Mansfield on Joyce

In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (23-30 August 2019 edition), John Barnie of Aberystwyth draws attention to the draft letter Katherine Mansfield wrote and included in her 1922 journal, on James Joyce's Ulysses, which had been published in February of that year.

I must reply about Ulysses. I have been wondering what people are saying in England. It took me about a fortnight to wade through, but on the whole I'm dead against it. I suppose it was worth doing if everything is worth doing ... but that is certainly not what I want from literature. Of course, there are amazingly fine things in it, but I prefer to go without them than to pay that price. Not because I am shocked (though I am fearfully shocked, but that's "personal"; I suppose it's unfair to judge the book by that) but because I simply don't believe ... [and there the draft breaks off].

How the information revolution bypassed democracy

Across the world [in the 19th century], wherever industrial technology advanced there were strikes, riots and reform because the technology of the industrial revolution connected people, empowered them and, through all this upheaval, catalysed the process of democratic politics itself.

But in the revolution of the new information age over the past 25 years, democracy has been noticeable only by its absence as elected leaders have largely disengaged from issues that will determine the future of their countries and their citizens: the use of new technology; the regulation of the internet; the ownership of information.

Gargantuan corporations, larger than any the world has ever seen - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - shake the ground on which nation states were built, cutting across borders and challenging governments' capacity to raise tax. They are accused of re-wiring our brains, corrupting our children, providing a safe haven for paedophiles and extremists, spawning terrorism, trashing our privacy and, of course, harvesting for free the most valuable asset of all - our data - usually without our knowledge.

Governments have allowed private firms to extract information - the oil of the digital economy - worth hundreds of billions of pounds. This time, it has not been pumped out of the ground but out of citizens. Worse still, this vast transfer of wealth and power has happened without touching the sides of democratic debate, until it is perhaps too late to stop it.

'The new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything,' as the tech writer Jaron Lanier put it, have been carved into the future by private corporations in the pursuit of vast profit without, for the most part, proper political debate or legislation.

- Tom Baldwin, Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy, London, 2018, p.234-5.