Remote work and the importance of writing

The written word will flourish in the post-pandemic workplace writes Bartleby in The Economist

The pandemic has given a big shove to all forms of digital communication. Video-conferencing platforms have become verbs. Venture capitalists make their bets after watching virtual pitches. Products like Loom and mmhmm help workers send pre-recorded video messages to their colleagues. More than a third of Slack users each week are now “huddling”—using the product’s new audio feature to talk to each other. And all this is before the metaverse turns everyone into an avatar. 

A workplace dominated by time on screens may seem bound to favour newer, faster and more visual ways of transmitting information. But an old form of communication—writing—is also flourishing. And not just dashed-off emails and entries on virtual whiteboards, but slow, time-intensive writing. The strengths of the written word have not been diminished by the pandemic era. In some ways they are ideally suited to it.*

The value of writing is a staple in management thinking. “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen,” reckoned Lee Iacocca, a quotable titan of the American car industry. Jeff Bezos banned slide decks from meetings of senior Amazon executives back in 2004, in favour of well-structured memos. “PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas,” he wrote.

Some executives write for themselves. Andrew Bosworth, a bigwig at Meta (formerly Facebook), has a blog in which he muses interestingly on many topics, including on writing itself: “In my experience, discussion expands the space of possibilities while writing reduces it to its most essential components.” Others do so to reach an audience. Shareholder letters from Larry Fink and Warren Buffett are the corporate equivalent of a blockbuster book launch.

But the move to remote working has enhanced the value of writing to the entire organisation, not just the corner office. When tasks are being handed off to colleagues in other locations, or people are working on a project “asynchronously”, meaning at a time of their choosing, comprehensive documentation is crucial. When new employees start work on something, they want the back story. When veterans depart an organisation, they should leave knowledge behind. Writing everything down sounds like an almighty pain. But so is turning up to a meeting and not having the foggiest what was decided last time out.

Software developers have already worked out the value of the written word. A research programme from Google into the ingredients of successful technology projects found that teams with high-quality documentation deliver software faster and more reliably. Gitlab, a code-hosting platform whose workforce is wholly remote, frames the secret of successful asynchronous working thus: “How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team (or in my company) were awake?” Gitlab’s answer is “textual communication”. Its gospel is a handbook that is publicly available, stretches to more than 3,000 pages and lays out all of its internal processes.

The deliberation and discipline required by writing is helpful in other contexts, too. “Brainwriting” is a brainstorming technique, used by Slack among others, in which participants are given time to put down their ideas before discussion begins. Lists of corporate values can make greeting cards seem hard-hitting. But thoughtful codification of a firm’s culture makes more sense in hybrid and remote workplaces, where new joiners have less chance to meet and observe colleagues.

Purists will sniff that none of this counts as writing. But good prose and useful prose share the same essential qualities: brevity, structure, a clear theme. Cormac McCarthy, a prize-winning novelist, copy-edits scientific papers for fun. Ted Chiang says that his science-fiction short stories and his technical writing both draw on a desire to explain an idea clearly.

Writing is not always the best way to communicate in the workplace. Video is more memorable; a phone call is quicker; even PowerPoint has its place. But for the structured thought it demands, and the ease with which it can be shared and edited, the written word is made for remote work.

Boris Johnson is Britain's most honest politician

Bagehot in The Economist

 

Boris Johnson lies often and easily. It is the hallmark of his career. He was fired from his first job, at the Times, for fabricating a quote. As a condition of becoming editor of the Spectator he promised not to stand as an mp, and then promptly did just that. As a shadow minister, he was fired by Michael Howard for lying about an affair. (He later divorced after a few more.) While mayor of London, he said numerous times that he would not stand in the 2015 election, only to turn up as a candidate in Uxbridge. 

Lying about attending a garden party at Downing Street in May 2020, at the height of lockdown, is just the latest in a very long list. When public anger grew, mps protested with all the sincerity of Captain Renault entering a gambling den in Casablanca. Douglas Ross, a Scottish mp who voted for the prime minister in the Conservative leadership election, labelled the prime minister’s position “untenable” and demanded he quit. Why did such defenders of truth once back a man they knew to be an enthusiastic liar? Because Mr Johnson is, in his own way, a man of his word.

When he was drumming up support for his bid for party leader, his pitch was simple: back me, keep your seat, defeat Jeremy Corbyn and do Brexit. And it all came true. Mr Corbyn was crushed and the biggest Conservative majority in three decades followed. In that election Mr Johnson promised two big things and did both. The nhs would be showered with cash, which it has been. And he would do a deal with the eu, which he did.

It was not a good deal, but it was quick and it was clear. Coming after a negotiation with the eu that lacked both speed and simplicity, it is little surprise that voters jumped at it. Mr Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, had obfuscated, attempting legalistic contortions to avoid Brexit’s brutal simplicities. Labour’s Brexit position was, in the words of one shadow cabinet minister, “bollocks”. Mr Johnson’s deal hobbles British business for little or no gain, beyond a point of principle. But it is, no more and no less, what he said he would do.

Political lying was not invented by Mr Johnson in the Brexit campaign, comforting though that idea might be. Indeed, the misleading claims of the Leave campaign sometimes revealed awkward truths. When it pointed out that Turkey was in the long process of joining the eu, for example, Remainers cried foul because other countries were likely to block its accession. Yet David Cameron could have promised to veto Turkish membership of the eu, and did not. Turkey joining the club was a long-standing British policy.

In politics, integrity is almost inevitably followed by hypocrisy. Politicians with firm moral centres can crack. Gordon Brown was feted as a son of the manse while hurling handsets at people’s heads. Tony Blair runs an institute dedicated to openness while accepting money from despots. Sir Keir Starmer stood for Labour leader by pitching himself as Mr Corbyn in a suit, and then ditched the leftiest proposals once he had won. Mr Johnson, by contrast, does not even pretend to be a family man, despite having a few of them. He has not pretended to be anything but a power-hungry cynic either. A lack of integrity becomes a form of integrity.

A competent administrator never lurked beneath that mop of thinning hair. Occasionally, a journalist has claimed otherwise in a breathless profile; Mr Johnson has not. Those who work closely with him cannot say they were fooled into thinking he was a loyal boss. His time as prime minister has been marked by the defenestration of aides. When trouble strikes Mr Johnson, deputy heads roll. Being a civil servant rather than a political appointee offers no protection. Those who help him out, for example by chipping in for new curtains in Number 10 to keep his new wife happy, end up enmeshed in scandal.

No one can claim they were not warned about Mr Johnson. He is in no sense a mystery. He is the subject of several biographies and for the past three decades has shared his views about the world in newspaper columns and articles. If he is ever silenced by ministerial responsibility, a high-profile relative can fill the gap with more Johnson trivia. Throughout his career he has left a trail of giggling journalistic colleagues with a cherished Boris story to be whipped out on special occasions, no matter how long ago or dull. The content of his character was known and yet people still saw fit to put him in power.

If voters are souring on Mr Johnson, they only have themselves to blame. The prime minister is not a monarch. In 2019 he won 43.6% of the vote, the biggest share since Margaret Thatcher. Mr Johnson is in Downing Street because just under half the country ticked a box next to a Conservative’s name. Voters are adults. They knew what they were voting for, and they voted for what they got.

It is common to blame the rise of Mr Johnson on “Have I Got News For You”, a bbc1 news quiz on which he was a frequent guest. Ian Hislop, one of the team captains, has a tart reply: “If we ask someone on and people like them, that is up to people.” Mr Johnson is not a boil that can be lanced, at which point Britain’s body politic will recover. British politics, its systems and culture, deteriorated to the point where an honest liar proved attractive. Mr Johnson benefited from chaos created by others.

Small lies, big truths

Those mps who helped put Mr Johnson in power must now decide whether to sack him for sins he has never hidden. Their choice will be made by calculating whether their voters still want him. Popularity was all that he promised, and he delivered it—until now. If his rise is depressing, his potential fall offers a glimmer of hope. British voters have, at last, begun to grow tired of Mr Johnson’s record of honest lies. A less cynical politics may prosper and populism become unpopular. But optimism should be tempered. mps would not hesitate to keep Mr Johnson if he, in turn, helped them keep their seats. If those who put the prime minister in power bring him down, they do so to absolve themselves.

Pakistan's New Security Policy

 

Will blockchain fulfil its democratic promise or will it become a tool of big tech?

Engineers are focused on reducing its carbon footprint, ignoring the governance issues raised by the technology writes John Naughton in The Guardian

Illuminated rigs at the Minto cryptocurrency mining centre in Nadvoitsy, Russia. Photograph: Andrey Rudakov/Getty Images



When the cryptocurrency bitcoin first made its appearance in 2009, an interesting divergence of opinions about it rapidly emerged. Journalists tended to regard it as some kind of incomprehensible money-laundering scam, while computer scientists, who were largely agnostic about bitcoin’s prospects, nevertheless thought that the distributed-ledger technology (the so-called blockchain) that underpinned the currency was a Big Idea that could have far-reaching consequences.

In this conviction they were joined by legions of techno-libertarians who viewed the technology as a way of enabling economic life without the oppressive oversight of central banks and other regulatory institutions. Blockchain technology had the potential to change the way we buy and sell, interact with government and verify the authenticity of everything from property titles to organic vegetables. It combined, burbled that well-known revolutionary body Goldman Sachs, “the openness of the internet with the security of cryptography to give everyone a faster, safer way to verify key information and establish trust”. Verily, cryptography would set us free.

At its core, a blockchain is just a ledger – a record of time-stamped transactions. These transactions can be any movement of money, goods or secure data – a purchase at a store, for example, the title to a piece of property, the assignment of an NHS number or a vaccination status, you name it. In the offline world, transactions are verified by some central third party – a government agency, a bank or Visa, say. But a blockchain is a distributed (ie, decentralised) ledger where verification (and therefore trustworthiness) comes not from a central authority but from a consensus of many users of the blockchain that a particular transaction is valid. Verified transactions are gathered into “blocks”, which are then “chained” together using heavy-duty cryptography so that, in principle, any attempt retrospectively to alter the details of a transaction would be visible. And oppressive, rent-seeking authorities such as Visa and Mastercard (or, for that matter, Stripe) are nowhere in the chain.
 
Given all that, it’s easy to see why the blockchain idea evokes utopian hopes: at last, technology is sticking it to the Man. In that sense, the excitement surrounding it reminds me of the early days of the internet, when we really believed that our contemporaries had invented a technology that was democratising and liberating and beyond the reach of established power structures. And indeed the network had – and still possesses – those desirable affordances. But we’re not using them to achieve their great potential. Instead, we’ve got YouTube and Netflix. What we underestimated, in our naivety, were the power of sovereign states, the ruthlessness and capacity of corporations and the passivity of consumers, a combination of which eventually led to corporate capture of the internet and the centralisation of digital power in the hands of a few giant corporations and national governments. In other words, the same entrapment as happened to the breakthrough communications technologies – telephone, broadcast radio and TV, and movies – in the 20th century, memorably chronicled by Tim Wu in his book The Master Switch.

Will this happen to blockchain technology? Hopefully not, but the enthusiastic endorsement of it by outfits such as Goldman Sachs is not exactly reassuring. The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn’t thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones.

Blockchain engineers also don’t seem to be much interested in the needs of the humans who might ultimately be users of the technology. That, at any rate, is the conclusion that cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike came to in a fascinating examination of the technology. “When people talk about blockchains,” he writes, “they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.”

And we’re nowhere near that point yet.

Stop Trying to Get It And You'll Have It | The Backwards Law

 

Pakistan's Brave Judge

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Justice Athar Minallah, Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court, has made history. He has ordered the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to knock down the Pakistan Navy’s Sailing Club House on the edge of the Rawal Dam in Rawalpindi as well as the Monal Restaurant in Islamabad and seize the Margalla Greens Golf Club in the Capital, because these have been built illegally on land belonging to the Margalla Hills National Park. He has thus outlawed the military’s claim to about 8000 acres of such land. Most significantly, the good judge has expressed the view that the Pakistan Navy does not have the authority to undertake a real estate development venture, nor the right to lend its name to any such enterprise.

Naturally, this judgment has warmed the cockles of millions of Pakistani hearts even as it has raised the hackles of powerful people lording it over unaccountable state institutions which have similar illegal stakes in real estate across the country. For starters, the Auditor General of Pakistan has revealed a list of 79 “encroachments” on the land of the Margalla Hills National Park, noting that several government bodies – CDA, Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad, Islamabad Wildlife Management Board, etc. – claim the right to control and manage the area, making the job of adjudication of rights and permissions difficult.

Justice Minallah’s judgment has also ignited questions of how courts have earlier dealt with such matters relating to the rich and powerful as opposed to the poor or feeble. In recent times, two cases have roused public indignation and in both the courts have been inclined to bend over backwards to appease powerful stakeholders. The first is that of Imran Khan’s sprawling multi-billion rupee estate in Bani Gala which was illegally constructed many years ago and brazenly “regularized” by the CDA on orders of Justice Saqib Nisar. In pursuit of this court order, the wretched chairman of the CDA who sent a questionnaire to Imran Khan regarding the property was swiftly dispatched to the nether lands and the journalist who quoted a news report exposing the PM’s shenanigans was served with a “show cause notice” by PEMRA. The second is a high rise luxury apartment construction at 1 Constitution Avenue Islamabad, a list of whose owners reads like a Who’s Who of the high and mighty (Imran Khan was one such). This building again, was “regularized” by the Saqib Nisar court, in sharp contrast to the demolition orders of lesser structures and lay encroachments in Karachi ordered recently by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Gulzar Ahmed.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The highway robbery began at the time of partition in 1947 when tens of billions worth urban and rural evacuee property of Hindus and Sikhs was seized by the new lords of the state and distributed freely over the years to their favoured assets and allies regardless of merit or due process. In time, the parliaments of the state began to make laws for cheap acquisition of lands and properties belonging to Pakistanis for the avowed purpose of building public parks, educational institutions or military security and defense installations. These land were then leased out at throwaway rates to favoured institutions and individuals, only for the latter to quietly transform these into high value, exorbitantly profitable commercial ventures in the private sector (housing societies, clubs, marriage halls, golf courses, etc). And that is how “Military Inc.” irresistibly came to be the leading “businessman” in Pakistan, owning airlines, shipping, hotels, banks, insurance, food, fertiliser, cement, housing, you name it. This is why Justice Minallah’s recent judgment is something to write home about. Earlier, he had put a stop to the practice of the civil bureaucracy allotting valuable residential and commercial plots to themselves and judges at throwaway prices to ensure protection against land-grabbing claims and law-bending practices, thus casting the first few stones at the established disorder. Which other court or judge will follow his laudable example and make these singular milestones in Pakistani history?

The Supreme Court is now faced with another public interest challenge. The Supreme Court Bar Association led by lawyer Ahsan Bhoon has filed a petition challenging the lifetime disqualification of PMLN’s Nawaz Sharif and PTI’s Jehangir Tareen from holding public office for not being “sadiq and ameen”. This petition follows revelations of high level judicial impropriety, misconduct and political bias by ex-CJP Saqib Nisar (that name again!) made by ex-CJ Gilgit-Baltistan, Rana Shamim, aimed at knocking out Nawaz Sharif from politics. To prepare the ground further for appropriate judicial review, the ex-Secretary of the PTI, Ahmed Jawad, has now come out of the closet to level accusations of judicial and military manipulation to oust Nawaz Sharif from office and hoist Imran into it. His allegation that Supreme Court judges disqualified Jehangir Tareen in order to “balance” their unfair ouster of Nawaz Sharif is bound to impact the trial and appeals of Mr Sharif in multiple cases and help pave the way for the judiciary to reclaim its lost credibility. It is significant that Justice Athar Minallah is also seized of adjudicating the allegations of ex-CJ GB Rana Shamim, and he will now be hard pressed to include the testimony of Ahmed Jawad in his deliberations.

Is Justice Athar Minallah the man of the moment? The history man?

Priyanka Gandhi Interview