There’s an interesting piece in Bella Caledonia by Mike Small about how “overtourism” is doing to Edinburgh what it’s done to so many other places in the world.

It’s not just Edinburgh. The “North Coast 500” road route, an invention to draw in tourists, destroyed the road surface and caused chaos on rural roads thanks to sports car drivers. The isle of Skye is reaching saturation point in the summertime.

But Edinburgh is facing a perfect storm. Airbnb rentals focusing on the Festival are doing serious damage to the housing market (the numbers are up from 2,000 a decade ago to 10,000 now), damage that has seen its use severely restricted in other parts of the world. The use of public spaces for more and more boarded-off events is ruining the public sphere. Boneheaded planning decisions have turned the city into a perpetual building site. The basic infrastructure of the city is struggling to cope.

Some of the same trends are happening in my own beloved Glasgow, but we don’t have Harry Potter tourism, the Festival or much of an Old Town to worry about. Edinburgh’s a very different place from Glasgow and its problems are on a much greater scale.

Mike Small:

Unless there is widespread and urgent opposition the trajectory of the city is clear: a city designed for and shaped around the rich and designed to exclude and exploit residents. The people who profit from the city are a tight network and the lack of transparency about ownership and decision-making is a well practised art form.

I’ve nothing against tourism, or the Festival, or gigs in public parks. But a city isn’t just a tourist destination or a playground for the very rich. It’s a place where tens of thousands of people live, love and work. It’s their city too.

Fortress Britain doesn’t want foreign musicians.

The musician Peter Gabriel has expressed “alarm” over UK foreign policy after a number of international artists were unable to perform at Womad world music festival after visa issues.

Or authors.

A dozen authors who were planning to attend this year’s Edinburgh international book festival have had their visas refused, according to the director, Nick Barley, who warned that the “humiliating” application process would deter artists from visiting the UK.

Visa problems have been an issue for festivals for some years now (and have been an issue for UK musicians travelling to the US, whose visas are hilariously expensive and make some small tours uneconomic), but the Conservatives’ “hostile environment” is making things much worse. And it doesn’t just affect the artists who lose income and still incur huge costs when their visas are rejected at the last minute: it affects the future viability of the festivals that book them too.

Elsewhere, Private Eye reports that the custom of touring musicians, especially classical ones, performing in Dublin before travelling effortlessly into the UK has been stymied by Home Office pedants who fear terrorists hidden in tubas. And UK musicians are worried about the very real impact the end of EU free movement will have on their ability to tour, which is a crucial component of any modern musician’s career.

What a bleak, insular, joyless country we’re becoming.

This, by Nikhil Sonnad, is a superb analysis of what’s wrong with Facebook and why it’s sending the world to hell in a handcart. Much of it applies equally to Twitter.

Sonnad begins with the story of Antonio Perkins, who was shot dead as he filmed a Facebook video.

Although his death is tragic, the video does not violate the company’s abstruse community standards, as it does not “glorify violence” or “celebrate the suffering or humiliation of others.” And leaving it up means more people will connect to Perkins, and to Facebook, so the video stays. It does have a million views, after all.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t see people as people. We’re just data.

…the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

By this reading, Mark Zuckerberg is a modern-day Victor Frankenstein. He’s created a monster and has no idea how to control it, if controlling it is even possible any more.

John Naughton makes the same point in The Guardian.

 This all became evident last week in a revealing interview the Facebook boss gave to the tech journalist Kara Swisher. The conversation covered a lot of ground but included a few key exchanges that spoke volumes about Zuckerberg’s inability to grasp the scale of the problems that his creature now poses for society.

…I can see only three explanations for it. One is that Zuckerberg is a sociopath, who wants to have as much content – objectionable or banal – available to maximise user engagement (and therefore revenues), regardless of the societal consequences. A second is that Facebook is now so large that he sees himself as a kind of governor with quasi-constitutional responsibilities for protecting free speech. This is delusional: Facebook is a company, not a democracy. Or third – and most probably – he is scared witless of being accused of being “biased” in the polarised hysteria that now grips American (and indeed British) politics.

Sonnad again:

Facebook’s value system has diverged from that of the rest of society—the result of its myopic focus on connecting everyone however possible, consequences be damned.

With that in mind, the thread running through Facebook’s numerous public-relations disasters starts to become clear. Its continued dismissal of activists from Sri Lanka and Myanmar imploring it to do something about incitements of violence. Its refusing to remove material that calls the Sandy Hook massacre a “hoax” and threatens the parents of murdered children. Its misleading language on privacy and data-collection practices.

Facebook seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill.

That blindness is already having terrible consequences. For example, the violence in Myanmar that  Sonnad refers to is attempted genocide. The UN human rights chief there, Markuzi Darusman, told reporters that social media had “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media.” There are many individual tragedies too, such as people driven to suicide by howling online mobs. And of course social media has been fundamental in the rise of the far right and associated violence.

We’re going to look back on this social media age with horror.

Yet more evidence of the malign influence of US money on UK media and politics. Hope Not Hate analysed social media support for neo-nazi poster child Tommy Robinson and – surprise! – discovered that it’s overwhelmingly from foreigners.

Only 40 per cent of the tweets using those hashtags came from UK users while 35 per cent of posts were from the US with the remainder split between countries including Australia, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand and Netherlands.

Meanwhile Steve Bannon, the man who was too right-wing for Trump and who aims to spark a far-right revolt in Europe, has been having discussions with Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

“I’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven,” he says.

Photo by Elekes Andor, CC BY-SA 4.0