Those who remember Visual Arts Trends, a publication created and edited by my friend Julia Dudnik-Stern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, might recall that I didnāt have kind words about the Rt Hon Tony Blair and his government. In those pre-Iraq war days, one reader was so upset they wrote to Julia, who, to her credit, defended my freedom to express a political view.
It was actually quite rare to attack Blair, Mandy, the Blairites and Labour thenāthe fawning interviews given to Blair by the likes of Sir David Frost, and so many of the British media establishment made their 1997 campaign relatively easy. They shrewdly pitched themselves, light on substance and heavy on rhetoric, and that may have been what I was calling out. For once, I donāt recall too clearly, but I can tell you that I do sweat, and did so even when the Falklands were on.
How times have changed. In 2019, an independent study has shown that Labour largely gets negative press coverage in British newspapers, while Conservative gets positive. As covered in The Independent, Loughborough University researchers assigned negative scores to negative articles and positive scores to positive ones, to arrive at an index.
In the period from November 7 to 27, 2019, coverage on Labour scored ā71Ā·17 in the first week, ā71Ā·96 in the second, and ā75Ā·79 in the third.
By contrast, the Tories received +29Ā·98, +17Ā·86 and +15Ā·87.
Tonight, Colin Millarās thread made for an interesting read, where the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn is damned if he does, and damned if he doesnāt.
There is a possibility Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister of the UK by the end of next week. There is no better time to highlight how, no matter what Corbyn does or whatever position he takes, his critics will attack him – even if they totally contradict themselves (thread).
Corbyn's problem? He's both too centrist. He's also too much of a fringe figure. Both are argued in the same piece by Tom Peck: https://t.co/OZH41FavKm
Now, I’m sure I’ve shifted my position on things, but generally not in the same year. And yes, Labour itself hasn’t had the best comms in the world.
However, the UK population, and, for that matter, we here in New Zealand, look at the state of news in the US and think we somehow are above the phenomenon of āfake newsā. But itās very clear that we arenāt, and I have insisted for years that we arenāt. This may be uncomfortable for some, but the truth often is. I can only imagine some are all right with being lied to, just as they are all right with being surveilled by Big Tech.
There seems to be little outrage in a week when an article by the UK PM saying that his countryās poor are made up of chavs, burglars, drug addicts and losers emerges, and that poverty is caused by low IQ. In a separate story of his, admittedly older than mine for Julia, he says that children of single mothers are āill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimateā. One wonders what our former PM, Sir John Key, raised by his mother, makes of that.
Just like 1997, one side is being given a free pass by the British media, whether you like them or not. Are ‘we British’ smart enough to see through it? History suggests we are not.
My thanks to Sydney-based photographer Robert Catto for linking me to this one, especially near the festive season.
It is funnier than the one I took in Sweden many years ago, which in pun-land could be racist:
The sad thing is, at some point, the majority will not get the top joke.
I have a ringtone on my phone for SMSs, namely Derek Flint’s ringtone from In Like Flint.
If I mention In Like Flint, in my circles there’d be about one person every two years who’ll get what I mean.
Twenty years ago, everyone would have said, ‘Who’s Derek Flint? That’s Austin Powers’ ringtone!’
Today, some of my younger readers will ask, ‘Who’s Austin Powers?’
So far, only a tiny handful of people get my reference when I say, ‘Dear guards, Jeffrey can be taken off suicide watch. Signed, Epstein’s mother.’
No, what Epstein did to his victimsāchildrenāis no laughing matter.
However, I don’t think I’m alone in needing humour as an anchor for my sanity when the news is abhorrent.
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffsāa group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social networkāsettled.
Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, āThe suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. āThe average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,ā stated an amended complaint.ā
Facebook denies this and settled for US$40 million, which is really pocket change for the multi-milliard-dollar company. Just the price of doing business.
Remember, Facebook has been shown to have lied about the number of people it can reach (it now admits that its population estimates have no basis in, well, the population), so Iām not surprised it lies about the number of people who watch their videos. And remember their platform has a lot of botsāI still have several thousand reported on Instagram that have yet to be touchedāand Facebook itself isnāt exactly clean.
Every time they get called out, there are a few noises, but nothing ever really happens.
This exchange between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Zuckerberg is a further indication that nothing will ever happen at Facebook to make things rightāthere’s no will from top management for that to happen. Thereās too much to be lost with monetization opportunities for questionable services to be shut down, while Facebook is all too happy to close ones that donāt make money (e.g. the old āView asā feature). The divisions and “fake news” will continue, the tools used by all the wrong people.
It’s your choice whether you want to be part of this.
"So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no."
Complete exchange between @RepAOC@AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today's House Financial Services Cmte hearing.
That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, donāt you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!
Strictly speaking, I realize it was Book Antiqua, though as we all know, that’s a Palatino clone.
Since even English types like Baskerville were influenced by what was happening on the Continent, for official use, the UK really needs to go back to Old English. And yes, I realize that suggestion has unpleasant parallels to what was going on in Germany in the 1930s ā¦
There was a great follow-up to my Tweet, incidentally:
I need a "Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!" tee shirt, and I do not even wear clothes with writing on them.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonāt name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iāll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
ā¢ have forward-thinking policies;
ā¢ appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
ā¢ frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canāt advise how to win since I didnāt. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
ā¢ Use rose-coloured glasses;
ā¢ appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
ā¢ suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnāt do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.)
Ken Clarke nails Boris Johnson's oh so transparent strategy 👏
1. Set conditions which make No Deal inevitable
2. Make sure blame is attached to the EU & Parliament
3. Fly a flag waving general election before the consequences of No Deal become too obvious pic.twitter.com/hoNKc9hysv
Subsequently, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lives in a dream world detached from understanding others, inspired even more rebellion, and with the PM’s speech, it played out exactly as Clarke predicted. Not predicted: Iain Duncan-Smith picking his nose.
Johnson is acting like the schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework and is trying to hide it in a myriad of excuses. The UK doesn’t even have a negotiating team, according to former Chancellor Philip Hammond, and the PM’s claims of ‘progress’ are a mystery to those in Brussels. There is only so much nationalistic bluster will get you if you don’t actually do the workāeven if you voted leave, you would expect this government to have advanced your interests even slightly. It appears that that was never its aim. It feels a bit like the last days of Mao: keep it messy in a hope to hold on a little longer.
Iāve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canāt book online, and I donāt know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnāt book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereās what happens after Iāve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letās begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereās what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarās Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donāt expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iām not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
In the last month, maybe the last few weeks, my likes on Instagram have halved. Interestingly, Lucireās Instagram visits have increased markedly. But as I use my own account more than a work one, I can see the trend there a bit more clearly.
Itās not unlike Facebook, which, of course, owns Instagram. While I havenāt used it for personal updates since 2017, I maintain a handful of pages, and I still recall earlier this decade when, overnight, engagement dropped 90 per cent. It never recovered. Facebook, like Google, biases itself toward those who can afford to pay, in the great unlevelling of the playing field that Big Tech is wont to do.
They know that theyāre structured on, basically, a form of digital drug-taking: that for every like we get, we get a dopamine hit, and if we want to maintain those levels, we had better pay for them and become junkies. But hereās the thing: what if people wake up and realize that they donāt need that hit any more? I mean, even Popeye Doyle got through cold turkey to pursue Alain Charnier in French Connection II.
Iāve written about social media fatigue before, and the over-sharing that can come with it. More than once I blogged about being āFacebooked outā. And as you quit one social medium, itās not too hard to quit another.
Iāve made a lot of posts on Instagram but I value my privacy increasingly, and in the period leading up to the house move, I began doing less on it. And without the level of engagement, whether thatās caused by the algorithm or my own drop in activity, Iām beginning to care less, even if Instagram was more a hobby medium where I interacted with others.
And since I have less time to check it, I actually donāt notice that I have fewer likes when I open the app. I only really know when I see that each photo averages 15 likes or so, when figures in the 30s and 40s were far more commonplace not very long ago.
So whatās the deal? Would they like us to pay? Iām not that desperate. I donāt āGram for likes, as it was always a hobby, one that I seem to have less time for in 2019. I never thought being an āinfluencerā on Instagram was important. The novelty has well and truly worn off, and as friends depart from the platform, the need to use it to keep them updated diminishes. In the last fortnight I recorded three videos for friends and sent them via Smash or Wetransfer, and that kept them informed. You know, like writing a letter as we did pre-email, but with audio and video. Instagram just isnāt that vital. Email actually serves me just fine.
As I said to a friend tonight, even Twitter seems expendable from oneās everyday habits. Especially after March 15 here. You realize that those who are already arseholes really want to stay that way, their life ambition probably to join certain foreign-owned radio stations to be talking heads. But since they lack the nous, the best they can manage is social-media venting. And the good people want to remain good and have the space to live their lives happily. So why, I began wondering, should we spend our time getting our blood pressure up to defend our patch in a medium where the arseholes are, by and large, gutless wannabes who darenāt tell you have of the venom they write to your face? Does anyone ever put a Stuff commenter up on a pedestal and give them respect? While there are a great many people whom I admire on Twitter, and I am fortunate enough to have come into their orbit, there are an increasing number of days when I want to leave them to it, and if they wish to deal with the low-lifes of this world, it is their prerogative, and I respect them for doing something Iām tiring of doing myself. Twelve years on Twitter is a long time. At the time of writing, Iāve made 91,624 Tweets. Thatās a lot.
Unlike the arseholes, each and every one of these decent human beings have successful lives, and they donāt need to spend their waking moments dispensing hate toward any other group that isnāt like them in terms of genitals, sexual orientation, race or religion. And, frankly, I can contact those decent people in media outside of social.
Maybe the fear of Tweeting less is that we believe that the patients will overrun the asylum, that weāre the last line of defence in a world where racists and others are emboldened. That if we show that good sense and tolerance prevail, as my grandfather and others wanted to do when they went to war, then those who harbour unsavoury thoughts toward people unlike them might think twice. I canāt really argue with that.
But I wonder whether Iāll be more effective outside of social. I publish magazines, for a start. They give me a platform others do not have. I donāt need to leave comments on articles (and over the years, I havenāt done much of that). And I have websites I visit where I can unwind, away from the shouting factories of American Big Tech. Most of us want to do good on this earth, and the long game is I may be better off building businesses Iām good at rather than try to show how much smarter I am versus a talentless social media stranger.
No, Iām not saying Iām leaving either medium. I am saying that Iād rather spend that time on things I love to do, and before 2007 I had enough to do without sharing. Some of the colleagues I respect the most have barely set foot in the world of social, and right now I envy just how much time they have managed to put into other important endeavours, including books that are changing lives.
Big Tech must know the writing’s on the wall.
PS.: From a discussion with the wonderful William Shepherd when he read this on Twitter (the irony is not lost on me given the subject).āJY
One thing about Twitter, it never sleeps. So when I can't sleep, it is an easy way to waste the early morning. 4:15 in LA, hey Jack.
"Last line of defense" is a good way to phrase it. Or, at least know when they have gone totally crazy from their own venomous rage.
My feeling is there will be an exodus soon but I donāt know why yet. My online activity on Facebook is not unlike my forum activity during Bush 43. And I know itās diminishing here and on Instagram.
I remember on Vox, I was happy blogging to an audience of strangers, and I wonder whether something similar is going to be the next creative outlet for people, especially as workālife balance becomes more important, and the US ā20 election cycle heats up.
The media will give politics wall-to-wall coverage, the consequence being that the public tires of it when going on to social media platforms. At some point, self-preservation has to kick in and that rage is going to do no one any good. The bots will also put people off.
Here’s a sure-fire way to lose readers and cost you ad revenue.
It seems Haymarket’s Autocar (which I have been reading in print since 1980) wasn’t pleased about people using online ad blockers, so it created a warning.
The trouble is I don’t use ad blockers. In fact, you can see a massive advertisement underneath the warning:
In fact, that ad keeps changing, so I guess the advertiser is charged for totally useless impressions.
Clicking ‘I’ve disabled my Ad-Blocker’ does nothing.
I decided to click the other option, for advice on how to whitelist the ad blocker that I do not have.
I presume whatever’s in that blue box are the instructions, which are illegible. Autocar often talks about the difficulties behind some car infotainment interfaces, but you’d hope a publisher with a budget that far exceeds mine would get this right.
The irony of this effort is that Autocar winds up losing ad revenue. I have Tweeted them, so here’s hoping this silly tech can be removed so I can help their bottom line. You do wonder about their bosses sometimes thoughāmaybe this sort of abrasive behaviour comes from the top.
Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.)
