joshajhall

[joshajhall]

How Blockchain could help us take back control of our privacy

The Cambridge Analytica scandal poses some serious questions about the integrity of democracies in the information age. From Trump to Brexit, the dirty tricks apparently offered by CA’s top executives should cause concern everywhere that elections happen. But the episode is also worrying because of its specific focus: data. We create reams of data every day – every time we open a browser window and every time we make a contactless payment. We do this without thinking. The Cambridge Analytica news demonstrates the power that this data can have when we lose control of it.

Read on The Guardian

[joshajhall]

Downward-Facing Capitalist Dogma

WE’RE IN THE LOBBY of a large office building in West London. The atrium rises to four storeys, each in gloss white with oak accents. There are high-backed chairs around shiny black meeting tables, each with its own pendant light. On one side of the floor is a large, warehouse-like room dedicated to small firms, with tech and lifestyle startups typing in silence. On the opposite side is a sprawling set of desks and studios for larger businesses; above there is a mezzanine with meeting rooms. And on one side of the space, taking up at least a quarter of the total area, is a yurt.

Read on The Baffler.

[joshajhall]

Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain reads the title of a 2017 book. From currency speculation through to verifying the provenance of food, blockchain technology is eking out space in a vast range of fields.

For most people, blockchain technologies are inseparable from bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been particularly visible in the news recently thanks to its hyper-volatility. Crypto-entrepreneurs have made and lost millions, and many people have parlayed their trading into a full-time job. But blockchain technology, which allows for immutable records of activities, stored on a ledger that is held not just in one place but massively distributed, has applications in every conceivable area in commerce and beyond. Soon, there will be blockchains everywhere that transactions happen.

While the focus has so far been on currencies such as bitcoin, what’s less well known is the large and growing community of blockchain developers and evangelists, many of whom believe that the technology could herald radical changes in the ways our economies and societies are structured. But there’s a big question at the heart of that community: what might a world built with the help of blockchain technology look like?

Read on The Guardian.

[joshajhall]

Imagining a future where machines have taken our jobs

The economy is broken. Living standards have undergone their worst collapse in modern history. Underemployment is endemic. The jobs that are being created are massively underpaid – meanwhile self-employed people, the group who’ve seen the largest jump in members, are now earning less on averagethan they were in 1995.

But there is one area that’s seeing huge growth: automation. Self-service checkouts are the most visible example of this, but it’s happening everywhere: in manufacturing, in surgery, in war, in stock trading, even in journalism. Automation is a generation-defining trend – one towards the replacement of human labour with that of machines.

Read on Dazed.

[joshajhall]

Art Under Threat: The bleak reality of growing attacks on freedom of expression

Music is at the front line of renewed global attacks on freedom of expression. This is according to a new report from Copenhagen-based NGO Freemuse, which catalogs instances of artistic suppression in its annual report Art Under Threat. In 2016, the report suggests, music and musicians suffered the highest number of ‘serious violations’ of any art form, with 86 recorded during the year.

Read on FACT

[joshajhall]

How the technology behind Bitcoin could change the music industry – and help everyone get paid

SoundCloud is starting to look like the first dead unicorn of its generation. ‘Unicorns’ – tech start-ups with a valuation of a billion dollars or more – are rare and precarious beasts, and no company sums up that precarity better than the Berlin-based streaming giant. Attacked on all sides by legal challenges, licensing issues and excessive downtime, the company is now frantically looking for a buyer to pull it out of the quagmire. Google is the latest suitor, rumored to be mulling a purchase for around $500 million – about half what the SoundCloud founders were demanding just a few months ago.

Read on FACT

[joshajhall]

Radar Radio and Sports Direct

In November 2016, The Guardian ran a piece about Radar Radio. The station, founded by Londoner Ollie Ashley, is, according to the article, “at the centre of a DIY online radio revival.”

Radar is an online-only London-based radio station, run out of a studio in Clerkenwell. Its programming puts it at the cutting edge of London’s underground: its schedule for the last couple of weeks includes shows from Crack Stevens, Spooky, BCB AZN Network, Girl Unit, and more. At the end of 2016 it ran a series of workshops aimed at young people wanting to break into the music industry, whether as DJs, presenters, or writers. According to The Guardian, Radar’s studio has a slogan written on the wall: “Tune in or fuck off.”

Radar came at a pivotal time for London radio, hot on the heels of NTS’s expansion and a resurgent Rinse. In a December 2014 piece, FACT said the station was “far from wet behind the ears”, with a studio full of top-of-the-line equipment and a founder with experience at NTS. Much has been written about London’s radio renaissance, at the helm of which you’ll find the Dalston station. Ashley reportedly cut his teeth as a studio manager there.

Radar quickly established itself at the heart of London’s underground. It began with regular shows presented by acts like Riz La Teef and Moleskin, but at the end of last month it continued its ascendancy in a coup de grace fabric co-promotion in association with Resident Advisor. Today, Radar is an unassailable part of the capital’s club culture. It was a meteoric rise, facilitated in great part by the shining Clerkenwell studio. But bootstrapped, DIY operations don’t work like that – few young London entrepreneurs have the capital to fit out a fully functioning radio facility on their own. Where was the money coming from?

It’s an open secret that Ollie Ashley is the son of Mike Ashley, the billionaire majority shareholder in Sports Direct and the owner of Newcastle United. Ashley senior, who placed at number 45 in the 2016 Sunday Times Rich List, never gives interviews and rarely appears in public. In 2006, long before the founding of Radar, The Times compared him to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. At the time of writing, Sports Direct had a market cap of £1.72 billion.

On 1 February, Companies House published Radar's latest accounts. As has been the case since May 2016, their company secretary is a firm called Eacotts, also the secretary for MASH Holdings, the company through which Mike Ashley holds his stakes in Sports Direct and Newcastle. The auditors are professional services giant Grant Thornton, also the auditors for Sports Direct – and, coincidentally, as of November 2016, under investigation by the Financial Reporting Council for signing off on a deal between Sports Direct and a company owned by Mike Ashley’s brother, whose firm made £300,000 a year from the arrangement while based in a registered address in a cul-de-sac in the Lincolnshire town of Cleethorpes.

In the year to April 2016, Radar Radio Ltd made a pre-tax loss of £826,337. At the end of April 2015, Radar had £1.2 million in debts coming due within the year. By April 2016, that figure had risen to £2.2 million.

The accounts state that Radar Radio “has financed its operations via loans from its parent company, MASH Holdings Limited.”

After the accounts were published, I emailed Ollie Ashley with a series of questions. In response, I received a letter from Radar’s lawyers threatening legal action in the event of defamatory material being published. Dean Dunham, the solicitor who sent the letter, was listed in the 2013 Thompson Reuters Super Lawyers list. He is currently the UK’s Retail Ombudsman Chief Ombudsman. Ashley declined to comment for this piece.

Despite his publicity-shy better nature, Mike Ashley has rarely been out of the public eye in the last two years. In December 2015 The Guardian, the same publication that ran the gushing Radar feature just a year later, published a comprehensive investigation into labour practices at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse. Their findings included: 

Staff being forced to undergo compulsory searches at the beginning and end of every shift, for which they are not paid

The use of zero hours contracts for around 80% of staff

Reports of staff “jeopardising their health” for fear of being dismissed

So-called ‘strikes’ for taking sickness leave or what managers deem to be excessive toilet breaks

Staff being verbally “harangued by tannoy” for not working fast enough

Union reps reporting staff members refusing to speak out about working conditions for fear of losing their jobs.

In the same investigation, The Guardian found that many staff were being paid an effective rate of £6.50 an hour once forced searches had been taken into account. At the time, the National Minimum Wage was £6.70.

Mike Ashley was asked to appear before a Parliamentary Committee in 2016, but prevaricated. In June of that year he finally turned up, in an appearance that covered the front pages. During the hearing, MPs delivered evidence including:

Transline, one of the labour agencies Sports Direct contracts with, had already been banned from operating in the food sector by the Gangmaster Licensing Authority

At least one worker was asked for sexual favours in return for an employment contract

Workers without bank accounts are offered their wages on a pre-paid debit card. “Workers are charged a £10 one-off fee, a monthly management fee of £10 per month for this facility, 75p for cash withdrawals, 10p for texts to the card holder of any transactions, and £1.50 of a paper statement. Unite estimates that several hundred workers could be using the cards.”

In the three years to June 2016, ambulances were called to the Shirebrook warehouse some 110 times. There were five births during that period. One woman delivered her child in the staff toilet, reportedly because she was too scared of losing her job to take time off.

Last month, the Financial Times reported on a case in which two men were jailed under the Modern Slavery Act for the exploitation of Polish workers in Sports Direct’s Shirebrook facility. The Crown Prosecution Service found that the pair had housed the workers in “squalid accommodation” in Nottingham, and had then secured them work at Sports Direct through Transline.

MASH Holdings has, according to Radar’s accounts, pledged to finance the station for at least another 12 months. Ollie Ashley or his lawyers are still yet to respond to questions for this piece.

[joshajhall]

Lost and Found

‘A person was driving the truck, and there was this wall of bamboo. He said that on the other side of this bamboo is the river. When the bamboo stopped, I saw it. It was very striking. And immediately my phone started picking up the signal of Mexico.’

From a hotel in Berlin, Guillermo Galindo is speaking about the first time he visited the Mexico-US border. Mexican by birth but now living in California, where he is a senior adjunct professor at the California College of Arts, Galindo is used to hopping between the two countries. For him, the journey is smooth. ‘I usually fly,’ he says. ‘For me, the border is the airport.’

Read on Frieze

[joshajhall]

Record Store Day risks becoming more of a problem than a solution

Record Store Day has become fraught with controversy.

Since its inception in 2007 the event has grown into the most important date in the record-buying calendar, but this year it has been heavily criticised by labels who suggest that they have been left behind.

Read on FACT.

[joshajhall]

East India Youth - Culture Of Volume review

Musical theatre is the only art form in which there is absolutely no discernable value. It performs the functions of emotion without actually having any, imagining that we can be tricked into having Serious Feelings by a vocal line delivered in a faux-vulnerable way, or by a series of lyrics so trite that you begin to wonder whether they are truisms rather than clichés.

‘Carousel’, the first single from East India Youth’s new album Culture Of Volume, is the sort of song that you imagine you might hear in an newly commissioned am-dram musical; the sort of thing that might be performed to a patchy audience of frustrated luvvies in a cheaply hired hall somewhere on the outskirts of London. “Carousel, carousel / Spin me round / Carousel, carousel / Holds me down,” William Doyle emotes in a tone so grave that you presume he thinks he has completed the sequel toThe Waste Land. Musical theatre revels in this sort of GCSE lyricism, and so does Doyle.

Read on FACT.

[joshajhall]

The life and death of the Compton Swap Meet

Much has been made of the idea that To Pimp A Butterfly sees Kendrick broadening his sightsfrom his native LA to the country at large, with the album focusing not only on his struggles with fame and depression, but also with what it means to be black in America today.

But the King Kunta clip places Kendrick firmly back in his hometown – and tells a story of one of Compton's best-loved institutions. Read on below as we explore the tale of the Compton Swap Meet – and learn how such a treasured part of the LA landscape could pass on.

Read on Red Bull UK

[joshajhall]

Hanoi Masters: the musicians keeping Vietnam’s lost songs alive

“My sister was born in November 1972, so very often my mom would share with us her memory of carrying my sister in and out of the bunker during the Christmas bombing.” Vân-Ánh Võ is recounting the impact of the Vietnam war on her family. “She recalled how you could hear the air-raid siren cut through the air, and then the frightening low hum of the B-52. The fighter jet came much faster, but it only could drop one or two bombs. Then the air was deadly quiet and the low hum appeared. That would be the scariest time, as she would know that bombs after bombs would drop.”

Read on the Guardian (also appeared in print in G2, Friday 13th March)

[joshajhall]

Kanye West live at Koko

The people who gave up and went home must be kicking themselves.

You can’t blame them – Camden is about the worst place you could hope to be on a Tuesday night, and the horror is compounded by three hours in the freezing cold, in a line that snakes back on itself three times before heading what seems like half a mile up the High Street. The things people do for Kanye.

Read on FACT.

[joshajhall]

Dean Blunt - Black Metal

It’s rare to find mention of Dean Blunt without some reference to him being a provocateur. At a show at the ICA earlier this year the ex-Hype Williams man’s performance consisted of a group of men in vodka branded t-shirts milling around while a DVD of Australian comedian Kevin Hart played. The Redeemer, FACT’s album of 2013, was an exercise in postmodernism, very explicitly pitting high culture against ‘low’. “So yeah, Dean Blunt is a prankster,” said Chal Ravens, in her review of the album. “But this time, I think he means it.” And yet, while The Redeemer was certainly a step towards a more straightforward, straight-bat Blunt, there were moments at which it felt wilfully inscrutable. For Blunt, every moment of frankness has to come with an emotional escape hatch.

On Black Metal, though, we might get the closest thing to a single entendre Blunt has yet made – although, of course, that’s all relative. In last year’s FACT interview he said that he doesn’t intend to make “difficult” music and, indeed, this is not a difficult album – certainly not in the manner in which The Redeemer could be considered to be. It is, however, an entirely conflicted one, on which Blunt forces the listener into a position of uncertainty. For every moment of honesty there is one in which he reminds us that, today, there is no single truth, no right answer. At one moment he seems vulnerable, candid; at the next, he seems to suggest that the whole thing might be one big joke.

Read on FACT

[joshajhall]

Jessie Ware - Tough Love

What do we want from our pop stars? Surveying the horizon we get a few potential answers. There’s Katy Perry, the candyfloss caricature of the girl next door. Or Rihanna, who projects and refracts our debauched desires. Or there’s the cast of The X Factor, who reassure us that we can make something commercially viable of our own mediocrities.

And then there’s Jessie Ware. Where does she sit? Pop stars are, quite obviously, constructions. They are texts to be read, compiled from a set of commercial imperatives. They are built for an audience, and they morph to reflect them. We are drawn to them because they are both us and not: they reflect “what it is to be a human in this society,” as media theorist Richard Dyer says, but they are also apart from us, necessarily other. They are simultaneously relatable and unknowable.

Read on FACT

[joshajhall]

Can the Music Venue Trust save Britain's pub circuit?

Up and down the country, small independent music venues are under threat. The so-called “toilet circuit” has long been a breeding ground for new talent, but a barrage of new and existing problems mean that dozens of the UK’s best-loved small clubs may soon close their doors – or already have.

The Music Venue Trust is trying to save those spaces. Set up by a group of live-music professionals, the organisation is working to build a network, so venues can work together to tackle the threats they face. Mark Davyd, the group’s CEO, believes that the contribution small venues make is not being properly recognised. Those clubs occupy, he says, “a weird space in the cultural fabric of the UK. They’re still viewed as slightly rebellious, rock’n’roll spaces, when of course time has moved on.”

Read on The Guardian

[joshajhall]

Rudi Zygadlo interview

Rudi Zygadlo has long been an outsider.

His first couple of releases, for Planet Mu, saw the producer lumped with an unsuitable ‘dubstep’ tag – an epithet that seemed to belie the real nature of his work, which was rooted as much in baroque pop-pomp as it was in easy melodicism, and which sat apart not only from the genre with which Zygadlo was associated but also from much of the rest of the Planet Mu catalogue.

Read on FACT.