Category Archives: Books

Update: This ended up being a really good interview, and I urge you to listen to it on the Little Atoms website.

I’m just about to head into London to interview Angela Saini, author of Geek Nation, for tonight’s episode of Little Atoms. If you’re in London you can tune in from 7pm to Resonance 104.4 FM to hear the interview, or you can listen live online here. A podcast of the interview will be made available on the Little Atoms website in the fullness of time. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

I used to work with Angela at openDemocracy.net, and it’s been fantastic to watch her journalism career go from strength to strength since she left that esteemed organ. I caught up with her at the recent Little Atoms event “Which Way to techno-Utopia?”, where I was impressed by the engaging way she spoke about the work she did for the book travelling around India to discern whether, as a nation, it has what it takes to be the world’s next scientific super power. The book addresses a number of issues I find fascinating, like the way science and spiritualism mix more readily in India than they do in the West, the ideological/nationalistic nature of the debate around GMOs, and the potential of e-government to transform India’s notorious bureaucracy. I’m looking forward to talking about these issue in more depth with Angela, and Little Atoms godfather and co-host Neil Denny, tonight.

When I joined the team of Little Atoms, I was told by Neil Denny, its head honcho, that the best thing about doing the show is that it’s a great excuse to meet your favourite writers. Well, my favourite writer is John Lanchester. Not because of his ideas, although I like his ideas. Simply because of the way he writes.

Last week Neil and I interviewed John Lanchester at the Resonance studios in London, and the broadcast went out on Friday. You can now download the podcast. In the interview, we talk about the ideas in his most recent book Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. It’s a great book to read if you want to understand the events that led to the credit crunch, not just because it takes you from financial ideas you might have some hope of understanding (like the balance sheet of a company) all the way to the complex PhD level maths that is the stock-in-trade of the modern quant, but also because it places events in a political context – something most commentators have failed so far to do.

They say you should never meet your heroes, but John turned out to be as eloquent a speaker as he is a writer. The interview was a relaxed, if mildly depressing, way to commence a Tuesday morning. Listening back to it I think it is the best one I’ve been involved with for Little Atoms so far. If you want to read more John Lanchester, check out his restaurant reviews for the Guardian, or look through his archive at the LRB, out of which I’d pick this piece on video games as one of my favourites.

Update: The interview is now available for download from the Little Atoms website.

My work for Little Atoms just keeps getting more and more fun. This week’s edition features Neil Denny and I interviewing Tim Wu, the man who coined the term “net neutrality”, about his new book The Master Switch. I loved reading this book. In it, Wu presents the last century-or-so of communications history as a cyclical battle between the opposing forces of disruption and monopoly. The book is rich with detail, with a lightness of narrative touch which makes it a really comfortable read.

Although some reviews of the book have focussed on Wu’s proposals for legislation to enshrine net neutrality in the US, what I found most interesting was his related focus on the business of Hollywood, the development of massive media conglomerates in the eighties and nineties and their effect on artistic output. For Wu it is as important if not more so to look at the way communications markets act on free expression as it is to study law and policy. With a few notable exceptions, the history of communications has been a history of legislators happy to accommodate the business models of incumbent operators. Broadly, this is “entertainment that sells”, meaning entertainment that sells advertising: diversity and pluralism are sacrificed for reach. In this atmosphere, writes Wu, “mediocrity begets mediocrity”.

One of the most compelling sections of the book sheds light on Hollywood’s shift from auteur-centred film to film as vehicle for wider intellectual property promotion across a consolidated media landscape. Wu compares a list of the most expensive films of the 2000s (including Spiderman III, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Superman Returns, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) with its 1960s equivalent and finds the recent blockbusters heavily skewed towards sequels based around “an easily identifiable property with an existing reputation, appeal and market value”, concluding “a film like Transformers or Iron Man doesn’t just earn box office revenue, it demonstrably drives the sale of the associated toys, comic books and, of course, sequels”. This, writes Wu, “has everything to do with the business’s being part of conglomerate structures”.

No wonder Hollywood is so keen to ramp up intellectual property protections. Reading The Master Switch it becomes clearer than ever that the effort the film industry puts in to influencing legislators (the MPAA recently hired former Senator and Presidential candidate Chris Dodd to fill Jack Valenti’s shoes, his salary alone is reportedly $1.2m) is nothing to do with fighting a rear guard action against online “piracy” and everything to do with shoring up its business against the disruptive new technology of the ‘net. It is a replay of the reconsolidation of the US telecommunications industry after Bell was broken up in the 1970s, a repeat of the pincer movement described by Wu with, on the one hand, elaborate and expansive political lobbying and, on the other, aggressive business practice. But whereas James Grimmellman can write of the Google Books settlement, “the Ninth Circle of antitrust hell is reserved for price fixers”, reports that the music and movie business deliberately block access to their back catalogues through punitive licensing arrangements, while steadfastly refusing to cooperate around compulsory licensing policy go pretty much unremarked. In another age, writes Wu, corporations of the size of Viacom and Disney would have attracted the attention of competition regulators.

The most tantalising thing about The Master Switch is that since Wu handed it in to his publishers, he has been hired by the US Federal Trade Commission as a policy advisor. So I asked him, purely theoretically of course, if he could only bring one anti-trust suit, would he pick Google (who he also labels “a monopoly” in the book) or one of the major media conglomerates? If you want to know which one he picked, you can listen to the broadcast, which goes out on Resonance 104.4FM on Friday night at 7pm, and which, if you don’t live in London, you can listen to online here. I’ll put a link to the podcast just as soon as it goes up.