I kept a blog while at Recurse Center. I took the chance to re-read and share the articles I’ve kept over the years. Recently I realized a common thread between most of them: paradigm shifts.
By Jo Johnson in the FT Weekend
In January, the fabled training ground of the French political and business elite will be compelled to quit the Left Bank, the plush district by the Seine that is a byword for metropolitan sophistication, for the provincial torpor of Alsace. ENA’s Parisian premises will be sold and the school that honed the minds of all French presidents young enough to attend it, from Valery Giscard d’Estaing to Jacques Chirac, will be relocated in its entirety to its Strasbourg campus, a former prison. There, four hours by train from Paris, the alma mater of nine government ministers, six of the last nine prime ministers and many of the captains of finance and industry will continue along the glidepath to banality.
Set back from the road in an 18th-century building behind the Boulevard Saint-Germain, ENA hardly looks the stuff of controversy. Sixty years old this year, it is in fact probably the most ruthlessly effective old boys’ network in Europe. The closely guarded alumni handbook, which includes the telephone numbers and addresses of all the 4,500 enarques still alive, right up to the presidents of the Republic, shows that the caste pervades every corner of the French Republic. The graduates of no other school in the world, with the exception of the ubiquitous alumni of Tokyo University, monopolise positions of power as comprehensively as the enarques do in France.do in France.
Today, however, ENA is in crisis. It is no longer needed for the task for which it was founded - to provide the mandarins to run a dirigiste economy - and is struggling to find a role for itself as France faces globalisation. “I sometimes say they should just close ENA down altogether so that people remember only the good things about it,” says Alain Minc, who was top of his ENA class in 1975, and is now, as chairman of Le Monde, a perfect example of the way the enarque diaspora has colonised positions of power in French society. “I don’t criticise ENA as it was 30 years ago,” he says. “It did the job it was meant to do brilliantly, but today, in a global economy, the ENA training is embarrassingly provincial.”
By Martin Sandbu in the FT Weekend
Oil companies were starting to leave Norway. Well after well had turned out dry and Phillips Petroleum, the first company to explore the Norwegian continental shelf and the last one still searching, was getting ready to throw in the towel. In summer 1969, it asked to be relieved of the final exploration well remaining in its work programme. The government’s oil office refused: if Phillips did not drill the well, it would have to pay a fee equal to the cost of drilling. Realising it would be cheaper just to drill, Phillips went ahead one last time. This well banished any thought of leaving. Forty years ago this December, Phillips declared the Ekofisk field one of the world’s largest offshore oil basins.
Overnight, Norway turned into a hydrocarbon superpower. Today, it is the world’s sixth-biggest net exporter of oil and the second-biggest net natural gas exporter. In the years since the Ekofisk discovery, the country has exported oil and gas equivalent to some 30 billion barrels of crude – and the continental shelf still contains, by official estimates, almost twice as much again. Yet the country has escaped the problems that beset most other oil exporters. Rather than stifling productivity, the oil sector has spawned world-class exploration, oil services and construction technology. Norway’s state oil company, StatoilHydro, is internationally recognised as a competitive commercial player and one of the most environmentally and socially conscious ones to boot. Since 1996, every krone the government has earned from oil has gone into a savings fund, which now totals some £240bn – more than a year’s gross domestic product and equivalent to about £50,000 for each of Norway’s 4.8 million citizens.
The real achievement, in other words, was not finding oil but coping with its discovery. Norway faced the same dilemma as every other new oil producer with no experience of the industry: if you rely too much on private foreign companies, too little of the oil wealth benefits the country in the form of government revenue or economic development; if you go too far in the other direction, you risk a bloated, politicised oil sector that evades both accountability to the people and competitive pressures to be efficient.
By James Somers in the New Yorker
We say that we “search the Web,” but we don’t, really; our search engines traverse an index of the Web—a map. When Google was still called BackRub, in 1996, its map was small enough to fit on computers installed in Page’s dorm room. In March of 2000, there was no supercomputer big enough to process it. The only way that Google could keep up was by buying consumer machines and wiring them together into a fleet. Because half the cost of these computers was in parts that Google considered junk—floppy drives, metal chassis—the company would order raw motherboards and hard drives and sandwich them together. Google had fifteen hundred of these devices stacked in towers six feet high, in a building in Santa Clara, California; because of hardware glitches, only twelve hundred worked. Failures, which occurred seemingly at random, kept breaking the system. To survive, Google would have to unite its computers into a seamless, resilient whole.
Side by side, Jeff and Sanjay took charge of this effort. Wayne Rosing, who had worked at Apple on the precursor to the Macintosh, joined Google in November, 2000, to run its hundred-person engineering team. “They were the leaders,” he said. Working ninety-hour weeks, they wrote code so that a single hard drive could fail without bringing down the entire system. They added checkpoints to the crawling process so that it could be re-started midstream. By developing new encoding and compression schemes, they effectively doubled the system’s capacity. They were relentless optimizers. When a car goes around a turn, more ground must be covered by the outside wheels; likewise, the outer edge of a spinning hard disk moves faster than the inner one. Google had moved the most frequently accessed data to the outside, so that bits could flow faster under the read-head, but had left the inner half empty; Jeff and Sanjay used the space to store preprocessed data for common search queries. Over four days in 2001, they proved that Google’s index could be stored using fast random-access memory instead of relatively slow hard drives; the discovery reshaped the company’s economics. Page and Brin knew that users would flock to a service that delivered answers instantly. The problem was that speed required computing power, and computing power cost money. Jeff and Sanjay threaded the needle with software.
By Caroline Moorehead in the FT Weekend
But then there was a second leak. This time it concerned Guantanamo, where the defence department said prisoners were “providing valuable information about terrorism” in an “environment that is stable, secure, safe and humane”. On November 30 2004, The New York Times published a report on Guantanamo, drawn on material gathered by the ICRC, who had been visiting the detainees since January 2002. Prisoners were revealed to have been stripped to their underwear, manacled hand and foot to a chair bolted to the ground, while strobe lights flashed and loud rap and rock music was played through speakers close to their ears.
Again, after the public outrage at the revelations had died down, there were attacks on the ICRC in the American press, but the ICRC is again certain that the leak had not come from its own people. However, even if one part of the American administration had misgivings about the Geneva Conventions and the ICRC (Gonzales once said in a memo that some Conventions provisions were “quaint”) and that international humanitarian law did not apply to the US global war on terror, it was clear that the president himself was determined that relations should not be soured. Earlier this year, the US committed itself to a further four years’ funding.
For the ICRC, however, something fundamental had taken place. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo highlighted for the first time not only the changing patterns of modern conflict and the ICRC’s difficulties when dealing with a western democracy, but the very nature and ambiguities of the ICRC’s work, and in particular the question of confidentiality. Like its profession of neutrality, the ICRC’s attachment to confidentiality is almost an article of faith. Confidentiality, the famous quid pro quo that allows the ICRC access to everything in return for publicising nothing, has been at the heart of their work for most of the past century. No other organisation has this pact with governments, and no other organisation has had such an impact on the lives of prisoners of war. The question raised by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was simple: had confidentiality become obsolete in the face of modern warfare?