THE TEALS HAVE AN accomplishment-based ideology, and each one of them prizes their achievements, of which, to be fair, they have a large number. Monique Ryan was a doctor and hospital administrator. Zoe Daniel was a prominent journalist. Zali Steggall was a barrister and led NGOs, and oh yes, won an Olympic gold medal. That accomplishment-mentality leads them to meritocratic thinking; they work hard, they achieve, they win, and not unexpectedly, they make the logical leap that they win because of their accomplishments and all that hard work; the just reward of effort and aptitude. They contrast themselves against the major Parties (and Greens), who, by contrast, stress collective effort and solidarity, and have a fundamentally different sense of power. The essential truth of meritocratic thinking is that you can't share wins.¹

I prefer to contrast them instead to one of the more remarkable episodes in recent Australian politics, the strange election of Ricky Muir to the Senate. He stood for a Motoring Enthusiasts party, won a tiny number of primary votes, and a cosmic accident of electoral law propelled him to Canberra, where he, equally unexpectedly, turned out to be actually quite a worthy Senator. He was an ordinary man from regional Victoria, who'd got an ordinary education, worked in unremarkable, unglamorous, honest ordinary jobs, and when he became for a brief period important, he took that attitude to Parliament. He approached it as just another honest job and was totally fine at it, and then the next election came and he wasn't a Senator anymore.

I know whose approach to human organisations and the ordering and limiting of power---in other words, politics---I prefer. There's the former which is exclusive to the best, the most brilliant, the cleverest, the most successful, where worthiness rests on a base of achievement. (That achievement also rests on a base of money is usually pronounced silently). Then there's the latter, of approaching politics as simply an ordinary duty that everyone has in a free society, that isn't about choosing the most special people, but that's approached by trying to be wise, which is a virtue open to anybody.

LIKE MANY CONTEMPORARY INTERNET users I subscribe to the newsletters of people whose writing I enjoy. These drop into the inbox of my email with a satisfying regularity. In a sense each of these fulfils the same niche as blog entries once did, with a bit more formality, each being a self-contained piece of writing by a single author generally on a theme or interest basis. Each invites me to subscribe, like, support. Are they novel?

Email newsletters today have a quality that even in their heyday weblogs didn't enjoy: subscription money for their writers. That subscription transaction is the basis behind companies like Substack and Beehiv, and Ghost, and many others, for writing which is too long or serious enough not to be confined to the realm of social media 'posting'. These all exist further on a spectrum of mailers and promoters, between fully fledged marketing services like Mailchimp, which are meant to serve as a public information superstructure to a more important organisational base, outright fundraising vehicles like Patreon, and the oldest of them all, venerable listservs like GNU mailman, where those of us of a certain age remember as one of the means people had arguments on the internet before social media. (Usenet, root of the Hot Takes evolutionary phylum, is at the time of writing functionally extinct).

Part of what is going on is the death of a functional journalism economy. The writers of these kinds of newsletters would have, and did, earned perfectly good wages doing reporting or niche writing. Since those jobs don't exist any more each writer is out on their own to try to survive on individual subscriptions. Ironically, the more successful newsletter platform Substack has succeeded by drawing in 'celebrity' writers whose name recognition acts as a tent pole to shelter the rest of the lesser known writers, in much the same way journalism has always worked; unfortunately, since many of those celebrities are Nazis, the platform and the genre as a whole suffers in reputation.

What does not suffer though, is one eternal element of the internet, unkillable as mushrooms, which is useful for anything and infinitely reliable: email. Blogs recede, newspapers die, reader apps come and go, but email is forever.

Timothy Burke, Dispatches from the AI front:

The punishing accumulation of bullshit work processes within the academy and the disconnects between them and the core labor of faculty. Visions of austerity slamming into teaching and scholarship while administrative ranks grow seemingly without end. It all has led to many students at large universities feeling as if the university and its curriculum is little more than a credentials pinata to be whacked until it gives up the candy, and GPT is only the best and biggest stick ever provided for that purpose.

Ferdinand Mount, LRB, The Tongue Is a Fire:

We need, I think, to get some feel for the pre-modern landscape of public speech to understand the huge distance we have travelled. The pre-moderns were painfully aware of the potency – and the perils – of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary sentiment, ‘the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones,’ is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

IN THE GLORY DAYS of blogging there was a grand blog, Marrickvillia, which coined some incredible phrases, including 'gut-n-smeg' (for the process by which an existing house with outdated fixtures is updated with new kitchens, bathrooms, and a new rental price). The greatest of these neologisms however was Fedeterranea:

These homes are found in every street in Marrickville. They're mostly owned by people who came to Australia from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s. A mix of Federation and Mediterranean aesthetics, they are a striking hybrid of architectural styles. Columns, stone lions, statues, terracotta tiling, palm trees and/or clipped conifers, olive & citrus trees, variations on the "Marrickville aegean blue" paint, arches, brick cladding... have all been added to the facades of sedate early twentieth-century homes that feature (or featured once) tuckpointing, coloured window glass, tesselated tiling, agave plants & camellia hedges.

Nearly twenty years on and these houses are becoming rarer and rarer through the inner west. The steel Corinthian columns are being replaced, brick arches brought low. Pebblecrete is dying as a path material, brick fences are being 'restored' to the former glory of timber paling or iron railings, and to say nothing of the utter passing of the 1970s interior deco that was utterly key to the style. Babas Place, a fancy Marrickville restaurant, took this decor on magnificently, though the aesthetic's probably best shown in Sooshi Mango's act (which isn't for me; it's probably funnier if you're not quite so Anglo as I am). The concrete lions are fewer and fewer. Sic transit gloria mundi.

This is a real moment of truth for capital-h Heritage in Sydney. These are a very well known and instantly identifiable architectural style, totally vernacular, in every case put there by the hands and sweat of the house owner, and not to be confused for the equally glorious, genuine architectural magnificence that's a house by Gino Volpato. They're adaptations of existing housings stock that, were it older, would be clearly the subject of conservation efforts---as 'workers' housing' is wherever it's found. By contrast, because the heritage system was codified and its culture set in the 1980s when these houses were common (and even locally dominant) Fedeterranea is being slowly and certainly gentrified away, or more commonly, 'restored' back to a perceived original state, somewhere in the early 20th century.

But which is the more authentic state for a house? Our system deals really very poorly at this level with the concept of layering of heritage, and cannot seem to cope with the idea that a Federation or inter-war house might have an equal claim to be a significant building by virtue of its backyard barbecue area and front yard vegetable garden. It's impossible to conceive of a modern-day DA being accepted to render the facade, install an aluminium sliding window, concrete the garden, and install tiles of the Virgin Mary on an existing early 20th century house. That leaves our suburbs all the poorer.

232. Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. Thus, a community can break out of the indifference induced by consumerism. These actions cultivate a shared identity, with a story which can be remembered and handed on. In this way, the world, and the quality of life of the poorest, are cared for, with a sense of solidarity which is at the same time aware that we live in a common home which God has entrusted to us. These community actions, when they express self-giving love, can also become intense spiritual experiences.

Dan Davies, Corporatism with a flat cap:

Either this cosy arrangement of mates, backhanders, off the books work and quiet words is the reason that nothing gets done in this town. Or … it’s the method by which everything gets done. If we want to think of an international analogy, do we look at some post-Soviet backwater where nothing gets done without blat, or some rapidly modernising part of China where everything gets accelerated by guanxi?

Me, in this blog, earlier:

Relationships of patronage and support, which are other names for corruption and nepotism, reward other virtues and talents than the ones our society values. Older, crookeder systems reward qualities like loyalty, attention to the needs of the institution, a strong sense of collective identity and goals, staunch support within groups and teams, talent-spotting and career development by superiors and bosses, protecting one's mates, and task orientation (just 'getting things done') as opposed to process orientation (making sure things are accountable). Those things aren't to be sneezed at either.

JAMES VINCENT WROTE IN the LRB about the meaning shifts behind the cardinal points.

Brotton ends his survey by noting the year the reign of the compass finally expired: 2008, which saw the launch of the iPhone and the creation of the blue dot, the constant marker in map apps by which we now orient ourselves. ‘In this our digitised century,’ Brotton writes, ‘there are now five directions – north, south, east, west, and the online blue dot: “You”.’ Paper maps have given way to the dot, which is now ‘pre-eminent, superseding compass directions which, for many, become irrelevant. Eyes glued to that jerky little blue ball, we spend less and less travel time observing the physical terrain through which we move.’

This is partly true: with the decline of paper maps we've also experienced a centralisation of mapping, with maps from a number of centralised services taking the place of very diverse variations on specialised maps and spatial diagrams. Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Maps (which, with wikipedia, has unexpectedly become one of the genuine wonders of the modern world), and a few others relevant to despotisms, like Yandex. If you or I use a map it will likely be one of these, and it will present the world according to its own ideological contours. Roads navigable by cars are totally predominant, especially on Google Maps where the street view survey is integrated. Advertising is key, which is a thing common to the history of modern mapping, but which takes new forms.

Some specific services should take credit for customising, via third party data-presenting tools like mapbox. NSW Transport Info is one of these, a really well-done web service that presents OSM data in a way that centres public transport---but it's still OSM under the bonnet.

Compare it to Sheilds 1845 map of Sydney, one of my favourites, which is rotated ninety degrees from where you or I would expect Port Jackson to be drawn. But it makes sense for the reader: here is Sydney laid out in a nineteenth century hierarchy, legible like English, left-to-right, from Chippendale and Redfern, then an area of brickpits and slums, through to the commercial wharves, to the barracks and drill square, the public buildings of the centre of town, and last at the far edge, for the colonial English-minded mentality of the time, to Sydney Cove, to the harbour, to the sea, and to home.

IT OCCURRED TO ME some months ago, in a thread of toots I think is worth reproducing here and now, later, as a blog entry, as I waited the usual three or four minutes for Word to open my document, that the basic tasks most people use PCs for (browsing file systems, opening documents and working on them, email) have barely improved or changed since the early 2000s. And have not sped up or become in any way more productive.

In fact there has been one great advance in personal computing since the Win95 era and that’s video conferencing becoming standard as Teams/Zoom etc. meetings. Which are certainly experienced as a productivity impact, but not necessarily as a gain.

Digital imaging/photography has altered completely in quality and in life impact, particularly with the use of phone cameras in everyday life. But the tech has been impactful largely in the device, not on PCs, where it’s about as productive to use Photoshop as it was two decades ago.

And for a lot of these basic white collar tasks, like reading email and passing documents around, it’s now significantly more arduous to do things than it was in 2000. Using computer is experienced as an endless series of demands, to multiply authenticate, to sign up for another service, to learn yet another new means to transfer one file from one computer to another. Or cloud. God.

The computer makes us do more, which is the reverse of the promise of futurism.

I was going to say, vastly more information has been digitised and is available online. But Web searching for information is significantly worse and less reliable than it has ever been. So that’s a wash I think.

The use of computers for leisure and socialising, on the other hand, those are unrecognisably changed and the experience is in every way better and more powerful, by magnitudes. Modern gaming would have blown your c.2000 ears straight back. So it’s not that it can’t be done.

I have two great big screens now, which is cool, and which beat the hell out of my old 1024x768 CRT for coolness. but it’s not clear that they make my work more productive.

I have a nice clicky mechanical keyboard because I personally am richer than I was in 2000, letting me buy it myself, and because Chinese manufacturing has advanced so far. Again, not clear it makes my work more productive.

I HAVE FINALLY UPGRADED the theme and CSS of this blog to something that is actually workable and viewable on a phone. Once in every decade seems about right for that kind of thing. Gentium remains an incredibly cool typeface and you should use it. Also updated is the About page which has additions accruing on top, hiding the old, an archaeological stratum on top of another, like a midden pile slowly growing over a mound of generational garbage, and that is an image I think as appropriate to this website as any there'll ever be.

'Presidents and Golf', Mary Beard, TLS Blog

In other words, this story is not merely a jibe on the megalomania of the emperor. It’s raising the question of how the autocrat impacts on the traditional structures of the state, any state. Nero, after all, didn’t declare himself victor. He was declared victor by the usual authorities. What does that say about us, we should ask? Who dares to stand up to the emperor and say he hasn’t won?

'The American Delian League', War by other means

Any adversary of the United States can very easily see—like Brasidas once did—that the entire imperial project that the Trump Administration is engaging in could collapse in on itself by the clever act of peeling off our allies from us with nothing more than the promise that they could be free.