• Last week I went to a thing about surveillance capitalism at the IIPP. It wasn’t very good.
• Maybe that’s unfair. I guess it was just very reactionary about technology in a way I don’t personally feel is useful to either the users, makers or legislators of technology. And if you’re not speaking to any of those groups then why bother?
• It’s like, a decade ago the only critical writing you could find about tech was in fashion magazines, which was weird but also had the side-effect of improving my wardrobe and here we are. Suddenly its 2019 and tech criticism is everywhere (which is good) but you get the impression that most people doing it don’t understand the tech at all (which is… less good?).
• In theory any critique is probably better than no critique. But also in theory having editorial balance on the news should make it better, and now we have anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers on the BBC. 🤷🏻‍♂️
• Designs of the Year exhibition is open at the Design Museum. The range of stuff in the competition is slowly expanding to cover areas like direct activism, policy and service design, which is brilliant. Sensible4 & MUJI’s self-driving bus should win — it answers a very real issue with suburban and rural communities depending on fossil fuels and so voting for climate denial candidates, and wraps it in a beautifully designed bit of hardware which actually works well enough that they’re currently doing a live beta with real users — but it probably won’t because their display in the actual exhibit is lowkey underwhelming and it’s still a design competition.
• The basement gallery in the Design Museum is still awful. If they had a proper space they could have just put one of the MUJI buses in there, and then it might have won. The poor curators.
• Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa is still on at Japan House. It’s just down the road from Designs of the Year, so you can go afterwards to cheer yourself up.
• I’ve been reading This Is Not Propaganda - Adventures in the War Against Reality. It’s very good. Holds back on making grand statements and instead focuses on one aspect of technology, exploring it thoughtfully.

Social media technology, combined with a world view in which all information is part of a war and impartiality is impossible, has helped undermine the sacrosanctity of facts. But the more I thought about the issue, the more it seemed to me I was asking the question the wrong way. Instead of questioning why facts had become irrelevant, I should ascertain why they had ever been relevant in political speech at all. And why were we seeing such similar tactics from both of the former cold war superpowers? Facts after all, are not always the most pleasant things; they can be reminders of our place and our limitations, our failures and, ultimately, our mortality. There is a sort of adolescent joy in throwing off their weight, of giving a great big ‘fuck you’ to glum reality. The very pleasure of a Putin or a Trump is the release from the constraint they offer. But though facts can be unpleasant, they are useful. You especially need them if you are constructing something in the real world. There are no post-truth moments if you are building a bridge.

p163. Peter Pomerantsev
This Is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality

• There’s other sections that could almost be direct critiques of the sort of reckons that were bouncing around the IIPP event.

The long-term implications (of thinking about propaganda on social media as information warfare) go deeper. If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Bejing and Moscow, effectively a cover for enforcing censorship.

p113. Peter Pomerantsev
This Is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality

• As I was reading it I couldn’t ignore how similar all Pomerantsev’s examples are to the sort of disinformation campaigns that have been running in the UK throughout brexit. Except here our disinformation campaigns happen in the newspapers rather than on social media.
• I haven’t written much on here over the last few years. Published a few things over on the GDS blogs but tbh the culture wars blowing up in the UK really limited what I felt I could write about without worrying about accidentally touching on politics. But now I have both free time and free speech so I’ve decided to try easing back in with some weeknotes. We’ll see.

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