Fridges, Fraud and Fun
What are technical skills? Why write online?
At the BBC’s headquarters in Portland Place, the communal milk is kept in shiny black Space Odyssey fridges, the doors unmarked except for a Siemens logo, like a single central eye, looking down from several inches above head height.
In October 2004 “the BBC entered a ten-year framework contract with Siemens for the provision of technology services, worth around £1.5 billion over ten years”. Those aren’t my words, they’re from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. The full report explains that the expected financial savings were not delivered.
What does it mean, I wonder, that the same company provides £1.5bn of IT services and the place we stick packed lunches?
You might point out that Siemens, the white goods manufacturer, is a different arm of the technology conglomerate Siemens AG, from Siemens IT Solutions. But how meaningful is that distinction, I wonder? They both have Siemens in their name. They are both owned by Siemens, even if that ownership is a typical modern construction to maximize tax efficiency. Different people do the IT from the fridges, but the money goes to the same place.
Something about this collapsing of functions gives me an amorphous sense of unease. It devalues the broadcast infrastructure to discover it’s run by the same company that builds the big cold box of sweating leftovers and forgotten sandwiches. You can’t help but feel the same care and importance is applied to both. Or that everything is being commoditised in the same way into one heap of money-making opportunities. Or even that we are compromised: we must buy their fridge, because they have us over the barrel on the IT contract. Or vice versa.
I don’t mean to pick on Siemens. If I wanted to do that, I would point out they owned a slave labour factory in Auschwitz, or that they built components for extermination camps as a joint enterprise with the SS. Or I’d mention the $1.6 billion they paid to settle a 2008 court case due to an “unprecedented” pattern of bribery. The fine was expected to be much larger, but according to commentators, the US depended on Siemens as a military contractor and was concerned about hampering its operations. Even with this quasi-inside trading, it was still the largest bribery fine in history.
“The scandal has cost Siemens […] its reputation,” David Grow wrote in the Guardian in 2008. I wonder about this reputation. The Wikipedia page Siemens scandal links to a different Siemens bribery scandal (this one from 1914). There’s a disambiguation section to identify which Siemens bribery scandal you’re looking for. Since the Guardian reported the fine, Siemens has increased its turnover yearly and purchased competition companies at a rate of up to 10 a year. Almost every word in the Guardian’s sentence is comically incorrect: Siemens already had a history of bribery, and this latest scandal did not affect the company’s reputation in the slightest. The fridges in New Broadcasting House, I notice, were fitted in the last few months.
The strangest part of this is that there is nothing special about Siemens. At the time the fine was the highest ever, but in 2024, that figure barely grants admittance to the top ten highest fines shortlist. Pick any large company and you will find scandals and accounting misdemeanours, crimes and conspiracies. Too big to fail, we say, but perhaps we mean too powerful to regulate. While we recognise the names of the companies that were too bad to survive (Lehman Brothers and SVB and FTX and Theranos and Madoff and RBS and Northern Rock and Enron and Equitable Life and Barrings) we forget about the scandals of the ones that first hung, and then carried, on.
What does it mean that Siemens provided the BBC fridges and IT infrastructure? It’s more than just a comic synchronicity. It’s one of those tiny inconsequential ways in which we see, in microcosm, the tangled, compromised operation of the whole modern world.
Elsewhere
For a reason I can no longer remember, I started picking science theses at random from the Australian National University library catalogue and reading only the acknowledgements. […] All the acknowledgements followed the same basic structure; they're formulaic. But as with many formulaic things, there's a story behind each one. […] I came to see that the acknowledgements of a PhD thesis are their own kind of thing.
The rest of the thesis contains careful, reasoned findings and figures, but on this one page, the author-scientist can release all the pent-up emotion they couldn’t express elsewhere.
They’re like an explosion in a lab.
I’ve written about acknowledgements before, and while I wouldn’t say it’s an interest of mine, I delight in seeing articles about them. This is a very richly assembled story of acknowledgements. At times, it’s almost too richly put together with parallax scrolling and animations and clickable elements almost taking away from Carvan’s fun observations and commentary.
The practice of dividing human beings into "technical" or "not technical" has annoyed me for more than ten years, but I've struggled to articulate why. It took a movie about rock climbing, a historic run by the Golden State Warriors, a broken sewing machine, and a serendipitous Slack comment, but I finally put my finger on it.
[…]
The specific moment that forever changed how I saw this came right at the end of the movie Free Solo. It's about the first person to climb up El Capitan without any kind of rope or safety device. As the credits rolled, my friend Sam said something offhand like "it was so cool to see the technical details."
I must have looked blank, because they elaborated: "you usually never get to see behind the scenes and exactly what it takes to prepare to do something that hard—the mental prep, what he eats, even how he positions each finger."
There’s a lot of mileage in picking at what words really mean to uncover new truths, I think. In this case, I really like Laundy’s conclusion:
But if "technical skills" are the skills we use to produce our work (good software) then by extension, every field has "technical" skills.
They're simply the skills used to produce the work.
What’s the fun in writing on the internet anymore? by James Shelley
You can now spin up new, “original” articles faster and easier than even reading the originals. This is a dizzying and dumbfounding new reality, when you stop and think about it: automated plagiarism is now more efficient than reading itself.
Shelley muses on what it means to put words onto the internet (and why), especially in the age of AI and content farms and plagiarism.
Perhaps I’ve ended up backing myself into a corner here since I’m quoting and pointing to this article (and commenting on it), but I’ve thought before that words on the internet are somehow more “working words” than fiction or more lyric forms:
In summary, it feels like the fate of words on the internet is to be paraphrased.
Despite the thoughtful beginning, this ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.
That’s all for today,
Simon