The below article is cross–posted from Antonym, my weekly newsletter.

“Do you enjoy cautionary tales? Shilly–shallying children eaten by wolves, that stuff?”

“Alice, I am gone on them,” Blossom breathes.

— The Paragon Hotel, by Lyndsay Faye

---

Dear Reader

Word of the week is “vaccinable”. Use that in a sentence? I most certainly could, but other than quoting Zurich-based immunologist Andrew Croxford, I’m not sure I often will, so why I don’t just give you the direct source:

I won’t spend any time trawling through the data hunting for a vaccine effect.

It will come, as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow.

COVID-19 is a vaccinable disease.

— Andrew L. Croxford (@andrew_croxford) February 10, 2021

As Tweets go, this one is trés elegant, almost poetic. It sang to me because I’d felt something like this for a while. There’s too much focus on what filmmakers call the dailies (the rush footage) when it comes to news and social media while we wait for freedom. Looking at the newest scraps of information won’t do more than give you some amygdala-jolts and some fearful thoughts and some useless gossip to pass on. The trend is clear, the science is clear – we will use vaccines to find our way out of this pandemic and all the panicked and pitiful conspiracy enthusiasts in the world won’t throw it off track. You want to know exactly when? Exactly how? Whether you should have the Pfizer or the Oxford jab? Oh, sod off.

Like Blossom in The Paragon Hotel, we humans are all story–junkies. We eat them up, and they eat us up. They entertain us while we stay safe indoors, and they chip away at our mental health when we get too many of the wrong kind.

The world is more confusing the more stories we tell about it. Because too many of them trick us into thinking we clear. We don’t understand the world through stories as much as enjoy the illusion of feeling like we understand. In that way stories are like hallucinogens – no one ever really found the answer to life, the universe and everything while high on peyote, or LSD or psilocybin, but many people have to feel like they did.

“Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. […]

“If the news did a better job of putting events into historical context, we would have better behavior-level understanding, which is deeper than event-level understanding. 

— Thinking in Systems, by Donella H. Meadows

Meadows talks about our minds as being all about linearity. We evolved to spot useful instances of cause–and–effect; but once you’ve reprogrammed the human brain several times over with language, and writing, and collaborative knowledge and frameworks for thinking, and then hooked them up to computers – well, those old urges to make everything fit in a story became much less useful.

The revealed complexity of the world and the growing need for humans to understand it runs into its biggest problem when we understand where beliefs come from. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about the discovery that when it comes to moral choices people believe what they instinctively believe and then strain their reasoning to explain their decision.

[In an experiment] it’s obvious that people were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally. Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

(See the Antonym No. 2 section on Polarization for a bit more on this.)

Teach ‘em to fish

This Sifted interview with Tendayi Viki, a strategist and consultant at Strategzer, rang true.

Viki’s big realisation was that you can’t convince people of anything, you can only help them come to a new way of thinking by themselves. It was Buckminster Fuller, the American innovator, architect and writer, who said: “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

He and his team had created an innovation framework for Pearson, which they called the Lean Product Lifecycle. It was widely admired in innovation circles and won two industry awards. But they couldn’t get anyone internally at Pearson to use it.

“When we first met some resistance we thought: ‘We need some senior-level endorsement. We’ll come back with a bigger stick.’ So we got approval from the CFO and the CEO, and we went back with our bigger stick and people still went ‘meh’. Senior-level approval got them to listen to us, because they had to, but it didn’t make them do things differently.” 

Viki has a blog and a new book out which should be worth a look, judging by this interview.

---

iOS Widgets are getting useful

More apps in iOS 14 are getting widgets now, as developers catch up with the opportunities the new feature gives them. 

As I’m using them more I’ve got a home screen on my phone now that is calmer and more useful than I’ve been able to get before. My phone is the device I will glance at the most during the day and the home screen can be useful as an enabler of good habits (and bad ones). 

Here’s an unnecessarily detailed analysis of what my home screen looks like now and why.

On coping

It’s always a delight to come across good advice about how to cope with the emotional strain of living through the pandemic. Even if it something I’ve heard before, if it’s well put and arrives at the right moment, I’m deeply grateful.

This week I found a few gems worth sharing. One on Twitter, one on Instagram and the other one in a book, so there’s some evidence for a mixed diet of information. The first is about how stress works – and how to deal with it and is a thread from a psychologist and author, Dr Emma Kavanagh, who specialises in dealing with fear in the police and military. Click on the Tweet below to follow the whole thread:Dr Emma Kavanagh @EmmaLKIt is a Wednesday. It is almost half term. I am still homeschooling. I am still in lockdown. I want a holiday so much I could cry. But instead, I’m going to spend a few minutes talking to you about emotional coping.February 10th 2021140 Retweets492 Likes

Another author, Matt Haig, seems to be a one-person support service on matters of mental health. I loved this post he shared on Instagram and shared it with my team at work.  Simple instructions in case you’re not sure how to deal with the lockdown day. mattzhaigA post shared by Matt Haig (@mattzhaig)

Lastly, via good old Readwise, this quote is a good mantra for the moments when the tension gets too much:

“When doing this exercise, it often helps to silently repeat the phrase “Soften, soothe, allow.” This reminds you to accept the feeling as it is, softening any resistance to it, while actively soothing and consoling yourself for any discomfort you feel.” – Kristin Neff, Self Compassion

Quick links

• This video by BBC reporter Sima Kotecha is great. She tracks down the source of a video her Mum was sent on WhatsApp, making dangerous claims about inhaling steam as a cure / preventative for COVID-19. Since completing this investigation, Kotecha tweeted that children in Birmingham have been admitted to hospital with scalding after inhaling steam – just one example of the harm this kind of misinformation can cause.
• Brilliant illustrator, Kezia Furni, made this lovely image of my other work home, the Lighthouse building in Brighton’s North Laine. Like any reminder of normal life, it makes me happy-sad – especially as the lights are on in the Lighthouse office and gallery office windows. Can’t wait to visit them when we’re all back in the world.
• I like Becca Caddy’s pragmatic and open approach to “tech balance” in our lives, noting that everyone is different, for a start. And her rejection of “detox” as a useful metaphor to use in addressing problems that have made.

There are other ways we can describe our tech relationships—as “habits,” for example—that make our screen time feel like an aspect of our lives we can gradually change instead of a toxin that must be expelled. Sudden, radical changes in our tech behaviors run the risk of making us feel even more isolated at a time when a lot of us need more ways to connect.

— MIT Technology Review | How to have a better relationship with your tech

• The grime poet Debris Stevenson held daily writing workshops on Instagram Live last week and will be doing so all this week. Every day she sets up a theme with a poem, while also sharing some of her experiences of writing and then there is a timed 30 minute exercise. You can see the recordings on her account too, which are fascinating even if you’re not going to write.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Debris Stevenson (@debrisstevenson)

• I like Becca Caddy’s pragmatic and open approach to “tech balance” in our lives and her rejection of “detox” as a useful metaphor in addressing problems. Habits in using technology are more important than the technology itself.  MIT Technology Review | How to have a better relationship with your tech

That’s all for this week. I hope you found something you liked.

Antony

A runner on Brighton seafront.

Cross-posted from Antonym at Substack, where I am trying out the newsletter format. I’m not sure where it is going yet, but I’m enjoying the reviewing of a week’s notes and bookmarks and sharing some of them in this way.

January 2021 had enough drama, world-changing, tragedy and hope to fill a year.

In the first 31 days of 2020 social media has been the enabling technology for a coup attempt and wrecking hedge funds. The focus is on Reddit this week, but social media like email is better understood as a whole – the means of production and distribution of mass communications being in the hands of anyone who can master it.   

There are scares and negative stories every day, but the trend is towards vaccinations working. The UK’s set a strong pace giving about 8.3 million people a dose of vaccine at the time of writing – around 12% of the population. In two weeks time all of the most vulnerable groups will have been vaccinated, a government projection (for once) believable, and backed up by data. 

Contagion was a prescient film that seemed to predict a great deal about how the Covid-19 pandemic turned out – but it got the ending wrong. There was an implication finding the vaccine was the conclusion of the story, when in fact it is just the beginning of (hopefully) the pandemic’s end game. 

In real life, the successful Moderna vaccine was designed within a few days in January. It took almost a year to prove it was effective and safe and start vaccination programmes. And now the challenge of vaccinating the whole world is underway. The real challenge. 

---

Who watches the watchmen? Bellingcat, does…

We Are Bellingcat is published this week (Feb 4th) – I will be dropping everything to read this account of the online investigation organisation founded by its author, Eliot Higgins. 

In a Lunch with the FT interview, he talks about overcoming severe anxiety.

Every few months, he’d have a panic attack. “I’d feel dizzy and my heart would start pounding . . . When it’s so much part of your life, you don’t even realise it’s unusual. I think it held me back a lot.”

What we talk about now as anxiety-inducing doomscrolling now became Higgins’s way through the anxiety. Living in online communities he found ways to use online information to expose wrongdoing and lies by governments and terrorist organisations around the world (see Antonym No. 1 for more on Bellingcat and the January 6th coup attempt in the US). Simple, tenacious analysis like this timeline of QAnon predictions that didn’t come true make Bellingcat a great read as well as a force for good on the internet.

Experiments for the win

At Brilliant Noise, we call our method for fast, accountable, integrated content marketing  Experiment–Led Marketing™. I collect examples of experimentation being used well. A complete delight, then to see AdAge run a piece this week called Five digital experiments that helped Joe Biden win the presidency by Allison Stern who was digital partnerships manager on the Biden-Harris campaign. 

The approach that Stern and her team used was methodical and managed to pay due attention to the fundamentals of integrated content marketing while bringing in platforms including TikTok, influencer marketing and gaming: 

This innovation all came because of decisions at the top to invest in, monitor, and double-down on digital innovation.

Skunkworks aren’t possible without strong fundamentals, digital table stakes like social media, communications, design, and paid media. The Biden-Harris team over-delivered on all fronts, and the successful strategies below are in addition to so many successes and innovations across the board. There’s no magic bullet, just a high-functioning team firing on all cylinders.

I hope we will hear more on the details of the experiment–led aspects of campaign in the coming weeks from Stern and the leadership team ( she cites “Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Manager; Rob Flaherty, Director of Digital; and Christian Tom, Head of Digital Partnerships”). 

(Bonus link: Henkel ran an advertorial on its experiment–led product development in the FT.)

Is this a mountain on an alien world? No, it’s an oblique view of the dot of white paint Vermeer placed on his masterpiece, “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, to create the illusion of light reflecting from her eye. Microscopy and digital imaging have created a ten-gigapixel scan of the painting that lets us look at tiny details and even view the surface it in 3D. Incredible.

Google Chrome – HIROX – GIRL WITH PEARL EARRING – GIGAPIXEL PANORAMA — Watch Video

A review of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, by Avi Loeb about the strange object Oumuamua that flew through the solar system last year concludes that even if the strange object wasn’t an artefact of extraterrestrial intelligent life, it would be sensible to behave if it wasn’t so:

Central to his argument is what he calls the “Oumuamua wager,” a takeoff on Pascal’s famous wager, that the upside of believing in God far outweighs the downside. Likewise, believing that Oumuamua could have been an alien spacecraft can only make us more alert and receptive to thinking outside the box. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Crochet artist turns viral Bernie Sanders image into a doll that sells for $20,000 | Bernie Sanders | The Guardian

Even Bernie’s memes do social good… the crochet figure featured in last week’s newsletter sold for $20,000 (and the profits are going to charity)

King, 46, initially posted photos of the 9-inch doll on her Instagram account, and they garnered thousands of likes and comments. By Saturday, she posted the doll on eBay and auctioned it for $20,300, which she said will be donated to Meals on Wheels America.

Sanders himself has been using the meme to raise money for Meals on Wheels – his campaign sold sweatshirts with the image and donated the proceeds to the charity. On Wednesday, the senator said he had raised $1.8m for the organization.

---

If there is a heaven on earth for me, it looks like a library. A list of candidates for my earthly paradise is included in this thread by Joaquim Campa (via Only Dead Fish, the godfather of marketing newsletters).

Joaquim Campa @JoaquimCampaThread of the most beautiful Libraries of the World 1. The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading , Rio De Janeiro. Credit: Alamy August 15th 202019,236 Retweets48,960 Likes

---

Here are five ways the government could have avoided 100,000 Covid deaths | Coronavirus | The Guardian (Summary)

A public health scientist – Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh – explains why the UK government have cocked up its Covid-19 response, even if they are having huge success with vaccination now. The contrast in the numbers of deaths between Australia and New Zealand and here still shocks me, no matter how many times we hear it.

While the number of UK deaths has entered the hundreds of thousands, New Zealand has recorded only 25 deaths from Covid-19 so far. Taiwan has recorded seven, Australia 909, Finland 655, Norway 550 and Singapore 29. These countries have largely returned to normal daily life.

1. “UK had no border policies in place for months.”
2. …“on 12 March, when the government made the fatal decision to stop community testing, abandoning its line of sight over who had the virus and where it was spreading.”
3. …“it delayed the first lockdown.”
4. …“the lack of appropriate personal protective equipment for many health and social workers who struggled during the first national lockdown in the spring.
5.  Finally, the UK has continually lacked both clear leadership and messaging, which are vital in a pandemic. Rather than leading from the front, the government seems to only follow public opinion and polling.

Quick links and things to share

• Sustainability exemplar Patagonia has started selling used clothing alongside new items.
• There’s a new dictionary of words used science fiction, a spin-off from an Oxford English Dictionary project. Enjoy nerds!
• Electric cars close to becoming the default new car purchase for most people.
• Book cover of the week: The front of Lazar Damic’s collection of essays is delightful. It’s written in Bosnian, so I will have to just admire the design until a translation appears.

Music

Probably like most people, I put playlists together in a haphazard way, scrapbooks of songs that catch me in the moment and that I want to hear again. After a while, I stop listening to them and they become a little time capsules and I find them again. Usually, I do about two a year, but perhaps something about the intensity of this time has had me decide to put a full stop on this one at the end of January.  Have a listen if you like – I tried to put the songs in an order that made some sense. https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/5vUrE5W5maF9IZHJOPFK8h

?si=BKYWY7JxSweY999936rGcA

And finally, one track which isn’t on Spotify but would definitely have been on this list is Ben Frost’s Main Titles for Raised by Wolves, the Ridley Scott produced HBO series: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dFs4yX4V7NQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

That’s all for this week – thanks for reading and I hope your February is… acceptable. 

Antony

I will probably keep cross–posting the letters here, but if you’d like to subscribe to Antonym and see if it turns into anything – go here.

This is a newsletter cross–posted from my Substack newsletter.

That’s hope I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic — and a fanatic is always hiding a secret doubt. 
– George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré

Dear Reader 

Happy New New Year. 

The first three weeks of 2021 were 2020 in disguise. This week it felt like we were changing the game – taking some pieces off the board, deciding on new strategies, considering a new phase. 

In an ordinary year, the third week of January week would have included the question: “Do we still say Happy New Year? When does that stop?” After the second lockdown, the emergence of ominous new viral variants and the horrorshow of Trump’s last days – we already had an implicit answer to that unspoken question. A cheery “Happy New Year!” would have sounded sarcastic any time after about the 4th of January. 

Things have got brighter this week.  A month after the Solstice, each day is longer and lighter. Trump is off social media and out of the White House. Five million people have been vaccinated in the UK.  [Corrected – not 10 million. Sorry!]

There were fireworks in Washington to greet the inauguration of the first black, hispanic, woman Vice President and Joe Biden. The pop–culture internet made its own light show with memes based on the endearingly well-wrapped up Senator Bernie Sanders.  WIRED thinks the Bernie Sanders inauguration memes are a sign of healing. 

Many of the best memes are born this way. Like most good humor, they’re tension breakers. A collective release. The internet has had some good ones over the past four or five years, but often, amidst the political bickering, it’s been hard to know when to interject with a joke. On Wednesday morning, people let ’em rip—and suddenly the thing keeping everyone warm was laughter.

The Bernie Sanders Meme Proves the Internet Is Resetting | WIRED

I’ve scattered a few of my favourites at the end of this email and here’s Senator Sanders reacting to a selection of his memes and then going on to address the seriousness of the moment and the challenges the world faces.  

Letters to the company

Every morning I write a letter to my company. It started as a practical way of keeping everyone updated when we had to close our office due to a case of Covid–19 a week or so before lockdown began. Soon though, they evolved to be a way of keeping us all connected, a space for reflecting about what was happening. The conversations and feedback and the power of the discipline of daily writing also give me a great deal. 

I published a few of them last year, mainly during lockdowns, but hadn’t done so for a while. This week I was nudged into putting another one out there and it has had some lovely reactions and even prompted some reconnections with people I’d not spoken to in a while. We all need to be making sense of the struggle to get through the pandemic, to make sense of it and to keep a sense of connection with one another and hope for the future. Maybe sharing what we’re thinking and what’s working and not is something we all crave. 

The letter is on LinkedIn and my blog if you’d like to take a look. And here’s an excerpt from another from this week:

A few years ago, we wrote a short book for a B2B content campaign called Design Your Day*. The conceit was to apply the discipline of design thinking to managing your time and energy every day. The design thinking method, made famous by IDEO, was initially used for product development and emphasised the use of prototypes to explore solutions to a problem. Famously, the IDEO team developed the roller-ball mouse for Apple, inspired by the business end of roll-on deodorant bottles. As soon as they had the idea, someone rushed out to buy some Right Guard to examine it, take it apart and use the ball to make a working prototype mouse.

The idea we liked for Design Your Day was to treat days as a prototype. We think it will work well like this – so we try the day out and notice what worked and what didn’t. The next day we make some tweaks and try it again.

Another insight we had while writing the book was that you can’t just plan the work bit of the day, you have to think about the whole 24 hours. The choices you make about food, exercise, relaxation and sleep are just as important as when you will write a report, do your expenses, or work on creative ideas ahead of a meeting.

After the cold-water shock of diving into the deep end of 2021, I’ve begun to find my rhythm in the days, and it is these two lessons from Design Your Day that have helped me. As mentioned yesterday, incremental improvements to routine build into positive and sustainable ways of living, even in the hardest times. Kindness to others, self–compassion, getting things done well, pausing if fear sets in and getting some perspective, making sure we eat and sleep, talking to family and friends.

Prototyping and improving how you get through the day can be an antidote to monotony. The sameness of the days is an opportunity to make each one a little better than the day before. And if it breaks, – if some part of you breaks, even – that’s OK. It’s a prototype – you take it apart, work out what went wrong and have another try at having a good day tomorrow. Or at least a slightly improved day.

Reading this one back, the sharing of it here is useful to me all over again. Reflecting, and reflecting on reflection isn’t indulgent in these times: it’s a matter of self–preservation, of making sure you can get out of bed and not collapse under the weight of the day. Thanks to others sharing thoughts like this you know you’re not alone. I was deeply encouraged a quote from a CEO of a large company in a Harvard Business Review article about leading during the pandemic: 

I’m surprised that the hardest part right now is managing my own mind.

Yes. I think we’re all surprised by how hard that is.

Kindness is strength

I read a lot about kindness this week. Understanding compassion is more about effectiveness than trying to emulate the Dalai Lama, despite what macho business–types will tell you. 

In the past I’ve felt intense pressure to be ruthless in making business decisions that would affect people’s lives in awful ways. As the endurance event that is the Great Pandemic rolls on, it’s clear that the long game is always to bet on people and that kindness – to yourself and others – is not humane for its own sake, but humane because we rely on other people to survive and get things done. 

In the FT this week, Andrew Hill cut through any nonsense about kindness being weakness: 

Tough decisions can be taken in humane and decent ways. “Kindness isn’t softness,” observes Kira Schabram of University of Washington, who has studied the relationship between compassion and burnout. “But for a long time we assumed there was no room for it in the workplace.”

It would be understandable if “compassion fatigue” were also a factor in wearing out empathetic colleagues. Here, though, Prof Schabram and her fellow researcher Yu Tse Heng have good news. Their separate study of social service providers and business students, just published by the Academy of Management Journal, confirms being compassionate to others can be good for you. Above all, performing acts of kindness helps reduce cynicism, one of three linked elements of burnout, the others being exhaustion and “inefficacy”, or dwindling performance. The kindness pool, in other words, is not finite. It can even be replenished.

Providing external resources to alleviate burnout is not good enough on its own, though, says Prof Schabram. “Self-compassion” is the best salve for exhaustion. In her experiment, timed nudges were enough to encourage stressed students to be kind to themselves. Even better would be to ensure that jobs are designed to minimise the risk of burnout in the first place.

Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg’s Harvard Business Review piece, “How to lead when your team is exhausted – and so are you”, which I mentioned earlier, has plenty more to say about using emotional intelligence (a.k.a. empathy and common decency) as a leader. 

It feels like the whole world is tired. Even though the vaccine shines a light at the end of the tunnel, the home stretch will be long and perhaps take a greater toll on our professional and personal lives than we expect it to.

Amen to that.

Leaders should focus on three areas: understanding the difference between urgency and importance, and focus on the latter; be compassionate while also driving your employees to action by channeling their feelings of defiance, anger, and frustration. Finally, change things up every single day with a focus on energizing your team. 

I also like the insight that we need to be doing things to rest sometimes: 

While rest is vital outside the workday, inactivity during it can backfire. In military units, for example, boredom and waiting time are perceived as more stressful than actual combat. In the study “The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” researchers found that when people were ordered to sit in a room and do nothing, they chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than pass the time in silence. 

Quick links

• [[Esther Perel]] posted some ideas about how to deal with stress on Instagram.

• The Economist says we could be on the verge of a new “roaring 20s”

Today a dawn of technological optimism is breaking. The speed at which covid-19 vaccines have been produced has made scientists household names. Prominent breakthroughs, a tech investment boom and the adoption of digital technologies during the pandemic are combining to raise hopes of a new era of progress: optimists giddily predict a “roaring Twenties”. Just as the pessimism of the 2010s was overdone—the decade saw many advances, such as in cancer treatment—so predictions of technological Utopia are overblown. But there is a realistic possibility of a new era of innovation that could lift living standards, especially if governments help new technologies to flourish.

• A nice little niblet of wisdom from Naval Ravikant on re-framing things like negotiations as games:

I generally say, though: “Negotiations are won by whoever cares less.” Negotiation is about not wanting it too badly. If you want something too badly, the other person can extract more value from you.

If someone is taking advantage of you in a negotiation, your best option is to turn it from a short-term game into a long-term game. Try to make it a repeat game. Try to bring reputation into the negotiation. Try to include other people who may want to play games with this person in the future.

Ein more thing…

This week, thanks to a virtual beer with a good friend in Munich, I found out about the Bavarian Space Programme. Not a joke one, this is a serious initiative with a few hundred million Euros of investment behind it, an aerospace research facility, and about ten tech/digital business incubators. The Minister-President of Bavaria, Markus Söder, is a gregarious but respected conservative politician with an eye on Merkel’s old job. He also had the chutzpah to put his own face on the mission patch (above) for the programme, which is inscribed “Bavaria One: Mission Zukunft” (Mission: Future). I would like one of those badges. 

Naturally, Meme–Bernie is one step ahead of Söder.

And of course, I had to spend a few minutes today using graphics programmes poorly to make this in case Bavaria wants to drop Söder from the mission patch: 

I hope you have a lovely week. 

Antony 

Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

— Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by John le Carré

This email newsletter has been cross–posted from Antonym. You can subscribe here if you want to see how the experiment goes.

Dear Reader

Welcome to the second of my newsletters. This week seems to be about pulling together three strands of reading and thinking: polarised politics, conspiracy theories and social media platforms. Let me know what you think. Last week someone told me they liked the funny TikTok video, and there’s nothing like that this week, which suggests I may not be very good at responding to feedback.

Polarization 

Changing your mind is hard, never mind anyone else’s. Because of various cognitive biases, it’s hard to understand how someone from the other side of an argument can even hold their point of view. Data suggest that we think people having an opinion that is the polar opposite of our own are uniformly less intelligent and informed than we are. 

“Humans may violently disagree with one another, but there are ways to bring them together.”

That’s the hopeful description of Ali Goldsworthy’s forthcoming book, Poles Apart. Ali was the Deputy Chair of the Liberal Party in the UK and is now CEO of the Depolarization Project.

I was lucky enough to hear a talk this week by Ali about how polarization is so powerful and why it works by people with the best intentions. 

Polarization sounds like a bad thing, right? Funnily enough, not always. Forming groups and consensus is beneficial in society and politics. But there needs to be flux and flow and change or divisions can become toxic and unhelpful. The unintended consequences of creating a movement are that a group set on change or challenging wrongs is real and sometimes very harmful. 

The phenomenon of polarization is complicated, but it’s clear that the more a belief becomes part of someone’s identity, the harder it is for them to change their mind, even when faced with evidence. 

Lots of good stuff in these links (and one to pre-order Ali’s book). 

• The Depolarization Project 
• Ali’s essay on a Radio 4 podcast
• Poles Apart – forthcoming book on polarisation from Ali Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne and Alex Clark.
• Change My Mind – The Depolarization project’s podcast.  

The surprising fragility of conspiracy theories

What about when the opposing point of view to your own really is a dangerous fantasy? Conspiracy theory-driven movements like QAnon are literally armed and dangerous in the US and just plain scary in the UK. 

A paper from UCLA last year on the structure of the stories that make up conspiracy theories used data from Reddit and other platforms to understand how conspiracy theories form and found that they are surprisingly fragile, according to an article from Ars Technica.

The narrative frameworks around conspiracy theories typically build up and stabilize fairly quickly, compared to factual conspiracies, which often take years to emerge, according to Tangherlini. Pizzagate stabilized within one month of the Wikileaks dump and remained relatively consistent for the next three years.”

[…] They found that conspiracy theories tend to form around certain narrative threads that connect various characters, places, and things across discrete domains of interaction that are otherwise not aligned. It’s a fragile construct: cut one of those crucial threads, and the story loses cohesiveness, and hence its viral power. This is not true of a factual conspiracy, which typically can hold up even if certain elements of the story are removed.

Conspiracy emerge from conversations that connect different bits of information. Jokes, misunderstandings, exaggerations and lies mix then sometimes a story appears that catches. 

A fascinating aspect of the paper’s findings is how long it takes for a conspiracy narrative to become stable, for people to be repeating more or less the same story and spreading it. For Pizzagate – look it up if you don’t know it – this process took just one month. 

How quickly these things take root reminded me of some analysis in a New York Times The Daily podcast on how people organised the attack on Congress online. The paper’s cybersecurity correspondent Sheela Frankel followed the journey from an angry Facebook group started the day after the presidential election through the Capitol’s violence on January 6th. 

It was extremely well-organized. The day after the election, a group immediately pops up on Facebook called Stop the Steal. It initially builds on this base of kind of Tea Party activists and QAnon supporters and otherwise long-term members of MAGA — the Make America Great Again term that Trump likes to use. And they come together and they start collecting what they see as evidence of voter fraud.

Frankel says the Facebook group was up for two days, long enough for half a million people to find one another and start organising. When the social network shut them down, the group and their narrative were already strong enough to migrate to a collection of other websites and platforms. A movement – a collection of Trump supporters, QAnon followers, religious extremists, and white supremacists of various stripes – formed and built a story and a loose organisation that carried out an insurrection. 

The insurrection will be monetised.

To a liberal mind, it seems that the solution should be discussion and debate. Facts will drive out untruths, and reason will win the day. What may be emerging is an understanding that conspiracy theories and misinformation are systems issues.  

Rather than deploring departures from reality by conspiracy theory movements, we would serve society better by spotting and disrupting them early on. Like fire-watching in a forest or airline safety, it may be carried out by others but should be regulated and not left solely to private interests.

We’ve waited too long for big tech to do the necessary – but relatively simple – job of moderation adequately. The more complex work of spotting and putting out conspiracy theory fires before they spread needs attention and should not be left to those who have profited hugely from having demagoguery and division.

Talking of monetisation, it turns out some of the violent insurrectionists in Washington on January 6th were earning money even as politicians fled from them and people were injured and killed. One man alone made at least $2,000  from his live stream video on a platform called D-live. 

Governments may be the ones that have to provide this misinformation emergency service.

At a personal scale, Bellingcat? used the Twitter account of the woman who was shot dead by Capitol police to tell the story of her radicalisation.

In terms of her views, Ashli Babbitt probably didn’t stand out from the crowd massed at the U.S. Capitol. And that is precisely why the story of her political awakening—well told through her activity on Twitter—is so instructive in understanding what brought that crowd together.

Over the past five years, a potent MAGA online subculture appears to have transformed this former Obama voter, who turned to Trump over a dislike of Hillary Clinton, into a QAnon follower ready to storm the Capitol. In a Twitter exchange on November 15 2018, Babbitt said that she had voted for President Obama, calling him “our president” and saying that he had done “great things.

Bellingcat? | The Journey of Ashley Babbit

---

This past week was a bit of a struggle for a social media user like myself and that description of Twitter resonated. The news is too terrifying and compelling to ignore, but I have deleted Twitter and Facebook from my phone a couple of times this week and tried to find healthier things to do with my poor beleaguered mind in the meantime.

May you be calm, safe and well this week. Thank you for reading.

Antony

This is cross–posted from my new Antonym Substack – an email newsletter/blog platform. I published it there as a series of five posts – but have combined them here. Be warned, it’s a long read…

When the going gets tough, the tough get reading.

We all had extra burdens to carry in 2020. People found their different consolations, found their own way through. Reading was one of mine, but not all of the time. 

I read less during the first, darkest phase of lockdown in March and April, due to a vicious run in with Covid-19 itself combined with intense challenges at work, not least dealing with the shift to remote working, furloughs for some of our colleagues and supporting our clients as they took stock of their businesses. I was too exhausted to focus on reading a book for long. As the spring came and we recalibrated the business, reading returned as a source of pleasure, inspiration, relaxation and a place to reflect.

I also wrote a great deal this year. Together with my Brilliant Noise colleague Stephanie Hubbard we published a short book about influencers and marketing on Amazon called Cut Through The Hype. Note: it’s good for apps but not e-readers as it is a print replica – hit me up if you want a PDF. As well as being well-written (ahem) it is a design triumph thanks to our design colleagues.

I also developed a habit of writing to my company every day, something that worked really well for myself and my team. In all I wrote about 80,000 words in daily letters to my company. A few of them I adapted as articles for LinkedIn (my favourite and most personal was Invisible Bombs, but the one people mention most is What Colour is Your Mood). I’ll talk more about this approach to reflection and communication more another time, but it’s something I intend to continue doing even when we are through the other side of the pandemic. 

In three categories – fiction, non–fiction and business – I’m picking my three to five best reads and may mention a handful of others I recommend. The pool these come from is the 50–60 books I read this year. If you’re interested you can see all of these on my Goodreads profile along with – sometimes – reviews. 

Partly because we’re back in lockdown over the Christmas holidays, I’m deeply valuing the opportunity to reflect on a year’s reading. I’ve gone longer in my writing about some of the books as usual, and will break this post into a short series to make it more digestible in blog form, and also to try out the newsletter format for the first time. So there will be four main posts – this introduction, the three genres and then a couple of bonus posts about The Mirror and the Light, which was my absolute favourite book of the year. 

The complete list of the year’s best reads: 

Fiction:

1. The Mirror & The Light, by Hilary Mantel
2. Outline, by Rachael Cusk 
3. Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie

Non–fiction:

1. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo–Lodge
2. Daemon Voices, by Philip Pullman 
3. Arabs: A 3,000–Year History, by Tim Mackintosh–Smith

Business:

1. Lessons From A Warzone, Louai Al Roumani
2. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff
3. No Rules Rules, by Reed Hasting and Erin Meyer
   

My book of the year: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & The Light

This is the second in a short series of articles about my favourite reads of 2020. The first instalment is an overview. The others will follow over the next day or so.

My favourite book of 2020 is The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel. The third of the Thomas Cromwell books, this is a work of genius. Immersive, thrilling and beautiful.

This book is about power, politics and psychology – the realpolitik or game of power as it is played and the inner games of power that take place inside people’s minds.

Cromwell learned about power as a mercenary and then a banker in Italy, and has read Machiavelli. You could write a credible list of business mantras based on quotes like:

Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.

However, this is a high stakes game – understanding the way Prince’s mind works is a matter of life and death for Cromwell; as he says in Wolf Hall:

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

To survive as long as he does, rise as high as he does, from runaway and hustler to the most powerful person in the country, he has to understand power in terms of grand strategy but also the psychological complexities of the king:

…princes are not as other men. They have to hide from themselves, or they would be dazzled by their own light. Once you know this, you can begin to erect those face-saving barriers, screens behind which adjustments can take place, corners for withdrawal, open spaces in which to turn and reverse.

In her 2017 Reith Lectures, Mantel talked about historical fiction as taking place the gaps between the facts. Some deeds are recorded, but the emotional reality of the people living then have to be deduced, intuited and imagined. She has immersed herself in the facts – and then let her mighty imagination loose on the bits in between. Mantel respects and works with her imagination more consciously than any writer I have ever heard talk about their work. Imagination for her has edge, holds peril even for the writer, is a tool with palpable power.

The bits in between the facts of history are the obvious but missing questions of history – how did he feel? How do tyrants not know they are tyrants, but imagine themselves victims and saviours? How do you work in the thick of politics where a wrong move means death and not lose your mind? What is it like to sit in a cell awaiting death? How does the person condemning you square the viciousness of their deeds with their conscience? This isn’t a story–tour of the past. It is the sometimes painful struggle of what it was to be in that time, to navigate the social and psychological topography of Henry VIII’s court and Tudor London.

One criticism of the Cromwell trilogy is that Mantel imposes a modern perspective on Cromwell’s outlook. But Cromwell is an inventor of modernity, his mind is different from those around him – hence his disdain for superstition.

The purpose of ghost stories is extortion, generally: to frighten poor folk into paying for prayers and charms to protect them.

He has a merchant’s eye for the systems of power and in this new world of printing presses and growing literacy, that beats theology, nobility and poetry hands down when it comes to getting things done. He is “a ready man” who gets things done. Old wealth and power uses him to do what they can’t and he accumulates his own resources as a result.

And whatever people’s beliefs are, power remains the same game whether you’re a player in the medieval or modern versions. Looking at political power through the eyes of someone who understands it so well, you return to the the headlines and realities of your own time with some of his guile. You see the same shapes of fools and chancers, flattered princes and unashamed manipulators, the greater goods and the unforgivable greed. You see the present afresh for having looked back in time for a while.

The most modern aspect of the psychology of Mantel’s imagined Cromwell may be is his insights about the nature of self, its slippery nature, and both the questions this raise about who he is and how he manipulates or guides the king’s changing story of who he is and what he has done:

You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself – slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well

And…

He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone

In Cromwell’s world, people who understand how private psychology and public power mix win. Those who stick hard by principles or ideas end up getting stuck by them. Thomas More dies for his principles, others are hoist on the petard of courtly love, incriminating poems and letters the evidence of ideals that are recast as treason. Cromwell’s conversation with Lady Shelton is cuttingly disdainful of the troubadour nonsense that addles courtiers minds:

‘It is all my cousin Anne’s fault, I agree. It was she who taught us to be selfish, and to reach for our desires. Amor omnia vincit, she said.’

‘Perhaps for a season it did.’

‘Love conquers all?’ Poor gentle creature, she bends her head. ‘With respect, my lord, love couldn’t conquer a gosling. It couldn’t knock a cripple down. It couldn’t beat an egg.’

Despite his downfall, Cromwell’s legacy is mighty – breaking England’s church from Rome and the publication of the first bible in English, an act less often recognised than martyrs burning at the stake, but far more consequential. His reputation lies tattered for centuries, until Mantel resurrects it with a story that prompted reevaluation of him in academia and popular culture alike, but he changed the world by changing what England read, how it thought and what it did.

We have agreed a translation, and it is Tyndale’s, as far as we have his work, but it goes under another scholar’s name. We have put Henry’s own image on the title page. We want him to see himself there. We need him to set forth a Bible under his own licence, and set the scriptures up in every church, for all to read who can. We need to get it out in such numbers that it can never be recalled or suppressed. When the people read it there will be no more of these armed and murdering Pilgrims. They will see with their own eyes that nowhere in the scripture does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics –’

Fiction

I’ve selected three books as my top fiction reads of the year. I went through a whodunnit phase, had a great time with what would be John Le Carré’s last novel Agent Running in the Field, PD James’s Children of Men and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. Where The Crawdads Sing and The Glass Hotel, American Dirt and My Sister The Serial Killer were transporting and engrossing, great reads all. The following three books are the ones that are most present still for me at the end of this year of years.

1. The Mirror & The Light, by Hilary Mantel
2. Outline, by Rachael Cusk 
3. Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie

The Mirror & The Light

In preparing this review of my year’s reading I’ve gone back to my highlights and notes from The Mirror & The Light and it needs its own article. If you’ve not seen it already it is here.

This book, and the trilogy it completes is such a staggering achievement as a work of literary art it absolutely has to be my book of the year.

If you’ve not read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies go back and read those first. If you’ve tried to read them but not quite connected, I sympathise. Watch the TV series and then go back and read them.

Mantel maintains that this is the best book of the three and I am not going to argue. Ironically the previous two won the Booker Prize, while The Mirror and The Light didn’t make the short–list. One of the judges, Lee Child, said that “there were better books” and I really look forward to reading Shuggie Bain, which won and the other three. They would have to be something remarkable to beat this book for me, however.

Outline, by Rachael Cusk

Outline took me completely by surprise. Utterly original, it’s a series of conversations that tell stories and that depict characters the protagonist – who may or may not be the actual author – meets while teaching a writing seminar in Athens one summer. We learn very little about the protagonist explicitly, but pick up a sense of her from the conversations.

Coming back to it now, several months later, to write about why it has – and had such a hold on me – the best I can offer is some of its flavour in a quote or two:

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.

There is a thematic connection with The Mirror and the Light, in that it is about what Julian Baggini’s calls The Ego Trick (“‘I’ is a verb, masquerading as a noun”). We invent ourselves from moment to moment, sometimes through reflections glimpsed in the eyes of others. This can seem like a depressing insight, until you grasp its power and the agency we have in making ourselves. Outline hints at the inner politics, the inner game, of who you are and who you will decide to be, the story you tell yourself when you look in the mirror.

In the strange intense summer after the first lockdown of 2020 in the UK, still in the grip of Covid and its cloying after-effects on my health, this book felt very real to me.
Outline has a deep but somehow nourishing melancholy to it. There’s a sense of consciously seeking refuge in a moment, of enjoying a sunny place in a distanced way, as a trauma recedes for a while, even if it has not been resolved. An aftermath can only be avoided for a short time. Eventually you have to start digging out your life from the remains. Even knowing that, there is solace in the moment of pause, while you wait for your sense of self to come back into focus.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

It was perfect in the moment that I read it, but it has a hold on me still. I’ve the next book in the trilogy ready for when I’m ready; which will be soon.

Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie

I’d like to connect some themes from the two previous books with this first–rate work of science fiction. Ancillary Justice is a book I turned to for escape; wanting to go to some other worlds far from the weight of life in 2020, but found more there than I’d expected. Set in a far future where a colossal empire that must constantly expand to sustain itself has intelligent and conscious spacecraft that each maintains small armies of ancillaries – human bodies which they have co–opted as agents or avatars: individual but connected elements of the same mind.

In Ancillary Justice there are selves and collectives and different versions of the same self. As the story develops there is a kind of split-personality disorder occurring in a leader that threatens civil war.

The best science fiction invokes a kind of intellectual vertigo, settling you in a reality you think you understand and then spinning your perspectives around like one of those astronaut training machines where the gyroscopes simulate the disorientation of losing all control and bearings in space.

One of the other themes in the book is communication. There are layers to the languages and communications, awareness of languages distinct weaknesses and strengths, even though the languages are imagined and never explicit. A recurring example of this is that the lingua franca of the empire is non-gendered and the default gender is expressed as female. Native speakers are bemused by the importance of gender in other cultures, just as people in those cultures can spot them as other because they struggle to identify not just the gender of words but of people.

The perspective of the speaker is defined not just by language, but by location – or locations – in which their consciousness is speaking. Conversations take place in parallel in different places, informed by events and conversations that linked minds are having.

Non-verbal communication too is important with a gesture mentioned indicating one thing or another but what precisely the movement might be is left to the imagination. For example:

… She made an averting gesture.
… I frowned, and she made a placatory gesture.
… I made a small, doubtful gesture.

There are also unintentional communications – the artificial intelligences and their ancillaries can read emotions from people’s micro-expressions, changes in perspiration, breathing and heartbeats:

Station could certainly see a large percentage of its residents with the same intimate view I’d had of my officers. The rest—including me, now—it saw in less detail. Temperature. Heart rate. Respiration. Less impressive than the flood of data from more closely monitored residents, but still a great deal of information

Apart from the thrill of perspective shifts and strange ideas, I enjoyed Ancillary Justice‘s playfulness and respect for the importance of language and conversation in understanding who we are and the idea of self.

Non–fiction

I’ll kick this section off with a little cheat – three recommendations of non-fiction books that didn’t make my top three:

• An exploration of what is understood and has been misunderstood about how our breath works and how we can use different techniques to aid our health: Breathe: The New Science of an Ancient Art
• The Art of Rest was a clever, timely read that combined personal narrative with scientific evidence about why and how we need to have more rest in our lives.
• The Essential Art of War, is a masterful translation and commentary which explained the much quoted, but much less frequently understood Art of War, by Sun Tzu (or as it turns out, likely the collective of voices that was called SunTzu).

My top three non–fiction books of 2020 are:

1. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo–Lodge
2. Daemon Voices, by Philip Pullman 
3. Arabs: A 3,000–Year History, by Tim Mackintosh–Smith
   Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, by Reni Eddo–Lodge 

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo–Lodge

This is a book about structural racism. It carefully and methodically explains how racism is part of the systems that we live in, and that change has to be at a systems level. The fact that I hadn’t read it until the BLM movement’s surge in the summer was, I realised, evidence of one of the effects of structural racism. At some level I’d not thought it was that interesting or relevant to me. Or I’d thought it was a someone–else’s–problem sort of a deal. The same reason that despite studying history at a university known for its progressive politics, I’d missed opportunities to study black history, other than in the context of the British empire and the American Civil Rights Movement, both of which felt like the past, even though their effects and struggles are still relevant.

Systems thinking is required and systems thinking is hard. Understanding some difficult ideas and dropping your instinctive defensiveness and dampening your biases, or at least being aware of them is what is required to grasp them. The brilliance of this book is that it helped me do this – even as a white man – apparently without compromise and on its terms. It didn’t hector or patronise, it just calmly – though the author’s anger and frustration was not hidden – unpacked and explained systemic racism. 

It is particularly useful for a British reader or someone familiar with our history, as it starts with a concise black history of the UK. Having studied history at university and – just as the book discusses – half unconsciously side–stepped any specific black or women’s history courses, thinking that they were not for for me, the surprise and shock of reading about things you really should have known about before, things were about a country where we had conned ourselves was less racist and therefore less culpable than, for instance, the USA, was shocking, humbling and disarming. Once shocked, disarmed and with as much humility as you can muster, the book takes you through the concepts of white privilege and other aspects of system racism with a combination of personal experience, history and data. 

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race is an inoculation against lazy thinking, apathy and abdication of responsibility when it comes to race. It is a call to arms and a practical guide to the terrible iniquity of racism with what–must–be–done advice for all (so much more useful than something–must–be–done sentiments). If you’ve not read it, don’t hesitate. Do it now. If it is in your to read pile put it on the top. If you started it and didn’t stick with it, pick it up and start again. 

The book left me changed, looking back over my life and what I’d learned, at the world around me and seeing it differently. It’s the start of an education that should have started long ago for me, and I’m so glad it is being widely read now, though as Eddo–Lodge has said herself it’s tragic that the deaths of Floyd George and others are the context in which it rose to the top of the best-seller lists.

Daemon Voices, by Philip Pullman

This book is a collection of Pullman’s speeches, lectures, forewords and other non–fiction articles. A lot of it concerns writing and storytelling and some of it concerns religion. 

I’ve somehow not managed to connect with the His Dark Materials series of books. My children enjoyed them but I didn’t read them with them – maybe that would have done it. However, Pullman’s writing is magnificent and his insights about his craft are wonderful. It was a nourishing book, one I came to when I wanted it in the year for a couple of sections and then went away again. 

I don’t know how other storytellers function, but in my case I never start with the theme of a story. My stories are about something, to be sure, but I never know what that is till I’m in the process of writing them. I have to start with pictures, images, scenes, moods – like bits of dreams, or fragments of half-forgotten films. That’s how they all begin. In the case of this one I didn’t realise what it could be about until after I’d discovered dæmons, which happened in the way I described just now. But more especially it was when I found that children’s dæmons change and adults’ dæmons don’t; and I think that that idea and the theme must have leapedtowards each other like a spark and a stream of gas. I don’t really know which came first, but they took fire when they came together.

The hardback of this book is a beautiful object and I will be keeping it near on my desk always. I want to have his advice literally to hand when need it.

>However, if I know anything about about writing stories, it’s this: that you have to do what your imagination wants, not what your fastidious literary taste is inclined towards, not what your finely honed judgement feels comfortable with, not what your desire for the esteem of critics advises you to. Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading: only the imagination can do that. So the imagination was going to win here, if I had anything to do with it; and what I had to do to help it win was to neutralise my uneasiness about fantasy; and the way to do that was to find a way of making fantasy serve the purposes of realism.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History, by Tim Mackintosh Smith

I’ve still got a few hundred pages to read of this book, which runs to 700 or so, but I include it here as it has had a grip on my thoughts for months now.

After reading Louai Al-Roumani’s Lessons From a Warzone (my favourite business book of the year – see the next article in this series) I realised how little I knew about Arab culture and history. This book, which I saw on Al-Romano’s Goodreads list, was a perfect first immersion into a culture that though I’d grown up close to it in West London, had always felt intimidatingly unknowable. Mackintosh–Smith writes with the passion of an outsider who is completely enthralled and fascinated by the culture. 

Mackintosh–Smith writes the book from his house in his adopted country of Yemen, where war and revolution and political upheaval can literally be seen from the window where he writes. It’s a history book that takes in 3,000 years and ranges across the world, but because of the author’s location it has a sense of place, and time and timelessness, which is utterly apt to the story of the people it describes. 

From the start, Arabs shows the importance of Arabic and of defining themes in the story of its people: unity and schism, the tension between nomadic and settled ways of life, North and South, and how a language can be more powerful and enduring in real terms than any of the physical wonders of the world. 

As native English speaker, I’m rightly proud of my language, its diversity and richness, and there are no shortage of hagiographic books and documentaries about how it is so wonderful. Reading about Arabic, I almost feel embarrassed at its shortcomings:

All the early and subsequent diversity and accretiveness of Arabic mean that the lexicon is embarrassingly rich. Multiple synonyms include 80 for ‘honey’, 200 for ‘beard’, 500 for ‘lion’, 800 for ‘sword’, and 1,000 for ‘camel’. The last figure seems if anything rather low: an old saw among Arabists that says every Arabic word means three things – itself, its opposite, and a camel – is not entirely untrue. There are precise terms for such things that one would never imagine needed a precise term, like the droppings of bustards as opposed to ostriches, and different types of farts, categorized by loudness, and the sound of locusts eating, and the spaces between the fingers, each space having its own term.

Even before the story reaches the founding of Islam, I had learned so much about the way that Arabic and especially its poetry shapes and sustains a culture so strong that much today would be recognisable and intelligible to a time-traveller from a thousand years ago. Mackinstosh–Smith is adept in his use of analogies to give a sense of scale to all of this: 

The standard English of the British empire is dissolving now. A present-day inhabitant of Kingston, Jamaica, would probably have little in common, linguistically or otherwise, with a seventh-century tribesman from Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; in contrast, despite the similarity of distance in time and space, a literate member of the black Moroccan Gnaoua in Tangier could hold a conversation with a seventh-century Meccan. Linguistic links are more powerful than genetic ones; ink is thicker than blood. For this we have to thank Islam, which never had a Pentecost, a revelation in many tongues.

So informative, revelatory, inspiring – Arabs: A 3,000 Year History is a truly magnificent work of history, but also of just good writing – the prose is so rich (partly a result, I suspect of its author having studied Arabic). Its revelations and the scale of its story gives the reader a sense of intellectual vertigo.

Like crop circles, the grand designs of geo-politics often only become apparent from the heightened perspective of future historians; at the time, on the ground, they can be invisible. Also like crop circles, the grand designs may never have been what they are claimed to be.

I suspect this won’t be the last book I read about Arabian culture – Mr Al–Roumani opened the door and Mackintosh–Smith’s flood of wonder and insight has swept me off my feet.

Let’s get right to it – my three favourite business books in 2021 were:

1. Lessons From A Warzone, Louai Al Roumani
2. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff
3. No Rules Rules, by Reed Hasting and Erin Meyer

Business books

Lessons From A Warzone, Louai Al Roumani

This book arrived at the perfect moment: just after the terrible phase of the global pandemic when the challenges we faced in my own business were daunting, but beginning to be tamed. The following is my original review of the book posted to Goodreads.

[I gave this book] Five stars because Lessons from a Warzone is such a singular book in the business category. 

It needed to be written because there was nothing else like it. Al Roumani looked for case studies and texts in running a business in an extreme crisis and there were none. The standard sources for business reference were not useful, the advice was not applicable to running a network of banks during mortar attacks, with the threat of ISIS fanatics taking over branches and stampedes to withdraw funds by customers. 

It needed to be read because we are suddenly all in the middle of unprecedented crises – the pandemic, civil unrest, climate change – all feeding into one another. 

I love the details of Arab culture – generosity, the importance of tea, the stories and legends that define Damascus. It grounded the accounts of dealing with operational and strategic business challenges in a real place and made me want to learn more about Syria and the Arab world.

There are two other things that endear the book to me. First, it is short, as every good business book should be. Second, the human passion, the intensity of the experience comes through vividly. The mix of drama and operational detail in the book feels so real to anyone who has been through a major crisis in a business (even if not as terrible as the Syrian War). There’s no sentimentality here, but there is deep humanity. There are lessons learned, there is hope, there are flaws. 

I’m personally – and professionally – grateful to Louai Al Roumani for writing this book. I hope I never have to live and work in a Warzone, but when we face crises in our lives and our businesses there are useful emotional and practical lessons there is huge value in reading the heartfelt and honest experiences of others. 

I recommend this book with a grateful heart.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff

I’ll be frank: this book is hard work and I’d only recommend it if you want to deeply understand this subject. I read it through after a couple of attempts and was glad I stuck with it, using the full free solo reader’s tool box of tricks – going back and looking up referenced concepts I wasn’t familiar with, pausing and reflecting, reading reviews and criticisms to get a handle on some of the chunkier bits. 

If you don’t read it, find some reviews or look at the Wikipedia article about the book to get a sense of the argument and key concepts. Zuboff’s important and brilliant achievement is to name and describe the process that the tech giants are applying to societies and economies through their business models. 

The essential warning of the book is: 

Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks. 

Published at the beginning of last year and likely the work of several years, this is a book that is powerful because it labels and explains a new system of power. 

Surveillance capitalism has taken root so quickly that, with the exception of a courageous cadre of legal scholars and technology-savvy activists, it has cunningly managed to evade our understanding and agreement.

Totalitarianism, the system where the state demands all of its citizens, including their inner thoughts and emotions, arose before the term did. Zuboff is going through the equivalent process in naming surveillance capitalism and “instrumentarianism” her term for the power that surveillance capitalist services like Google and Facebook ads and the data they have about individuals and social groups give to governments and corporations to manipulate the behaviours of individuals:

There is no historical precedent for instrumentarianism, but there is vivid precedent for this kind of encounter with an unprecedented new species of power. In the years before totalitarianism was named and formally analyzed, its critics appropriated the language of imperialism as the only framework at hand with which to articulate and resist the new power’s murderous threats. Now surveillance capitalism has cast us adrift in another odd, dark sea of novel and thus indiscernible dangers. As scholars and citizens did before us, it is we who now reach for familiar vernaculars of twentieth-century power like lifesaving driftwood.

This isn’t an everyperson guide to the subject. What Zuboff has done is lay an intellectual framework for understanding and countering the awesome power of big tech. At the end of 2020 the US Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and 52 states have launched the largest anti-trust action since the 1970s aimed at Google and Facebook. This was surprising to many, following years of the US system standing back while the EU tried to put limits on the tech giants’ burgeoning monopolies and power, but I would not be surprised if politicians and lawyers were not armed with Zuboff’s ideas. 

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hoffman and Erin Meyer 

This is a clever business book and joins a small collection of works by business leaders who have been through the mill and are genuinely curious about what they have learned that they can pass on. (Creativity, Inc., The Hard Thing About Hard Things, High Output Management and Principles would be my other nominations for this category, books I read and re-read for support and inspiration.) 

As CEO of Netflix, Hoffman is riding high on 15 years success. It is his second business, having run the first with the logic of a software engineer – identifying and eliminating issues with increasing amounts of process – and ruined the culture in the process, he says. The future is far from assured for the company and it has to keep racing to keep its advantage in the face of well–funded companies with huge brand power like Disney and HBO, while the best–funded company in the world, Amazon, also competes with its Prime video service (which it is effectively giving away for free to promote free shipping subscriptions for everything else it sells).

A few years ago, Hoffman’s genius chief creative officer, Ted Sarandos made the most eloquent statement of strategy I’ve ever heard: “We have to become HBO before HBO can become us.” They succeeded. A reinvention from streaming platform to original content creator no less ambitious and radical than its reinvention from a postal video rental service to online. 

What drives the company’s success and ability to reinvent itself is a culture which famously eschews process and policies (including unlimited amounts of leave and no expenses policies) and giving its people a great deal of decision–making power and, despite being a publicly listed company, transparency in almost every aspect of the business.

The book is brilliantly useful for several reasons: 

1. It doesn’t offer easy solutions. There is a formula for creating a culture like Netflix’s, but it is staged and explained carefully. 
2. It critiques itself. CEOs are always blind to some of the realities of their business, and the best ones know it. Hoffman invited business school professor and author Erin Meyer to co-write the book by including counterpoint sections where she explains what the reality of a policy or idea is one the ground at the company, having interviewed many employees there. 
3. It’s about the people, stupid. Despite being a tech company in many’s eyes, Netflix knows that its success relies on creative talent and so is all about how 
4. It’s not utopia. This isn’t a template for every company in the world, but it is a detailed account of how one of the best operates and how to copy elements of it. Netflix is a growth company and has a more humane version of the reviled “up and out” policy at General Electric and other macho companies of the 90s. It “rewards adequacy with a generous severance package” as its model relies on top performers. This lack of sentimentality extends to senior management and Patty McCord who co-authored the famous culture statement presentation with Hastings developed the “keeper test” policy as it is known and then accepted that she was no longer right for the company in its next stage of growth. 

If you are involved in running a business you should make time to read this as soon as you can. If you run a creative business, you must read it immediately.

Two bonus books about learning

• How To Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens, is a concise book relating some of the principles of note taking and indexing developed by Niklas Luhman, a prominent sociologist and a major contributor to the field of systems thinking. Ahrens and Luhman’s ideas have been influential in the development of the Roam Research wiki/database tool that was launched this year and has developed a loyal following. I’m using it myself, but tools aside, I’d recommend Ahrens’s book for anyone working with ideas and writing non–fiction of any kind. 
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows is a classic of systems thinking, a field I’ve been reading about learning for the last three or four years. Think of it as a serious 101 course on the subject. Even before reading 10% of the book I was applying lessons to my own business planning.

---

That’s all for this year’s review. Thank you for reading it. I love books and enjoy this annual chance to look back at what I’ve read and pass on some recommendations. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions. And… may all of our 2021s be a little lighter!

This article is adapted from a letter to my team at Brilliant Noise last week. It has a special resonance on the eve of the 75th anniversary of VE Day. 

Dear Brilliant People

They are beginning to ease the lockdown in Italy. And other places too. It looks like we’re past the peak in deaths in the UK. The first wave may be passing.

Coronavirus is a slow-motion natural disaster. It’s invisible and slow compared to an earthquake but it manages to reach across the whole world.

In a previous century’s pandemic, artists imagined the disease as an archer firing invisible arrows – because no one could see the cause, but they could see the damage, the people falling ill and dying all around them. Maybe we can imagine the results of coronavirus as invisible bombs falling from the sky.

We’re not living through the Blitz, but this ain’t nothing. Around 32,000 people died in the Blitz across the UK, and we’re just passing 20,000 coronavirus deaths right now and some estimates put the real total at 50% higher overall. [At the time of publishing this on LinkedIn, UK coronavirus deaths are over 30,000.]

It’s embarrassing sometimes when people draw parallels between our current crisis and the Second World War experience on the Home Front. They are invoking folk stories, memories of memories that risk being oversimplifying, misleading or horribly nationalistic.

The “Blitz Spirit” wasn’t some kind of British superpower –apart from anything, London and other big cities were stuffed full of Poles, West Indians, Jews and Irish, French governments in exile, and a throng of different nationalities. London’s an international city, always has been. The Blitz brought out a lot of kindness, mutual help and gritty determination, but it still left a bunch of grieving people and undiagnosed PTSD cases. As well as volunteers manning soup kitchens and forming human chains to dig people out from the rubble there were looters, black-marketeers, profiteers, busybodies, rich people fleeing the cities to countryside boltholes and fake news gossip-merchants galore. Londoners, Brummies, Liverpudlians and people in cities across the country were just like us today: they endured because they had to – and made the best of it, or the worst, depending on their character and choices.

In 1942, a year after the Blitz, my Grandmother was living with her three young sons in one of the great pre-welfare state social housing Peabody Estates, at the top of the Fulham Palace Road in Hammersmith. My Grandfather was operating an anti-aircraft gun on the south coast, so they didn’t see him for long stretches. One of her brothers was fighting in Africa and another was dying slowly in a prisoner of war camp in southeast Asia.

One night a bomb took the roof off the block they lived in and they had to leave. They didn’t know it, but they were lucky. A council map of bomb sites in West London shows their home was later destroyed completely by a V2, one of the first long range missiles. Homeless and without anyone around likely to help, she set off with the boys in tow to look for somewhere to live.

Image: The Peabody Estate in Hammersmith after a V2 attack in 1944.

In nearby Chancellors Road, she found a terraced house that had been abandoned. It was at a slight angle, as the whole terrace listed slightly toward a bomb crater three doors down. She persuaded a carpenter to change the locks and claimed the house. My family ended up renting it all the way up to 1989, not long before the Berlin Wall fell. My Mum was born in that house in the early fifties, had her wedding reception there and I was brought back to it from hospital when I was born a few months later. I lived there on and off with my Mum until I was seventeen. The house was still wonky – if you put a ball on the floor it would roll all the way to the wall.

My Grandmother was from Wexford in Ireland. She came to England in the twenties because an invisible bomb called Spanish Flu (which actually originated in Kansas during the First World War) killed her Dad and his poultry business, pushing her whole family into some very hard times.

So, I was born to the daughter of an immigrant who had herself come to London fleeing post-pandemic poverty. My first home was a house that my family claimed with squatters rights in the middle of a war-zone.

I’ve never thought of it like that.

Now I sit here with nothing apparently happening outside in comfort that would astonish my Grandmother. Despite the invisible bombs falling, and the struggle to save lives going on in care homes and hospitals around me, there is peace and time to reflect.

All these stories. Memories come up unbidden in lockdown. I’ve heard its quite common. A side effect of the sometime–stillness. Novels will be written about it, I’m sure.

Thank for reading this very personal letter. Like I said – they are a box of chocolates and this is the one that came out this morning.

I’m going to shake the remembering out of my head and get on with this week.

Antony

This article is adapted from a daily letter from me to my colleagues at Brilliant Noise. I’ve been writing one each morning since we went into lockdown. My colleagues edited some of the first months’ into another article, called “Time Goes Weird in Lockdown”, and I have previously shared two more here: “What Colour is Your Mood Today?” and “Putting Humanity at the heart of business”.

A friend asked on Twitter: “What two books would you recommend a new people manager reads and why?”

One book I recommended was The Prince, by Niccolò Macchiavelli.

Why on earth would I recommend a book by him? To people managers?

Well, I wouldn’t advise treating The Prince as a management manual – HR will have issues if you start destroying your enemies completely, and some of Niccolò’s misogyny is unforgivable to modern eyes. But if you’re going to read about leading and managing you might as well read something interesting, something that’s stood the test of time. 

But isn’t Machiavelli short-hand for cunning and conniving and untrustworthy? 

In short, yes – but we confuse Machiavelli with Machiavellian, the adjective that conjures scheming, sneakiness and self-interest. Such is the popular image of Niccolò Machiavelli that if you’d not read The Prince, you might think it was the intellectual equivalent of reading a shady pick-up artist guide or Donald Trump’s guide to deal-making. Why would you bother? You’re not that kind of person, are you?

Here are a few reasons why The Prince is still one of the best books on management and politics (often the same thing) and why you should read it and if you read it years ago (perhaps under academic duress) read it again, now that you are engaged in whatever variation of the Great Human Game of getting things done in groups has ended up as your calling. 

1. Start with the source. The Prince is the original getting-things-done manual. A lot of advice about work, business and power is diluted re-telling of previous writers’ insights, watered down with platitudinous cant and fashionable feel-good-isms. Why bother reading recycled and re-packaged insights when you can read them in the original.
2. It is the longest surviving management manual. In the natural selection process of whether texts survive, The Prince pre-dates the printing press and hasn’t been out of print since print was a wave of disruptive new media. 
3. Everything is political. Power is always a part of how organisations work. Politics are unavoidable. If you aren’t Machiavellian, you should understand how people who are that way inclined will behave to get their way, even at your expense. If you say – and I said it myself for years – “I try to steer clear of politics”, then you may as well say “I steer clear of ambitious projects that might make a real difference”. Politics is how everything gets done in groups.
4. It is a reminder that every author has an agenda. Few books make money for their authors, especially business books and leadership manuals. Niccolò wanted to save his backside by ingratiating himself with a Duke. He did this by providing the best demonstration of his usefulness that he could, The Prince. Some business books these days are written to boost a consultancy, set up a sideline in punditry and public speaking, or to boost a reputation. 
5. It’s short. This is a virtue shared by too few business books. It makes its points and then leaves you to get on with its life. It has some respect for the reader. 

The above are general points about the book. Here are some specific lessons from The Prince that will help any new people manager: 

1. You lead for the benefit of the led and with their implicit consent. If you expect respect or compliance because of a new job title, you’re already on the wrong track. If you’re managing a person or a team you need to succeed by making them successful and not seek the credit for what they do.
2. Be unusual. Reputations are built on what you do differently, on the big challenges that you overcome. 
3. Be alert to the need to adapt — and do it boldly when it is time to do so. Change will come, but we act as if it never will. Best to accept that it is coming and be ready when you see signs. The positive version of this is – change is good, and there are always opportunities if you look for them.
4. If you’re going to make changes an organisation, best to do it quickly. Ever lived through a six-month re-org? If not, I hope you never do. Everything else stops, no one can think about anything other than the change that will come.
5. Innovation requires power. To innovate you need to be in power, or as Thomas Cromwell puts it in Wolf Hall, “pick a prince”. In modern corporate parlance, find a senior sponsor for your brilliant project. Having a great idea and being passionate are not enough to get things to happen – you need support. That’s politics. 

One more reason to read The Prince: If you’re a Hilary Mantel fan, this is a text that Thomas Cromwell owned in the original Italian. With the final part of her trilogy The Mirror and the Light out in March 2020, this would be a great preparatory read.