What is the great Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification? It’s the particular path monopolistic profiteering takes on digital platforms. Here’s the first section of a substantial recent (Feb 8, 2024) article by him. If you find it interesting, I suggest you click through for the rest of the article.
We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn. …
It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.
Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public.
It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world. That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users.
Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you.
In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem. It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform.
Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers. To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.
To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too. Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in.
Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders. For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen.
For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.
When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.
(This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.) But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.
This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”. That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde? Nope.
There’s much more and I recommend clicking through.
From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.
There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable. …
Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.
And lo, the Lord said “Put ye on a hi-viz best and marvel at the paradoxes of the world. You may not be paid or treated well. You may need to piss into a jar, but politicians will dress up as you. And lo, it will be good(ish).
No that’s not a joke. Amazon has always been an audacious company that thinks big. When it builds some unique capability it doesn’t just want its own lines to benefit from it. It wants to profit from making it available to large swathes of the market. It did this with Amazon Web Services, and the use of the logistics networks it built to sell merchants that part of their own service.
Now they’re doing it for parcels. Australia Post has 80% of the parcel delivery business, but it uses its network to cross-subsidise the city. “Wait” I hear you cry. Aren’t Australia Post’s cross-subsidies supposed to go from the city to the bush?” Well yes, but that’s the legislated monopoly. In the bush they have a natural monopoly so they gouge on their margins there and enshittify the service (with unreliability and delays) to cross subsidise parcels in the city where they face most competition.
So it’s nice to see Amazon rolling out its network more widely and providing merchants with access to it. It doesn’t completely solve the ‘last mile’ problem because it’s unlikely to do it where it doesn’t pay, but it will keep Australia Post a little more honest, a little less shittified.
None of this proves that Amazon haven't enshittified other parts of their business — you have to pay dearly for prime location on their website — though this is as you’d expect. But the unenshittified part of their operation prompts an intriguing question. At least in principle, shouldn't governments be involved in something similar — helping to convene, enable and solve collective action problems for smaller minions?
The launch of the Delivery Service Partner program – which is available in 19 countries – comes after Amazon expanded its free one-day delivery service for Prime customers to key regional areas last month, taking on a market previously dominated by Express Post. …
Amazon Australia’s General Manager of Delivery and Supply Chain, Anthony Perizzolo, said encouraging more people to start their own delivery business, would create “hundreds of permanent jobs for delivery drivers”.
“What we’re able to provide is Amazon’s expertise within logistics, infrastructure support training technology. So these owners can go and hire and retain amazing teams, run their daily operations, manage their fleet, so that they can grow their own business and invest in their communities.” The start-up cost to join the program is $30,000 and covers services including fleet and payroll management as well as insurance
“We have a ton of technology that will aid them in running their own business. For example, their drivers get technology that has mapping functionality and routing functionality.”
“We provide them with the services that they will need through … partnerships that we’ve created. We’re pretty proud of how low the barrier is and the relative low cost of the start-up investment that they have to make.”The Delivery Service Partner program complements Amazon’s Flex scheme, which taps into the gig economy but instead of being paid per parcel delivery, drivers are paid in hourly blocks. …
Since its launch, Amazon Australia invested more than half a billion dollars in its last mile network. It has opened 12 logistics sites around the country – including in regional cities such as Newcastle, Gold Coast and Geelong – creating more than 1,000 operational jobs, as well as flexible earning opportunities delivering packages with Amazon Flex
Declaration of interest: Lateral Economics is being funded by a logistics firm, Team Global Express (TGE), which does a lot of contract work for Australia Post, to provide economic analysis in support of the (overwhelming) case for open access to the last mile of Australia Post’s natural monopoly network in regional Australia.
Four-minute comedy masterpiece
Dean Ashenden’s: Unbeaching the Whale
This picture is particularly apposite. Are the people at the bottom of the picture under the water or on the shore? Well, whatever they’re doing and however little sense it makes, they certainly look both well-intentioned and busy. What could possibly go wrong?
Dean Ashenden is one of those rare folks who, rather than just pumping out content and commentary, has been trying to figure things out. He sent me his recent short book to check out. It has a brilliant title that obviously refers to the great, beached leviathan of our politico-education system. But perhaps it also adverts to his own mental labours. (I’ve certainly been trying to unbeach my own whale for many a decade now!)
I thought the prologue — which I reproduce below — was a magnificent provocation.
Consider this: Australia is one of the best-run countries in the world (don’t laugh unless you can point to five countries clearly run better). Yet it spent the best part of a decade and vast sums on revitalising education only to see it decline further (and perhaps faster than it otherwise would have). I see this again and again. It basically happens wherever policy steps outside the playpen where problems are solved by applying the most straightforward principles of economics and public policy and building them into an app — as is the case with the tax and welfare systems and their combined use as with HECS and the child support agency.
In indigenous wellbeing, prisons, entrenched disadvantage of all kinds, whether at the family, individual, or locational level, everyone looks busy and is very well-intentioned. They mouth buzzwords like ‘evidence-based’ and ‘data-driven’. They attend away days to strategise their mission and their ‘impact’. But, as if they’re being inhabited by some foreign and malevolent being (albeit a humourous one), nothing hangs together; nothing really makes sense. Beyond breezy generalities and aspirations, no one can tell you what is working so well it’s earmarked for expansion and what’s looking like it needs serious practical attention.
I spent over 7,000 words trying to explain it to myself here.
Still, we’ve been here before. We’re always here. Here is the great Bill Stanner in 1959 on another fad in public policy. Assimilationism for indigenes — to replace the previous official policy of gentle extermination, pacification and erasure.
The aspirations are high; the sincerity is obvious; everyone is extremely busy; a great deal of money is being spent; and the tasks multiply much faster than the staffs who must do the work. In such a setting a certain courage is needed to ask if people really know what they are doing.
Quite.
Anyway, here’s Dean’s prologue.
Prologue
The historian Manning Clark believed that Australian political leaders fell into one of two groups; they were either “straighteners” and prohibitors or they were enlargers of life. So too ways of thinking about schools; this short book is an argument for an enlarging spirit in schooling and against the demand for compliance before all else.
That is not what I had in mind; the initial idea was to pull together some threads of thinking developed over a decade or so. Certainly I began with a set against what governments of all persuasions had been saying and doing about schools since the Howard years, an approach driven with utter conviction by the Rudd/Gillard governments in their “education revolution” (with the sole but compelling exception of “Gonski”). But as I dug out and for the first time really focused on a mass of evidence about how things had been going I got more than I’d bargained for.
I was not shocked, exactly, but taken aback by the consistency of the picture over a wide field and across many years: Australian schooling has been on the slide for two decades, is still on the slide and is showing no signs of turning around. That conclusion was reinforced and expanded in scope late in the piece as I at last realised that much-publicised difficulties of a behavioural and emotional kind (“classroom disruption,” “school refusal,” early leaving, bullying, lack of “engagement,” problems of “wellbeing”) are even more marked, fundamental and significant than the cognitive shortcomings on which much of the evidence dwells; they suggest that schooling isn’t working, and that it isn’t working because what children and young people experience there is badly out of kilter with what they experience elsewhere.
There was more to come as I turned to the obvious question: how come? Why didn’t an agenda prosecuted with exceptional vigor by exceptionally capable political leaders deliver what it promised, let alone do what really needed doing? There is nothing inherently wrong in the big arguments used to make schools sit up straight and do as they were told — choice, equality, more “effective” teaching, the duty owed by publicly funded schools to the wider society, including its economy. All can be constructive, inspiring even. But not the versions that came to dominate official minds.
Then the third and final occasion for a sinking feeling: how and by whom could the slide be arrested and reversed? As the straightening agenda expanded and grew in confidence, the system of governance — already limited to doing what could be done in bits and pieces within three-year election cycles — became more complex and less capable. When the Productivity Commission looked at the problem it found that key elements of the national reform agenda had been “stalled” for thirteen years, and that the things talked about at national HQ could seem “remote” from the “lived experience” of teachers and school leaders. There is now no entity, “national” or other, no government, state/territory or federal, and no stakeholder or combination of stakeholders with a span of responsibility and authority and a relationship between brain and body close enough to conceive and drive change of the kind and scale required.
***
There is another side to this ledger, however. I was not the only or first to be dismayed at how things were playing out. Prominent veterans Brian Caldwell and Alan Reid (both former deans of education) conclude that “Australian schools have hit the wall” (Caldwell)and need “a major overhaul.” (Reid) A former NSW education minister, Verity Firth, argues that the time has come for “structural” reform rather than more of the same. Her Western Australian counterpart (and former premier and Gonski panel member) Carmen Lawrence rages against the long tail, rising segregation, pathetically narrow performance measures, the failure of new school planning, “deeply disturbing” inequities and “huge” differences in resourcing and opportunity. Barry McGaw, former chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research and former head of education at the OECD, famously careful in his pronouncements, says bluntly that quality is declining, inequity is high, and the system is “resistant to reform”; his successor at the ACER, Geoff Masters says “deep reforms” are “urgently required.”
All this comes amidst a flurry of books about the “tyranny of merit” or “threats to egalitarian schooling,” books assaulting policy “that is taking us backwards” or calling for “reimagining” or “revolution” or “transformation” or a “ground-up rethink” of what “learning systems” are needed to equip students for “societal challenges we can’t yet imagine.”
And it’s not just policy wonks and the kinds of people who write books. Others trying to find a way through the maze include some actually giving life to ideas often given lip service by the powers-that-be: that all young people will become “confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners and active and informed members of community,” Now, for the first time, breakthroughs in the rigorous assessment of learning and growth are making it possible for schools to keep doing some of the important things they have long done and to do important new things as well, and, what’s more, to do it for everyone: to provide twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years across the board.
So the nub of the answer to the question posed in the book’s subtitle — can schooling be reformed? — is yes, but it’s a very big ask, and schools can’t do it by themselves. It requires a reorganisation or “restructuring” of the system of goverance; of the sector system, government, independent and Catholic; and above all of the daily work of students and teachers. And that in turn requires a very different way of thinking about schools and reform: more incremental reform, yes, but within a big, long-term strategy for structural change; equality in schooling rather than through it; more fraternity as well as more equality and liberty; more “choice,” but made more equally available; sectors yes, but not organised so that two feed off the third; realising that schools, like students and teachers, need space and support to find their own way within a negotiated framework; accepting that schools can contribute to prosperity, but not by aiming at it; and the really big one, focusing not on teaching, effective or otherwise, but on the organisation of the production of learning and growth by its core workforce, the students. Thinking needs to be more politically capable and inspiring as well as enlarging in spirit, able to inspire and guide the kind of top-down-bottom-up popular movement briefly seen in the “I Give a Gonski” campaign (and on a very much larger scale in the distant but formative tumults of the 1960s and early 1970s).
The case for such a big and risky ask is, on the one hand, necessity (current and piecemeal “reforms” can’t do what needs to be done) and, on the other, that it really matters, not in a life-and-death way but in a hard-to-pin-down, universal, lasting way.
***
What follows retraces the course of my own enquiries. Chapter 1 describes the straightening agenda of the education revolution, and then surveys the evidence of its failure. Chapter 2 asks why the revolution failed, and finds the answer in a worldwide climate of opinion, its constituent ideas, and its powerful machinery of production and distribution; chapter 2 proceeds mostly by critique but also tries to pin down what was crucially different about Gonski. Chapter 3 draws the morals of these stories for tackling the question that really matters: what now?
Thanks to Dean Ashenden’s book, I now know of Simon Armitage and this poem. I also watched this interview on poetry as a form of dissent.
Robin Hanson on experts and elites
Now about half way through Unbeaching the Whale I’m thinking that Robin Hanson’s recently articulated distinction between experts and elites provides another powerful lens through which we can observe the meltdown of our institutions. He sets it out well to the thrillseeker hosting a podcast while being charged by an elephant above. Here is what looks like his first blog-post on the subject, which is spookily similar to the way he’s explaining it three years later.
Consider a typical firm or other small organization, run via a typical management hierarchy. At the bottom are specialists, who do very particular tasks. At the top are generalists, who supposedly consider it all in the context of a bigger picture. In the middle are people who specialize to some degree, but who also are supposed to consider somewhat bigger pictures.
On any particular issue, people at the bottom can usually claim the most expertise; they know their job best. And when someone at the top has to make a difficult decision, they usually prefer to justify it via reference to recommendations from below. They are just following the advice of their experts, they say. But of course they lie; people at the top often overrule subordinates. And while leaders often like to pretend that they select people for promotion on the basis of doing lower jobs well, that is also often a lie.
Our larger society has a similar structure. We have elites who are far more influential than most of us about what happens in our society. As we saw early in the pandemic, the elites are always visibly chattering among themselves about the topics of the day, and when they form a new opinion, the experts usually quickly cave to agree with them, and try to pretend they agreed all along.
As a book I recently reviewed explains in great detail, elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc. Elites like to pretend they were selected for being experts at something, and they like to pretend their opinions are just reflecting what experts have said (“we believe the science!”). But they often lie; elite opinion often overrules expert opinion, especially on topics with strong moral colors. And elites are selected far more for prestige than expertise.
When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. At which point they often start to wax philosophic, and writing op-eds. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. Elites far less often lust after becoming experts, because we are often willing to treat elites as if they are experts. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science, they are often willing to field science questions when they give a talk on their book. And the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about.
Consider talks versus panels at conferences. A talk tends to be done in expert mode, wherein the speaker sticks to topics on which they have acquired expert knowledge. But then on panels, the same people talk freely on most any topic that comes up, even topics where they have little expertise. You might think that audiences would be less interested in hearing such inexpert speculation, but in fact they seem to eat it up. My interpretation: on panels, people pose as elites, and talk in elite mode. Like they might do at a cocktail party. And audiences eagerly gather around panelists, just like they would gather around prestigious folks arguing at a cocktail party about topics on which they have little expertise.
Thanks to Gene Tunny for sending me this video. I’ve always thought Piers Morgan was kind of OK — at least as far as shock-jocks go. He knows the game, and wants to be successful, so just like politicians and business people do stuff to win votes and remain profitable that they mightn’t do otherwise, so, when he plays a shock-jock he interrupts and generally carries on. But I’ve never found him poison to listen to — like for instance pretty much any regular hack on Fox News, or Tucker Carlson, or in Australia Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt. Still I expect some people will disagree.
Anyway, since moving to his latest gig he’s managed to actually do his job in the role he’s taken on, which is to explore the different views of significant people and to allow them a reasonable chance to get their views out. He’s been much less propagandistic on Israel than most others. Much more interested in arranging it so his viewers can check out some of the better and more senior spokespeople on either side. He also brings his own views in as part of the discussion, which can work well if it’s not too assertive.
In this interview, he retains some shock jock ticks, particularly personalising everything and setting Sachs up with gotcha questions. I’d have liked Sachs to have a rather more straightforward way of saying, “Putin and Xi and their regimes aren’t such nice guys, but that’s not the point”, but since he’s deep into his own role as a jet-setting mover and shaker, he won’t allow himself that luxury. He seems to be trying to behave as if he was a world leader.
He also offers commentary on AUKUS about 19 minutes in.
I’d add that one can find Sachs critique of how we got into this war persuasive or at least a reasonable view and still support vigorous support for Ukraine. However badly others behave towards you, that does not justify invading another country. In fact I’ve put that last sentence wrongly. We might be motivated by right and wrong, but, in international relations, right and wrong should be read in a special way — largely relating to expediency. Irrespective of who is a good guy and who isn't, will a world in which the Russian invasion is permitted be better or worse than one in which they’re fought off (if it can be done without triggering nuclear war)? I think the idea of collectively defending countries from foreign invasion is worth fighting for. (Pity the West and its much-vaunted ‘rules-based order’ didn’t give two figs for it in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Anyway, to make the point, here is a passionate argument for defending Ukraine with which I agree from Martin Wolf.
Martin Wolf: Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine
Did anybody imagine, before Trump’s emergence, that a man who tried to overthrow the result of a presidential election would be the Republican candidate in the next one?
Like most strongmen, Trump prizes loyalty above everything. As Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic noted in a recent column, “For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand.” So it is. But it is vital to do so, because it tells us something profound about events in the country that has been the leader of the west since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Ukraine has fought the Russian behemoth to a standstill over two heroic years, despite being outmanned and outgunned. The heroism of the Ukrainians is even more remarkable than that of the Finns in the winter war of 1939-40 against Stalin’s armies. Putin’s so far unsuccessful war has also cost Russia heavily. According to CIA director Bill Burns, “two-thirds of Russia’s prewar tank inventory has been destroyed, and Putin’s vaunted decades-long military modernization program has been hollowed out”.
Sir Roderic Lyne, former British ambassador to Russia, writes that “western estimates of Russian losses, killed or seriously wounded, range between 300 and 350 thousand, with over a hundred thousand dead . . . Casualties are set to approach half a million by the end of this year.” Moreover, he adds: “A third of the budget is being spent on defence . . . .”
Ukraine has achieved this against Putin’s revanchist dictatorship at minimal cost to western countries. Nato soldiers are not even being called upon to fight. For the US, the damage inflicted on Russia by the Ukraine war has been a colossal bargain. Yet now, Trump and his acolytes seem set on handing Putin an unearned and undeserved victory. …
If the US now abandons Ukraine, it will shake its alliances to their foundations. How has Trump managed to exercise such control over his party? The answer is that much of the Republican base is loyal to him personally. The Republicans are a cult. Armed with this support, Trump controls party legislators, by exploiting their cowardice and their careerism.
This makes the next election at least the most important since 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. What might happen if Ukraine were indeed abandoned? Evidently, it will raise questions about US reliability everywhere. Above all, allies will doubt guarantees. How might they respond?
One possibility is a dangerous surge in nuclear proliferation. Another is the remaking of alliances into ones less dependent on the US. Yet another is an attempt to do deals with China and Russia. In a transactional world, that is what many sensible players will do. It is not hard to understand that many Americans resent allied freeriding on their resources and their will.
This is a classic collective action problem: countries that will not make a difference to outcomes are tempted to be free-riders. But a superpower cannot freeride. Its retreat from the world will reshape it. That is what it tried to do between the two world wars. It did not end well. It is unlikely that a world from which the US has withdrawn would be to its liking. …
Ukraine is certainly not a free-rider. It is instead paying with its blood for the right to be a free and democratic country in an unequal fight against the neighbourhood bully. What it seeks is also perfectly affordable financial and military assistance. This war has done far more than inflict great damage on Russia’s military. It has also revitalised Nato itself. …
What lies ahead is likely to be a long war of attrition, before the Russians realise they will not be allowed to erase Ukraine. The role of western allies is only to supply money and weapons. … To abandon [Ukraine] now in their hour of great need would demonstrate catastrophic western weakness at a moment of potential success: Russia would rejoice; the western alliance would crumble; and many would conclude that the US is in irreversible decline. For the US and the world, this truly is a decisive moment.
Images from Byzantium: Antigone interviews Averil Cameron
The Empress Theodora and her attendants, 6th-century mosaic (Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy).
Detail from the so-called ‘Stilicho Sarcophagus’, 4th century (Basilica of Sant’ Ambrogio, Milan, Italy).
Luxury at the Byzantine imperial court extended to the smallest objects: this tiny enamelled head (only an inch long) seems to have been affixed to the end of a pointer that was used during public readings, or presentations of elaborate manuscripts, produced between 1080 and 1150 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA).
The Emperor Justinian as depicted on the 6th-century Barberini Ivory (Musée du Louvre, Paris, France).
The famous ‘Strand Chapel’ of King’s College, London, completed by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1864.
What got my attention was this: Live, after April 2020 (when we recognized what was going on and took steps), in a county where the margin for Trump vs. Biden rises by an extra 1%-point…
…and your chances of dying from the Covid Plague go up by 0.0075%-point:
That means (with an election turnout of half the population) that you only need an additional 67 excess Trump voters in a county to kill one additional person from the Covid Plague.
It’s in the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It's a model of a cathedral made entirely of retail armorments.
Is free trade good? Depends who’s driving it
Next time you say to Dall-e “draw an op ed illustration illustrating the choice between free trade and autarky” you may get a strange picture of an elephant in the room. Well not in the room, but on an odd wooden stage with containers on either side. The elephant may even have only two legs as in the illustration I got.
Dani Rodrik rarely disappoints and didn’t disappoint me here.
Whereas free trade was once the central cause of progressive reformers seeking to combat entrenched interests on behalf of ordinary people, now it is the bête noire of both right-wing nationalists and the mainstream left. To understand why attitudes changed so radically, one must follow the money. …
Free trade was the rallying cry of nineteenth-century political reformers, who saw it as a vehicle for defeating despotism, ending wars, and reducing crushing inequalities in wealth. … And it wasn’t just political liberals who supported free trade. US populists in the late nineteenth century staunchly opposed the gold standard, but they were also against import tariffs, which they thought benefited big business and harmed ordinary people. They pushed to replace tariffs with a more equitable progressive income tax. Then, during the early part of the twentieth century, many socialists viewed free trade, supported by supranational regulation, as the antidote to militarism, wealth gaps, and monopolies.
These conflicting views would seem to pose a conundrum. Does trade promote peace, freedom, and economic opportunity, or does it foster conflict, repression, and inequality? In fact, the enigma is more apparent than real. Either outcome – or anything in between – depends on whom trade empowers.
Nineteenth-century liberals and reformers were free traders because they thought protectionism served retrograde interests, including landed aristocrats, business monopolies, and warmongers. They believed economic nationalism went hand in hand with imperialism and aggression. Palen cites a 1919 essay by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who depicted imperialism as a “monopolistic symptom of atavistic militarism and protectionism – an ailment that only democratic free-trade forces could cure.”
It was this vision that informed the post-World War II international trade system. The American architects of the International Trade Organization followed in the footsteps of Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, believing they were pursuing world peace through free trade. Hull was an economic cosmopolitan and a devotee of the nineteenth-century radical free-trade advocate Richard Cobden. Unlike previous regimes, the postwar order was meant to be a system of global rules that did away with bilateralism and imperial privileges. …
But trade can be instrumentalized just as easily for authoritarian and militaristic ends. A particularly egregious example is Antebellum America, where free trade served to entrench slavery. During the drafting of the US Constitution in 1787, slave-owning Southerners ensured that the text would prohibit the taxation of exports. They well understood that free trade would ensure that plantation agriculture remained profitable and safeguard the system of slavery on which it was based. When the North defeated the South in the Civil War, slavery was abolished and free trade was replaced with protectionism, which suited Northern business interests better.
The situation under British imperialism was similar. After the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the British government nominally turned its back on protectionism and led Europe in signing free-trade agreements. But in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, free trade was imposed through the barrel of a gun whenever the British encountered weak potentates ruling over valuable commodities and markets.
The British fought the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to force Chinese rulers to open their markets to British and other Western goods (opium chief among them), so that Western countries in turn could buy China’s tea, silk, and porcelain without draining their gold. The opium was grown in India, where, as Amitav Ghosh details in his new book, Smoke and Ashes, a British monopoly forced farmers to work under horrendous conditions that left long-term scars. Free trade served repression and war, and vice versa.
The post-WWII regime of multilateral free trade under American leadership would fare much better. … By the 1990s, however, the trade regime had become a victim of its own success. Large corporations and multinationals, empowered by the expansion of the global economy, increasingly drove trade negotiations. The environment, public health, human rights, economic security, and domestic equity took a back seat. International trade had yet again moved away from Cobden and Hull’s original vision, turning into a source of international discord instead of harmony.
The lesson of history is that turning trade into a positive force requires that we democratize it. That is the only way to ensure it serves the common good, rather than narrow interests – an important lesson to keep in mind as we reconstruct the world trade regime in the years ahead.
NEW YORK – Last year, US President Joe Biden’s administration infuriated lobbyists representing Big Tech firms and others that profit from our personal data by denouncing a proposal that would have gutted domestic data privacy, online civil rights and liberties, and competition safeguards. Now, Biden’s new executive order on Americans’ data security reveals that the lobbyists had good reason to worry.
After decades of data brokers and tech platforms exploiting Americans’ personal data without any oversight or restrictions, the Biden administration has announced that it will ban the transfer of certain kinds of data to China and other countries of concern. It is a small, but important, step toward protecting Americans’ sensitive personal information, in addition to government-related data.
Moreover, the order is likely a precursor to additional policy responses. Americans are rightly worried about what is happening online, and their concerns extend well beyond privacy violations to a host of other digital harms, such as mis- and disinformation, social media-induced teenage anxiety, and racial incitement.
The firms that make money from our data (including personal medical, financial, and geolocation information) have spent years trying to equate “free flows of data” with free speech. They will try to frame any Biden administration public-interest protections as an effort to shut down access to news websites, cripple the internet, and empower authoritarians. That is nonsense.
Tech companies know that if there is an open, democratic debate, consumers’ concerns about digital safeguards will easily trump concerns about their profit margins. Industry lobbyists thus have been busy trying to short-circuit the democratic process. One of their methods is to press for obscure trade provisions aimed at circumscribing what the United States and other countries can do to protect personal data.
It might seem obvious that a US president should protect Americans’ privacy and national security, both of which could be jeopardized depending on how and where the vast amounts of data that we all generate are processed and stored. Yet, amazingly, former President Donald Trump’s administration sought to prohibit the US from placing any restrictions on “the cross-border transfer of information, including personal information” to any country if such transfers were related to the business of any investor or service provider operating in the US or other countries signing the agreement.
The Trump administration’s proposal to include this rule in the World Trade Organization did provide for one exception, which ostensibly would allow some regulation “necessary to achieve a legitimate public policy objective,” but it was designed not to work in practice. While Big Tech lobbyists cite the exception to rebut criticism of the broader proposal, the provision’s language comes straight from a WTO “General Exception” that has failed in 46 of 48 attempted uses.
The ban on cross-border data regulation was just one of four proposals that Big Tech lobbyists convinced Trump officials to slip into the revised North American Free Trade Agreement and to propose at WTO-related talks. Written in arcane jargon and buried among hundreds of pages of trade-pact language, these provisions were misleadingly branded as “digital trade” rules.
By prohibiting governments from adopting certain policies, the proposal’s industry-written terms threatened bipartisan efforts in the US Congress to counter Big Tech’s abuses of consumers, workers, and smaller businesses. They also undercut the US regulatory agencies responsible for protecting our privacy and civil rights, and for enforcing antitrust policy. In fact, had the Trump-era rules banning government restrictions on data flows gone into effect at the WTO, they would have barred the Biden administration’s own new data-security policy.
Few people realized the Trump-era proposal even existed – except, of course, for the lobbyists who had been quietly commandeering trade talks. While no previous US trade pacts had included provisions pre-empting executive and congressional authority over data regulation, digital platforms suddenly would have been granted special secrecy rights. The kinds of algorithmic assessments and AI pre-screenings that Congress and executive-branch agencies deem critical to protecting the public interest would have been banned.
After Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, industry lobbyists still hoped to make these anomalous rules a new norm. Their plan was to get the same provisions added to a Biden administration agreement called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But instead of going with the lobbyists, Biden administration officials worked with Congress to determine that the Trump-era proposals were not compatible with congressional and administration goals for digital privacy, competition, and regulation.
Now, we can understand why tech lobbyists were so incensed by the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw support for the Trump-era proposal. They recognized that by casting aside Big Tech’s favored “digital trade” handcuffs, the Biden administration was reasserting its authority to regulate the large platforms and data brokers that Americans across the political spectrum think have too much power. Trade agreements have gotten a bad name precisely because of this kind of behavior by corporate lobbyists.
The US needs a robust debate about how best to regulate Big Tech, and over how to maintain competition while preventing the digital harms that are stoking political polarization and undermining democracy. Obviously, the debate should not be tethered by constraints imposed surreptitiously by Big Tech through trade agreements. US Trade Representative Katherine Tai is exactly right when she says that it would be “policy malpractice” to lock in trade rules limiting action on these matters before the US government has established its own domestic approach.
Whatever one’s position on the regulation of Big Tech – whether one believes that its anti-competitive practices and social harms should be restricted or not – anyone who believes in democracy should applaud the Biden administration for its refusal to put the cart before the horse. The US, like other countries, should decide its digital policy democratically. If that happens, I suspect the outcome will be a far cry from what Big Tech and its lobbyists were pushing for.
Nathan Wilcox on why neuro-economics shouldn't start with the brain!
I was struck by this essay when I first encountered it (I guess) about eight years ago. It seemed right on the money to me, but the triumph of LLMs vindicates it further. And it reinforces something I’ve been banging on about so embarrassingly often that I need only go back to last fortnight’s extract from the wonderful How Life Works.
In 1962 David Smithers warned about the dangers of taking too reductionistic a view of cancer. It is, he said,
no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars. A lifetime of study of the internal-combustion engine would not help anyone to understand our traffic problems. The causes of congestion can be many. A traffic jam is due to a failure of the normal relationship between driven cars and their environment and can occur whether they themselves are running normally or not. …
The analogy of the traffic jam is perhaps even better than Smithers appreciated. For traffic jams can be triggered by a single individual doing something, such as braking too hard too suddenly. But it is doubtful whether this can be identified as the cause of the jam, because a jam will only result if it happens within the right (or wrong) context—in that case, if the density of traffic is above a certain threshold. Either way, the jam is a collective phenomenon that cannot be deduced or predicted from the behavior of a single driver. As Smithers put it, “Cancer is a disease of organization, not a disease of cells.” He argued that the key criterion for whether cancer develops is the organizational state of the tissue.
And so to Nathan Wilcox’s essay.
Abstract
Neuroeconomics illustrates our deepening descent into the details of individual cognition. This descent is guided by the implicit assumption that “individual human” is the important “agent” of neoclassical economics. I argue here that this assumption is neither obviously correct, nor of primary importance to human economies. In particular I suggest that the main genius of the human species lies with its ability to distribute cognition across individuals, and to incrementally accumulate physical and social cognitive artifacts that largely obviate the innate biological limitations of individuals. If this is largely why our economies grow, then we should be much more interested in distributed cognition in human groups, and correspondingly less interested in individual cognition. We should also be much more interested in the cultural accumulation of cognitive artefacts: computational devices and media, social structures and economic institutions.
Experimental and behavioural economics and, by association, neuro- economics overwhelmingly involve this kind of experiment: Simple choices for individuals to make, perhaps in the context of a simple social interaction such as a two-person game. Importantly, each subject’s access to other subjects is tightly circumscribed. In individual choice experiments, such access is simply forbidden for statistical reasons, and in game experiments it is closely regulated for both game-theoretic and statistical reasons. The hunch seems to be (1) that individual minds are the centrally important information-processing units of economic science, and (2) that simple decision problems and simple games usefully characterize the actual decision problems and actual games that govern the important economic phenomena, such as growth and inequality. For example, McCabe (2008, this issue) singles out trust and reciprocity as enablers of economic growth, and perhaps they are. We are invited to view experiments about simple trust games between two individuals (and what happens within the individual skulls involved in such games) as crucially relevant to economic growth.
Let me illustrate an alternative hunch. I rather suspect that economic growth is overwhelmingly due to the cultural accumulation of external cognitive artefacts, including social distributions of information processing, which implement external information representations and algorithms. This accumulation increasingly exploits the performance strengths of individual cognition (e.g. hand-eye coordination, fast pattern recognition) and increasingly avoids its weaknesses (e.g. algebra, emotional interference). It increasingly distributes information processing across group members in highly structured ways, aided by external cognitive artefacts, and lessens the importance of individual brains to economically important information-processing tasks. I also suspect this accumulation is not mostly the product of individual learning, but is rather mostly the product of social learning processes that operate across contemporaneous social space and (especially) across generations of social groups confronting related tasks. This story of economic growth is of the increasing marginality of individual brains and the growing centrality of socially distributed cognition. I think this is a plausible alternative hunch about cognitive science’s primary relevance to economic growth.
I will call the viewpoint I am criticizing “cognitive individualism”. It powerfully shapes and constrains theory, research questions and empirical inquiry. Importantly for this volume, it unsurprisingly draws researchers and resources ever deeper into the study of individual cognition. In an intellectual milieu guided by cognitive individualism, the emergence of neuroeconomics (and the strong support it gets from many distinguished scholars) was inevitable. To be clear, neuroeconomics is not my target here; it is just one particularly vivid manifestation of my true target.
I suspect that many decision and discovery processes that govern the most important economic phenomena involve a high degree of social and/or computational complexity. This is notoriously true of many dynamic decision problems and their solution algorithms: I suspect that a substantial part of inequality is due to differential success (across dynastic families) at intergenerational innovation and transmission of good heuristics for dealing with life-cycle decisions. Related considerations apply to technological progress and hence growth. I simply don’t believe I have this nifty laptop or this swell alphabet merely (or even mostly) because of individual cognitive solutions to simple tasks or games. Rich, external cognitive artefacts like these were accumulated by increment and innovation across years and indeed millennia. I suspect the information- processing units responsible for these increments and innovations were usually groups of people and rarely individual brains (notwithstanding our seeming need to render scientific and technological history in terms of individual heroes). That is, I suspect our accumulation of cognitive artefacts (that transform our tasks and shape distributed cognition) is overwhelmingly the product of social learning processes. And so I suspect that most of the experimental and theoretical work on individual learning, with or without brain scans, has limited relevance to this accumulated cognition, and hence limited relevance to economic growth. Or at least, so goes an alternative hunch. …
I cannot put this better than Hutchins (1995: 128–9):
The basic computations of navigation could be characterized at the computational, representational/algorithmic, and implementational levels entirely in terms of observable representations. On this view of cognitive systems, communication among the actors is seen as a process internal to the cognitive system. Computational media, such as diagrams and charts, are seen as representations internal to the system, and the computations carried out upon them are more processes internal to the system. Because the cognitive activity is distributed across a social network, many of these internal processes and internal communications are directly observable. If a cognitive psychologist could get inside a human mind, he or she would want to look at the nature of the representations of knowledge, the nature and kind of communication among processes, and the organization of the information- processing apparatus. We might imagine, in such a fantasy, that at some level of detail underlying processes (the mechanics of synaptic junctions, for instance) would still be obscured. But if we could directly examine the transformations of knowledge representations we might not care about the layers that remain invisible. Any cognitive psychologist would be happy enough to be able to look directly at the content of the cognitive system. With systems of socially distributed cognition we can step inside the cognitive system, and while some underlying processes (inside people’s heads) remain obscured, a great deal of the internal organization and operation of the system is directly observable. On this view, it might be possible to go quite far with a cognitive science that is neither mentalistic (remaining agnostic on the issue of representations “in the head”) nor behavioristic (remaining committed to the analysis of information processing and the transformation of representations “inside the cognitive system”)
Neuroscience does not “look directly at the content” of any information representation in any brain as concrete, observable, rich and obvious as a ship’s fix and projected bearing on a navigation chart, or a family’s current and projected asset position as represented in its own external financial accounts and plans. As near as I can make out, they haven’t yet agreed exactly where, or even how, the content of nouns like “ship” are physically represented in a brain (Martin and Caramazza 2003). Hutchins is, I think, still correct in spirit after 13 years: What is still a fantastic voyage for neuroscience has long been feasible for social scientists examining distributed cognition systems. We can now (with the right ethnographic skills) literally step into these and directly observe just about every theoretically central entity of rigorous Marrian cognitive science.
also good https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/world-war-2-could-learn-something