2 May 2023. Technology | Music
Let’s stop messing about and just regulate the tech sector. // Fado: singing the blues.
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It’s a Bank Holiday week in the UK this week, and I’m also away. So I’m hoping to have an edition of Just Two Things out on Tuesday (today) and on Friday.
1: Let’s stop messing about and just regulate the tech sector
Scott Galloway has a long piece at his blog on the virtues of regulation and the pressing need to regulate the tech sector. He says we should think of this as regulating AI, although I’ll come back to that bit. But it underlines an important point: that we are at a moment now when regulation of the harms done by the external effects of the tech sector is feasible and possible, as well as being necessary.
(Thanks to John Naughton’s blog for the lead).
Early on in the piece he runs through a list of the recent evidence, starting with the recent leak of classified material by a young man apparently in search of social status:
The leaker’s preferred platform was Discord, which has been used to share child pornography and coordinate the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville. Discord is not alone. Recently, Instagram assisted the suicide of a young British girl by serving her images of nooses and razor blades. Facebook fueled a mob riot in Myanmar. The list goes on: Teen depression, viral misinformation, widespread distrust of national institutions, polarization, algorithms optimized for rage and radicalization … We’ve discussed this before.
(Some of these links are paywalled, by the way).
Paraphrasing Galloway here, Steve Jobs called computers “bicycles for the mind”, which is a benign enough image. But he suggests that it is more like a motorcycle for the mind. Not just any old motorcycle, but one of those over-powered high torque machines on which teenage bikers are likely to become unstuck.
The parallel is deliberate, because Galloway shares a chart of the decline in US road deaths over multiple decades, and points out that it was regulation that made the difference. (As an aside, looking at the chart below, there’s a reason why girl group songs about the death of their boyfriends on motorbikes peaked in the early to mid 60s.)
Sixty years ago the U.S. registered more than 50,000 car crash deaths annually. So we created the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and charged it with making the roads safer. If you’re under 60, this may be hard to imagine, but not that long ago, many Americans saw seat belts as an assault on their personal liberty — some cut them out of their cars. Democracy bested stupidity, however, and between 1966 and 2021, vehicular death rates in America were halved.
Regular readers will note a resonance here with one of my themes on Just Two Things about big technology waves like cars and computers—that there a comes a point in the technology’s life when it is ubiquitous, when the external costs become noticeable, and society finally decides to do something about it. And: they regulate.
Galloway notices in passing that regulation was turned into a dirty word by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, and forty years later we still get conservatives saying things like ‘bonfire of red tape’ as if they know what they are talking about and as if this would be a good thing:
We usually call this “regulation,” a word Reagan and Thatcher made synonymous with bureaucrats and red tape. Yes, air traffic control delays and the DMV are super annoying, but not crashing into another A-350 on approach to Heathrow, not suffocating as your throat swells from an allergic reaction, and being able to access the funds in your FTX account are all really awesome.
In defence of regulation: it’s the reason why your chance of dying in a plane crash is less than one in three billion:
Next time someone tells you they don’t trust government, ask them if they trust cars, food, pain killers, buildings, or airplanes.
But, of course, the one area that has largely escaped regulation is digital media and digital services.
A lethal cocktail of complexity, lobbying, cultural worship of tech leaders, and anti-government libertarian screed has rendered tech immune to the basic standards of safety and protection. Lethal is the correct term.
The tech sector is the largest in the US by market cap, yet has no regulator:
The justification for this was the go-to new-economy get-out-of-jail-free word: “innovation.” When tech was nascent and niche, we were smart to err on the side of growth vs. regulation. That movie ended a decade ago. Phones aren’t toys for early adopters, and search and social have moved beyond campuses.
Specifically, where it has moved to right now is “AI”, which apparently concerns technologists so much that they are writing self-serving open letters suggesting that we should “pause” AI. Galloway gives all of this fairly short shrift, but also says: we can take it at face value. If technologists are asking for regulation—because that is what is involved in a “pause”, we can help them out here:
We should grab this opportunity with both hands. Specifically, both hands on the wheel. Not a “pause,” which, in my view, is a bad idea. (China, Russia, and North Korea won’t pause.)... But we do need to seize this moment, likely brief, when some tech leaders have remembered the virtues of government oversight. We need a serious, sustained, and centralized effort at the federal level, perhaps a new cabinet-level agency, to take the lead in regulating … we can call it AI.
I’ll come back to the rest of his argument later, but I’d rather we didn’t call it AI, because that is one of those weasel tags that technologists use when they want to pretend that something is too complicated for everyone to understand.
(In a separate piece this week, Naughton writes about a House of Lords’ hearing on killer weapons where Lord Browne (I’m guessing this is the guy who put the ‘beyond petroleum’ into BP) makes the usual speech:
“We just have to accept that we will never get in front of this technology. We’re always going to be trying to catch up.”)
Or maybe not. “AI” is a collection of bits: Large language models, training data sets, neural networks, collection devices (such as sensors), algorithms, and all of these touch the ground at some point. They only seems like a black box because it is in the interest of the technology companies to present them like this. So let’s not regulate AI: let’s regulate all of these familiar components for their familiar flaws, starting with bias, consent, equity, accessibility, accountability, liability, safety and the other issues that regulators should properly concern themselves with.
Galloway notes that one of this issues here is that “we have incorrectly conflated wealth and innovation with character.”
A growing vein of the tech community (Venture Catastrophists) deploy weapons of mass distraction and fear to wallpaper over an inconvenient truth: The menace unleashed on America the past two decades isn’t psychotic homeless people or a crime wave, but a tech community whose products depress our teens, polarize our public and render our discourse more coarse… Our failure to regulate this sector, as we have done with every other sector, is stupid.
2: Fado: singing the blues
I’m in Portugal, and have been to see some fado. But I’m on holiday and haven’t quite got enough time to write a full Just Two Things. Some I’m re-publishing here a post about fado written after my last visit to Portugal in 2014, and published then on my Around the Edges blog.
Portuguese fado (tr: “fate”) is one of those distinctive forms of music that is easy to recognise but hard to understand unless you know the language, which I don’t.
But on a visit to the Museu do Fado in Lisbon recently, I learnt enough to make some sense of it. The Portuguese word that’s associated with fado is saudade, one of those more-or-less untranslatable words that means – inexactly – something like “longing,” one of those emotions that resonates through cultures where people have migrated through choice or through necessity.
As the Dutch anthropologist Mattijs van der Port writes in his fascinating essay (on JSTOR, if you have access) on fado‘s greatest star, Amália:
[T]he fadistas favor themes such as the unpredictable whims of fate, the transience of youth, the deceitfulness of love and the disenchantment that comes with the loss of illusions. They mourn the lost glories of the Portuguese empire, yearn for the good old days in the poverty stricken neighborhoods of Lisbon, and try to reconcile themselves with the ‘realization that any mortal desire or plan is at risk of destruction by powers beyond individual control.’
In terms of the music’s early history, it seems to be most similar to the blues. It was brought to Portugal from Brazil in the early 19th century, when Brazil was still a colony and important enough to host the Portuguese royal family’s exile during Napoleon’s Iberian campaigns.
The Salazar years
During the course of the 19th century, it became associated with Portugal’s developing working class, especially in Lisbon, Much performance was informal, and a lot was improvised, The words, according to the museum, were often “transgressive” (although it didn’t provide examples). Even the lyric form seems to have a bit of a resemblance to the blues, at least from some of the the sub-titled songs I watched: two lines repeated at the start of the verse, for example:
When I can’t see you, it makes me cry (x2)
When I see you again, I still cry (x2).
Then, of course, came the dictatorship of Salazar, the longest in 20th century Europe. Rather than try to stamp out fado he chose to co-opt it. Under the decrees of 1927, performers and venues had to be licensed, and lyrics cleared in advance by the censor. No more improvisation. In one particular way, public recognition helped. Amália, the most influential of fado singers, popularised the music globally, touring widely to places as far afield as the USSR, Japan, Israel, and South Africa, as well as the United States.
The result was that fado became identified with Salazar’s Portugal and Salazar’s regime—so much so that it was banned for two years after the “Carnation” revolution in 1974. Although it survived this, there followed a period when fado went into cultural decline, perhaps because it was associated with older people, an older inward-looking Portugal, and perhaps also the old regime. It took the emergence of Mariza, fado‘s second global star, to refresh the music, modernising it and taking it to new younger audiences.
Two guitars
But at its core, fado—at least the Lisbon version—remains simple to perform: a singer, male or female, backed by two guitarists, one playing a European acoustic guitar (apparently brought to Portugal by English expats in 19th century Lisbon and Porto) and one playing a lute-like instrument derived from the Moors, who have a history in Portugal. This is the version you’ll hear in the clubs and restaurants which play the music in Lisbon.
We listened to some live fado in Maria da Fonte’s small fado restaurant off the Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, with three singers performing during the meal. There are miserable reviews on Tripadvisor, which I’m not going to link to here, since they seem to be written by Americans complaining that (although they were clearly in a fado restaurant in Lisbon’s fado district) they were expected to be quiet when the singers were performing. I’ll skip the obvious point about checking on the rules when you’re in someone else’s culture, but one of the things I hate most about Tripadvisor is that the niggly reviews always float to the top, no matter how unrepresentative they are of the experience. We had a decent meal at a reasonable price, and the music we heard was good. And fado is, at heart, an intimate experience and a live one.
National mourning
Amália, for her part, lived long enough for her cultural role to be remembered and honoured. When she died in 1999, there were three days of national mourning. Mattijs van der Port, quoted above, jumped on a plane to Lisbon the moment he heard the news of her death. He notes:
It is not without significance that in the course I took to master the Portuguese language, fado is somehow the final destination: after you have struggled your way through all the many tenses, the last exercise of the book is the translation of a fado, as if to show to yourself just how deeply you have penetrated the Portuguese sense of Being. At the time of her death, Amália was an icon of this Portugal. The queen of fado is hailed as ‘the link between the soul of Portugal and the hearts of all the Portuguese’ (a ligagao entre a alma de Portugal e o coragao de todos os Portugueses), ‘national unanimity’ (unanimidade national) or ‘the complete symbol of a country and a city’ (um simbolo máximo de umpais e de uma cidade).
At the same time, though, this also explains the ambivalence about the music among many younger Portuguese:
This equation of Amalia with fado, and fado with the alleged melancholy and fatalism of the Portuguese nation may help to explain the resentment the singer provokes among young aspiring cosmopolitans such as my friends in the Portuguese capital. … They prefer a more up-beat spirit to guide their actions – the spirit of the Portuguese discoverers, that was the main inspiration for the 1998 world exhibition, rather than Amália’s sighs – and feel hindered by the ‘master fiction’ that portrays the Portuguese as a sad and fatalist people. ‘The thing that shocked me most about the death of Amalia,’ said Paulo, ‘is the fact that so many people found the time to go to the funeral. Don’t they have to work or what?’
And for reference
I wrote a piece here on business transition in two instalments earlier in January. I have now re-posted this as a single, if lengthy, article on my blog, The Next Wave, for ease of access. An extract:
Companies are people. The root of the word is in the Old French, compagnie, for “society, friendship, intimacy”. The Tomorrow’s Capitalism project has built on this to describe the different roles played by a company. Companies, it says, have five roles. They are: citizens; producers; customers; employers; and investors. In theory, when these roles are aligned, then the organisation can move ahead purposefully. When they are not, you end up with what the economist Kate Raworth describes as a corporation with a split personality. Different roles—sometimes enacted by the same people—pull in different directions.
j2t#451
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