Welcome to 2023: Misinformation, quantum computing, and the end of print

ALSO: Did I enjoy Year One on Substack?

Welcome to 2023.

To start this year, I’m going to do a gobbets round-up edition of the newsletter. A couple of short stories, a few stray thoughts. Then, after the subscriber only paywall, I’m going to give my candid thoughts (and possibly self-deprecating ones) about my first year writing on Substack.

THE ERA OF MISINFORMATION?

On New Year’s Eve, my partner and I hosted a small dinner party. And naturally, at a New Year’s Eve dinner party, conversation turned to grandiloquent declarations about the state of the world. With the fireworks here in London mourning the death of the Queen via some strange drone light show, we instinctively started to talk about the end of “the long 20th century”. What, it was proposed, would define the current and coming years?

The answer suggested by my dinner companions was access to information – and, more starkly, disinformation. Fake news, propaganda, bots, denialism etc. I sat through this discussion, largely biting my tongue (though my fellow attendees may disagree on that).

The thing is, as far as I see it, access to information – to news – has never been better. Access to high quality, fact-based, precise reportage has never been better. We have never been more enabled for fact-checking, more capable of personal research, more empowered to discover new sources of information. But with that diversification of the information superhighway comes the converse reality that we are also able to access much lower quality information. Stuff that’s maliciously fictitious, and stuff that’s just plain wrong.

The comparison mooted by my dinner companions (who don’t subscribe to this newsletter) was a newspaper in the first half of the 20th century. A single, authoritative source of information; higher quality and more reliable than, say, davidSAYNOTOVAXXspurslover.blogspot.com. And, in that sense, there’s certainly some truth. The erosion of gate-keeping boundaries has definitely facilitated malign actors. Whether that’s the Russians using social media to try and influence election results (somehow very different from all the sanctioned, economy boosting, attempts to use social media to influence election results), or self-publishing permitting un-cited or wonky data – clearly you can no longer blindly trust the written word.

But could you trust the written word of the few newspapers published in 1923? Would I rather have access to extremely limited and very middling information, or vast swathes of information of wildly divergent quality? Clearly we have access right now to more misinformation than ever before, but we also have access to more good information. I certainly wouldn’t swap the current situation for having to believe every word written in, say, The Times of London (which in 1923, it should be noted, had just been bought by John Jacob Astor and was about to become the media arm of Chamberlain’s ill-fated appeasement policy).

For the record, my take on the question was that we are just exiting the war on terror era, and are now in the energy transition era. Not a fun answer, sadly.

PRINT DECLINE?

I rarely pay attention the ABC circulation figures for British newspapers, because they’re published far too regularly and seem to respond to the smallest tremors in the market. Anyway, I happened to look at November’s data because it gives an instructive year-on-year perspective (and December is a write-off due to the changed publishing schedule over Christmas and what the teens are calling Twixtmas).

The picture is, let’s face it, brutal. The biggest measured year-on-year change was the Evening Standard (a London-based free circular, aimed at commuters) which was down 27%. Others with a decline of more than a fifth included: the Express (-20%), the Sunday Post (-20%), Star Sunday (-21%), the FT (-22%), Sunday People (-23%). There were four more publications on an 18 or 18% decline: Sunday Mail, Daily Star, Sunday Express, Sunday Mirror.

The fact that it was such a poor year for weekend papers seems somewhat counterintuitive to me. The decline of the Evening Standard is clearly inseparable from the degradation of “the commuter” as an advertising property in the post-pandemic era. Similarly, the problems at the FT can possibly be rooted in the number of large offices which have moved to a hybrid working pattern and therefore probably cancelled at least half of the hundred-odd copies of the FT they had delivered daily. But in that world, you would expect the decline of the weekend papers to move at a different pace. Who doesn’t love a lazy Saturday morning with the FT Weekend, a cinnamon bun and a steaming mug of coffee?

Well, the British public, apparently. Daily Record (-17%) v Sunday Mail (-18%, and not to be confused with the Mail on Sunday); Daily Mail (-12%) v Mail on Sunday (-13%); Daily Mirror (-15%) v Sunday Mirror (-19%). Almost across the board, weekdays outperformed weekends (nb. The Guardian and Observer don’t submit data).

I fear this just speaks to the inexorable growth in distaste for print journalism, along with the cutting of discretionary spending. The £4.80 I spend on the FT Weekend each Saturday is entirely unjustifiable as a professional expenditure – whereas if I spend £4 on a Monday morning copy (or whatever it costs) that’s maybe perceived as less frivolous.

All in all – I wouldn’t buy shares in print newspapers. Only the i had a manageable decline, just 3% year-on-year. Hard not to think that’s because of my feature on A Christmas Carol that they ran a few weeks ago…

QUANTUM COMPUTING?

I was listening to the last Hard Fork (the New York Times’ tech podcast) of the year a couple of weeks ago, and one of the glib predictions made on that show was that quantum computing would turn out to be a hoax.

The joke is that for many years, quantum computing has been talked up as the great technological game-changer, but little progress seems to have been made. The essential advance in quantum computing is to move from the binary ‘bits’ system of regular computing, to a ‘qubits’ system where or is replaced by and and thus the potential computational power increases exponentially. This may sound hard to comprehend, even converted into layman’s language and then communicated by another layman, but we are reliably reassured that it would be foundational transformation for computing. And given that computing is now foundational for human existence, we can assume that it would really change the world.

It was perfect timing for my small brain to see Stephen Witt’s essay about quantum computing appear in the New Yorker Christmas issue. The piece spoke to many luminaries in the field and tried to get a handle on that essential question – is this actually going to happen?

Nobody doubts the credible potential of quantum computing, which is arguably the foremost technological battleground in the world right now. It is already a many billion dollar industry, just because the breakthrough potential (and reward) is so incredibly high. The question has always been whether the theoretical stability of the ideas can be matched by the material stability of the hardware. Quantum computing involves a process called superconductivity, requiring the CPU-equivalent to be cooled to near outer-space temperatures. As such, it’s a bit of a fucking nightmare.

The date of quantum computing’s viable arrival has been flippantly referred to as Y2Q, in reference to the doomsday worryings about the millennium and Y2K. The current predicted date for Y2Q – a point at which a computer can run the necessary algorithm – is 2029. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has set a 2035 deadline for converting essential cryptographic structures to a quantum-proof level. This is obviously a mismatch of several years – several years in which a computer could undo the entire world of financial and military encryption.

Witt’s article concludes that quantum computing has many variables to its success, bits (or qubits) that need to be resolved. The timeframe is impossible to predict, but incremental progress will likely be made in the coming years. The possibilities of quantum computing are clearly limitless (the processing power is so far beyond the human brain that it renders imagination almost obsolete; post-quantum computing, nothing will be achievable without the participation of quantum computing). The terrifying example of this raw power that Witt uses is encryption keys, like the ones used by WhatsApp, which are so secure that they would take current computers millions of years to crack. “A working quantum computer,” he writes, “could crack one in less than a day.”

So it’s worth bearing in mind, in the coming years, that technological progress (which feels like it’s accelerating pretty rapidly already, given the advances in AI and machine learning) could be about to go supernova. You ain’t see nothing yet.

After the jump, I’m gonna get real about Substack.