Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2024

“Nice business ya got there, Patreon. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it …”

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Above the paywall, Ted Gioia discusses Apple’s latest attempt to cut itself a nice big middleman’s slice of the indy creator market by putting the thumbscrews to Patreon:

Can Apple really charge a 30% tax on indie creators?

What Apple is now doing to indie creators is pure evil — but this story has received very little coverage. Journalists should pay attention, because they are under threat themselves.

Apple is now putting the squeeze on Patreon, a platform that supports more than a quarter of a million creators — artists, writers, musicians, podcasters, videographers, etc.

These freelancers rely on the support of more than 8 million patrons through Patreon, which charges a small 8-12% fee. Many of these supporters pay via Patreon’s iPhone app.

Earlier this year, Apple insisted that Patreon must pay them a 30% commission on all new subscriptions made with the app. In other words, Apple wants to take away close to a third of the income for indie creators — almost quadrupling their transaction fees.

This is the new business model from Cupertino, and it feels like a Mafia shakedown. Apple will make more from Patreon than Patreon does itself.

The only way for indies to avoid this surcharge is by convincing supporters to pay in some other way, and not use an iPhone or Apple tablet.

This is what happens when Apple decides to treat a transaction as an “in app payment” — as if an artist’s entire vocation is no different than a make-believe token in a fantasy video game.

But you can easily imagine how almost anything you do with your phone could be subject to similar demands.

I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.

November 3, 2024

The end of the “cheap streaming era” is at hand

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

Ted Gioia explains why your streaming services are going to be jacking up their prices — if they haven’t already done so:

I got a request to explain why streaming subscription prices are so damned high — and getting higher.

This came in response to a chart I shared two days ago:

And it’s not just Disney.

All the streaming platforms are jacking up prices. I still subscribe to five different streaming services—down from six previously. Every one of them raised prices this year, and always by more than the inflation rate.

Here’s what Spotify is doing:

What’s going on? And will it continue?

I recently described this as an “endgame strategy” — but that might be confusing to readers.

Endgame is a term drawn from chess, where it refers to a body of wisdom about the final moves on the board. But business is like chess, so I frequently analyzed endgame situations back in my days at the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey.

I now see these endgame strategies getting implemented in various media, entertainment, and streaming businesses. But almost nobody inside those businesses wants to talk about it.

So let me lay it out for you.

The Entertainment Industry Is Adopting an Endgame Mindset

You pursue an “endgame” strategy when demand for your business hits a wall, and it’s hard to attract new customers. The most typical endgame strategy is to cut back investment into new products and services, while raising prices sharply.

You’re willing to accept some loss of customers, because you’re now squeezing more profit-per-user out of your remaining consumers — who stick with you out of loyalty or habit or inertia.

These are your sheep, ready to be shorn.

Profit per customer is now the key metric driving your business. It’s more important than innovation or growth or artistry or any of those old fashioned ideas.

That’s why, for example, Netflix won’t share data on the number of subscribers anymore. They claim this is no longer relevant to their business model — and they aren’t lying.

Price increases are now the engine of their business.

October 25, 2024

QotD: The treason of the music critics

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

This is what I was saying above: everything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different. But then, that’s what happens when you tell a lot of mostly white and mostly male taste makers that a particular set of tastes is inherently sexist and racist — they sprint in the opposite direction as fast as they can. Because aging white men are almost as afraid of being called racist and sexist as they are of being old.

Freddie deBoer, “A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-07-22.

October 20, 2024

QotD: The “Spirit of the Sixties”

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

Quick, ask the Boomers what was so great about The Sixties™. I hope you’ve got a few months to spare, but if you boil it all down, it’s “the spirit”. They really thought they were fundamentally transforming the world, and may God have mercy on all our souls, they were right. Same thing with the WWII generation, the Progressive Era, whatever. Even those who wax nostalgic for the 80s will talk about the feeling of the age — “the last golden Indian summer of America”, as someone quoted in the comments yesterday, and doesn’t it break your heart?

Not to get all Classical Rhetoric up in here, but for prior generations, things like “The Beatles” are synecdoche. They’ll go to their graves insisting that The Beatles were “the greatest band ever”, but if you press them on it, most of them are honest enough to admit that Ringo et al weren’t such great shakes, musically. At their best, The Beatles’ songs are musically simplistic and lyrically gibberish; at their worst, they’re “Rocky Raccoon”. The Beatles are “great” because they were innovators, not so much musically but because they were so goddamn pretentious. They wanted to be not mere entertainers, but artistes, and we indulged them, and that combo — pretentiousness and indulgence — became The Spirit of the Sixties.

Thus if you answer “The Beatles” to the question “What’s so great about The Sixties?”, it’s a synechdoche for “the spirit of the age”.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

September 7, 2024

QotD: Instrumental music doesn’t always need or want lyrics attached

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

When a piece of instrumental music is popular, it’s hard to resist the temptation to put words to it, and thus make it even more popular. As noted in this space over the years, a big chunk of Duke Ellington’s “songs” aren’t songs at all, but jazz instrumentals to which a lyric has been awkwardly appended: “Yoooooooooo…. must Take The A-Train/Toooooooo… get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem.” Who needs it? Just about any instrument playing that line would do a better job than those words do. And “Take The A Train”‘s lyric is a work of genius by comparison with “Prelude To A Kiss”. Ira Gershwin always resisted offers to put words to “Rhapsody in Blue” or “An American in Paris”. He and his brother had written plenty of songs over the years, and he figured if George had wanted “Rhapsody” to have lyrics he’d have mentioned it at the time. Leroy Anderson liked words: He spoke at least nine languages (English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese) and, indeed, fancied himself as a lyricist in at least a couple of them. But he didn’t think as a songwriter; he thought as a composer. Unlike, say, Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, he orchestrated his own music, and so he conceived it instrumentally rather than vocally. Although you can find texts that were written for his most popular pieces, they sound very much like words set to pre-existing notes which don’t particularly require them.

Mark Steyn, “Sleigh Ride”, Steyn Online, 2019-12-08.

August 8, 2024

“The future was then” – the Avant-Garde is so passé

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

Ted Gioia shares some observations on the Avant-Garde in modern culture, where the bourgeoisie seem to have become immune — or at least inured — to all the épater-ie:

Some time back, I was invited to attend a concert by an up-and-coming avant-garde band. These musicians were hellbent on disruption and mayhem, proving their transgressive credentials at every turn.

My companion that evening was a well-known jazz musician and, at the end of the concert, he turned to me and said:

“The future was then.”

I laughed, because this was so true. The performance we had just experienced wanted to be cutting-edge and futuristic, but every note played reflected a notion of the avant-garde as it existed sixty years ago.

The future was then.

I thought of that concert recently when a magazine convened a group of artists and intellectuals and asked them a troubling question:

What happened to the avant-garde?

Few people paid attention to their hand-wringing. I didn’t even hear about this online colloquium until months had passed — and I try to stay on top of precisely these kinds of issues. Nobody I know mentioned it, and I stumbled upon it purely by chance.

But that only proves that there really is a crisis in the avant-garde. It’s a crisis of neglect. Of disinterest.

People once got worked up about cutting edge art and transgressive culture. They loved it or hated it, but they always had strong feelings. Nowadays they hardly notice.

Perhaps they are just deadened to it from over-exposure.

You can put up the strangest statue in the town square nowadays — let’s say Albert Einstein getting swallowed by a monster snail — and people just walk by it. They’ve seen it all before.

You have too.

Artists can make the most bizarre music, destroying instruments, shouting obscenities, and creating all sorts of noise. But — yawn! — somebody’s great-grandpa was doing all that three generations ago.

QotD: The real reason modern music sounds the same

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

… (paraphrasing Frank Zappa), back in the days rock was new enough that the record company execs had no idea how to handle it. They didn’t know what the kids would like, and they knew they didn’t know, so they used the plate of spaghetti approach — just throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.

Fast forward a few years, though, and now they’ve got a pretty good idea of what “rock” is. More importantly, they’ve got a pretty good handle on what the market for rock is. At that point, they do what execs in any industry do. Why bother trying to find the hot new thing, when you can just make it yourself?

And that’s why two guys you’ve never heard of, Max Martin and a dude calling himself “Dr. Luke”, have written every #1 pop hit for the last 15 years. I’m sure they don’t work cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than scouting every bar band in America for a sound / look / stage act that might or might not pan out. Much easier to focus group a few traits, call up central casting, have them send over a made-to-order bimbo, and have him / her / xzhem front Dr. Luke’s latest computer-generated ditty.

And if everything on the radio all sounds exactly the same, that’s because it is exactly the same. Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and their zillion Mini-Mes at every level of the record biz, sometimes write songs for specific people — hey, guys, Katy Perry needs another ballad for her new album, hop to it! But mostly they write on spec, and shop it around. Different singers, different bands, different genres, doesn’t matter — this time it’s the two generic prettyboys in the “country” band Florida-Georgia Line singing it, but last time it was Katy Perry, the next time it’ll be the Backstreet Boys on their triumphant comeback tour, feat. Jay-Z and MC Funetik Spelyn. Same exact song, literally — it’s just that Kenny Chesney needed one more track on his album this time, and Taylor Swift didn’t, so now it’s #5 with a bullet on the “country” chart.

Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.

August 7, 2024

QotD: The crew of HMS Sheffield in the Falklands

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

But it’s 40 years since the Falklands. And from that we get this:

    May 4th 1982: As HMS Sheffield is abandoned and the fire spreads towards the Sea Dart ammunition. The remaining crew gather on the foredeck singing “Always look on the bright side of life”.

Now I have heard that story and I’ve always thought it were more than a little bit mythmaking. And yet, and yet. Someone I know (our fathers knew each other, he took a sister out a few times, we worked together for 6 months later on) was actually there. Running the flight control stuff from the next ship over:

    Singing led by the FC that we had loaned to them. One of our Sea Kings closed on the fo’c’sle to pick up wounded and saw them all swaying from side to side with their arms outstretched. I learned why when he got back.

I’ll take that as being something that really happened then. Not for publication, not something published for home consumption, but something that actually happened. Young men, on a burning ship, not knowing whether they’d be lifted off before the fire got to the missiles and the kaboom of their little bits all over the South Atlantic. […]

We’re a weird, weird culture here in Britain. We will, and do, take the piss out of absolutely anything, including our own impending death.

Now, whether that’s quite what the economists mean by institutions that aid in economic development is another thing but it is indeed one of those institutions of that British culture.

It’s also wholly glorious but then I’m a Brit so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Tim Worstall, “The British Are A Very, Very, Weird People”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-05-06.

August 5, 2024

Short-term technological forecast – “If I were a commercial pilot, I’d tell you to return to your seats and buckle up”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Most of this Ted Gioia post is behind the paywall (and if you can afford it, I’m sure you’d get your money’s worth for a subscription):

I anticipate extreme turbulence on every front for the remaining five months in 2024. You will see it in politics, business, economics, culture, world affairs, the stock market, and maybe even your own neighborhood.

That’s one of the themes of my latest arts and culture update below.

What happened to the AI business model last week?

After almost two years of hype, the media changed its opinion on AI last week.

The hype disappeared almost overnight

All of a sudden, news articles about AI went sour like reheated 7-Eleven coffee. The next generation AI chips are delayed, and 70% of companies are behind in their AI plans. There are good reasons for this — most workers now say AI makes them less productive.

People are also noticing that AI businesses want to use the entire electricity grid to run their money-losing bots. Meanwhile AI companies are burning through cash at historic levels. Even under the best case scenario, this all feels unsustainable.

But the worst disclosure, in my opinion, came on July 24 — just eleven days ago.

A study published in Nature showed that when AI inputs are used to train AI, the results collapse into gibberish.

This is a huge issue. AI garbage is now everywhere in the culture, and most of it undisclosed. So there’s no way that AI companies can remove it from future training inputs.

They are caught in the doom loop I described last week.

That same day, the Chief Investment Officer at Morgan Stanley warned investors that AI “hasn’t really driven revenues and earnings anywhere”. One day later, Goldman Sachs quietly released a report admitting that the AI business model was in serious trouble.

Even consulting firms, who make a bundle hyping this tech, are backtracking. Bain recently shared the following chart (hidden away at the end of a report) which explains why AI projects have failed.

These findings are revealing. They show that management is absolutely committed to AI, but the tools just don’t deliver.

And, finally, last week the media noticed all this.

They published dozens of panic-stricken articles. Investors got spooked too — shifting from greed to fear in a New York minute. Over the course of just two days, Nvidia’s stock lost around $400 billion in market capitalization.

In this environment, true believers quickly turn into skeptics. The whole AI business model gets scrutinized — and if it doesn’t hold up, investment cash flow dries up very quickly.

This is exactly what I predicted 6 months ago. Or even a year ago.

I expect that the next few weeks — or maybe even the next few days — will be extremely turbulent in the AI world.

Buckle up!

The dominant AI music company just admitted that it trained its bot on “essentially all music files on the Internet”.

Suno is a huge player in AI music — it tells investors it will generate $120 billion per year. Microsoft is already using its technology.

But there’s a tiny catch.

The company now admits in a court filing:

    Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions

Hey, this is totally illegal — it’s like Napster all over again.

Suno will need to prove that all these copyrighted songs are “fair use” in AI training. I doubt that any court will take that claim seriously.

If the music industry is smart, they will use this violation to shut down AI regurgitation of copyrighted songs.

If the music industry is stupid — run according to my “idiot nephew theory” — they will drop charges in exchange for some quick cash.

July 25, 2024

Poptimism?

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

Freddie deBoer has a few things to say about “poptimism” (whatever the heck that might be):

this piece is by a literature professor btw

I mean, honestly, what are we doing here? Where does this go? When does the madness end? What degree of all-swallowing society-wide celebration of pop music might be considered sufficient, for pop fans? How much more slavish devotion can Taylor Swift engender before they stop calling her an underdog? What is the endgame? What level of delusion is yet to be achieved, in the space of pretending that pop music is somehow marginalized or disrespected? This is, I’m told, “pop girl summer“, and it is genuinely difficult to find new music that gets any burn that isn’t some 18 to 28 year old photogenic woman, autotuning over shlocky overproduced midtempo backing tracks complete with beats stolen from mid-2010s EDM and muddy indistinct synth lines that all sound exactly the same. (Jack Antonoff should be put to death for his crimes.) My friends: you get all the streams, you get all the good reviews, you get all the Grammys, you get all the magazine covers. There exist almost no mainstream publications that regularly cover any music other than the kind you like. If anyone uses words like “authenticity” in music criticism, they will be sent to the gulag; if anyone suggests that musicians who write their own songs possess some sort of intimate connection to them, that person receives the digital equivalent of being pressed to death like Giles Corey. What more adulation do you want for your stars? What additional level of respect is there for them to secure? What do you want?

NPR says “This summer’s music charts are dominated by pop girl underdogs”. Underdogs cannot dominate! Definitionally! If they are dominating, they are not underdogs! This is the modern hell of crybullying, the person who tells you that you’re oppressing them while they’re busy mashing your face into the asphalt.

And, of course, it’s mostly all a negotiation with aging. As one of the oldest Millennials, I’m watching as my generation reaches middle age and reacts to that transition, and I can give you an initial verdict on how it’s going: not well, at all. We’re mostly adjusting to it by not adjusting to it. So, so many Millennials are confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture, loudly declaring that the only music that matters is that which you discover on TikTok. They need everyone to know that they’ve spent the cost of a new Toyota on tickets to the Eras Tour. (Which soaks up seats that might otherwise be available to actual young people, not wine moms with too much money, but nevertheless.) They might like music. But in a much deeper way, they need it. They need what they think it represents.

Of course, this is all made a little bleaker by the fact that elder Millennials were once defined as the “hipster” generation, Williamsburg residents swilling PBR at backyard parties where they listened to the latest indie darling. In other words, they — we — have gone from being ostentatiously countercultural to ostentatiously mainstream, in the span of twenty years, which makes it hard not to conclude that they — we — never actually had aesthetic tastes at all and have instead lived like little reeds in the wind, terrified of ever appearing to not be The Right Kind of Person, which can only ever be defined through our capitalist consumption, since we think that all we are is our capitalist consumption.

July 19, 2024

QotD: The value of contemporary music

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

The music piped into the men’s locker room at my gym puts me in touch with contemporary culture, and, in so doing, gives me an incentive to change as quickly as I can.

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “The Timelessness of Elle Cordoba”, Extra Muros, 2024-04-18.

July 7, 2024

QotD: Musical criticism

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

Nine-Inch Nails [is] inspirational music for serial killers. Background music for having sex with dead bodies.

Steve H., “Music to Slowly go Insane By: A Partial List of Popular Musicians Who Should be Publicly Dismembered”, Hog on Ice, 2005-06-13.

July 4, 2024

QotD: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Memorial Day in America – or, if you’re a real old-timer, Decoration Day, a day for decorating the graves of the Civil War dead. The songs many of those soldiers marched to are still known today – “The Yellow Rose Of Texas”, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, “Dixie”. But this one belongs in a category all its own:

    Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…

In 1861, the United States had nothing that was recognized as a national anthem, and, given that they were now at war, it was thought they ought to find one – a song “that would inspire Americans to patriotism and military ardor”. A 13-member committee was appointed and on May 17th they invited submissions of appropriate anthems, the eventual winner to receive $500, or medal of equal value. By the end of July, they had a thousand submissions, including some from Europe, but nothing with what they felt was real feeling. It’s hard to write a patriotic song to order.

At the time, Dr Samuel Howe was working with the Sanitary Commission of the Department of War, and one fall day he and Mrs Howe were taken to a camp a few miles from Washington for a review of General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. That day, for the first time in her life, Julia Ward Howe heard soldiers singing:

    John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave
    John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave…

Ah, yes. The famous song about the famous abolitionist hanged in 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia before a crowd including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth.

Well, no, not exactly. “By a strange quirk of history,” wrote Irwin Silber, the great musicologist of Civil War folk songs, “‘John Brown’s Body’ was not composed originally about the fiery Abolitionist at all. The namesake for the song, it turns out, was Sergeant John Brown, a Scotsman, a member of the Second Battalion, Boston Light Infantry Volunteer Militia.” This group enlisted with the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment and formed a glee club at Fort Warren in Boston. Brown was second tenor, and the subject of a lot of good-natured joshing, including a song about him mould’ring in his grave, which at that time had just one verse, plus chorus:

    Glory, glory, hallelujah
    Glory, glory, hallelujah…

They called it “The John Brown Song”. On July 18th 1861, at a regimental march past the Old State House in Boston, the boys sang the song and the crowd assumed, reasonably enough, that it was inspired by the life of John Brown the Kansas abolitionist, not John Brown the Scots tenor. Over the years in the “SteynOnline Song of the Week”, we’ve discussed lyrics featuring real people. But, as far as I know, this is the only song about a real person in which posterity has mistaken it for a song about a completely different person: “John Brown’s Body” is about some other fellow’s body, not John Brown the somebody but John Brown the comparative nobody. Later on, various other verses were written about the famous John Brown and the original John Brown found his comrades’ musical tribute to him gradually annexed by the other guy.

Mark Steyn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Steyn Online, 2019-05-26.

July 3, 2024

Tanks! – Allied tanks of WW2 – Sabaton History 127

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

Sabaton History
Published Mar 14, 2024

Sabaton has written several songs about tanks — the boys are tank CRAZY! Songs like “Ghost Division” or “Panzerkampf” are about the German panzers and even the Soviet ones, but what about those of the Western Allies? Were they any good? And if so, how did they lose the Battle of France?
(more…)

July 2, 2024

The virtue-signalling Olympics … aka “Glastonbury”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill documents the awesomely awful human beings at the Glastonbury music festival this year (like most years):

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Virtue-signalling reached its nadir on Friday night. It was at the Glastonbury music festival. Of course it was. A swaying crowd of the time-rich, turbo-smug thirtysomethings who make up Glasto’s clientele passed around an inflatable dinghy filled with dummies designed to look like migrants crossing the English Channel. As some band you’ve never heard of sang a song about “beautiful immigrants”, the audience hoisted the blow-up boat above their heads and basically crowd-surfed it. What a gauche display of phoney virtue. What an orgy of hollow vanity. Surely it would have been cheaper to rustle up a banner saying, “Aren’t we fucking wonderful?”.

It will surprise not a living soul that the boat was the handiwork of Banksy, every posh twat’s favourite graffiti artist. Banksy has never once seen a moneyed, mostly white audience that he didn’t want to titillate with platitudes about Tory scum and cruel capitalism, so it was only natural he would gravitate towards Glastonbury. He knows it’s rammed with people called Archie and Poppy who lap up his unsubtle stencils about the rat race that is neoliberal society and how dreadfully frightful war can be. So who better to dragoon into his boat stunt than these folk who likewise love advertising to the world how much they care about migrants and stuff?

Let’s leave to one side how unbelievably crude it is for a rich graffitist and Brits who can afford to fork out £355 to listen to crap music for five days to celebrate boat journeys that often end in death. One wonders if any of the audience members who cheered illegal immigration later retired to one of Glasto’s luxury yurts, which contain not only “proper flushing toilets” but also toilet attendants. You can hire one for £5,000, which, ironically, is around the same amount of money dirt-poor migrants are forced to stump up to criminal gangs for a seat on one of their perilous crossings that the righteous of Glasto think it’s a hoot to sanctify.

No, even worse than the sight of the well-off of Worthy Farm using the wretched of the Earth to burnish their moral credentials is the fact that if any Channel-crossing migrant were to rock up to Glastonbury they’d be cuffed and shoved in the back of a paddy wagon faster than you could say “What time’s Dua Lipa on?”. Glastonbury is one of the most fortified zones in Britain. It is surrounded by a fence that is 4.12m high and 7.8km long and which has numerous “unique high-security features”, including an “external roadway to prevent tunnelling”, a “45-degree overhang to prevent climbing” and “zero nuts and bolts to stop the fence being tampered with”. “No borders!”, cry the virtuous of Glasto while surrounded by a border fence that the screws of Alcatraz would have envied.

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