Technology

Thursday

Rod Liddle

What if Covid had struck in the 1970s?

We have reached Covid-19’s first anniversary in the UK — and I really think we should do something fitting to mark the occasion. The actual date is pretty much a moveable feast. The first patient in the UK known to have died of the disease was Peter Attwood, aged 84, on 30 January. But we didn’t know then that he had Covid, finding out only about six months later. On 4 February, the government instructed all Brits living in China to get the hell out and return to the UK sharpish and breathe all over us, as I believe the press statement had it. On 11 February, the little baby

Sunday

Yiannis Baboulias

The free speech row tearing apart the tech community

Donald Trump’s Twitter suspension after the riot at the US Capitol made headlines around the world. What was less reported, however, was that as the then-President was suspended, so too were tens of thousands of right-wing accounts. Their social media refuge was Parler, another micro-blogging platform. Parler markets itself as a ‘free speech-focused and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks’. Whatever its intentions, in recent years the platform has become a cesspit of extremist content. So extreme, in fact, that Amazon banned Parler from its hosting services earlier this month. The case is now going through the courts, after Parler launched a lawsuit. What makes Parler an interesting case is

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Business rebirth is always possible – with the right help

The online fashion retailer Boohoo is buying Debenhams without its stores and staff, confirming the demise of the high street. Airlines face quarantine rules that could kill international travel for many months ahead, while the cross–Channel Eurostar rail service cries out for state rescue. The travel and hospitality sectors, alongside what’s left of bricks-and–mortar retail, watch their survival chances evaporating. Amid unremitting economic mayhem, new milestones are easily taken for gravestones. But here’s an optimistic parable from half a century ago. The bankruptcy of Rolls-Royce on 4 February 1971, crippled by a contract to supply newly developed RB211 jet engines for the US-built Lockheed TriStar aircraft, was a traumatic episode

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Our obsession with city living is out of date

In March last year, the world made an interesting discovery. We found that a high proportion of knowledge-work could be performed remotely. Significantly, this came as a surprise to everyone. It should be a source of mild shame that, for all their talk of innovation, very few companies or institutions had experimented with this possibility beforehand. Given that this technology might help solve the housing shortage, geographical inequality, intergenerational wealth inequality, the transport crisis, the pensions crisis, the environmental crisis and almost everything else people worry about, it seems odd that it attracted so little consideration until a pandemic forced our hand. If I pay a London-dwelling employee 10 per

Thursday

Christopher Brown

My historical re-enactment group’s battle with Silicon Valley

The Wimborne Militia of Dorset prides itself on being the only formally commissioned ‘private army’ in England. We’re well known locally but less well known in California, which is perhaps why Facebook banned our homepage a few weeks ago, thinking we were a right-wing Trumpian ‘militia’. Its algorithm seems not to recognise historical re-enactment societies, which is a shame. They are an important part of British cultural life. I’ve been a historical re-enactor since 1983 and I’ve found that my fellow amateur historians are happy with the moniker of ‘mostly harmless’ eccentrics. The Wimborne Militia, a band of about 50, receives from the town council a commission ‘to further historical

Thursday

Niall Ferguson

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

Tuesday

Tom Morgan

Is Elon Musk right to use Signal over WhatsApp?

Elon Musk has a habit of sparking fires on Twitter. His latest suggestion to ‘Use Signal’ might have confused a few people – what is it, and why should I ‘use’ it? Signal is, in short, a messaging app for people who are concerned about privacy: once-upon-a-time a concern of small group of techies, but now something that most people have good grounds to start taking seriously. Signal is one of the first messaging apps that claims to hold absolutely zero data about you Whenever you interact with anything – or anyone – online, some data is being passed round the internet; and some of that data can be personally

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Is it time to reopen technology’s cold cases?

One of the staples of crime drama is the ‘cold-case squad’. This allows programme-makers to add period detail to the scenes set in the past, while the present-day scenes can show implausibly attractive forensic scientists hunting for clues in a creepy location such as a long-abandoned children’s home (an activity obviously best performed during the hours of darkness by two people who separate in mid-search for no apparent reason). I have often wondered whether it is worth establishing a cold-case squad for technology and science, to investigate those lines of inquiry that went cold 50 years ago but would now repay further investigation; or inventions that suffered from a miscarriage

Thursday

Toby Young

Can £3,000 make me as pretty as Emily Maitlis?

If you’re a journalist with a fondness for appearing on television — and, let’s face it, most of us are — the Covid crisis has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you’re no longer expected to drag yourself off to a studio at the crack of dawn, whether it’s Broadcasting House in the West End or Sky’s headquarters in Isleworth. You simply tumble out of bed, open your laptop and do a ‘down the line’. You don’t even have to put your trousers on. But the big drawback is, you look terrible. In a television studio, you have the benefit of make-up, professional lighting and proper cameras and

Thursday

Candia Lutyens

Why has eBay banned me for life?

Imagine a country where there is no rule of law, where you might be scooped off the street without warning, put before a kangaroo court and sentenced to life in prison without parole and without right of appeal. You have no idea of the charge against you because no one in authority will tell you. You are innocent of any crime, except you don’t know what your crime is; the full might of the law has been brought down on your head and you have nowhere to turn. What if this imaginary country was not in fact a nation state but a large, wealthy and powerful company? What if it

Thursday

James Ball

The EU’s muddled approach to encryption

The EU would like you to know that it doesn’t want to ban encryption. In fact, it correctly recognises that encryption is absolutely essential for our privacy and financial safety on the internet. That’s why a draft resolution – due to be tabled in front of EU leaders at a pivotal summit later this month – spends paragraphs extolling the virtues of online encryption, before setting out the EU’s complaint: they would really like to be able to read encrypted messages. And they want technology companies to do something about it. On the surface, the EU’s argument might seem quite reasonable: most of us would generally believe that with warrants

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The ludicrousness of stemmed wine glasses

In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. Back then, it was also rare to make a mobile-to-mobile call. If you did, it was the main topic of conversation for the first few minutes: ‘Where are you?’ ‘On a boat.’ ‘Wow, I’m on a train going through Leighton Buzzard.’ And you’d laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. The world’s most ludicrous object is the stemmed wine glass. Why does this idiotic item persist? Now let’s imagine that, owing to a technological limitation, early cellphones hadn’t offered interconnectivity with

John Phipps

Boldly going where hundreds have gone before: Brave New Planet podcast reviewed

Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that driverless cars, green energy and of course certain vaccines are, for all their breakneck pace, still taking for ever to arrive. Watching the future emerge is like watching slow-motion footage of a high-speed train. We know it’s going quickly — but can we not just fast-forward? Perhaps it’s merely our heightened expectations, our diminished boredom thresholds. Some of our most distinguished thinkers and entrepreneurs have warned that an all-powerful artificial intelligence, badly calibrated, might represent the greatest threat to the long-term survival of humanity. That they’ve been warning this for

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

What’s the point of trying to break up ‘big tech’?

The ‘antitrust’ law suit launched by US authorities against Google has been reported as a potential turning point in the dominance of ‘big tech’ — and an echo of the courtroom dramas that diminished the excessive power of America’s late 19th–century oil, steel and railroad barons. But I wonder how much impact it will really have. The allegation, in brief, is that Google has created an illegal near-monopoly by paying large sums to Apple and other smartphone makers to secure its position as the default search engine for billions of consumers, its grip reinforced by ownership of Android, the phone operating system, and Chrome, the popular browser — all of

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Has my tech guy moved to Africa to escape from me?

‘I can’t put it off any longer. She’s dying and I don’t think I can ignore the inevitable. We’ve got to let her go. I’m scared. Will you come? Please? I really need you.’ I sent the text and waited. After a few minutes, the man I depend on more than any other texted back. Usually he drops everything and comes. This time, his reply would shatter my world. We had been planning to go together to Currys, my tech guy and I, when the old Acer finally gave up the ghost. But I had been dreading it so much I had nursed her along even when the keys started

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The terror of choosing the wrong email sign off

Just now, I wrote an email and I couldn’t for the life of me think how to sign it off. ‘Kind regards’, the default setting for most messages, felt a bit too formal, given I am on friendly terms with the recipient; he’s older than me and a priest. ‘Yours ever’ seems forward. ‘Best wishes’ is fine for strangers but may be stilted for someone you know quite well. ‘M’, my most frequent sign-off, would look downright rude. An ‘X’ was out of the question. So plain ‘Melanie’ it was. But I was left wondering which of the range of options I should have gone for, each suggestive of a

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Remote workers of the world, unite!

A few nights ago on Twitter, I quipped that I was planning to launch a trade union for remote workers. With dues of £10 a year, but membership of 200 million worldwide, I planned to become the Jimmy Hoffa of Zoom (my colleague Jamie McClellan, clearly a Microsoft fan, suggested we call ourselves the Teamsters). If our demands for swivel chairs were not met, we would threaten to homework-to-rule — sitting with our backs to brightly lit windows, perhaps, or running vacuum cleaners in mid-presentation. But in a way, a million or so Londoners are already doing something similar by refusing to travel to work. This is a white-collar strike

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why our greatest inventors are supreme hucksters

People often tell me I have a strange way of looking at the world. Obviously, it doesn’t seem strange to me. But I do tend to see the world backwards. For instance, most people think the principal obstacles to economic and technological growth are all about supply. To me, it’s all in the demand. I have met one Italian economist, Mario Fabbri, who agrees. But apart from him, me and maybe Matt Ridley, there’s nobody else. Now, how crazy is this idea? What if the biggest constraint to progress really is a question of psychology, not economics? Certainly, if it is true, it should not surprise us that economists and

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Trick or treat: the pros and cons of being hacked

The phone rang at 9 a.m. on Monday, with an old friend from Italy saying: ‘Of course I’ll do you a favour, my dear, but you don’t say what it is.’ I thought he’d finally lost his marbles (always a possibility with friends my age) but he said I’d just sent him an email asking if he would do me a favour. I hadn’t sent any emails that morning so I was mystified. As soon as I put the phone down, another friend rang saying of course he would help, but he was on Hampstead Heath and it would have to wait till he got home. But what had to

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Finally, we’re unboxing the teleporter

This week’s Wiki Man may read a bit oddly. You see, I haven’t ‘written’ it at all; I’ve dictated it into a kind of dictaphone (an Olympus LS-P4, at £130, needlessly expensive for the purpose, but that’s how I roll) and then uploaded the audio file to an online transcription service called otter.ai. The reason I’m doing this is to find out how long it takes to write a Spectator article when you dictate it and get it transcribed online, compared with writing it on a keyboard like it’s 1940 or something. I’ll let you know the result at the end of this article. But I’m doing this because I