Superseded by machinery

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He was one of that large class of purely mechanical and perfectly mediocre persons connected with the practice of the law who will probably, in a more advanced state of science, be superseded by machinery.

Wilkie Collins – Man and Wife (1870)

The other day I received an email from our electricity and gas supplier asking me to submit a new meter reading. Of course the email was composed and sent by a computer. I duly read the meters, entered my readings online and the machine calculated our latest statement. Mine was probably the only human role and a subservient one at that. One day smart meters will get rid of my job too.

Early in the New Year I’ll receive another email from another machine reminding me that our credit card payment is due. I’ll pay our credit card bill via the online machine and another machine which is our bank. Nobody else involved here either.

Later I’ll probably visit Tesco and pay for some groceries using that same credit card. When I reach the checkout a Tesco machine will validate my credit card and issue a receipt allowing me to take the goods. If I buy a bottle of wine a machine will tell the Tesco checkout operator to confirm that I’m old enough. One day it will already know.

At some point I may take the car to the unmanned fuel station at Asda to buy some diesel from yet another machine. Some machines have permanent human minders, but that may change. Supermarkets alone give us some pretty strong clues about our future – machine minders.

Picture a solicitor behind a desk a few years into the future. On the desk is a computer and this is where the solicitor’s professional expertise really is. The solicitor consults the machine but it is the machine which really sorts out the legal work. The solicitor is merely its trained minder, its human face.

How about teaching, job interviews, accountancy, driving a car, lorry, taxi, bus or train? How about delivery drivers, journalism, supervision and even management? How about politics? In many ways David Cameron is a machine minder. He looks after that little cog in the global machine, the cog we used to call the United Kingdom.

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WWII: the war in the airwaves

(Pic source)

We watched "Ice Cold In Alex" yet again, a few days ago. A classic, and a dream for lager marketing men (Dad used to recall the instant headache he'd get stepping out into Egyptian sunlight after a few pints of Stella.)

But the war took many other forms.

70-odd years on, we're familiar with WW2 war room scenes of girls plotting plane movements and communicating with pilots in-flight. What's less well known is that elsewhere in Britain, some were speaking to enemy airmen...

"Starting in 1943, Aspidistra was used to disrupt German nightfighter operations against Allied bombers over Germany. German radar stations broadcast the movements of the bomber streams en route to targets during RAF Bomber Command's Battle of Berlin. As part of their strategies to misdirect the German fighters, German-speaking RAF operators impersonated these German ground control operators, sending fake instructions to the nightfighters. They directed the nightfighters to land or to move to the wrong sectors."

Here is a Youtube recording of a 1973 radio programme about the deception work of Sefton Delmer, who set up a number of radio stations broadcasting "psyops" man-in-the-middle transmissions, ostensibly by Germans, to the German military and public:




Besides Delmer's own revelations in the second volume of his autobiography, called "Black Boomerang," there are accounts by R V Jones and David Garnett.

As the drama-doc above says, Delmer had hoped to fake the Germans into a premature ceasefire in 1945 but was told that it would not be good if the latter could claim afterwards that they had been defeated by a trick. (There is some merit in the objection, since WWI diehards had claimed that Germany was defeated not militarily but because of domestic treachery. No need to set up another propaganda hostage to fortune.)

But ironically, Delmer's apparently unfinished early '70s memoir "Tail of a Tale" begins with his own sense of betrayal - by our US allies as the British Empire was undermined and dismantled:

"I would have laughed at anyone who told me in that hour of triumph that our governments, Socialist and Conservative, would be competing over the next twenty years as to which of them could do most to liquidate the Empire and betray the trust of the colonial peoples that looked to us for sound administration untrammelled by nepotism, tribalism or corruption. Or that on the one and only occasion when a British statesman stood up to defend a lifeline of the Empire, the United States government with a dumbfounding blindness to its own long term interests and disregard for the international rule of law would join the Soviet Union in supporting the aggression of the Egyptian Hitler, Gamal Abdel Nasser. (Not that this deterred the Americans from reproaching us with a lack of loyalty and vigour in supporting them in the areas east of Suez - our line of communication with which they so rashly helped to sever - when they themselves in their turn became embroiled in Vietnam and the Middle East with the same forces they had supported against us in their post-war anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist fervour)."

(Above-quoted extract found here.)

Funny how "right-wing" and "left-wing" don't seem adequate to cover the full spectrum of political opinion. We're not what we were, but nor, as Delmer says, are yesterday's anti-imperialists.

Today, when Saudi Arabia is funding terrorism while ostensibly opposing it, Turkey smuggling oil from IS while sheltering Syrian refugees, and Russia and now China stepping in to help Syria's government against what is under international law an illegal attempt by Western powers to overthrow it, the fog of disinformation is rising again.

I guess that's what Delmer meant by the boomerang.


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College education and the 1944 GI Bill

One of the first things I learned from reading Donleavy's "The Ginger Man" was that WW2 veterans were entitled (among other benefits) to a free college education and living expenses.

What a far-sighted investment that was! Wikipedia comments:

Historians and economists judge the G.I. Bill a major political and economic success—especially in contrast to the treatments of World War I veterans—and a major contribution to America's stock of human capital that sped long-term economic growth.

Even now, there are European countries where university education is free.

But it seems that in the USA and UK it's just another way for the financial system to load people up with debt - at an age when they should be starting to buy a house and form a family.

What went wrong?


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Drinking

I'm reading J P Donleavy's first - notorious - book, "The Ginger Man". I was intrigued years ago by his sparky titles ("The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B" etc) but never got around to opening one until now.

The back cover quotes Dorothy Parker: "... brilliant.. the picaresque novel to stop them all, lusty, violent, wildly funny." That should be a warning bell: DP would look back on her own disorderly days with rue, calling herself a "smartcracker".

The book, set in Dublin in the late 1940s, is not so much funny as horrifying. The protagonist is a raging sociopath called Sebastian Dangerfield, modelled on one Gainor Crist according to Ken O Donoghue (who himself is in part the model for Dangerfield's pal Kenneth O Keefe). Dangerfield chisels evryone for money, women are groomed and exploited with satanic skill and discarded ruthlessly, and forever there is drink.

O Donoghue, who also knew Brendan Behan, reflects:

I, at that time, still liked the pubs. So I would frequent them. But to avoid the poisonous drinking I would slowly consume a sandwich. If asked what I was having I'd always say, "A sandwich, please." Most wouldn't buy me one but now and then the odd one would. I never bought drinks in return for anyone. I would offer to return the compliment by offering the buyer a sandwich in return. But, as you may know in OZ, drinkers, especially those who are Irish or of Irish descent, care nothing for food while they are drinking. They then progress to the stage where they practically never eat, then into the box for good.

Today, like an old Puritan, I think Irish pubs are the most gloomy, uncomfortable, smoky, highly unpleasant places ever invented for the entertainment of man. Murderers of Irishmen I think of them now.

It was living on the continent that taught me drinking and eating go together. The Irish never drink while eating, except milk, or tea and sometimes even water. Drinking is something else; not to be contaminated by food. They go into the pub. Throw it back like crazy; go out with the poisonous alcohol in their blood eating away at their brain tissue, slowing down their reflexes, get into packed cars, career down the roads with the hope of killing themselves which many do. Or outside the pub get into a fight over some alcohol inflamed set of ideas. I've done it all and now wonder why I did.

Gainor Crist is dead, Paddy Kavanaugh, is dead. Brendan Behan is dead. Myles na gCopaleen is dead. John Ryan is dead. There are others. They committed suicide using the Irish pub as an instrument.

To me Donleavy's writing has echoes of James Joyce, but the spirit is reminiscent of Henry Miller: darkness, desperate dissolution.

Here in Britain the radio is advertising deals on canned cider with the sound of the ringpull pop and into the glass gurgle. The TV tells us where you can get litres of vodka for £15. And in Dublin, you can book a literary pub tour to follow in Flann O'Brien's footsteps.

Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies" refers to "the real aristocracy... the two or three great brewing families which rule London" (to tickle his friends Bryan and Diana Guinness); a Guinness descendant was 15th in the 2014 Irish rich list, thanks largely to a stake in the parent company Diageo.

Without drink, what would we do to celebrate? Is British culture that nihilistic?


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Walls

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they themselves have built, and most: men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful.

Word of his activities is carried over the walls. His name is shouted and is carried by the wind into the tiny inclosure in which other men live and in which they are for the most part absorbed in doing some petty task for the furtherance of their own comfort. Men and women stop their complaining about the unfairness and inequality of life and wonder about the man whose name they have heard.

Sherwood Anderson – Poor White (1920)

This was one of Anderson’s themes, our inability to scale the walls of misunderstanding we ourselves have built. He saw it as an ineradicable feature of human nature when faced with the flux of interests and social convention in which we find ourselves so firmly enmeshed. Powerful interests know it well and build more walls by fostering even more misunderstanding.

One might have supposed that Anderson’s view would become dated, that the walls would be at least partly demolished by modern communication, but it doesn’t appear to be so. If anything the situation is worse now that it was almost a century ago because we have more powerful forces intent on building walls designed to suit their interests.

As always the most pernicious walls are those between elite classes and everyone else. David Cameron builds such walls, building them with care from obfuscation, misdirection and endless petty dishonesties.

Rats and mazes come to mind, but who is the master builder?

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Energy and liberty

An excellent long-range thinkpiece by Nick at Capitalistsatwork, looking at the energy landscape in the wake of the closure of the UK's last deep coal mine.

I comment:

Bang on. It's very worrying. England's population was only 7.1 million in the early 18th C; for GDP-expanding reasons, we seem to have a policy of suicidal population overshoot. If ever the wonderful world-wide goods trading system hiccups we're sunk into the most terrible chaos - WW2 ended just in time for us, as our soil was getting exhausted ("losing heart" was the phrase used, I understand) - and that was with a population considerably smaller than now, and much more growing land.

And I've been thinking recently that our quasi-democracy and civil rights are luxury by-products of the new energy sources and technological development and empire-building of the Industrial Revolution, else we might easily have gone the way of the French Terror. Funny how we suddenly stopped burning women at the stake in 1789.

We've had Illich's "energy slaves" for two or three centuries and that's going to change. US/Mexican billlonaire Hugo Salinas Price reckons we'll see the return of domestic service. And maybe the servants will lose the franchise.

Follow-up: Google "Olduvai Theory."


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Elite scientists

Sackerson sent this interesting link about elite scientists and their tendency to retard the evolution of new ideas until they peg out.

Max Planck — the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who pioneered quantum theory — once said the following about scientific progress:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,     but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Shorter: Science is not immune to interpersonal bullshit. Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die.

The piece goes on to demonstrate the validity of this claim via patterns in published work. It comes as no surprise of course. Scientists are human; they have families to support, mortgages to pay, status to earn and maintain.

To explain what is going on here we could adapt an idea from Wittgenstein – the distinction between symptoms and criteria. Acolytes may present the opinion of Celebrity Scientist as a criterion of valid science. Celebrity Scientist says X, therefore X must be scientifically valid. Celebrity Scientist has become a criterion of sound scientific opinion.

In reality Celebrity Scientist's opinion may not be a criterion of sound science at all. It may have been once upon a time, but perhaps other possibilities are emerging within Celebrity Scientist's field. Celebrity Scientist's opinion may have become a symptom of hierarchy, personal vanity and the inability to accept new thinking.

Confusing symptoms with criteria is very common. For example, is an Ofsted report a criterion of educational excellence or a symptom of educational malaise? Both perhaps. Symptoms and criteria are often mingled.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is another example. Widely known to be a misleading metric, GDP could be seen as a symptom of political mendacity rather than a criterion of economic health.

GDP purports to measure economic activity while largely divorcing itself from the quality, profitability, depth, breadth, improvement, advancement, and rationalization of goods and services provided.

UK general elections seem to have have become a symptom of democratic decline rather than a criterion of healthy democratic government. Which is why useful reform is unlikely.

One could go on and on because elites often confuse symptoms with criteria. Even elite scientists may find it useful once perched atop the greasy pole.

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