Torture: the podcast
You may recall I recently extracted this article on an old-school reunion between a Guantanomo prisoner and his torturer. This is a podcast interview with the journalist who brought it about and it brings out much more suggesting that the guy was completely innocent. Like two lie detector tests and lots of circumstantial evidence.
Oh — and I wonder if we’ll manage to extract our boy, Julian Assange, from the maw of this system.
What a difference three years can make
The disappearing long tail
Remember Chris Anderson’s book of the article The Long Tail — about that huge ‘back catalogue’ that the internet made it possible to service. The book was a bestseller. Sense an irony? The book wasn’t part of the long tail — it was the usual bit of mass production. Now the technology certainly exists to lengthen the tail, but more money can be made at the mass production end — which in culture is the mass meme end. And that’s where the market’s gone.
The bottom line is that the blockbuster hit didn’t die. It didn’t die in movies. It didn’t die in books. It didn’t die in music. The contrary happened. It was the counterculture that got squeezed and marginalized. And if you’re looking for the final irony, check out both the front cover and back cover of The Long Tail book, where the first thing the publisher announces is that the book is a BESTSELLER! If they really believed that the blockbuster hit was dead and small niches are the future, they would have made a different claim—something along the lines of: buy the book everyone else is afraid to read. Because that’s what a flourishing underground culture actually says to the mainstream public. But even the people behind the Long Tail book want to operate on the short end of the distribution curve.
Meanwhile relentless optimisation for the market produces this:
Taking on an icon
Maybe the mighty can be taken on?
To understand the scale and reach of Disney’s power in Florida, one only need look at the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the governing jurisdiction for the land on which Disney World is located. The district, created in 1967 by a special act of the Florida legislature, gave Disney World the power to operate like a county government. There, Disney World functions as its own mini-country in the state of Florida. Disney World has the authority to claim eminent domain and even build a nuclear power plant (pending federal approval); it also operates its own public utilities and has its own fire department.
DeSantis’ tussle with Disney World was a genuinely shocking moment. For one thing, it proved that the governor was not a PR-construct doing an impression of Donald Trump. In April of 2022, DeSantis made his move and signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District; it goes into effect June 2023.
Working from home could have been the reset we needed
Rory Sutherland is a funny, intelligent and generous man. He also quotes an article of mine in this piece, so what’s there not to like?
If working hours and locations are non-negotiable, and salaries are secret, capital holds all the cards when negotiating with labour. The lone outlier is executive pay, which spiralled upwards when board salaries were made public, since by knowing the pay of their opposite numbers, CEOs bizarrely enjoyed bargaining power through comparisons that ordinary workers lacked.
Now that flexible work has also become publicly known, it has suddenly become a bargaining chip for employees. Comparison with the flexibility enjoyed by contemporaries working in tech recently led to mass employee activism at Goldman Sachs.
You can’t turn back the clock. (As the old song puts it: ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’) What you can do is find new, inventive forms of remuneration and recognition. If you have motivated staff whom you trust, this is not a trade-off, but a mutual win.
A classic
From the Department of D’Oh!
Energy Sanctions Are Hurting Europe More than Russia
Russia’s oil revenues have actually risen. This is mainly due to the rising price of oil, which has more than offset lower export volumes. In addition, Russia has easily found alternative buyers for its energy – notably India and China. So not only are sanctions hurting Europe, they’re actually helping the West’s main geopolitical rival – which gets a discount on each barrel of oil it imports.
In an interview back in May, EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen explained precisely how energy sanctions could end up backfiring. If we “immediately” cut off the oil, she said, Putin “would be able to take the oil that he does not sell to the European Union to the world market, where the prices will increase, and sell it for more”. Strangely, Von Der Leyen seems to have ignored her own advice.
And if you thought that was ironic, India has been importing crude oil from Russia, refining it, and then re-exporting it to Europe at a profit. Which means Europe is still ‘funding Putin war’s machine’ – only now it’s paying a fee for the privilege of doing so.
Is there deep faking after death?
Amazon senior vice president Rohit Prasad announced at a conference in Las Vegas that the company plans to roll out a new Alexa feature enabling the voice assistant to imitate a dead loved one’s voice using only one minute of prerecorded audio. The reason for this latest excursion deep into the uncanny valley? To "make the memories last" since "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic, said Prasad.
Should you move to Austin? Hint: probably not
There’s a lot of excitement about Austin Texas. I didn’t get all the way through this overly long piece, but I did like this passage
Cultural and technological leaps happen when wealthy people (who often don’t have ideas) meet ambitious creatives on the intellectual frontier (who have lots of ideas).
Indeed. We could do with more of it. In my experience wealthy people want to somehow make it about them, and they’d be better off backing someone they thought might get somewhere in the thinking business.
Behind the Teal reset
The former Labor adviser who helped catapult three Sydney independents into parliament has warned the Liberal Party there are “many other seats” where his playbook for success could be replicated if the Coalition doesn’t respond sufficiently on climate change.
Anthony Reed assisted Steggall’s re-election campaign in Warringah and handled digital advertising for teal independent Monique Ryan in Josh Frydenberg’s former seat of Kooyong. He did not fear Abbott’s attacks about voting for Steggall and getting Bill Shorten. What he really feared was that a contrite Abbott would apologise for his mistakes and rectify them.
The Liberals seemed not to have learnt that lesson, Reed said on Sunday. Senior moderate Liberal Simon Birmingham also alluded to that on the ABC’s Insiders, saying Abbott’s defeat should have been a canary in the coal mine for the Liberal Party. “We should have acknowledged that had broader implications than just related to Tony,” he said. “Now we’re paying the price for that.”
People listen to, and are persuaded by argument: SHOCK!!
This is old news, but interesting. And I didn’t know of it so you might not either. (HT: Rachel Krust.)
Like everyone interested in politics, we’d seen a lot of town hall meetings, and noticed that they tend to either break down in shouting, or be so stage-managed they never really generate a real conversation. Our suspicion was that much of the dysfunction stemmed from the events themselves, which tend to draw from very strong partisans on both sides. So we set out to study whether a differently structured meeting might have different results. With a random sample of the public and neutral moderators, could members of Congress actually persuade citizens to change their opinions on hot policy issues through substantive discussion? We also wondered whether the politicians could win over their constituents on a personal level, even earn their votes.
Judging by the town-hall shouting matches that one sees on TV, you might expect that our events would just recycle the same incivility and partisan red-meat. What we found, however, was entirely different.
The discussions were remarkably civil and substantive. We surveyed the constituents and the members before and after the events, and found that members of Congress actually had persuaded their constituents about the merits of their views on the policy issues. They also rated their members as much more trustworthy, qualified and accessible. Even months later, the participants were about 10 percent more likely to vote for their member. Remarkably, the members were persuasive not only to people from their own party, but to those from the opposing party as well.