At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

"Any short essay" - agree.

This isn't a short essay!

Paragraph 2: he tells us that in 2023, all these items use microchips:

ovens, fridges, vacuums (= vacuum cleaner?), car keys, radios, speakers.

Note that 'speakers' are an item he's just added to the list and were not part of his original scenario, while fridge and toaster have mysteriously disappeared!

I definitely believe that current, high-end versions of these things are very electronic and sophisticated.

I am unsure that every instance of them, including those that I have in my home, are.

Does my oven contain a microchip? Quite doubtful. It seems to be quite a mechanical device. I turn a dial and it starts making a noise and generating heat. It doesn't seem very electronic.

Same for the toaster, actually.

In short, I'm not sure that Lanchester's view of 'now' as against 'then' is very precise.

Does your oven have a digital clock?

this very simple looking toaster has chips: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/electric-toaster-pictures.htm

you're probably right about the speakers!

I don't think my oven has a digital clock. It has a dial that turns round to make it heat up.

<3 but I did just remember Those round things that are in the middle of car tires and often seem to fall off, what's their purpose?

I mistyped in saying 'fridge and toaster have disappeared' from Lanchester's list, from para 1 to para 2 -- I meant HOB and toaster.

Odd as I think my hob *does* seem quite electronic.

The problems continue.

At p.2, para 2, of the article Lanchester tells us about a shift from one kind of 'chip' to another. Possibly this second kind is the 'microchip' - I'm not sure. He doesn't say so here, though that term is surely central to his review.

What is a 'chip'? He describes it visually here, which is a start. But what is it, what does it do? He doesn't say.

Further on p.2 Lanchester explains that US bombing used to be very inaccurate, then they used electronic chips, and it became accurate.

Why?

He leaves this totally unexplained. What is the relation between electronic chips and bombs? This is central to what he's saying, yet he gives no explanation of it whatever. Instead he ventures into a typically irrelevant, self-serving digression about TOP GUN - quite characteristic.

Another bad sentence, qua sentence, I think, later arrives: 'If the first important beneficiary [...] was the military, the second was the rest of us'.

So the second important beneficiary was ... everyone except those already covered by the the first important beneficiary? Isn't that so all-inclusive as barely to count as a proposition?

Maybe he’s leaving out unimportant beneficiaries. “Them,” perhaps. Or snakes.

The further I get in this article, the less I see the relevance of its much-derided opening.

All chips are microchips. It’s fair to lambast Lanchester but it’s akso fair to assume readers have some awareness of the world post 1945.

I've heard good things about the book Chip Wars

Ideally to be read in conjunction with a history of the Cod War.

James Morrison: I agree that any article needs to assume that potential readers already know certain things. It can't explain everything.

This *particular* article is about microchips - and, by extension, I think, transistors, semiconductors and such like. As such, it would be a good idea for the article to explain those items.

On the other hand, I don't think this article has a responsibility to explain the Vietnam War. It mentions that war, but that's not what it's about.

I wasn't sure that you could write a brief enough explanation of semiconductors and transistors to fit into such an article so I had a go:

Silicon by itself is not a conductor,  but you can 'dope' it with other elements to improve its conductivity - hence semiconductor. The doping can be done in two different ways, n-type and p-type. By themselves each of these types is only a moderate conductor but if you put them together you get interesting properties. Electricity will only flow from the n-type to the p-type, permitting current in only one direction. As an electrical component this is called a diode. If you put three layers together in a sandwich, npn or pnp, you'd think that no current could flow, and you'd be right - unless you apply a small current to the central layer, then current can flow through the whole sandwich. This is a basic transistor, the micro electronic equivalent of the vacuum tube or valve, where one electrical current can be turned on or off by another.

Furthermore, because transistors are switches that use one flow of current to control another, you can wire them into each other. By doing so you can create logic gates, which can for example produce an output current if two input currents are on (AND), if either input current is on (OR), or an output current if there is no input and vice versa (NOT). If you take an output current to be a 1 and no current to be a 0 then you can wire up logic gates in such a way as to perform binary arithmetic. And binary arithmetic is ultimately all that computers do.

Thanks Ledge for producing these descriptions.

Do you work in computer construction?

This reminds me that 10 years ago I tried to understand electricity. I think I learned that it had something to do with magnets - that electricity was generated between magnets. Unsure why, and perhaps that's not even true.

It is hard to see how human beings would discover electricity.

the usual explanation is that electricity was first observed as static electricity, as generated by rubbing amber (greek: elektrum) against cloth

the relationship between electric current and magnetism: if you pass a conducting metal through a magnetic field (viz basically past some magnets) it generates an electric current: this is because magnetism is the consequence of an excess of electrons moving towards a zone that lacks electrons, and the moving magnet (oversimplification alaert) "drags" the electrons in the conducting metal so that they push against other electrons and cause a current, like a river of electrons. magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other; a conducting metal is a substance in which electrons move fairly easily (metals such as copper; also water, as a non-metallic conductor).

^^ a great deal of technology from the mid-19th century onwards uses this mechanism (often the magnets are caused to spin around wires in which you need a current)

the "field" is the larger region affected by the magnet (there's a mathematical definition, but i won't risk embarking on that)
"resistance" is (in this instance) a material quality of the substance that slows electrons down

actual real scientists can step in and slap me around when i start talking nonsense here

you can also generate electricity from potatoes.

I work in i.t. but strictly software. I've read about this stuff before but forgot it all so had to crib it again from various how stuff works articles.

magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other

Isn't it that the magnetic field of all the magnet's atoms or molecules are lined up in the same direction?

Tatoes being full of water, I guess

salty water yes

xp lol probably

yes haha my "static electricity" theory of how magnets work is not in fact correct

(to be fair to me it is nearly 50 years since i learned this stuff; to be fair to the readers may be i shd look stuff up and check before i speak)

there was program on the radio where some boffin said magnets are sort of magic because they shouldn't actually work by the laws of metaphysics or summat like that.

lol I'm just remembering being taught Fleming's right-hand rule or the gener-righter method as our tutor called it during my electrical apprenticeship. Very handy thing to know, can barely remember a bloody thing about it.

Was this boffin a member of the Insane Clown Posse?

lol, quite possibly was

I wonder whether John Lanchester knows or understands these things.

The problem as a writer, very specifically, is the difference between knowing/understanding and making it clear to an audience that doesn't

^^^

(and it's an issue i've been obsessed with probably since i was editor at wire: how to translate and transmit the inner workings of music and music theory as they impact on what players do, the key issue at that magazine; and latterly in no particular order and as a more general conundrum for general-topic magazines, critical theory, economics, electronics and the levels of science where it's more than just just-so-stories about marble runs)

(the spillover into this thread being that lanchester has somehow been appointed the LRB's popular explainer of certain topics -- economics and finance, "the internet", now microchips and computers) and in my estimation he approaches this task quite wrongly (and as pertinently his line-editors are not allowed to scream at him bcz he's too high up the editorial order to have to listen)

Yeah it's clearly a difficult job - maybe elements of it are near impossible - but it's the job. If you don't make at least a thrust at achieving those goals then by definition you're terrible at your job

my favourite editors have always been the ones who stubbornly say "no mark i don't understand what you're getting at here" and make me dig out the idea some more

it's an aspect of editing i'm not terrific at myself bcz i'm too vain: i can very easily kid myself (re someone else's prose) that i *do* get it

mark, can you think of a really good example of writing about "the inner workings of music and music theory as they impact on what players do"?

I really enjoy reading that type of thing, and I think it must be a pretty tricky balance to write about ...

anything by charles rosen (but he only writes about classical music)

max harrison on jazz tho many find him stylistically dry and old-school

i remember really enjoying robert walser's running with the devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music -- tho it's 30-odd yrs since i read a borrowed copy and gave it back and i don't know if the power/gender stuff wd hold up well now (it seemed important and new and i was probably giving it loads of unlearned leeway)

i will try and scare up some other titles, maybe when more of my books are out of boxes (really i shd be unpacking and not discussing john fkn lanchester)

s/b unEARNED leeway

Thanks so much!
I will check 'em out... maybe start a new thread if I get really inspired...

"lanchester has somehow been appointed the LRB's popular explainer of certain topics"

Yes - Mark S OTM here. It's because Lanchester has this role, and thinks he's good at it, that he's fair game when he doesn't execute it properly.

Did a double take at Robert Walser heavy metal book but of course it’s a different guy

The top gun para in this article, oof marone - he is very bad at humour/bathos, unsurprisingly since he is fully tone deaf

Yeah, first google for R Walser was a little confusing, but now I've discovered two intersting writers off one recommendation....

Lanchester at end of 2nd page:

'American workers were expensive, not least because - boo! - they tended to belong to unions'.

Was that interjection necessary?

I imagine -- though it's not clear! -- that he's ventriloquising the opinion of the implausibly named "Charlie Sporck" (inventor of novel plastic cutlery iirc), and trying to do so in a spiffy and economical one-word manner. Once again the subs should be pulling him up and pointing out this ambiguity: "John, who is thinking this? Be clearer!"

Isn't it clear that the bargaining power of workers in chip factories meant that wages and conditions would decrease the profitability and therefore this was the drive toward manufacturing moving to East Asia, where (as the piece says) the majority of the chips are made?

the presence of the word "boo!" is extraneous to that point tho

The meaning of the sentence is clear enough. That's why I say the 'boo!' is unnecessary. The statement would be complete, and presumably accurate, without it. The 'ventriloquism' that Mark S quite accurately identifies is not needed, and is delivered in an infantile way that an article in the LRB should not require.

This infantile quality is, I realise, a feature of Lanchester. It doesn't generally feature in the LRB, though Runciman and Burrow have their own bad blokeish qualities.

Ah ok, sorry I am just catching up with the piece and the various complaints about this piece...which I am reading just now.

Finished most of it.

I can see why we all started on that first para because it doesn't come off in terms of setting the scene..."the writer's stuff" is pompous. It mentions the Tories to no effect (they didn't have any) to then go through a history of a technology that starts much before the 70s. Very clunky.

I get that I'd like to be conveyed the inner workings of music if I pick and regularly read about different types of music in a music magazine every month for years on end, as an avid consumer and enjoyer of music!

However with semiconductors it's just one of those things -- like 99% of human endeavour -- where I'm looking for things like: how does this impact me now, how it might impact me in future and what role does this have in shaping the world. Even if I was told a bit more about the inner workings of semiconductors it wouldn't go anywhere, but if I'm told that this made the US military more effective at killing that's conveying impact. That the US also lost in Vietnam is something he says, something we know so it tells me semiconductor use wasn't decisive (in the way that some people know about the decoder machines invented by British scientists in WWII). My issue is he doesn't work through this (what if technology will not have as much impact as he thinks) and yeah, then goes into Top Gun aside for a bit of colour. To be lazy.

This is all to say that the piece was mostly fine, jokes and manner aside. The background is told as much in terms of the people who invented bcz people can relate to that a bit more? It tells you how the tech impacts on the personal and the politics around you, goes into geopolitics from the Cold War to East Asia and China. It gives another dimension to the conflict over Taiwan.

I'm not sure how telling me about the science of this tech improves it. Other things would tho'.

Lanchester is such a 6/10 guy.

Lanchester at end of 2nd page:

'American workers were expensive, not least because - boo! - they tended to belong to unions'.

Was that interjection necessary?

Think he's tryna give it some of that Patricia Lockwood pizazz the editors like.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/salad-chain-that-thought-it-was-a-tech-firm-looks-wilted-f2696360?st=1lko4n6ldd4sgjv

One thing I wanted Lanchester to explain was a line around VCs. I quite like him to give 6/10 explainers on that and private equity.