At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

https://www.wsj.com/articles/salad-chain-that-thought-it-was-a-tech-firm-looks-wilted-f2696360?st=1lko4n6ldd4sgjv

One thing I wanted Lanchester to explain was a line around VCs. I quite like him to give 6/10 explainers on that and private equity.

quick update

Chip War the book is very clear and well-organised btw. It may have been worth reading even if it poorly written - the technology is central to our epoch, and the geopolitical consequences significant and of the moment - but it's well handled and informative, and yes, covers semi-conductor technology etc as part of the history of the technology etc.

i don't think he's a particular favourite of ilx, but ezra klein's podcast is occasionally worth listening to, and his recent interview with the author covers the main topics at play.

more importantly, i wanted to pick up on mark's post about haptics and related matters. it's something that's been nagging away at me for a long while - in fact i was several times on the verge of starting a thread, called something like Soyface Wojak in the Stavanger Cloudweb: The Aesthetics of Computing as a catch all for this sort of thing from memetics to the material layer. but the haptics post reminded me of it, as have some recent issues at work.

Roughly the problem as i see it, or rather the set of related problems, is the separation between the tactile and material layer of computing (plastics, wires, screens) and our experience of using computers (representations of information extremely abstracted from the physical layer) mean it's very difficult for one to inform the other in the way that metaphor has traditionally allowed. that is to say we have always clothed our feelings and thoughts in the cloth of nature or that experienced in our ambulatory and perceptual life - it's the thorn, the crack in the teacup.

this can be seen in a number of ways, for example the use of the word 'cloud' to represent what are in fact huge data centres kept freezing cold, in icy landscapes or embedded in a former nuclear bunker at the base of a granite cliffed stavanger fjord, cooled by the icy waves. or to take another example, me having to do a powerpoint presentation on the application of machine learning to my particular area of work, and asking a technology colleague whether he had any visual representations of the technology at work - no, but some command line stuff running gave the right 'vibe'.

'early' representations, like William Gibson's Cyberpunk, or the Matrix dripping digits, are in some ways the best, when the abstracted layers were more visible, more tangible (just think of the sound of a modem) but are of course incredibly cliched and outdated now. it amused me to read lines in The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966 and think of how small a jump it was to the world of the Matrix (in itself, like Gibson, based on phone lines but digital):

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

the hieroglyphic streets is perhaps right, like Calvino's Invisible Cities, architectural and social embodiments of algorithmic outcomes.

still, the point remains, the quality of aesthetic representation of modern computing seems thin and undernourished (please furnish me with counterexamples!).

ofc metaphorical schema (that is to say internally consistent - roses and lilies are always x and y) for abstract concepts have existed, but utlimately the appropriateness of their use for abstract concepts seems to me to relate to the fact that both abstract experience and 'natural' clothing both stem from God/creative being/s, or Nature or whatever points of motive authority you wish.

that layer - material and abstract - is somewhat separate, because abstracted, from the objects computing allows us to present and proliferate ie the aesthetics on and and presented on the internet (but not elsewhere). representations of things going wrong with the system, glitches, or grotesque collapses of aesthetics shown by many memes seem of particular interest, partly because they go against the grain of computing making it easier to do easier to do things you want - so do things that are ugly, or aesthetically worthless, or grotesque - and partly because they surface broken mechanics several layers down from what a common user will see.

On haptics...

at work, the transition from hardware and serial interfaces to IP workflows, software defined channels, metadata driven automation, and 'control surfaces' for human operators leads to a difficulty for those operations. when something goes wrong it's hard to understand where it's gone wrong. that's usually because control surfaces are driven by metadata that assumes the successful processing of the orchestration or workflow. if it goes wrong, the metadata won't always be available to be represented to the user what's gone wrong. put another way, problems like this can't be resolved by the person operating the tools, but by a software engineer. there is something of the 'haptic' even if it's not quite touch, it's that the information in the system was near enough the surface to enable an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

perhaps this is only another way of saying that in a software world, your operations are more likely to be DevOps environments (doing the building and support of the tools with traditional operations increasingly automated) - this is after all a transition period. but the drama being played out is a submerging of the mechanics of the world into a space difficult to be rendered via useful metaphor, and difficult to comprehend and understand so that we may adapt it.

these all seem interrelated, so some order is needed, some layers, and maybe the OSI model in itself isn't a bad place to start for examining the problem.

• metaphorical layer ('cloud', 'web' - the control layer if you like - how we represent the *processes* of computing and information flow, the data available to do so)
• material layers (cold data centres, mountains of chips and electronic waste in slums in Guiyu and Agbogbloshie, mining of precious metals) - how does the material layer inform the metaphorical and representative landscape
• representation (how we render the world of superprocessing, data and information flowsto make it *aesthetically* tangible) and loop back to the metaphorical layer

anyway, apologies for the digression, it just seemed an opportunity to get some of this down on a rainy bank holiday.

I love it :)

v low indeed even on the scale of things that are currently consequential but this (excerpted from twitter so the refuseniks can also enjoy):

Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth: John Lanchester don’t get really basic quantitative ideas hopelessly wrong challenge
[context: lanchester has written abt SBF-FTX in the LRB; @maxrothbarth is actually economically and financially literate and works in the fraud-reporting field]
Jay Owens @hautepop; Write us a pithy letter?
[context: as @hautepop was a Good Thing back in the blogging era; she is the new and evidently activist "readers' editor" at LRB, which I think is also quite likely a Good Thing]
Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth: If you look back through the archive you’ll see that of the three letters I’ve so far had published, two of them are variations on the theme “John Lanchester is wrong”, and I don’t want to come over as obsessive

!!

ps I vented a while ago to my sister abt how bad WHOOPS was and she said "look i read it and learned a lot from it, yr standards are too high bcz you already know too much" -- well this is not the worst put-down i have ever taken (and rivers/rothbarth knows way more than me; like actually what he is talking abt for example) but feedback noted for balance like

lol, i still retain a mild neutrality towards Whoops, based on knowing less then than i do now (but then i guess that is in part due to Whoops), and being a lot less tolerant of the 'lanchester summarises' mode and manner these days.

ble an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

Of course you could say, "Everybody is an operator," but---

Already, the day felt long. When he looked back at his screen, it was 14:27. He wished, now, that he had gone out at lunchtime and walked as far as the canal. He could have sat on one of the benches there for a while and watched the swans and the cygnets gobbling up the crusts and other bits and pieces people threw down for them on the water. Not meaning to, he closed the budget-distribution file he’d been working on without saving it. A flash of something not unlike contempt charged through him then, and he got up and walked down the corridor to the men’s room, where there was no one, and pushed into a stall. For a while he sat looking at the back of the door, on which nothing was written or scrawled. When he felt a bit steadier, he went to the basin and splashed water on his face, and slowly dried his face and hands on the paper towel that fed, automatically, from the dispenser.

On the way back to his desk, he stopped for a coffee, pressed the Americano option on the machine, and waited for it to spill down into the cup.

I was going to defend that until I got to "budget-distribution file"

I'd be interested to know what you felt was defensible up until that point. I feel the whole thing is turgid inanity.

"crusts and other bits and pieces" although innocuous looking, for long time lanchester heads, indicates the open-ended material leakage of his prose... what other bits and pieces? not crusts? the crumb too? or.... specifically bought bird food As We're Told... bits and pieces sounds like people are ransacking their sheds.

i'm with plax here, i think, you might defend the first sentences as a fusion of style and content, but it toils so.

budget-distribution file is pure chef kiss of course. absolute a-grade, inject-it-into-my-veins lanchester.

i'm actually going to allow something here. 'where there was no-one' + 'on which nothing was written' ('or scrawled' lol) and the automatic towel dispenser + the Americano option on the machine, feels like he may be trying to do something. but who knows, he walks round like a sims character.

in fusion of style and content news: "already, the day felt long" <-- already the sentence felt long (yes it's that comma)

yes, it's remarkable how tired you feel just a few words in.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2013/QwrC28.gif

yes, you get three words in and lean back in your easy chair and think 'christ is it time for a drink yet. no i see it's only 9:10am'

It was the twin 'where there was no one' and 'on which nothing was scrawled' that finally made me throw up my hands.

i did wonder if he was going for a bit of poetic balance there ('empty' is probably a better phrase for the toilet).

but now i'm laughing at ever going into the 'men's room' (? oddly american turn of phrase?) and thinking 'there is no one'.

i feel i should point out i was drunk when i first read this

Sorry, the bit I posted is not written by the man himself, I just felt it was absolute textbook Lanchester. The towel dispenser is the low point for me.

I also hate the comma after already.

it’s an extremely enjoyable paragraph. as so often with JL it contains multitudes. i found myself on the somewhat catechistic train of thought, hopelessly banal: “JL is a very bad writer. In the same way that some are very good writers, he is very bad at it. He cannot do it. Even where he thinks he is doing something (and i think he must think this) it does not then pass the test of *why* he thinks this is something he should do. *Why*.”

And you end up going round again, like Michael Finnegan… “Because he is a very bad writer.” etc

You can compound it with questions like “*why* do they let him? *Why* do they pay for him to do it? Does he think he is in some way good? When he’s finished a work, does he feel, like Nabokov, satisfied as if he had laid an egg? *What* do people say after they’ve read something by him? Do they feel their store of imaginative exploration has in some way been replenished? *Why*

You are aware that it’s a form of mediocrity so intense that it is worse than the merely very bad.

There is something Widmerpool like about it all (from Dance to the Music of Time). The stolid successful progression of lack of talent. It perhaps is related inversely to the same energies and demons that occasionally take great talents from us early.

xpost oh.

who is this epigone.

it is very characteristic.

has he taken on a disciple?

brought them into his workshop of dreams?

I just looked it up on my laptop via the internet search engine and discovered it to be Claire K33gan.

I am being mean but the top quote from CK says 'I can't explain my work. I just write stories'.

“I can't explain my work. I just sit down at my study desk, switch on my laptop, open up the word processing programme that the laptop came with and write stories“

<3

it’s interesting to consider why they’re v similar. one aspect of manchester’s prose is the sense that he’s imagining himself walking or going through the process as it happens, so that his sentences and the thought of his prose is also organised in this way. the sentences sort of discover what’s happening at the same time the writer and relevant character does.

the same things going on here. they are a mere stenographer for the minimal levels of empathetic imagination going on. there’s no sense of organisation or art to it.

i’ve never read any keegan, so this may be unfair - after all deploying a style like that in a v limited way within a wider context may have some meaning or purpose. rather than just being how you write.

xpost

lol mark s.