history

Remember Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s historical SF novel about the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a real-time planned economy using computers and the ideas of Oskar Lange and Leonid Kantorovich? Sure you do if you’re on this blog. Well, it turns out that it had a dark and twisted 1980s sequel. We already knew about…

Read More That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 years

Here’s something from Municipal Dreams on the Dover House estate, Putney. Quote of note: This was a new working class whose living conditions and relative affluence combined with a self-conscious ‘respectability’ to create a more domesticated and private life-style, one that knowingly and happily distanced itself from the old intimacies of slum living. We saw…

Read More Monopoly is Bad. Competition is Good for All

The catalogue of the Foreign Office’s secret archive at Hanslope Park is available on data.gov.uk and it is as cool as you may have hoped. Literally every mark in here exudes history. It also reminded me of the J.G. Ballard short story The Index, a novella that only exists as its own index. I mean,…

Read More the index

Cold War nuts should follow Mike Kenner’s Twitter feed if they’re not already. His key shtick is getting interesting documents under FOIA and tweeting them bit by bit. This week, he’s got the national war instructions for the police, from 1977, codenamed POLWIN. This is some pretty bleak stuff, obviously; I can’t imagine instructions on…

Read More …and give reasons in writing

Via someone on twatter, Parliament debates telecoms regulation, in 1895. The superficial bit: there was a great distinction between telephones and such subjects as gas and water. Gas and water were necessaries for every inhabitant of the country; telephones were not and never would be. It was no use trying to persuade themselves that the…

Read More How the Scottish Labour party got telecoms policy right in 1895