A Singular Thesis

The information revolution has brought our planet to an inflexion point. This is our generation's industrial revolution, and conventional wisdom of all sorts is suddenly in doubt. But is the universe really about to wake up? Are we about to look into the face of God? Ray Kurzweil thinks so.

Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for “the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause”.

Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resemblant of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, The Singularity Is Near. For if ever a man were committed overtly - fervently, even - to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: one one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit.

Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the “singularity”, a point at which he expects with startling certainty that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away.

Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there’s a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness which, in his enthusiasm, he may have crossed.

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks frequently and modishly of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: “the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive” and “evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity”.

“Kurzweil seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, wherever it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often.”

But to suppose an evolutionary algorithm has “a problem it is trying to solve” - in other words, a design principle - is to emasculate its very power, namely the facility of explaining how a sophisticated phenomenon comes about *without* a design principle. Evolution works because organisms (or genes) have a capacity - not an intent - to replicate themselves. Nor, necessarily, does evolution increase order. It will tend to increase complexity, because the evolutionary algorithm, having no insight, is unable to “perceive” the structural improvements implied in a design simplification. Evolution has no way of rationalising design except by fiat. The adaptation required to replace an overly elaborate design with more effective but simpler one is, to use Richard Dawkins’ expression, an implausible step back down “Mount Improbable”. That’s generally not how evolutionary processes work: over-engineering is legion in nature; economy of design isn’t, really.

This sounds like a picky point, but it gets to the nub of Kurzweil’s outlook, which is to assume that technology evolves like biological organisms do - that a laser printer, for example, is a direct evolutionary descendent of the printing press. This, I think, is to superimpose a convenient narrative over a process that is not directly analogous: a laser printer is no more a descendent of a printing press than a mammal is a descendent of a dinosaur. Successor, perhaps; descendant, no. But the “exponential increase in progress” arguments that Kurzweil repeatedly espouses depend for their validity on this distinction.

The “evolutionary process” from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call “paradigm shifts” but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and (usually) obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but - and this is critical - by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren’t even conceived of in the earlier technology - sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology. That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call “perspective chauvinism” to judge former technologies by the standards and parameters set by the prevailing orthodoxy - being that of the new technology. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. The fallacious process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil’s inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress. It isn’t that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn’t change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

“Evolutionary development is constantly forking off in unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.”

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true - but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution - we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent 97 years the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They clearly aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model.

If this is right, then Kurzweil’s corollary assumption - that there is a technological nirvana to which we’re ever more quickly headed - commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future - when the universe “wakes up”, as he puts it - will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption.

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just seven years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

“By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing”

On the other hand I could find scant reference to “cloud computing” or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil’s book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don’t need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and every one will increase performance.

I suppose it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re already three years into the new decade (he also missed the mobile computing revolution, come to think of it), but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in), being path-dependent as it is. 

You can’t predict for developments that haven’t yet happened. Kurzweil glosses over this shortfall at his theory’s cost. 

A version of this article was first published on Amazon in 2010.

The future's so bright I've got to wear VR goggles which help me empathise.

If your kids already spend eight hours a day online, the future depicted in Pareg and Ayesha Khanna's “Hybrid Reality” might ring true for you. Others may be harder to persuade.

Hybrid Reality is the short monograph which I suppose serves as flagship publication Pareg and Ayesha’s Hybrid Reality Institute, an organisation whose raison d’etre seems to be the pursuit of unfettered wishful thinking about the potential of technology. Good luck to them: dreaming up whacky visions of the future does sound like fun, and while it’s hard to see any practical application for the Fortune 500 companies the authors claim as their clients, if they’ve managed to persuade these conglomerates otherwise, happy days. Especially if in the future, everything is going to be crowd-sourced and free.

Hybrid Reality is thus an attempt to sketch out a future based on extrapolating current trends of technological development: a (thankfully slimmer) companion-piece to Ray Kurzweill’s The Singularity Is Near.

In fairness, Hybrid Reality quickly moves beyond stock platitudes about crowdsourcing, but where it does it does so without much credibility. The text is plastered with buzzwords borrowed from other disciplines and deployed with carefree abandon: 

“accelerated evolution creates what we might call a Heisenbergian or quantum society: we are particles whose position, momentum and impact on others, and the impact of others on us, are perpetually uncertain due to constant technological disruptions.”

Okayyy. Amongst the rhubarb there is a point to be made about rapidly disrupting technologies, but that’s not it. To the contrary, the rate of change is so fast that genuinely novel technologies and businesses have little chance to establish themselves, and that those which get a foothold do so as by fiat as sober business development, and then proceed to hammer everyone else into the ground. In such a nasty, brutish and short environment conditions favour not elegance and sophistication in design but the lowest common denominator. 

Breath-taking technologies of the sort which overflow this book, on the other hand, assume a sophistication which needs a warm and safe environment in which to incubate. Increasingly, new technologies never get the chance to be smart. It isn’t accelerated evolution that’s going on, but accelerated extinction.

“In such a nasty, brutish and short environment conditions favour not elegance and sophistication in design but the lowest common denominator.” 

I suppose you might expect a degree of credulity from faculty members of the “Singularity University” but, still, their vision owes as much to science fiction as it does to academic analysis and nothing at all to the traditional discipline of economics. Perhaps the dismal science, too, will succumb to the information revolution: cavalierly, Samuel Huntingdon’s maxim is reformulated so that it is not economics but technology that is “the most important source of power and wellbeing”. Older hands will recall hearing that kind of talk before, and it didn’t work out so well in 2003 when hundreds of “new economy” business models folded when it turned out they did need to generate revenue after all.

It’s easy to be a naysayer, of course, but all the same my hunch is that the Khannas’ monologue has little value for anything but excitable kite flying. Many of their assertions strongly suggest this pair really, literally, need to get out more. “Of the eight hours a day children today spend online, 1.5 involve using avatars…” they say, as if that initial premise may be taken as a given. Eight hours a day online? Which children are these, exactly? “Robots are incontestably becoming more ubiquitous, intelligent and social” and “represent an entirely new type of ‘other’ that we interact with in our social lives”. Elsewhere, “Technik”, as they put it, seems to have the power to change the laws of nature, and in the short term: “The average British citizen will likely live to be 100 years old”, they predict. Technik is so clever it can even grant us powers which we already have: In the future there will be virtual reality goggles, we are told, which can “sense other people’s stress levels”. Just imagine being able to do that.

“Many of their assertions strongly suggest this pair really, literally, need to get out more.” 

You can, in any case, read your fill here of all the ways the internet of things will provide an untold wealth of cool free stuff, but note the lack of any financial analysis: All this cool stuff requires effort: not just to design and conceptualise, but to manufacture, distribute, house, power, maintain and (to extent it can’t be fully computerised) operate. And effort, generally, requires money. Previous generations of technological development have shifted the labour demand curve upwards: automation has taken out repetitive, low value tasks but created more complex ones designing, building and maintaining the machinery to carry out these tasks: as a result we have grown busier with each development, not more idle - though our occupations have been more complex, challenging and rewarding. The Khannas’ brave new world would, by implication, flip that on its head.

For argument’s sake, let’s say the robots can fully take over, perform our manual labour, wipe bottoms, cure diseases and revolutionise production across all industries and agricultures so that human intervention is not required at all. Hard to see, but let’s say. Is a permanent state of situation of blissful, but chronic, total global unemployment a feasible basis for an economy?

As far as I know, man cannot live by Facebook likes alone. Last time I checked, rent wasn’t free. Nor was power, food, nor raw materials. As we go on, they’re getting harder (and costlier) to extract. So who will finance these lives of leisure? With what? Why? Who would provide services, when there was no-one to pay for them? Is it perhaps the case that personal labour, rather than being an unfortunate by-product of the “old economy” way of doing things, is in fact an immutable in the calculus of value?

Dreaming about amazing technologies which might be coming down the pike is the job of a science fiction writer. The academic question is less glamorous and more fundamental: how, within the new parameters of digital commons and in a post-growth world, can anyone devise a business model able to deliver them? These, it seems to me, are the really challenging questions, and you won’t find them addressed in this book.

How to philosophise with a hammer

I am a hopeless handyman. I have poor attention to detail and lack patience. I am disorganised. When hanging a picture, rather than finding a hammer, I bash the tack in with whatever first comes to hand. Recent examples: A tin of Rawleigh's Medicated Ointment (reasonably effective), an ornamental porcelain donkey (bad - it didn't survive) and a book (a hard-backed edition of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: better than nothing, but now pocked with pinholes).


That we tend to do that sort of thing lies at the root of a big problem with the ideas inside Professor Wilson's book (just as well, therefore, it has some use for hammering in picture hooks). Using a familiar object to do an unfamiliar job is rather like coining a metaphor: It's a creative act. As well as being pragmatic, it has its advantages. (It must have some advantages - convenience; it overcomes the lack of botheredness to find the hammer - or you wouldn't do it). But while my tin of ointment (or ornamental donkey, for that matter)  might not be conventional (and, in the donkey's case, might not work awfully well) it's not wrong. It is as good as the job it does. A "proper" tack hammer has been designed, to the exclusion of all other purposes, for hammering in tacks. You can imagine other objects being better or worse at functioning like hammers. Blu-tack, for example, would be hopeless. But not wrong. Just not much use.

And so it is with metaphors:  they deliberately take a conventional concept and put it to work in a concept it wasn't designed for. As a result metaphorical meanings are different from literal meanings (in a manner of speaking) but no worse or better - while they might be more or less effective, effectiveness is in the eye of the beholder.

Often, a metaphor can more elegantly or succinctly some aspects of its "target" (which Julian Jaynes would call a "metaphrand") than a literal construction. "Love is a rose": I suppose you might take this to mean love is a delicate, beautiful, fragile, thing that can prick you if you aren't careful with it. Or that is is a soft, rich and complexly enfolded collection of different facets. These aren't mutually exclusive metaphors, but they're not entirely consistent either. Both of them make some sense, where a literal interpretation of "love is a rose" doesn't.

Now while I was bashing in my picture hook with Professor Wilson's book I got to thinking about what was inside his book, and how Professor Wilson's whole enterprise, his desired end state, is one which overlooks the metaphor. This is some irony as metaphors, and rich ones at that, are scattered prodigally around his text.

Professor Wilson, in Consilience, sees the possibility (not yet arrived) of a unified, unique, continuous, contiguous spectrum of knowledge, encompassing not merely the physics and the physical sciences, but all of the humanities too. In fact, I think he sees the necessity of it. Wilson is an unabashed reductionist. Wilson embraces a hierarchy of physical sciences (physics at the bottom, grounding everything else; Chemistry sitting atop it, Biology atop that, and so on. Higher sciences can be reduced to lower ones; all sciences are consistent with each other, and it is only a lack of data which prevents completion of the total blueprint of the physical universe. Thereafter the social sciences and even the arts will fall into a pre-ordained and logical place and will similarly be logical, consistent and unambiguously explicable. Wilson is excited by this idea (it horrifies me, personally), and sets out in his book to give it some intellectual underpinning.

Wilson is running before he can walk. Metaphor gets in the way - literally, and metaphorically. The same thing happened to Bertrand Russell following a similarly hubristic exercise restricted to the logical underpinnings of mathematics. In the infancy of the twentieth century Russell tried to chart the entirely cosmos of the mathematical universe by reference to a single, finite set of well-defined logical axioms. By limiting himself to numbers, Russell took up an easier challenge, you would think, than Wilson has. Mathematics was, Russell supposed, a closed logical system: finite, reducible and therefore well susceptible to his kind of enterprise.

But Russell failed to complete his mathematical globe. Russell didn't just not manage to get to all points in a large whole; he failed totally: his entire project, so pointed out a precocious young German chap by the name of Goedel, was logically flawed. Doomed.

The reason? Metaphor. Even though Russell had decreed some ad-hoc rules to guard against logical cul-de-sacs - for example, no item was allowed to be a member of its own set - it was possible to run mathematical operations by analogy - metaphorically, in other words, that could tell you things that a literal mathematical operation could not. And any ostensibly complete description of a language which forbade expressions such as "the set of all possible sets" was going to be practically useless anyway. There are some excellent accounts of Goedel's dramatic insight, Douglas Hofstadter's a particularly good one (though his ultimate conclusion seems wildly wrong).

When he does refer to metaphor, Wilson's is a rather unimaginative account: what he describes isn't metaphor so much as definitional drift occasioned by metaphor. To use one of his examples, by the time "plot" - a physical site and a building plan - came to mean "plot" - the narrative structure of a story - any figurative content in the expression had long since evaporated; seawater gone, a residue of salt.

Wilson's idea of a metaphor therefore is a dead one: these are the ones "normal scientists" like, of course, because dead metaphors can't get up and bite you by suggesting what you meant to say might be taken in a number of ways. If there were a substantive distinction between art and scientific literature - and like Wilson, but for radically different reasons, I'm inclined to think there isn't one - it might be found in the systematic exclusion of metaphor from scientific discourse. Science is about exactitude; consensus on a literal way of speaking enhances that end.

But at some cost, and not just in the notorious dullness of scientific literature. Literalness encourages and perhaps compels compliance with orthodoxy. Paul Feyerabend - another conspicuous absentee from Wilson's reading list - makes the inspired observation that scientific revolutions rely on inspired observations: a willingness to disregard the formal language of the discipline. If you stick rigidly to the rules of the prevailing scientific paradigm it is not possible to see, much less formulate, contradictions to it: Anything which looks like a contradiction, by the terms of the theory, must be explicable some other way (wind interference; malfunctioning equipment).

To find a new solution to a conundrum you are forced to use existing concepts in a new way. You can only do it by being creative with your language.

How David Bowie nearly blew up Wall Street - Part 2

To recap from last time, courtesy of a clever idea from some financial wizards, sober bankers like Capt. George Mainwaring suddenly had a solution to the age-old problem of managing the risk of borrower default in their mortgage portfolios. They could suddenly do two things with their mortgage portfolios:
Firstly, they could "sell" their mortgages more easily, by putting them into a format which allowed economic interests in the mortgages to be transferred without the transfer of the mortgages themselves. This is "securitisation" - which means "turning into a debt security" - a debt security being banker jargon for a bond. Bonds are like bank notes: they are easily transferred: mere possession of a bond is enough to prove you own it.
Bonds are, in this way, very different from mortgages. A mortgagee lender not only has to prove the existence of the loan by means of signed, witnessed loan contracts, but also needs to register the mortgage with  the land transfer authorities.
Now the ability to sell mortgage portfolios by itself wouldn't be that big a deal, as any buyer would wind up with exactly the same problem that the seller had in the first place: a buried, impossible to predict, risk of borrower default. But securitisation enables many buyers to buy small  shares of the same portfolio. This permitted trick number two, which is the "special sauce".
Say you are Captain Mainwaring, and you manage a portfolio of a hundred mortgages for your bank. If you arranged these in a 10 x 10 grid, and marked the defaulted mortgages with an x, it might look a bit like this:

That is to say, defaults randomly dispersed all over the place, with no rhyme or reason to how they came about. Since you can't predict which loans will blow up, it doesn't really matter how you look at it: Captain Mainwaring has this risk. Assume that in normal economic times, about 5% of all the mortgages are likely to go bust.
But look what happens when two people share ownership of the portfolio: an ambitious investor can say: Tell you what, if you pay me three quarters of the total interest due on all the mortgages, I'll take all the defaulted loans into my share of the portfolio first. That way you'll get less interest, but you have much less risk: you'll get all your interest and principal back unless there are so many mortgage defaults that I lose my whole investment. So we can rearrange our mortgage portfolio to represent this:

Because Investor B has agreed to take all the first losses, Investor A is able to confidently say that, until Investor B is wiped out in full, it has no risk on its portfolio.  Investor A has a "second-loss" risk on the portfolio.

This technique of packaging a mortgage portfolio up into a securitisation and selling it into the capital markets as a bond instrument became to be known as the "Originate and Distribute" model of mortgage finance. Instead of lending money and keeping the "assets" represented by mortgage loans on its books for thirty or more years (the "Originate and Hold" model), a lending bank can immediately "sell down" its risk in the capital markets for a repayment in full, without bothering the borrower of the loan.

This is attractive because we are able to slice the portfolio into high risk "equity" part, and a very low risk "senior" part. In the example above, before Investor A (the "senior" investor) starts to lose any money, there would need to be a 20% default rate in the total portfolio (that is, all of Investor B's portfolio would have to have defaulted). This, the logic goes, is highly unlikely given the usual means of assessing probabilities, which put the risk of default in the portfolio at no more than 5%.

And so, were the usual means of assessing probabilities  to apply, it would be. The problem is that, for two reasons, usual rules of assessing probabilities (that apply a "normal" distribution to events) are a misleading guide. 

On of those reasons is fascinating, but complex, and I couldn't cover it in detail in this post without getting completely side-tracked. Suffice to say, where humans interactions are concerned, "normal" distributions are often misleading because human actions tend to influence each other (that is, once one person defaults, that makes it all more likely that others will too). A "normal" distribution assumes all events are independent of each other, and therefore have no influence on each other. 
Interdependent human events follow tend to follow a "power law" distribution, which has a much longer and fatter "tail" than a normal distribution. If you are interested in reading about this I heartily recommend a few books: The (MIS)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward by cassandra-like French Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Critical Mass by Philip Ball.
The other reason is related, but subtly different: The very act of creating a securitisation and changing the to the "originate and distribute" model itself changes the probabilities, because it changes the parties' interests.
Mortgages tend not to default immediately. Usually even a poor creditor will manage to make payments for six months or a year. When you originate a loan you know you'll be stuck with for 30 years, you're very careful to pick borrowers whom you think unlikely to default at any time. Having a close and personal relationship with your borrowers enables you to make these assessments with a relatively high degree of comfort - hence the relatively low level of historical defaults on mortgage portfolios. Banks of Capt. Mainwaring's persuasion used to be prudent lenders, because it was in their interest to be prudent.
Note how that dynamic changes with the originate and distribute model:

• Firstly, Banks who expect to quickly "sell down" mortgages they originate have less interest in the long term creditworthiness of the borrowers: once the securitisation is completed it is "somebody else's problem" as they no longer have risk to the borrowers at all.
• Secondly, Securitisation investors have far less ability to assess the credentials of mortgage borrowers as, unlike originating banks who lend the money, securitisation bondholders have no direct relationship with borrowers at all, and far less information about each loan. Instead they tend to rely on general due diligence done by rating agencies who are retained by originators to provide a ratings valuation for the securitisations. Rating agencies are a fit subject for another whole post.
• Thirdly, Securitisation investors have less ability to do anything should mortgages start going bad: they are reliant on third party mortgage servicing companies, who, unlike originating banks, have no "skin in the game".

We know that mortgage lending standards "relaxed" markedly in the late 1990s, and the world was bequeathed concepts like "self-certifying mortgages"; acronyms like NINJA "no income, no job, no assets", and from personal experience I know it became a lot easier to borrow a much higher multiple of income. It also didn't help that interest rates were extremely low throughout the 2000s - in England, a rough and ready average of the rates was far lower than it had been in the preceding 25 years, not exceeding 6% at any stage:

This is significant because it becomes easier to make money out of property if your cost of financing that property drops: Simply put, if you borrow £100,000 at 10% per annum to buy a property, your property has to increase in value by £10,000 in a year for you to even break even. If you borrow at 0.5%, then it only has to increase in value by £500!
These lower interest rates and a greater availability of mortgage lending meant it became viable to invest in property as a sort of investment, and before long it became almost mandatory, to avoid "falling behind": 

By now, I hope, you'll see that a perfect storm was developing, and all these little developments were feeding into each other and egging each other on: Banks were now able to quickly sell their portfolios, and so were less incentivised to apply strict lending criteria. Rates were dropping, making it more compelling to invest in property. Given the returns to be had on property and the low interest rates, demand was picking up for residential property, which in turn caused property values to rise, creating more demand for mortgages, and more demand for securitised product. A classic bubble was developing. 

We need more evangelists

Every revolution needs its instigators, and every instigator needs his prophets, evangelists, propagandists and advertisers. Just as it was true for religious and political, so it is for the cultural rebels. It's not always by design: contextualisers might be fellow travelers, but the most powerful aren't in the employ of those whom they evangelise.

In these anodyne days, magazines are a great example. They provide context for you and tell you what, how, where and why to buy. No matter that what they say is often patently absurd. Take, for example, this example from the current edition of What Hi-Fi Sound and Vision: It's a review of a power cable - the thing that plugs into your power socket at one end, and into your appliance at the other. This power cable - a regulation 1.5m in length - costs £60. It is carefully constructed, apparently, in terms of "many aspects of the content and construction of the cable - the number and arrangement of conductors, the insulation, the mains plug at one end and the three pin plug at the other." Trust us; it's very technical.

Sixty quid. For a power cable. What Hi-Fi has been quite unable to say what is so special about it: just that it really is carefully constructed. The benefits, it says, over a normal cable are "...abundant. Used in a video discipline, [it] offers greater certainty where movement and edges are concerned, deepens black shades and offers great punch to the high-contrast scenes. Colours are bolder, details more numerous."

The assertion, therefore, is that the construction of a power cable qualitatively, meaningfully, affects the representation of pictures on your TV. Can you imagine anything more preposterous? To catch a magazine reviewer out getting completely carried away isn't the point: the point is that, without this sort of independent publicity legitimising such a transparently absurd idea as a £60 power cable, no-one would buy it.

And so it is with all cultural artefacts.

So Elvis benefitted from Dewey Phillips - a brain-fritzed hillbilly who sounded like he was on speed - a Memphis DJ who championed That's Alright Mama on his Red Hot and Blue show. Later in life Greil Marcus was a leading contextualiser of Elvis, Bob Dylan and many others.

A prime moving evangelist begets other evangelists - gets a movement going, and from then anything can happen. But had Dewey Phillips not played that record on his show, the cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century might have been very different. Sun Studio, 706 Union Ave Memphis, is a small and unprepossessing place. Just making the music wasn't enough. Someone independent, with credibility, needed to broadcast it; validate it; vouch for it.

Lester Bangs - whose many best works can be enjoyed in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - was another evangeliser. What he wrote about - punk rock in the seventies - was a base, greasy, countercultural mess that didn't have a shape or a context and stood about as much chance on its own of overcoming its meagre origins as did Elvis, Bill and Scotty's acetate. But - like Greil Marcus did with other artists - Bangs gave it shape, context; consequence; significance. Writing passionately and eloquently about an inconsequential subject gave others a prism - any old prism would do - through which to relate to it. Much of what Bangs wrote was, like the What Hi-Fi review of the £60 power cable,  on its face absurd, but that really wasn't the point. Or perhaps more accurately, that was the point.

This is the point. There's a new blues revival brewing in the UK. I only found out about it by accident: searching on the wonderful Spotify for Ram Jam's sprawling seventies' bastardisation of Leadbelly's Black Betty, I came across this one, by 18 year old Norfolk guitarist Oli Brown.

Norfolk?  Don't smirk. It's no more provincial or parochial than Memphis, Tennessee was in 1953.

Brown's take on Black Betty is less gaudy, less louche; a bit more respectful than Ram Jam's, but then, there's time. Oli Brown's not old enough to have experienced a real Black Betty - bam-a-lam - so hardly surprising he doesn't sing with total conviction about her. But he does have chops, and it was enough to buy the record. There are other interesting youngsters kicking around, too: Joanna Shaw Taylor, for example, from Birmingham (in the England's Black Country, not Alabama) looks a little like a young Kate Winslet, but her demure bearing belies a muscular voice and a bitching guitar tone - it sounds like she's channeling Bonnie Raitt of the voice, and Jimmy Vaughan of the guitar. They're all on an independent blues label, Ruf, which appears to be managed from Germany.

They're all a little too in the thrall of Stevie Ray Vaughan, truth be told, but they'll grow out of that: Given the cultural wasteland wrought by Simon Cowell and his kind, this is exciting to behold: The last time there was a British Blues Invasion, the cultural world turned forever.

But they can't do it alone: they need an evangelist. That, I suppose, is our job.