Suggested reading: The first ten weeks edition

Protestors march in New York City on 5 April 2025. Image source: Associated Press

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to oppose the actions of the new administration. Its first ten weeks have been a spectacle of cruelty, crudity, corruption and mendacity that have exceeded, if that's the word, even my abysmal expectations. The attempted destruction of government services and vital data relating to health, education, social benefit programs, scientific research, environmental protection, worker and consumer safety, and financial fraud; the suppression of free speech, the arrest and deportation of legal immigrants for constitutionally-protected activities, and attacks on schools and academic freedom; the rampant self-dealing and conflicts of interest; the exposure of highly sensitive personal data; the defiance of court orders; the list could go on, and on.

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes a look at the current administration, our historical amnesia, and the state of our politics:

1. "From comedy to brutality," Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.

   In the days surrounding his inauguration, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered to buy Greenland from Denmark (and told reporters that he would not rule out seizing it by military force), suggested that he would annex Canada as "the 51st state," threatened to invade Panama to reassert U.S. control of the Canal, and proclaimed that the U.S. would "own" Gaza and resettle its population.

   You might think that these ideas were unique to the considerable idiosyncrasies of the current occupier of the White House. However, as Fintan O'Toole reveals in the New York Review of Books, all of these schemes have long and often ignoble histories:

• Greenland: After the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward requested "A Report on the Resources of Greenland and Iceland," which was issued in 1868. The U.S. had just purchased Alaska from Russia, and Seward was contemplating a similar deal with Denmark for Greenland and Iceland (but nothing came of it).

  

  Arctic Boundary as defined by the Arctic Research and Policy Act (modified by geographic labels). Map author: Allison Gaylord. Image source: US Arctic Research Commission

  And after World War II, during which the U.S. military occupied Greenland to deny its use to Germany, President Harry Truman approached Denmark with an offer to buy it (but nothing came of it). Eighty years later the U.S. still operates a major military base there, now called Pituffik Space Base.

  Greenland is actually closer to Moscow (2390 miles) than to Washington, DC (2620 miles), and closer to Copenhagen (1860 miles) than to the nearest location in the U.S.: Madawaska, a town at the northernmost tip of Maine just across the St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada (1930 miles). [1]

  In short, whoever should have sovereignty over Greenland, geography would suggest that it isn't the U.S. A wild idea: perhaps the people who live there should govern themselves, and control Greenland's mineral and other resources? But as we know from many contexts, some discussed below, when you are occupying increasingly desirable real estate it is money, power, and violence that usually decide the outcome.

• Canada: From its very inception as a nation, the U.S. has had territorial designs on its northern neighbor. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War of American Independence, the U.S. demanded and received all of the territory of the British Province of Quebec south of the Great Lakes; today, that territory comprises the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as eastern Minnesota, western Pennsylvania, and about half of New York. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation contained a clause admitting the rest of British Canada as a state if it voted to join the former colonies (it didn't).

  

  The thirteen original colonies in 1774 (detail), McConnell Map Co., 1919. Image source: Library of Congress

  During the War of 1812 the U.S. invaded Canada in a campaign to capture Montreal, the key to the rest of Quebec; the invading forces were defeated almost as soon as they crossed the border. But the dream didn't die; in the late 19th century William Seward, Henry Adams, and the poet Walt Whitman, among many others, envisaged a United States that encompassed Canada. HWSNBN's annexation plan is just the latest irruption of this idea—probably one of the very few ideas he shares with Walt Whitman.

• Panama owes its existence to U.S. intervention. In 1903, the U.S. encouraged Panama, then a province of Colombia, to declare independence, and then immediately bought the rights to the land through which the Panama Canal would be carved. By happy coincidence, the Panamanian representative in the negotiations also worked for the French company that had been given a concession to build the canal across the isthmus. The deal included a $10 million payment to the Panamanian government plus annual rent of $250,000; $40 million went to the French company for the land rights.

  

  "The Coup d'Etat," by Charles G. Bush, New York World, 8 November 1903. Image source: The Age of Revolutions

  As historian Justin J. Masucci writes on the website The Age of Revolutions, "Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity — in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama." Panama remained a client state of the U.S. until the 1960s. It didn't gain jurisdiction over the Canal Zone until 1979, or control of the canal itself until 31 December 1999.

  

  Panama Canal and Canal Zone. Image source: Project Gutenberg

  Under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that eventually turned control of the canal over to Panama, the U.S. retained the right to militarily defend the neutrality of the canal. However, it pledged to "abstain. . .from any intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama." [2] But just a dozen years after the signing of the treaty, U.S. armed forces invaded Panama to depose and take prisoner its leader Manuel Noriega and re-establish a U.S.-friendly government.
  
  Panama City is conveniently located next to the Pacific entrance of the canal. Any U.S. military invasion of the Canal Zone would inevitably involve its capture and the replacement of Panama's leaders, extending a long legacy of U.S. dominance of the country.

• Gaza: While rhetorically disapproving of Israeli settlement on Palestinian lands as an impediment to a two-state solution, the U.S. government has continued to provide an uninterrupted flow of weapons to Israeli governments. [3] According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since the end of World War II, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid by a factor of two. [4]
  
  Aid has continued to flow since the Oslo Accords in 1993 as the number of Israeli settlements and "outposts" has more than doubled, as the number of West Bank settlers has increased by more than four times to nearly half a million, and as the number of settlers in East Jerusalem has grown to nearly a quarter of a million. [5]

  

  Settler population growth in the West Bank, 1993–2023. Image source: Peace Now

  U.S. aid has provided direct and indirect support for this expansion.

  

  U.S. military and economic aid to Israel since 1970. Source: Council on Foreign Relations

  And during the Israeli government's assault on Gaza in 2024 U.S. military aid more than quadrupled from 2023 levels, to $12.5 billion. That assault has resulted in an estimated death toll to date of over 50,000 men, women and children. The weapons and munitions that resulted in this death and destruction are largely supplied by the U.S. [6] 

  And not only munitions: the Israeli military uses AI and cloud computing services supplied by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. According to an article by the Associated Press, "An Israeli intelligence officer told the AP that AI has been used to help pinpoint all targets in the past three years." These, then, must include the "pinpointing" of a car being driven by Hoda Hijazi. Her mother and her three daughters, Rimas, 14, Taline, 12, and Liane, 10, were killed, and later falsely claimed by the Israeli military to have been "Hamas targets." [7] Medical facilities and personnel, aid workers and journalists have also been targeted.

  

  Gaza in March 2024. Image source: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East

  So HWSNBN's open endorsement of the forcible relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza does not seem to many Palestinians to be a radical departure from decades of implicit U.S. policy. The mildest term for such an action is "ethnic cleansing" (implying that the existing population is filth that needs to be swept away), which came into use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The UN Commission of Experts stated that such actions "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." [8]

  

  Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, 14 March 2025. Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP. Image source: NPR

  On 26 February, The Guardian reported that HWSNBN had posted a "bizarre AI-generated video" on his social media site depicting Gaza as a luxury seaside resort, or as he called it in a 4 February press conference, "the Riviera of the Middle East":

  Words fail.

2. "An Expanding Vision of America," Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   Of course, dispossession and genocide were foundational acts of the U.S. itself. As Nicole Eustace writes in her NYRB article,

   . . .at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement.

   I have some disagreement with the way this statement is framed. First, it seems to anachronistically attribute to Native peoples a capitalistic ownership model of land and natural resources. Second, the phrase "exploitation of Native peoples" obfuscates how deadly the encounters between settlers and Native peoples were.

   

   California's indigenous history: Native people of this place. Image source: Digital Humanities at Santa Clara University

   Taking the state I live in as an example, in 1849 it's estimated that there were 150,000 Native people living in California. Drawing on Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Eustace points out that this population had already been decimated: these were "survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769." By 1870, after two decades of murder, starvation, disease, and the seizure and privatization of the land, the estimated Native population was reduced by 80%, to 30,000. Over that same period the settler population grew from around 95,000 to over half a million. [9]
   
   Today, people who claim at least some continental American or Alaskan native ancestry make up 3.6% of the California population, a lower percentage than the estimated 5.4% of 1870. The three California counties with the lowest percentage of people with native ancestry are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. [10] The Native peoples of California, as with others discussed in this post, had the misfortune to occupy land that other, more powerful people wanted.

3. "A Self Divided," Laura Marsh, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   The appalling spectacle of our current politics may be partially understood through reference to a study conducted at the University of Virginia in 2014. As Laura Marsh explains in the NYRB, the researchers

   asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable.
   
   In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. "Simply being alone with their own thoughts" was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would "rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all."

   Two-thirds of the college-age American men in this study would rather give themselves an electric shock than be "alone with their own thoughts" for as little as six minutes.

   In The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025), journalist Chris Hayes points to this study as a way to explain why many people spend a majority of their free time scrolling on their phones. As Marsh writes,

   The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it's possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab [app to app?], or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished.

   For social media addicts, "the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing," the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, "The actual point of 'screen time' is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up."

   

   Image source: OpenAccessGovernment.org

   Hayes contrasts the social media model with the old television model. Decades ago TV producers needed to create programming that would hold your attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, or longer: I remember in the early 1970s regularly watching, along with my whole family, the entire three-hour Saturday night CBS lineup of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A little later on I would follow this with the local 11 o'clock news and then switch to NBC for two new shows, Saturday Night Live (three Saturdays a month) or Weekend (one Saturday a month). The idea was to root you to the spot to provide a reliable audience for advertisers.

   The social media model is compared to playing a slot machine, "where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the outcome of the bet." Hayes writes,

   What will hold people's attention? [Social media companies] don't have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

   HWSNBN is a master of using repeated distraction to grab attention. As Marsh notes,

   He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy. . .[but] the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of [HWSNBN]—sticks out.

   As Antonia Hitchens writes in the London Review of Books ("At CPAC," 20 March), in 2018 former HWSNBN strategist Steve Bannon called this technique "flooding the zone." As he put it, "If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one."
   
   Of course, HWSNBN also has the advantage of almost universal name recognition from his "decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality"—combining the advantages of old and new media. HWSNBN is the first social media president; others must inexorably follow.
   
   Our 21st-century technological innovations are ironically returning us to the late 19th century, when the main features of our politics were cynical and corrupt party loyalty and grotesque smear campaigns, and when our economy was dominated by exploitative robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Leland Stanford. It was a time of extreme anti-labor violence, inequality, anti-immigrant actions, and ideological conformity. Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Only this time around no one other than the crew of billionaires, ideologues, enablers and toadies surrounding HWSNBN is laughing.

---

1. Air distances calculated from Greenland's geographical center on the Distance.to website.
2. "Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal," U.S. Department of State Archive.
3. The only exceptions I've found: in 1982 the Reagan Administration refused to provide cluster bombs to Israel after they were used against civilians; in 1991 the Bush Administration delayed a $10 billion loan package for four months when Israel's government would not pledge not to use the aid to build more settlements; and in 2024 the Biden Administration paused a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs because similar munitions had been dropped on Gaza, causing many civilian deaths.
4. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts. Council on Foreign Relations, 13 November 2024.
5. Peace Now Settlement Watch, 30 Years After Oslo – The data that shows how the settlements proliferated following the Oslo Accords, September 2023.
6. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Anas Baba, and Daniel Estrin, Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign, NPR, 25 March 2025.
7. Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick and Garance Burke, "As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies," Associated Press, 18 February 2025.
   
8. Ethnic Cleansing, Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes, United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Note to idiots and trolls: my reportage of these facts does not imply support of Hamas.
9. Oakland Museum of California. Resource 6-1a: California Population by Ethnic Groups, 1790-1880.
10. U.S. Census Bureau. California 2020 census.

Suggested reading: Will press lever for food

Cain having just murdered his brother Abel by Henri Vidal, 1896, Tuileries Garden, Paris. Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos; image source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (Attribution 2.0 Generic)

1. Gen Z

Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z, and whatever comes after: generational labeling has never been so prevalent. But do generational labels and their accompanying generalizations really tell us anything that's not obvious?

In "Gen Z and Me" [1], Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, points out that some generational differences are real (though their significance is another matter). In communication styles and the use of technology, for example, (most) members of Gen Z differ from (most) members of previous generations. In general, Gen Z derides email (requires too much time to read or write) and has developed elaborate unwritten rules defining online etiquette. The political attitudes of (many) members of Gen Z on issues such as gender and sexual identity, privacy, racial justice and climate change can also differ from those of (at least some) members of previous generations. But Moran points to two recent books that draw contrasting conclusions about what these technological and attitudinal differences really mean.

In Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a Stanford anthropologist (Roberta Katz), an Oxford linguist (Sarah Ogilvie), an Oxford historian (Jane Shaw) and a Lancaster University—now King's College London—sociologist (Linda Woodhead) use interviews with college students try to explain Gen Z to everyone else. Moran writes that, according to Gen Z Explained, the members of Gen Z have

created rich and hard-to-penetrate subcultures. What they mostly like to do, the book argues, is to collaborate in leaderless groups. They use digital tools to create shared documents, sync their calendars, write and read fan fiction, play games together. They use apps to organise lift-sharing, couch-surfing and political activism. The authors further 'explain' Generation Z by pointing to the intricate language and etiquette of their online lives. Post-millennials can quickly convey their pleasure or displeasure through memes. They use emojis as a 'social lubricant' and bracket words with asterisks and tildes for emphasis and irony. Whether they write 'k' or 'kk' to mean 'OK' is charged with meaning. The first is curt; the second is cheerful and casual, a way to temper the brusqueness of the single letter. These tonal shadings matter because post-millennials like to state their intentions clearly. Self-labelling, especially of fine-grained sexual and gendered identities, has become an 'imperative'. They think it important to be themselves, to admit their struggles and vulnerabilities, to say what they mean. In the iGen Corpus, a digital data bank compiled by Ogilvie of seventy million words used by post-millennials, terms such as real, true, honest and fake occur far more often than in general language use.

But being earnest, creating subcultures and language that are impenetrable to people your parents' age and using technology that befuddles them are all just part of being in your teens and early twenties. Earlier generations did the same things, while members of their parents' generation rolled their eyes, complained, or thought that it heralded the end of civilization:

• Gen Zers spend too much of their time bent over their phones texting their friends? "Youth is the age when people are most devoted to their friends or relations or companions, as they are then extremely fond of social intercourse and have not yet learnt to judge their friends or indeed anything else by the rule of expediency."

• The mocking memes and references Gen Zers exchange seem bizarre? "If the young commit a fault, it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration. . .they carry everything too far, whether it be their love or hatred or anything else. . .Finally, they are fond of laughter and consequently facetious, facetiousness being a more cultivated form of insolence."

• They are far too ready to take offense? "They are passionate, irascible and apt to be carried away by their impulses."

• Their self-righteousness is irritating? "They think they know everything and are absolutely sure in their assertions; this is in fact the reason of their carrying everything too far."

• They seize on and abandon trends with bewildering rapidity? "They are changeable too and fickle in their desires, which are as transitory as they are vehement; for their wishes are keen without being permanent, like a sick man's fits of hunger and thirst."

As you may have suspected, the quotes above are taken from a source written a few generations back: they're from Aristotle's Rhetoric, written two and a half millennia ago in the 4th century BCE. [2] For a compendium of similarly parallel comments about Gen Y/Millennials and the youth of previous generations, see "People have always whinged about young adults. Here's proof." [3]

In The Generation Myth: Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think (Basic, 2021, published in the UK as Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?), King's College London professor of public policy Bobby Duffy "argues that the discourse around generational difference is 'a mixture of fabricated battles and tiresome clichés'." In Duffy's view, most "generational difference" is a "lifecycle effect":

Sociologists give three explanations for the change in people’s attitudes and behaviours over time: period effects, lifecycle effects and cohort effects. Period effects describe change across all age groups: the result of sweeping societal shifts. Lifecycle effects describe change resulting from the ageing process or in response to key events such as leaving home, becoming a parent or retiring. Cohort effects describe change that results from shared generational experiences. Duffy, a professor of public policy, argues that the current discussion attributes too much to cohort effects and not enough to period and lifecycle effects.

In other words, many of what seem unbridgeable differences between older generations and Gen Z have to do with the phase of life, late adolescence and young adulthood, that Gen Z is passing through. Older people judge younger people not in comparison to the way they actually behaved when they were the same age, but in comparison to an idealized memory distorted by the way they are today: older, sadder, perhaps wiser, and probably further behind the technological curve.

One common complaint about (many) members of Gen Z is their sense of entitlement. Teachers complain that students seem to want infinitely flexible deadlines and to receive good grades no matter what their actual effort or achievement. This isn't because Gen Z members are uniquely lazy or incompetent, but because students have vastly more leverage now than in the past.

"What grades really mean," by Jorge Cham, 2014. Image source: Piled Higher and Deeper (www.phdcomics.com)

2. "Liking" good grades

Grades have little to do with learning. They do not measure it, and if anything the emphasis placed on grades (a short-term goal based on punishment for failure) is actually counterproductive to expanding students' knowledge and capacities (a long-term and cumulative project based on engaging and rewarding curiosity).

There's another way in which grades are a meaningless measure: they shift over time so that similar levels of proficiency receive ever-higher levels of assessment. Grade inflation is real, but it is not the fault of either students or instructors. It is the inescapable result of our dysfunctional system of funding higher education. As Lorna Finlayson writes about the UK higher education system in "Everyone Hates Marking" [4]:

The proportion of firsts [first-class honours degrees] has more than doubled in the last ten years: it's simply not plausible that the overall standard of education has risen dramatically in this period. What has changed is the marketisation of universities, which introduced pressures that make so-called inflation inevitable, linking institutions' material fortunes to league table positions while financially incentivising the 'recruitment' of as many students as possible.

In both the US and Britain, state support of public higher education has plummeted. This has been a long-term trend over the past several decades, and its negative effects are now unavoidable. Colleges and universities are expected to make up the difference between lower levels of state support and ever-higher operating expenses by enrolling more students and charging higher tuition. In order to attract more students and charge them more, schools have to compete with each other in catering to their wants.

Of course, it's a Catch-22: more students require more dorms, more classrooms, more instructors, more support staff, and more library books, increasing costs further. And raising tuition is not only directly counter to the mission of public universities to provide an affordable education to every state resident who qualifies, it burdens students with ever-higher levels of debt.

Most of the additional instructors who are being hired to teach these larger undergraduate cohorts are part-time, non-tenure track adjunct lecturers. Since they generally have no research responsibilities, their continued employment from semester to semester is dependent almost entirely on good student evaluations of their teaching. However, student evaluations do not correlate with learning and have been shown to exhibit systematic gender, age, and racial bias. In addition, instructors who are perceived to be "tough graders" receive lower evaluations, particularly if they are women. [5]

Since it's so strongly in the economic interest of colleges and universities to enlarge enrollments, it's no mystery why grades for similar levels of proficiency keep moving up the scale: we have created a system in which, to remain employed, instructors must chase "likes" from their students. And students like good grades.

"Will press lever for food" by Craig Swanson. Image source: Perspicuity (www.perspicuity.com)

3. The Reaction Economy

This is an example of what William Davies terms "The Reaction Economy" [6]. He writes,

The behaviourist tradition that came to dominate American psychology in the 20th century, pioneered by John B. Watson after the First World War and later identified with B.F. Skinner, was established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable. Psychology would abandon any theory of mind in favour of data on observable behaviour. Behaviourists imagined a wholly conditioned, programmable person. . .

The behaviourist tradition has revealed a lot about how humans (and other animals) respond to different stimuli. . .But it tells us nothing about the vast amounts of time and labour that societies such as ours now invest in actively trying to generate and capture reactions of various kinds, not just in science laboratories or hospitals, but across the economy, public sphere and civil society.

On the contrary: far from telling us nothing about the reaction economy, behaviorism's explicit goal is "predictable and thereby controllable" responses; think of laboratory rats pressing levers for a reward. And the biggest behaviorist experiment in human history is currently underway. On social media, search engines and other commercial sites companies track your "engagement," clicks and "likes," and sell your attention to advertisers based on predictions of your behavior. Your responses to the ads you see become more data points in an endless feedback loop. This system has been memorably described by social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff as "surveillance capitalism." And the engine driving it is the technology sector centered in Northern California that since at least 1970 has been called Silicon Valley.

Cupertino, California: Aerial photo of Apple new campus building, April 13, 2017. Photo credit: Uladzik Kryhin. Image source: Shutterstock

4. Silicon Valley

The man who founded what became Silicon Valley was William Shockley. As a researcher at Bell Labs in New Jersey after World War II Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which he and his colleagues jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. That same year he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in what was then known as the Santa Clara Valley. A key reason for Shockley's choice of location: his mother lived in Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and the next town over as you headed north from Mountain View towards San Francisco.

Shockley had a good eye for talent, but as John Lanchester writes in "Putting the Silicon in Silicon Valley" [7], he was "an outstandingly horrible human being." He divorced his wife when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, he actively promoted racist and eugenicist views, and few could stand to work with or for him. Just a year after the founding of Shockley Semiconductor eight of its leading researchers left to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. A decade later two of the eight, Robert Noyce (co-inventor of the integrated circuit) and Gordon Moore (formulator of Moore's Law) split off from Fairchild to form Intel. Along with Texas Instruments, Fairchild and Intel dominated microchip design for decades.

But manufacturing chips was expensive, even in the low-wage nonunion states to which these companies moved their production, and in 1968 to increase profits Texas Instruments built a chip fabrication plant in Taiwan. Lanchester writes, "The investment would also give the US a stake in defending Taiwan, at a time when America’s enthusiasm for Asian military adventures was at a low ebb. TI committed to build their Taiwan fab [fabrication plant] in 1968. In 1980 they shipped their billionth chip. A new strategy was in place."

A key figure in the strategic integration of Taiwan into the microchip supply chain and thus the US military perimeter was a man named Morris Chang. Born in mainland China in 1931, he emigrated to the US in 1949, and after getting bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT and a TI-sponsored PhD at Stanford, eventually became vice-president in charge of TI's microchip division.

After leaving TI, in 1987 Chang founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which for decades has produced many of the most advanced microchips. Advanced microchips are crucial to the development of new military technologies, including AI.

Risk 60th Anniversary Edition Board Game created by by Albert Lamorisse and produced by Hasbro. Image source: Best Buy

5. Meet the new strategy, same as the old strategy

A major driver of China's interest in absorbing Taiwan is that by seizing the world's most advanced microchip fabrication plants it would control the chip supply to the rest of the world—most especially the US—and gain a large technological and military advantage.

As Lanchester writes,

China has to import powerful microchips. The numbers involved are substantial. For most of this century, China has spent more money on importing microchips than it has on importing oil. . .China is acutely aware of its dependence on the West in this area.

In October 2022, the Biden administration instituted a ban on advanced microchip exports to China by US companies and any foreign companies that use US microchips—in practice, a global ban (although enforcing it is another question).

This has disturbing parallels with the events leading up to World War II in the Pacific. In July 1940 the US placed an aviation fuel and scrap iron embargo on an expansionist Japan that had already brutally invaded and occupied Manchuria and was in renewed conflict with China. In September 1940 Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The US imposed a total oil embargo in August 1941; four months later on 7 December Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and a month after that invaded the Dutch East Indies, a major producer of rubber and oil. [8]

Lanchester concludes,

The chip ban has been described as a 'declaration of economic war'. And perhaps not only economic war. The assumption in military circles is that AI is going to be crucial to the next wave of innovation in warfare. The AI revolution will depend on new chip technology. The second Cold War is going to be a military-technological contest just like the first one, and once again semiconductors are going to be central. We are starting to get glimpses of what that might look like, with the first arrivals of drone swarms on battlefields. Coming soon: unmanned vehicles, fire-and-forget missiles, 'loitering munition systems' and facial recognition assassination drones. Advanced chips are as crucial to the process of designing new weapons systems as to the weapons themselves, because the majority of testing for these systems is done on computers. Fingers crossed that all this helps with avoiding World War Three.

Yeah—embargoes worked so well at heading off World War II.

Update 5 July 2023: An article in The Guardian today, "Chip Wars" by Amy Hawkins, reports that the Biden administration is considering expanding existing restrictions to include some less advanced chips, as well as some cloud services. The Netherlands, home of advanced-chip maker ASML, is also expected to increase its restrictions. On 30 June the Dutch government announced that export restrictions on photolithography equipment manufactured by ASML that is used to etch circuits onto microchips would go into effect on 1 September.

Update 16 November 2025: In late October of this year Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of Harvard College (the undergraduate programs of Harvard University), released a report on grade inflation at her institution. It points out that "in 2005, As accounted for 24% of all grades awarded in Harvard College; in 2015, for 40.3%; in 2025, for 60.2%." Harvard's median undergraduate grade-point average is now 4.0.

Students self-report spending about 12 hours per week per course on academic work, which is similar to the time spent in 2005. However, faculty in reading-intensive disciplines report that students are entering their classes "with less experience reading complex prose and less capacity for focus and sustained attention," and that in response "they've had to trim some readings and drop others entirely, that they've had to switch from novels to short stories." And yet grades inexorably keep rising.

Claybaugh's white paper points to a number of reasons for this, but a key one is competition for resources. You might think that Harvard would be insulated from these sorts of market pressures on grades; it has the largest endowment of any university in the world, which is approaching US$60 billion, and can afford to reject 96% of applicants. However, Claybaugh writes that faculty "know that they are competing with one another for students. With good enrollments come guaranteed teaching for graduate students, the possibility of more faculty lines for departments, and the opportunity to introduce students to the subjects we've devoted our lives to studying. It makes sense, in this context, for faculty to lower standards in order to raise enrollments. 'Grading at Harvard is in a race to the bottom,' one faculty member observed. 'This is a classic game theory problem.'" In this case, of course, "the bottom" is the top of the grading scale. And if this is true at Harvard, of all places, grade inflation pressures are even greater at institutions that are more dependent on enrollments simply to meet their operating expenses.

---

1. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 4, 16 February 2023: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/joe-moran/gen-z-and-me
2. The Rhetoric of Aristotle, translated, with an analysis and critical notes, by J.E.C. Welldon. Macmillan, 1886, Book II, Section xii, pp. 164-166 (translation slightly altered). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxjtry&view=1up&seq=216
3. Amanda Ruggeri, "People have always whinged about young adults. Here's proof." BBC Worklife, 2 October 2017. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20171003-proof-that-people-have-always-complained-about-young-adults.
   See also: John Protzko and Jonathan W. Schooler, 2019, "Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking," Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 10:eaav5916. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6795513/pdf/aav5916.pdf;
   Jessica Kitt, 2013, "Kids These Days: An Analysis of the Rhetoric against Youth across Five Generations," https://cah.ucf.edu/writingrhetoric/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2019/10/KWS2_Kitt.pdf
4. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 6, 16 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/lorna-finlayson/diary
5. Heather E. Campbell, 2019, "JPAE at 25: Looking back and moving forward on teaching evaluations," Journal of Public Affairs Education, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 23-29, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2018.1558823
6. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 5, 2 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/william-davies/the-reaction-economy
7. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 6, 16 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley
8. See "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," in Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, Pantheon, 1969, pp. 159-220.

Suggested reading: Hidden costs

This edition of Suggested Reading is about the hidden (and not-so-hidden) costs of actions we take and choices we make, often unthinkingly.

Container ships waiting to be unloaded at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles last week.
Image source: New York Times.

1. Shipping

In one sense, the cost of shipping is essentially zero. As John Lanchester explains in the London Review of Books, thanks to the innovation of the shipping container in the 1950s loading and unloading a ship more than 1000 feet long now requires a matter of hours and a few crane operators, not days or weeks and dozens of men. Sailing huge vessels holding perhaps 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (i.e., 20-foot-long containers) across thousands of miles of ocean involves crews of only 20 or 25.

But the negligible direct costs of shipping means that "90 Per Cent of Everything" (in the words of Rose George) is grown, extracted or made across the globe from where it is consumed. I live in one of the most productive farming regions of the planet, and yet find agricultural products from Mexico, Chile, South Africa and Australia on display in my corner grocery. The huge towers for the wind turbines currently being installed in the North Sea are made in Vietnam, one of the low-wage, low-regulation countries to which manufacturing in many sectors has shifted. The first five shirts in my closet were sewn in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, respectively, but the constituent materials (raw cotton, cloth, thread and buttons) may have been sourced from three or four other countries. In 2013 Planet Money traced the supply chain for the show's T-shirts and found that it involved multiple countries and 20,000 miles of travel (if interested in more detail you can view the 15-minute video series or listen to the full 120-minute, 6-episode podcast).

Such lengthy and complex supply chains are marvels of logistics—until they break down. And that breakdown can be due to many disrupting factors, a situation recently brought home, as it were, by the Ever Given (the ship that in March got stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic for six days) and by the recent and continuing shortages of gas, lumber, food, PPE, computer chips, and batteries. In some cases low supply and spiking prices are due to a shortage of raw materials; in some cases, a shortage of workers; in some cases, a shortage of transport; and in some cases, political hostility.

And although shipping is energy-efficient, because of its immense and increasing volume it has significant environmental effects:

. . .marine transportation still generates negative impacts on the marine environment, including air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, releases of ballast water containing aquatic invasive species, historical use of antifoulants, oil and chemical spills, dry bulk cargo releases, garbage, underwater noise pollution, ship-strikes on marine megafauna, risk of ship grounding or sinkings, and widespread sediment contamination of ports during transshipment or ship breaking activities.

In addition, Lanchester reports that the International Transport Workers Federation estimates that 2,000 crewmen lose their lives at sea every year. Some things to think about the next time you reach for that out-of-season tomato grown in a different hemisphere.

Image source: Kew.org

2. Cotton tote bags

Although consumerism causes environmental damage, we are often told that the solution lies in being better consumers. Plastic bags, for example, ultimately wind up in landfill or the oceans, where they can persist for centuries. So clearly when we go shopping we should be using one of those ubiquitous cotton tote bags rather than plastic. And an organic cotton tote would be the greenest choice of all, no?

Not necessarily. Cotton is a highly water-intensive crop grown in increasingly drought-prone areas. And although cotton grown with organic methods has a significantly better environmental profile than cotton grown using conventional (i.e., polluting and worker-exposing pesticide- and herbicide-dependent) methods, it has a significantly lower yield per acre. Also, the vast majority of the world's cotton is grown and harvested in countries where forced labor or child labor has been documented in its production, such as India, China, Brazil, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Mali, and Benin (eight of the top ten cotton producers in 2021/22, according to the ICAC; the other two are the US (#3) and Australia (#8)).

As Grace Cook reported recently in the New York Times, the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark recently estimated that a single organic cotton tote bag needs to be used daily for 54 years (that is, 20,000 times) to match the human and environmental costs of a low-density polyethylene (LDPE) shopping bag that is reused once as a garbage bag and then incinerated. By their estimate a conventionally-grown cotton tote "only" requires 7100 uses, or a mere 20 years of daily use, to offset its excess costs over LDPE, while a brown paper bag requires 43 uses. We can be skeptical of these figures while at the same time recognizing that choices of plant fibers and even organic agricultural methods can have costs that we have not taken into account. (For the record: I'm in favor of both.) Take note if you (like me) have a pile of cotton totes at home: maybe the next time you are offered a "free" new tote bag, you should turn it down.

Image source: Sulamith Sallmann, CC BY-SA 4.0

3. The vinyl revival

In 2019 I predicted we'd reached peak vinyl. As with my prescient previous predictions about the quick demise of desktop computers, tablets, and smart phones, I couldn't have been more wrong (hey, at least my record of bad market predictions remains unbroken!). In 2020 sales of vinyl records surpassed those of CDs for the first time since 1986, according to the RIAA. And it wasn't even close: vinyl sales totaled $626 million, while CD sales totaled $483 million.

But the toxic impact of the production of vinyl records has been well documented for decades. Vinyl records are made of petroleum-derived polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is condensed from vinyl chloride gas, a known carcinogen. Most of the PVC pellets used in the production of records come from Thailand, where environmental regulations and worker protections are lax. US producers of PVC pellets also have poor records: in 2004, executives of Keysor Century Corporation pleaded guilty to felony charges for "exposing workers to toxic fumes, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and dumping toxic wastewater" into the Santa Clara River, as Kyle Devine writes in The Guardian. The company agreed to pay a $4.3 million fine and was ordered to stop production. It declared bankruptcy, leaving behind contaminated soil and groundwater at its industrial plant, which in June 2005 was designated a Superfund site.

So clearly the green solution is to stream music rather than purchasing physical media, no? Not necessarily. As Devine writes,

. . .digital media [are] physical media, too. Although digital audio files seem virtual, they rely on infrastructures of data storage, processing and transmission that have potentially higher greenhouse gas emissions than the petrochemical plastics used in the production of more obviously physical formats such as LPs—to stream music is to burn coal, uranium and gas [uranium isn't burned, but never mind]. . .The devices required to access those infrastructures—smartphones, tablets, laptops—rely on the exploitation of natural and human resources around the world. These products then quickly succumb to fashion and obsolescence, ending up at dump sites, making further claims on other people and places.

Although streaming is more energy-efficient per track than vinyl, that efficiency is offset by increased use. According to MRC/Billboard, in 2020 in the US there were 873 billion song streams. At the official equivalency rate of 10 tracks per album, this represents 87.3 billion albums, as compared to 27.5 million vinyl albums shipped. This means that for every album purchased on vinyl more than 3000 album equivalents were streamed. And while Spotify has released data suggesting that the carbon footprint of their server farms is decreasing, this relies on an accounting trick: Spotify is outsourcing its streaming infrastructure to Google Cloud. Devine points out that "as more and more streaming services subcontract their data storage and processing needs to cloud corporations, they also subcontract responsibility for the energy requirements and carbon emissions of digital music." Devine concludes, "Music, like pretty much everything else, is caught up in petro-capitalism."

Amazon Ring. Image source: Wikimedia

4. Amazon Ring and Apple AirTag

In 2018 Amazon bought the video doorbell company Ring for around $1.5 billion, and immediately did two things: it created the Neighbors app, which allows users to upload video and photos from their Ring cameras as they post about anyone seen in their neighborhood that they consider suspicious. And Amazon partnered with more than 1800 police departments, enabling them to request recorded images directly from Ring users without a warrant. In the year ending last April, more than 22,000 separate requests were made.

As Lauren Bridges writes in The Guardian, "once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared"; this includes the application of biased facial recognition technology. In the month of December 2019 alone it's estimated that nearly half a million Ring cameras were sold. Bridges concludes that Ring

is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property [ordinarily protected by Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure] and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. . .Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen.

Ring doorbells and cameras (along with Echo speakers) are also by default incorporated into Amazon Sidewalk, a shared wireless network intended to help solve connection problems for its "smart" home technologies. Users of Ring and Echo are given a very limited time to opt out of Sidewalk, after which their bandwidth becomes generally available to neighbors and passers-by to enable their devices to stay connected (and monitored) and to extend the range of tracking devices such as Tile.

Image source: The Conversation

Not to be left out of the surreptitious surveillance market, Apple has developed AirTag, a small tracking device that can be attached to personal items such as luggage, purses, or keys. AirTags themselves do not broadcast GPS location data—instead they ping any AirTag-compatible Apple device within 300 feet (if you have an iPhone 11 or later or are running iOS 14.5 or later, AirTag is enabled by default). The device uploads its location and the AirTag ID to Apple's servers, from which they are transmitted to the AirTag's owner.

To prevent your phone from being used in this way you must turn off both Bluetooth connectivity and location tracking. But then, of course, you can't operate your phone hands-free, use Bluetooth-connected speakers, earbuds or hearing aids, navigate using GPS, or even locate your phone itself if you misplace it.

The potential for AirTags to be used for tracking someone's movements without their knowledge is immediately apparent. Apple claims to have incorporated safeguards to alert potential stalking victims that they are being tracked in this way, including beeps from the AirTag itself. However, as Paul Haskell-Dowland writes on The Conversation blog,

One experiment showed a tag can be placed on a person and would not trigger any of the safeguards if reconnected to the stalker’s device regularly enough. This could be done by the victim returning home or within range of their stalker within a three-day window.

In essence, Haskell-Dowland writes, if you own an iPhone you are part of "an Apple-operated surveillance network in which millions of us are unwitting participants."

Image source: The Conversation

5. Microsoft Excel

How not to Excel at economics: In 2010 the world was struggling to emerge from the Great Recession. The global financial system had teetered on the brink of collapse, and unemployment, foreclosure and eviction were widespread in wealthy industrialized countries such as the US and the UK. Governments were scrambling to find ways to encourage economic growth. At that moment two prominent Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published a paper that purported to show that in countries in which government debt exceeded 90% of GDP, the economy shrank. 

Obviously, you don't want to address an economy in recession by implementing policies that will make it shrink further. Britain's then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, cited the work of Reinhart and Rogoff as his justification when later in 2010 he imposed a decade-long policy of austerity. Additional government support for those who had lost their jobs and homes would not be forthcoming.

There was only one problem: in 2013 it became apparent that Reinhart and Rogoff's data actually showed that in countries where government debt exceeded 90% of GDP, the economy, instead of shrinking, grew by an annual average of 2.2%. In other words there was no basis for austerity measures, which could actually be counterproductive.

How could two economists at the peak of their profession get it wrong so spectacularly and so publicly? Leaving aside the question of political prejudice, the answer is that they did their calculations in Microsoft Excel.

Excel is a very widely used tool, but it has some highly problematic features. One is that formulas are hidden: when you apply an Excel formula to derive a value it is not apparent just by looking at the results which data cells have been used in the calculation. You have to be able to click into the spreadsheet itself to see how the formulas have been defined.

In 2013 a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Thomas Herndon, and two faculty members, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, were attempting to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff's findings from the data published in their influential paper, and discovered that they were unable to do so. They requested a copy of the original spreadsheet used to make the calculations, and amazingly Reinhart and Rogoff still had it and were willing to share it. Once Herndon was able to examine the spreadsheet he discovered that Reinhart and Rogoff had made a basic error. In calculating the change in GDP they had inadvertently omitted from their averaging formula the data for five countries out of their 20-country sample: minor economies such as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark. (They all rank in the top 25 countries in the world in GDP per capita, ahead of the U.K., France, Japan, and Italy.)

In other words, as Jonathan Borwein and David H. Bailey write in The Conversation, "the key conclusion of a seminal paper, which has been widely quoted in political debates in North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, was invalid." And the austerity policies it was used to justify may have set back economic recovery for years, causing untold damage to ordinary people's lives.

Image source: Gov.uk

Viral errors: In October 2020 Public Health England (PHE) announced that 16,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases were missing from their data for the previous eight days. Although before the data were sent to PHE most people who tested positive had been notified by the places they'd gotten tested, the cases were not entered into PHE's records or into the Test and Trace system of the National Health Service (NHS) until after the error was discovered. How could 16,000 COVID-19 cases simply disappear from the public health system as the virus was starting to surge once more?

As Paul Clough writes in The Conversation, the culprit was once again Excel. PHE was loading the data it received from testing companies and hospitals as comma-separated values (a format widely used to prevent the inadvertent introduction of error) into Excel templates for forwarding to the NHS and other agencies. But in the older version of Excel they were using templates can store only limited amounts of data (sufficient for about 1,400 cases). The rest of the data exceeded the storage limits and simply wasn't saved or forwarded, and for more than a week no one noticed. Newer versions of Excel can store more data, but there are far more robust and checkable data storage and transfer systems that could and should have been used.

As a result of this error, many of those who came into contact with those 16,000 infected and infectious people were not notified that they'd been exposed until enough time had gone by for them to have passed on the virus to others. That due to their poor data practices, the agency tasked with monitoring public health enabled more than a week's worth of untraced transmission involving these cases just at the moment that a new wave of infections was building (and before any vaccine was available) may have had devastating impacts.

Image source: The Conversation

Garbled genes: Another problematic feature of Excel is autoformatting. The spreadsheet has been programmed to recognize certain types of data, and automatically reformats them.

As is well known by anyone who has ever had a text or email message autocorrected into gibberish, these "helpful" features can be highly annoying. But when Excel has been used to store scientific information, any such changes are more than an irritation—they corrupt the data. And as researchers from the US National Institutes of Health discovered in 2004, there are at least 30 gene names, including medically important ones, that Excel interprets as dates. For example, the tumor suppressor gene DEC1 (Deleted in Esophagal Cancer 1) is automatically converted by Excel into the date 1-Dec. And, of course, "1-Dec" is just what Excel displays; the internal code assigned to this date is 36129. In other words, everywhere DEC1 appears in a list of gene names in Excel, it is automatically replaced by the date code 36129. As the NIH researchers wrote, "These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered."

But this problem has been known since 2004, and so surely researchers stopped using Excel to store genetic data long ago, right?

Wrong. In 2016 Mark Ziemann and his colleagues were digging into the supplementary data files of a highly cited journal article and discovered Excel autoformat gene name substitutions. They decided to investigate how widespread the problem still was by downloading the supplementary Excel files from 3600 articles published in 18 different journals over the previous decade (that is, since the publication of the NIH report warning about the autoformat problem). They found that 20% of articles with supplementary Excel gene lists contained the errors. They published an open access article detailing their findings with the alarming but accurate title "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature."

As a result of this article the Human Genome Organisation's Gene Nomenclature Committee, the international body responsible for official gene names, took the extraordinary step of renaming the most problematic genes. For example, SEPT1 (Septin 1) was renamed SEPTIN1 so that Excel wouldn't misinterpret it. This makes research involving problematic gene names more difficult to search—both new and old gene names now need to be looked for—but given the extent of the problem such a step seemed warranted. And surely now that the problem had been highlighted again and the gene names had been changed, the problem was solved. Right?

Wrong again. This year Ziemann and Mandhri Abeysooriya repeated the analysis on a broader sample of articles published since 2014, and discovered that the problem is even worse. Nearly 30% of their sample of more than 11,000 articles with supplementary Excel gene lists contained autoformat errors (up from 20% in 2016). As they write,

Although changes to gene names and software will help, they won’t solve the overarching problem with spreadsheets: that (i) errors occur silently, (ii) errors can be hidden amongst thousands of rows of data, and (iii) they are difficult to audit. . .The difficulty in auditing spreadsheets makes them generally incompatible with the principles of computational reproducibility.

Suggested reading: Technocracy unbound

Image source: The Guardian

1. Graded on where you live

You may not have followed the story about A-level results in Britain last summer; after all, for non-Brits another country's college entrance exams may seem pretty remote from their own daily crises. But it's worth taking a closer look because it starkly illustrates how, under the guise of "objectivity," algorithms can perpetuate injustice.

The General Certificate of Education Advanced Level test in the UK is somewhat equivalent to the SAT or ACT in the US: it's used to determine what university or other post-secondary education a student qualifies for, if any. Falling short means that you don't qualify. Obviously for students the stakes are huge.

As has been well documented, "standardized" tests are anything but: scores on such tests in the US correlate more strongly with factors such as race, family income and parental education level than they do with success in college and beyond (non-normalized high school grades correlate more strongly with college success than SAT scores). Increasingly colleges and universities in the US are de-emphasizing or even (as in the case of the University of California system) eliminating the SAT or ACT as requirements for admission, since their role in perpetuating systemic educational inequities is so clear. [1]

In the UK last spring the A-levels had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closing of schools. Universities were faced with making admission decisions based only on the A-level grades as assessed by teachers. Britain's Department for Education directed that, to prevent grade inflation, the assessed grades should be adjusted by the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual). Ofqual developed an algorithm to adjust the assessed A-level grades based on the A-level grades earned by students at the same schools over the previous three years, how those grades related to national averages, and whatever adjustments were needed to fit scores to a pre-determined national distribution. [2]

The results were disastrous, and disastrously unfair: nearly 40% of teacher's assessments of their students were downgraded. High-performing students from disadvantaged schools were more likely to see their assessed grade reduced, while students attending schools with historically above-average results were more likely to see their grades raised. As Kenan Malik writes,

Algorithms are, as the writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness puts it, "prejudice engines". The data with which they are fed is inevitably tainted by the prejudices and biases of the human world. Unchecked, that feeds into the results they produce. And where algorithms make predictions, those prejudices and biases are projected into the future.

The reason the exam algorithms penalised pupils from disadvantaged schools is that this is the algorithm built into real life. The education system has long served to thwart the ambitions of working-class pupils and to ease the path of the more privileged ones. The results debacle is but a sharper expression of what usually happens year after year. [3]

In one school, over the previous three years 8 out of 64 students (12.5%) earned the highest grade (A*), and none received a U ("unclassified," or fail). If those patterns held for the 27 students from that school taking A-levels in 2020 you would expect 3 students to earn an A* and none to receive a U. However, the algorithm predicted that only 5.7% (or 1.5 students) from that school would earn an A*, and 2.3% (or 0.62 students) would receive a U. Obviously you can't assign a grade to a fraction of a student, so the number who received algorithmically-assigned A* grades was reduced to 1, and the number who received a failing grade was increased to 1. This process was applied at every school: if the algorithm predicted a non-zero probability of a U, the student with the lowest teacher-assessed grade had to be assigned a U, even if their assessed grade was much higher. [4]

As you might guess, the downgraded results inspired outrage. Following days of vociferous protests by students, parents, teachers, and school administrators, the education secretary Gavin Williamson made a complete U-turn: the algorithm's assignments would be discarded and the teachers' assessments would be the A-level grades of record. But by then it was too late: universities had awarded places in their incoming classes based on the algorithm. Although the change back to teacher assessments meant more students qualified for university entrance, there were no places left for them.

Jessica Johnson. Image source: The Guardian

"I've fallen into my story": One of the affected students was Jessica Johnson, who had won an Orwell Foundation Youth Prize in 2019 for a story about school results being assigned by a biased algorithm based on social class. Then in 2020 her own teacher-assessed English A-level grade of A was reduced to a B by Ofqual's algorithm. She had been admitted to her first-choice school, the University of St Andrews, but the offer was withdrawn when her grade was lowered. "I've fallen into my story. It's crazy," Johnson said.

Her real-life story, at least, ended well: after the A-level grades were reverted to teacher assessments, her withdrawn place in the incoming class at the University of St Andrews was reinstated. Not everyone was so lucky, though. An unfair algorithm had changed the lives of thousands of students.

"We got told you can go wherever you want in life if you work hard enough," Johnson said before the U-turn, "but we've seen this year that no matter how hard you worked, you got given a grade based on where you live." [5]

Eyal Weizman, founding director of Forensic Architecture. Image source: Goldsmiths

2. Human rights as a security threat

Last February Eyal Weizman was scheduled to give a talk at the opening of an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in Miami devoted to the work of Forensic Architecture, the London-based nonprofit organization of which he is founding director. But Weizman never made it onto the plane. Two days before his flight his visa was revoked with no reason given and without the possibility of appeal. When he went to the US Embassy to reapply, he was told that "the 'algorithm' had identified a security threat."

Forensic Architecture uses the tools of computer image and audio analysis and 3D modelling to investigate suspected human rights violations. The MOAD exhibit featured Forensic Architecture's work on a CIA drone strike in Pakistan, a Chicago police killing, the Israeli bombing of Rafah, and ICE's Homestead detention center in Florida.

Weizman, a Fellow of the prestigious British Academy, was requested by the US Embassy to provide 15 years of his travel history and the names of anyone he'd been in contact with who might have triggered the algorithm. He writes,

we are being electronically monitored for a set of connections—the network of associations, people, places, calls and transactions—that make up our lives. Such network analysis poses many problems, some of which are well known. Working in human rights means being in contact with vulnerable communities, activists and experts, and being entrusted with sensitive information. These networks are the lifeline of any investigative work. I am alarmed that relations among our colleagues, stakeholders and staff are being targeted by the US government as security threats. 

Weizman refused to comply, but the information is likely known to government agencies anyway. As has long been the case, those who monitor governments are themselves placed under intensified governmental surveillance.

Since the MOAD exhibit opened, Forensic Architecture has continued its investigations: they have produced reports on the massive Beirut port explosion, police brutality at Black Lives Matter protests, and the exposure of personally identifiable data collected by COVID-19 contact-tracing software. As Weizman writes, "Our work seeks to demonstrate that we can invert the forensic gaze and turn it against the actors—police, military, secret service, border agencies—that aim to monopolise information." [6]

Image source: The Guardian

3. Eliminating cars, increasing traffic

Speaking of technocratic solutions gone awry: London has done much that is promoted by "green city" advocates. It has virtually eliminated private cars in the central city at peak times, offers a ubiquitous public transportation network and has built "cycle superhighways." And yet, as Gwyn Topham notes in The Guardian, until the pandemic hit London traffic had reached the point of gridlock. The reasons are many:

• Uber and Lyft: Although ride-sharing promised to take private cars off the road, in fact it increased them: the number of licensed private-hire vehicles in London went up more than 75% to nearly 90,000 between 2013 and 2017. And ride-shares seem to cannibalize public transportation and taxis rather than reducing individual car use. Not to mention that at any given moment, about a third of ride-share vehicles on the road are empty of passengers. The Union of Concerned Scientists has found that due to "deadheading" (travelling without a passenger) and the use of ride-sharing instead of lower- or non-emission alternatives such as public transit or walking, "ride-hailing trips produce 47 percent more carbon emissions than a similar trip taken in your own private car. . .[and] are 69 percent more polluting on average than the transportation options they displace." [7]
  

• Delivery vans: Supposedly a more efficient way for us to receive stuff, our delivery system is an overlapping network of companies, routes and drivers. A single household might receive three or four separate deliveries over the course of a day; an office building might receive dozens. Amazon Prime and other next-day shipments are an especial problem, because instead of being efficiently consolidated deliveries are made one item at a time.
  

• Bicycle lanes: Dedicated bicycle lanes are safer for cyclists (though not for the pedestrians who have to dodge them), but they reduce the road space available to buses, slowing them down. And buses are far more efficient at moving people around the city than bikes. Not to mention that buses, unlike bikes, are broadly accessible to disabled riders and can transport people in all sorts of weather. However, when buses are slowed by traffic they lose ridership. One London bus route measured in 2016 had an average speed of 4 mph, which is only slightly faster than most people walk.

• Decentralized decisionmaking: Local government is better and more responsive than remote central government, no? But some issues are best resolved at a higher level than the local. London is a patchwork of 32 boroughs plus The City, leading to contradictory policies and congestion-creating inefficiencies. The head of a London bus company states, "Regent Street [which runs for little more than a mile between Regent's Park and Pall Mall] had 36 different operators doing recycling. Each person was doing the right thing, but add them all up together. . ." [8]

This is not to say that all these things are only bad. But lack of coordination among different entities with different priorities leads to a situation of cross-purposes and stand-still, which is realized quite literally on urban streets.

Image source: Huffington Post

4. Management by algorithm: Uber and Lyft's business model

In November 2020 California voters, swayed by a relentless $200 million dollar ad campaign paid for by Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Instacart, overwhelmingly passed Proposition 22. Prop 22, authored by the same companies, exempted their "independent contractor" drivers from California Assembly Bill 5 (passed in 2019), which had reclassified them as employees with rights such as unemployment insurance, health insurance, minimum wage, and collective bargaining. Uber and Lyft had never complied with the provisions of AB 5.

The majority of voters might have been less susceptible to Uber and Lyft's manipulative ads had they understood more about their business model and practices. As researcher Aaron Benanav has written in The Guardian,

One might assume that misclassifying drivers as independent contractors enables rideshare companies such as Uber to make exorbitant profits. The reality is far weirder. In fact, Uber and Lyft are not making any profits at all. On the contrary, the companies have been haemorrhaging cash for years, undercharging users for rides in a bid to aggressively expand their market shares worldwide. Squeezing drivers' salaries is not their main strategy for becoming profitable. Doing so merely slows the speed at which they burn through money.

The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers. Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft's long-term business plans. [9]

As has become clear to drivers since Prop 22 went into effect. While it supposedly guaranteed that drivers would earn at least 120 percent of minimum wage and receive health care stipends, the proposition is full of loopholes that enable the companies to evade these promises. A study by Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich of the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that under Prop 22's provisions:

• waiting or travel time between passengers is not counted as work time,
• mileage and insurance costs while drivers are between passengers are unreimbursed, and while they are engaged with passengers are under-reimbursed,
• the majority of drivers don't qualify for the health care stipends,
• as independent contractors, drivers must pay both the employer and employee share of payroll taxes and do not receive paid rest breaks, paid meal breaks, paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, or worker's compensation insurance.

The authors calculate that the true guaranteed wage paid by Uber and Lyft under Prop 22 after subtracting for unpaid time and un- or under-paid costs is actually $5.64 per hour. California minimum wage is currently $13 per hour, 130% greater. [10]

A scare tactic used in the ad campaign was that Uber and Lyft rides would become more expensive if Prop 22 didn't pass in order to pay for employee benefits mandated under AB5. Prop 22 passed, and Uber and Lyft have raised their passenger charges anyway. Meanwhile, drivers report that their pay has fallen. [11]

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1. Richard V. Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias, "Race gaps in SAT scores highlight inequality and hinder upward mobility," Brookings Institution, 2017: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/. Unfortunately, as Reeves and Halikias point out, simply making college admissions more equitable does not close racial gaps in degrees awarded. Long-term inequities in K-12 education and college preparation must also be addressed.
2. Angelique Richardson, "Elbowed off the pavement," LRB Blog, 20 August 2020: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/august/elbowed-off-the-pavement
3. Kenan Malik, "The cruel exams algorithm has laid bare the unfairness at the heart of our schools," The Guardian, 23 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/23/the-cruel-exams-algorithm-has-laid-bare-the-unfairness-at-the-heart-of-our-schools
   
4. Alex Hern, "Do the maths: Why England's A-level grading system is unfair," The Guardian, 14 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/14/do-the-maths-why-englands-a-level-grading-system-is-unfair 
5. Jessica Murray, "Student who wrote story about biased algorithm has results downgraded," The Guardian, 18 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/18/ashton-a-level-student-predicted-results-fiasco-in-prize-winning-story-jessica-johnson-ashton
6. Eyal Weizman, "The algorithm is watching you," LRB Blog, 19 February 2020: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/february/the-algorithm-is-watching-you
7. Jiayu Liang, "Ride-hailing: Convenience at what cost?" Catalyst, Spring 2020, pp. 9-11,21: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/catalyst-spring-2020.pdf
8. Gwyn Topham, "How London got rid of private cars—and grew more congested than ever," The Guardian, 11 February 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/11/how-london-got-rid-of-private-cars-and-grew-more-congested-than-ever
9. Aaron Benanav, "Why Uber's business model is doomed," The Guardian, 24 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/24/gig-economy-uber-lyft-insecurity-crisis
10. Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, "The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees only $5.64 an Hour," UC Berkeley Labor Center Blog, 31 October 2019: https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-uber-lyft-ballot-initiative-guarantees-only-5-64-an-hour-2/
    
11. Michael Sainato, "'I can't keep doing this': Gig workers say their pay has fallen after Prop 22," The Guardian, 18 February 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/18/uber-lyft-doordash-prop-22-drivers-california