Month: April 2015

The Aargauer Zeitung reports on foreign spies being trained in Switzerland.

Wavecom advertises its products in the USA as a “COMINT solution” for military intelligence services, telecoms authorities and other government agencies…

I do not learn where the customers come from. Wavecom has, though, put a list of its branches on the internet. Besides countries such as the USA, Germany and France, the company also advertises its business in totalitarian states like Russia, China and Vietnam.

Do you dream of architecture?

Thomas de Quincey did, although he blamed it on dope. The original English Opium Eater, de Quincey found his drug-induced dreams were of elaborate buildings:

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye unless in the clouds.

de Quincey then makes an extraordinary leap, linking his fantasies to the only artwork that adequately described them. Extraordinary, because he

hadn’t even seen

the pictures in question:

Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by [Piranesi], called his Dreams [actually,

Carceri d’Invenzione

, “

Imaginary Prisons

“] and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever

The sensation which de Quincey imagined in Piranesi was one of “endless growth and self-reproduction”, buildings growing to giddy heights, full of immense machinery and with a menacing air of entrapment.

In describing Piranesi, de Quincey was bang on the money. The Imaginary Prisons are something like a gothic-industrial Escher

avant la lettre

.

The visions are, as de Quincey suggests, something from an intense dreamscape. Not benign, but not quite nighmarish. There’s even a faint echo of this architectural reverie in the work of Coleridge, de Quincey’s counterpart in drugs as in art appreciation.

Kubla Khan

, the most famous product of his opium-induced dreams, operates mostly in a mode of pastoral mysticism. But even here there are occasional irruptions of architecture — the

pleasure-dome

, the

walls and towers

enclosing its twice five miles of gardens.

What’s more, Coleridge makes explicit something implied by Piranesi and de Quincey. These buildings have not been, could not be, built by humans. Only nature and gods operate on these rules of unstoppable, incomprehensible self-replication. To build the pleasure-dome, Coleridge’s dreamer must transcend humanity, become a god who inspires in others the dread which de Quincey found in Piranesi:

I would build that dome in air, 
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! 
And all who heard should see them there, 
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! 
His flashing eyes! His floating hair! 
Weave a circle round him thrice, 
And close your eyes with holy dread, 
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Coleridge, de Quincey, Piranesi: all are approaching some kind of architectural analog to the Uncanny Valley. Buildings in themselves are not frightening, nor is nature. But buildings behaving as nature —

that

is a source of ecstatic, hallucinatory horror.

Piranesi’s work all but transposes Kafka into architectural fantasy. “Imaginary Prisons” are by their nature part Metamorphosis, part Castle. They turn civilisation into cancer — rudderless, irrational, merciless and self-perpetuating. And, as with Kafka, reality echoes fantasy well enough to give it extra propulsion.

Aldous Huxley managed to pin down some of that beautiful, bureaucratic horror, in terms that could almost come from a back-to-nature critique of industrial civilisation:

The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons is the

perfect pointlessness

which reigns throughout. Their architecture is

colossal and magnificent

…. on the floor stand

great machines incapable of doing anything

in particular, and from the arches overhead hang ropes that carry nothing except a sickening suggestion of torture. Some of the Prisons are lighted only by narrow windows. Others are half open to the sky, with hints of yet other vaults and walls in the distance. But even where the enclosure is more or less complete, Piranesi always contrives to give the impression that this colossal pointlessness goes on indefinitely, and is

co-extensive with the universe

.

Piranesi is now somewhat less striking now than he must have been two hundred years ago. He was working one hundred years before Kafka, two hundred before Escher, developing a style that somehow anticipates not just the artistic but also the economic currents that would come generations after his death. And yet his prisons seem as though they could appear in my dreams, just as easily in the dreams that once touched de Quincey.

Maid in London is a blog by a cleaner in a London hotel, about work conditions and her efforts to form a union. It’s excellent, if depressing, reading.

A recent study by a major UK union found that out of 100 housekeepers they surveyed, 84 said they used painkillers every day before coming to work.

Nipping downstairs to the locker room, I realise why so much of the linen is marked or lacking altogether. There’s one guy on the laundry chute. One guy dealing with what a former Linen Porter told me is about four tons of laundry hurtling down a single metal chute from five floors into a massive pile every day. He wears a dust mask.

There used to be two porters on the job, but now there’s just one. The guy struggling with it all is from Romania. His eyes are spritely behind his white mask. He must be about 21. We smile and say hi to each other.

Via Daniel Davies, a side-effect of the UK housing crisis I hadn’t thought of: it’s screwing small business startups.

Business loans in the UK have, apparently, tended to be secured by re-mortgaging the founders house. That kluge has worked moderately well — entrepreneurs have typically been white men in the forties, often with professional experience. These are people who, in the past, have been likely to have bought their own house and largely paid down the mortgage.

Not any more. Even the professional classes can no longer afford their own homes, at least in London and the South-East. So there is no equity to secure a business loan. So businesses which require capital just don’t get started…

And if you have a generation of businesspeople who don’t own houses, and who therefore can’t be fit into the historic template of British small business lending, then you’ve got the impetus for a total reinvention of small business finance in the UK. The banks which realise this first will do best, and if the incumbents don’t then entrants will. Arguments of the form “this problem has to be made worse to heighten the contradictions so that real change will come” always sound a bit Leninist, and have a pretty bad track record as either predictions or policy advice. But in this case, all of the contradictions have already been heightened, as the result of other policy choices made which had very little to do with industrial policy at all. Nobody has really given much serious priority to the need to re-engineer business finance in the UK, but we’ve now reached a point at which the old way of doing things is no longer possible.

My friend Sasha spent the last month guest-blogging at the F-word. It’s all worth reading (although inconveniently not all linked in one place). I particularly like her defence of using the word

pretty

:

When I describe someone or something as pretty – particularly when it’s not someone young and female, which is mostly the case – it feels in some way like a fuck you, a reclamation and repurposing of a word that has dogged me and my gender my whole life….

It feels like some small attempt to redress the balance, to reinvent ‘pretty’ as a universally applicable term of approbation, to bring feminisation into aspiration instead of disparagement. I like its slightly offhand, flippant tone, which completely fails to disguise how heartfelt it really is….

I would also rather live in a world where feminisation and aestheticism wasn’t used to reduce or control or belittle, and reclaiming ‘pretty’ is my (inadequate and imperfect) attempt to build that world.

Profile of Russian hacker group “Humpty Dumpty”. It starts out looking like an idealistic hacktivist network, the “Anonymous International”.

Shaltai’s stated mission is “to change the world for the better, helping to bring greater freedom and social awareness.”

One of the group’s members even quoted the 2009 film Watchmen, saying, “We don’t do this thing because it’s permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we’re compelled. Once a man has seen society’s black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it.”

But in the end, hacktivism turns out to be a publicity-grabbing loss-leader to drum up paid hacking work:

Shaltai Boltai, if Lewis is to be believed, is only a “side project.” The group’s main work is getting hired to dig up information about private and public individuals. The whole company consists of a dozen people.

…

We’re hired by private individuals and groups within the state, and we never work with anyone tied to the drug trade. But we maintain that we’re an independent team. It’s just that it’s often impossible to tell who our clients are. Sometimes we hand over information to intermediaries, without ever knowing the client.

Once upon a time, fairy tales were unspeakably brutal. The Brothers Grimm often take the flak for this, but undeservedly. They didn’t create the aura of homicide and senseless injustice, merely absorbed it from the existing oral traditions. Other European folklore collectors got much the same vibe, as did those from further afield. For much of human history, the stories we told to kids were downright

nasty

.

Today’s children’s literature is, relatively speaking, all sweetness and light. So what changed?

Perhaps it’s about changing attitudes to childhood. Start off with a Romantic idea of the innocence and grace of children. This one was already well underway in the early eighteenth century, and is in the background of some early criticism of Grimms Tales as corrupting. This strand of ideology turns into the Victorian desire to shelter children from the evils of the wider world — a rare chunk of ideology from that time which has only grown stronger in the intervening years.

Or you can take the approach that popular fiction is psychology writ large. Stories, like other forms of play, are about making sense of the world, and particularly learning to deal with its dangers. They may not directly depict the experience of their audience, but some emotional or thematic parallel exists.

The most direct, extreme case is in the games played by children in concentration camps. These might involve imitating guards, or learning deception:

One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp’s daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing — for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone’s escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

Grimms’ tales make sense in a world of high infant mortality, frequent violence and untamed nature. With childhood becoming safer, the classic fairy tales seem increasingly alien.

It’s interesting to look in this light at the dystopian trend in modern children’s books, with the Hunger Games trilogy as standard-bearers. The danger here is state and society. Survival comes less from honour and courage than from building alliances and navigating structures of power. All of which, I’d say, is a pretty decent approximation to the state of the world today.

Alex Harowell has an interesting post about the economics of unemployment at AFOE.

In a strong economy, career paths tend to stay within a specialism, developing increasing experience and skill, and hence steadily increasing productivity. Or if somebody switches careers, it’s more a case of

reculer pour mieux sauter

, taking a temporary setback to end up somewhere more productive.

That doesn’t work in a recession. People who lose their jobs in bad circumstances are more willing to accept a new one, even with much worse pay and prospects.

In the long term, this is often a Bad Thing, both for them and the economy. They get onto a different career path, one coming more from desperation than choice, and will find it hard to switch back:

The unemployed are suddenly driven off their optimal productivity path, and are usually under pressure to take any job that comes along, no matter how suboptimal. Until they get back to where they were before the crisis, on their new paths or on their old ones, the economy will forego the difference between their potential and actual production.

The long-term cost of this depends on how desperate the unemployed are to take just any job that comes along. It’s better for the economy if they stay unemployed for a while before returning to a high-productivity career, rather than getting locked long-term into something less productive.

i.e. it all depends how society treats the unemployed. If you cut benefits, treat the unemployed like shit, and hussle them into whatever job is available (UK), you set the country up for long-term under-productivity:

If the unemployed sit it out and look for something better, you would expect a jobless recovery and then a productivity boom – like the US in the 1990s. If the unemployed take the first job-like position that comes along, you would expect a jobs miracle with terrible productivity growth, flat to falling wages, and a long period of foregone GDP growth. Like the UK in the 2010s. And if your labour market institutions are designed to prevent the information destruction in the first place, with a fallback to Keynesian reflation if that doesn’t cut it? Well, that sounds like Germany in the 2010s.

* lets ignore the fact that people may choose lower-paid (i.e. less productive) work for non-monetary reasons. Everything else works out much the same

Shortly after discovering Black Mirror, I discovered this discussion of it, on a comedy forum. Here are some of their proposed storylines for the next series:

It turns out that internet trolls are just aliens trying to make first contact.

As a direct consequence of this unfortunate cultural misunderstanding, Earth’s connection to the galactic internet is severely throttled during peak times.

Glitter and Huntley roam freely, sexing children in the open, but getting away with it because they’re passing their penises through the re-animated corpse of Jimmy Saville, using him as a “VPN tunnel” and thus escaping prosecution

THE WESTMINSTER BUBBLE

Britain is ruled by a giant bubble at Westminster. When everyone rebels it floats up above the country and fires on the masses with its DeathStar-style laser guns.

An independent analysis of LHC data suggests that the Higgs boson committed a string of sexual assaults in the 1970s, and high-ranking officials at CERN were aware of it.