Category Archives: Blog

General thoughts on life, the universe and everything. Stuff that doesn’t fit in the other categories!

Blog

How to be a Liberal

You can’t say that it lacks ambition. Ian Dunt’s “How to be a Liberal“:

tells the forgotten story of the advance of liberalism and the events which led to its current retreat.

And, by and large, it succeeds. I’m not qualified to say how complete it is — he may have missed out half of the story for all I know — but from Descartes to Mills, to Keynes, Orwell, Trump and Brexit, the history is here, right up to events of 2020. It’s well researched and mostly easy to read1. Having heard the author on various podcasts, I might have expected more swearing.

From a personal point of view, I think it clarifies a lot of my thinking and opinions, putting a name and a structure around things that I’ve likely believed for a long time but had never known the correct label.

In the UK, “liberal” is often understood to be directionless, wishy-washy, neither Labour nor Conservative. I never thought I was without principle. Being in favour of private enterprise doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be limits. A belief in personal responsibility doesn’t mean that I think people should end up destitute for mistakes or bad luck.

I never thought I was without principle, but perhaps I lacked the vocabulary to easily explain where I was coming from. With its discussion of the “harm principle,” the English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, Keynes and Hayek, I now have a better handle on that framework.

It also ends on a positive note. I don’t know about you, but I needed that.

  1. A few typos and dodgy sentences made it into print. Not enough to spoil the book but enough to be noticeable. ↩︎
Blog

Come Again

I learned about this book on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP!). One of my favourite nineties comedy performers interviewing one of my favourite two-thousands comedy performers. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not entirely impartial; I was predisposed to like “Come Again.”

Webb’s first book was a kind of a memoir. This is a novel. I’m pretty much the perfect demographic. The lead character went to an English university in the early nineties to study Computer Science. Even though it was a different university, so much was familiar.

Is it well written and researched or just lazy nostalgia?

I think that’s the question for the book as a whole. It’s a quick, unchallenging read. The writing is functional and it’s structured to included a few nice twists and the odd end-of-chapter cliff hanger.

The three sections are quite different in tone. The first and second work well but the third, while entertaining, doesn’t quite seem to fit.

So clearly I’m not going to describe this as “must read.” It’s a fun read and maybe that’s all it needs to be.

Blog

Sex Power Money

This book isn’t what I was expecting. I know Sara Pascoe’s standup and thought this might be some fun, light reading.

To be fair, the writing does have fun bits but the subject matter? Not so much. Relationships, power dynamics, tesosterone, prostitution. Heavy stuff! She’s clearly done reseach and quotes interviews1 she’s conducted. This is no “memoir” as many comedians have done. But nor is it an academic treatise. There are still personal bits, as she discusses the struggles she had grappling with some of the more challenging concepts or how her opinions had changed over time. It’s a refreshing approach as most authors push the solution rather that the journey to it. Sometimes the route is more interesting than the destination.

Overall it’s thought-provoking stuff and worth a read for that reason alone. You may not agree with all of it but you might have the odd snigger reaching that conclusion.

  1. She has a podcast series with some of them. ↩︎
Blog

The Value of Everything

Economics is one of those subjects that I’ve only ever seen from the sidelines. When I was at school, I remember seeing friends drawing simple demand curve graphs. It looked pretty straightforward, though, of course, anything you don’t understand very well often does.

Over the years, “life” touches on the concepts fairly often. Whether it’s what’s going on at work or things the government is doing (or not doing), you can’t get far without hearing the word.

Probably what I need is an “introduction to economics” book. Instead, I read Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything,” which talks about the concept of “value” which isn’t quite the same thing but was fascinating nevertheless.

For example, reading about forecasts and GDP1, you often see hints, or explicit mention, that government is “unproductive.” Certainly, the idea that private enterprise is more efficient than the government is thoroughly entrenched. What I hadn’t really considered was how “value” and GDP is defined. And, it turns out, that what the government does is by definition unproductive.

This is a narrow definition of “productive” that then makes its way out into society by people who don’t know that it’s an economics term. Much as the word “theory” is used to discredit “the theory of evolution” by people who think “theory” just means a hunch or guess.

Having defined value, Mazzucato moves on to discuss the implications, from the contribution to GDP that banking, pharmaceutical and technology companies make to the effectiveness of government spending and austerity.

It’s not the most exciting of subjects, I grant you, and it’s written fairly flat and academically, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. A few times I found myself disagreeing, or thinking a statement was overly generalised, only to find that she covered that in a subsequent section. This was a little frustrating on one hand but on the other kept me reading to the end.

Overall, it’s easy to recommend if you’re conflicted on the role of government and big business. As ever, there are no easy answers but it clarified a few things and made me think and about others.

  1. Yeah, maybe I should get out more. ↩︎
Blog

The backlash

The backlash has begun. Four months ago, everywhere was proclaiming that working from home was both the New Hotness and Here to Stay. In the last few weeks, those same venues have switched gears, documenting how people can’t wait to go back to the office. What changed?

Nothing. Simply the novelty wore off.

I get it. The last time I had a work-from-home job I didn’t really enjoy it. It was a decade ago and the technology wasn’t quite there. No Slack, an emphasis on phone calls rather than video-chats and much weaker collaboration tools like wikis. I was also one of only a few people working remotely. But, perhaps most significantly, I was at a different stage of my life.

If the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had hit back then, how would I have coped? It’s impossible to say for sure, of course, but less well I think.

And if you go back much before that and I wouldn’t have been able to work at all. I remember a teacher friend grumbling that she took work home but I didn’t. Couldn’t would have been more accurate: I didn’t have a £250,000 computer at home! A lot of business don’t even have machines like that any more.

Ultimately, people are learning that working remotely is a skill. If you just plonk people in disparate places and hope for the best, you’re probably going to fail over the medium term. Those unplanned meetings in corridors really won’t happen. As suspected, people won’t schedule a thirty-minute meeting to discuss… well, who knows what… the whole point is the serendipity. If these things are important — and I think they are — then you can’t just say “That doesn’t work remotely,” give up and insist everyone return to the office. That’s a total abdication of leadership!

The meeting won’t happen in exactly the same way, but you can encourage public conversations in Slack or Teams. You can have “happy hours” when the team can dial in for chit-chat.

I’m sure you have your own ideas. The point is that collaboration can and does happen remotely. Sure, there are cases where it can’t happen, or at least can’t happen easily. If you’re designing or making hardware it’s difficult.

Hopefully, as the threat of COVID-19 lifts, we’ll remember the lessons we’ve learned. We shouldn’t go back exactly to how things were before. The people who like working from home should still be able to do so, at least some of the time. I want to believe that the idea that people can’t be productive at home is no longer wide-spread. On the other hand, it’s not a panacea. We shouldn’t be closing all the office space in cities and we shouldn’t force people to work from home if they prefer being in an office.

In the end, treating staff like adults and trusting them to Get The Job Done is rarely a bad policy.

Blog

Facebook: The inside story

I’m not a big fan of Facebook. And the odd thing is that it feels like Steven Levy isn’t either.

I’ve read most of Levy’s previous books and, while he’s never been uncritical, there has always been a mostly positive spin. From Apple, to Google, to the “hacker culture” (including Stallman) I don’t recall any of his previous works quite being so down on their subjects.

It’s to the credit of Zuckerberg and his crew, then, that they were so involved in its creation. All the big names were interviewed on the record and, frankly, few come off well. Zuckerberg himself comes across as petty, jealous, arrogant and not terribly likeable. Even Steve Jobs had a fun, mischievous side.

That’s not to say the Levy doesn’t give credit where it’s due. The coverage comes across as fair, so maybe it’s more fair to say that reality is skewed against Facebook than this book!

It covers everything from Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook projects, through to its founding, move to California, early growth and the last decade of being practically ubiquitous.

Most of the early phases have been well documented elsewhere (including in the Social Network movie), which made the discussion of some of Facebooks biggest missteps, and the threads that connect them, the highlight. The focus on growth at all costs, the organisational split between Zuckerberg and Sandberg, and the belief that connecting people is an unalloyed good seem to be the key to most failings and, disturbingly, they don’t seem to have learned that lesson.

Overall, it’s a fascinating, well written book about a troubling company. If we can’t avoid the company, we should at least try to understand it.