Monthly Archives: August 2017

His own worst enemy: Anton, a participant in Channel 4s Eden. Photograph: C4

Eden: Paradise Lost (C4) | All 4 Citizen Jane (BBC4) | iPlayer Utopia: In Search of the Dream (BBC4) | iPlayer Trust Me (BBC1) | iPlayer Diana: In Her Own Words (C4) | All 4Eden, the Channel 4 year-long reality experiment in the wilds of Scotland that famously went wildly wrong, suddenly resurfaced in a week-long coda, Paradise Lost, in which the producers sought to excuse their mistakes by giving us more of the same: inanity, truculence, the milk of human kindness openly curdling. It was a grim watch, made brief fun only by our knowledge that the contestants emerged from their months of fame-seeking to discover the show had long been cancelled: more of Britain had watched Cash in the Attic. Chief problem was apparently that, as one of the women said, it turned into just a penis size matching competition.

It has been said more succinctly, but we knew what she meant. The main swinging dicks were Titch, presumably named for the breadth of his non-swearing vocabulary, and Anton, a lumbering, infuriating soul and his own worst enemy: every hour last week I was waiting to see Anton decked.

Here was a generation brought up to believe in their right to believe in themselves, if not actually be good at anything

Given my feelings of depression and boredom and that was only in three or four nights watching goodness knows what it was like for the participants. There was some revolting misogyny, but there was also some savage incompetence. A hunter who couldnt hunt, a gardener who couldnt weed, a chef who seemed only to plunge knives into peoples backs. No one count them, none appeared to take more than the briefest of seconds, in a whole almost-year, to drink in the beauty of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, fresh startled every morning, or to read half a book, or teach others about anything.

Here was a generation brought up to believe in their inalienable right to believe in themselves, if not to be actually good at anything, who, for all their easy talk of democracy, had forgotten how to count the very thing, as witnessed in the shoddy voting-out of Anton. By the end I just felt sorry for the midges.

Far more instructive, hopeful even, in terms of a slice of paradise on Earth was Citizen Jane, a masterly film on the battle for the soul of a city. New York, as it happens, and a battle fought from the 30s to the 70s, but it encapsulated much of the soul of the 20th century.

On the one hand, city developer Robert Moses, in increasing thrall to the automobile, and the utopian blandishments of Corbusian modernism. On the other, Jane Jacobs, a phenomenally articulate writer. Her every sentence sang off the screen: Projects that are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life civic centres that are avoided by anyone except bums.

Jacobs understood, viscerally in the main but also through exhaustive empirical research, that cities cannot be built top-down, by even well-intentioned gods (and here I was minded of the soaraway success of SimCity). Buildings that turn their backs on the streets; expressways that eviscerate. She went to war against Moses and his armies, arguing instead for short blocks, myriad channels, a mix of old and new buildings, constant connections with neighbourhoods. Jacobss mantra was: There is no logic that can be superimposed: people make the city.

There was great footage of Little Italy in 1962: flashing-eyed women arguing that the streets were immensely safer there. Two-three in the morning, the men are sitting in the cafes and theyre watching for you. And there were grim lessons from 50s slum resettlement in Baltimore, the replacing of neighbourhoods with sanitised architectural housing projects that had turned within nine years into some of the most dangerous places in the world. We saw, in turn, their late 90s demolition: literally, a bonfire of the vanities. China is currently engaged in Brobdingnagian urban expansion and has decided its template will be exactly that failed 1950s American model.

BBC4 is also giving us a highly promising three-parter, Utopia: In Search of the Dream, and art historian Richard Clay has already managed, without straining, to link Thomas Spences commons of shared ownership, via George Bernard Shaw and Star Treks Gene Roddenberry, directly to Wikipedia. Its intellectually splendid. We saw a flash-forward to this weeks second episode, and a keen-eyed young black architect enthusing: We are declaring war on the slums! The words of Robert Moses, 80years on.

I almost stopped watching TrustMe, BBC1s new four-part drama, 10 minutes in, when the already semi-daft plot dunked its head into simple medical ignorance. Jodie Whittakers angelic if stroppy nurse Cath, trying to expose hospital abuses in Sheffield, is given her perfunctory jotters: shamed and angry, she (somewhat inexplicably) decides to steal her best pals identity, pretend to be a full doctor and gets a whizzy new job in Edinburgh. Shes welcomed north with more friendship, and certainly a greater lack of credential-checking, than greeted the announcement of the actress as the next Doctor Who.

Sharon Small is Brigitte, Caths stressy new Scots boss, and wonders: So why here? This place is a backward step, surely? this isnt exactly a centre of excellence.

Diana was not a republican (the clue coming in the fact that she wanted her son to be king)

Say what? It gave its name the Edinburgh Model to global teaching systems: its graduates founded five of the seven Ivy League medical schools. The storyline was fullof such sillies. The Sheffield reporter who insisted that Cath herselfgo public and personal (absolutely no need) with her whistleblowing, and thus lost the story; the absurd ease with which Cath multitasks upheaval, a daughter, a new affair and speed-reading Surgery for Dummies from her gown pocket: if a patient arrived in A&E up here boasting as many plot holes, theyd be borrowed for a string vest.

They might just seem surface sillies, but Ill warrant a writer such as Jed Mercurio would have taken better chances to tell more sober truths aboutwhistleblowing, along with the drama. Yet Ill stick with it, mainly to see if the plot manages to extricate itself from the roils of its own entrails and to enjoy a good cast.

What did we learn from Diana: In Her Own Words? Barring a couple of swipes at those who cant answer back, and the fact that such shows will resort to much padding, and that the exceedingly posh and coy Diana was, despite strident claims from the misguided, not a republican (the clue coming in the fact that she wanted her son to be king), Id have to say a big fat jack. What learned, though, from the weeks of hissy furore between Channel 4s right to broadcast private recordings of Diana, and her sons rights to a quiet life? Those twin British failings a capacity for self-deception and love of deference are alive and kicking today: it might be 2017 rather than 1953, but millennialsare keen to bend the knee anew.

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The week in TV: Eden: Paradise Lost; Citizen Jane; Utopia: In Search of the Dream; Trust Me; Diana: In Her Own Words - The Guardian

PUBLISHED: 12:11 10 August 2017 | UPDATED: 12:11 10 August 2017

Professor Richard Clay filming on location in Letchworth for Utopia: In Search of the Dream. Picture: LGCHF

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The team behind Utopia: In Search of the Dream presented by art historian Professor Richard Clay filmed in the original garden city in April.

Among other things they explored the Garden City Collection, off Wilbury Hills Road, and interviewed curator Vicky Axell.

Letchworth features heavily in the second hour-long episode, Build It and They Will Come, which will be shown on BBC Four on Tuesday night a week on from the opening episode, Blueprints for Better.

The people behind the show include production manager Clare Burns who lives in Letchworth herself, and very much enjoyed shooting in her hometown.

She said: The second episode of our series examines some of the attempts to create liveable utopian societies.

Sometimes they work, but more often, for various reasons, they fail. We filmed at a Shaker village in New Hampshire, a hippie community in Virginia, a communist housing estate in Lithuania and in Letchworth!

As well as interviewing Vicky, we filmed all across the town from the allotments in South View and the first roundabout in Broadway to the little green on Westholm and the Spirella Building.

We sent up a drone camera over Norton Common and got some beautiful aerial shots.

I was very proud of my hometown, and I hope viewers enjoy the series and agree with our conclusions about Letchworth.

The documentary is part of BBC Fours utopia season of programmes, which looks into and celebrates the ideas, inspirations and visionaries behind the idea of a place or state of things in which all is perfect.

BBC Four channel editor Cassian Harrison explained: Utopian ideals and the very idea of utopia itself have always fascinated and inspired the human race from art and architecture movements, to genres of fiction, new experimental societies and beyond.

With the intellectual ambition that is its hallmark, BBC Four is delving into a world of visionaries, philosophers, and genius to examine what propels us to endlessly search out ideas of perfection.

The show featuring Letchworth is scheduled be shown on BBC Four at 9am on Tuesday, August 15, and will be available afterwards on BBC iPlayer at bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090w6y3.

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Letchworth features in new BBC Four documentary series Utopia: In Search of the Dream - Comet 24

Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the companys gender diversity policies and made statements about womens biological suitability for technical jobs.

Portions of the memo violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace, Googles chief executive, Sundar Pichai, wrote in a companywide email.

Its impossible to believe that Google or other large tech companies a few years ago would have reacted like this to such a memo. In 2011 when CNN filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the workplace diversity data on big tech companies, Google, among others, asked the Department of Labor for its data to be excluded. The company said that releasing that information would cause competitive harm. It was not until 2014 that Google began to disclose statistics showing that only 17 percent of its technical work force was female.

The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity. Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.

If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks?

Today Google is under growing scrutiny, and the cognitive dissonance between the outward-facing Dont be evil stance and the internal misogynistic brogrammer rhetoric was too extreme.

Google had to fire the offending engineer, James Damore, but anyone who spends time on the message boards frequented by Valley engineers will know that the bro culture that gave us Gamergate an online movement that targeted women in the video game industry is much more prevalent than Mr. Pichai wants to acknowledge.

Google employees who opposed Mr. Damore found their internal company profile pictures posted on Breitbart, the Verge reported. What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the internet they were leaking it to, a former Google employee said. They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.

The company canceled a planned all-hands meeting on Thursday, citing concern about harassment.

For much of the short life of Silicon Valley, America has held a largely romantic view of the tech industry. Men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were held in high esteem. But increasingly, companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are coming under the same cultural microscope that questioned the greed is good culture of the 1980s. Viewers of the comedy series Silicon Valley note that uber-libertarianism and uber-geek machismo go hand in hand. And certainly Mark Zuckerberg was not happy with his portrayal in David Finchers The Social Network, nor could anyone in the Valley be happy with Dave Eggerss novel The Circle or Don DeLillos Zero K.

The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap. But it will soon involve the heart of Googles business: surveillance capitalism. The trope that if you are not paying for it, you arent the customer youre the product has been around for a while. But now the European Union has passed the General Data Protection Regulation, which will go into effect next May. This regulation aims to give people more control over their data, so search engines cant follow them everywhere they roam online. It will be an arrow to the heart of Googles business.

We have an obligation to care about the values of the people who run Google, because weve given Google enormous control over our lives and the lives of our children. As the former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris points out, Without realizing the implications, a handful of tech leaders at Google and Facebook have built the most pervasive, centralized systems for steering human attention that has ever existed, while enabling skilled actors (addictive apps, bots, foreign governments) to hijack our attention for manipulative ends.

The future implications of a couple of companies having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt. The rise of artificial intelligence combined with Googles omnipresence in our lives is an issue that is not well understood by politicians or regulators.

America is slowly waking up both culturally and politically to the takeover of our economy by a few tech monopolies. We know we are being driven by men like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos toward a future that will be better for them. We are not sure that it will be better for us.

As George Packer, writing in The New Yorker in 2011, put it, In Thiels techno-utopia, a few thousand Americans might own robot-driven cars and live to 150, while millions of others lose their jobs to computers that are far smarter than they are, then perish at 60.

Somehow the citizens of the world have been left out of this discussion of our future. Because tools like Google and Facebook have become so essential and because we have almost no choice in whether to use them, we need to consider the role they play in our lives.

By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future.

Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern Californias Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Doesnt Care Whats Best for Us.

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Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us - New York Times

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Posted: Aug 12, 2017 12:01 AM

Al Gores new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era manmade climate disaster report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of climate deniers are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we dont end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe its our educational system, our cargo cults easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Lets take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the25 billion megawatt-hours of todays total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (Thats not total energyconsumption, and it doesnt include what wed need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) Wed need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require12.5 billion acres! Thats twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. Add in transmission lines, solar panels and biofuel plantations to meet the rest of the worlds energy demands and the mostly illegal tree cutting for firewood to heat poor families homes and huge swaths of our remaining forest and grassland habitats would disappear.

The renewable future assumes these eco-friendly alternatives would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner.Refrigerators and freezerswouldconk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foodswouldspoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone so we wouldnt have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. Kiss yourcotton-polyester-lycra leggings and yoga pants good-bye.

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldnt even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise we couldnt mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldnt even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required tomanufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines much less power civilization.

My grandmother used to tell me, The only good thing about the good old days is that theyre gone. Well, theyd be back, as the USA is de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. Recall what we were able to do back then, what lives were like, how long people lived. Visit Colonial Williamsburg and Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia, or similar places in your state. Explore rural Africa and India.

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

Think back to amazing construction projects of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome or even 18th century London, Paris, New York. Ponder how they were built, how many people it took, how they obtained and moved the raw materials. Imagine being part of those wondrous enterprises, from sunup to sundown.

The good news is that there will be millions of new jobs. The bad news is that theyd involve mostly backbreaking labor with picks and shovels, for a buck an hour. Low-skill, low-productivity jobs just dont pay all that well. Maybe to create even more jobs, the government will issue spoons, instead of shovels.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there wont even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioid crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, youll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again grow millions of acres of hay to feed them and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

Therell be no paved streets unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC.

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. Youll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live. Dont bet on it. Dont even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel or spoon.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. And that group likely wont include too many Handgun Control and Gun Free Zone devotees.

But at least your climate will be stable and serene or so you suppose. You wont have any more extreme weather events. Sea levels will stay right where they are today: 400 feet higher than when a warming planet melted the last mile-thick glaciers that covered half the Northern Hemisphere 12,000 years ago.

At least it will be stable and serene until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky, powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries wont be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward toward the good old days. Those that dont swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid (most of which will end up with ruling elites and their families, friends, cronies and private armies).

So how about this as a better option?

Stop obsessing over dangerous manmade climate change. Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earths climate, when they really end up controlling our lives.

Dont force-feed us with todays substandard, subsidized, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-renewable energy systems. When better, more efficient, more practical energy technologies are developed, they will replace fossil fuels. Until then, we would be crazy to go down the primrose path to renewable energy utopia.

Link:

Life in fossil-fuel-free utopia - Townhall