Category: Society

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Society Technology

Not waving but drowning beneath grey goo data

A few decades ago, someone or other caught the imagination of nerds by warning about ‘grey goo’ – a sludge of self-replicating nanobots that once they got going would eventually submerge the planet beneath depthless layers of their endlessly churned-out carcasses.

That or they ate the world to the core with their ceaseless reproduction.

Either way, not so much Terminator as a silicon Sperminator.

Now, you might protest that I’ve been a bit vague with my introduction. Who exactly said this? When? Where?

But let’s face it – this is the direction we’re headed.

I vaguely remember the details. Either I’ll have to Google it or you will. And right now – mostly to make a point – I can’t be arsed.

You knock yourself out though if you like. I’ll wait…

…you’re back already? I suppose some of us slip down the Net’s rabbit holes more easily than others, eh?

Anyway, back to grey goo.

No goo zone

Or maybe not as grey goo hasn’t happened yet. So far the only unnatural junk piling up on the planet is what we humans put there.

Yes, okay, mud in some forms is a sort of carbon-based life’s grey goo. I’m thinking rich peaty loams and forest canopy floors. Oil sands.

And yes, we could have a long chat about the evolution of grey goo that eats grey goo and where that would all go in a billion years.

But this isn’t the article for such diversions.

My point is we’ve escaped Goo-meggedon so far. At least in the physical world, which still matters the most but won’t before the century is out.

Let the goo times flow

Back over in Not Real Life however – the light-fast world of data and compute and 4Chan LOLs and our future – things aren’t going so well.

Just two months ago I wrote that soon we’ll have to demonstrate our identities to prove we’re not AI-bots. To authenticate our humanity on everything from Twitter to (eventually) talk radio phone-ins.

But by ‘soon’ I mean I was thinking a few years. Not months.

However ChatGPT has put the vanguard of machine learning into the public’s hands with a global gusto. And the resultant cacophony of coverage and wonder has even outdone Dall-E and Stable Diffusion and the other image-focused AI systems’ debuts earlier this year.

Indeed no sooner than you can say “a gun is a dangerous weapon, don’t point it at anything important and treat it with respect” people are already flooding Internet forums created for human pronouncement and consumption to post ChatGPT’s (stupendous) verbal vomit.

To give just one example, Liam Tung of ZD Net reports:

Stack Overflow, a site where developers can ask and answer coding questions, has temporarily banned the use of text generated from ChatGPT, a chatbot released by Open AI last week.

ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model.

People have quickly discovered that, while it answers prompts in a “human-adjacent” way, there can be flaws in the answers it gives.

Basically, keen Stack Overflowers (I guess? I’m not a local) have been spamming the site with ChatGPT-created content. Which is a problem when even the bot’s creator, OpenAI, stresses its precocious child can deliver “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

Liam Tung – who may or may not be an organic life form himself – continues sagaciously:

This appears to be a key cause of its impact on Stack Overflow and its users who are seeking correct answers to coding problems.

Additionally, because ChatGPT generates answers so quickly, some users are supplying lots of answers generated by it without parsing them for correctness. 

Oh Liam! In just a few casually typed out / generatively predicted words there, you’ve raised so many questions about the future of knowledge, civilisation, blogging for early retirement, and getting a robot to do one’s schoolwork.

But it’s a common kernel at the heart of all that which we’ll be choking on today.

The goo goo trolls

You see, what has struck me most forcefully in the past fortnight is the sheer volume of data these things are going to create.

So far it’s just everyone and his dog. But soon it will be everyone and their robot. Then their robot’s robot. And so on.

Listen carefully! Do you hear a tap-tapping?

Yes, it’s the sound of Lithuanian troll farms and Texan entrepreneurs alike bashing out code and sending forth bots to drown us all in this calorie-light info-crud in order to earn a few dollars from Google’s Adsense. Or perhaps to tilt us to vote this way or that.

Look, I don’t know their nefarious plans. I’m one of the good guys.

But even as I’ve been pecking away for hours like every other curious pigeon on ChatGPT’s levers in the hope of another crumb of dopamine, it struck me that humanity’s death by AI might be even dumber than I previously suspected.

True, I’ve led the field among very obscure pundits in warning that just getting rid of 90% of low-level knowledge jobs could be more than enough to rupture society. At least for a few decades and a civil war or two.

In other words we don’t need a post-singularity-level evil and scheming AI to explain why, with regret, the human race has to go, as it dangles us over a bubbling vat of metaphorical sulphuric acid.

No, just a cheap and dumb-ass bot that can be copied-and-pasted over the world’s office employment might do the trick.

But what’s clear from even these early skirmishes with ChatGPT is an even more insidious risk – the danger of our emerging ‘other’ reality being rapidly flooded with data goo. ‘Plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical’ gunk – or even mostly right but still exceeding mediocre verbiage – that crowds out what little signal is left in a world that already seems to be turned up to 11 on the noise front.

Holly goo lightly

Of course there will be solutions. Every platform already has its own Deckardian countermeasures seeking to resist or destroy this stuff.

But the models will improve. And it will be ever harder to tell their output from a real person’s most precious shared thoughts.

At best it’s yet another arm’s race that you and I will increasingly be viewing out of a passenger window rather than the cockpit, while software does all the heavy-lifting.

Leaving us wondering if we’re on a nice getaway flight to someplace warm, or actually cooped up inside a missile heading for impact.

Or else I guess it breaks the Internet and we go back to fire and parchment and worrying about the wolves.

(But no we won’t go back. As I wrote previously we’ll sign-in as provably real people and fence this stuff out. But we’ll have to do that, for as long as we can. Nobody wants the wolves again.)

Hah! Stick those 1,153 words in your natural language model’s pipe and smoke them. I won’t go down without a fight.

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Society Technology

Settling up and moving on

We were done with our meal and so I signalled to a waiter to settle up.

A very young woman at a table nearby explained what I’d done to her companion – not unkindly, and without possibly knowing she was within earshot of a highly-sensitive Geiger Counter of a human being:

“Did you see that? Do you know why they do that wiggle with their hands? It’s because they used to have write their name on a piece of paper to pay their bills.”

Thank goodness my postman still calls me ‘young man’.

My vanity and intimations of mortality aside, it’s interesting to think about all these little cultural – or even structural – artefacts that litter our society and environment.

One example is the QWERTY keyboard. Most of us use one every day. After a few years and no-training, sheer repetition turns us into touch typists. Our fingers can reach for a P or the space bar even when we’re tapping away on a keyboard-less desk!

Yet this QWERTY layout is arbitrary from today’s vantage point. It’s a legacy of an arm’s race in the once red hot mechanical typewriter boom.

Indeed popular legend is that the key arrangement was selected not to speed up typing but rather to slow typists down – in order to prevent a typewriter’s hammers from jamming.

Whether true or not, the arrangement of keys has not been selected for the modern world – and yet it’s not going to change in our lifetime in the Latin-writing world.

(The only thing likely to supersede it is voice. How very back to the future).

Another example of this in-the-making is the navigation of virtual realities – or The Metaverse as we must call it nowadays.

Getting from imaginary A-to-B is sure to build off video game controls first pioneered by the likes of Doom and Super Mario 64 in the 1990s. Nobody is going to spend time figuring out whether that’s optimal, when so much of the money-spending adult world knows how to do it already.

Of course some habits or actions do go change or away.

My parents were still reciting their number on picking up their home telephone well into the era of Caller ID and mobile. At some point they stopped. Nobody does that any more.

On the other hand, many of my generation still end their emails with a ‘best’ or a ‘cheers’ and their name. The young people don’t.

You can’t model the future

These changes happen so slowly we seldom see them underway.

But for a striking visual example, check out this video of a Chinese model racing through a clothing shoot for a fast fashion brand:

Two things are happening at once here.

Firstly, the ease of manufacturing and the relentless turnover of disposable fashion means the manufacturer Taobao requires images of thousands of product skus every month. Possibly every week.

The model – a pragmatic woman called Cui Yue – laments they could shoot for 24 hours a day and still not get through the backlog.

Which means everyone involved must move at speed.

Secondly, there’s no film in the photographer’s camera. Instead it’s all digital, which makes the marginal cost of an additional shot extremely near-zero.

Fashion photographers were always click-happy, but this is the old flash-flash-flash cliché on steroids.

As a result Yue seems more like some Boston Dynamics ModelBot than the strutting, stalking models of old. She transitions through a dozen poses in as many seconds, with an economy of movement that would put a ballerina to shame.

She’s like a very pretty C-3PO doing Tai Chi.

Turn, turn, turn

Cui Yue has made peace with her eventual replacement by younger, cheaper women.

And I expect those women will have to accept they’ll be replaced by computer graphics. All those people with cameras and clothes and bottles of water are expensive, even at this pace.

The young historian at the restaurant who explained away my hand wave no doubt paid for her bill – like I did – by touching her phone to a portable card reader, brought to the table by the staff.

All very 2022 and yet probably not long for this world, either.

Waiting for the bill is only slightly less annoying than waiting in a queue at the supermarket in today’s world of self-serve checkouts. There’s a small social payoff at the restaurant, but I don’t think it will save the ritual any more than album covers held back music streaming.

Several startups enable diners to pay and leave whenever they want – just by scanning a QR code either at the start or the end of their visit. You get up and go when you’re done.

But that won’t last long either.

Amazon Fresh stores enable you to pick-up anything you like off the shelves and walk out without any formal settling-up. Doing so at a restaurant would be magnitudes easier.

Everything is changing, all the time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re from the future.

If you can read this you’re already a relic from the past.

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Society Technology

Saving Star Wars: one deep fake at a time

Hayden Christensen in 2010 and good luck to him.

I have a long-running disagreement with a friend about Deep Fake technology and what we’d currently call meme or TikTok culture.

Within some number of years – whether 20 or 1o0 – I believe everyday consumers will be able to seamlessly insert anyone they want into an existing film in place of the original actors.

There are already lots of iPhone apps that will do this clumsily for a face for ten seconds or so.

But I’m envisaging a more complete removal, insertion, and touch-up job. One that can have you wandering around looking for the Lost Ark instead of Harrison Ford, or for the perfect pair of Jimmy Choo heels instead of having to see Sarah Jessica Parker have all the fun.

I believe when this is possible, everyone will have fun doing it.

However my friend considers it “pointless” and in contrast argues “nobody would want to do that”.

I suggest my friend pays more attention to social media.

A disturbance in The Force

But sure, like all these things the novelty will soon wear off.

For two years in a row my mum was in hilarious uproar just from sticking family faces onto the dancing elves of a digital Christmas card.

Now not even she – the biggest fan of that flash in the pan – can be arsed.

However one can speculate about more finessed implementations of the same technology.

By way of example… egged on by Obi Wan Kenobi, I’m re-watching Star Wars in chronological order on Disney Plus.

And to my shock I’m finding the prequels far less terrible than I’d remembered.

Even – whisper it – mostly pretty good. They’ve not just withstood the test of time. They’ve grown stronger for it.

Maybe it’s that 20 years later the stakes are much lower. Or maybe it’s because a dozen Star Wars spin-offs later, we’re all less reverential.

But today, The Phantom Menace’s pod race is clearly a franchise highlight. The various worlds pop.

For whatever reason even Attack of the Clones is almost watchable.

Almost, because… Hayden Christensen. And Natalie Portman. And the porn film level dialogue. And the wooden 1920s stage-y standing around stating their characters’ development.

All that is still something you have to hold your nose through, like a whirl of broccoli puree in what would otherwise be a wondrous Strawberry Sunday of a movie.

The re-write stuff

Is this awfulness because of George Lucas’ famously dire dialogue?

We’ve all heard how Harrison Ford apparently quipped: “George! You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”

Yet the original Star Wars films made Ford and his wise-cracking Han Solo famous – despite or just maybe because of Lucas.

Ewan McGregor wrings out pearls from Lucas’ placeholder bantha fodder in the prequels, too.

But sadly, Christensen does not.

Now to be fair to him he does come across as an arrogant, illogical, surly and deeply unlikeable teenager – which is mostly how I find late adolescents males these days. So given his character’s arc, perhaps it really was all superb acting on his part.

Even so, the verbal ping-pong-played-underwater-in-treacle between him and Portman pretty much sinks Clones as something you’d do for fun, as opposed to something you’d do because you had to atone for wanking in the confession booth.

Which made me wonder… what about if we could just edit him and Natalie P out of Star Wars?

Replace them?

And release not a Director’s Cut but a Viewer’s Revision?

Saving Private Hayden

At last some tangible upside from humanity’s march towards doom!

Anyone not paying attention to the threat from Deep Fake technology should study the polls concerning people’s views about Trump losing the election, Russia and Ukraine – heck even 9/11.

True, a lot of these dedicated reality denialists already wave aside video and audio proof as fake news.

But the average waverer in the street still mostly believes their eyes.

Within a decade or two, that will change. (Unless we can agree some kind of mandatory encoding for anything tampered with using software, which would be almost everything you see, and perhaps force the encoding on to a verification blockchain, say, so that anyone can it look up. But that’s for another day).

Batten down the hatches when Deep Fake wins over the doubters.

The End of Democracy aside, though, the tech could at least fix Attack of the Clones as a side benefit amid the apocalypse.

Take out Christensen and Portman.

Put in, well almost anyone, even a couple of those aforementioned porn stars. But preferably some sassy actors with a bit of chemistry.

Get Phoebe Waller-Bridge to rewrite the dialogue.

Boom! Suddenly Clones is a great movie.

Would you like Peter Sellers with that?

This kind of digital wart removal will become commonplace, I imagine. At first illegal, but later captured and sanctioned by IP owners whose business model is already mostly remixing someone dead’s bright ideas from 50 years ago, ad nauseam.

In the short-term then, we get a better Star Wars.

But what does it mean for the long-term?

Would movies and other cultural releases be V0.9s – betas – and then be patched for years afterwards?

What about once you throw generative AI into the mix? Would there ever be any big franchises again?

Would studios A/B test 100 versions of the same film with a dozen different actors and avatars before releasing the highest scorer?

Even this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.

Most people today still really don’t guess at how fast and furious the future is going to be.

Post-publication update: Here’s Kermit the Frog envisaged in various movies by the DALL-E natural language driven AI.

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Society

World Cities and aggregation theory

The (Great) Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Ben Thompson of Stratechery fame has a way of explaining the winner-takes-all dynamics of Internet-era platform companies which he calls Aggregation Theory.

It’s worth having a read and a think about if you’re struggling to understand why trillion dollar tech firms are posting 20%+ annual revenue growth, for example – and the supposed law of large numbers be damned.

Ben’s developed the concept since he first semi-accidentally coined it in 2015. He recently applied it to ideas and memes, noting:

…sure, the Internet makes possible a wide range of viewpoints — you can absolutely find critics of Black Lives Matter, COVID policies, or pro-Ukraine policies — but the Internet, thanks to its lack of friction and instant feedback loops, also makes nearly every position but the dominant one untenable.

If everyone believes one thing, the costs of believing something else increase dramatically, making the consensus opinion the only viable option; this is the same dynamic in which publishers become dependent on Google or Facebook, or retailers on Amazon, just because that is where money can be made.

Ben Thompson, The Current Thing, 17 March 2022

I can see where he’s going with this.

A bane of our times is how the proliferation of ideas and the thousand voices blooming potential of the Internet seems to be so much dough going into a doctrinaire cookie cutter that stamps out a couple of ideologically-opposed tribal views about everything from Brexit to Trump to Covid to Climate Change and that’s your lot.

Ben’s mapping of aggregation theory onto this paradox is as good as any other explanation.

All roads lead to Rome

It made me think that aggregation theory could also explain why as the Internet boomed and location became apparently less important, a handful of global cities became all-important.

The way I’ve put it before is that:

The more people can be anywhere, the more they will want to be somewhere.

Relocation, relocation, relocation, 2 September 2020

I think aggregation theory can map straight across to why bright young people migrate to places like London, New York, and Shanghai and to hell with all your regional redevelopment schemes and play-nice art galleries on the docksides of former industrial towns.

Ben argues that:

…centralization is a second order effect of decentralization: when all constraints on content are removed, more power than ever accrues to the entity that is the preferred choice for navigating that content; moreover, that power compounds on itself in a virtuous feedback loop.

Ben Thompson, The Current Thing, 17 March 2022

Like the factionally-correct doctrines Ben talks about in The Current Thing, moving to London is similarly a no-brainer when it comes to solving the problem of where to live for someone who can choose without constraints.

A city is a platform

Consider these traits of an aggregator, as per Ben’s definition:

  • Direct relationship with users
  • Zero marginal costs for serving users
  • Demand-driven multi-sided networks with decreasing acquisition costs

I don’t think it’s a stretch to apply that to all cities.

What sets the leading World Cities apart is their ability to create bigger and better ‘multi-sided networks to drive demand’ – and hence reduce the CAC of tempting a new graduate to plug into the World City’s network versus an inferior one down the train line.

It’s up to you New York

Of course this isn’t really saying anything especially new.

Cities scale – we know this.

Venture capital networks in Silicon Valley beget more venture capitalists – and more entrepreneurs.

Paris was full of artists in the 1920s and Berlin was in the 1930s.

And so on.

Yet I think there’s something about the true rootlessness possible in 21st Century life that amplifies the literal attractiveness of a city.

Like how gravity is the weakest force, but strongest gravity always wins.

Many pundits envisage our untethered lives will be increasingly lived up mountains or floating across the Atlantic or whatnot. At least when we’re not hamming it up in the metaverse.

But I doubt it.

The attractions of a World City may be relatively weak versus their heyday, considering you can now get nearly everything – artsy movies, kink, the latest thoughts from brilliant minds, speciality drinks – via a wire(less)…

…except in comparison to the even-weaker attractions of all the also-ran cities.

Weak beats weaker, so gets stronger. And everything aggregates.

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Nature Society

Delta foxtrot

A couple of weeks ago I WhatsApp-ed a few of my diehard virus-obsessed friends to ask them: “Why is the UK so crap at Covid?”

After all, we’re at the forefront of the world when it comes to vaccinations.

And we’d been stuck in some form of lockdown longer than most countries, too – with restrictions just extended again beyond 19 June.

Yet it already seemed we were on the cusp of a third (fourth? fifth?) wave of Covid.

I’d been concerned enough by the numbers to move my second jab forward by five weeks.

Better to look silly than sorry.

Case studies

That new-wave thesis has since been borne out in the curves:

We’re on the up and up again (Source: World in Data)

Our long lockdown over winter and into spring – plus the hugely successful vaccine rollout – had flattened the last wave by mid-May.

And yet here we are rising again as other countries flatline.

Various theories were put forward by my friends, from weaker guidance adherence at home (allegedly) to tougher restrictions abroad (supposedly).

I don’t buy any of that. To me this is clearly the Delta variant at work.

Always the sick man of Europe

In the past week the rest of the world seems to have woken up to the threat of Delta – or at least the stock markets have.

Yet we’re also hearing the same stuff we’ve heard throughout the pandemic as to why Delta won’t spread across Europe, or surge in the US.

Apparently it’s a British thing because it’s – um – currently in Britain? Yeah we’ve seen that movie before.

The one constant in this pandemic has been wishful thinking, and I’m finally immune to that.

It’s very likely that all those countries in the graphs above will see a resurgence of Covid over the next few weeks. Poorer countries with few vaccinations will be hit worse.

Israel, the other super-vaccinated country, has also seen cases rise in the past fortnight, incidentally.

Of course the pandemic has made us all look silly at one time or another. For instance while I definitely acknowledged the threat in March 2020, I didn’t believe the virus would prove so enduring.

I also feared the economic impact of lockdowns would be far more visible – mostly because I couldn’t have imagined the level of emergency government support and intervention we’ve seen, even in the US.

So perhaps I’m wrong and Delta’s proliferation in the UK is down to some particularly unfortunate set of circumstances here.

Oh, and – um – in India.

Yeah, perhaps not.

Deaths down despite Delta

Happily there is one good bit of good news, and it isn’t wishful thinking.

By and large vaccinations do stop you going to hospital with Covid, let alone dying.

There’s some lag in the data as always (because deaths don’t happen for a bit) but this UK Delta wave isn’t killing as many so far:

(Source: Our World in Data)

True, it’s sobering to think that 15 deaths a day would have been seen as terrible news in January 2020 – and to remember that every death is someone’s lost life and the loss of a loved one.

But deaths were running as high as 1,200 a day in early 2021. We’re in a far better spot right now.

Cases aren’t anything like as high as early 2021 yet, so more deaths will surely follow.

But a crude extrapolation might put us at about 150-200 deaths a day if things got so bad as January 2021.

(And they shouldn’t get so bad, given that more than 80% of people have been vaccinated. Vaccinations must act as some sort of transmission firewall, however imperfect.)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks determined to fully re-open the economy, despite Delta. In PMQs today he even used the unofficial term ‘Freedom Day’ for the rescheduled end of restrictions on 19 July.

So it seems we will finally see what “letting it rip” looks like.

Probably a lot of us getting Covid as it becomes a perpetual low-level irritant.

But hopefully not much more dying.

Clearly we can’t keep hiding from the virus forever.

And after the vaccines there’s arguably nothing else left to wait for – except perhaps even better vaccines.

On the other hand, the rest of the world is about to go through Delta. Brewing-up new variants while doing so.

This isn’t over until it’s over – everywhere.

Categories
Society

Crying out for a 0% corporation tax rate

You don’t need to look far to feel bad about late-stage capitalism in 2021.

The sky-high executive salaries.

The crazy valuations on certain product-less, profit-less, SPAC-enabled stock market listings.

Dogecoin.

However we citizens also need to shoulder some of the blame for the ruinous reputation of the system that sustains us.

In particular, well-off middle-class people in the West need to stop drifting through life on the gilded conveyor belt of the market economy, while simultaneously ranting that corporations are evil and cheering when company taxes go up but their income tax doesn’t.

Such hypocrisy extends in every direction, of course.

I could moan about Guardian readers shopping in the departure malls of Heathrow Terminal 5 telling each other ‘capitalism’ is cooking the planet until the cows come home (or more specifically, until the cow comes to their destination mini-break hotel, in the shape of a formerly CH₄ -spewing chateaubriand…) but never wondering if they really needed a third holiday overseas this year, let alone one that lies directly beyond the slowly submerging Maldives.

But I won’t. Let’s just stick with taxes.

Because we’re all taxed more when corporation tax rises.

Just in a more boneheaded way.

Communism versus capitalism

Quick reminder.

Communism believes that people who struggled to remember their gym kit at school on a Wednesday are best-equipped to determine what society needs. Aided and abetted by a one-party system that soon becomes entirely preoccupied with its own survival.

In contrast, capitalism hands the power – and much of the rewards – to the savviest and greediest members of society. That doesn’t sound too promising (and it isn’t) except their self-interest means they’ll typically try to sell something that consumers actually desire, as opposed to putting in an order for another 100,000 tractors for the Volgograd oblast because they owe their brother-in-law a favour.

In other words, at its best capitalism figures out what we need and how to get it to us.

We the people outsource planning, production, and fulfilment to profit-seeking companies.

And – notwithstanding a huge amount of waste, noise, red herrings, and the occasional fraud – those companies deliver, as best they can.

Which is why you’re reading this on an Apple Mac and not a Sovietski 1992 teletype prompter with a pedal-powered CPU.

Who pays corporation tax?

The point is, capitalism mostly makes things we want.

I’m not saying it makes what we should want. That’s a discussion for another day.

But it’s a fair generalisation to say that the successful firms are those that supply the most popular goods and services at the keenest price.

Given this, isn’t it obvious how absurd it is to tax companies at all?

Company A produces a vacuum cleaner that everyone wants to own. It’s sexy, collects dirt like a third-term Tory administration, and lasts longer, too. The company makes as many as it can, as fast as it (prudently and profitably) can.

As a result it gets thwacked with a tax on its profits, reducing the cash it has left at the end of the year.

Company B produces a terrible vacuum cleaner that people have to be tricked into buying. It’s expensive, and it leaves your carpets dirtier than it found them. The company makes no money.

As a result it’s rewarded by our system, by being charged no tax penalty at all.

Why would we tax the company making the things we want – and so directly shrinking it – while giving the loser a break?

If anything we should tax loss-making companies!

You win, you lose

If its profits weren’t taxed, Company A would have more money left to redeploy at the end of the year. Like this, its shareholders and executives would be rightly rewarded for their success.

Instead, the State docks it hard for producing what we want.

Now, there are ways for smart companies to get around this – if their aim is genuinely to grow as much as possible to meet demand.

Amazon is a good example.

Amazon was decried for years as a money-burning chimera, by so-called analysts who somehow missed it was taking over the world on the back of its supposedly dismal business performance.

What Amazon was really doing, of course, was reinvesting everything into expansion and efficiency. By the time the £9.84 you spent on weird soap bombs for gran for Christmas reached the bottom line, there was not a penny of profit to be seen. Yet Amazon kept on growing. You could even track its escalating scale and success in its soaring cash generation figures.

This solution – pre-spend what would be taxable profits before you’re taxed on them anyway – is fine, in so far as it goes.

But we don’t really want capital allocation decisions to be distorted by tax policy.

There are loads of reasons why not, but to give just one – a profitless company can’t pay dividends. Pension fund managers and others who lean on income to meet their obligations must instead sell shares to generate cash. Which is in theory no problem, but in practice for many a problem. It introduces friction and cost, too.

Far better to let every company show its true profitability without fearing it’ll be taxed, and to let it do with the cash what it wants.

In most cases that will include reinvesting to produce more of what we want, which is how it’s making those profits in the first place.

Tax the rich

None of this is to say we don’t need taxes.

Nor that the profits created by companies are somehow ring-fenced from taxation.

No, there’s a very simple way to tax them, which is at the point they leave the company.

That’s typically via wages, dividends, and stock options.

By all means tax salaries, dividends, and capital gains (we do). Increase the rates if you deem it best for the wider good.

I’m not a neoliberal zealot who thinks all taxation is unjustifiable theft.

I’m just saying we should do our justifiable thieving at the point where the money has left the corporation to which we’ve outsourced the meeting of our needs and wants.

At that point it definitely won’t be spent on new factories or superior analytics or employee-enhancing office plants.

It will instead be going on hot tubs and handbags for its owners.

Fine, tax it.

The withdrawal method

Corporation tax makes no sense. In the UK it only came into being in 1965. It seems sex wasn’t the only messy invention of the 1960s.

Indeed I suspect company profits are taxed mostly because they sit there looking so taxable.

Or rather, they were sitting there. This isn’t even true any more, in the era of multinational tax arbitrage.

Probably better today to tax overseas companies operating on your shores via sales and income taxes (on salaries), and to tax shareholders when they extract profits.

Beats trying to fight a pan-global hydra.

Taxing matters

Of course, there are also problems with a 0% corporation tax rate.

When personal tax rates were very high in corporatist Britain, all kinds of middling managers drove around in expensive company cars.

Various personal expenses were put through the company’s books, rather than paid out of a fat cat’s post-tax salary.

It’s an issue.

Nevertheless I stand by the principle.

Taxing company profits in a capitalist society is like paying a cash bung to get a job done in a communist one.

Which of course happened.

Because… people!

Categories
Society

Frictionless burns

Friction gets a bad rap in everyday speech.

For example we talk about the unnecessary friction involved in the home buying process.

Or we’ll say there was a lot of friction between two world leaders.

Or between me and my old boss.

Friction burns are flat-out agony.

Yet when you think about it, friction is almost as vital for our life on earth as oxygen and water.

Without friction we’d be sliding all over the place. Items put down without perfect precision would continue to move across the desk or the floor until they hit a sufficiently chunky obstacle.

And – stretching the definition of ‘friction’ a bit – all the while we’d be being assailed by face-bound objects flying at us through the air and would-be shin crushers rolling on the ground around us.

We’d have to be permanently armoured, and we’d fasten our stuff down with hooks, magnets, and adhesives.

Although really, we wouldn’t – because we’d actually be very different creatures in a very different world, probably more like crabs or corals.

You can’t touch this

Maybe there are lifeforms getting by in the very-near-frictionless depths of space, waiting to be discovered/injured by some ill-prepared earthlings in a rocket ship.

But for now one of the closest approximations we have to a frictionless world is what quaintly used to be termed ‘cyberspace’.

The Internet enables us to move data here and there with virtually no impediments

Of course no laws of physics are being violated. Data centres are heating up. Signals are being boosted along the way. Energy from our transmissions is leaking out into space.

And even in terms of analogy there are friction equivalents, as anyone whose seen their Netflix buffering during lockdown can attest.

But compared to the real-world, the online realm is a near-frictionless place where many of the awkward everyday resistances that have defined our evolution are lessened or absent.

This has consequences – not all of them good.

We the people

Clearly I’m playing with a metaphor here.

But consider how the physically frictionless agglomeration of Reddit was able to mass together and drive up the price of GameStop.

They were aided in this by the frictionless share dealing of the fee-less trading platform Robinhood:

“It’s when friction decreases that you expect much more action, more trading, so going to zero in trading fees matters. The more frequently that people get price updates the more it warps, and changes their behavior.”

Stephen Wendel, Morningstar – Bloomberg, 3 February 2021

The whole thing was orchestrated, obviously, over the Internet, where to the conception of a human mind, information just blinks into existence in different places like quantum particles.

In reality there’s a speed of light and bandwidth thing going on, I know.

But we only notice that when the Net gums up at the limit, when servers are overwhelmed, say.

In contrast 100 years ago a mass buying frenzy on this scale would have involved huge crowd of punters squeezing into bucket shops waving dollars to buy shares, jammed lines to New York, and elbows jostling.

Take out all the friction and you upgrade the mob in ways we’re only just coming to understand.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

Another example – and a parallel I’ve drawn before – was the Trumpist insurrection in Washington.

How did these people on the fringes of the right develop their views to the extent that they felt entitled to walk into the White House?

Equally, how do so many on the left come to believe that the slightest deviation from their agreed truth represents Neo-Nazism?

In part because the Internet has taken out most of the friction – social as well as physical – from their interactions.

There’s no sawtooth against wood, pulp against milling equipment, or rubber tire on road required for the fringiest elements to broadcast their message to anyone in the world.

Meanwhile on the social side, voicing even extreme views online gets little if any heat – friction – provided you do it in the right corner of the Web.

A National Front thug or a Citizen Smith of the 1970s would have been quickly reminded that few thought the same way if they went too far with their theories in their local pub, let alone at work or with family.

But now there’s mostly no counterforce to their theorising. No friction, short of some interfactional backbiting.

Stop the Word – I Want to Get Off

The frictionless physical world I described at the start of this piece sounds alien and terrifying.

But we might be getting a preview of its potential to cause harm in what it’s doing online today.

Categories
Society

Radicals who have their heads in the cloud

January 2021 saw not one but two semi-spontaneously mobilised armies of radicals take on the US establishment.

On 6 January a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the White House.

Their actions were violent and surreal by turns. Lawmakers hid under their desks. The US Capitol was locked down. Several people died.

On 28 January traders from a popular subReddit drove up the share price of troubled US retailer GameStop to near-$500, from less than $20 weeks earlier.

They’d already caused one hedge fund to seek a $2.8bn bailout. Soon brokers were shutting down trading in GameStop, citing a threat to their platform’s operational viability. Meanwhile the market was tanking and there was talk of a revolution on Wall Street.

Whose riot is it anyway?

Depending on what gets your juices going, you may see my associating these two events as offensive in one of many different ways.

Some people will see good – ordinary traders taking on hedge funds – lumped in with evil – right-wing fanatics attacking democracy.

Some will see freedom fighters – battling for a different election result – versus greed – boys in their basements getting rich quick.

Alternatively you may see similarities between the principle agents, but they too will be contrary to the similarities seen by others.

Maybe you see the same angry white male faces in both groups asserting excess privilege.

Or sex-less young men unfairly demoted by society, casting about for meaning.

Or a pandemic that’s made all kinds of people lose touch with reality.

Or a shared frustration with the 1% capturing 99% of wealth creation.

And so on.

How can we all think so different about the same reality – let alone the (il)legitimacy of the events themselves?

Rage in cahoots with the machines

We all know by now the answer is social networks and echo chambers.

Did Trump incite the Washington rioters? Hard to see it otherwise from here.

But his words fell on ears that had selectively funnelled a distinct view of the world to the brains between them for years.

Fermenting a well-fertilised conspiracy myth whose time had come.

Were those amateur traders really trying to strike back against Wall Street and revenge the financial crisis?

That rhetoric pervaded their posts and interviews, even if to outsiders it looked like an old style pump-and-dump. It’s not obvious why they’d say it if they didn’t believe it.

Both groups inhabited online spaces with particular self-evident truths, immutable laws, creation stories, and private jargon.

Which brings me to what these events really have in common.

Tik tok boom

Forget your own version of how the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Let’s get down to the technicalities.

Because what I perceive are two civic spectaculars spun-out of the unrelenting iterations of algorithms.

Algorithms that forever sift, test, promote, highlight, and propagate the most compelling narratives that emerge about all our social ills.

Making the best – most transmissible – story stick within different self-selected communities.

Creating feedback loops that encourage us to pile-in and promote, highlight, and propagate whatever best fits our own evolving intolerance about how the handbasket is hell-bound.

Hitherto most of the fallout from this sort of thing has been suffered by individuals in the form of online persecution.

Women harassed, threatened, and driven offline or worse by battalions of angry gamers, many of whom apparently believed they were just standing up for unbiased journalism.

Or woke students righteously de-platforming academics and others whose opinions or work falls outside of what their faction currently deems to be a speakable truth.

This was quite terrifying enough. (All that protects anyone from an online hate mob is good luck and obscurity.)

But with the White House insurrection and the GameStop short squeeze, we can see the invisible hands of these algorithms mobilising real-world happenings on a grander scale.

Not through any conspiracy or masterplan.

Just as a by-product of totally understandable commercial imperatives.

Radical pique

This may seem fanciful.

There are deep political divisions in the US, after all. And there have been frothy share discussion boards for decades.

History is replete with semi-spontaneous uprisings, too.

What’s different, you might ask, except for faster and wider communications, and the much deeper integration of the substrate by which these narratives spread into our daily live?

The phones we carry everywhere at all times in our pockets and purses? And check first thing in the morning and last at night?

That host the online platforms some of us seem to derive our sense of self from?

Well that’s plenty enough.

But I also think a big difference is there’s an aimlessness – literally – to all this which is different to say the civil rights battles of the 1960s or boiler room schemes that profit from the rise and fall of penny stocks.

From what I could tell from the news reports, for every super-pumped, weapon-toting rioter at the White House, there were two or three who appeared to be playing some kind of far right-wing LARP.

Photographing the sights, the flags.

Queuing to take part in the insurrection like tourists at Disneyland.

Equally, little thought had been given as to what was supposed to happen next when the GameStop share price did soar 70-fold and hedge funds started faltering.

Very few of the traders (at least of those who made it to the top of up-ranking discussion algorithms) talked about selling at the highs.

They had ‘diamond hands’ and would hold until GameStop doubled again and again.

And, um, again?

Boring old farts like me warned that a short squeeze is finite, and that you didn’t want to be holding the bag when the move turned.

I guess our dull story was slow to go viral.

Days when decades happen

Viewed through this lens, such events seem like almost random happenings that emerge from the excesses of social media mechanics.

With participants who mostly never set out to end up there.

True, perhaps this isn’t entirely unprecedented.

It took months for the French revolutionaries to decide what to do with King Louis XVI once they had him, for instance.

And that revolution continued along its murderous way in unscripted chaos for years.

Maybe the real difference is just that these things seem to pop-up and attract global attention within weeks, rather than over decades.

Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was published in 1867. More than 50 years passed before the Bolshevik’s established the Soviet Union – communism’s first State-level touchdown – in Russia.

You wonder if it would now take a summer.

Then again, there’s a lot else to be going on with these days.

Every week some new unparalleled mania.

Maybe what protects us is the sheer noise of it all. A new Marx might not be heard for long enough for anyone to really listen.

Or maybe it would happen quicker, like everything else does these days, as we spin towards the singularity?

If that thought bubbles to the top of global consciousness, just remember you heard it here first.

p.s. A friend mentioned the Arab Spring of late 2010 when we talked about this theory. My memory was it had involved more peer-to-peer communication – direct messages between young people – rather than having been nurtured by algorithms. It seems social media played some disputed role, however. So this has potentially been going on for a decade.

Categories
Investing Society

Bursting bubbles

How it started, and how it’s going.

Seems like everyone I know and read believes we’re in a gigantic stock market bubble. A green bubble. A bond bubble. A real estate bubble, at least in the US.

I get it. There are signs of mania all over if you want to see them.

Freetrade and Robin Hood junkies punting their way to overnight riches on hot momentum stocks.

Government bond yields only just back off the flatline.

Tesla’s shares rising from $100 to over $800 in less than a year.

Bitcoin multi-bagging to more than $40,000.

The SPAC boom.

Some call it the everything bubble.

It’s a bubble-spotter’s paradise.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Consider though the times we are living in. Are they not unprecedented?

  • A global pandemic that has half the world in self-isolation
  • A US president who urged his supporters to insurrection
  • The major central banks holding short-term rates at near-zero for the foreseeable future
  • Governments borrowing and distributing significant slices of our future wealth as stimulus and life support today
  • We’re maybe 50 years away from catastrophic climate failure

That list feels like it barely scratches the surface.

Given the strangeness of the times, should we really be surprised to see pockets of apparently irrational activity spilling into the capital markets, too?

Wouldn’t it be stranger if the financial world stood apart from all the mayhem?

If equity markets were processing at a stately 8-10% a year clip, and Treasuries returning 3% a year?

I’d join the conspiracy theorists in such a reality.

Same difference

Contrarily, what if the world isn’t so unusual right now?

My friend posted the photo above contrasting two generations of world leaders to Facebook. It got the traction you’d expect.

Yes, we do seem to be living in a madhouse run by clowns.

But consider that 1940s portrait again.

Stalin killed tens of millions.

Americans added the Twenty-Second Amendment in the wake of Roosevelt’s fourth term, because they sniffed dictatorship.

As for Churchill, I’m unfashionably and on balance a fan, but the man conducted briefings in his bathtub naked and often began his daily drinking before I break my intermittent fast.

The point is history looks neat in the history books. Trite but true.

It’s the same with stock market bubbles.

Anyone can see a bubble once it’s burst.

And it’s equally easy to see a bubble that isn’t a bubble.

It’s all the shades in-between that make reality – and investing – such a challenge.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Categories
Society

Relocation, relocation, relocation

Blah, blah, blah…

No, that’s not a publishing error. I haven’t forgotten to write my introduction.

It’s how I feel when I read the whole world of work – and with it office and home property – has changed forever due to Covid-19.

From the Financial Times:

In the world of social distancing, many of the world’s office workers have not seen their desks for weeks. But when coronavirus lockdowns finally ease, there may be fewer desks to return to.

Facing a sudden need to cut costs, chief executives have indicated in recent days that their property portfolios look like good places to start given the ease with which their companies have adapted to remote set-ups.

“The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” said Jes Staley of Barclays.

Financial Times, 1 May 2020

That is just one of innumerable articles. I picked it because Staley was one of the first big shot CEOs to jump on the bandwagon fleeing Central Business Districts in big cities across the globe.

Back in May, with lockdown underway, it was easy to be gloomy.

But here we are in September and the narrative hasn’t really changed. Indeed it’s gone mainstream.

From Marie Claire:

Following COVID-19, over 3 in 5 (63%) respondents strongly or somewhat agree that following the pandemic the 9-5 is, in fact, over. This shows that the 9-5 as we know it doesn’t suit workers, and perhaps, it never did.

Marie Claire, 10 August 2020

That article covers lots of angles, with survey results suggesting the Marie Claire demographic is divided about the future of office life.

As for the stock market, it also has… an opinion:

Source: Google Finance, 2 September 2020

Shares in Landsec (LSE: LAND) are down more than 40% for the year. They were hardly booming beforehand.

At the end of its last financial year, Landsec’s net tangible assets per share (TNAV) were £11.92. So Landsec shares are trading at a discount of more than 50%.

Seen another way, the market is prepared to pay £500,000 for ownership of a building that surveyors value at £1 million.

Shares in REITs like Landsec have sometimes trading at premiums to TNAV, so this is no structural feature. One side is too optimistic, and the other pessimistic. The property can’t simultaneously be worth £11.92 and £5.66.

Okay, it’s not quite so simple. The market is discounting future cashflows and uncertainty, and Landsec’s valuers aren’t making their estimates based on a firesale of all of its properties for cash.

But the discount is vast enough to make such points moot. Something is wrong somewhere.

Meet me for a coffee

This isn’t all about offices.

Landsec is only partway through getting rid of dated retail assets.

Worse, what it thought were its prime retail assets – coffee shops in mixed use ‘campuses’ in Central London locations and the like – were rendered sub-prime by the virus.

I do believe the shift to online retail is real and continuing. Some discount is surely warranted.

But more than 50%?

I suspect you have to believe the Everything Has Changed outlook for that to hold.

Personally, I doubt everything has changed. There were lots of reasons for lots of people to cram together when working in the past – and always plenty of reasons not to.

In contrast, the purported huge change has been sparked by just one thing – Covid-19. That won’t last forever.

Yes, some companies have been exposed to how modern technology can stand up virtual offices that enable plenty to get done more cheaply.

But that technology existed before Covid-19. Lots of companies were already using it.

I also suspect many companies are coasting on the institutional memory, networks, and systems acquired by working together.

There’s a sunk cost they are benefiting from that would need to paid some other way in a massively distributed working world.

Of course this doesn’t apply to one-man bands and start-ups. But it never did.

Nearly there

A friend of mine works for the Google AI division Deep Mind in its Kings Cross campus. Those offices were deliberately built in Central London on a campus that – also very deliberately – includes the new home of the longstanding Central Saint Martins art college and the new Francis Crick Institute for biomedical research.

These facilities were all built close to each other for a reason.

I had exposure to the ‘future is working from anywhere’ meme in the early 90s. We had the Internet at my university, and I was years ahead of the masses in predicting people would soon work wherever they liked, thanks to ubiquitous connectivity.

Very early, and very wrong!

In the years that followed, Silicon Valley prospered and London boomed. Prices rose in the prime cities of the world as young smart people stove to live, work, and play near each other.

The potential for a pandemic was always present. It will never go away. But I suspect our memory of the hassle, pain, and loss will.

I think the fear of density is a blip.

There will be changes due to lockdown and the virus – especially for those who lived through it (i.e. generational) – but there were incentives to proximity in 2019 and I think there will be in 2022.

My view: The more people can be anywhere, the more they will want to be somewhere.

Disclosure: At the time of writing I own shares in Landsec and a flat in London.