Technology

After an hour’s beach work I was just about done. I’d read some book, I’d skimmed the papers, I’d eaten some bits of cheese on some oat biscuits (the closest I’ll concede to picnics, which I hate), I’d drunk some water as per my instructions from the Fawn (‘Drink some water! You never drink enough water’), I’d dried off from the swim, I’d got a pair of very numb buttocks after sundry failed attempts to get comfy on the not very flat rock: surely I’d done enough now to earn my release? But I knew I’d never be allowed to get away with it. Not this soon. The Boy, maybe:

When I saw my first jogger in Wales in the early 1970s, I assumed he was running away from the police. Presumably joggers were familiar in California by then, but not elsewhere. I can’t imagine any of the characters in Goodfellas going jogging, any more than I can imagine Rick in Casablanca going to a spinning class. Nothing was stopping you from running around the streets back then. It was simply that there is always a high social cost to doing things most people don’t do. Our brain’s two most powerful default settings are social copying and acquired habit. Hence our preferences are not independent of our past behaviour, nor

I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days for the next instalment of my favourite television programme. It didn’t seem to bother me in the slightest that my holiday photos would not be seen until I’d picked them up from the chemist. I even went to the library to get information from an encyclopaedia. Life, in short, used to be a waiting game, and patience was not just a virtue but a habit. Now I wonder how I survived in a world without Google Maps, Uber or smartphones with in-built cameras. The whole direction and purpose of modern

Happy birthday to the Spectator. This week, we’re celebrating our 190th birthday. Lara Prendergast takes a walk down memory lane with three editors of the Spectator, past and present. But before that, it’s the podcast as usual. This week, we’re asking – do anti-Trump protests achieve anything other than virtue signalling? And are driverless cars on a road to nowhere? Donald Trump is soon to visit the UK, and after two false alarms, this time, it will actually happen. Next Friday, Trump will be welcomed by May in London and greeted with major protests. There is a carnival of resistance organised, with special guests such as Lily Allen and a

The Times reports this morning that Bournemouth business leaders are hugely annoyed with the BBC, whose weather app predicted thick cloud and thunderstorms for the recent bank holiday. In the event, it was sunny and warm, but the damage had already been done, and takings on the seafront were said to be down by nearly 40 percent as people decided to stay at home rather than risk a soaking. While weather forecasting is undoubtedly getting better, it seems fairly clear that ultra-local forecasts of the kind you find on weather apps can be very misleading: reducing the whole forecast to a single icon, as most apps do, removes all the

When I was ten, the two things we all expected to enjoy by 2020 were flying cars and videotelephony. What never occurred to us was that we might successfully invent one of these things and then fail to use it. Yet that has largely been the case with video conferencing. Is its day still to come? Will there be some tipping point when we start to hold virtual meetings routinely? Or will video conferencing turn out to be one of those technologies whose promise is never fulfilled: something which ‘has a great future — and always will’. I don’t know. Certainly it suffered from being oversold too soon. Memories of

New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era of transparency and knowledgable bliss? This technology makes George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four redundant: no longer science fiction; more Knights of the Round Table. Big Brother is more powerful and more all-knowing than ever before, and we have that Errol Flynn lookalike Mark Zuckerberg to thank. There is no such thing as privacy any longer, unless of course one writes letters by hand and does not possess a smart telephone. (Include me out — I own a mobile but use it only when on board a sailing boat.) Yes, the world

At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet taken place. So far, lots of very clever people have performed amazing feats of technical ingenuity. But for the most part our collective behaviour has so far failed to change enough to truly benefit us. Rather than making us freer, more relaxed and more efficient, in general everyone seems busier, more distracted and more tense. Unfortunately, technology is a bit like Hitler: it doesn’t know when to stop. No sooner has it annexed the Sudetenland than it starts invading Czechoslovakia. The world might be happier if Silicon Valley were put

Right now, in some tasteful open plan office in California, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ is hard at work. Or at least they should be, because they have a lot to do. When he wasn’t trying to explain the 101 basics of how the internet actually works, Zuck was telling senators that his team would look into the details, and would be in touch.  The reason he was there at all, subjecting himself to five gruelling hours of intensive and sometimes wildly misdirected questioning, was to reassure three groups of people: Facebook users, who need to know Zuck cares about privacy. Investors, who need to know the company is dealing with the

Few readerships of any intelligent national magazine will be more alive to the perils and downsides of 21st–century cyber-life than you, fellow Spectator readers. Many of you might share my use of the generalised expression ‘the internet’ for the whole damn thing — while not being quite sure what we’re referring to. Few, on the other hand, will be more likely to show a lively appreciation of community, locality, the sense of belonging and of place that even in this fast-paced and mobile age, our country at its best can still nurture. You might think those two dispositions make comfortable bedfellows. The faithful little band of stalwarts at Evensong, the

Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations… I didn’t want any of them. Back in 1981, I did want a CB radio and I nearly got one too, but then my mother found out that lorry drivers were on them and the thorny issue of whether it would be appropriate for a nine-year-old girl to converse with a trucker put the kibosh on the whole thing. I was bitterly disappointed. I seem to remember I cried. I did not cry about not being bought a Commodore 64 or a BBC Computer, as the technological bee’s knees was

It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as my girlfriend’s six-year-old boy, then became my stepson and featured here quite often over the years because, being a scaly-tailed creature of evil, he was always good for some copy. This new year, with his agreement, I upgraded him to full son status. Let me explain why in a way that I hope you’ll find charming, rather than one that makes you want to throw up. The first reason is purely mercenary. During Christmas, while over with his wife Chloe from Hong Kong, the Rat managed to find about £10,000

Blockchain is an idea whose time has come. By which I mean it’s still mostly an idea, and is currently the only thing tech people want to talk about. But it’s in danger of getting hyped out of control, which in the end will damage it. So what actually is a blockchain? Very broadly speaking, a blockchain is a way to store information. Boring, yet possibly revolutionary. A copy of every transaction between people is stored on a chronologically ordered, secure database, and identical copies of that database are hosted on multiple computers. New transactions can only be added once they have been verified by other computers, and it’s not possible to