Google

Numerous commentators have noted how the Irish marriage referendum was influenced by big business, especially Californian-based companies like Google. It's one of the curious trends of recent years that big business, once considered the enemy of ‘the Left’, is now its greatest proponent; or at least the dominant strain of Leftism, social justice liberalism. Silicon Valley is the most extreme example of this, an industry that is young, dynamic and universally socially liberal; but elsewhere most politically interested billionaires in the West tend to be more liberal than the population, whether it's George Soros funding various social justice causes or other Democrat-supporting moguls.

What are newspapers for? The answer, of course, is not just to tell us what's going on and explain the implications, but also to select the most important items from the background noise. Over the last few years, though, we've started to get our news in a different way: through Google, where selections are made on the basis of a constantly evolving algorithm, and through social media sites where news stories are recommended by friends. Throughout this change, Google has argued vociferously that it is not a publisher. Particularly in Europe, issues such as privacy, copyright and the right to be forgotten have led it to claim that it's simply a platform, and no more involved in the content it hosts than is a newsagent.

Yesterday at SXSW, the world's grooviest 'interactive festival', the head of Google X – the company's mysterious research lab – finally admitted it. Google Glass was one gigantic embarrassment. Or, as Astro Teller put it, 'We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the programme'. You don't say. For a glimpse of the sort of attention Google didn't want, just look at the photograph above – some poor sap on the subway using Google Glass and a smartphone. It went viral on Twitter. The guy was dubbed 'the glasshole', a pun that works in both American and English accents. Google Glass has given wearable tech a bad name: it's raw material for standup comics.

One of the questions I most often get asked is: ‘What can I do?’  If you agree that actual liberals are the only palatable future in authoritarian societies and also recognise that they are a beleaguered minority, is there anything you can meaningfully do to help? Western governments are generally too busy doing business with authoritarian governments to focus on actual human rights abuses.  Meanwhile many groups at home which claim to care about human rights around the world are too busy attacking the world’s only democracies or defending extremists to have much time left for the real fight. But I have recently been introduced to an initiative which stands a good chance of providing an answer to that difficult readers' question.

I read that Damon Runyon, in New York in the 1930s, would get up at 1 p.m. for a breakfast of ‘fruit, broiled kidneys, toast and six cups of coffee’. Then he would read all the newspapers. Then he would bathe, shave, dress and go out for a long walk which would probably include some shopping — one of his favourite activities. (‘He wanted to buy prize fighters, and racehorses, and great houses, and stacks of clothes and jewellery for his lovely [second] wife.

Most people, when they hear the word populist, will think of Marine Le Pen going mad about Muslim immigrants or a Ukipper saying he wouldn't want an Albanian living next door. But yesterday we witnessed a different kind of populism: the deceptively right-on variety, which aims its black-and-white moralistic fury not at cash-starved people at the bottom of society, but at wealthy individuals at the top. The purveyor of populism this time was Margaret Hodge, panto queen of the Public Accounts Committee, her target was some HSBC suits, and it made for an unedifying spectacle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdu-ueG78o Hodge has in recent years become Parliament's poundshop Robespierre, a one-woman mopper-up of moral rot in the establishment, the purifier of the political realm.

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry. The docs seem ill at ease, as if their collective nose is out of joint, and I don’t think it’s overstretching or underfunding that’s the problem. My unprofessional diagnosis is that there’s a change under way in the balance of power between patients and medics; the status of GP as unimpeachable oracle is under threat, he feels the first tremors of what may be a seismic shift, and he doesn’t like it.

Just before Christmas I achieved something so totally, incredibly amazing that I think it probably ranks among the greatest things I have ever done. In terms of danger, raw physical courage and menace overcome, it was at least on a par with cage-diving with great white sharks or taking on the ‘Breastapo’ the other week over that incident in Claridge’s. As far as personal satisfaction goes, it felt like getting into Oxford, teaching my children to read, bagging a Macnab and climbing Everest blindfold on the same weekend. What I did was this: there was a problem on my computer — and I fixed it. All by myself! When I took to Twitter to broadcast the fantastic news it didn’t go quite as viral as I’d hoped.

‘So were you levitating with rage by the end?’ I asked her. She — a veteran of Bletchley Park — and I were discussing The Imitation Game, the new film about the mathematician and code--breaker Alan Turing, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and a host of historical inaccuracies. But she remained sanguine: ‘Not at all, I really enjoyed it a lot. A little dramatic licence here and there, but that’s what you get with films.’ Indeed. Still, the film didn’t take the biggest dramatic liberty of them all, thank goodness — that of suggesting that Bletchley’s triumphs were entirely down to the Americans.

Are the nerds of Silicon Valley responsible for harbouring terrorists? On this week's View from 22 podcast, Hugo Rifkind and James Forsyth debate their articles on the battle between the geeks and spooks. Has the government forgotten that online media should have the same rights as print outlets? Or are the technology companies acting irresponsibly over battling terrorism? Damian Green MP and Isabel Hardman also discuss the Tory battles already being fought over the EU. If the Conservatives are victorious at the next election, is the party on track to split three ways: the inners, outers and reformers? Does this growing split show that the Cameroon modernisation project has failed? And what is Theresa May up to this week?

Black cab drivers are striking in London today because they are angry that Uber – a rival taxi service supported by Google – is undercutting their market. They will argue that Uber’s drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares, despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters. I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of this argument (the High Court can figure that one out). All I care about is getting home safely and it not costing too much. Uber offers me that. I’m wary of jumping into unlicensed minicabs. As those spooky tube adverts remind you, ‘If your minicab's not booked, it's just a stranger's car’. But with Uber, they are booked.

There’s something perversely satisfying in discovering that your children have inherited your vices. That’s why I was so quietly pleased the other evening when Boy came to see me petrified that the huge fat spider with the sinister body-markings on the wall above his bed was in fact a deadly false widow with a bite — so the internet tells us — whose symptoms can range from ‘feelings of numbness, severe swelling and discomfort to various levels of burning or chest pains’. Though I’m not personally scared of spiders, I could most certainly claim proud authorship of the catastrophist tendencies Boy was displaying here. Also — being a fellow cyberchondriac — I was more than happy to indulge his urge to go straight onto the web (ho! ho!