Modern truth is not just outpaced by fiction, it can be bypassed altogether as part of a sound political strategy or as a central requirement of a media business plan. In an illuminating exchange with the Guardian last week, Arron Banks, the wealthy donor partly responsible for the Brexit campaign, explained leave’s media strategy thus: “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

"So Facebook is not responding to the demands of fickle users who don’t like Upworthy links. Instead Facebook is effectively producing fickle consumers (whose one-dimensional attention span is ever shallower) to drive harder bargains with those who want to sponsor News Feed posts and have them show up more prominently. By design, the algorithm exhausts us on successful content types and renders them boring, redundant, overexposed. The newsfeed algorithm destroys organic reach so that Facebook can sell reach in the form of sponsored posts.

The eradication of “substance, nuance, sadness, and anything that provoked thought“ from News Feed content is the prerequisite to make ads acceptable as content there. It is not an unfortunate unintended consequence; it is the premise that makes News Feed work as it is supposed to, as an ad conduit. The algorithm is there to make the News Feed into commercial broadcast television and to guarantee a suitably passive audience for it. Like TV has long done, they’re just giving the people what they want."

"The war between peer review and metrics is a phoney one. The real war is between those who believe that values of respect and trust, mutuality and solidarity, should guide the behaviour of universities, and academics, and those who are determined to impose an impoverished and impoverishing market ideology in higher education."

"Metrics, and still more altmetrics, are far too crude to measure the quality of science. To hope to do that without reading the paper is pie in the sky (even reading it, it’s often impossible to tell)."

What if all UK institutions made a stand against global rankings, and stopped using them for promotional purposes?

Oh FFS. Google are ****s with vast power and zero accountability. Stop trying to play them at a game in which they make up the rules as they go along as if you're playing a game of chess with a friend.

"Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm’s length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first. Some of those historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme. But they will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, perhaps you’d better think again."