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.