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

http://artswrap.co.uk/sites/default/files/imagecache/event_image_full/John%20Lanchester.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TFBp8yq9lN0/TVADjVtkD-I/AAAAAAAAK1c/jmebtc7mrkw/s1600/pj-harvey-let-england-shake.jpg

Because I didn't want to clutter up the What Are You Reading thread with the way this book perpetually perks its folly in my face.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Don't be absurd! Also, reader wonders whether she is distantly or even closely related to Geoffrey.

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I hope you're already getting a sense of fatigue at the toiling rhythm and progress of his sentences, the way he leaves nothing to chance.

It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office,

Stop telling me the time of day.

Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop (sorry thomp) at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm was set to go off.

Please stop telling me the time of day. Also - came awake?

Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip.

ffs

At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount...

At ten o'clock Shahid was stacking...

Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat...

I've reached Part 2. Things are going to start happening!

You can't buy this sort of publicity. Will read (this thread).

Didn't bring the book with me today, of course.

I was on the verge of ordering this yesterday, will hold off on that one then.

Can tell you the characters of course.

You just have to insert ffs or 'oh god' after each one:

Petunia Howe - an octogenarian lady who notices how young people like doctors are etc.

Roger and Arabella Yount - a wealthy banker and his wife who likes shopping and spas and says 'dahling'.

Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc - a Zimbabwean refugee (escaping political death squads), who can't be deported, and who has a job as a traffic warden.

'Bogdan' Zbigniew (can't remember his surname) - a Polish builder who is saving up money to give to his father back in Poland. He saves this money up by playing the stock market (??).

Ahmed, Usman, and Shahid. Brothers who collectively run a corner shop. Shahid has dabbled in terrorism, and a shady terrorist friend from his past has just appeared on the scene. Goes to a militant mosque in Brixton. Can't remember what Usman does.

Freddy Kamo(!) - Young African footballer with lanky legs (Lanchester is an Arsenal fan right?) who plays for a thinly disguised Chelsea. Always smiling. Stern father.

Smitty - a 'concept' artist, who leaves anonymous graffiti around the place, and who Lanchester somehow manages to get talking in a faux faux-Cockney/Mockney.

All of these behave exactly as you'd imagine they'd behave if you a) had no imagination b) got all your information from Sunday Supplements/daytime tv? apart from 'surprising' gestures towards 'civilised' or nuanced (ie white male) thinking.

read you talking about this in the reading thread and am glad this hilarious spin-off exists

Why isn't there a racist taxi driver? I demand a racist taxi driver.

further comments from here, Matt. Just couldn't be bothered to cnp them all in.

Ah, with Lanchester the 'racist taxi driver' would in fact be a surprisingly tolerant racist taxi driver who has a copy of the Economist on the front shelf of his taximetered cabriolet.

Q. Is the problem with "state of the nation" novels usually that they are written by people far removed from most of the nation?

Q. I though Lanchester's steez was a kind of sub-Banville aestheticism. Wtf was he thinking?

A little surprised there are no media types, unless that's Smitty's role of course. There should also be a harassed woman juggling kids with running some sort of poorly-funded third-sector body.

Must have fancied it after everyone loved Whoops!, I guess. Once you're thinking 'I get bankers, I've talked to a lot of bankers', and you've written abt London property, it must be p much irresistible to write a 'city of do-you-see contrasts' novel.

Also - came awake?

It's when someone has a nocturnal emission so violent that it wakes them up.
The cover of this book annoys me the way the cover of 'Cloud Atlas' does.

Is there any detailed exposition of what bankers actually do, other than having three computer screens? Ian McEwan, even if being tedious, would always have some of this to redeem it.

xpost to NV.

thomp p much nailed The Debt to Pleasure on the what are you reading thread - 'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up, narrator has poisoned some dudes, envies his brother's career as chef, is self-described gourmand, presents memoir of dudes he has poisoned as a series of menus. it's aight i guess.

Problems with this state of the nation novel, with a star by problems that I think are possibly generic pitfalls:

The characters attempt to be 'representative' and of course are pure ciphers and representative of nothing.*

Lanchester isn't very good, in fact is very very bad at filling his book with material.

The need to fill your book with situations that, again, are representative, makes it feel like satireless satire.*(unless its actual satire)

Capital is extraordinarily badly written on a sentence by toiling sentence basis, which makes me wonder whether he's even capable of doing the sub-Banville aestheticism, on any level.

Insights of daily life barely merit the name insight, apart from a couple of occasions where I said to myself 'yeah, I guess that's just about a thing'.

The interior monologues of the characters are utterly utterly dreadful, full of truly mundane material that should never be in a book. 'So and so looked at the Prius and its leather seats, he wished he could afford a Prius but in the meantime would continue to take the tubefghk;lsfb;hadfjghvflk;sxnhjnhj'

It is a book whose messages come as a clearly attached post-it at the beginning of each chapter. *(I guess - message novels have to stay on message, rather than let the imagination of the writer take them in places that are interesting or entertaining. You just feel like you're being shown things that you've read a thousand times before in longer-form journalism.)

What it reminds me of most is The Information by Martin Amis, which isn't an amazing book, but is world's classics status compared to Capital. Amis wouldn't call a bar 'Uprising' but he might do something similar, better, but similar. Likewise there are the shady figures, the underclasses, the outsider figures, presaging doom for the main power characters.

But MA was probably the best recent State of the Nation novelist? He was funny and he was a very good writer, which helped. Still easy to come a cropper, with the all CAPS text messaging in Yellow Dog for instance. And everything from The Information onwards has been increasingly flawed, and is probably a continuation of the things that made London Fields weaker than Money?

Any other candidates for good recent State of the Nation novelists? (Or any time - would George Eliot have counted? Probably?)]

xp

His dad was some kind of banker iirc, & he does seem to have actual friends in the city, so you think it'd be his strong suit.

Feel like this is going to be a MAJOR NEW DRAMA on BBC1 at some point.

What a Carve Up? I remember it being good, but don't trust 90s me as a judge tbh. It also doesn't quite take the cross-section of society route iirc.

Amis also had a couple of Zbigniews in I think London Fields.

McEwan's Saturday is clunky-as-hell but basically alright.

Is there any detailed exposition of what bankers actually do, other than having three computer screens? Ian McEwan, even if being tedious, would always have some of this to redeem it.

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 9 March 2012 12:19 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There isn't, perhaps surprisingly. There's some rather awkward handwaving towards types of trading, and bankery things, to indicate he knows what he's talking about (which he does), but it's kept at a minimum, I suspect because Lanchester feared (prob rightly) that going too much into it would a)be disproportionate b)reveal that he knows rather less about the working detail of everyone else.

I think a fictional account of a banker by Lanchester, or a group of bankers, would have been far more interesting than this 'terrorist', 'immigrant', 'old lady', 'young artist' media stereotype bollocks.

Things where you can tell Lanchester feels more comfortable:

Talking about football (this isn't good, but it doesn't feel RONG).
Bringing up small children (this isn't funny, but " " " ")

er 'of a banker or a group of bankers by Lanchester' not 'by Lanchester or group of bankers' obv.

xp

aesthetic saturday objections aside, I think a state-of-the-nation has to be significantly longer than that, 400pp minimum.

Heh, I like the idea of a group of bankers writing as Luther Blisset.

is Hensher's Northern Clemency in this vein? Anyone read that?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway.

I enjoyed Theo Tait putting the boot into Ali Smith's last, vaguely S-o-E book: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/theo-tait/the-absolute-end - doesn't happen often enough, presumably because of the very small world of London publishing. Read the kindle sample of the Lanchester and couldn't believe how slack it was, yet I haven't read a bad, or even mixed, review yet.

Have the feeling this is going to belong on this thread soon:

http://fivedials.com/images/672.jpg

private eye gave captial a stinky review, fwiw

x-post

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 8 March 2012 14:25 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo.

xp

I also saw a mixed somewhere serious, but can't remember where.

How about a state-of-the-nation novel not set in London? Is there such a thing?

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

If the Northern Clemency is that sort of thing, it seems to be Sheffield-based. But I think most SoN-type novels would try to do London a bit maybe? At least have one character moving/working there?

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

i was a fan of What a Carve Up when i read it but when i've flicked through it since i thing i was mostly wrong, and the clumsiness i excused as Dickensian at the time just reads like clumsiness to me now.

interesting to think of Middlemarch as a state-of-the-nation novel because of course it's addressing "middle England" before the fact, at a time when it was far from central to English notions of England maybe?

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway

Should have just gone the whole hog with 'I Hate The Fucking Proles'.

don't think he realises his dad was sometimes joking

I quite enjoyed that Ali Smith book as I was reading it but some of its sympathetic characters are more annoying than its unsympathetic characters and it descends into caricature rather a lot. Also it doesn't really go anywhere.

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

― woof, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:07 (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Actually it was a good sandwich," runs a typical sentence

Good job the review has forewarned me of this particular sentence, otherwise I might have hurled the book across the room.

That review is spot on about the 'drone' of the prose. Also:

And there's a lot of slightly lazy repetition: "Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college."

This! Who on earth let this sort of thing through? It's like the weird repetition of the business about the skips and builders in the first chapter and the 'Transport for London card charging device'.

There was an interview I skimmed through that did say L's dad was banker. But so what? Isn't part of the 'story' how the system almost took on a life of its own and no one really has any control/understanding?

Part of the reason why I never got round to Whoops! anyway was that all of a sudden this novelist that is never on your radar acquires an interest over these topical matters - except that in this case, as I've said, my impression is that even the so-called experts are no experts when it comes to the financial system, so what chance does this guy have? The other reason is that unemployed/laid-off bankers started writing a mountain of these so cynicism set in.

Related but separate thing is you have other novelists I think I'd hate - Geoff Dyer and Adam Mars-Jones writing bks on things I really like: on Stalker and Late Spring, whereas I would like to see these being written by film writers that would bring wider knowledge on Japanese and Russian cinema instead of what I think it would be (= too many boring personal reflections...its for the fans you know). Its depressing that this might be the only way for bks to get published on really interesting films/topics and this seems like the only way to get any shelf-space/coverage.

I guess they've done their 'research', ffs.

'the system' took control -- this is SF material of course, fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit.

otm.

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

yes, I get the impression he's well-liked; also bad reviews aren't really done that much anymore (there was some fuss about this recently, maybe centred around that hatchet-job award?). The notable thing is how much attention it's getting - I got the impression that Lanchester was slipping into the terminal midlist zone before this, releasing also-reviewed, diminishing-returns novels every few years. Now he's a hit! I guess that's partly Whoops!, partly a canny topic, partly a very quiet literary spring in the uk, partly book-page need to have some literary middle-aged men to take seriously.

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

― Stevie T, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:13 (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is a little bit. But I think the thing that annoys me about these specific sentences is the way he smuggles in other information. The 'brisk clip', and another one where after the usual time and season bollocks, Lanchester puts in a 'slightly out of breath'. I wouldn't mind so much if it was as formulaic as Adam Curtis' 'I'm going to tell you the story of x. It's a remarkable story that involves x,y,z,π and ك'.'

Idk, should this be changed into a 'State of the Nation' novel thread? Change title one of these maybe?

'Actually it was a good sandwich' - State of the Nation novels and what is in them

'fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit'

'I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo'

'Why isn't there a racist taxi driver? I demand a racist taxi driver'

'I also saw a mixed somewhere serious'

'i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy'

'wonky textspeak'

' I guess it looks like what broadsheet journalism likes to believe novels are'

ah, 'I also saw a mixed review somewhere serious'.

I dunno, enjoying the title as it stands, above all "that the computer had come with"

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.

quick update

Chip War the book is very clear and well-organised btw. It may have been worth reading even if it poorly written - the technology is central to our epoch, and the geopolitical consequences significant and of the moment - but it's well handled and informative, and yes, covers semi-conductor technology etc as part of the history of the technology etc.

i don't think he's a particular favourite of ilx, but ezra klein's podcast is occasionally worth listening to, and his recent interview with the author covers the main topics at play.

more importantly, i wanted to pick up on mark's post about haptics and related matters. it's something that's been nagging away at me for a long while - in fact i was several times on the verge of starting a thread, called something like Soyface Wojak in the Stavanger Cloudweb: The Aesthetics of Computing as a catch all for this sort of thing from memetics to the material layer. but the haptics post reminded me of it, as have some recent issues at work.

Roughly the problem as i see it, or rather the set of related problems, is the separation between the tactile and material layer of computing (plastics, wires, screens) and our experience of using computers (representations of information extremely abstracted from the physical layer) mean it's very difficult for one to inform the other in the way that metaphor has traditionally allowed. that is to say we have always clothed our feelings and thoughts in the cloth of nature or that experienced in our ambulatory and perceptual life - it's the thorn, the crack in the teacup.

this can be seen in a number of ways, for example the use of the word 'cloud' to represent what are in fact huge data centres kept freezing cold, in icy landscapes or embedded in a former nuclear bunker at the base of a granite cliffed stavanger fjord, cooled by the icy waves. or to take another example, me having to do a powerpoint presentation on the application of machine learning to my particular area of work, and asking a technology colleague whether he had any visual representations of the technology at work - no, but some command line stuff running gave the right 'vibe'.

'early' representations, like William Gibson's Cyberpunk, or the Matrix dripping digits, are in some ways the best, when the abstracted layers were more visible, more tangible (just think of the sound of a modem) but are of course incredibly cliched and outdated now. it amused me to read lines in The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966 and think of how small a jump it was to the world of the Matrix (in itself, like Gibson, based on phone lines but digital):

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

the hieroglyphic streets is perhaps right, like Calvino's Invisible Cities, architectural and social embodiments of algorithmic outcomes.

still, the point remains, the quality of aesthetic representation of modern computing seems thin and undernourished (please furnish me with counterexamples!).

ofc metaphorical schema (that is to say internally consistent - roses and lilies are always x and y) for abstract concepts have existed, but utlimately the appropriateness of their use for abstract concepts seems to me to relate to the fact that both abstract experience and 'natural' clothing both stem from God/creative being/s, or Nature or whatever points of motive authority you wish.

that layer - material and abstract - is somewhat separate, because abstracted, from the objects computing allows us to present and proliferate ie the aesthetics on and and presented on the internet (but not elsewhere). representations of things going wrong with the system, glitches, or grotesque collapses of aesthetics shown by many memes seem of particular interest, partly because they go against the grain of computing making it easier to do easier to do things you want - so do things that are ugly, or aesthetically worthless, or grotesque - and partly because they surface broken mechanics several layers down from what a common user will see.

On haptics...

at work, the transition from hardware and serial interfaces to IP workflows, software defined channels, metadata driven automation, and 'control surfaces' for human operators leads to a difficulty for those operations. when something goes wrong it's hard to understand where it's gone wrong. that's usually because control surfaces are driven by metadata that assumes the successful processing of the orchestration or workflow. if it goes wrong, the metadata won't always be available to be represented to the user what's gone wrong. put another way, problems like this can't be resolved by the person operating the tools, but by a software engineer. there is something of the 'haptic' even if it's not quite touch, it's that the information in the system was near enough the surface to enable an operator to fix the system. modern day haptics also come into it and help illustrate what i mean, perhaps - due to latency in the system a particular issue for some of our operators was that status changes after an on screen button press on the control surface did not appear rapidly enough after that button press, which led to people pressing the on screen button multiple times, even though the initial command was being acted upon.

perhaps this is only another way of saying that in a software world, your operations are more likely to be DevOps environments (doing the building and support of the tools with traditional operations increasingly automated) - this is after all a transition period. but the drama being played out is a submerging of the mechanics of the world into a space difficult to be rendered via useful metaphor, and difficult to comprehend and understand so that we may adapt it.

these all seem interrelated, so some order is needed, some layers, and maybe the OSI model in itself isn't a bad place to start for examining the problem.

• metaphorical layer ('cloud', 'web' - the control layer if you like - how we represent the *processes* of computing and information flow, the data available to do so)
• material layers (cold data centres, mountains of chips and electronic waste in slums in Guiyu and Agbogbloshie, mining of precious metals) - how does the material layer inform the metaphorical and representative landscape
• representation (how we render the world of superprocessing, data and information flowsto make it *aesthetically* tangible) and loop back to the metaphorical layer

anyway, apologies for the digression, it just seemed an opportunity to get some of this down on a rainy bank holiday.

I love it :)