Quotulatiousness

February 23, 2024

The Royal Navy ballistic missile submarine commander’s “Letter of Last Resort”

Filed under: Britain, Military, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Britain’s Royal Navy always has a nuclear submarine — currently one of the Vanguard-class — at sea with a unique mission … stay undetected to ensure the survival of Britain’s nuclear deterrent in the form of the boat’s live nuclear weapons. Ned Donovan reposted an article on the mission orders each sub commander has locked in a safe for the duration of the mission:

HMS Victorious, a Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine in the Clyde estuary on transit to base at Faslane on 8 December, 2003.
Photo: LA(phot) Mez Merrill/MOD via Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, every hour of the day, every day of the year, a lone submarine glides through the ocean with no real destination. Since 1969, one of the four boats of the UK’s Continuous At-Sea Submarine Deterrent has always been on patrol. Its location is known to only a handful, even many of her crew will have no idea where they are.

While many Royal Navy captains hold responsibility for their crew, Trident submarine commanders also bear a far more macabre role: the duty to play Britain’s final political and diplomatic hand possible. Within the bowels of each boat lays two safes, an outer and an inner, and within that inner safe sits the letter of last resort.

One of the first tasks of the Cabinet Secretary on the appointment by the Queen of a new prime minister, is to have the new leader write that very letter.

After the elation of an election victory, the civil servant informs the politician that this letter will lay out the action the prime minister wishes to take, should the government and chain of command be totally destroyed by nuclear attack. Tony Blair, according to his cabinet secretary, was said to have gone “quite white” on being told of his options.

Options do allow a great deal of latitude, with varying degrees of widespread destruction of human life:

  1. Retaliate with nuclear weapons without prejudice.
  2. Do not retaliate at all.
  3. Allow the commander to act within his own discretion.
  4. Place the boat under the control of an allied navy, specifically the Royal Australian Navy or US Navy.

Given some time alone, the prime minister is requested to decide and write it in a letter addressed to the commanders of each of the Vanguard-class submarines in the navy. The message is then sealed in an envelope and sent to be placed into the boats’ safes. So far, none of these missives have been opened, and the letters are burned at the end of each premier’s term.

The only prime minister to comment openly on their orders was Lord Callaghan in an interview with historian Peter Hennessy:

    If it were to become necessary or vital, it would have meant the deterrent had failed, because the value of the nuclear weapon is frankly only as a deterrent. But if we had got to that point, where it was, I felt, necessary to do it, then I would have done it. I’ve had terrible doubts, of course, about this. I say to you, if I had lived after having pressed that button, I could never ever have forgiven myself.

To get to the stage where the letters can be opened is a long and purposefully difficult journey. First, the prime minister must have perished or become incapacitated in some way. Then, his proposed alternate decision makers would had to have met the same fate. It is only after that point that the submarine commanders go anywhere near their safes.

Updated to fix broken link.

“… the very act of education is ‘a colonial structure that centres whiteness'”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Teachers in the Toronto District School Board are being told they have to focus on the race of their students above everything else:

The Canadian education system exists exclusively to perpetuate “white supremacy” and schools must prioritize the race of their students above any other factor, reads an official guidebook distributed to all 20,000 Toronto public school teachers.

“Race matters — it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining people’s social, political, economic, and cultural experiences,” reads one of the introductory paragraphs of Facilitating Critical Conversations, a handbook produced and distributed by the Toronto District School Board.

Teachers are told that they serve an educational system “inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture” and that the very act of education is “a colonial structure that centres whiteness”.

“Therefore it must be actively decolonized,” the guide says.

Authored by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Department, the guide is one of several new policy documents telling teachers to become agents of “decolonization”.

At multiple points, teachers are told to interact with students based primarily on their “identity group”.

“Am I thinking about the various identities students may hold, whether they are part of a group, their comfort in identifying as part of this group, and articulating/coming out as part of this group,” reads one entry in a checklist of how teachers should engage in “critical conversation”.

The “critical conversation” itself is defined as a means of conditioning students that “identity and power” is inextricable, and that the world around them is chiefly defined by “structures that privilege some at the expense of others”.

“White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and communities,” it reads.

The entire document was produced to replace a 21-year-old TDSB guidebook that was previously the standard text for addressing “controversial and sensitive issues” in the classroom.

The Gun Science Says Can’t Work – Madsen LMG Mechanics

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Nov 2023

The Madsen LMG is generally considered an extremely complex and confusing system — but is it really? Today we are taking one apart to see just how it actually works. Because in fact, it’s a very unusual system, but not really any more complicated than any other easy self-loading action.
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QotD: Eating roti

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I used chicken because I was tired of looking unsuccessfully for goat. You can get goat if you go where people from the islands live, but that would be a lot like work.

You roll the roti up and eat the curry like a bear eating a Cub Scout in a sleeping bag.

Steve H., “Roti Stuffed With Curry: Green and Mean”, Hog on Ice, 2005-01-01.

February 22, 2024

Trump’s crude, threatening rhetoric on NATO’s cheapskates is … right

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé joins all right-thinking people in condemning Donald Trump’s campaign trail threats to not defend NATO’s freeloaders if they’re attacked by, say, Vladimir Putin:

Donald Trump recently called into question the core principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As a collective defence alliance, NATO operates on the principle that an attack against one member is an attack against all. This principle is enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO agreement. Although Article 5 allows each ally to respond as they see fit, there’s an understanding that allies have an obligation to defend each other.

On the campaign trail, Trump declared that, if elected, he wouldn’t defend NATO allies if they’ve failed to spend two per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence. Not only that, he said he’d encourage Russia to attack these allies. As Trump reiterated last week: “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect, okay?” These comments raised serious concerns within NATO. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, warned that Trump is striking at the underlying logic of the alliance. The Secretary General stressed that “We should not undermine the credibility of NATO’s deterrent”.

What should we make of Trump’s threat? On the one hand, it’s clearly dangerous and evidence that a second Trump presidency could shake the foundations of the alliance. We should rightly be worried and condemn such reckless rhetoric. On the other hand, this is classic Trump. His approach to international politics can best be understood as “mobster diplomacy”. He demands personal loyalty as the head of the “family” of Western liberal democracies. When it comes to trade deals, he echoes Don Corleone in making offers that partners can’t refuse. As for alliances, he sees them as a protection racket. When it comes to NATO allies, his message is simple and direct: “Nice country you have there … pity if something happened to it”.

Allied leaders and academics can protest that the two per cent target isn’t a payment to the United States; it’s a measure of the relative amount allies spend on their own militaries, not a fee they owe Washington. While true, it’s a waste of breath to point this out. Trump and his supporters don’t care. They see most allies as freeloaders who’ve been coasting on American military power for too long. And you know what? They’re not wrong. That’s the rub for those who are understandably horrified by Trump’s comments. Far too many NATO allies, including Canada, have been content let the United States carry a heavy defence spending burden, while we focus on other priorities. That’s what Trump is ultimately getting at here, however menacingly.

Canada has been particularly unwilling to pay its agreed share, actually cutting the military budget late last year while many of our European allies were increasing theirs. We’re habitually the ones who slip out of the room when it’s our turn to buy a round, militarily speaking.

Allied War Crimes, Latin American Troops, and Top-Secret Proximity Fuzes – WW2 – OOTF 033

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Feb 2024

Did the Western Allies commit war crimes? What did Latin American troops do during the war? And, how did the top-secret proximity fuze change the face of warfare? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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The feminization of movies – the Luke Skywalker Effect

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Like Lorenzo Warby, I was a fan of the first three Star Wars movies, but rapidly lost interest as the series progressed (I think I watched about half of Attack of the Clones before giving it up as a hack job). Here he gives his opinion on one of the biggest reasons why the later movies sucked:

I am, in many ways, a Stars Wars kid. I can remember sitting in a cinema in 1977, listening to the music play as the opening words flowed across the screen and the sound of the Star Destroyer rumbled out of the speakers and thinking “Yes, a film by One of Us”. That is, a film made by a genuine fan of SF.

A film, moreover, that gave us epic characters. Luke Skywalker: young, eager, physically skilled, charmingly gormless. Han Solo: charismatic rogue (who definitely shot first, that’s what charismatic rogues who read the room do). Princess Leia: the epitome of the competent-beyond-her-age young woman making sure the boys don’t get above themselves. Darth Vader: the looming — and yes charismatic — menace. Chewbacca: scary loyal sidekick. Obi-wan Kenobi: wise, world-weary, teacher with intriguing powers. Grand Moff Tarkin: the ruthlessly competent minion that autocrats both want and fear.

A film that was fun, that was embedded in an intriguing universe. A film that understood the need for training, the hero’s journey, building teams. The briefing of the fighters before the attack on the Death Star is a classic example of informing the audience by letting them see the process of getting everyone on the same page.

I loved the first three films: yes The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is the best of them. I was not entirely sold on the Ewoks, but they were fun. Those films were a huge success for very good reasons.

I was less impressed with the prequels. I described The Phantom Menace (1999) as “Star Wars for six year olds”. Lucas should have stuck with the pattern that worked so well for The Empire Strikes Back — get a good director and have good scriptwriters tighten up his story.

When Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, I was actually pleased. Disney, I thought, knew how to tell stories. Rogue One (2016) seemed to be a vindication of that.

When The Force Awakens (2015) came out, I was so happy to have a big screen Star Wars epic film, I just went with it. There were huge problems with the character of Rey, but I wanted to be taken for a ride, and so was: in so many senses.

Looking back, the writing down of the character of Han Solo was a big red flag. In the original trilogy, he grew as a character, as a person. In the first of the sequel trilogy, we were presented with a broken down, ageing failure as husband and father who had decayed to less than what he was when we first met him.

Meanwhile, we had the Mary Sue of a Rey who was just better than the boys as everything, including running the Millennium Falcon. She didn’t need training or experience, she was just naturally awesome because … girl.

Hollywood pretending that women have the same upper body strength as men is pretty pathetic, but never as pathetic as in the light-sabre fight between Rey and the Emo-Teenager Discount Darth Vader aka Kylo Ren. Yes, Ren was wounded, but years of experience and training counted for naught against Rey because … girl.

The Last Jedi (2017) was so much worse. Again, I wanted to like it, but things just niggled at me all the way through, despite my wish to enjoy the ride.

Once I got out of the cinema and began to consider what I had watched I became very angry. The chubby Chinese girl and belittled Black guy side plot was tired agitprop. Snope had been built up as epic villain but was disposed off with ridiculous expedition without any backstory explanation. Admiral Gender Studies was a study in pathetically bad leadership who clearly had no idea of how to build a team yet presented as a righteous authority. Poe Dameron was diminished into Male Initiative Is Bad Because Toxic Masculinity morality-play persona.

Epic military scenes do not work as parables. Parables subordinate story and character to didactic purpose. Epic military scenes really do not work as parables when the didactic purpose itself is so pathetic.

This is all bad enough, but the unforgivable crime against the entire legacy of Star Wars was what was done with Luke Skywalker’s character.

The original Luke Skywalker was a study in epic heroism. Yes, he was genetically advantaged, but he also trained to hone those advantages. He was not only physically brave, he was morally brave. Alone, captive, in the hands of his enemies — having deliberately surrendered to save his friends — he refuses to strike his father down. Alone, he defies the Emperor to his face and suffers terribly for his decision. He earned his capacities and his heroic standing.

What are we presented with in The Last Jedi? A broken and pathetic shadow of his former self. The offhand disposal of Snope has the effect of belittling the characters of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker even further. Their son, nephew and disciple had defected to the Dark Side because of … an explanation that made no character sense at all.

Seriously, the man who had shown that level of moral courage decided to kill his disciple and nephew because he had disturbing visions? It was an insult to the character, to the legacy and to the audience.

The sequel trilogy, particularly The Last Jedi, was a profound insult to legacy. To the legacy of Star Wars and to legacy within Star Wars. Thus was another parable pushed: legacy is pathetic and needs to be abandoned and subverted. The contemporary progressive contempt for all past human striving — it’s so full of male faces don’t you know, and (in the West) white ones — in fictional form.

We were presented with a universe where men fail as mentors and examples and women don’t need such. The later added-in training of Rey in The Rise of Skywalker was a pathetic patch on a deeper story-telling failure.

Any white male was pathetic, a failure, evil, stupid, toxic or some combination of the same. Meanwhile, the protagonist was great because … girl.

This was a vision that is sexist-racist, in a quite deliberate fashion.

The completion of the trilogy in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) had interest only to see how they were going to resolve (or not) all the story-telling holes The Last Jedi had lumbered the trilogy with. Bringing back Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine — easily the best thing in the prequel trilogy — was a sign of desperation, of creative exhaustion.

Each of the films in the sequel trilogy did worse than at the box office than the one before. A very clear statement of a legacy being run down.

The Malayan Emergency – Britain’s Jungle War v Communists

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Chap
Published Nov 16, 2023

Britain’s Victorious Jungle War Against the Communists

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QotD: Why companies continue to irritate their customers with online social justice marketing

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, up top, when I said that Facebook “can’t or won’t” stop this kind of stuff? I lied. There’s no “can’t” about it. It’s “won’t”, for the simple reason that Facebook understands its market and the Daily Mail writers obviously don’t. You’d think that the legendarily trashy British tabloid media would get this — and as I understand it, the Daily Mail is somewhere in the bottom half of the barrel — but Facebook’s market isn’t its users. Not even big companies like Starbucks. Facebook’s market is advertisers, and what they, Facebook, are selling is views. Eyeballs. “Engagement”, I think the Ad Biz term d’art is. In short: It doesn’t matter what the comments are; it matters that the comments are.

Ad company execs are walking into a meeting with a Starbucks-sized company right now. They’re pitching a bold new social media strategy to their clients. And they know it works, these ad men say, because look at all this data from Starbucks. Their posts average so much “engagement” every time, but look, when they post on “social justice” topics, their “engagement” jumps 350%!!

In case you were wondering how all this “social justice” shit keeps appearing in ads, despite the well-known effect of pissing off companies’ established client base, well, there you go — the company execs, being #woke Cloud People, want to do it anyway, and they’ve got whole binders full of data from the marketing department that prove “social justice” ups social media “engagement” with “the brand” umpteen zillion percent.

Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.

February 21, 2024

“College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found”

Filed under: Education, Health, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Johann Kurtz believes the modern university’s survival despite its increasingly irrational and counterproductive actions can be explained as the last modern example of an initiation ritual:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

Our understanding of the college system is incomplete. Until we correct this, we won’t be able to fix or replace the system.

First, consider a paradox: college attendance remains near all-time highs [Link], yet the majority of Americans no longer believe it is worth the cost [Link].

The college system seems irrationally resistant to declining value. We must therefore ask: is there an important non-rational reason for college attendance which we have failed to acknowledge?

I believe the answer is “Yes”. College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found.

Our culture is historically anomalous in lacking explicit initiation rituals.

Mircea Eliade, the great religious historian of the 20th-century, defined initiation rituals as “a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated“.

    In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.

    — Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

In Europe, fully expressed initiation rituals were common until the end of the Middle Ages, and in the wider world, until the end of the First World War. Now, they only persist in the West in the sacramental practices of devout Christians (baptism, confirmation, and so forth).

Once, however, these practices were of tremendous importance to us, as Eliade makes clear:

    To gain the right to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their works …

In the absence of local community rituals, the universities are a natural site for their replacement. These have always been religious sites, although the nature and expression of this religion has transmuted over time.

H/T to Bruce Gudmundsson at Extra Muros for the link and his additional comments:

This hypothesis accords with the argument, made often in this blog, that education and schooling are two very different things. At the same time, it suggests that one of the definitive purposes of Extra Muros, the encouragement of young people to eschew the conventional college experience in favor of a combination of practical pursuits and systematic self-tuition, may be a fool’s errand. After all, if four (or five or six) years of drinking second-rate beer from red plastic cups does for the office-bound folk of North America what fear-filled rites of passage do for members of the bone-in-the-nose set, then I might well be sailing against the wind.

Upon second thought, I find hope in the possibility that the parasite (or, to be more precise, the cancer) promoted by d’Angelo, Kendi, and company will soon deal the coup de grâce to its mortally-wounded host.

The coming-of-age ordeals of warrior tribes demand that boys who would be men prove possession of such martial virtues as courage and self-command. The rites-of-passage of the modern middle classes, however, require that postulants demonstrate a mixture of conformity, conscientiousness, and, to a diminishing degree, intelligence. (Readers familiar with the oeuvre of economist Bryan Caplan will recognize the source of this troika. However, it is worth noting that, while Professor Caplan will occasionally tip his hat in the direction of the campus-based building of basic brain-power, he devotes far more attention to the collegiate cultivation of the two components of Sitzfleisch.)1

The cult of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse demands complete compliance, not only with its basic tenets, but also with any changes in the party line that, from time to time, may occur. (I am old enough to remember the days when campus commies of the caucasian persuasion could don dashikis without facing charges of “cultural appropriation”.) Thus, those who sit at the feet of the acolytes of critical theory learn an art of great value to people who wish to thrive in a large organization, that of discarding the old hat, and putting on the new one, at just the right time. (Think, if you will, of the mid-level employees of the McDonalds Corporation, who, over the course of the last four decades, were obliged to alter their opinion of the McRib sandwich more often than they changed the oil in their cars.)

    1. Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pages 9-21.

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 3 – The Ancient Greeks: Rising Tensions with Persia

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024

This third lecture in the course deals with the rise of the Persian Empire, and the growing tensions between the Persians and the Greeks, culminating in an account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
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“There’s a moral imperative to go dig out that villa … It could be the greatest archaeological treasure on earth”

Filed under: History, Italy, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Nicholas Wade discusses the technical side of the ongoing attempts to read one of the Herculaneum scrolls:

A computer scientist has labored for 21 years to read carbonized ancient scrolls that are too brittle to open. His efforts stand at last on the brink of unlocking a vast new vista into the world of ancient Greece and Rome.

Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, has developed methods for scanning scrolls with computer tomography, unwrapping them virtually with computer software, and visualizing the ink with artificial intelligence. Building on his methods, contestants recently vied for a $700,000 prize to generate readable sections of a scroll from Herculaneum, the Roman town buried in hot volcanic mud from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

The last 15 columns — about 5 percent—of the unwrapped scroll can now be read and are being translated by a team of classical scholars. Their work is hard, as many words are missing and many letters are too faint to be read. “I have a translation but I’m not happy with it,” says a member of the team, Richard Janko of the University of Michigan. The scholars recently spent a session debating whether a letter in the ancient Greek manuscript was an omicron or a pi.

[…]

Seales has had to overcome daunting obstacles to reach this point, not all of them technical. The Italian authorities declined to make any of the scrolls available, especially to a lone computer scientist with no standing in the field. Seales realized that he had to build a coalition of papyrologists and conservationists to acquire the necessary standing to gain access to the scrolls. He was eventually able to x-ray a Herculaneum scroll in Paris, one of six that had been given to Napoleon. To find an x-ray source powerful enough to image the scroll without heating it, he had to buy time on the Diamond particle accelerator at Harwell, England.

In 2009, his x-rays showed for the first time the internal structure of a scroll, a daunting topography of a once-flat surface tugged and twisted in every direction. Then came the task of writing software that would trace the crumpled spiral of the scroll, follow its warped path around the central axis, assign each segment to its right position on the papyrus strip, and virtually flatten the entire surface. But this prodigious labor only brought to light a more formidable problem: no letters were visible on the x-rayed surface.

Seales and his colleagues achieved their first notable success in 2016, not with Napoleon’s Herculaneum scroll but with a small, charred fragment from a synagogue at the En-Gedi excavation site on the shore of the Dead Sea. Virtually unwrapped by the Seales software, the En-Gedi scroll turned out to contain the first two chapters of Leviticus. The text was identical to that of the Masoretic text, the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible — and, at nearly 2,000 years old, its earliest instance.

The ink used by the Hebrew scribes was presumably laden with metal, and the letters stood out clearly against their parchment background. But the Herculaneum scroll was proving far harder to read. Its ink is carbon-based and almost impossible for x-rays to distinguish from the carbonized papyrus on which it is written. The Seales team developed machine-learning programs — a type of artificial intelligence — that scanned the unrolled surface looking for patterns that might relate to letters. It was here that Seales found use for the fragments from scrolls that earlier scholars had destroyed in trying to open them. The machine-learning programs were trained to compare a fragment holding written text with an x-ray scan of the same fragment, so that from the statistical properties of the papyrus fibers they could estimate the probability of the presence of ink.

Can you make a tank disappear? The Evolution of Tank Camouflage

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Nov 17, 2023

It’s not easy to hide a tank. But over the years, military commanders have developed ways to disguise, cover and conceal the presence of their tanks from the enemy. This video is about the “art of deception” – and how, since World War One, through World War Two and into the present day, the science of tank camouflage has evolved to meet the conditions and threats of the contemporary battlefield.

00:00 | Intro
01:38 | WWI
06:26 | WW2
13:42 | Post War
19:40 | Conclusion
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QotD: Mid-century London

Filed under: Books, Britain, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Two of the novels were by, respectively, Nigel Balchin and R. C. Hutchinson, writers well regarded in their time but now mostly forgotten, while the third was by Ivy Compton-Burnett, who still has her admirers. They were quite different authors, but each had an unmistakable quality of unreconstructed English national identity, such as no writer about London — where two of the novels are set — or anywhere else in the country could now convey.

It is not that foreigners could not be found in 1949 London, which was then still a port city of some importance. In Hutchinson’s book, Elephant and Castle, set largely in the East End, one of the main characters is half-Italian, and foreigners of various nationalities have walk-on parts. But they in no way affect the strongly English character of the city. Today’s London, by contrast, seems more like a dormitory for an ever-fluctuating population than a home; even much of its physical fabric has been completely denationalized by modernist architecture of a sub-Dubai quality. It is not a melting pot, for little is left to melt into; a better culinary metaphor might be a stir-fry, the ingredients remaining unblended — though, with luck, compatible.

Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.

February 20, 2024

Welcome to Dopamine culture

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia thinks the annual “State of the Union” address is boring, but a much more relevant thing would be a “State of the Culture” address … and he’s got lots of concerns about modern day culture:

Many creative people think these are the only options — both for them and their audience. Either they give the audience what it wants (the entertainer’s job) or else they put demands on the public (that’s where art begins).

But they’re dead wrong.

Maybe it’s smarter to view the creative economy like a food chain. If you’re an artist — or are striving to become one — your reality often feels like this.

Until recently, the entertainment industry has been on a growth tear — so much so, that anything artsy or indie or alternative got squeezed as collateral damage.

But even this disturbing picture isn’t disturbing enough. That’s because it misses the single biggest change happening right now.

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.

[…]

Here’s a better model of the cultural food chain in the year 2024.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok — an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.

TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook — once a place to connect with family and friends — is imitating it. So long, Granny, hello Reels. Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media.

This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever — because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.

Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good — so we want to repeat the stimulus.

[…]

So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even “distraction” is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays — which is addiction.

Here’s the future cultural food chain — pursued aggressively by tech platforms that now dominate every aspect of our lives

The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies — because they will be the dealers.

Addiction is the goal.

They don’t say it openly, but they don’t need to. Just look at what they do.

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