layout: post title: A stew of packetized content created: 1081868819 categories:

• VoIP

But history tells us that speed and target marketing are not the forte of Tier 1 providers. Sure, they can collectively offer VoIP across the country in a blink of an eye, but to be anything more than a cheap, commoditized blending of voice and data into a stew of packetized content, large service providers need to utilize platforms that can spit out targeted application for very specific customer needs like watermelon seeds. Either that or they leave a big chunk of their potential market to those who can—the innovators. Tim McElligott: The Tao of VoIP

The residential VoIP market is already facing a hail of price cuts, so it is likely that the incumbents (with their bigger bank rolls and large target markets) can win this low-margin business. To tap into higher value business (often associated with small and medium businesses), a one size fits all approach no longer works.

Hence, the need for either a customizable “platform” or portfolio of solutions that meet different needs. Are we talking software or hardware here? Well, both, although I think an open software platform will be more important in the long run.

(via Jeff Pulver)

layout: post title: No games for the Mac and gaming micro-content created: 1101695711 categories:

• Game
• Mac

When you tell someone you’re buying a Mac and they throw the No_Mac_Game FUD in your face, they’re being lazy. Someone, somewhere, at some time, told them that "Mac Games Suck" and that’s simple idea to remember. FUD paints a world of black and white and the good news is it’s all gray people. Rands In Repose: Silver Bullet: No Games for the Mac

I thought this was appropriate since I am (still) enjoying World of Warcraft. Pretty much all of Blizzard’s games are cross-platform, and usually ship with one set of CDs as well. Actually, the guys at Electronic Boutique where I bought the game almost didn’t want to sell it to me when I mentioned I was playing on a Mac.

I don’t care to get involved in the FUD one way or another — if I was really interested in playing games I would get an Xbox or a PlayStation.

Something else that I wanted to point out was the other company referenced in Rands’ post: Bioware.

Their main products are based around the <acronym title="Dungeons & Dragons">DnD</acronym> role-playing system — they’ve used it to development the fantasy-based Neverwinter Nights as well as the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. But both are platforms (with NN being more of one).

Neverwinter Nights ships with full development tools. You can make your own modules, including full scripting abilities, your own persistent servers, etc. etc. Every pen-and-paper RPG playing nerds fantasy.

And now Bioware has opened up a store. Small, high-quality, very inexpensive modules that you can play after you’ve finished the main “game”. This goes beyond mods or add-ons for other games — these modules are completely self-contained, and need only the original platform purchase to enable people to start playing.

Theoretically individuals could start charging for these modules as well. Gaming micro-content, which has been out of reach because of the now millions of dollars that is required to develop (and more importantly, market) a game.

I see modular sales like this as being another valid business model vs. online games like World of Warcraft that charge ongoing subscription fees.

Interesting times. I’m off to go summon some demons with my gnome engineer.

layout: post title: Three ways of syndicating beyond blogging content created: 1126036911 categories:

• Personal Publishing
• Web Development

In my continuing quest to understand and try to explain where microformats fit, I think I have three use cases of syndicating “beyond blogging” content. This means, content/data which has semantic information attached to it — events, people, etc. etc. I’m probably using the phrase “semantic information” wrongly — call it rich data or structured blogging, it’s content that goes beyond base textual description and is “data” that has meaning.

For the most part, I’m only considering generated content. People that want to hand-code individual pages will fall into the first use case of embedded rich data.

This is a work in progress. I may make changes inline and/or integrate comments directly.

1. Text/HTML blobs with embedded rich data

   Considering as I am not a fan of RDF for no particular reason, this seems the best use case for microformats — easily accomplished even by having little saved snippets in your composing tools.

2. First-class data model support (XML flavoured)

   This use case is where a platform/web app supports events or people natively, e.g. there are event and people data objects which you can create/display directly. The type of application which would have first-class support might be an online address book (example?) or calendaring program (e.g. WebCalendar).

   Tantek has had some feedback that it may be easier to, e.g., generate an hCalendar display and then use a proxy to transform this into (in this case) vCal. I know that in Drupal, and I would think in other well-designed applications, it’s easier or as easy to just generate a vCal file directly. Remote proxies involve a point of failure, and local proxies mean another app/more code to deploy. Code libraries which parse microformats or vCal etc. should be equally available.

   Microformats are good at the display layer, for presenting a uniform target for theming thanks to common classes. Crawlers optimized for XHTML might have an easier time parsing this, although just as crawlers can do conversion of binary formats such as PDF or Word to HTML/text, I imagine the same could be done with vCard.

3. Established format support

   Typically, every system that has native support for data models will also provide direct support for any non-RSS established formats. Calendars supporting iCal/vCal and address books supporting vCard are two good examples. Outlines supporting <acronym title="Outline Processor Markup Language">OPML</acronym> is another example, although neither outlines nor the OPML format itself are nearly as widespread — something that is likely to change rapidly due to Dave Winer’s work with the OPML editor.

   These established formats are probably few and far between — offhand, only something like Google’s KML comes to mind, which is nothing more than a de-facto standard for interfacing with the Google Earth application. These formats are of course not directly human consumable — clicking on an iCal button representing a webcal feed and/or ics file depends on the operating system to pass this on to local applications that support them.

So, in two out of three use cases, there are very compelling reasons to make non-microformat information available as well. Of course, we’re mainly talking about event and person data, for which long standing formats exist that are consumable today by lots of systems, including desktop applications. My next post will cover some areas that are sorely in need of microformats.

layout: post title: "Yiibu: re-inventing microcontent" created: 1132258870 categories:

• yiibu
• bryan rieger
• microcontent
• andaman
• Vancouver
• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

Bryan Rieger came by the office yesterday and we caught up on where his new company, Yiibu is at. They just soft launched with an example of one of the first pieces of open microcontent that they’re going to be working with. Their first microcontent stack is a guide to tropical fish, a wonderful nod to the original Mackerel Stack mentioned in Bryan’s recent thank you post. It’s been my pleasure to get to know both Bryan and Steph, and it’s been amazing seeing the ideas they come up with.

What they’re doing and thinking about is a new new thing, I believe. We’re finally getting to the point where mobile devices can easily work with multimedia content, with new devices like the colour iPods and the Sony PSP turning out to be great platforms to carry around user-created content. The Creative Commons and the very concept of shareable content shouldn’t be discounted either — lessons like the Sony DRM debacle are only reinforcing that.

How can you share microcontent? How can you get paid for creating microcontent? What is the best way forward in terms of mobile platforms and the carrier walled gardens? These are the types of things that Yiibu is thinking about, and has started creating solutions for. There are still lots of issues, like truly portable metadata, and being able to source where content comes from, but this is exactly the space that Bryan and Steph are working in. Their doors are open if you want to pick up some smart consultants in this space, never mind start experimenting with some of the content and payment models they’ve put together today.

I’m going to write a longer review of Andaman: A Wee Guide to Tropical Fish and how it works on different mobile devices — or at least, my iPod Nano and my Nokia 6630. Check it out yourself, and think about what universal microcontent means to you.

layout: post title: "BarCamp SF: The Jive Live, or how to make money from great video content" created: 1151279795 categories:

• Greg Narain
• video
• Jive Live
• barcamp
• barcamp san francisco
• Revver
• YouTube
• blip.tv
• Social Media

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today…

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly….just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

On the topic of using existing video communities, we went back and forth as to what kind of video those communities like (short stupid stuff for the younger crowd?) and how to get people back to your own website from that. Greg talked about branding: do intros and overlays on your video, plus link back to your website in the description. But, there is no denying that putting video into a community like YouTube can really increase traffic. But, of course, you have to use the tools: connect with people on YouTube, make groups, tag all your video, and cross promote all this with your blog.

But can YouTube help you make money? Directly, probably not. Our friend Micki Krimmel is now Director of Community over at Revver, which integrates advertising and pays you money for views of your video content. The Jive Live crew are in LA as well, so hopefully they can connect at some point.

Blip.tv, which I'm using from my cameraphone, is also supposed to be launching integrated advertising soon.

These seem to be more realistic avenues of making money directly from your video content (well, for freely shared video content — you could also sell videos using Google Video).

At the end of our discussion, we set them up with a Wordpress.com blog. Of course, long term they should integrate this directly into their website, and in fact re-vamp the website so episodes are in RSS feeds and people can subscribe to different categories of video directly, but this gives them an easy way to start experimenting.

AI and differentiation free vs paywalled content§

Go back to [[Week 3 - Introduction]]

On differentiating free vs paywalled content:

On the websites offering paid access to the content, per-sonalization is also used both to pick up preferred journalist materials, and to determine the scope of user access to var-ious types of media products.

A New Test of Artificial Intelligence - Should the Media Industry Be Afraid?

Go back to the [[Readings list]] or the [[Master of Philosophy - Main Page]]

Reference: Horska, K. (2020). A New Test of Artificial Intelligence: Should the Media Industry Be Afraid? Science and Education a New Dimension. Humanities and Social Sciences, VIII(39).

The relevant section is available here.

#AIBusinessCase

All of the content in your Quartz should go in the /content folder. The content for the home page of your Quartz lives in content/index.md. If you’ve [[setup Quartz]] already, this folder should already be initialized. Any Markdown in this folder will get processed by Quartz.

It is recommended that you use Obsidian as a way to edit and maintain your Quartz. It comes with a nice editor and graphical interface to preview, edit, and link your local files and attachments.

Got everything setup? Let’s [[build]] and preview your Quartz locally!

Syntax§

As Quartz uses Markdown files as the main way of writing content, it fully supports Markdown syntax. By default, Quartz also ships with a few syntax extensions like Github Flavored Markdown (footnotes, strikethrough, tables, tasklists) and Obsidian Flavored Markdown ([[callouts]], [[wikilinks]]).

Additionally, Quartz also allows you to specify additional metadata in your notes called frontmatter.

---

title: Example Title
draft: false
tags:
  - example-tag

---

The rest of your content lives here. You can use **Markdown** here :)

Some common frontmatter fields that are natively supported by Quartz:

• title: Title of the page. If it isn’t provided, Quartz will use the name of the file as the title.
• description: Description of the page used for link previews.
• permalink: A custom URL for the page that will remain constant even if the path to the file changes.
• aliases: Other names for this note. This is a list of strings.
• tags: Tags for this note.
• draft: Whether to publish the page or not. This is one way to make [[pages private]] in Quartz.
• date: A string representing the day the note was published. Normally uses YYYY-MM-DD format.

See [[Frontmatter]] for a complete list of frontmatter.

Syncing your Content§

When your Quartz is at a point you’re happy with, you can save your changes to GitHub. First, make sure you’ve [[already setup your GitHub repository]] and then do npx quartz sync.

Customization§

Frontmatter parsing for title, tags, aliases and cssclasses is a functionality of the [[Frontmatter]] plugin, date is handled by the [[CreatedModifiedDate]] plugin and description by the [[Description]] plugin. See the plugin pages for customization options.

Autogeneration of news content§

Go back to [[Week 3 - Introduction]]

While not completely generated by an AI or by machine learning algorithms, this is headed in that direction (p27).

Knowhere  publication, which is a result of human-AI collaboration, maysetan example of a new view on what an  independent and  objective  media  can  be. Its  founders call it “the most influential journalist ever built” [14], as the medium reviews a huge number of sources ona specific topic, validates them and based on the outcome, delivers its own unbiased story.

14. Knowherenews.com. –https://angel.co/company/knowherehq/jobs.

A New Test of Artificial Intelligence - Should the Media Industry Be Afraid?

Go back to the [[Readings list]] or the [[Master of Philosophy - Main Page]]

Reference: Horska, K. (2020). A New Test of Artificial Intelligence: Should the Media Industry Be Afraid? Science and Education a New Dimension. Humanities and Social Sciences, VIII(39).

The relevant section is available here.

#AIBusinessCase

Bots for news content§

Go back to [[Week 3 - Introduction]]

Some time ago, the Washington Post tested processing of  the  online-received  date  using  intelligent  software  of Heliograf company. The  mediumreceivedan award  for “Excellence in Use of Bots” for its work on the 2016 elec-tion coverage. The Press Association uses Radarfor similar tasks of dynamic creation of large amounts of content.

...

However, bots could be usedmore broadly. One of the optionsis to integrate a chat bot in journalists’ materials as an alternative narrative, which extendsthe possibilities of a dialogue with readers [17].

17. Veglis A.,Maniou Th.A.  Embedding  a  chatbot  in  a  news article:   design   and   implementation// 23rd   Pan-Hellenic Conference  on  Informatics  (PCI  ’19).  Association  for Computing  Machinery,  New  York, 2019,  P. 169–172.  DOI:10.1145/3368640.3368664.

A New Test of Artificial Intelligence - Should the Media Industry Be Afraid?

Go back to the [[Readings list]] or the [[Master of Philosophy - Main Page]]

Reference: Horska, K. (2020). A New Test of Artificial Intelligence: Should the Media Industry Be Afraid? Science and Education a New Dimension. Humanities and Social Sciences, VIII(39).

The relevant section is available here.

#AIBusinessCase

the idea that you should create notes in your own words rather than having notes that are clips of other people’s work

Osetensibly this fosters creativity or something

I’m not [[dogmatist]]

Current uses of Natural Language Generated Content§

Go back to [[Week 3 - Introduction]]

(Page 7)

The main areas where this is already happening is in situations where large amounts of similar semi-structured content is delivered and reshaped by algorith. Examples include:

• Sports
• Real estate
• Market analysis
• Weather

Though this is likely to spread, especially to numbers-heavy beats first.

Page 8

Integration or Replacement: Journalism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Robot Journalism

Go back to the [[Readings list]] or the [[Master of Philosophy - Main Page]]

Reference: Saad Saad, D., & Issa, T. A. (2020). Integration or Replacement: Journalism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Robot Journalism. International Journal of Media, Journalism and Mass Communications. 6(3).

The relevant section is available here.

#AIBusinessCase

• [[ArchLeucoryx]] https://twitter.com/ArchLeucoryx/status/1491345015448432645 pull

Organizing Knowledge with multi-level content:§

Making knowledge easier to understand, remember, and communicate§

Notes:§

This paper discusses how to best communicate multi-level content. Multi-level content refers to the idea that there are multiple levels at which you can describe a concept. For example, a paper’s abstract may be understood as a high level overview of the paper’s contents. For some, the abstract might be enough, but for others, they will need to read the paper for low level details.

The author provides The Cognitive Bias Codex as an example of multi-level content communication. Going from the outer rings to the inner rings, there are four categories that describe 20 subcategories which describe 180 specific cognitive biases. This allows readers to gain a high level conceptual overview and then narrow in on the specific subjects they care about.

⥅ [[Cognitive Bias Codex.png]]

The paper refers to "the problem of multiple knowledge levels." Essentially, knowledge has a hierarchical structure, and if high level overviews or low level details are missing, it becomes harder to understand. Additionally, if high level overviews are visually undifferentiated from low level details, then the reader might waste their time trying to understand the domain in a more difficult way.

In some ways, [[P- Francis Miller]] is attempting to solve a problem of [[Search Behavior]] in an exploratory search setting. Essentially, how can people find what they are looking for, even when they do not know how to describe what they are looking for? Starting with broad questions and progressively drilling down into specific domains may be an effective search strategy. After all, [[C- An exploratory search system should help the reader cumulatively gain information]].

[[Writing in hypertext]] attempts to solve the same problem. Whenever the reader is unclear about a concept, they can click on the hyperlink, read about it, and then bring their new knowledge back to the note that they were originally reading. When the hypertext links have descriptive titles, they provide an "[[information scent]]" that informs the reader whether it will be worthwhile to follow that link’s path.

However, hypertext differs from what Miller proposes insofar as it describes a flat information architecture. In hypertext, you can start on any page and explore outwards. Compared to Miller’s abstract to specific search strategy, however, it may be inefficient.

One solution to the problem of multi-level content is apparent in the structure of the paper. First there is a summary of the paper as a whole, followed by a summary of each of the four parts, followed by each of the four parts. While the paper itself is more than 90 pages, the expectation is that people will only need to read the subset of those pages necessary to satisfy their interests.

Another idea present in the paper is a [[Zoomable User Interface]]. While the term was not explicitly mentioned, the author alluded to the concept. Imagine a digital map. When you zoom in, you see the names of specific streets and stores, but when you zoom out, those fade away and are replaced with the names of towns and cities. Now imagine a discourse graph where you can zoom in or out to go from increased detail to broader abstractions.

This implies the necessity of [[I- Summarization as a primitive]].

[[C- A key requirement to participating in a discourse graph for a specific domain is knowing the vocabulary used in that graph]]. ZUIs that support abstract to specific search strategies can facilitate people learning the vocabulary they need.

The paper also shows multiple types of knowledge structure which may be taken into consideration to answer [[Q- What is the data structure of a graph built to facilitate decentralized knowledge synthesis]].

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211019173927.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211019174114.png]]

Additionally, Miller makes the argument that the very act of making knowledge maps that communicate the multiple-level content is rewarding and fruitful. When considering the question [[Q- What are powerful interfaces for entering information into a discourse graph]] with the goal of promoting synthesis, we should bear this in mind. Map making is itself a primitive. Zooming It allows you to identify gaps and patterns that would otherwise remain undiscovered without a forcing function to lay out all of the information and its structure from top to bottom.

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211019174658.png]]

[[Figma]] now lets you zoom in and out on comment threads and clusters. Notice how I click on the middle right DR and that zooms into a cluster of 4 comment threads.

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211129114041.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211129114058.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211202140908.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211202140929.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211202140919.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20211202140855.png]]

• a [[coalition]]
  • [[go]] slac-coalition.org
  • announced at [[i annotate 2021]]
  • [[mail]] join@slac-coal
• a [[panel]]
  • [[i annotate 2021]]
  • [[dan whaley]] [[mark graham]] [[delmar larsen]] [[nathanael lee]] [[heather staines]]
  • screenshots:

⥅ [[Pasted image 20210625190720.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20210625190825.png]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20210625191200.png]]

• [[internet archive]]
• [[libretexts]]

Sort-by-controversial as a proxy for information content§

A common defense of trendism is that unpopular content does not necessarily have more information than average — some things are unpopular…

Sort-by-controversial as a proxy for information content§

A common defense of [trendism](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/against-trendism- how-to-defang-the-social-media-disinformation- complex-81a8e2635956?source=friends_link&sk=867e6aa7117b5a1a06fbd1c7d7129b6a) is that unpopular content does not necessarily have more information than average — some things are unpopular because they are boring & some things are popular because they’re interesting, so a naive reader with approximately average priors will get more out of being exposed to popular things than unpopular things. I’ve [previously rejected](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/trendism-cognitive- stagnation-21c8e003df83?source=friends_link&sk=484882732c87324401e0a25d083577e9) systems like curation that attempt to harness trendism by injecting interesting content in a broadcast model, because my problems with trendism come down to a criticism of the tendency to accept a broadcast-like model (with all its downsides) as unavoidable. But, there’s an alternative to ‘sort by new’ and ‘sort by random’ that’s worth serious consideration: ‘sort by controversial’.

There’s a model, promoted by a piece of Scott Alexander’s short fiction but fairly natural, that suggests controversy is a good signal of high information content (marred by its tendency to also signal high emotional engagement). Alexander presents extreme controversy as being inexplicably divisive — we cannot articulate why someone would or how someone could disagree with us about something with this attribute, even though we might know a great deal else about them, & being on the other side of this line makes them Other and unknowable. This is almost the pinnacle of high-information: extremely surprising, and requiring the analysis of unknown-unknowns (the awareness of which is itself information-rich) to justify. I think this characterization does not account for classes of division that are easily explained.

Media that is controversial for political reasons is rarely interesting in of itself. In the united states, we have two major parties, and the country is more or less evenly split as to which is worse (and although almost nobody considers either good , almost everybody considers the difference between them substantial ), so any piece of media that supports or identifies with one of the two major parties is controversial. Nevertheless, identifying with a major party is low-information: the major parties agree on almost every policy, so actual governance is similar between them in the worst case, and those disagreements they have are well-known and well-understood. Party affiliation is well predicted by geography, age, race, and cohort (in fact, it’s well predicted by each of these alone), which also makes it low- information. Mainstream party affiliation is not usually the product of careful thought; careful thinkers end up affiliating with obscure political ideas (georgism, left-accelerationism, deep green, anarchosyndicalism, posadism) or having political ideas that aren’t easily categorized at all. The affiliation of a figure with obscure political ideas is of substantially higher information value, but is less controversial, because controversy in this case is an artifact of tribal competition rather than disagreement about ideas or ideals.

Another example of high-controversy low-interest media is when controversy is explained by a cohort effect. In anime fandom, most people become anime fans for about 2 years, during which they consume all available anime & give inflated ratings; after 2 years, almost everybody drops the medium entirely. The two year mark is the point at which someone develops enough familiarity with the medium that the novelty of common tropes drops off & shows can be evaluated on their actual quality — which is all over the map. Shows that are extremely controversial are often popular-but-bad: the half of the audience who has had less than two years of experience with the medium is wowed by a novel-to-them use of cliched tropes and ranks the show highly, while the other half of the audience has already seen the same kind of show done substantially better & ranks it low. (In a general audience, we see this same tendency with children’s television: if we had three year old children and thirty year old adults watch and rate Blue’s Clues, then aggregated those rankings together without accounting for the age difference, Blue’s Clues would seem like a very controversial show.)

Nevertheless, I think that with a sufficiently diverse audience or a sufficiently un-diverse one, sorting by controversial is a better way of optimizing for interest than sorting by popular, sorting by new, or sorting by random.

By John Ohno on January 1, 2019.

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/sort-by-controversial-as-a-proxy- for-information-content-748bd7124b7a)

Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.

Wiki content§

What do you put in a wiki? Whatever you want! It’s your wiki.

For me, I feel it’s a lot more than just a set of ‘facts’ that I’ve discovered about my particular interests. It would then just be a really poorly maintained subset of Wikipedia. I think the point is to make sure not to lose the personal and the [[personality]]. (That which Wikipedia deliberately avoids).

Wisdom, not facts. We’re not just looking random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? Your commonplace book, over a lifetime (or even just several years), can accumulate a mass of true wisdom–that you can turn to in times of crisis, opportunity, depression or job.

– How and why to keep a commonplace book

I agree with that, except to de-emphasise wisdom a little. I don’t want to feel a pressure that what I put in here has to be wise. It’s a place for percolation. It might turn into wisdom eventually.

Winter of discontent§

In the late 1970s the Labour party was in office, but only in a limited sense was it in power. Trade unions were at the peak of their political and social influence. At two general elections in 1974 – the first producing a minority government, the second a government with a majority of three – voters had narrowly decided that Labour was the best party to work with the unions, hopefully to the benefit of the country. The two Labour premiers that followed, Harold Wilson and then Jim Callaghan, were not dominant figures but fixers – political lion tamers to those Labour voters who, rightly or wrongly, feared the unions.

For four years, the lion tamers’ tricks worked reasonably well. A “social contract” was negotiated between the unions and the government, which met union demands such as increases to welfare benefits in return for workers accepting modest, often below-inflation pay increases. The arrangement did not produce a particularly dynamic economy but a fairer one: by the late 1970s, Britain was as equal as it has ever been.

Yet in the autumn of 1978, workers who had had enough of pay restraint started to rebel. Strikes spread, and the government failed to persuade trade unionists to call them off. As everyday essentials from food delivery to healthcare were disrupted, just like now, the government’s lack of power was suddenly obvious.

Contrary to the story usually told about the 1970s – which has been set by the right – the Callaghan government’s support did not collapse. At the 1979 election, the Labour vote actually went up by 75,000. Many Britons refused to accept that Labour’s power-sharing approach to government – which much of Europe still follows – was now obsolete. For anyone hoping that this autumn’s crises will quickly dissolve support for Boris Johnson’s government, the loyalty of voters to Callaghan is a cautionary tale.

What decisively changed the balance of power in Britain in the late 1970s was a surge of support for the Conservatives. With clear rhetoric and ruthless timing, as the winter of discontent raged, Thatcher offered voters not compromise with the unions but domination of them: a Britain where employers would be much more powerful than workers once again. That is the world we still live in – for now. The value suddenly placed on lorry drivers and other essential workers this autumn could just be the beginning of that world’s unravelling.

• A winter of discontent is unlikely to dissolve the Tories’ support | Andy Bec…