related books over the years, but there was still lots in here that I didn’t know. For a Beatles nut, I’m actually not that familiar with McCartney’s early solo discography. I’m a long-time fan of McCartney (1970) and Band on the Run (1973), but have only recently picked up Wild Life (1971) and am yet to explore Ram (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973). It’s been fun to read about a track and then listen to it on a streaming service, particularly when I wasn’t familiar with it. For the songs that I was familiar with, there were fascinating nuggets and insights. For example, I hadn’t realised that the high-pitched sound a few seconds into The Lovely Linda, the first track on Paul’s first solo album after the Beatles broke up, is the squeaking of a door that was accidentally captured and left in. This is the first example in his solo career of going with the flow when something happens:

Unlike other artists and producers inclined to erase extraneous noises or accidental instrumental strikes on individual tracks, Paul would leave them as they were recorded, allowing the potential to “explore the accident, not fix the mistake” as Seiwell put it. Though aiding the creative process, for Alan Parsons this posed a problem. “You try to keep the tracks clean and try to avoid having to pull down faders every time if there is a noise or a talking voice or something,” he explained. “Whereas McCartney was notorious for never allowing engineers to wipe anything, so it always made the mix take twice as long.”

It was amazing to hear that Henry McCullough got to appear on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon through the accident of Wings being booked in a neighbouring studio:

“They were next door making Dark Side of the Moon,” said Paul. “The engineers were quite interchangeable, so an engineer that’d work on their stuff would work on ours. And he did play us some of the Dark Side of the Moon stuff.” For an hour or so, during the weekend of January 19 and 20, Wings and Pink Floyd joined forces, on Pink Floyd’s turf, when the latter were recording voices that would be woven into the fabric of several songs.

…

And so it was that a hazy recollection of McCullough’s—“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time!”—found its way into ‘Us and Them,’ a track on one of the most revered albums in the history of rock.

Despite its size, the book didn’t feel overly-long or too detailed. I found myself picking it up at any available moment and was disappointed when I reached the end. Fortunately there’s a sequel in the works that is due out in December this year, covering the period 1974–1980. Here’s how we leave things:

With a critically lauded, Gold-certified hit album on his hands, Paul found himself in a very different position at the end of 1973 than he’d been in at the end of 1969. Four years earlier, he was crawling from the wreckage of the Beatles, unsure of himself and his future. But he had also been nursed, coaxed, and sweet-talked by Linda into recognizing his strengths sufficiently to borrow a Studer four-track from EMI and set down some tunes, taking his first steps toward reinventing himself. But what he recorded then was a motley batch, assembled largely of belatedly finished songs from the Beatle days, revived and polished juvenilia from the late 1950s, and jams molded into instrumentals. He started with only two new songs; others had sprouted as he worked, including the enduring ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ But the music on Band on the Run was fresh—its oldest songs were written during the Red Rose Speedway sessions—and the album was fully conceived before the first session.

I’m excited to find out what the next book brings.

Finished reading How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter. I picked this up from Heather Burns’ 2023 ‘get ready for the coming US election’ reading list. The title is perfect, as the book is literally a narrative that explains the research into the conditions that can typically lead to civil war. It’s been interesting to read this in such close proximity to the riots in the UK that have been taking place over the past week.

A central point of the book is that countries that are neither full democracies nor full autocracies as defined by the ‘polity score’ — known as ‘anocracies’ — are the most likely to experience instability and/or armed conflict. There is danger as a country moves through the anocracy zone, whether that is a country that has declined from being a full democracy, or a country that is moving at speed towards full democracy.

The USA slipped from a rating of 10 in 2015 to a rating of 5 in 2020, following the insurrection on 6 January that year. It became an anocracy for the first time in over two centuries.

Once a country is in the anocracy zone, the biggest warning sign of a civil war is the appearance of a faction, a political group based on ethnic, religious or racial identity rather than ideology. Civil war is even more likely in countries divided into two dominant groups, where one group represents 40–60% of the population. The group that once held power and feels it slipping away is likely to be the one that starts the violence.

People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals, and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.

In recent years, social media has accelerated this process. The proportion of Americans getting some of their news from social media has increased from 23% in 2013 to over 70% today. The platforms promote “a sense of perpetual crisis”. The riots in the UK over this past week are fresh in my mind as I re-read this:

Disinformation spread by extremists discredits peaceful protesters, convinces citizens that counterattacks by opposition groups are likely, and creates a sense—often a false sense—that moderates within their own movement are not doing enough to protect the population, or are ineffective and weak compared to the opposition. It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.

I’m not sure that this is exactly what is happening right now in the UK — so far the riots don’t seem to have spread to moderate people — but I can see how it might happen.

Walter weaves the ten stages of genocide into her narrative. According to Wikipedia, stage 4 is ‘dehumanisation’, where “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.” The ongoing narrative about refugees and asylum seekers in the UK’s most popular newspapers promotes this way of thinking, and has been so painful to see.

“THE ‘SWARM’ ON OUR STREETS” is a disgusting headline. The Daily Mail has been pushing this agenda for as long as I can remember. It may be impossible to draw a direct line between these front pages and the riots that have been happening in the UK over the past week, but they can’t help.

The author also mentions Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), an organisation that publishes fascinating reports and datasets on how countries around the world are democratising or autocratizing. The recent reports are jarring.

V-Dem, the Swedish research institute, collects detailed data on the different types of democracies around the world and then rates them on a 100-point scale with 100 being the most democratic and 0 being the least. According to the institute, Spain has suffered one of the worst declines in Western Europe, followed by Greece, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Austria. Nordic countries, the most liberal in the world, have also dropped since 2010: Denmark, the number one ranked democracy for most of the past hundred years, has been downgraded 10 points on V-Dem’s scale; Sweden has been downgraded 35. The swift rate of democratic decay around the world has been so rapid that V-Dem issued its first “Autocratization Alert” in 2020.

The book explains that the most effective way for a country to avoid violence and civil war is to strengthen the quality of its governance, and make people feel that the systems and institutions are working. People need to value their democracy and believe that it is effective. Doing this is “significantly more important” to avoid conflict than improving the economy.

“…three features stood out: “the rule of law” (the equal and impartial application of legal procedure); “voice and accountability” (the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media); and “government effectiveness” (the quality of public services and the quality and independence of the civil service). These three features reflect the degree to which a government serves its people and the degree to which its political institutions are strong, legitimate, and accountable. Improvements in governance tend to reduce the subsequent risk of war.”

The book is a quick read on a tough subject, giving an excellent overview of the resources and evidence available.

I’ve finished reading Mapping The Roads: Building modern Britain by Mike Parker. A beautiful little book that had been on my shelf for years. It’s filled with gems, such as:

• Driving on the left became law in 1722 in an effort to deal with congestion on London Bridge. (Driving on the left makes sense as tradition for horse riders in a world where most people are right-handed; that hand is free for greetings or drawing swords.)
• In 1895, Britain had around 15 cars. This swelled to 700–800 by the turn of the century, 8,500 by 1904 and more than 85,000 ten years later.
• Bridget Driscoll was the first pedestrian to be killed by a car in Britain, in 1896. The coroner said he hoped that “such a thing would never happen again”.
• The AA had people on patrol who would salute members showing their badges. If the AA patrol person didn’t salute, you could stop and ask them why and they could then inform you of a speed trap ahead.
• Fuel cost the equivalent of £2/litre (in 2016 prices) in 1920.
• The road numbering system in England and Wales is focused on London, with the M1 going directly north and the numbers ascending in order in a clockwise direction. Scotland got roads beginning with 7, 8 and 9, centred around Edinburgh. In both cases the most important roads got the shortest numbers.
• The first petrol station opened in 1919. Ten years later there were 54,000.
• The first motorway in Britain was…the Preston bypass, not the M1.
  

The book has so many lovely maps and illustrations. Pitched at just the right level for a road-curious nerd without getting lost in the detail, it was a joy to read.

The book is a polemic that explores technology, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence and asserts that they are always biased. It has really got me thinking and seeing things in a different way. It reminded me of when I read Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist in that it has given me a completely new way of seeing the world. Recently I have been reviewing documents on ethical AI and I am now looking at them in a completely different light.

This coded language shows up everywhere once you are attuned to it. Consider this IBM AI governance report, which reads: “Extensive evidence has shown that AI can embed human and societal biases and deploy them at scale. Many experts are now saying that unwanted bias might be the major barrier that prevents Al from reaching its full potential. . . . So how do we ensure that automated decisions are less biased than human decision-making?” This is problematic because it assumes that Al’s “full potential” is even possible, which has no evidence aside from the imagination of a small, homogenous group of people who have been consistently wrong about predicting the future and who have not sufficiently factored in structural inequality. The question of “How do we ensure that automated decisions are less biased?” reinforces this problematic assumption, implicitly asserting for the reader that computational decisions are less biased. This is not true, and IBM and other firms should stop writing things that include this assumption. The technochauvinist binary thinking of either computers or humans is the problem: neither alone will deliver us.

I loved the insights on how inputs into machine learning models come from a world that is inherently biased, which will always lead to tools that are biased in some way. Many examples are given of how the systems that have been trained on this data enforce and amplify the existing patterns. For example, where exams couldn’t take place in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, algorithms were used to determine pupil grades instead. The book gives examples from the US, but I distinctly remember the fiasco here in the UK. Assigning grades to students based on historic data from their school, or through the use of any other other demographic information, may seem ‘fair’ to those people designing the algorithm. But to any one person being judged by the system it is deeply unfair.

The book explores the use of machine learning systems by the police. Historic data shows where arrests have been made and who was arrested, but not necessarily where crimes have been committed and who did them. This bias creates a feedback loop where predictive technology asserts that future crimes will be committed in similar areas, by similar people.

The thing is, everyone is a criminal to some extent because everyone has done things that violate the law. For example, white and Black people use drugs and deal drugs at equal rates. Bias determines who gets constructed as a criminal; not everyone gets caught, not everyone gets punished, and some people get punished more than others. The unequal application of justice can be seen in crime maps. Look at a crime map for any major city, and it’s pretty much the same as the map of where Black people live. Again, not because Black people commit more crimes, but because the things we call “crime maps” are actually arrest maps, and Black people are arrested for crimes at a higher rate. When you train algorithms on crime data, you are training the algorithm to over-police certain zip codes or geographic areas, because that is what has happened in real life in the past. You are training the algorithms to be biased.

There’s a fantastic example where someone has put together a ‘White Collar Crime Risk Zones’ tool which identifies ‘hotspots’ in a similar way to other systems. For New York City you can see that the major ’risk areas’ are clustered around the financial districts.

Broussard asserts that people coming from the data science/technology world often assume that they can use their tools to get insights in whatever field they are applying them to, without considering the long history, large body of work and experts that have been in this space for many years before them:

One of the big misconceptions of data science is that it provides insights. It doesn’t always. Sometimes the insights are merely things that the data scientists didn’t know, but people in other disciplines already knew. There’s an important distinction between what is unknown to the world versus what is simply unknown to you. Data scientists in general need to do more qualitative research, and talk to experts in relevant fields, before designing and implementing quantitative systems.

I loved the insight that designing tools for inclusion actually makes them better for everybody. It got me thinking about the minimal effort that I have been putting in to adding alt-text to images on this website. The tools I use for blogging don’t help me but I know there will be a way to do it. I’ll try harder. It’s not really acceptable that images are inaccessible to vision-impaired readers in 2024.

Useful innovations like the typewriter, text messaging, audiobooks, remote controls, wide rubber grips on kitchen tools, voice assistants, and closed captioning all stem from designs for disability. “When we design for disability first, we often stumble upon solutions that are not only inclusive, but also are often better than when we design for the norm,” Roy said. “This excites me, because this means that the energy it takes to accommodate someone with a disability can be leveraged, molded, and played with as a force for creativity and innovation. This moves us from the mindset of trying to change the hearts and the deficiency mindset of tolerance to becoming an alchemist, the type of magician that this world so desperately needs to solve some of its greatest problems.”

Although I found the writing style quite dry, I’m very glad I picked this book up. I’m going to be thinking about its insights long after I’ve put it down.

In short, the broader the use case and more general the AI deployment, the riskier the outcomes are likely to be. Using a large language model to summarise or convert content is a good use case. Offering an AI-powered general purpose chatbot to your customers is likely to cause a plethora of problems, particularly where you are not able to vet the data that the model has been trained on. Businesses need to make sure that they aren’t getting themselves into sticky situations by moving too quickly or deploying technology that can break in unexpected ways. Governments and regulation moves slowly, but at some point it will catch up and there may be a lot of companies exposed to lawsuits and fines when it does.

This book is required reading for everyone involved in looking at Generative AI for their business or in their work.

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked him what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, economics, and law.

“How about fiction-novels, plays, poetry?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I have never had time for them. There is so much else I have to read.”

I said, “Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time. I don’t know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I had only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it.”

My friend nodded gravely. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact.”

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Finn, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. And if you want to know about Pennsylvania of the last hundred years, you’ll read O’Hara or you’ll know less than you might.”

The chapters of the book give different slices through the author’s life and experiences, kept fresh through the angles that they take. In one chapter late in the book we are given what I assume to be a ‘typical’ day in her life as a teacher, from when she wakes up until she’s back in bed again.

The book is life-affirming and relatable, with a few nuggets of wisdom in its pages:

Most of them are getting the questions right. I used to think that asking kids things they already knew was pointless. But it’s not: it puts them in a good mood for learning new things.

Kellaway reflects on her own past: her parents and her education, as well as the way in which she brought up her own children. I found myself nodding in recognition to her experiences both as a parent:

Subsequently I discovered that size of house cuts both ways. It may have kept us safe from the world outside, but it also kept us safe from each other. As the children grew older and became teenagers an average evening at number 52 would not find the family amiably playing Scrabble or even gathering passively around the TV to watch Friends. After a quick supper cooked by me – soggy leek-and-bacon pasta or chicken nuggets and broccoli – we dispersed.

…and as someone who wants to focus on specialising and refining their performance in their current job, not focusing on promotion:

My position, and that of about two-thirds of the Now Teachers, is quite different. We have no desire to advance above the bottom rung of the ladder that we are now squarely standing on. We own our own property and don’t need to prove ourselves in the same way she does. We don’t want to be promoted, but only want to be responsible for our own classes and for becoming better at what we do. That feels quite enough. This resistance to promotion makes us both happier and harder to manage.

But the best parts are about her experiences as a teacher, and what she has come to learn — and to question — over the past few years:

For all its strictness, the school does give some latitude to teachers on how they teach. Yet this is provisional, and puts the onus on me. I need to prove that I can get good results – and I have absolutely no idea if I can. Is it possible to teach both the world and the syllabus? If not, is there a trade-off? If children get one grade lower because they have spent a lot of time thinking about broader things, how much does it matter?

I enjoy planning lessons but it strikes me as a shocking waste of time. Why aren’t there national lesson plans designed by the best teachers in the country and updated every year? I spend the next 20 minutes hastily scrabbling around for material and putting together a slap-dash PowerPoint.

Two years later, I have a clearer idea of what it is I’m trying to do. Changing lives turns out not to be about making instant transformations – it is about hard slog and tiny, incremental improvements. This realisation has changed my own life – or at least how I teach, and the sort of teacher I want to be.

Since that day the penny has dropped: the best way of helping Alicia is not to try to make economics a fun show, it is to get her to pass her exam. If it is a teacher’s job to open doors, those doors, under the present regime, are GCSEs. When I started teaching, I thought exams were a necessary evil. I still think that. I hate the way schools talk of them as if they are the purpose of education, when in fact they are merely (flawed) evidence that you’ve acquired some. I despised the government’s response to Covid in schools, where it prioritised the year groups taking exams, as if the education of the other years somehow didn’t matter. I despair at the way teachers spend as much time teaching exam technique as the subject itself. Yet despite this I, too, am teaching the exam first and economics second.

Recommended.