Minority Report

Jews for Scotland

2012-01-17T14:00:00.000Z

"..I like being in Britain with Scotland in it, as someone with my kind of background".

David Aaronovitch from Dateline London

I don't want to make too much of this statement, and the blog title is not a serious one*. David Aaronovitch is a liberal, right-of-centre columnist. He isn't a signatory to the Euston manifesto, but he is a blood brother. He may have a typical London Jewish background, but he is publicly atheist - all of which I can relate to. I'm sure I understand his statement to mean that it is more comfortable for minorities to live in a country not defined by a race or creed (like, em, Israel), and that a union of countries better exemplifies this.

But I'm afraid that is a very strange yoke to throw around the Scots. Very kind as that would be, nevertheless the Scottish have no responsibility to help the English be more cosmopolitan. Indeed the Scots have every right to become a little more flag flying and partial as their inevitable independence would encourage. There will still be as many Scots in London, no matter what currency is used in Edinburgh. In fact, I suspect more bright Scots will head for London if they are forced to narrow their identity.

There isn't much doubt about the strength of London as a trading nation and liberal force is due to the relative comfort afforded to folk without deep Anglo roots. And London, as one of the main cog's of the UK, has indeed broken free of any English/British questions and is just another World City.

Elsewhere, there has been a confusion between British values and English values - but that is because England has been part of Britain within folk memory. Arguments about relative value of "the North" vs "the South" may well get a bit more heated. Behind this, we all recognise that the great unifying force of World War II will finally dissolve for the next generation.

But if we haven't persuaded the Scots after this length of time that they are better off in a union, then one side or the other must be deluding themselves. So it would be better if the divorce were amicable, giving us more time to persuade Wales to stay put.

(*There is, rather oddly, a Jews for Jesus organisation, and the post title is really a play on that.)

Man of the Year

2011-12-25T11:53:00.001Z

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States magazine Time that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year"

You may laugh at the pointless sexism implied by "Man of the Year", and of course it is now "Person". When do you think they made the change? After 1952 when the Queen was selected? No. 1999. And that year, they picked a man.

And this year, it is not a man or woman, but a generic "Protester". This is not the first time the editors twigged that the anachronism wasn't working. In 2006 the winner was "You". In 1982 it was "the Computer".

One thing this silly award has proved is how the internet has usurped the idea that history is carried exclusively by the genius of a few individuals. In the end, Barack Obama was selected in 2008 because of what that represented: white people voting for a black president.

In the past, fate or good organisation attempted to place the best minds into influential positions. Great progress in any sphere was only possible when brilliant individuals held sway. Darwinian selection formed the aristocracy from those who were good with horses and spiked sticks.

This wasn't a good thing, it was a sad necessity. Many millions of great minds were wasted because they couldn't record their thoughts, or get to positions of influence. But as the excellent may be able to do a magnitude more than the merely very good, this made sense in times of limited communication.

But these times have long past. No modern society or enterprise, whether democratic or not, need invest a single person with any form of ultimate responsibility. A visible titular head helps to avoid invisible influences, but we don't expect any more than pleasant words from leaders, and maybe some negotiation skills. "Leaders" are still paid handsomely, because it would be too self defeating not to. But when we were told that the then president Ronald Reagan had a lot of naps while in the Oval Office, this was just a genuine indication that the Leader of the Free World was mainly there to tick boxes when asked to do so.

To maintain an all powerful leader today is to be at a terrible disadvantage. Somebody usually has the job of saying "yes" or "no", but any issue should be framed in such a way that the decision is trivial. The real work is moulding the issues correctly. In many ways, modern leaders are correct in seeing their real job as managing presentation. If one last person is left to make a vital decision, the organisation is already failing.

While there will always be the odd amazing scientist or researcher who simply restates problems in amazing new ways, in general science builds on itself - so to select a scientist is to celebrate the tip of the iceberg.

The human condition is very much to look upwards in a hierarchy. Your parents. Your older brother. Your teacher. Your manager. Your god. Some imply guidance (the transfer of experience) some imply submission (the transfer of responsibility). These one to one relationships mean less and less as the nodes get further. I don't gain anything from my teacher's teacher. Grandparents are respected, but mainly because they help to explain our parents. And most religions place their deity at the root of all things and don't accept a god of gods. The loss of a close relationship always hurts, but the top of an inverted tree should be easily replaceable. To this extent, Premier league football clubs are right to replace managers regularly; they only have a substantial effect on the team if the team believes it.

I don't expect Time magazine to ditch their award - but we can look forward to some strange "People of the Year" in the future: quangos, social networks, buildings, brands, space; maybe even editors.

I'm on the train

2011-11-24T20:48:00.001Z

One of the sad things that the Leveson inquiry has brought up is the number of times that victims of phone "hacking" have blamed those close to them for the release of information, unaware that their own voice mails - taken illicitly by journalists - had betrayed them. While the case of the Dowler family is uniquely evil, it is the stories of B-list celebrities that are illuminating.

If you are missing a vital piece of information, you may well end up coming to a conclusion that you would not otherwise have arrived at. In many cases this leads to embarrassment but few consequences. Most families can relate stories of the "it was the dog that ate it after all" type, usually remembered best by the injured party.

The vital piece of information that some of the injured parties in the Leveson inquiry were missing is that a mobile phone does not solely create a direct connection to someone else's ear. A phone is part device and part service. Media intrusion by phone "hacking" is pernicious, but it isn't black magic. You wouldn't protect your front door with a 4 number combination lock, with the combination "1234".

This type of digital dysphasia is remarkably common. An email does not create a direct connection to a single other person's screen. A message in Facebook does not transfer itself directly to the minds of your friends. If I send a CD of sensitive government information over the post, there is no guarantee it will end up on only the recipient's laptop.

This has nothing to do with security; most communication tools and services are not particularly designed with security in mind. That comes a long way behind price and convenience. Indeed, social internet services are designed to increase connections. The slogan information wants to be free is not so much a call to arms as a reminder of what the gains of open communications are.

For most of human history, societies depended on a tiny set of great men and woman to make huge leaps. But only by luck or inherited wealth did their ideas come to light. (If you are still under the illusion that great people somehow rise mysteriously to the top, then it probably is worth reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.) One hopes that mobile phones and the useful bits of the internet make it easier for good ideas and brains to be discovered - wherever they are and whoever has them.

Secure private communication is something that those who are no longer anonymous believe they need. The annoying man who speaks loudly on his phone in a railway carriage has got one thing right; because he is anonymous, his public wittering does not effect his privacy. You neither know nor care who he is or who he is talking to. Similarly, using Gmail doesn't effect your privacy, even though your message content will be scanned. Because so are a billion other messages.

The best way to ensure privacy in a public world also has nothing to do with security. Refer to people you know and places you go to with pet names. Use in-jokes. All of which most of us do anyway. Think about a management meeting and the indecipherable acronyms and meaningless project names used. Who could benefit from that?

There is privacy, even if everyone is listening.

Back from the ill behaviour

2011-11-06T01:35:00.000Z

One thing I haven't done before is blog directly about my individual experiences. I don't like to give too much extra credibility to something purely because "I was there". You don't see much of the world just through your own eyes.

But my two week hospital stay courtesy of the NHS gave me a little view on Britain as seen from one of its most contentious institutions.

I entered hospital for the first time as an adult because a GP who had never seen me before said "I didn't look well", correctly ignoring my flu like symptoms. 72 hours later I was waking from a life saving operation. Along with the various tubes attached to me, I was wheeled back to my ward to start recovering.

As a patient, your bed is an island within the sea of chaos that is the hospital ward. Nurses maintain a vigil, day and night, checking your vital signs as well as dispensing pain relief. Orderlies support the nurses with the more physical duties like giving a patient a shave. Porters steam in, pick up patients and steam off to get an x-ray. Cleaners float about scrubbing and mopping any exposed surface. Junior doctors follow senior consultants like ducklings as they do their rounds. Phlebs surface from the depths and take more blood. Food and refreshments arrive on a large trolley. And all this happens with no apparent orchestration.

The sense of hierarchy and purpose in a hospital feels timeless. I suspect Florence Nightingale would be quite at home on a ward today. But because everyone is always needed, there is no obvious tension between the staff roles. For instance, with the fear of MRSA, a cleaner is not seen as lowly - rather a vital defender of holy cleanliness. Everyone scrupulously cleans their hands coming in and out of a ward.

The ethnic mix working in this outer London hospital is familiar and updated. The bulk of nurses are Irish and Caribbean, with a good few Filipinos and the occasional Australian accent. The junior doctors are mainly Asian - Indian or Chinese. (There are too few consultants to make any type of generalisation.) Orderlies and Porters are often East European. Indigenous Brits seem most evident in support medical staff - physios, councillors, admin etc. This is just a rough sketch of course; I asked one junior doctor where she came from, and she replied Mauritius. It could be that a flood of immigrants have rushed to take all available NHS work - but the truth is almost certainly that well off Brits just don't see themselves working long term in the caring profession.

This mix of backgrounds encourages a functional spoken English, free from the bureaucratic corpspeak found in most NHS written communication. Yes, there are the obvious cultural nuances that can clearly cause problems. For example, there is no point asking the older generation of British men if they are "ok" - they will demurely respond with a polite "yes, thank you". Even if they are in fact about to expire.

The octogenarian opposite me was told that he could go home the next day. During a care worker interview he made it clear he had no regular help, but blithely stated he would be fine. But I knew he frequently forgot where and when he was, and had difficulty getting to the chair next to his bed without assistance. Fortunately a second set of care workers were more assiduous and delayed his release.

The food really wasn't that bad - it naturally has to be biased towards being appetizing to the largest audience. This probably edges out healthier, but less familiar food. It is true that there seems little observation as to whether a patient is eating or not.

One of the bigger questions facing the NHS is how it can successfully accept IT. Something in the DNA of the service makes it immune to government initiatives, especially the large ambitious sort.

I was certainly asked the exact same questions by different staff about six or seven times. Even taking into account that asking questions is often a ploy to check the patients state of mind, it became obvious that data once given was not necessarily recorded. My immediate thoughts were "give everyone a bloody iPad".

A week or so after leaving, I was back, waiting for an outpatient appointment. I saw a man pushing a trolley full of fraying yellow folders, each stuffed with patient records - usually hand written notes. The trolley was being pushed around to distribute these patient files. It is hard to imagine such a disrespect for information.

Actually, I didn't have to imagine. Sitting behind his desk, my appointed doctor noticed that the folder with my name on the cover actually contained someone else's files. He said to the nurse "this isn't good". No sir, it was not. The correct folder was found ten minutes later - but the appointment was cancelled anyway because there was no report available for a scan I had only taken the day before.

So, hurrah for the NHS. There is no doubt that the system that brought together a set of professionals with minimal information on a Sunday in order to operate on me definitely works. It probably does not work in a way that a management consultant would appreciate, but a little like many institutions, it works around it's own shortcomings. When we decide what modern Britain should look like, perhaps it can be coaxed to fit in.

But if you do find yourself having to stay for a couple of weeks in hospital, I have only one bit of advice - bring a Kindle.

Elite

2011-09-26T16:26:00.000+01:00

While I'm happy to support the Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment, this is a good example of an issue not particularly suited to mass support. I might have a moral aversion to state termination, but with no direct experience with the type of people likely to be executed, their victims or their executioners, I'm just an onlooker. My current outlook could - in theory - be altered by experience. Similarly, the people that wanted "Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister” may not have actually met him, or the many thousands that detest him.

The e-petitions site briefly appears to be a welcome introduction to direct democracy:

e-petitions is an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK. You can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be eligible for debate in the House of Commons.

Anything? The petitions on view quickly descends into duplication and nonsense. Similar sounding propositions sit next to each other splitting attention. Reasons for rejection are carefully logged, but many of the allowed petitions have little concrete meaning.

The random nature of the entries (and the proud lack of curation) suggests that it was designed as a participation sport. In short, people want to see their suggestions on a list – to see the process work for them.

A quick look at wikipedia tells you that a set of informed articles does not appear purely because people want to see their words reflected back at them. Mass online participation does not lead to coherent action unless the intention is already there. (According to http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2011/09/fixmytransport-yes-please, the Scottish system is tighter)

Direct democracy is about choosing between a set of balanced propositions. Creating the right propositions requires experience not numbers. There is no hypocrisy here - democracy isn't some sort of riposte to conspiracy theorists; not every wild flight of fancy can or should be framed into a valid law. Yes, you need an elite to weigh common opinion.

Parliamentary democracy was a successful implementation of this elite; it has only failed recently because the 600 or so MPs no longer appear to have any role in government decisions. And if they do, their opinions must be filtered through party politics.

It is quite possible that the immaturity of the e-petition idea is a stick with which to beat and destroy it (again). But it is not a step in any useful direction .

The threshold of 100,000 signatures before a Backbench Business Committee gets to decide whether it should be debated assumes that whimsy cannot happen en masse. But various Twitter and Facebook campaigns have regularly proved this incorrect.

Indeed a web based petition seems to represent a response to events, not a crucible for good law. To quote from an article by Natasha Engel MP:

The petition [to axe looters' benefits] was a reflection of the anger and frustration that people felt after the riots. But we didn't need an arbitrary threshold of 100,000 signatures to tell us that law-abiding people were furious.

None of this diminishes the need for direct democracy to intercede in our presidential government. But this approach isn't progressive.

Cornish

2011-09-04T15:35:00.000+01:00

As the rebels take control in Libya, and the Gaddafi family take their last stand, now is the right time to question the role of the West in this enterprise.

Initially it seemed that we backed the equivalent of the Cornish National Liberation Army to overrun London; an arbitrary grouping whose only qualification was dislike of the government.

But after reading the article Who really beat Qaddafi? I'm ready to accept the two main points that Clay Claiborne makes. Firstly, that we should know the rebel Libyans, due to the plethora of internet media about them. And secondly that the West has taken too much credit for a revolution that was going to happen anyway.

I remember turning on the news to see cheering rebels in Tripoli's Green Square, even though 24 hours earlier commentators were suggesting progress to the capital was slow. The sudden conversion of Tripoli from Gaddafi supporting heartland to rebel held bastion indicates that the mainstream media reports on the ground were inaccurate, and that revolution was well prepared. Whatever amateurish behavior we were shown weeks ago from yahoos in jeeps was a misdirection.

This leads to the likely reason for the latest Middle East escapade; that the West wanted to reduce the time between the predicted collapse of the dictator and a new government taking charge so as to keep oil resources running smoothly. Again, given the speed of natural regime change during this Arab Spring, you can see the logic in this from a skittish corporate world.

While hoping that Libyans achieve some measure of security, David Cameron and the other Gung ho leaders will now be seeking their reflected glory. Indeed, it is hard to separate local political ambitions from their stated wishes to bring liberation. The UN mandate to stop Gaddafi striking non-military Libyans was converted into a regime change order. The security of Britain was not in question, yet by simply acting quickly very little democratic checks were put in place.

Libya is not in our geopolitical back yard. If Iran supported IRA incursions into Belfast, I think we would be the first to complain. To get involved simply because the geography made it possible – unlike in Syria – is pathetic. On reflection, the diplomats who worked with Gaddafi to stop his earlier nuclear ambitions must have believed he was not the worst thing in the area.

We have already seen several times that there is absolutely no way to install democracy from outside - assuming democracy in itself is a panacea. However happy Libyans now appear to be on rolling news, most of them have lived their lives with the idea that government has nothing to do with them personally. With the best will in the world, they will not be able to hand over their guns and increased taxes like consumer sated capitalists.

There is something very wrong with the speed at which democracies now use military interventions to gain short term poll benefits. It is almost as if by working fast, people see a tactical necessity that doesn't exist. Too many politicians simply went along with the idea that bombing a dictator's compound was part of a humanitarian mission. This presidential style of decision taking seems to have eclipsed cabinet identity, so without some form of direct democracy, continuous war is the likely future.

Paper weight

2011-07-11T02:17:00.000+01:00

In the past, the important thing about any new enterprise was its value(s); not necessarily how well it was done. Whether it was a new business, a new rock band or a new book it had to be something people would want. That is, the people you knew would want it today. What is the value proposition? Is this what people are into now? When the new daily paper The Independent launched in January 1986 in the UK, it was a perfectly conceived response to journalism and politics at the time. That was enough to secure its launch. It took a little longer for people to realize it wasn't actually very good.

One aspect of the social internet is that value is no longer something that has to be understood at the beginning of innovation. Because as long as you execute well and consistently, someone will find the value they need. Your immediate friends might not see the value in a book about a school for wizards, or a network with a message limit of 140 characters - but someone will. An audience will find you.

The quality of execution is always down to the maker, and that remains their prime responsibility. Make it work, make it fast, make it right. But you don't have to make everyone share your vision - or even have too much of a vision yourself. In fact a vision needs to be jettisoned quickly if it doesn't fit. If you think it's green but your fans think its red, then it's red. Just pivot to the new way of thinking.

The internet can quite easily grab something from the past and give it a new value. A whole set of "retro" things have been reclaimed from cultural abandon. In earlier times, it would take a half a generation or so for a forgotten artist or notable person to have his or her reputation restored.

Unfortunately the inverse is also true, something can have its value destroyed overnight. One interesting aspect of the calamity that hit News International this week was that the News of the World was killed because it was seen as a “toxic brand”.

But the marketing terminology somehow understates the problem - many people already thought the News of the World was not worth reading well before cronies were caught guessing the credentials to voice message services. If it had continued in print, it would have still made money for a while. But it would have suffered the fate of the low valued. The British motor industry lost value over decades. Eventually it was just easier for the same people, sometimes in the same factories, to make cars for foreign companies. Perhaps the News of the World would have hit notional bottom immediately.

Of course, it is the term "value" that has really changed; in the limited manner I use it here. Perceived value is no longer some type of peer reviewed, curated, academic term. That's because if you can ask thousands of people what they think in seconds, you don't need to rely on a coterie of opinion formers. The opinion formers are relegated to being just another network. So the result is something more akin to a market value. We still want to listen to subject matter experts, but only to avoid pitfalls.

Alternative

2011-04-26T01:47:00.000+01:00

Neither with First Past The Post (FPTP) or the Alternative Vote (AV), will the incumbent MP in my constituency be under any threat. Despite the poor national result for the Labour party, his share of the vote went up to a little over 50% in the last election. This could be because he is a splendid MP - though that is hard to discern as he hardly ever speaks in the House. In reality, the social makeup of a constituency decides how it votes. Living in my end of Ealing, you might initially be surprised to discover that all the candidates have South Asian names. But this is logical because the constituency includes Southall; and control of that very unique area is sufficient to control the constituency.

This situation is repeated all around the country where one cohesive group is in the majority; sometimes it's townies over villagers, farm workers over shop workers, urbanites over suburbanites. And of course most minority groups rarely get the chance to have their own MP. Under FTPT, your vote may make no material difference to the result if you don't live in a swing seat or you aren't voting with the target group. The biggest recent political victims were the SDP during the 80's. Even with 25% of the national vote, they only won a handful of seats. They were popular all over the country, but not in concentrations centered around vulnerable seats.

While Proportional Representation (PR) is designed to solve this problem, AV at least stops the wasted vote syndrome, while keeping the constituency link. The plebiscite in the UK this coming May is between keeping the current system and the "compromise candidate" of AV that the coalition agreed to let the public choose between.

But the question is, how good does democracy have to be before anyone feels fairly represented even if their choice isn't in office? Do we need to improve the democracy we have? If most people are willing to follow the law, society is stable - everyone benefits. But beyond this, Britain uses very little democracy in practice.

Most of the leaders in the last 30 years have been self-detached from their parties, preferring a presidential model. This helps to mitigate against the fact that their parties may only have minority national support. Of course, the Tory-Liberal coalition wasn't even an option at any poll. Additionally, fewer policies are actually put into manifestos. You can't vote for or against a policy that is only revealed after an election.

A few weeks ago, David Cameron agreed to send in jets to bring about regime change in Libya. This was on the back of a very legitimate humanitarian intervention, which has now become mired in problems. When he helped to urge this action in the UN, very few people knew he had any interest in foreign intervention at all. Given that Libya does not threaten the UK, and that Colonel Qaddafi was treated as a trade partner not an enemy, it is unfortunate that no part of this decision has in any way been democratically tested. As more questions about how this is supposed to work get asked, it is hard to see how this type of action can remain legitimate.

We don't have so much democracy in this country that we can afford to reject any reasonable chances to extend it. For this reason, I would hope Britain votes yes to AV.

Day of the Triffids

2011-03-22T23:37:00.005Z

Science Fiction is an entertaining way to write about social politics, often with robots and lasers. It sets up extreme situations with no parallels in real life, and watches what happens to the fictional characters trapped within its pages. Whether we get a child manipulated into committing genocide through a virtual world, a rogue who uses his mutant ability to control emotions and run an empire or a spaceship manned by dolphins, sci-fi can cover some interesting (if convoluted) possibilities. Most serious novelists shy away from it, but there is more to imagination than middle class suburban angst.

The Day of the Triffids sets up a classic scenario by colliding two improbable events; first, that man would breed giant aggressive plants for their vegetable oil, and then an unexplained meteor shower would blind everyone that watched it. Now the slow walking plants have the measure of a crippled humanity.

Does this controversial risk followed by a disaster sound familiar?

Compare the triffids to nuclear power. Compare the blinding fireworks to a 9 magnitude earthquake followed by a 10m high tsunami hitting coastal Japan. Of course, John Wyndham was more interested in how society - polite British society, naturally - could re-assert itself in the face of very bad luck.

But the Japanese people have accepted their disaster movie events with the very definition of stoicism. Many aspects of Japanese life have ossified since the heady days when Nippon was on top of the world. Many parts of Japanese public life are too secretive, with a government that seems extraordinarily inflexible and introverted given how rich the nation still is.

The Fukushima nuclear reactor problems have come after one of the worst tsunami death tolls in history. And yet the ancient reactors, which are not much evolved from electric kettles, did not melt down to the Earths core, or poison the country for a thousand years. With no malice, the world's press were fearing a catastrophe, but none has come.

The story rumbles on; leaking radioactivity is still an invisible threat that will turn up uninvited in water and food for a while longer. But it seems that the real story is how difficult it has been to get aide to the tidal effected villages. In this context, the problems in Fukushima are more macabre sideshow than main event.

The infrastructure of modern life - mobile communication, social media - mitigates against the isolation that many fiction disaster scenarios describe. TV news has a choice of videos to show of the wave coming in; this will never be a forgotten event.

And after a cold hard look at the situation, I suspect a lot of governments will realize that nuclear power should remain part of the modern energy source mix. As George Monbiot pointed out in his Damoscene conversion, given the size of the disaster, nuclear power has not proved unworkably dangerous. At present it is wind, solar and wave power that remain the real science fiction.

2011-02-05T19:42:00.002Z

A security conference is a strange place to argue that the UK needs a stronger national identity to prevent extremism. That any prime minister is willing to make speeches with structured content is fairly remarkable. Admirably, David Cameron turned on his own right wing by rejecting Islamophobia without exception.

That he has only just noticed that multiculturalism is moribund is not so impressive; he is about five years late. In trying to work out what the "problem" is with Islam, he struck on odd chord with disruptive events in the Middle East. What makes a peaceable nigger, turn against his rightful Master?

In the UK , some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practiced at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity.

Ignoring the guff about Islam, those last ten words stand out on their own as an issue. See, we don't really do identity here. You are just British; you don't talk about it.

By the turn of the previous century most people living in the UK would broadly think of themselves as Christian, rationalist, both, or too poor to have time for philosophy. That is, if asked one of the "why are we here" type questions, they would have mentioned "Jesus", "for Queen and country", or similar. Progress was seen as a positive thing, and the Christian message was still being sent to all corners of the Earth.

By comparison we are now all educated and well fed, but faith in either science or religion is receding. And no one lives for the good of any monarch. Outside work and family, there maybe little holding up the sky. This means the audience receptive to vivid messages that drown out the background hum is probably growing.

Back home, we’re introducing National Citizen Service: a two-month programme for sixteen-year-olds from different backgrounds to live and work together. I also believe we should encourage meaningful and active participation in society, by shifting the balance of power away from the state and towards the people. That way, common purpose can be formed as people come together and work together in their neighbourhoods.

Islamic firebrands could be replaced by cup cakes or Jeremy Clarkson. Anything self consistent and substantive. I'm not sure it is the government's job to artificially fill the void, but the idea that a raft of proposals to Anglify hapless immigrants will somehow fill their lives with missing rapture is foolish. But if only we could keep the ~~peaceable niggers~~ moderate Muslims from turning bad, would that not be ideal?

One hopes that any immigrant culture will do its part to re-energize the host. Most Irish and black Britons can attest to early teething problems, but we all get along just fine now. Plus our construction industry is better, and our food spicier. I see nothing to convince me that a bunch of Etonians has any great moral compass to help steer troubled Asians to calmer waters. Yes, appropriate authorities have to stop tribal absurdities and dangerous hotheads because they are incompatible with humanity, let alone Europe. But if strengthening our "collective identity" can only be done by suppressing minorities, then our arguments must be less persuasive than we believed.

The un-national

2010-12-31T13:13:00.011Z

For a quick introduction to the issue of network neutrality, the Economist is as good as any:

FOR a subject that arouses such strong passions, “network neutrality” is fiendishly difficult to pin down. Ask five geeks and you may well be given six definitions of it. The basic concept sounds simple enough: that the internet’s pipes should show no favours and blindly deliver packets of data from one place to another regardless of their origin, destination or contents. But the devil is in the detail. What happens for instance if some people want to pay for their data to go faster, or if others hog all the bandwidth? And it does not help that both political proponents and opponents of this undefinable thing claim they are fighting to defend free speech and innovation.

Indeed, recent articles from geeks such as Cory Doctorow and Robert Cringley confirm that views on network neutrality can differ.

Like most infrastructure, the internet was built with the ideal of improving communication; and the world wide web was a further improvement for human communication on top of that. Business rewards the labours of those who successfully use the internet in some innovative way. And usually the law and regulatory bodies help to protect consumers from novel abuses.

This is a similar setup to older networks like roads, power or postal services. Indeed if you buy a shiny new internet device on Amazon, you will be using these venerable services to get delivery of your new toy. Most regulatory arguments concerning the internet and how it is delivered look similar to the well worn issues of road pricing, electricity companies also selling gas, or first class and second class post. But your new toy will still get to you eventually, and probably work first time.

But there is a difference. The internet cannot naturally be restrained by national boundaries, yet is too personal to be governed by global rules. China tries to create a China only internet - a brave but ultimately losing battle. And while everyone benefits from American west coast innovation, very few are interested in American east coast regulation.

This leaves everyone with the feeling that the internet is somehow an untamable Wild West where normal boundaries and etiquette are not applicable. A gambling site can sit in a low governance country while taking money from punters in high governance nations. Inconvenient spam hits you, shot from the autonomous revolvers of shady cowboys. Material considered private, copyright or secret travels about unhindered.

The response to this is where stakeholder communities start to split. Some consider the internet as a new way of doing the same old things, and some consider it as a new thing that old ways need to take into account. Some of this difference in thinking was starkly revealed by the attempt to close down Wikileaks. The US administration tried to deal with the personalities, tried to cut off the flow of money, and tried to use political influence. For their part, Wikileaks supporters just altered the topology of the internet to go around the obstacles.

But threats to the neutrality of the internet are more likely to come from the telecoms companies that provide the service to the customer. With the attempt to "add value", the owners of the "dumb pipes" may well be encouraged to allow premium users to get a faster service.

There is no question that if I opt to pay for private medical insurance, I will inevitably weaken the existing public health provision because of my economic signalling that the market picks up and inevitably acknowledges. There is now a little more money available that could go to medical research ready to relieve my ills, and therefore a little less incentive to research those things that maybe of more interest to the rest of mankind. Hence I help create a two tier health service.

Most offerings on the web are direct to any user irrespective of nationality, and have very little or no research costs. This makes the internet even more sensitive to tiering. At least a business can choose to send its outgoing mail by first class, but a startup company can do nothing if its services are put on a "slower" lane by the customer's Internet Service Provider (ISP).

If an ISP simply adds a surcharge to your bill to discourage, or cash in on certain behaviour, neutrality is not really breached. The market will either support ISPs that try this, or not. Unlike throttling, the user cannot be bamboozled as they will see a higher bill after they were streaming video all night. New services will only suffer if they force users to suck up excessive bandwidth.

The idea that one provider will favour their own services by throttling others is something that has been seen plenty of times elsewhere and I am confident standards bodies will easily stamp that out.

I don't know whether the Post Office recognises that a letter addressed to London posted with a 1st class stamp in Germany should be delivered in the UK as first class. I don't know, but I'm sure someone does. There is a similar quality of service issue when one network hands its packets to another. And they work it out.

This leaves us with several ways to look at the internet when thinking about how problems will be solved: It is un-national (as are many of its builders); problems associated with it are usually similar to problems associated with other networks; but solutions to those problems may not look like old familiar solutions.

Dump

2010-12-05T11:19:00.002Z

The inability of much of the media to engage with anything not involving personalities can be crippling. None of the essays on "Who is Obama?" have helped us understand the man's actions in office. His personal story as a "transformational" figure is largely - figurative. He plays basketball. He bombs Afghanistan. Yes He Can. And by asking the same question of the man most associated with Wikileaks, "Who is Julian Assange?" again the media stares at the epicenter and ignores the blast.

Wikileaks, the controversial "document dump", has angered a number of governments. In response to the recent release of diplomatic cables, the US government has tried to wrench the site off the web. In their turn, sections of the internet community have tried to circumvent this. As it happens, rerouting information is something that the internet was built for, and it is slightly depressing that these basic tenets have not been understood by the nation that largely created the system in the first place. As a secondary effect, the private enabling companies that seem to have acted as government proxies may also be widely criticized.

That the community has not sought to ask questions about the politics of Wikileaks itself or the nature of the current leaks isn't some type of mass naivety. The first responsibility is to reverse the vandalism (The #imwikileaks tag shows this effect). The veracity of the information - not that that has been doubted - is a lower order problem, and a lower priority. If a film has unappealing scenes in it, you don't destroy the cinemas showing it. And you certainly don't threaten to kill the distributors.

There are serious discussions to be had on whether public information can be stolen by the public. But too much is made of the quality of this type of secrecy. While adult society requires secrecy to function, government secrecy is purely tactical and not sacrosanct. We are not talking about your father not being your father. This is about the analysis of partial information in the absence of trust. You keep your cards close to your chest, you make your play and move on. It is quite clear that diplomatic opinion was "secret" to hundreds of people; at some point the wild eyed might refer to that as a conspiracy. In playing the spying game, lives are routinely put at risk. Wikileaks can take on the responsibility for considering the consequences - but they are the whistle, not the blower. They can never get this entirely right.

This "internet community" I mention are simply those likely to value the internet as a structure over the concerns about what it is carrying. Similarly, I don't believe that traffic accidents invalidate the need for roads and transportation. To prevent the internet from becoming subject to the whims of national government, people need to state openly whether they will protect the messenger from the reactions to an unpleasant message.

No place for the curious

2010-11-06T03:12:00.004Z

I have written quite a few posts that promote the increased use of direct democracy. This seems a little hopeful given that in the UK we are only just considering the Alternative Vote. And doesn't a coalition prove that tribal politics is dead?

When Members of Parliament simply ignore what they promised to do before the election, people get rightly annoyed. But essentially, MPs have no particular reason to honour pledges based on issues, as their jobs depend on geographical support and party patronage. The coalition has actually increased this problem, offering the option for MPs, caught breaking promises, to blame their new partners for their behaviour. "I would have reduced university fees, but they said we couldn't."

But the main reason for insisting on the need for as much direct democracy as we can manage, despite recognising some of its crowd sourced woes, is that party politics is very bad for independent politicians.

MPs who don't follow party orders are allowed to fail at every opportunity. What amounts to failure today, is the inability to defend yourself against media allegation - whether justified or not. The myriad news and journalism channels that now exist keep many eyes on what politicians do. Keeping yourself clean of shit is not possible without someone to watch your back and help wash it off. MPs who wish to say things that have not been cleared by a battery of lawyers quickly find they are friendless, or adopted as lightning conductors to keep the really bad character alive a bit longer.

By contrast, MPs who can navigate the media successfully are guaranteed long and healthy careers - and are essential to support the government. The classic example is of course Peter Mandelson; he has simply not been allowed to die, despite several political deaths.

But a more sinister example is Phil Woolas. He is hardly the first home office minister to use the race card, but his tactical use during an election was unusually brazen. Only months after his victory in Oldham, his thug antics have caught up with him. Yet Ed Miliband clearly didn't believe his dubious character would make him an inappropriate choice for shadow immigration spokesman. Indeed his skill at playing both the media and his own party totally trumped any other consideration. Tellingly, many Labour party old timers are still supporting him.

A party leader must now be an expensively educacted 40 year old baby faced white man whose most important asset is that you didn't notice him two years ago. All those close to him must be able to "run interference", that is displace the media agenda if it's unfavourable. Everyone else must fend for themselves, which is well nigh impossible in the 24 hour media circus.

While this situation is not new, it has grown steadily worse over the years. Survival means joining the club. Given that character or personality flaws are fairly common in those who spend little time considering how they look to others, it is unsurprising that the curious are fast being displaced by the merely competent.

One way to puncture this is to accept the limitations of parliament and do as much outside it as possible. Direct democracy doesn't rely on the ability of the public to judge a party on how its members deal with Jeremy Paxman. It forces issue based debates - which help to highlight those with genuine ideas. Considering new ways to elect the same MPs does nothing, on its own, to stop the steady collapse of political life.

Cheesemakers

2010-09-29T13:25:00.003+01:00

It took me a little time to appreciate what a good chess player means by "the truth of a position". Chess is completely open, there is no hidden information. What you see on the board is surely always "true". Of course, the players are struggling with what they understand to be their future potential in the game. Or more likely, how screwed they actually are.

When The Master Game was aired in the 80s, it famously introduced player commentary to a televised chess game. As the commentary was added afterwards, it usually took the form of an internal monologue based on whatever was going through the mind of the player at the time. In the case of top Grandmasters this was often rapid move combinations, or fairly elliptical stuff to us average players.

But the reason the commentary was added was ultimately because the producers knew that humans need a narrative to understand fluid situations. That narrative doesn't have to be strictly true, and indeed can be better as fiction. But we seem to link events together best through stories.

In theory politicans tell us what they think, and we get to measure their actions later to examine any "truth". But most analysis is being replaced by journalistic narrative.

By example, take Andrew Rawnsley and his claim that Gordon Brown was a bully. He had a book to sell, and this looked like the hottest issue. The media were onto it immediately.

Almost every cabinet minister or member of Brown's team when interviewed, whether partisan or not, flatly denied he was a bully. Some thought the accusation foolish, others just refuted it plainly. Rawnsley continued to back up his own narrative with observations like "Brown is a hulking figure" as if that would change the facts.

Indeed, Brown is pretty big, and is not visually pleasing. He clearly didn't get into power by schmoozing. There were regular accusations that he put his weight about in a political sense, and Blair confirmed he was extremely difficult to work with at times - but this does not segue into stealing lunch money.

So many people were asked to verify whether he was a bully or not that eventually they simply stopped worrying about the question and just added to the narrative. "No he wasn't a bully, but once he accidentally brushed me aside in the hallway", replied one colleague.

Brown was perceived as a somewhat tragic figure, and Rawnsley's narrative helped us to understand a complex person - through a fictitious device. This is after all what satire has done from Private Eye to Spitting Images. But usually satire tries to focus on the politically relevant.

Made up narrative gets us even further down the path of politics reduced to a story about leaders. And finally just stories about stories. We have recently seen a party leader immersed in a narrative about brotherly feuds. The coalition government has already earned comparisons with a gay cowboy art house film.

Many of the stories seem Biblical in nature - or at least fairly primal. Maybe if a man or woman can be linked with a character from the good book, then what they do or think can be ignored. However boring politics actually is, "Blessed are the cheesemakers" will not help improve public understanding of governance. It just moves Parliament deeper into irrelevance.

Out

2010-08-24T01:28:00.008+01:00

In an interesting experiment on how children learn, a web terminal is mounted in a hole in a wall in a remote part of India. After a while, kids gather around it and teach themselves how to use it - see Sugatra Mitra's talk from TED. This is a very different scenario from a class room teacher lecturing the quiescent pupil. No motivation or evangelism needed. What caught my attention was the term "outdoctrination" to describe this process, and how the spread of information was related to other complex systems - like violent radicalism.

Drop from your mind, if you can, the latest NWO definition of which Muslim is a terrorist this week. Instead, think about any group who have taken up arms or explosives against the state in the last 50 years.

Modern terrorism can no longer be spread by indoctrination, as a cell cannot organise by waiting for weak willed people to turn up at their door. That recruitment style would succeed only in attracting counter surveillance operatives.

Outdoctrination seems a much better description of how like minded people, probably remote in location, self organise. While a charismatic tutor or leader helps, ultimately it is down to individuals to see if the view of the world as seen by the group matches their own.

The vanilla definition of a terrorist describes an individual who selectively uses violence to support a political cause. That dry viewpoint says nothing about a journey from frustration or desperation to some kind of twisted expression. Would be terrorists 'self actualize' - hence the success of the internet as a tool to fan the sparks.

This makes terrorism more "social" in nature. Intelligence organisations have observed that the apparent leaders are not necessarily the "influencers"; it is often drivers or bodyguards who have more contacts on their iPhones. The effectiveness of terror groups is not down to how many nutcases they have, but to how pervasive their network really is.

The more society defines itself from a central point, the more radical groups are free to roam the dissatisfied fringes. As daft as allowing citizens to arm themselves to the hilt maybe, America has suffered little internal terrorism over the years partly because gun ownership is not an expression of radicalism - quite the opposite.

And if it is easier to find the aims of Al-Qaeda using Google than it is to find out which way your local government representative is likely to vote on any issue, then it is easy to see which system will best exploit the other.

Another casual intrusion

2010-07-20T23:30:00.006+01:00

The inherent evils of the Digital Economy Act (DEA) have been thoroughly documented - and in one case licked - by the great and the good in many places. And now there is a reasonable hope that the law can be repealed.

So why was this law created by our previous administration? And where does it belong in the canon of New Labour's other casual intrusions?

One of the best ways to exercise power is to create a rift between a body of people who might otherwise coalesce and attack you. The DEA is a wonderful example of this, as it places a lever between those whose livelihood depends on the assertion of copyrights, and those who want to encourage the growth of the internet through user content.

Very few "content creators" can calmly hold their nerve and preach fair play when they perceive that their pockets are being picked by freeloaders. While this does not, and never will justify the cursory removal of the internet from a household, even skilled liberal politicians have had difficulty separating fact from fear. For such is the divisive genius of Lord Peter Mandelson.

At some level, New Labour identified loftily held "rights" as a weak spot for liberals. Think about how the denial of nuclear weapons was used as a baton to the head of old Labour. As liberals tried to defend rights that were about to be eroded, New Labour sniped them at leisure - usually via the tabloids. The right to free association? Only kiddy fiddlers support that. The right to equal treatment by the law? Only suicide bombers support that. The right to anonymity in public? Only thieves support that.

And the right to unfettered access to the internet? Only pirates support that. In true Stalinist fashion, New Labour used its natural enemies to attack its friends. Because when energy dissipates, ruling by division is easier than ruling by consensus.

This is not to say that the Guardians of the Internet are blameless. As Andrew Keen has made a career from pointing out, the crowd is not always something you should try to follow or accommodate. In talking about rights protection, many commentators who should have known better elided the consequences of liberalisation. The consequence is often that one party gets to commoditize someone elses work. Google mugs the content Robin Hoods on a daily basis.

When the correct business models find their levels, the pay walls come down and we all learn to love the because effect, memories of the DEA and its twisted sisters will vanish. But today we are left with yet another disproportionate law whose origin lies in chaos.

David Cameron communicates to prostitues

2010-05-29T22:56:00.002+01:00

"Roxanne"

Roxanne
You don't have to put on the red light
It is an inefficient way to signal trade intentions
And you should record your productive liaisons in a more auditable fashion

Roxanne
You don't have to wear such revealing clothing
While we may revisit decriminalisation
Your conduct is contrary to community standards of justice, honesty and good morals

Roxanne
You don't have to put on the red light

I understand the context of your actions
I have no reason to doubt your basic intentions
But I have to tell you how my party views this
I won't allow your to besmirch our social record
I know my cabinet is at one with this
So please reconsider your future monetary strategy
As I have already stated
It's not a viable way to commence

Roxanne
You don't have to put on the red light
Roxanne
Consider a trade whose remuneration is less risk intensive

Casual intrusions

2010-05-16T18:19:00.015+01:00

I think we were too casual about the intrusions of the state and should have taken civil liberties issues more seriously

Ed Miliband

Given the long list of "intrusions", both large and small, it is worth considering how we got here. Why did a group of people who believed they had a mandate to produce a fairer society, end up degrading human rights so much?

It is instructive to compare what happened to two MPs after they made small libertarian gaffs. Shortly before Gordon Browns premiership, Jack Straw suggested that Muslim women should not wear veils, because they "inhibit inter-community relations". A few months ago, Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, suggested that B+B owners should have the right to turn away gay couples.

Both of these comments were designed as semaphores to a tabloid audience, not an uncommon practice for MPs needing to expand their support. In both cases, the wrong bits of the media picked up on them and some little embarrassment ensued.

But there the similarity ends. Chris Grayling was denied any cabinet position in the first Tory administration for 13 years. Jack Straw was appointed Secretary of State for Justice.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear

In the 70's, I remember hearing that the police in Spain, still under Francos influence, would arrest people for just staring at them. I thought that was ridiculous and surely untrue. Now, I live in a country where it ls illegal to film the police.

The events of 9/11 seemed to be a trigger for those who saw a new and original danger to Western society. Not content with stopping the terrorists and their backers, they wanted the public to take part in a crusade. Tony Blair made some strange and rambling speeches about the new terrorism, but in hindsight, these were overlooked; there were after all some valid security fears.

Partly under the auspices of involvement in the War on Terror, a number of liberty busting measures started to seep into law. Maybe some think tank felt that we were somehow living in a "liberty excess". More likely, it was probably just that the part of the electorate that would whine most were already lost to the New Labour project.

After the 2005 suicide bombings in London, far from calming people down, the government ramped up the fear levels - while taking little effort to investigate what actually took place.

This paranoia reached a peak with the shooting of an unarmed electrician in Stockwell underground. The accidental assassination of Jean Charles de Menezes was treated as a casualty of war, despite the fact we were not at war. But what many people picked up on was the attempt to push this as "the new normal".

It is a little easier in hindsight to see that Britain is not infested with Saudi trained and financed terror cells just waiting for a man in a distant cave to give them the word. The state must play a careful role in security and cannot really act transparently. So we trade some of our freedom in the hope that this will benefit security.

On its side, the government relished removing liberties, as if their bonuses depended on it. The Home Office was told repeatedly in public and in private that ID cards would in no way deliver improved security. But they proudly stuck to it. Arbitrarily increasing the days that a suspect could be detained without trial was a poker game played with human rights.

I have heard well meaning activists point out that CCTV has improved the conditions in many unruly housing estates. And of course it features heavily in just about every public space. While it is a little odd to see a socially progressive government seek to do no more than increase convictions, the idea that only the symptoms should be treated should alarm everyone.

Of course the corollary of the individual having a little less power, is that the state has a little more. And maybe that was all it was ever about? This post was getting too long, so I will try and make a follow up.

Lobby

2010-03-19T13:35:00.007Z

"How can our listeners fight back against the digital economy bill?"

So asked the host, in a podcast about the passage of 'debill' - an informative commentary given by a thoughtful Liberal Democrat MP. The question probably seemed like a natural one.

What the music industry will do in the face of a generation who don't view digital anything as a premium product is fascinating. Attempting to wave a legal club at the internet in general, and unauthorized downloading of copy written material in particular is an undignified response to the slow death of parts of the entertainment industry. But, whatever enticements Lord Mandelson might have received from worried media barons, the problems - even defining what they might be - will not be solved by party inspired legislation. A bill, one of whose key areas is to "extend the range of video games that are subject to age-related classification" may well be no more than an expression of one generations exasperation with its own progeny.

And the reply given in the podcast to what listeners could do? The answer was what you would expect from a politician. "Election coming", "lobby your MP", "best time to make them focus" etc. Yeah, sure.

My MP, whose selection depends on picking up the large batch of Asian voters in Southall, doesn't appear to have any interests in the digital economy - or in fact much at all given his attendence record.

Party politics revolves around jockeying into position to form the next government. There is little time to handle what are often called "single issues". When fox hunting was banned, this was a loud bellow from the bowels of an old class based hatred. So despite that fact that almost no one cared about animal welfare, toffs chasing vermin generated intense interest between the parties. But that was the exception that proved the rule - in most cases, issues that are local, and simple enough for MPs to give direct answers to are few and far between.

If I advocate direct democracy, it is not because I have some wide eyed belief in the wisdom of crowds. A political representative is a nice idea, somewhere up there with a personal shopper or a personal trainer. But I wouldn't waste one minute writing missives to an MP unless I was communicating within the bounds of his or her attention span, understanding and interest. If we separate the formation of government from the forming of legislation, then we might stop asking an MP who knows instinctively how to reduce the cost of social services, about the legality of invading a Middle Eastern nation, or whether a child of 10 can be evil.

Control of the internet is one of the many issues that is above and beyond the remit of a constituency MP. No one gained their seat in the last election promising to stop the illegal downloading of Desperate Housewives. Expert committees can be formed around willing members, and with so many MPs, every topic will have an advocate - but it's a very indirect route. I cannot, or course, simply vote for an MP whom I happen to agree with.

Of course, those media barons will pay MPs via the lobby to represent their interests - but this leapfrogs democracy altogether. Indeed, it is one set of stakeholders barricading themselves against the interests of another. There is no efficient way for us to say "as a stakeholder of the interenet, I do not consent to my government stifling a utility it did not create, while acting as proxy for a corporate interest". There will be demonstrations from enlightened geeks, but we know full well these will be ignored - or worse.

Until there is a valid direct way to connect opinion to legislation, at some level there will be disinterest in Westminster politics. And disinterest is not always neutral.

New Model Armies

2010-01-10T20:13:00.007Z

Since Cromwell forged an army ran under professional lines, not as a gentleman's club, a national army has been an expensive instrument of the state. Indeed the needs of the military were the main drivers for mass production of goods.

Today, with consumer society driving production, the military no longer have the buying power. Now the US Air Force buy Playstations and links them together to make an ad hoc supercomputer; snipers use trajectory programs on their iPhones and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are using theirs to run translation software. Maybe this is the "military consumer" complex. Look at this toy and how indistinguishable it is from a UAV scout drone.

The military consumer superstar is the AK-47; in many troubled areas, this is easier to get hold of than a stapler. It isn't accurate - but it is simple, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to clean and maintain. These are largely consumer benefits, not so much military ones.

When soldiers had only face to face communication, discipline was important - today mobile phones have removed the need for rigid command hieracrhy. Indeed a small unit can switch from civilian to paramilitary and back simply by reading text message orders, picking up hidden arms, hitting their targets and then returning their arms to the cache and clocking back in to their day jobs. All of this without meeting the person giving the orders.

In the same way that a terrorist cell can easily form around a minimum amount of expertise, now a security service can morph into a small armed unit without much fuss. This reality is usually masked by terminology to avoid embarrassing questions. Look at the term "policing". While we understand the police to be a strictly civil an public entity, "policing" seems to be done by private military entities in the Middle East. And "military advisor" also seems to be an underhand term used to explain similar things.

Is the US planning to fight more future wars through private proxies? Blackwater (now Xe) looks very much like a private army supermarket, and has gained notoriety because its actions were obscured behind the name "security service". Companies like Sandline International have been providing similar mercenary services for sometime, though without so many headlines.

Most national armies are best at ceremonial duties, and are less good at fighting where most wars are actually fought. As the price per soldier reduces, it will be much easier to hire men in one country, train them in another and deploy them in a third - perhaps in a similar way to city states in the middle ages. Hezbollah is a current example. Arguably, faith defined armies are more efficient than state defined one. Notice how the makeup of "Taliban" alters depending on time and location, to take advantage of local content.

To look good on the world stage, governments will continue to trade away useless nuclear cold war relics, back peaceful defence pacts, and use their armies to help in natural disasters, while buying and deploying off the shelf military services in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This used to be a game for superpowers only, but now anyone can play.

Flushed

2009-11-15T02:07:00.016Z

While many of us have been using the web for some time, the idea of running an application on a computer you don't own is a relatively fresh idea in enterprise culture. Computing as a network utility is seen as a great way to transfer capital expenditure to operational expenditure, but other issues with cloud computing seem to inspire angst.

When it comes to trusting others with your personal freedom, there is a confusion between the needs for privacy and anonymity. You need the first much less than the second.

What about trusting third parties with your (or your companies) data? When the computers you run your applications on are owned by someone else and located beyond sight, surely there is cause for concern. But the belief in an inherent risk with cloud computing is mainly a marketing strategy for companies (like Microsoft) who came late to utility computing. In reality, third parties deal with their customers valuable assets everyday. One assumes that those still in business do it properly.

Trust problems are twofold between your data and a third party; trust as in "they don't care like I do" and trust as in "they may betray my interests".

The idea that "they" cannot be trusted is not a concept you often hear aired about other vital public networks:

We run our own power supply here, in case they try to cut us off or reduce our current.
We collect and filter our own water in case they cut off our supply or taint it somehow. Or it comes out of the tap too slowly.
We don't use the public phone system - they might be listening. We only use satellite phones.

There is a well known medical condition for anyone using the arguments above without good reason.

Of course, I don't "trust" my electricity supplier in a personal sense. But thanks to capitalism, I know the workers at the power plant have kids. And these parents will not be able to afford to send their kids to the right school if they displease customers too regularly. So annoying me may well lead, inexorably, to little Johnny coming home from his bad school crying, because his head was flushed down the toilet again.

And that I do trust.

Hospitals have their own backup generators, which seems to imply that when its important, you can't trust a public network. In reality, a hospital is not going to have the skills and understanding to maintain a reliable fallback. A lone generator gathering dust in the basement is a costly way to ward off a small risk. For most of us, a sensible fallback is knowing how to find candles and matches in the dark - until the power is restored.

While a power cut maybe the equivalent of losing your data, there is no simple equivalent to your data getting into the wrong hands. But most industrial espionage does not involve high tech skulduggery - just smooth talking on the golf course. Or looking at trash.

Google have a lot of information about me, surely they can abuse this? But Google don't know - or care - who "I" am, and this gets us back to the cloak of anonymity. Google holds massively valuable trend information about how groups move. What an audience search for after a commercial break is worth millions. Compare that to the value of knowing what porn site a minor celebrity browsed - maybe a newspaper exclusive? And for that, the risk of destroying a search providers credibility irreparably overnight. Not good value.

But of course, if the third party is under pressure from your own government, then it is somewhat different. With market defying nonsense like the War on Terror, for example, anonymity is ripped up regularly. Once this happens, any network can be perverted from a transport mechanism for information or materials to a jail system. An outward eye turned inwards, with links turned to restraints.

If you don't trust your service provider, change them. You don't have to use Google. But if you can't trust your rulers, then all decisions - business or personal - are in any case compromised.

Apart from the tax opportunity, representative governments usually end up steering clear of direct interference with network utilities. But as a new network appears, the government is often forced to act as arbiter, planner or wet nurse. Even as the first rail routes were laid, there were fears that it was dangerous for people, especially women, to move at high speeds. (And yes, maybe this does explain Network Rail delays today.)

Perhaps, to be generous, the current government need to protect us all from Internet pirates is just one of these early glitches. Meanwhile, only advocacy, tactical voting or revolution can really stop a government pushing any public network down the pan.

Feathered

2009-10-16T01:22:00.004+01:00

Walking through the last section of the Montezuma exhibition at the British Museum, there is a slightly regretful attitude to the displays. Even today, we have little option but to accept that the destruction of the Aztecs is a story seen through Spanish imperial spin. We see paintings of a noble savage, Montezuma, chatting pleasantly with Spaniards, giving up his kingly status to the better catholics. That Spanish court society obviously didn't exist in Technotichlan wasn't a problem. This stuff played well back in Castille.

It is just a solid reminder of the well turned phrase - winners write the history. While the conquistadors had the guns, germs and steel advantage, there was also a fatal misreading of signs. As fascinating as their society was, continuous blood sacrifices really didn't help read runes. What did Quetzalcoatl mean by sending these white strangers? Were they emissaries of the feathered serpent? No. Cortes was not the Messiah, he was just a very naughty boy.

And so we have today's remake of Christian people killing (ig)noble savages in a nation that are also confused over signs. But in this version, the steel advantage is smaller, and the invaders are not lead by Cortes. And this version is playing badly with the audience back home.

In this new blockbuster, the President is both supporting production and trying to change the ending. You see, he doesn't really like the script. He is willing to repeat the old lines about fighting in Afghanistan to make the streets back home safer. Though he wouldn't bomb the Chicago projects to make Illinois safer.

Puzzling about how many troops to send also breaks with the whole vision. The ad campaign has already been paid for. Just Do It!

And you can't change the baddy. Its The Taliban yeah? They wear beards and don't approve of rock music. Why change the enemy to Al-Qaeda? Those guys were written out of the plot in the prequel, and are not due to comeback in for at least another two films. And EA have bought options.

These themes were really developed for the faith based Yoda style politics of Bush and Blair. When a Nobel prize winner repeats them, they lose meaning because, of course they, never had any. But it seems he is unwilling to sack the writers.

To many naïve observers, it would be better to stop prosecuting a war where comparsions with Vietnam loom larger. But from a political point of view, the story comes first. And while the working script is a well known one, it was written for different voices. Ones who wouldn't worry about small details like the resulting corrupt regime.

Lets face it, the whole War on Terror franchise is looking clunky, and was done better in Battle Star Galactica anyway. Whatever the outcome, this one is going straight to DVD.

Cant

2009-09-09T00:01:00.007+01:00

I do mean cant; I haven't dropped an apostrophe or changed the vowel to be polite. Dr Johnson explains it to Boswell:

"My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly."

Though he died 300 years ago, Dr Samuel Johnson is still a reasonable choice for patron saint of bloggers; his style of rhetoric is clearly what many modern columnists aspire to - ever since being rude was publicly acceptable. I guess if anything "the mode of talking in society" has largely moved Johnson's way.

Blogging, along with micro blogging, is a mass movement away from the pure consumption of produced opinion. And unlike talking in the pub, a blog post can be scrutinized and rebutted at leisure. But the open nature also breaks away from cabal politics - "are you one of us?" - that colours mainstream political parties and media. Good blogs and forums usually represent the stream of a conversation, not just an isolated rant. At best, they build positively on current waves of opinion.

Which begs the question; if a large set of people are making their opinions public and easily accessible, where does that leave representational politics? Apart from being a member of a jury for a couple of weeks, and voting every four years or so, the vast majority of people don't get involved with the moving parts of government whatsoever. And everyday there is another story that restates how remote MPs are from anything outside the Westminster village.

Internet petitions are the first taste many in the UK have had of direct democracy. The recent successful campaign to garner an apology from Downing Street about the treatment of the mathematician and war hero Alan Turing was revealing. Despite the issue meaning little to most people and the events having nothing to do with the current administration, Gordon Brown bowed to the request. It cost nothing, and the chance to nod to the inevitable was probably appealing.

What direct democracy has is what parliament is losing daily: Legitimacy. An increasingly informed electorate want explanations of illegal wars, expenses scandals and financial disasters. When these are not forthcoming, voters now look for answers elsewhere. And a similar accounting is now required in most countries with internet access. If direct democracy can help bridge the chasm between the average citizen and the political class then it will come about - not with the blessing of politicians, but because the alternatives are unpalatable.

Examples of direct democracy in action are patchy. The Swiss have direct democracy - but to be fair, very little that happens in Switzerland has any parallel in the rest of Europe. The Californian ballot proposition system (The Economist refers to it as the "crack cocaine of democracy.") has recently helped make the state close to ungovernable. The "more services, less tax" conundrum isn't easy to get around if you ask people what they want.

Left to direct democracy, we would certainly have capital punishment in Britain. That's simply because for most people not involved with justice, killing bad people appears to have no downside. Voting on issues that are beyond everyday experience may produce ugly results - but this a known flaw.

One unpalatable outcome of letting the chasm grow wider is increasing political isolationism. The shout that the government should not interfere with family or religion has the equal and opposite implication that the voters sphere of influence should not spread beyond their home. Themes like the War on Terror, designed to keep peoples eye off civil liberties, are fuelled exclusively by fear. Direct democracy drowns quickly when debate is visceral not cerebral.

For now, changes are talked about in code because frankness is potentially disruptive. The terms "moving the seat of democracy out of Westminster", or "a fully elected upper chamber" or "halving the number of MPs" is indeed just cant that means something else: people taking more responsibility from their "representatives".

1988: Almost 300 die when a plane is destroyed

2009-08-24T23:28:00.005+01:00

The bomb explosion on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie happened 6 months later. Just a useful perspective concerning current matters.

(from Private Eye covers)

Achoo

2009-05-06T00:59:00.006+01:00

The influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people:

The plague emerged in two phases. In late spring of 1918, the first phase, known as the "three-day fever," appeared without warning. Few deaths were reported. Victims recovered after a few days. When the disease surfaced again that fall, it was far more severe. Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours of their first symptoms. Others succumbed after a few days; their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death.

You see, when I started writing this article, H1N1 (i.e. Swine flu) was slowly drifting out of the news; but due to tardiness, it is now back in the headlines. That makes the above look a bit more sensationalist than intended. But nothing in this post is specific to this or the next epidemic.

One of the strengths of human societies is that we have built in redundancy. Many lone carnivores simply die if they get too ill or damaged to hunt. If we get ill, usually others can fill in our functions, allowing for rest and recovery.

One of our massive weaknesses is that because we are physically close to many others in our species, viruses get to infect hundreds at a time. Many of us are told not to come in to work if we are infected, for fear of what will happen to the team. An eagle virus, by comparison, would spread very slowly indeed.

Western societies are also getting more segmented and stratified. At one time, everyone was a hunter gatherer, with a little specialised knowledge of local flora and fauna spread through a clan. If you could hunt one animal, you would eventually be able to hunt a similar one before starving. Survival was hard, making everyone less likely to be surprised by new disasters. But the post apocalyptic films that have wily heroes scavenging for parts are no longer possible. Most consumer machines are black boxes, and more systems are centrally managed. Fewer things can be repaired. As I've mentioned in previous articles modern national armies fight with a fragile umbilical chord that supplies them and limits their adaptable movement. Everyone else fights with AK47's, because any goat herder can maintain one.

A virus, maybe related to a strain in existence today, will eventually act as an extinction event for modern human society. We will not suddenly drop like flies, but society will break down because a garment designer couldn't revive a damaged digital communications structure, and a hacker would be hard pressed to mass produce clothing. We will revert back to a society that the available redundancy can support. This is equivalent to the often repeated threat to "bomb a nation back to the Stone Age".

In Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham described how a true disaster is a combination of seemingly unrelated events. This form of black swan cannot reasonably be predicted, making national efforts to plan their way out of possible disasters largely for the benefit of the media.

So having some Tamiflu and a knowledge of what you need to survive will get you through the first few days. But get used to a serious amount of downsizing.

Camera obscura

2009-04-13T11:56:00.008+01:00

There was a time when the public trusted any plausible narrative given by the state. People went to war based on radio broadcast descriptions of events happening in nations they knew nothing about. I think it is safe to say we are now in a different place.

Ever since the police beating of Rodney King, image evidence from private individuals has been used to challenge official explanations. Conversely, the lack of CCTV evidence damned the police investigation into the July 7th attacks. The death of Ian Tomlinson updates the same pattern.

This is a strange inversion of the "surveillance society", whereby everyone watches everyone and no-one trusts anything unless it is on camera. But holding authority to account simply by trying to catch them in the act of cheating simply gives power to those who cheat well. And it ironically punishes the usually honest who naively trip up.

Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I'll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like - you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.

Professional journalists pieced together Watergate, but it would be hard to build up a case by relying on passing tourists getting incriminating evidence on their Nokias. Its more likely than an infinite number of monkeys coming up with the works of Shakespeare, but the focused plans of a well resourced state will only fuck up a small number of times.

No amount of individual observations can replace trust. Even government officials who lie occasionally are a better bet than hoping to trip up the seriously devious. Unfortunately lost trust doesn't really return.

Somehow the current low trust institutions need to be rebuilt. The solution will probably involve systems that break the ties of loyalty to careerist superiors. But this problem won't be faced unless we stop using institutions we no longer trust, and stop making one nation under CCTV.

Panic on the streets of London

2009-03-25T14:37:00.005Z

The newer, shinier, War against Terror was introduced by Gordon Brown over the weekend, and by a Metropolitan police poster campaign .

Mr Brown's article is by turns depressing and hysterical:

We should be under no illusion, however, that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of al-Qaida

The preparation of ordinary citizens who have been co-opted, or "trained and equipped", to deal with problems looks very, er, National Socialist. In any other sphere of crime prevention, this would be, quite rightly, regarded as vigilantism.

What has led the New Labour think tanks to come up with this stuff? I will assume, for charitable reasons, that there is more to it than "because they are cunts".

The government fears losing the reigns of power if another terrorist incident occurs. Even a temporary blip will be magnified during the G20 summit or the London 2012 games. By pre-booking the fear response, they hope people will give them credit for being on a known track should the worst occur.

You might think that a better way to avoid panic is just to lead by example, as opposed to resetting the clock back to 1984. But from an administrative point of view, that may not be an option.

The economic downturn is beginning to undermine the assumption of authority that the incumbent establishment usually has. If stuff just works, there are few reasons to ask questions. But the sudden onset of poverty tends to focus the mind. Yeah, just like hanging does.

And on top of this, the net is providing a ready source of alternative narratives as to why things are as they are - few of the 700 replies to Mr Brown's article are supportive.

Economic collapse. Terrorism. Alternatives.

Outside of alarmist films, most of us settled in the west have little experience with extreme situations. The governments deepest fear is that people will swing wildly between ugly nationalism and dysfunctional behaviour - leaving society kaput. There have been moments in the last few months that hint at this.

None of the above justifies the fear pimping because, ultimately, the governments job is to protect society as it is - not to subvert it to taste.

During the original Irish terrorist troubles, open propaganda was limited to functional reminders not to stop tube trains in tunnels. It was supposed that people did not require the state to fill in the blanks - the history between the English and Irish is twisted, but well documented.

But there were strange moments. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, was subject to a ban on the media broadcast of his voice - in the belief that he had Svengali like hypnotic powers. Laughable today, but that is what panic does. We now know that an awful lot of things were done in our name that we had no idea about - but in most cases they were focused on dealing with the IRA, not selling Double Think.

This may be a way point to further measures, or just the stuttering of a leadership running out of ways to look serious. Either way, prepare for a long hot Summer of Rage.

Modern Liberty

2009-03-01T11:30:00.005Z

I went to catch the train. Buying the ticket was easy - I didn't have to, as all I did was walk through the barrier, my National ID card and my Credit Card had been interrogated by contactless technology. The rescue services said it was much safer if they knew who was in which carriage when the train crashed.

As I walked into the shop my ID card registered my presence, and the CCTV checked it was me. Once or twice a week I get stopped by the security guards, they say it is my fault, because my beard causes more false negatives. The shop keepers say it has reduced shop lifting.

I get home to a message telling me that unless I walk more I will be deemed to have failed to keep my responsibilities to the State, and that the level of my health cover will be reduced. They promise that this will not impact emergency care, but that I will have lower priority in booking appointments. They list my travel over the past month, identifying 20 journeys that I could have walked rather than driven or taken the bus.

While the narrative doesn't seem like such a terrible Dystopia, on closer examination much of it is coming to pass with data already held in the public and private sector. The above is taken, with thanks, from another attendee of the Convention on Modern Liberty that took place over the weekend.

Despite the lack of anything in writing, a comfortable British consensus supports the notion that a set of civil rights are required for the relationship between the state and its citizens (er, subjects) to remain healthy. In recent times, the government has traded some of these in, to more keenly prosecute The War on Terror. Quite a few cross party organisations have sprung up in defence of these rights, that we don't actually have.

The speakers were pretty much those you would expect to see on Question Time; there were multiple panels sessions with the Great and the Good (well, the Guardian anyway) to cover the various areas that have been trampled on recently. Shami Chakrabartis (Liberty) keynote speech was manic, Philip Pulmans (the author and atheist) was lyrical, and that from David Davis (Tory without portfolio) was certainly powerful.

Helena Kennedy suggested there was something in the water in the Home Office, to allow so many rights shaving measures to be introduced. From 42 days detention, ID cards, attacks on the jury system, the DNA database, there was plenty to debate. I say debate - but that isn't quite correct. There was little discussion on how or why, only on what method of complaint was best. Its as if the awkward parents of teenage lovers were working out how to punish their delinquents.

The ID card debate is a good example of this. We all move around with dozens of pieces of plastic that refer to some data on ourselves. A possible future scenario could involve a policeman asking me to produce an ID card. I "willingly" give my data to private companies, but I should not be forced to give it to a "central state database". The fear of the government holding data appeared to the delegates as a massive spectre; the shit loads of data held privately was of little interest. In fact the idea of the State being separated by some Chinese wall from the private sector is fairly quaint.

As the young black inner London New Labour MP pointed out, CCTV does improve the experience in otherwise dangerous Streatham neighbourhoods. In fact the few New Labour representatives tended to talk in a different language. They talked about "mainstreaming" and "service delivery". Maybe that is not so surprising. The chattering classes are mainly talking to themselves, whereas the government is trying to communicate with the electorate, and the electorate are only talking to Tescos.

As dangerous as correlated data is, the structures of repression cannot cause that repression by osmosis. It has to be in peoples brains, or it doesn't exist. Once there, any law can be bent to the needs of hatred. I give you the SPG.

There is something rotting inside the current administration, but it is not the result of some choreographed master plan. People have to ask themselves, did they believe that the London bomings on 7/7 was the work of Al Qaeda, because Tony Blair said so? I can't remember a lot of people questioning him at the time. It is the forgotten moments of fear and compliance that gave birth to most of the curbs in civil rights we see now. Look back in anger all you want.

Politics by other means

2009-01-25T19:31:00.006Z

Donald Rumsfeld knew he had a problem. It wasn't how to take Iraq; it was how to control the US army. He knew that there are two types of army. The large hierarchical state armies that project power through equipment, systems and organisation. And the small racially cohesive units, that are agile and can follow political objectives.

An army, or a a state force that Clausewitz would recognise, is only controllable by the military and follow military rules. And that is why Rumsfeld wanted to remake it into the second type of army that he could control. He couldn't do anything about cohesion, but he knew he could do business with about 75,000 troops. The US Army wanted to send 400,000.

Rumsfeld will be remembered as the the man who didn't plan for what to do after Iraq was "captured":

One of Secretary Rumsfeld's close associates was telling me, quite passionately, that Rumsfeld axiomatically is against predictions and expectations. Life is uncertain and that's fine. But when he comes to drawing up plans for running a country, it's hard to have quite this existentialist view. Existentialism is fine as a personal philosophy. But if you're running a nation's occupation, it can lead to problems.

The large state army still works, witness Russia slapping down Georgia when it tried to push its luck, but this is now the exception.

After Gaza, it is clearly obvious which way things will go in the future. Gaza was bloody because two modern style small armies were prepared to go head to head. As Hamas were by definition surrounded before they had even started, the result was not at issue - even if the forces had been balanced.

The Israeli army, or IDF, is not really a military force - it is almost totally political. They had no, and didn't need any, achievable military objectives. (Stopping your neighbours sticking two fingers up at you is not a valid military objective). But the Israeli racial distrust of their enemy allowed them to ignore the rules of fair war and just put fire down where it would have most graphic effect.

Of course, Israel were trying to punish Palestinians. In Israeli eyes, it is they who voted for Hamas - and thus all Gazans were valid targets. And a political tool can be used to instill fear, in order to destabilize a regime. Hence killing a few children here, using a little white phosphorus there and hitting UN schools for kicks sent the required message - nowhere is safe; if you tolerate Hamas your children will be next. These are not the actions of regular disciplined forces.

Successful armies are now more likely to be sectarian in nature, because with a reasonable cost base they can do a lot of damage, and easily hold their own against bigger slower forces. But much more importantly they can take direct political direction - as long as its correctly dressed up. What if you don't have a small racially cohesive pack of war dogs? Don't worry - use someone elses! A proxy war is still a good war.

A little local difficulty

2008-12-30T13:47:00.005Z

If there is one thing that the internet has certainly done, it has reduced the cost of giving a damn.

During summer weekends in 70s London, a "demo"was a fairly common event. Protesters would be bussed in from around Britain to protest about.. well anything. Vietnam, pay and conditions, racism, fascism, nuclear confrontation - Piccadilly or Hyde Park would grind to a halt with slow walking banner holders, mothers with prams and flanking policemen. Londoners are quite used to the world's troubles (and bombs) being aired on its streets. It's what real cities are all about. By the evening, the television news would show a few seconds of protest - and then let the corresponding minister assure the country that Everything Was Alright.

To show support for those wronged abroad, many chose to follow letter writing campaigns via Amnesty International. Letters are a much more accurate form of communication than slogan shouting.

A lot of energy and thought was needed to make small, one way ripples of concern that could be denied in a moment. (I have no wish to stop anyone working with Amnesty International, their work is still vital.)

Compare and contrast with today. The Israelis Hasbara or propaganda machine realise that killing 300 Gazans over 48 hours might cause a few waves of concern in the West. Starting a war over Christmas is no longer enough to confuse 24 hour news coverage.

By using the popular social media service Twitter, the Israeli consulate held a "conference" and got the chance to see how the connected world's opinion sees their little conflict. They are sensible enough to realise that they cannot control the hosepipe of condemnation, but they can at least place their own objectives and viewpoints into the stream.

The definition of the "connected world" is now no more than the ability to read and write on a web site. It takes little time, but is visible to all, immediately. Letting everyone voice their opinion is not in itself a panacea, but from it flows more understanding of how others view the world. And it is much harder for those who have missed the zeitgeist to slip by unnoticed.

The losers of open debate are politicians who speak without first listening; for example David Milliband's initial statement was very anodyne even for a foreign secretary, as if mourning a death on Eastenders. Or take this example, from the start of an article by Seumas Milne:

Israel's decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance", the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed". The daily Ma'ariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe"

Put simply; when your finger is on the trigger you seek to cover your exploits in darkness, not light. Israeli forces are mainly just kids, many of whom are "Generation Y" social media junkies and they can see for themselves that preserving the safety of their homes is not best done by torching their neighbours.

Have a great 2009.

No more heroes

2008-12-14T18:45:00.006Z

In a scene from Steven Soderbergh's first film about Che Guevara, we see the icon inspect a few potential recruits who have come from the nearest village to join up with the Cuban revolutionary army. He glances at the motley villagers, and immediately accepts those with their own weapons. Then he asks those who can't read and write to go home.

This selection method seems to confirm the view of Che as the romantic poster revolutionary cum poet. Later, he explains that those who cannot read are too easy to fool. He wasn't trying to gain control of Cuba by some type of common coup, he wanted complete revolutionary change. Nothing reversible.

Partly to avoid this calamity, most modern democratic styled nations use adversarial politics. A government is balanced by an opposition with, usually, opposite opinions. Except of course when they agree.

This system seems to work well when ideas are placed, like a football, between the two sides. After getting buffeted about a bit, the idea ends up either helping one side win or it gets rejected. If rejected, proposals can always be put through at a later date. Those on the losing side of the debate don't try to start a revolution - they just adapt their tactics for next time.

This leaves the public, like football fans, to watch and support one side or the other. So although we don't get to make any decisions, we get to cheer or boo and are entertained in the process.

We all know that this system only really supports two political parties, with independents or a third party as little more than a tasty pie to be consumed during half time. But we are getting just a bit bored of this sport.

While we are still all willing to go to the match, we are beginning to realise the sides are often just going through the motions. Because events happen at a scale or speed that can no longer fit into a 90 minute spectacle. While the sides kick the truth about on the pitch, those guys in the executive suites aren't even taking any notice. Maybe they already know the result - or couldn't care less?

And like the premiership, politicians don't really have deep rooted reasons for being on one side or another anymore. Indeed, most can quite happily argue for or against the same policy on demand - because being adversarial is their job. The right position trumps the right solution every time.

A revolution is one method to change an ineffective system - but something bloodless would be more comfortable. Either way, the current systems do need to be revamped to become more flexible in responding to circumstances. For instance, it is still controversial to not compose the main decision making body wholly with the members of the majority party - except in a national emergency. And we also know that by supporting both sides, anybody with sufficient money and influence can push any vaguely acceptable idea through.

In reality what needs to be done gets done outside of government purview - which just pisses everybody off. The much coveted ability to throw one party out for another one is a great solution to the national evils of a previous century. It doesn't help much today, when a single banker, or a lucky terrorist can change the world in a matter of minutes.

Crash

2008-11-15T13:39:00.003Z

I like cross cultural parodies, such as this T-shirt design. To get the reference, and thus the point, you need to be familiar with video games as well as modern art.

So is the joke half Magritte and half Super Mario? Well, yes. The picture belongs to the Nintendo game, and the French words are from the well known painting. But is what makes the T-shirt funny half Belgian and half plumber? Obviously that doesn't make sense. The joke simply refers to contradictions and surprises - clearly something that both Magritte and Shigeru Miyamoto enjoyed, but not unique to them.

There have been quite a few heated debates by columnists and bloggers trying to decide whether the new president elect of the United States is black, of mixed race, or neither. Treating a human as a tin of paint (or a T-shirt) is unlikely to yield much truth, though some interest in what makes Obama tick is hardly surprising. Is it always wrong to wonder how culture may effect people?

I was intrigued by what Malcolm Gladwell, the Tipping Point author, had to say about how a persons culture has a greater effect on their job than many other factors. He gives the example of how a cultures deference to authority has lead to increased air crashes, purely because of bad communication between pilots. If a co-pilot sees a problem, but does not feel it is right to confront the captain, what happens? What happens if he cannot find the right form of words, in a timely fashion, to indicate that fuel is low, or there is ice on the wing? Well, statistically, the answer is that he could cause a plane crash. Hence a culture’s attitude toward authority can influence things unexpectedly elsewhere.

So it isn't wrong to think about how culture can influence how people behave, as long as you realize individuals don't spend time fitting in with statistics - a point Mr Gladwell emphasizes. And the way people interpret statistics.. is cultural. The tendency to look at a story, then counterfactually make connections that don't really exist is a hard habit to break. For example, if Obama was involved in street crime, he would definitely, as far as the media was concerned, become black.

(Having said that, you may want to avoid Colombian airlines.)

Brown man in the White house

2008-11-05T21:32:00.005Z

It would be hard for a blog that is often about the politics of identity not to mention what is a momentous event in identity politics. On the face of it, a country with so many relatively high profile non-whites should be able to throw up a suitable candidate. But Barack Obama did not vote himself into office, so his accession is really about the people who did. And what they think they have done.

One question that is worth asking; why did the same electorate that chose a right wing Texan four years ago, suddenly switch to his polar opposite now? Was the election of the now unlamented George W. Bush an early indication that people wanted to break racial barriers?

Without intending to, people tend to view president elect Obama as a transformative character. Not from any known abilities, but purely through his existence. Indeed, much of the world also views him in this way. Given that what he says isn't that much different from any previous Ivy league liberal academic leader of the Democratic party, it might well be down to his "dual heritage". Especially the African part, of course.

Racism is strange that way. The human mind's inability to override the primal fear of the other, has caused quite a few hardships. That a mixed race guy is now deemed as a solution to a complex abstract problem, Americas loss of power and popularity, partly because he represents the joining of two races... maybe Freud could sort it out.

Feared one minute, leader of the free world the next - quite a journey, and all in the mind of white America. To be fair, Mr Obama didn't milk his "advantage". He did an excellent job in invigorating the Democratic base; McCain seemed unwilling to communicate with the Republican hardcore. It is unlikely the temporary increase in the youth vote will last - the world wide trend is against it. But the black community have seen the civil war finally end in Virginia, and that is permanent.

Any bridge building Mr Obama manages will be of his own making, not a melanin driven ability. There is no reason why he should not make an excellent U.S. President, and his campaign was certainly impressive - if tightly controlled and very high spending. But I don't think it will take long for America's enemies to work out that his skin colour and wider cultural experience does not drive his very American mind.

Trust me

2008-10-31T01:00:00.007Z

One of the early promises of the 80's computing revolution was the true dawn of Artificial Intelligence. By the end of the century, so scientists said, Japanese robots would be helping old women cross the road.

AI suffered a sort of semantic breakdown, as it turned out that no one knew what intelligence was, and therefore whether it made sense to say it was artificial or not. Philosophers such as John Searls with his Chinese Room problem started to question the validity of AI as a concept.

Maybe the AI community underestimated how hard it would be to simulate even the "unthinking" parts of the brain - just vision and walking are still challenging today. But while many strands of AI have been abandoned, the brute force computations that computers have always excelled at have been improving. Hence we do have good expert systems.

I was listening to how an expert system has been developed that differentiates between genuine and fraudulent works of art by examining brush strokes in detail. While the system was able to discover some fakes that had previously passed as genuine, it also mistakenly endorsed some known fakes. Oddly, these endorsed fakes still found a value in the art market, which recognised the "authenticity" of the fraud. The fact that a fraudster does not know the original artist's PIN number is not the issue.

This leads to the modern day problem of identity and attribution. This is best seen in politics, where candidates reveal less and less about policies ahead of taking power, prefering to play what-if games. They need to persuade their electorate to trust that they would make the "right" decision in any given event, only going by previous (and possibly unrelated) decisions.

It won't be that long before an expert system will claim to accurately extrapolate what decision a leader might make based on their previous decisions, as well as other leaders in similar positions and circumstances in the past. I use the word "claim" because with all predictions, they only matter if people take them seriously. This will lead to more assiduous recording of all speeches and decisions by anyone remotely in the public eye - if that is possible. Then it can be fed into the system and matched with patterns, rules, and learning.

Somehow, a person's identity comprises of the sum of all their communications and interactions. The brain already deals with this in its own way - and creates appropriate trust models necessary for survival. We have always rightly distrusted politicians who want to set a year zero on their personal histories, which usually starts after they smoked pot or slept with their relatives. To see what Barack Obama will do in Iraq, it may be necessary to look at his behaviour in nursery. Just to seed the model with some data, you understand.

Apart from projections, a decision actually taken could be judged to be atypical, or even fraudulent. After all, if you sell yourself on a set of given behaviours, then why can't you be criticized for making a bad impression of yourself?

Artists do of course break out of their oeuvre occasionally, sometimes to great applause, sometimes not. But politicians, who want to avoid the accusation of not being "real", tend to follow the same track for their whole career. This makes them very good targets for modelling. I'll leave out any pun about being painted into a corner.

Short

2008-10-12T11:05:00.003+01:00

Even its name, "global financial crisis", has only been settled on recently. Sometimes its the "global financial system in crises", or the "recession/depression".

It is clear to anyone after countless articles and interviews that no one in the financial community (let alone politics) knows what is going on, how it happened, or what will happen next. Increased coverage just underline how the community all see different events as being the cause for different outcomes. One day the problem is short selling, then it isn't, and so on. Its as if a comet had presaged an alien invasion.

The simplest reason that accounts for no one being able to describe things is just that they don't understand them. Which seems obvious. No one completely understands the economic system, perhaps because this is the first time in living memory there has been any need to.

For some reason, experts and lay people insist that the economy is now more complex, apparently because of mobile phones and the Internet.

Is it really? I can't see what major elements of economics (people, goods, services, value, money) have altered. The fact that I can buy shares from my yacht, and look at their performance on a web page wouldn't appear to change these basics. Certainly events follow more quickly. But while there are now more exotic ways to do the same things, people need banking today for much the same reasons as they did 100 years ago.

The crisis is also grandly referred to as "global", as if before this month, the economy was a local phenomenon. Given that the most basic consumer objects owned in the West come from Asia, this really seems ridiculous.

There doesn't appear to be one good agreed concept or idea to help people simplify the economy in their heads. Contrast this situation with, say, evolution, where Mr Darwin's ideas are available and explicable to more or less anyone. Or, if you prefer, consider gravity, or the Prisoner's dilemma.

This is one case where the Crowds do not appear to have much Wisdom. Without the basic mental tools, more comment just generates more heat without the light. It may be that it will be a few decades before enough is understood for this period to be properly documented without being sold short.

The highest priority is The War on Terror

2008-10-01T23:12:00.005+01:00

Come and have a good time

2008-09-08T00:19:00.004+01:00

Nations have often resorted to ad men when they want to improve their image - either to encourage tourism or inward investment. For example, Spain wanted to portray that it was no longer a dirt poor country run by a dictator, but a stylish democracy. Barcelona topped that by holding the Olympics with Catalan elan. Freed from Soviet domination, the Baltic states successfully increased their appeal as cheap places for stag parties for richer Europeans. Many Arabian countries have world class hotels, but don't want to be known for past beheading policies. Britain went though similar campaigns in the 80's, to try and reverse the "sick man of Europe" image gained from striking public workers.

Israel, finding its image somewhat negative, also wants to rebrand itself. But unlike the other cases, their problems are not in the past. I'm sure Israeli beaches are very nice, clean and safe, and the tech savvy companies and Nobel prize scientists are all real. But the land stealing security fence, the unending violence towards Palestinians and threats to poorly defended neighbours are all very real too.

Even the Chinese government is clearly heading, at their own pace, towards an improved relationship with its citizens - and the Olympics seemed like an honest portrait of a fast changing empire.

Too many Israelis simply think that everyone is wrong except them. Even when their old friends the South Africans stopped racist rule, they still stick with the old antagonisms. Ultimately it's up to them to take the appropriate road, but their current attitude is broadly unmoving. Being bad is one thing, but being unrepentant is worse.

"We don’t want to ignore it but to contain it", says a brand-minded
Israeli. "There are 800 foreign correspondents here, all focused on the conflict. We would like them to zoom out and look at other things too. Branding is about the real Israel."

The real Israel does little to stop its security forces killing children. For that reason alone, many journalists will not be taking up the kind offers to enjoy the beach.

Sorted

2008-08-11T01:39:00.007+01:00

I don't think I remember meeting more than one or two Americans who admitted voting for Bush the first time around. That's fair enough; the travelling Americans I see are likely to be more liberal minded (for a start, they have passports). What was odd in the last presidential election, is that many Democrats said they didn't even know any Republican voters.

This conundrum is explained by The Big Sort, whose premise is that Americans are choosing to move in order to live with others who share their views on life. Indeed, they will move out of one county and into another to be near the right flavour of church. This behaviour is apparently accelerating to create large echo chambers of similar thinking - and in American political terms large areas that are entirely red, or entirely blue. This is quite different from only a few decades ago.

Evangelical, small government, anti-abortion, rural, Republican go together to form one side of the tracks, with less religious, interventionist, pro-choice, urban Democrats make the other side. Politics of place and belief. Race is a divisional issue too, but the Big Sort is above and beyond that.

And the internet is gladly helping people to keep the separate together. Similar peer groups can meet in person, or in virtual space. Indeed it's now easier than ever to get to boundless sources of information that will never tell you anything you don't want to know.

While all this is understandable, as a Londoner (and I think for many city dwellers), some of this is odd. I don't know the political or spiritual leanings of my neighbours. And even if I thought I did, very few people's views all slot into one tidy party manifesto. As long as they belong to a similar class and are convivial, most English people don't care much about their neighbours beliefs. But inevitably trends in the US will find some reflection worldwide.

How much does the Big Sort matter?

The (fairly small) thinking part of the far right like to state that "kinship" groups are a natural societal boundary, so would find favour with Big Sort behaviour. One obvious problem with this is that kinship groups are a fixture from human evolution. Yet man uses his big brain to think beyond that. For example, it would be difficult to build a moon mission with just your extended family, and maybe a few mates from down the road.

Trying to devolve towards self similar groups probably does promote social cohesion. But it surely would arrest human progress as a result. The way Harry Lime put it in The Third man, peace and love will get you as far as the cuckoo clock. This is probably not an option for the Western world.

Contract

2008-08-03T01:08:00.004+01:00

It is one of the safest ways to identify someone. Wait for them outside their home. Wait for them to come back alone. Then say their name. When they turn around, you can shoot them. You are already on a West London street, so just find the nearest tube and get to Heathrow. And hope there are no delays.

Almost immediately after the TV celebrity Jill Dando was shot, even the police were assuming it was a professional hit. Some think it was a Serb terrorist, others that her job presenting Crimewatch may have annoyed the criminal underworld.

Contract killings on working Londoners are probably not that infrequent. Even the plainest of people try to take financial short cuts, and believe urban anonymity can save them from retribution. The police surely can't relish opening such a can of worms. Hiding in the deadly assaults on ordinary members of the public each year will be a few of these cases.

Seeing Barry George released this weekend was a sickening reminder of how happy the media played along with the fantasy that an intellectually challenged social misfit could suddenly make the transition to stealth assassin. But the police had found the perfect loner to stitch up. Who cared if this loser did some time?

The attitude towards this form of "community policing" has changed since the arrest eight years ago. Putting weirdos behind bars is no longer seen as a quick win, given the amount of violent knife offenders at large (and given prison overcrowding). And of course, there is a War on Terror to be fought. The apparent vagueness as to whether an armed unit had been rifling through Barry's apartment or not - and contaminating the forensic evidence - now looks deeply unprofessional with CSI on TV most week nights.

The pressure applied by sections of the media to find the defiler of the pure Ms Dando certainly led to the police becoming snow blind, as Barry's barrister has suggested. And failing under media pressure is one thing several parts of the British establishment do a little too regularly.

Oh, and naturally no apology is forthcoming from the men in blue.

25 words

2008-07-20T14:09:00.002+01:00

A late entry into this simple "25 words" project:

The early blackberries I just picked above the fence were technically my neighbours, but morality is more fluid at the margins - and I like blackberries.

City of Blades

2008-07-20T03:08:00.003+01:00

I was somewhat bemused to hear that the police unit responding to my minor burglary call had been diverted to deal with a stabbing. After all, it was 3am on Monday morning. The police later apologised and explained that they have very few resources and cannot deal with any peaks whatsoever.

While the current cycle of teenage knife crime seems to be climbing frighteningly beyond the statistical curve, one remembers that certain security departments are very well funded indeed.

Yes, the "war on terror" may have faded into the background somewhat - but it is still swallowing a large amount of police time. For our safety, the forces of law and order follow a handful of dodgy bearded brown people on the pretext that what happened in London 3 years ago in July was the continuation of the world wide Muslim conspiracy. As time passes however, we are left with the images of a few lonely men with elevated passions and rucksacks full of death, but no guidance from any shadowy Svengali of terror.

A blog mate pointed out a post by the usually hilarious Charlie Brooker. In it, he suggests that anyone doubting the official version of the events around September 11th 2001 is a conspiraloon. With over 1700 comments, a record for this forum, it is clear that the public do not wholly agree with Mr Brooker. Scepticism regarding the behaviour of the Coalition of the Willing is broadening beyond those whose only interest is demolition explosives.

The sharp end of this is that the number of people willing to see street violence spiral out of control in order to support the enthusiastic hassling of extreme elements is probably shrinking. "Nothings happened, so we must be doing the right thing" is not an argument you can use forever.

Conflating the bobby on the beat and internal security may be unfair, but it won't be too long before a few reckless politicians realise they can grab the zeitgeist by telling us what we already suspect. Especially as the elected leaders that forged the whole terror business, and kept it going, are declining in number.

Not cricket

2008-06-29T13:15:00.004+01:00

English politicians talk about Zimbabwe much like ex drug addicts talk about their friends who fail rehab. They know their perspective might be flawed, but guilt keeps them involved. Recently, the BBC has featured many black Africans denouncing Mugabe and his self election. This feels better. (Actually asking Africans about Africa is a fairly novel approach, but I'm sure it won't last.)

Mugabe is in fact repeating himself. In the 1980's, his army killed upwards of 20,000 civilians just to destroy Joshua Nkomo and his tribal influence and thus maintain a one party state. He has never been much of a democrat.

You would think that this fairly obvious historical pattern would be picked up on, but the media seem not to dwell on it. In fact, until the attacks on white farmers, Zimbabwe was held up as a shining example of economic prosperity. In short, given a few years, outsiders will forget about the mass murder of Africans if the economy is healthy and Communists are controlled. This is the secret that the continents dictators have used for years.

Nobody dares look too closely at Morgan Tsvangirai in case a simple "regime change" scenario may look less than fantastic. I'm sure he is a great guy, but I'm certain that if he needs the West to help him topple Mugabe then things will be bad for a long time.

There are no shortage of other great initiatives being suggested. "Why doesn't South Africa just turn off the power supply?" is as daft as it is ugly. Perhaps the French should have considered doing that to Britain when they lost the Olympic bid to London. Refusing Mugabe "access to his money" and "access to medical care" sound sharper, but depend on the dictators lack of foresight.

If Mugabe had simply done the usual trick of delaying an election forever, the West would have taken far longer to focus. As it is, we have our noses up against the glass but can't figure out whether to break it or not.

Sadly there are probably many people in the area who are hoping for the West, perhaps even Britain, to help them. Maybe when they see that our idea of help is to take away Mugabe's knighthood and stop the cricket team from coming over, they may figure out that they are better off doing the job themselves.

Just ask for it

2008-06-06T00:49:00.008+01:00

One question that concerns the current crop of Internet companies, is how to make money. Astonishingly, many of the most well loved "web 2.0" style social networks have neither a business plan, or any immediate reason to exist. The answer usually given is to start advertising. This is supposed to be the classic way to turn visiting popularity into revenue. But even before financial conditions got rougher, most insiders reckon advertising on the web is failing to deliver.

It appears that the American Democratic President in waiting, Barack Obama, has now created another very effective model - if you need money, just ask for it.

If Hilary Clinton had raised $55 million in one month without hosting a fund raising event, many would be looking for some type of misconduct. However, Mr Obama raised vast sums regularly throughout his recent campaign, and no one thought anything of it. Perhaps because blacks have no stereotypical affinity to money and business, his astounding fundraising skills are ignored by the media.

Months ago I saw a video of Obama giving a talk - to Google. In fact he hit the red hot button issue of network neutrality - something that will determine how and if Internet companies can stay in business over the next decade. A deeper examination of Obama and the amazing money machine points out what a good match he is with Silicon valley. There, a young guy with little experience but a strong sense of direction is a wholly positive thing. From then on, the recognition that social networks are the best way to grow a campaign and raise money seems to have cemented this relationship. As is often stated, Obama raises money not from a handful of rich power brokers but from many small donations. Americans voted with their wallets to empower the verbally resplendent Senator for Illinois.

The relationship between political expression, social networks and fundraising may be self sustaining over the long term. Just as a direct charitable appeal is the most efficient way to convert concern to action, single issue politics can clearly do the same - while clawing some power away from central government.

Soft targets

2008-05-19T01:11:00.002+01:00

"Representatives from more than 100 countries are to meet to discuss outlawing the use of cluster bombs. " Not attending are US and China, and other nations that produce and store them. The Pope does support the cause - though its not clear how the Holy See effects munition deployment policy.

Even years after combat is over, the bomblets from cluster bombs can still main and kill hapless civilians. This of course makes the weapon seem particularly callous. But beyond tacit agreement between warring parties, I'm not sure that it is useful to go through a catalogue of weapons and say "this one is good", but "that one is really beyond the pail". Designed correctly, all weapons are dangerous. Maybe the problem is the war they are used in?

Trite, I know. Maybe there are so many small conflicts that are really beyond the judgemental worlds control, that even superficial fixes seem worth making. But that's much like asking armed robbers to please not use shotguns, because of the terrible noise they make when they go off.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was flawed in a similar way. Instead of focusing on the problems that capitalism and communism were (and still are) producing, members protested that they didn't want to die in a nuclear war. Well, I wouldn't like to be hacked by a machete either.

We now accept that communism was a much bigger blight than any war could achieve. And the West is slowly accepting that results of unfettered capitalism are keeping vast numbers of humans in poverty. Continuing to reconcile real problems is lengthy, boring and sometimes futile but gesture politics is truly callous.

Crime and Punishment

2008-05-03T20:54:00.004+01:00

"We cannot and should not pasteurise the streets of this city. They will always be full of life and excitement, but they can be safer, and they will be."

That is a very sound statement, but Mr Johnson, the new Mayor of London, has a brand new crime manifesto. If the voters were specifically concerned with crime, they had a real ex-policeman to choose from. But Brian Paddick came a distant third.

For a Conservative, talking about crime is code for a respect for private possessions, the right to hold accumulated wealth and defence from the unruly. In short, the speaker has no socialist leanings. This posturing is irrelevant in modern London, where we all walk pass the stinking rich and the homeless everyday. A Londoner accepts extreme socialism and extreme capitalism without blinking.

Serious crime in any big city defies prediction and often understanding. It certainly cannot be legislated for by a Mayor. The number of sociopaths attracted to a city dwarfs the size of any organised policing system. Indeed, it probably subsumes any policing system.

What there is left to talk about is anti-social behaviour and marginal crimes. And there is a never ending conversation about how to deal with these. Whatever initiatives the Mayor adds to the list I somehow doubt they will stop some ruffian nicking your bike, picking your pocket or puking on your tube train. And you will be rightly riled when it happens.

Measuring the quality of city life by how long you can go without being touched by crime is pointless. In the same way that measuring happiness by the number of consumer goods you have doesn't really work. Society only advances when large numbers of people live and work close to each other in relative freedom. And so does crime.

Fixing broken lights, cleaning up graffiti (unless its by Banksy of course) and creeping gentrification is how most cities successfully improve themselves. Mr Johnson does have other plans that he will hopefully spend his time on as opposed to confusing the Metropolitan Police any further.

Amateurs

2008-04-11T01:48:00.004+01:00

Truth is quite a separate thing from opinion. To calculate 24 plus 36, would you ask 100 people for their answers and take the average? We have all heard multiple diverging descriptions of a single event enough times to realise that even with the truth in plain sight, people report things wrongly or are hopelessly prejudicial. Sadly, you have to be trained to observe accurately. Opinion, however, is cheap to produce and cannot be countered.

A very worthwhile new documentary entitled The Truth According To Wikipedia brings up some interesting points about the wisdom of crowds, and the quality of information. One accusation levelled at that the founders of the webs Encyclopedia is that they are libertarians. And its true that the ageing hippies responsible for the current state of the internet are probably the digital equivalent of a survivalist state militia who hate authority, formality and control.

The author Andrew Keen gets a reasonable amount of time in the film to expound his 'elitist' views. For him, experts are more right than amateurs and the blogosphere weakens quality media. The opposite view may lightly be characterised by the Zulu term ubuntu - all information lacks meaning in isolation and all views should be equally respected. As facts have to be placed in a useful human context - there is lots of "truth" that won't help anyone live - there should be value to local truth as well as just absolute truth. It may be Einsteins universe, but we live in Newtons world.

Not all of the films polemic hits Wikipedia accurately. Where an aggregate medium excels is in the collection of knowledge. While no amount of opinions can somehow coalesce into truth, capturing the knowledge of millions creates a dynamic picture of any topic. In most situations you don't actually require the sharply focused truth, just a helpful sketch. And the chaotic democracy of Wikipedia is actually held together by some fairly sensible sentinels - whose access looks suspiciously hierarchical. Another saving grace is that a vandals attention span is mercifully short.

Keen's point is more relevant when examining how (western) society is fragmenting into millions of personal self interested bubbles. He refers to digital narcissism when talking about internet culture. Even if the bubbles collaborate on occasion with other bubbles they know, its hard to build up knowledge if everyone starts from their own position. Equal access to information leads to all information being equal. So importance on the internet is just popularity, and thus quality loses meaning.

The combination of pure democracy and anonymity seems to have very specific strengths and weaknesses. Wikipedia may represent both of sides. Whether the web can assert quality or just increase fracture should become apparent in the next few years. At the moment, it could be Lord of the Flies.

Zombie

2008-03-19T02:38:00.003Z

While watching the credits roll for "There will be Blood" in the comfortable Curzon Soho, I noticed that the film was based on a book by Upton Sinclair.

Then I remembered why this Upton Sinclair bloke sounded familiar. He featured in a strange novel called "U.S.!" by Chris Bachelder ( the author of the brilliant "Bear vs Shark"). In the book, Upton Sinclair is an old school "muck raking" socialist who believes that with just a bit more persuading, America will become socialist. He is continually assassinated, and resurrected. The technicalities of resurrection are not discussed - this is just something that happens. After reading it, I confirmed that Sinclair was indeed a real (but properly dead) politician of the American left.

What is particularly odd is how reasonable the whole thing seems. Despite the massive conceit, the book engineers itself in such a way as to make socialism in the USA the only truly unlikely idea. I can believe in Zombies, but not state control of the economy.

And indeed this is probably intended. There is still a trace left of an anti-capitalist message in "There will be Blood", yet one does not really notice it. Its as if the oil economy, which is the driver for every character in the film, somehow is just a backdrop. It is now very hard for our western minds to conceive of any system other than free market capitalism. Even an imminent banking collapse seems not to disturb this.

It probably requires a logical impossibility, or at the very least a large shock, to test our belief in capitalism sufficiently to question it effectively. An atomic bomb was needed to check Japanese belief in the infallibility of the Emperor. A lengthy depression combined with a minor environmental disaster may cause not just a change of heart, but a violent swing away from what we have now.

Markets are as old as crossroads, but normally the price of anything is related to its value. The logic that ties the value of your house to a pyramid scheme of faulty loans, promises, consumer spending, credit debt and fractional-reserve banking is one that most people are willing to ignore while things are good. When confronted with the truth we are forced to take either the blue pill or the red pill. But the economy may only be working now because we have chosen to swallow the blue pill for such a long time.

Dusk till Dawn

2008-02-24T03:18:00.003Z

Before long, your DNA data will be held on a database, and you will have given it willingly. But the database will belong to a private company, and you will be paid good money for it. But that's the near future.

For now, it looks as if the police have done everyone a favour by bringing up the issue of compulsory DNA collection before it could be silently introduced without debate. By shining a light on the issue before the necessary spin could be readied, the Home Office have been forced to deny interest in the idea.

The fact that being arrested (not convicted) is sufficient to have your DNA recorded, and that it is near impossible to remove the record is a legal blemish being tackled by a number of human rights lawyers. Interestingly, serving police officers must give a DNA sample, but this is removed from records as soon as they retire. The upshot has been the human rights argument that either everyone's DNA should be recorded - or no ones should be.

But it maybe dangerous to play this bluff, because circumstances can quickly change. We have already seen how one terrorist incident has led to the removal of hundreds of liberties and long held values throughout the world. Had the wheels spun quicker, we would all have been walking around with biometric identity cards by now.

If it was simply about solving crimes, then most people would agree that a DNA database addresses the symptoms not the cause. Clearly a nationwide dusk till dawn curfew will abruptly reduce crime. In fact I can think of all manner of liberty denying ideas that I hope will never be implemented in peace time. The current administration, however, have few qualms about borrowing the tactics from police states if there are votes in it, or quotas are satisfied. More to the point, they are upfront with the moral challenge - if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide.

While identity may be an issue with a lot of bloggers, it isn't to the public at large. Which is where privately held databases holding your DNA come in. They will effectively become brokers to interested parties. Researchers, insurance agents, and a lot of other people would like to peruse a large sample of geolocated human DNA. How would it work? You sign up, you get swabbed, and you get paid. Your DNA is public - but whose DNA belongs to who is not released; it is public, yet anonymous. If the police arrest you, but can't find the DNA they are looking for in the database(s) you registered with, you are in the clear. People with no hereditary diseases will join exclusive databases for insurance perks - the same way safe drivers do today.

Naturally criminals will not sign up - so the position will be the exact opposite of how it is now. Again, liberty will be successfully brokered by the private sector. Because whatever people feel about trust, convenience and money are always the number one concerns.

Old battles on new fronts

2008-02-10T13:18:00.000Z

There were a lot of "demos" back in 70's London. A demonstration would usually involve thousands of people, with crudely daubed placards marching down Park Lane, maybe meeting in Trafalgur square. With plenty of aggressive unions, fashionable terrorists, spiralling inflation, less than frank government and the likelihood of thermonuclear destruction, people had a choice of issues to protest about.

A demonstration is only as good as its media coverage. But the "new media" path to finding and covering current events is a bit different - what follows is an example from this morning.

After noticing an interesting remark on Twitter , I was directed to a site that carried live feed from mobile phone cameras. I was surprised to see a live demonstration, outside the Scientology building close to where I work in Blackfriars. Indeed I've mentioned the cult and their occupation of a historic building previously. Shaky footage of casually dressed twenty somethings, complete with placards, confirmed that this was indeed an old style demo.

The self anonymisation of the protesters was interesting. Many were wearing masks, scarves and hoodies. While this was partly to get in the mood, the inevitable presence of filming observers and plentiful CCTV cameras provided another reason to cover up. The police presence appeared to be visible but restrained. The video mentioned 300 or so protestors.

The other interesting feature was the "back channel". While the live streaming video was coming through on the site, instant message style text comments from other web viewers was published below the images. This is a fairly common concept today, underlining that very little media need be passive. It would be quite reasonable to assume some of the protestors would see some of these comments; indeed there were comments directed to that end.

The nature of the protest was interesting. How do you protest against Scientology? It is a fairly daft venture even for a cult, but seems to have quite a bit of money behind it. The protesters did not seem well practiced in throwing live insults, and indeed the back channel tried to give hints and inspiration. They were also unsure whether they should "present" what was happening, or just point the camera. Many on the back channel wondered when the BBC would cover the protest. The main direction of complaint centred around the cult's secretive nature, the fact that it isn't free, and their habit of stifling complaint by litigation. There is also the distinct feeling that the movement seems to escape government scrutiny.

While the guiding hand of main stream media was evident in what occured, it has been the case that from seeing the link to writing this entry I have not turned on the radio, the TV or visited a recognised news website. I do still feel the need to see events reflected somewhere - the need for official blessing is strong. But it seems less fanciful to imagine that before long what was the source of news, slowly morphs to the lesser position of archive.

Do-gooders

2008-01-24T03:42:00.000Z

If Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sounds like an oxymoron, then maybe you believe that no company will ever do anything "good" unless it is legally obliged to do so. However, many modern organisations are often prepared to do good things without being forced to, usually in a philanthropic manner (Bill Gates comes to mind).

This can be seen as a relatively new idea, or the old Victorian concept of charity, depending on your point of view. The Economist mentioned in its lengthy special report that the goal of CSR is often to mitigate against social disasters (e.g. sorry about polluting the atmosphere, but we now grow nice trees) or to show a worthy side while recruiting naïve graduates. It is sometimes just boardroom waffle.

Obviously the flip side is that the more a company does to behave, the less government has to do. This allows a minister to pass the buck to large corporations when things go wrong. If kids are fat, it's the fault of fast food producers. If roads are smelly, blame car manufacturers and so on. Either way, the state gives way to the private sector.

Can this principle work elsewhere? Can a company push against government regulation in other areas because it is can take responsibility for itself?

When I was dropped off a block away from the entrance of Glasgow airport a week ago, it took me a few minutes to remember that it suffered from an attack by terrorist doctors, in the middle of last year. To stop any more car bombers, three foot steel barriers now protect the entrance to the terminal buildings. That should be sufficient to foil any further terrorists planning to do exactly the same thing again. Lets hope they are deeply unimaginative.

As yet another plane was delayed for no clear reason, it was easy to see how the airline industry has become beholden to forces other than economics. Clearly airport authorities feel that safety is more important than flying planes. But this is probably only because they have been told to see things that way. Few customers entirely agree with the current balance.

It is fairly obvious that running an airline smoothly is more important to society than following government inspired fear regulations. It might be that CSR should inform airlines that it is to everyones benefit to run what is already an environmentally harmful industry as efficiently as possible. It might be that I trust an airline to judge security concerns more than I trust government because they are not trying to justify illegal wars.

Usually companies fight regulation quietly with lobbyists. But it might be better for them to try and make the process more transparent. As we have seen recently, handing politicians unattributable amounts of money in lieu of services just gets them in trouble. Better to stop the backhanders to government and try airing the unpleasant issues in public as well as the nice ones.

Ronald

2008-01-05T02:18:00.000Z

The assassination of Benzair Bhutto has thrown up an ugly argument about political leadership. Clearly passing on the torch from mother to son is not very enlightened. But it hardly "feudal" as some Western critics have suggested. Any more than are the Republicans for selecting two Bush's (and the Democrats possible two Clintons) in a short span of terms. These are really just legacy traditions that no one has got around to questioning.

The reality is that selecting leaders in a democracy is becoming strained, and occasionally shifts into farce. Or even entertainment. Diverting attention by insulting Pakistanis at a time of emergency does nothing to contradict this.

In the UK, The Liberal Democrats have valiantly failed to select a suitable leader so often that they have become a laughing stock. They are not even under much pressure to do it quickly. And they are as democratic as you could wish. From drunk, to geriatric, to clone - missing out the user of rent boys. And none of these gentlemen made (or are making) any other notable mark on politics to overshadow these unkind media references.

Compare and contrast to the rise of a dictator. In nearly all cases they pervert a weak or corrupt system to seize power, usually by skulduggery or violence. The same colleagues that help select a leader in a democratic party, just weigh up their options and take a gamble. We all know dictators are supported by cohorts who reckon that despite the death squads, their man represents the best for their nation (and their career).

While democratic systems prevent all this, they also sideline any strong individual. Maverick personalities rarely play well with others - that's their nature. Such people don't have the skills to raise support.

While being convincing is a necessary political asset, it now counts for more than any other trait. This leads to politicians not even discussing policies, for fear that these break a crafted mould. So we have the separation of presentation and content. Far from being elated that a non-white man and a white non-man are running as presidential nominees, their oppressive blandness is just annoying onlookers.

I'm seriously wondering how long it will take party spin doctors to realize that marketeers at corporations deal with things more sensibly. In theory, if it is only ideas that form the identity of a party, then it is probably better that there is no human face at all. After all, I fully understand the point of McDonalds, and I have no idea who runs the company. While I question the motivation of Ronald McDonald - I can at least see he derives pleasure from purveying the tasty product of dead cows. Its a limited value statement, but one I understand it well. And as consumers, a lot of use are still clearly voting for Big Macs. (According to Super Size Me, Ronald McDonald is more recognizable to young customers than Jesus Christ.)

Cartoons, marionettes, clowns, any of these would provide a more persistent image for a party and would allow a proper disconnect between image and execution. And its more humane than expecting humans to become cartoon character.

Problems with Big

2007-12-17T02:04:00.000Z

Here is Robert Cringley talking about the Google Lunar X Prize -

"On the US government level, which is to say NASA, the space culture is one of risk aversion and budget preservation: all budgets are spent but most projects are cancelled. Space technology is moving forward at a very slow rate, with propulsion systems, for example, little changed from 40 years ago. Moore's Law has described many things, but serious space advancements aren't among them. The result is that hard-won knowledge has retired with the men and women who developed it and we are substantially LESS able to go to the Moon today as a nation than we were 30 years ago.

Private space exploration has become a great hobby for Silicon Valley tycoons who bring to it fresh money, some fresh ideas, and by their sheer number compared to NASA a greater pace of change through accelerated natural selection. Yet I worry that this is a fad, that it will fade over time as space enthusiasts lose the 10 percent of their fortunes their wives will allow them to risk, then go back to building big boats or big houses, or whatever they would otherwise have done with that money."

So how do you fund Big Projects that may not make any money? The first answer (certainly in Europe) seems to be "the state"; but tax payers, or their representatives, naturally want to see some return on investment that they can appreciate. And the lifetime of Big Projects makes them vulnerable to changing fashions, misunderstandings and malpractice.

Many projects do produce money somewhere down the line, and private enterprise can sometimes find potential profit. But that can fatally redefine the purpose.

If the only upshot is that no one builds pyramids anymore, it wouldn't matter. But there are also serious implications, such as heavy industry not converting to replenishable energy resources. Or no one manufacturing affordable life saving drugs for all. Or no one creating defences to destroy incoming "extinction level event" asteroids.

This is certainly one glaring weakness with modern national democracies. If its unpopular or wont make money, it can't be done. One has the suspicion that capitalist like non-democracies such as China may be better systems of government for the next century or so for this reason alone. While allowing only a select few to make decisions usually does go wrong eventually, leaving resource decisions to the wisdom of crowds or markets just encourages short-termism. Of course, most democratic governments are carefully constructed so as not to be too democratic too often, but faster information sharing encourages greater public participation.

The evidence from years of conferences is that large scale issues like global warming do not necessarily force collaborations. Without a military threat, nations see little reason to make joint decisions. There is the possibility of large global corporations clubbing their resources together to do Big Projects purely for self-aggrandizement. I'm not sure I want to see Mars being owned by Google, but that maybe one possibility.

Meanwhile, we are doomed to see a lot of things not happen, that we might have imagined would have happened by now.

Will

2007-11-29T02:56:00.000Z

Remembering famous people on their anniversaries is a bit artificial, and probably encourages package tourism into the past. But being reminded that William Blake was born 250 years ago, I was a bit nostalgic about an early memory of going to a gallery.

When I was taken to an exhibition of his work in the Tate, I thought he was a raving loony, but also brilliant. That he was thrashed by his parents for seeing a tree full of angels in Peckham Rye certainly made him a roll model in my eyes. He was a dissident's dissident, hating church and state and wanting revolution everywhere. But the energy and religious nature of his paintings challenged rationalism - specifically the rise of Newton' mechanistic universe. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." I'm guessing he wouldn't have spent much time messing about on Facebook.

His belief in not restraining desire makes him sound like a bit of a Father Jack type character - obviously with a larger vocabulary. Maybe at the time I realised that the path I was on academically - that of the geek - would probably take me away from being a brilliant raving loony. I didn't have it in me to believe in god or to take serious hallucinogenic drugs, so rationality would have to do. Blake's fiery imagery did make me appreciate imaginative modern art. There is no good reason to just paint a piece of fruit - unless its melting, or floating under a bowler hat.

But, of course, the real world is quite irrational. Whether looking at quantum mechanics or middle management decisions, it is quite often impossible to understand events based on initial information. That's probably why you know instinctively that all human based systems are doomed to failure, even though you live with them. So the next time you sing Jerusalem, remember the bloke that wrote it. He probably saw the whole thing happening in his back yard while having lunch.

Faceless

2007-11-25T01:17:00.000Z

I mentioned in a previous post why I think city mayors get a good chance of executing practical politics. The flip side is the continuing irrelevance of parliamentary democracy.

How does an opposition MP gain support? Well, one way is to write articles. In this one Nick Clegg, probably the next Liberal Democrat leader, tries to align himself with the common man against the evil UK government:

"I see this on a daily basis in my constituency in Sheffield. As a local MP, most of my time is devoted to helping people who have been pleading their case for so long that they have given up hope of ever being heard; who have been wandering the administrative maze for so long they've given up hope of ever getting out; who have been put on hold for so long that they've given up hope of ever getting through.

That is the reality for the millions of people who have been drawn into a bureaucratic relationship with our monolithic, faceless state."

Monolithic? Faceless? Thinking of the smooth black obsidian monolith from the film 2001, it's difficult to compare this with the two faced, schizophrenic chaos of a modern state. Being put on hold is an experience everyone in the connected world has had at sometime, and has everything to do with relentless resource management and nothing to do with state conspiracy. Dealing with a cacophony of free expression strains any system. It is very easy to come up with 10 stupid things, off the top of your head, that some part of the government is busy apologising for - whether fighting pointless wars, losing private data, wasting oodles of cash, shooting Brazilians etc. It is impossible to gather them together and fashion them into some unifying Stalinist world view. In attempting to hit the barn door, Mr Clegg announces his lack of purpose. Unless he wants to work in a call centre.

A more practical example can be seen with the whole identity card issue that the Liberal Democrats amongst others vigorously shake a stick at. Its not much of a rallying point, but nevertheless a serious issue. Real identity exists in fragmented form all over the place - with friends, in office draws as well as on databases. A government sponsored identity card will be an expensive addition to this, one that won't deter terrorists but neither will it lead to a dystopian future. Whatever.

Meanwhile, the actual destruction of the ID card policy is happening via blogs and social networks. These express the doubts of the IT community, which is undermining the policy by stealth. As the parts of the government that would actually execute the policy fear the worst, the idea is being dropped by erstwhile supporters. This is real politics today. Did you need to put a Liberal Democrat in Westminster for that? No of course not.

During ancient times of revolution, it was necessary to gather together around a firebrand with a dream and storm the castle walls together. Today any idea can gather steam overnight without the need for party politics. Why wait 4 years to vote for Mr Clegg, when opinion moves daily online?

Flair

2007-11-02T01:16:00.000Z

The image is from a Barclay card ad campaign currently doing the rounds.

The other posters in the "Future of London" campaign seize on environmental issues. The one seen here turns London into an extended funfair, and is by turns a little surreal and maybe a touch sinister. The artist mixes present concerns with good artwork. But the idea is clearly to sell a fun filled city to the ready consumer. That this London doesn't really exist is of no concern to Barclays, even though it does place expectations on the real place.

Many smaller villages all over England only survived intact into the 21st century due to tourism. So while London will always have its financial business to keep it relevant, the capital is still dependent on the image outsiders have of it.

Making things more approachable or user friendly only by a quick image change is a short term move, though one that corporates seem to make relentlessly. Every McJob now comes with a carefully constructed McUniform. I'm reminded of Jennifer Aniston's waitress in Office Space being forced to wear '37 pieces of flair' to prove to her manager that she truly deserved her lowly position. London is also a little too keen on painting a friendly face over a scowl. All world cities give over large parts of themselves for visitor comfort , indeed you can travel from Notting Hill, to Camden, to Shepard's Market, to Upper Street, to Northcote Road and see nothing of modern London whatsoever. But you will be able to buy a convenient gift (probably made in China) for the folks back home. That's fair enough.

I love the London Eye, and I don't worry that the most famous landmark of parliamentary democracy has a Ferris wheel bang opposite just to give it some pizazz. But there are increasing signs of the "visitor friendly" image starting to throttle London as "working city". Its nice that Covent garden is busy, but not that the tube station has to be exit only over weekends because it can't support the crowds. The Thames is great, but the flood risk is real so encouraging growth on the riverside is not too clever. Having more places to buy coffee suites me just fine, but London will never be a cafe society - few Brits will talk to someone they don't know, or emote in public. Pedestrian zoning the streets makes things much friendlier for walkers - but real business needs proper transport access all the time. And of course it's now hardly worth the effort for property developers to build "affordable housing" where they could build a hotel, or a gift mall.

London's real business will always be making money with financial services, and this activity doesn't need the help of image consultants. But to keep a working city functional may sometimes mean sacrificing a few of the pretty things for dirty smelly boring infrastructure.

Toff vs Newt

2007-10-01T01:54:00.000+01:00

Here is Boris Johnson being interviewed about cycling:

Interviewer: The thought of cycling in London fills me with dread!

Boris: Why?

Interviewer: It's dangerous!

Boris: Done it everyday for 8 years.

Interviewer: How often have you come off?

Boris: Err.. Once, when I hit a French tourist.

Who is Worse: Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson? notes the plentiful negative points of the incumbent and front runner for Mayor of London have no effect on their continuing popularity.

Both men are in their own way "larger than life", though not necessarily in a heroic way. The role of Mayor has to be recreated by whoever does it; there is no precedence to go on*. This keeps it the preserve of politicians for the moment - there is no well oiled engine that a guileless celebrity can rely on. Crossrail, the Oyster card, the Olympics bid and the Congestion Zone are the visible results of having an active central authority in a city. These are not results of round table politics - they are the grand plans of a benign megalomaniac.

While Mr Johnson probably can't depose Mr Livingstone this time round, if King Newt stands down in the future, The Blonde Toff will have little difficulty in getting elected - assuming he still cares to. There is a guilty pleasure in watching Boris, similar to watching a documentary about a Tourette's sufferer . Bits are missing, but somehow the sum of the remaining parts remains effective. Much is said about Boris, but mostly it is what he says himself that does him damage.

Mr Livingstone is mildly attacked for his associations, though over the years he doesn't seem to have made too many blunders, even while supremo of the wayward GLC. His willingness to hold open talks with the IRA seemed reckless at the time - but we now know the Government was doing the same thing in secret. Its seems odd now, but many people thought he was a bit barking for supporting Nelson Mandela. Hanging the unemployment statistics outside county hall facing the Houses of Commons was one of his typical stunts.

The connection between these two is fairly apparent. Both have a semi detached connection to a political party. Neither have much time for the phony war on terrorism, fear of immigration or the various "change" agendas. Consequently both have a support base that is independent of opinion polls, and in fact mainly personal. Neither men spends much time controlling their image, though a visit to the courts scares neither.

It might be a bit early to wonder if London mayors will continue to kick the creeping consensus politics in Parliament. It might be that when Ken steps down, a dead weight suit will take over and London will revert to sleep or (more) chaos.

(*The purely ceremonial Lord Mayor of London is quite different)

SPQR

2007-09-15T15:09:00.001+01:00

Looking at how Mugabe has run Zimbabwe into economic ruin, one wonders why South Africa doesn't appear to want to help. No wait a moment; its actually the media that wonders this - we just repeat it. Far from wanting to stem an immigrant tide by interference, the South African government is quite happy for honest educated and cheap workers to cross the border and help their expanding economy.

Maybe to deflect thoughts of colonialism, the term "failed state" has now leaped away from its academic definition straight into the broadsheets. This term transforms one countries problems into a statistical representation. Its common use is to depersonalise a countries people into disconnected bits of data, none of whom have reason to resist a foreign intervention. Thus Iraq’s invaders can ignore the effect they have on the country because Iraq itself has already "failed". Perhaps they view themselves as some form of exam board helping Iraq with a "retake". Iran used to be described as a "rogue state", then a "pariah state" and will eventually find itself as "failed" too.

The liquid nature of nation states might tend to suggest the future should be more uniform. While early science fiction books dreamed of one world governments, this hasn't happened either. Neal Stephenson's "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities" is nearer the mark. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, we are all used to seeing maps of Eastern Europe and Asia full of new countries with similar sounding names.

Even here, Scotland want to leave the UK and just sit within the bigger EU - in short they want to be Scotland, but somewhere else. The Economists recent notion that Belgium should "give up" is only partly made in jest. Belgium has always had two very separate tribes, and now seems to be having trouble resolving their differences.

The complex evolution of the nation state is a lame excuse for empire building. And the arguments used for foreign intervention are sounding increasingly like those of the Roman Empire. A nation that is too weak should be destroyed. A nation that is too strong should be subjugated. The threat of the Caliphate, or Islamic Empire, has even been resuscitated to try to make this all seem reasonable. But it may as well be Oceania and Eurasia.

If South Africa do or do not "rescue" Zimbabwe, the reasons they have are unlikely to be related to the large game of Risk going on elsewhere.

Not built to last

2007-08-12T00:50:00.000+01:00

It didn't immediately occur to me that the number of little moths hanging around my kitchen wasn't a coincidence. Spontaneous generation was not to blame, just some poorly enclosed dry goods. I am now a little more familiar with the life cycle of the meal moth, but have less pine nuts.

Even modest household maintenance requires constant attention. Humans respond well to visceral stimuli, but fare worse when it comes to responding to what we know about but can't see. Building something is always fun and tactile. Maintaining it afterwards seems dull and lacking in reward.

That is why we can all be surprised when a flood plain floods, or when bridges collapse due to wear and tear. Its not that we don't understand the issues, its just that we are not always looking at the warning signals. Maintenance isn't sexy.

I don't tend to trust assets that need a lot of maintenance but hardly ever get used. During the cold war, the apparent over capacity of nuclear missiles was a tacit admittance that they were not reliable. The chances of an ICBM responding correctly to a launch command, and not blowing up on the launch pad, and finding its target and then exploding was probably slim. They were just for show - fortunately.

The increase in small wars owes a lot to the recognition that a military force that uses only easily maintained equipment, as opposed to high tech but fragile weaponry, is cheaper to run and more likely to endure. At the end of the conflict, the weapons can just be tossed onto heaps for UN inspectors to count, and hostilities can be restarted at a later date with updated kit.

I think this disposable war philosophy is the right idea. Many complex projects still go wrong because a small part simply failed unexpectedly after a while. Even when we can accurately predict when things will break, long term maintenance is a losing battle that absorbs more and more resources.

For this reason I'm beginning to think that built in obsolescence is the way to go. True, manufacturing industry still abuses consumers with the principle, but constructing things that are aware of their limited lifetimes, and are easy to destroy and rebuild seem like a good thing in green times.

Technology should be praised when it is cheap and disposable, not complex and over engineered. Otherwise we are doomed to fritter away the future on maintaining the past.

Ealing comedy

2007-07-18T19:18:00.000+01:00

I didn't take the chance to vote in our local bye election today, called due to the death of the Labour incumbent, and oldest MP in the House. Although my fervour for rubber stamping the Westminster parliament is waning, this should be an interesting time in UK politics, with all three parties nursing relatively new leaders.

My little bit of Ealing is at the poorer end of the mainly affluent West London. A large slab of Anglo lower middle class mix happily with the growing Polish community. Houses are posher towards Ealing Green, and shabbier towards Brentford. On my walk to the Piccadilly line I will pass urchins on bikes, a gaggle of old men by a small Syrian church running mincabs, students going to the local college, maybe an antipodean playing a didgeridoo. A typical neighbourhood.

So you will not be surprised to hear that 10 out of the 12 candidates are Asian, and mainly of Sikh origin. The English Democrat party candidate and the UKIP candidate are, oddly, not the exceptions. As our constituency covers Southall, the parties need only court the well established Hindu and Sikh community to control the seat. Only the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and the Greens failed to find a brown face.

As usual, a week before the election we get a bunch of leaflets introducing candidates that have had little or no public exposure, and fuck all time to run a campaign. Most mention the usual guff and include the family "I'm probably not gay" picture. Some remember that the planned tram route was a local issue, but most don't mention it. Some mention Iraq, as if it is a large Tesco superstore being built on a kids playground.

Most of the candidates and campaign managers seem to have defected from other parties. The Tory candidate, a local businesman and "life long Tory" has quite recently given money to the Labour party. The UKIP candidate was a Lib dem. The Lib Dems have a Tory defector in their ranks. And of course no election is complete without voting irregularities.

An apathetic Lib Dems supporter rang me at home asking which way I intended to vote. If he knew anything about his candidate, the issues or policies he certainly didn't feel like telling me. I suspect I am distracting him from finishing a mildly difficult Sudoko.

As backbenchers have no power, and are usually bypassed for any decisions by their own side, it's only natural that those interested in doing things go elsewhere. Being an MP probably improves your chances of getting onto Celebrity Big Brother, but that's about it. Expect to see more join the race for London Mayor, even if that means running with whackos like Boris Johnson and Gary Bushell.

Bottle rocket

2007-06-26T00:26:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks back I was in Florida watching the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis with some colleagues; we had parked on the coastal road to Cocoa Beach. On schedule, we saw a small stick shape on the horizon pushed into the sky by a bright expanding explosion. Shortly afterwards, we heard the roar. And shortly after that, there was nothing left but vapour trails, and the barely visible spent boosters falling back to Earth.

The event had pulled in a lot of spectators, locals who had brought their outsize cars and were sipping beer or doing some fishing. We talked to one guy, who had come out for most of the launches and remembered seeing the challenger disaster. I would imagine most of the Americans watching were there to wish the astronauts godspeed, and probably viewed attending such an event as a form of patriotic duty. Much of what makes America American is indeed represented by the shuttle.

During that week, there was a national debate in the media about whether it was reasonable for an illegal immigrant to be able to buy nationality for $5000. There has been quite a history of concern about secure borders and immigration in the states, much like elsewhere. While in some countries the concerns may be racial, and in others economic, the underlying question is always "does this person share my values"?

Shared experiences are quite an effective bonding mechanism, especially where national identity is concerned. When I was a kid, the first question that one middle aged man would always ask another was about service in the war. This helped establish both social order (class) as well as identity. One of the problems with modern nationality is the lack of many shared experiences of this kind. Big events like September 11th were both too local and too global to mean very much.

In fact we all have plenty of shared experiences; but they are usually based on consumerism and television shows. If Friends and Starbucks are the only things two people share, they can't be sure of sharing any significant values. Nowadays kinship is based on a more fragmented scale - geeks share their memories of playing great Atari games, travellers compare island hopping routes through Southeast Asia.

Trying to work out whether potential citizens are indeed "one of us" is bound to get harder because there is less that defines the people within nations, bar textbook history. At the same time, there are more ways of making virtual societies and more consumer based shared social experiences. But whether this is leading up to a time when social identity is based only on religion and where you were when Monica proposed to Chandler, I doubt.

Everyone is Miscellaneous

2007-05-28T01:51:00.000+01:00

History is littered with classification systems, whether Dewey's way of sorting library books, or the Linnaeus classification for biological science. However well meant, category systems are always skewed towards the creators world view. Without these systems it's hard to work out where a book belongs, or how to uniquely name a species. David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous, follows many brave but faulty attempts to categorize.

In the digital world, where meta data takes no space, you can describe one thing in as many ways as you like. Most of us have applied tags to blog posts or Flickr uploads. Thus a tourist picture of Tower bridge can be tagged "London", "Bridge", and "My Holiday". In the physical world, it would require a committee of experts to carefully categorize a library of photos by hand. Would the picture of Tower Bridge go in the section marked "famous city tourist sites" or "civil engineering"?

If I search for "terrorist" on Flickr, I get a list of photos that include: people putting balaclavas on their heads; guys posing in pretend pre-suicide videos; President Bush, isolated camper vans, even a pigeon. These are the tag makers sarcastic views on what a terrorist is. Almost none of the pictures actually show factual "terrorism" - whatever that may be. This compares with most of the pictures tagged "rainbows", which clearly show rainbows. So its a bit worrying to hear that the government knows what terrorists look like, given that most of us do not.

Proposals to allow police to "stop and question" anyone in the UK under new anti-terror laws look designed to be combined with identity cards. The idea that an individual should be allowed anonymity (not to be confused with privacy) unless they chose to lose it is blown away. If you look like someone involved in terrorism, don't expect to have the same rights as everyone else.

A few decades back, "Stop and search" was used primarily to detain Afro Caribbeans who acted "suspiciously". As more blacks languished in holding cells, the police felt that arresting dodgy looking rastas was some form of public duty. Indeed being black was in itself suspicious. Eventually the courts became exasperated with the large number of meaningless cases brought before them by Constable Savage and his colleagues, and the practice ebbed away.

Ironically, stop and search was not designed to reveal identity. If you carried no form of ID with you, and you didn't cooperate with questions, your anonymity could be maintained (maybe with a few bruises). But with the new anti-terrorism law in place, any Muslim looking person can be fined if they don't submit to interrogation.

The outgoing Mr Blair bemoans how hard it is for the authorities to fight terrorism and maintain civil liberties. That to me seems a reasonable balance. Terrorism and road accidents are comparable; they are bad and sometimes preventable, but are a result of modern urban life. If you want high speed transport, or an army that occupies far off lands illegally in the name of peace, there may be a price. Traffic accidents cannot destroy a normal society (though I suspect the Victorians thought otherwise) and neither can isolated terrorist incidents.

Civil liberties on the other hand are the glue that allows trust between those who govern and everybody else. Without that trust, modern life is impossible. There is little point in being protected from one set of arbitrary beliefs only to be subject to another. Everyone needs freedom from rogue categorizations.

Galileo figaro

2007-05-12T02:22:00.000+01:00

The continuing failure of project Galileo, Europe's answer to the Global Positioning System (GPS), makes you wonder how yet another EU grand design started out.

At some point, one committee sat down and thought that it was commercially sensible to launch a competitor to GPS, just on the basis of improved accuracy. Then another committee sat down and agreed that Europe needed independence from the American controlled system. What if they turned it off? So the work was handed out amongst a bunch of countries keen on having the job creation schemes.

The project is now late, out of control, already outmoded and about to swallow more cash. If this story of misguided European collaboration sounds familiar, then it should do. Remember the euro fighter? A plane now ready to fight the Cold war, long after the Cold war is over.

There is nothing wrong with spending large amounts of money on large scale projects, but over time commercial targets are very likely to change. Pure research has a good chance of eventually bearing fruit, but only when the fruit is ready can you then work out how to sell it.

You have to worry at the political logic too. It says that the only response to the power of the US is to reproduce it. And that the EU is positioned to be that new power. This is the expected response from a Marvel super villain, not a pseudo political entity.

The U.S. has, of course, threatened to turn off GPS if "naughty people" use it. But this would be throwing a lot of babies out with the bath water - aviation and shipping, American and foreign, would be pretty screwed all over the world. The practice of "Selective Availability", or clouding the civilian signal to make it less accurate, was given up years ago by the Clinton administration.

So good old GPS is there, it works, and there is little likelihood of it being switched off anytime soon. I can't remember anyone saying "I refuse to use Tom-Tom because of the Iraq invasion". That might sound trite, but mixing up commercial and political stuff on such a grand level is not a good idea. If the US felt that an operating Galileo was aiding terrorists, they would of course just shoot down the offending satellites. In short, our problems with the current US administration need to be resolved elsewhere.

Got a short little span of attention

2007-05-07T23:20:00.000+01:00

Running at three books with a total of 2700 pages, reading and finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle feels more like an accomplishment than a passing pleasure.

Stephenson knows his audience; he has always written for engineering types. His future worlds are a direct and logical extrapolation of society as it is now. And they are normally funny to boot. The Baroque cycle simply starts in the other direction; it describes various events in the seventeenth century and how the enlightenment led to the world today.

If there is beauty in his writing, it is in how he describes systems - whether the system is the French court of the Sun King, or trade and banking in an age before long distance communication. The world is a chain of actions and consequences, and we marvel at it like a giant game of marbles.

The precursor to this sort of writing is certainly Gödel, Escher, Bach which is a freely wandering journey around strange loops and self representation within systems. Coming in at 750 pages, this too is a little "inaccessible" however well written.

Books of this nature are not really the accepted way to learn or play anymore. Any activity that needs our attention over a long period of time is unlikely to get it. I want to play my two favourite songs - I don't want to hear the whole album. I want to see the best scenes from the film - yeah this is the good bit. If its long, that's fine, but give it to me in bits. I want to snack, I want lite. I want it predigested. Bottom line. Highlights. Fast forward.

One can't help notice that there is a sharp increase in self help books, and work related books. The underlying idea being that any investment in time needs to reap a direct personal profit. Otherwise.. whats the point?

There is the possibility that some ideas actually need to be expressed and absorbed over a long period of continuous time - though its equally possible that the author of a long book isn't good enough to write a short book. Is short the way to go?

Neal Stephenson doesn't seem to think so. His old homepage is titled "My ongoing struggle against continuous partial attention" and includes the great quote from Donald Knuth:

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role
in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the
bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible
concentration. "

From this I take it that Mr Stephenson thinks we should not complain about the length of his books. And at least the chapters are not too long.

Giving the finger

2007-04-10T02:58:00.000+01:00

I don't usually stay in hostels anymore, but on a recent trip to Bristol I followed the majority. After scribbling our names and addresses on a blank piece of paper, we waited in the reception area for our dorm key. But there was no key; we were ushered towards a fingerprint scanner. Yes, a biometricly operated hostel. You can't make that up.

The young guy at reception explained that any of us who felt like scanning our fingers could then open our dorm door. Additionally, we would have access to the adjoining bar. Some fingers scanned well, some didn't.

Far from being concerned about global fingerprint recognition, our host seemed pretty fired up about it. "..and ultimately you can book a hotel room in one part of the world and immediately have access to it via your finger print". Quite. And what about the reverse?

It's probably true that distrust of identity systems is not necessarily an issue for everyone. The idea of a world without conventional locks, where your identity is the key is both slowly appearing yet strangely alien. The consequences of becoming a non person over night is unsettling. With conventional keys, the door owner has to trust the key holder to a degree. With a fingerprint, the key holder now has to trust the door owner. And the stake is identity, not just a piece of metal.

If the fingerprint is anonymous then it would seem less of an issue. Note that I didn't link my fingerprint with my personal details in the hostel situation. Alternatively, multiple personas, as in the virtual world, may help to avoid putting all your eggs in one identity basket. This may lead to people using their real names less in public. So John Smith would have a persona called Bob that he used to pay the bills with, and a persona called Slim Shady he used in a club to buy drinks with. Both are legal but incomplete parts of John Smith.

When the first lock and key were made, they were doubtless only intended to secure physical possessions in publicly accessed spaces; maybe the contents of a large chest in some lord's castle for example. That seems sufficiently different from today's needs, where the ownership, permission and access of secured things may all be in flux.

It may be necessary to accept slightly flawed identity systems - whether physical or digital - so new solutions can be tested in the wild. More examples like the hostel may help us see what the limits of this sort of world are.

The Trap

2007-03-28T02:00:00.000+01:00

I've often heard people complain that the old concepts of common good, patriotism and public service have recently been undermined. The excellent short documentary series “The Trap - What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom” actually charts how it happened.

It starts off with the RAND Corporation, and their work on nuclear détente during the cold war. (Ever wondered what the model was for all those secret twisted government research organisations so loved by popular TV shows? Look no further. This is the daddy.)

Information on what the other superpower was doing was usually vague, leaving room for many what-if scenarios. This continuous game playing coincided with the ideas on game theory proposed by John Nash. Their basis was that you can use mutual mistrust to create a stable system. If the only thing I trust is that you will stab me in the back, and vice versa, then we are unlikely to get too close to each other.

And it worked. The cold war featured many close calls and proxy wars but fear of retaliation kept very large nuclear missiles locked in their silos. Not necessarily because the Russians Loved Their Children Too but because people in power knew they could not keep it during an apocalypse. Mutually Assured Destruction was cool.

After the cold war, people continued to look at their systems of government. Why did game theory not apply now? Why depend on the few who truly believed in the public good when fear and greed were common to all? So a new form of social control was born.

The formula was simple. Stop letting idealists run government, those who may have a sense of public duty, or those who could scheme their way to the top. Instead give everyone targets and penalties; carrots and sticks. So everyone played everyone else. The only true value of a product or service was what people would pay for it. Everything had a value, just like in the open market. Thus the outcome of any action could be evaluated. Winners and Losers would be transparent.

Freedom was restated as the smallest barrier between people getting exactly what they wanted, and making value judgements based only on their own desires.

But this would fail if the rest of society didn't play along. We had to accept that personal fulfilment was always more important than some wishy-washy belief in The Greater Good. The public spirit had to give way to private values. Moral respect had to give way to The Price is Right. For Mrs Thatcher and other free market thinkers, the way towards real "freedom" was to atomise society. Sometimes, literally.

In practice, free market principles did not always work well for public servants. During the Vietnam War, soldiers with performance targets would kill civilians to improve their body count total. When giving the British health service an internal market, the amount of money spent on administration soon compared favourably with the money spent on doctors and medicine.

There is a bit of a backlash today, but really “freedom” won. The few areas of public life that are fighting standardisation (medicine, law, politicians themselves) are under attack every day. Political parties are now abstracted away to allow focus on presentational issues. The Big Idea is still No Idea.

The last episode of The Trap shows how most governments bounce between attempting to impose “freedom” on their population, or on everyone around them, and the various disasters that ensue. However well intentioned they start out, democracies tend towards explosion or implosion. What is the right balance between telling people what to believe, and telling them to believe in nothing - just in case its dangerous?

Heat

2007-03-07T23:55:00.001Z

After watching the documentary "Dispatches: Greenwash" by the increasingly futile George Moonbat, I now know these handy facts:

Oil companies make money producing oil.

A Toyota Prius is the same weight as a car.

Don't put a mini windmill on your roof.

A hole in a bedroom wall is a heat sink.
(I give no link to this documentary, for your own edification.)

No wonder the global warming debate seems so intractable. While the factions chase their own tail in the main stream media, the public look on indifferently.

I used to think that I worked in a relatively energy efficient sector. Well, not quite. Computing seems to be a very power hungry industry right now. In the old days, you turned on your PC, did some stuff then turned it off. But now a lot of your data floats about in servers that are never switched off. This means that you get to waste energy even when you sleep.

With the arrival of web 2.0, there are a lot more servers around. When I saw the claim that avatars in the virtual world of Second Life take up as much power as the average Brazilian, I thought it was a joke but it doesn't appear to be. According to Robert Cringley, Google are busy finding small town electric utilities that they can subsume for their server farms. They already know the future involves lots of servers and mucho power. Of course one easy solution is just to place server farms near cheap sources of electricity. How about on top of a volcano?

The problem with all this is the implicit linking between the computing and the energy industries. Investors have, up til now, probably assumed that oil price fluctuations (due to wars in the Middle East, for example) would have no overall effect on IT multinationals. Yet even a moderate rise in energy costs could surely hit Google, for example, quite hard. Not good for a company that wants to own the Internet. Investors are already leery of large IT companies making very strange decisions in order to solve what are just temporary problems. In the future, this may just mean that you have to pay a little for those cool sites and services that have been virtually free so far.

Its hard to talk about energy conservation, because expending energy is such an integral part of life. And most of us suspect that something as old and complex as the Earth's environment can't seriously be damaged by keeping your TV on stand-by. Until we all come to an agreement about the true cost of energy use, there will be a lot more crap documentaries.

Flash Mob

2007-02-23T00:35:00.000Z

My previous article concerning robots jogged my memory about a short story by Isaac Asimov. Franchise concerns a future "electronic democracy" in which a computer (the infamous Multivac) selects a single American citizen and asks him or her a few simple questions. The answers are then extrapolated to decide an election. The citizen selected in the narrative declares how Americans had "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise". The story is not about computing power of course, its about the nature of social representation and the hive mind.

Democracy is about asking a lot of people a question and selecting the answer given by the majority. As interesting as this idea is, the only other time that anyone trusts the answers of an anonymous crowd is in "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" and then only as a last resort. Its the least worst way to pick a government, but its not a great way to solve problems in general. The Internet can muster a vehement virtual army, but attempting to use the assembled forces as a self controlled democratic instrument seems wrong.

I mention this because of an "e-petition" against replacing road tax with pricing based on vehicle use. People were surprised that even with a squillion signatories, the UK government showed no interest in taking it seriously. While it's fairly easy to ignore a poll when the question is so unbalanced ("do you like tax?", "are you still beating your wife?") one quickly sees that tackling congestion is beyond the wisdom of crowds.

So the web has given us a new route to social representation without responsibility; and a way to do it quickly at that. By contrast, many of the mechanisms of democracy (such as second chambers) improve the democratic process by slowing it down. Reactive forces are better when they are not rushed.

Jason Laniers points out that the Internet does not necessarily help spread knowledge and truth - it just strengthens "digital Maoism" (He revisits the original article here ) or the less useful machinations of the mob.

In a timely fashion, someone has just sent me this link http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/ with the hope I will sign. The petition is against the governments ham-fisted attempt to control happy snappers. A fine idea, but it would have been better to start the discussion when British paranoia got a foothold after July 7th 2005 . Instead a flash mob will be created, who may have little mind share bar anger, and an ability to shout incoherent messages claiming "rights" not so far found in the Magna Carta or anywhere else.

My, Robot

2007-02-13T01:58:00.001Z

I heard a Catholic guest explaining on a radio talk show the other day how Western Europe was dying because we are not having enough children. Statistically this is correct, as if two parents are replaced by two or less offspring the population will stagnate. At the moment the fertility rate in the UK is about 1.8 (and as low as 1.2 in Italy) but age imbalance is a certainty as people live longer but are not replaced by children.

She went on to say that while Europe declined, we will need the surplus population of good Catholic third world countries to look after us as we get old. While the speakers agenda was fairly obvious, its true nevertheless that the indigenous birthrate is unlikely to rise. I can't remember hearing any women (whatever their education or circumstance) saying that they wanted to get down to having as many children as they could bear as soon as feasibly possible. Not in West London anyway.

It struck me that I have heard this population decline argument some time ago, but then it ended with ".. and robots will help humans do their menial work". Sure, I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, but I definitely remember more interest in robots about fifteen years ago.

Seeing that the most advanced humanoid robots can only just about walk, I suspect they won't be spoon feeding us nutrients any time soon. So it looks like immigration will continue to solve the aging population problem for a while.

But however expensive the mechanical option appears now, we can't assume there will always be cheap and willing immigrant labour ready to wipe our dribble. Immigrant aspirations eventually move them away from the lowest paid sectors, forcing a search for the next mobile poor. It seems that advances in robotics are the only answer in the long term - unless we look to Logan's Run as a social model.

Fortunately, Japanese companies are already investing in robots with the aim of producing models to look after the aged. Perhaps the Japanese have always been comfortable with robots both scientifically and culturally. In Europe, we seem to have lost interest in self motivated robots, or indeed any sort of mechanical engineering. While we fiddle in virtual space, a few companies have slogged away at the mechanical problems that plague humanoid robotics. Eventually these will be solved and robots will be available for general service. Meanwhile, we will be displacing yet more hungry masses to keep our failed system going.

Bork

2007-01-18T20:35:00.001Z

One of the first things I remember hearing in hip hop lyrics were their self referential nature. An average pop song was usually about (if it was about anything) a fictional world with a minimal number of protagonists. By contrast, the rappers reportage style usually included random acts of violence, threats to rivals etc that involved the rappers themselves. But in addition to this were bits of other songs, clips from films, quotes from elsewhere. The very mentioning of other material fixed a track in the here and now - the antithesis of the pop netherworld of Me, You and Our Eternal Love.

Pop cultural cross referencing, or "borrowing" sources to help produce something new is now fairly standard. Whether its hip hop, collage, mash ups, mixing things together is an accepted way to produce more pop culture. And mixing things up digitally is the webs natural language.

An extreme example is the fast and funny Robot Chicken, which is a sort of American TV cultural sketch show using stop-go animation. One short sketch featuring the Swedish Chef from the Muppets referenced an Icelandic singer songwriter, an eighties sitcom about an alien, a hybrid form of cutlery, a character from a Star Trek spin off show, an early interactive text adventure and the bass player for the Monkees. To round this off, these shows are available on youtube, which is nothing more than a collection of other stuff.

Traditional culture - by this I mean art, folklore or custom that are handed down by at least one previous generation - seems to be at a disadvantage as a sources for mixing. Older stuff is usually longer, slower and can lack quick iconic representations or handy catchphrases. How do you sum up Beowulf in an SMS?

Naturally pop culture lends itself to being knocked about a bit, and the nerds who run the net are more familiar with it. But in theory all recordable culture exists somewhere on the net in some form or other. So, inevitably, it will be sourced, whatever the consequences. Music lovers who would rather die than hear a scratch remix of Eine kleine Nachtmusik will eventually do just that. Maybe all cultural sources will be ground down to a mixable form, making an even playing field. Or a brown mush.

Sometimes the canonical form of culture is specifically designed not to be messed with, like a sacred religious text. Others are flexible enough to suffer some hacking. Adverts that take the hummable tunes from classical pieces don't necessarily kill them. (Though its hard to understand Dvorak if you think he came from a Yorkshire mining town. ) And of course as human desires don't change, some stuff just works in whatever form - Shakespeare works just fine when set in feudal Japan.

One massive advantage that old stuff has, of course, is that copyright becomes less of an issue with the passage of time. This has kept much of the mixing culture at the legal margins; its a sad fact that sharing without permission can be seen as "stealing". Its this that still keeps mix culture off the mainstream for the moment. As long as traditional culture can at least survive on modern formats, then it has as much chance as being stolen to order as anything else.

The Age of the Pot Noodle

2007-01-04T00:49:00.000Z

Were we just in the atomic era? Well, not if you measure successful technology by its ubiquity. I'm sure an atomic bomb is very impressive, but I've never seen one. On the other hand I have a push bike, its really useful and I can keep it going cheaply. So can millions of others.

Successful technology should be measured not just by how common it is, but also by how maintainable it is. Could a small ordinary group of people with tools they are likely to have, using materials they could reasonably obtain keep it going? In short, a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb is not really a part of current useful technology, rather than the will of a motivated government.

Prestige artifacts tend to lead you to the wrong conclusions about a society. Take the ultimate prestige building, the pyramid. There was no "Age of Pyramids"; some Pharaohs just had a lot of slave labour available, and some good engineers. A random set of villagers could not have built a pyramid. Similarly, a random engineering company today could not construct a nuclear submarine, let alone maintain one.

My home is full of objects I cannot reasonably hope to reproduce, or even make close facsimiles of, and it runs on networks and services that are beyond my control even though I understand them in principle. To maintain modern life requires a lot of domain experts; people whose knowledge is deep rather than wide. This form of segmented knowledge has a tendency to tie societies to each other as well as to friendly networks. It increases interdependency and reliance on an array of pre-created components such as batteries, pot noodles and Ethernet cables.

In post apocalyptic disaster movies, directors try to portray how life would work when the electricity isn't flowing and the usual things aren't available. But there are already some examples of how our reach is already declining.

The war in Iraq, which was designed to show off the technical advantage of western troops has ended up displaying the weakness of a fighting force that cannot sustain itself without an expensive support network. Soldiers cannot venture far from their bases, or really live off the land. They are truly cut off. Sixty years ago a similar American army fought across multiple continents successfully with much less.

Its worth remembering this the next time it is announced that today we live in the "information age" or the "digital decade". That most people can navigate a web page does not imply a common understanding of "digital" or even "information". How long would it take to recreate a small digital network with 100 people in a remote uninhabited island? Would anyone bother?

Second Life

2006-12-29T20:43:00.000Z

So why do societies and great civilizations collapse? Guns, germs and steel did for many nations, such as the Aztecs. In many cases strong empires simply succumb to the second law of thermodynamics; systems tend towards disorder. Any ordered system of knowledge - scientific progress being an example - will also find itself subject to entropy.

Evolution backing superhero Richard Dawkins is finding himself battling evil creationists yet again, this time from within the education system and, ironically, using the second law as an argument. Read the article to discover how our hero wins the day - or not depending on how you see these things.

The battle against evangelical Christians, who are tapping into deep resources to attack evolution with negative memes like "intelligent design", seems to be never ending. I suspect fundamentalism is simply a modern guise for universal disorder. Capitalism also eats away at science by moving capital away from pure research and towards the production of mobile phone ring tones. Its not reasonable to pick on one source of dissent to fight against a general trend.

That common spelling mistakes are not entered into the OED isn't due to academic elitism. As an ordered system, a dictionary can't really include examples of entropy. I think the education establishment is right in fighting hard to keep creationism away from school science lessons for the same reason.

But the forces of entropy will eventually topple any system, and establishment science seems to be losing arguments in many areas at once at the moment. Oddly the internet seems to be accelerating entropy, as single sources of information fracture into multiple channels and personal content. Big science is going to go the same way. Who is to say that Quantum physics has more to offer than Palmistry?

Anonymous

2006-12-07T01:06:00.000Z

Privacy is nice, but I wouldn't lose much sleep if a secret film showing my most embarrassing moments was available to all the people on the planet who don't know me and will never meet me. That is, as long as I am not identified. Its anonymity that is essential.

A celebrity can be defined as someone who has lost their general anonymity. Their name, image and accomplishments are known to more than just their circle of friends. To them, privacy is worth keeping because anonymity is already gone. For everyone else, anonymity provides enough isolation to live with.

As surveillance increases in the public sphere, its important to be clear about what matters and what is irrelevant. We know that no one is going to take the high street cameras down - increased snooping is here to stay.

What breaks the protection of anonymity is the correlation of information that links different pieces of data - sometimes called data mining, or even "joined up government".

Take the good old Oyster card. When I go into an underground station, a camera probably picks up my image. My card, which is registered, makes a record as I pass through the barrier. I will then appear on other cameras as I leave the tube system. Maybe my voice will be picked up be Police eavesdropping equipment.

Now lets rewind.. what connects my image on camera to my registration? With access to the camera and the barrier data, its no problem for someone to take a guess that the person seen walking through the barrier at 10:24 is the same as the registered user passing through the gates. Two separate pieces of data, correlated by a human.

And I couldn't give a fig about that. Human detective work moves at human pace. The same bloke that linked the two pieces of data could have done a similar task by asking the station manager or a nosy newsagent. If someone is trying to track me down, then someone must think I really am worth the effort.

Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.

In the digital era the process of correlation is not humans talking to humans, its programs interrogating databases. A credit card is used in a store. A high street camera tracks a face in the crowd. Now I am identified and located.

One probably essential point to freedom is choosing which realm, public or private, we want to be in at any one time. A blog, for example, may act as a public keyhole into the bloggers life - even if the identity of the writer is unknown. A columnist on a broadsheet paper could use a pseudonym. The choice is the writers.

When the cameras on the congestion zone see my car, they automatically check DVLA to see if I my licence plate has any infringements. In short, my movements are immediately being linked with criminal activity - and never with my authority. And of course the cameras are on even while the zone is not in force.

While the good side of sharing data - federation - helps us work with others in trade and commerce, correlation is the evil twin. It is the unauthorised creation of connections that you didn't know you were making. Remember; your mobile is tracking you, your calls are logged, your home power usage is recorded, your browser visits are saved, and needless to say your credit card bill is as good as a diary. What unintended connections could be produced with all that lovely stuff?

Too much data created by correlation will quickly produce a shadow representation of yourself, that is beyond control. Accurate enough to be implicate you in a terrorist plot, but never complete enough to illuminate your motives.

Return of the Rings

2006-11-26T17:39:00.000Z

When Erich von Däniken tried to persuade readers that aliens must have built the pyramids, part of his argument was to have us believe that ancient humans couldn't have done it themselves. Maybe he couldn't imagine Egyptians with engineering skills.

Andrew Rawnsley's article about the Olympics is somewhat von Däniken like. He denies that the Olympics can possibly be affordable. He claims correctly that it will cost more than originally quoted, and that the date can't be changed. The spectre of the Millennium Dome wails. It is physically possible to complete large construction projects on time and on budget - Heathrow Terminal 5 is one example - though its not one of our known strengths. But ultimately the article simply asks what do the Olympics actually buy us. Its not the bill that worries Mr Rawnsley; its the fact that there appears to be no value proposition. With this logic, the only things that can or will ever be built are shopping malls and office blocks. Money invested to produce more money.

When the economy is working properly, dropping large amounts of money in one place doesn't permanently do anything - money like rainwater just flows back to the bank in different routes. On the way, someone buys your widgets so everyone gets paid. The money could equally be spent on hospitals and schools. But the empty buildings then need to be filled with doctors and teachers who need to be paid in perpetuity. And in most cases, people don't want more hospitals - they want a better health service.

I support the London Olympics partly because it is a global prestige event, and London's main business is financial prestige. Both are all about confidence. While Ken Livingstone has little to do with commercial banking, I'm guessing that he gets that bit too. The city attracts the event, or the event suggests the city - either way. I have no idea whether the world cup has boosted Germanys image. It probably works in reverse; one thinks a bit less of countries too small or too disorganized to be a host. I personally couldn't care less, but businesses who are playing with big cash usually do.

That there is something wrong with the Olympics itself - its' a drug fueled circus of the ridiculous whose time must surely be over - is a separate issue. I don't really "get" athletics, and I'm not sure running around in a circle should be considered a great feat. But there are few recognized world spanning events, and the idea that only Sir Bob Geldof should link everyone together is too horrible to contemplate.

Every Little Helps

2006-11-23T00:58:00.000Z

Attempting to keep up with the guide, I walked quickly down the path by the tracks at Birkenau. This was just where the Nazi doctors decided which of the new arrivals would go straight to "showers" and which were strong enough to work as slaves for the Third Reich.

Looking back at the Gates of Death, I realised that far from getting a chilling feeling, I had a slightly warm feeling of recognition. It suddenly hit me that there is another institution who use a similar architectural design; Big front entrance, well planned transport links, plenty of space.

Veil over Europe

2006-10-27T02:36:00.000+01:00

Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" was named the best science book ever written. If you've never heard of him or the book, I recommend it - though I never thought of it as a science book at the time. It is probably some of the best writing I've ever read. It certainly isn't Dawkins.

I wasn't aware of the award when I saw the film based on his experiences after being liberated from Auschwitz in this years London Film Festival. As he and his compatriots were liberated by the Soviets, they took him across the Iron Curtain into Ukraine and Belarus before deciding to send him back to American controlled Italy via Moldavia, Hungary and Austria. The film has his words against a journey around the same places today. The modern journey had no specific agenda, but included some worrying footage.

The film starts in Poland, where we see communists described as "useless workers" by the new industrialists. Gypsies are insulted too, which is a bonus.
We see shots of the nationalist movement in Ukraine some five years ago, as they rally around their oddly familiar looking flag, exhorting the masses to replace Russian music with Ukrainian music. We jump cut to today, where kids in a youth concert are listening to Eminem like everyone else. In Belarus, filming was interrupted by members of "the ministry of culture". Under the patronage of President Lukashenko, things look pretty much as if the Soviet Union was still in place. (There are elections in Belarus, though the opposition are usually barred from contesting these for, er, technical reasons.)

We end up at an orderly meeting of Austrian fascists. In typical Anglo-Saxon tradition, stereo typical neo Nazis show concern to clarify an agenda item.

Such is life in wonderful old Europe. It seems rather strange to think that while some have been insulting their neighbours in unimaginative ways for years, we in the UK have government ministers insulting a minority in completely original ways. Almost makes me feel proud to be British.

Xenu in the community

2006-10-13T01:55:00.000+01:00

One of the pleasures of working in the city is walking around 17th century history, randomly placed between the newer temples of Mammon. To think that Newton, Hooke and Wren lost their bearings in the same maze of alleys as I walk through on my way to lunch is thrilling. But I almost dropped my Latte when I noticed that the new occupant of the Faraday buildings in Blackfriars was… the Church of Scientology.

Ok, maybe they qualify as a business concern, but how the fuck did they get permission to deface a building with their drivel? I never minded their little shop on Tottenham court road. If you were about to be ripped off by some overpriced electronics, why not have your engrams audited? After all, you may be an operating Thetan.

Having a noble edifice in the city puts them on the same plateau as, er, Starbucks. And that is most profane. Sadly their belief system is neither as well constructed or as entertaining as the average Marvel comic back story, and their one strong shot - dislike of psychiatry - is not quite original enough to make anyone outside of Hollywood take notice.

I quite like the ancient Sumerian cult that suggests humans are a slave race. This seems quite likely; we are good at various work tasks, are easy to control, and breed in most environments. More to the point, we have already used other humans as slaves. And if it comes down to celebrity support, David Icke just beats Tom Cruise in terms of weirdness.

Cults easily ride on the back of the media attack on faith, hence their widening appeal over the last decade. The media does not question the components of faith; it simply points at the trappings and gawps. So now there is less general suspicion of Wicka than any of the major religions. As an atheist, I view all cults and religion as similar artefacts; but I still expect the media to respect all morality affirming faiths considerably more than they do.

The city based Scientologists will have some competition. Across the road, just before the Millennium bridge are the modern offices of the Salvation army. They might have a moribund belief system, but they do have a decent cafe.

4 8 15 16 23 42

2006-09-28T03:08:00.000+01:00

The superior American TV shows share a comfortable formula. An hour long, a few strong well developed characters in very specific situations, with expertly written but simple dialogue. Watching half is as good as watching it all - because the viewer is busy. Stories are self contained or the story arc between shows move slowly - because the viewer is casual and may miss episodes. The good guys may be quirky, they may have Issues, but they win through in the end. The American Way is hard but fair to all. Buy the box set on DVD now.

In light if this, how Lost got commissioned is not entirely clear. The show is expensive but was guaranteed to lose viewers almost willfully. The plot arcs look like Jackson Pollock took control of them. Characters are many and varied, strewn unevenly through the episodes. They have back stories as long as your arm, yet their motivations are obscure. Nothing is resolved. Ever. Any further in this direction and the show would enter into the self indulgent Dadism of the Prisoner.

The success of Lost is due to how it harnesses the internet to keep its hard core fans happy. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking the fans gain leverage from the show as opposed to the other way around.

Fans have always swarmed around their favourite pop culture, and much of the social network the "web 2.0" now offers have been purloined by tech literate fans to extend their fandom. Most shows have an uneasy relationship with their possibly frothing admirers, though official websites will happily sell T-shirts and ringtones to those that want them.

Lost exists as much on the web as it does in the actual shows; sometimes more so. There are so many occurences of "the numbers" in the show for example, that it is quite feasible for a keen eyed fan to spot one no one else has seen - as if finding a new star in the heavens. Bloggers theories on what on earth is going on are often helpful, like a good cinema review. Indeed it soon becomes clear that only by reading hints from those with sufficient time on their hands to watch the program for you, can you ever hope to keep afloat.

From a commercial standpoint, once an advertiser has paid for an eyeball to see their ads, the rest is irrelevant. In the case of Lost and similar shows, sufficient fans download podcasts of aired episodes that the dependency on a network should disappear altogether. Maybe that is TV 2.0 - or maybe not.

Deus ex machina

2006-09-10T22:50:00.000+01:00

Close to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, now seems a good time to talk about string theory. First gaining media attention in the eighties, it was slated to explain how gravity (through heavy objects) fitted together with quantum physics (the preserve of the very small), while explaining how things like black holes worked on the way. It turned out to be easier to make equations around a one dimensional line than a zero dimensional point - hence the term "string". I remember seeing the little diagrams on my tutor’s scribble pad, and later seeing the tutor on popular science TV shows.

Modern science works very much like a shark; it has to keep moving. No science faculty will say “we're done here". String theory is another attempt at the elusive Grand Unification, but twenty years later it has neither been proved, or been used to predict anything. Some physicists are openly wondering whether its time has passed. From a scientific point of view strings have been very successful in producing coherent theories - but none that have any practical merit.

The West leans on science to prove that technology and knowledge supersede the need for an inscrutable deity. This is used, in turn, to paint the picture of Muslim fundamentalists as permanently "backwards looking" and illogical. After all, they didn't invent mobile ring tones. So fuck them.

The West’s own fundamentalists don't quite get off the hook here; especially considering the persecution of scientists by the church in previous centuries. Even today, many Catholics are unhappy with social and biological progress. But the Puritan attitude that "god made brains, so use them" is overwhelmingly the Christian as well as the secular world view. While scientists themselves come from every background and belief, they do need to work in societies that don't censor ideas.

But science and technology have not lived up to expectations of the last 50 years. Our understanding of genes is mainly limited to "if we leave this one out, this goes wrong". Robotics has slowed down because much of artificial intelligence has been a dead end. A robot that walks is still a gimmick. Recycling of consumer products was strangely not seen as an issue by reckless engineers. Compute power and networking, the obvious jewel in the crown, are still only tools waiting for real purposes. Maybe a big breakthrough is around the corner, but we have not reaped considerable benefit from recent progress.

This all has hard consequences for political reality. We now know that a technically superior military force cannot overcome a less well equipped one that is willing to take a few risks. We probably can’t produce limitless power, so we still have dependencies on anachronistic Arabs. We cannot defeat famine, merely create expensive hybrid crops. Disease control is still reactive not proactive, as our response to HIV / AIDS has proved.

The secular worlds attempt to square up to the faith based world is stalling after an auspicious start in Afghanistan five years ago. If there is to be a clash of civilizations on the horizon, it may involve China; but it seems unlikely to be Europe or America. Maybe the West will stop turning inwards and arresting every liquid carrying Asian for the next five years, but it doesn't look that way at the moment. And strings are not going to replace the certainties of religious texts any time soon.

The honey in the hive

2006-09-01T02:39:00.000+01:00

"Last November US politician John Seigenthaler took Wikipedia to task in the columns of USA Today over a false and defamatory biography of him that had been posted on the site.

The biography, it eventually emerged, had been written as a prank, but it remained online for four months before it was noticed and removed.

Since Mr Siegenthaler Sr was neither controversial enough to merit consistent attention, or interested enough in what happened online to bother to Google himself regularly, his biography simply sat there unremarked, although we have no way of knowing how many school essays mention his entirely fabricated involvement in the assassination of Robert and John Kennedy. "

If you want to find a primer on a subject you know little or nothing about, Wikipedia is one of the best places to start. That’s because it’s free, fast, and immediately available on the net. The fact that it’s open for anyone to edit for the most part means there is no bottleneck getting between the request for information and its response. Give me the meat of the information, I'll worry about detail and balance later. If you need something more definitive, go and spend a little more time searching recognised authorities.

That the guardians of Wikimedia think it needs greater editing supervision to stop vandalism is a pity, but probably a result of its own success. Almost everybody has to take charge of their digital identity these days – it is not just a chore for the famous.

So I was a bit surprised at the attacks that the various hubs, aggregators and other useful internet tools received from various quarters – many following the lines of the attack from Jaron Lanier in “Digital Maoism”. Wikipedia is slated as being the work of a hive mind; a faceless collective. I see it as a bunch of geeks and academics entering articles on anything and everything. They could leave their names, but why should they? I probably don’t know them. I thought this was just anonymity.

The so called "hive mind" is only visible when a large number of people act simultaneously, such as at a football match or in an election. If you want help doing simple arithmetic, use a calculator - don't ask for the average of 100 peoples opinions. But if you are lost in a town, a local passer by will probably know how to help you find directions. Even an anonymous passer by, with a funny accent, can do the job just fine.

And at that point I would normally leave it at that – plenty of notable folk have done a good job in trashing this article, and giving the hive mind back to the bees.

But that isn’t it because the main stream media want their ball back, and will use spin as well as financial power to regain the right to tell it like Rupert says it is. Newspaper editorials don't miss opportunities to tell their readers how worthless the net is. After years of limp investigative journalism, these Turkeys still haven't seen the coming of the festive season. It is amusing reading once respected “maverick columnists” thrashing madly at the blogosphere because now they are just one more voice amongst many possible dissenters. But when politicians start to blame bloggers for their electoral failure, that’s a different matter altogether. These people don't take kindly to being dethroned.

The vigorous defenders of the free press may not defend public forums if there is nothing in it for them. And we have seen that the internet can be controlled to some degree when the law requires it. A few War on Terror acts will do wonders.

Village People

2006-08-11T22:36:00.000+01:00

A Norfolk based Labour MP, Dr Ian Gibson has been somewhat frank about the relationship between increased incidence of diabetes and genetics :

"I would imagine it is linked to the fact that people in Norfolk are quite inbred with many not leaving the county," he was quoted as saying.

Challenged by the Eastern Daily Press on whether local people would be offended, he replied: "Probably, but they are inbred. If you look at the names in Norfolk, there's a lot that are the same.

"There is an inbreeding complex in villages - people inter-marry. That might mean more of them have got the same gene which predisposes them to it."

He wasn't referring to incest, merely the problem with a reduced gene pool. Nevertheless, using scientific terms in a public discussion isn't a good idea. And of course its just a hypothesis; probably not a bad one.

My assumption had always been that many people instinctively select partners of similar stock, culture and geography, and accept the genetic risks. Or rather, there are cultural pressures that play up the gains and play down the risks. But this can't be entirely true, otherwise none of Dr Gibson's remarks would be taken as insulting, whatever the context.

The opposite of Norfolk in terms of the gene pool is probably a city such as London. Most Londoners were born elsewhere, come from a variety of backgrounds and may not show an inclination towards self similar partners. However, class and religious belief are two cultural aspects that most of us do want to match in partners.

It doesn't seem that genetic Norfolk's will naturally occur anymore. Now that travel is easy, geography rarely creates natural gene pools. Class, even without money, is still a dividing a factor in some places, but not a growing one. The last bastion of the class based gene pool, i.e. royalty, is in retreat.

Unfortunately memetic Norfolk's do exist. I'd say Israel seems like a Norfolk for the mind. For such an inventive people, there seems to be an astonishing lack of political or humane ideas on basic statehood. The only arguments from Israelis about their own predicament seem to be about the rate of smiting. Faster or slower? Rockets or shells?

Modern Islam is not the hotbed of ideas it once was. There seems to be a lot of tail chasing about interpretations, futile comparisons and fear of the West, and too much reactionary politics. But there is at least a recognition that there is a problem.

Israelis and their supporters honestly think the rest of the world is mad. And now they don't even have South African racists to talk to. Maybe they should try finding a people to live with, who don't think like jews. Now where in Palestine could they find them?

Prisoners to game theory

2006-08-06T12:25:00.000+01:00

There has been a lot of commentary on the Israel vs. Hizbullah conflict. Almost all of it is designed to point out that one side is more wrong than the other. This is because articles titled "Why we are justified in killing babies, because they may be helping terrorists" or "Firing rockets into Tel Aviv will help the Palestinian cause" would probably open the writer to ridicule.

John Major started the end of the Irish problem by stating publicly that Britain had no political interest in occupying Northern Ireland. This agreed statement confirmed to all parties that as no side had achievable victory conditions, everyone may as well go home. The next step involved explaining this to rest of the population, who had assumed there were unassailable moral reasons for the conflict.

Could peace have been tried any earlier? Getting two sides to sit down and agree to peace is a little like the Prisoner's dilemma problem. Each time two sides sit down to talk, they consider what they have to gain by stopping, and what they could gain by continuing. They then consider what difference it makes if their opponents obey or disobey any ceasefire. For example, if the IRA gave their guns away and the British reneged, then armed Republicanism would have been set back a generation. Civillian casualties don't make the equation.

So you could look at the history of any violent conflict as being interspersed with rounds of peace talks cum-game theory that eventually resolves when both sides stick to peace. But of course its not as simple as that.

During the final period of the Troubles, the Irish Republic itself was getting richer as a nation. Going over the border to have a pop at the hated English didn't seem such a relevant pastime. The romantic notion of unification gained by terrorism seemed bizarre. And that was before 9/11. The IRA were isolated, and succumbing to increasing infiltration by British secrets services. In short, conditions made a ceasefire attractive.

If Israeli's believe Hizbullah can be "defeated", and Hizbullah think they can cause Israel to collapse, then both sides will put the negatives to the back of their mind and keep going. This is bad for the Lebanese non combatants, who have to hope the rest of the world can somehow create the conditions that usually take years to come about.

That Eighties Show

2006-07-14T20:33:00.000+01:00

In the mid 80s, Israel was embroiled in Lebanon, fighting both the PLO and Hezbollah. Later, in those days before blogs, some reprobate even turned the situation into software entertainment. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Middle East is still a game played with the same pieces interacting in different ways to produce misery.

Hezbollah’s relationship with Lebanon is unusual, but not new. They are a militia, in a country that used to be run exclusively by militias. Israel blame the Lebanese government for not fully controlling their country, but Israel is not known for listening to foreign governments or caring for the welfare of gentiles. Hezbollah, in any case, would not exist but for the Jewish states previous intervention.

The militia is an interesting body. Its bigger than a "terrorist cell" but smaller than a religious minority. They are both political and military, not just an armed group with some civilian apologists. In the case of Hezbollah (The Party of God) they are influenced by the Shia Islamic Revolution of Iran, the power of Syria, the righteousness of the Palestinian cause but they also run hospitals in Lebanon. They don't really fit into today’s media template. They used to be referred to as "armed factions", along with the Christian Phalangists. But today it is unseemly to represent Christians as being on the same level as Muslims.

There has been no time to guess what Hezbollah are trying to achieve by mixing it with Israel. It almost feels like a flying picket - going on strike in sympathy with other down trodden workers. Another throwback to the Eighties. Either way, events are likely to move faster than any peace efforts.

Isreal, whose policy is to reveal an iron fist from inside an iron glove, are again turning a drama into a crisis. New party, new leader, same response. This belief in Mutually Assured Destruction has not escaped the attention of those living in Beirut, who have no wish to go down with the ship. While they look for somewhere to flee to, they fear the destruction that the Israeli army and Hezbollah will leave in the South after they finish will probably be bigger than last time.

Working for the customer

2006-06-28T02:15:00.000+01:00

"The victim's voice needs to be heard much more than it is at the moment," says Lord Falconer. Like most attempts at populism, this form of vacuous statement eventually diminishes the messenger, while leaving the government briefly enhanced.

I heard the same thing from a victim support group. Victims don't want to be relegated to talking to the press on the court steps; they want to talk inside the court.

It’s difficult to tell whether this is just a plea for emotional expression, or an attempt at influence. There seems to be a genuine belief that the mechanics of grief should somehow be part of the process of judgement. Victims, who are after all tax payers, could speak before a judge passes sentence.

A court first discerns who did what, and then works out how long the guilty should suffer. I assume it’s the second part that victim support groups hope to effect. Sentencing does, after all, sometimes seem a bit arbitrary. So surely this posturing will have no detrimental effect on the court system?

I'm concerned that people have confused a voice in justice with consumer feedback. If I don't like a meal from a restaurant, I certainly won't go back and may think about complaining - bar my usual British reserve. Either way, the restaurant will improve if I say what I don't like. Conversely, it will surely do badly if it ignores me.

By being a victim (or the family of the victim) of a crime, I am unwillingly pulled into the justice system. But the quality of justice is unlikely to be improved by telling the court how I feel about the crime. The process is not "customer" centred, and is unlikely to ever be. While there is no need to make ordinary people feel alienated, the otherworldly nature of court etiquette does at least remind people that they are not just chatting with their mates.

Let’s just remind ourselves here. Customer centred justice means I pay a man to take out the bad guy. This is condescendingly called the "law of the jungle". But this is at least straight forward. However well meant it may be, attempting to make court justice fit the expectations of its audience can't really work. The basic nature of presenting evidence to a court, satisfying a judge or jury, and getting a verdict is not meant to favour either side.

The detrimental effect of a crime on the victim and the victims family represents only one possibility of many that could happen after the crime is committed. But a crime is in any case judged on its likely outcome, whether the worst happened or not.

But of course, who am I kidding? These redtop fuelled victim campaigns exist to keep people behind bars longer. If those found guilty of violent crimes are getting sentences that the public finds too short, the correct response isn't simply to push victims in front of the judge’s nose.

Death by misadventure

2006-05-21T23:42:00.000+01:00

A week or so before the local elections, a Labour councilor rang me to gauge support. He was quite happy to talk for some time about local issues. The big one issue in West London right now is the planned tram system; the council supports it but the traffic disruption it could cause has ruffled home owners. As it turned out the Labour incumbents were famously turfed out. While I have no basic problems with the transport initiative, it's the details that cause concern. It appears that much of the initial planning was based on the principle that because road users "should" switch to the tram, they therefore would. Public infrastructure planning does not really meld with consumer choice.

Attempts to mould opinion to avoid compelling people to accept things is one of the trade offs that liberal governments have to make. Mr Blairs vocal defence of animal testing and attack on anti-vivisection extremists is a mixed blessing to medical scientists. At this moment in time, something stronger than mere support is required however.

That medical scientists are still using animals is as unfortunate as it is necessary, for both ethical and technical reasons. Scientists themselves don't drive these decisions - indeed the science community farms out ethical questions to worthy committees. Given no options, most scientists have and will experiment on themselves if that will speed things up. For them it isn't a question of morals, it's a question of resources. In an era where a bag of nuts must say "contains nuts" for fear of litigation, no company can risk a half arsed testing solution.

Our understanding of disease and death has moved very slowly over the last millennia. In the same way that you wouldn't try to understand what a radio is for by looking at a circuit board, trying to decode DNA is great technical science but probably won't further the understanding of any bigger questions. No one knows, for example, whether living systems have built in obsolescence or can carry on forever given genetic improvement and enough cranberries. Because of this, testing on live systems (ie. animals) can't be safely mimicked in any predictable way. And yes you guessed it - improving our understanding of living systems involves experimenting on them.

Sacrificing animals in order to help humans has ethical problems whether you care about animals or not. The "us" and "them" attitude is deeply unhealthy. How many rats should be consumed in order to relieve one area of human suffering? While this question has no good answer, trying to answer it still leads to trouble. Eventually the question shifts further up the food chain until "rat" and "human" get replaced by "my family" and "your family" etc.

There is no complete alternative to animal testing as yet - but that isn't a good enough reason to do it. Trying to seek bizarre justifications - and I've read some odd ones - only helps split society further. We abuse animals for science because we feel impelled to improve our own lives above and beyond our understanding of the consequences. Its not pretty, but the alternatives are to face falling life expectancy, a new use for illegal immigrants or near extinction from the next virus we don't quite fathom.

The revolution will not be televised

2006-05-21T12:23:00.000+01:00

Challenged by my esteemed blogmate , I feel somewhat duty bound to big up Pandora as a product of the wonderful new Web 2.0 world. It is customary to avoid defining what this term actually means, and simply make glib comparisons such as "personal websites are 1.0, blogs are 2.0".

Pandora acts as nice way to use the rather impressive music genome project. This catalogues music by its content. Its an attempt to describe any track by its constituent lyrical, instrumental and stylistic elements. Is this absurd? Not at all. Its just a way to say one track is like another one. And of course, this method of comparison bypasses commercial attempts to tip the balance when pushing new music.

So I can define a personal radio channel simply by naming a band or artist that I like. Very simple. Immediately Pandora plays music based on my selection - it maybe by the artist I chose or something completely obscure. I can give any track the thumbs up or thumbs down and that will further refine the channel. I can share my carefully constructed channel or play other peoples.

In the Web 2.0 world, your personal choices (or preferences) get pulled into what is usually termed a social network. This gets around the problem of publicizing private data by grouping preferences together anonymously to gain something useful. Most people see this as the mysterious ability of Google to figure out what you actually meant to search for when you made a typo. LastFM, a close stable mate of Pandora, further uses social networks to configure a personal radio channel.

There is no evidence that Web 2.0 applications actually provide a new financial model. You may remember that the last so called internet revolution failed because few companies worked out how to make any money. Pandora is, after all, just a radio channel with a less annoying DJ. It does reveal the different attitudes to digital rights and the internet that various record labels have. But this war has largely been fought already.

One other notable aspect of most Web 2.0 applications is that they are well written; I suspect this is because there are more computing graduates who have been given better free tools and good advice - and the carrot that maybe Google will hire them. I'm not sure whether this is the second coming of the internet revolution, but you might as well enjoy the free stuff while you can.

Blood brothers

2006-05-15T01:01:00.000+01:00

It was the bombing of Belgrade that first made me angry about the supine nature of our foreign policy. Serbia’s criminal regime was, initially, Serbia’s problem until they started to attack their neighbours. While many European countries tried not getting involved, some sort of military action to stop Serbia’s effort at ethnic cleansing was inevitable. The UK got involved immediately, which was creditable.

But when Nato bombed Belgrade in 1999, I still felt some disgust. This was a very severe way to try and communicate with otherwise friendly people. While it was a military strike against military objectives (with the usual "collateral damage") I waited for a statement from the government that made clear how far we would and would not go. None came. It was clear that Mr. Blair saw no need to define our position as any different from Washington’s.

While it’s not wise to lay your cards out before you play, or publicly nay-say your allies, democratic governments do actually represent the people that voted for them. Serbia was not part of any axis of evil. I remember skiing in Kaponik when the inflation started to reach Weimar Republic levels. I had a Serbian technical drawing teacher. There was a bunch of great Serbian BMW mechanics in Swiss Cottage. A responsible government would try to explain how these everyday facts marry up to dropping cluster bombs in downtown Belgrade. It’s only polite.

Nothing much has changed. Our government makes no effort to point out any differences in our world view and the American one. Apparently, London’s view of events in Iraq is Washington’s. While Mrs. Blair has voiced some personal camaraderie with Palestinian suicide bombers, London’s view on Israel is Washington’s. Of course "London" here means "Blair", because there appears to be no separation between the Prime Ministers office and the foreign secretary du jour.

So as a parting gesture before he goes, I hope that Mr. Blair does not pre-order some early softening up strikes on Tehran just because some of Bush's mates yearn for rapture. It would be fine if we Brits saw everything in the same way as our American cousins but we never have. Unlike Serbia, Iran is not a geopolitical neighbour, and I have not been skiing there. But without any great street knowledge, I know that a Middle Eastern leader demanding the destruction of Israel is just spouting the required hot air. They all have a bullet point to "destroy Israel" on their to-do lists, just like Western leaders have "eliminate poverty" on theirs. Bullshitting a home audience is unpleasant, but not a reason to go for blood.

On July 7th last year, Blair made a speech about the transport bombs in London. This was not a faraway issue; the explosions went off within earshot of Downing Street. Blair was on home turf, and had the time, space and attention to say something statesman like. Instead he ranted against Al Qaeda (who?) and ratcheted up the fear. It was left to Ken Livingstone to point out that the problem was misguided sociopaths with bombs, not some grand Muslim conspiracy.

It doesn’t have to be this way between allies. Consider how Churchill got on with de Gaulle, in a real war:

“Winston Churchill was once informed by his butler that French President Charles de Gaulle wanted to speak with him on the telephone. Churchill, in the middle of eating a bowl of soup, refused to take the call. DeGaulle persisted, however, and Churchill was eventually persuaded to abandon his meal. When he returned to the table, his soup was cold but Churchill himself was simmering with rage. "Bloody de Gaulle! He had the impertinence to tell me that the French regard him as the reincarnation of Joan of Arc," he cried. "I found it necessary to remind him that we had to burn the first one!"

Fear leads to Euston

2006-04-23T18:54:00.000+01:00

The Euston Manifesto is an interesting agitprop creation; a mixture of self appointed left leaning journalists and bloggers taking responsibility for a political document that came to being in a North London pub. It isn't actually a call for a new political party, or even a new direction for an existing one. More a parting of the waves.

Once the banalities are removed ("we don't like bad people" etc.) what remains are clumps of self contradictory stances. There is a sort of imperialist mandate for attacking shifty looking Muslims who don't kowtow to democracy. There is an apology, on behalf of the left, for being a bit anti-American recently. There is disagreement amongst the signatories with respect to any economic details. And there are still more pointless generalisations.

In a bizarre addition, it also adds support for open source software. I can't recall any political movement directly backing a software movement before. This could be proof of how random and confused the document is, or perhaps it's stuck in as an joke by a Mac user. Given that the same paragraph includes opposition to the patenting of genes, it may be a virtuous attempt by media studies graduates to mix it with geeks.

Ultimately its the language itself that is most significant, and repellent. "We reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women;" Ok, so they hate Mullahs, we get that. But there is an unpleasant overtone that goes beyond petty racism. "Women" seem purely symbolic here, not actual people. "We stand against all claims to a total - unquestionable or unquestioning - truth." A bit too Orwellian surely? I hesitate to say it, but perhaps these guys need to lighten up.

As an antidote to this guff, here are some lyrics from a track by Lily Allen that made me laugh out loud as I heard it on the radio.

"There was a little old lady who was walking down the road,
she was struggling with bags from Tesco
There are people from the city having lunch in the park,
I believe that is called alfresco"

Now that is inspired.

You're the daddy now

2006-04-17T13:42:00.000+01:00

Oddly, the Economist magazine has kindly pointed out why I am not a libertarian. Apparently I'm a soft paternalist.

While New Labour have certainly been responsible for some dubious paternalistic behaviour recently, they have tried the newer approach sometimes too. Soft paternalism recognises that by fixing sensible defaults (employees must choose not to have a pension) or by using financial penalties (you can smoke, but its expensive) peoples lives can be improved without removing choices. Well, that's the sympathetic view.

A libertarian believes that the individual always knows what's best for him or herself, and that the state never does. For that to be a guiding philosophy, it would have to be right a lot more often than it is. But its wrong so often that we all accept some paternalism whether hard or soft. People are fully aware and in control of only a small part of their everyday lives. More information improves this, but does not turn children into adults, make the disabled able bodied, make a doughnut sour, make a 4WD car environmentally friendly or stop heroin hitting the brains pleasure centres.

The Economists tentative argument against soft paternalism is simply that people have to be left to fuck up sometimes. If by doing so no one else is screwed, then this might be a tempting point. Think about how well children learn from experience rather than by direct teaching. But in the adult world, there are active forces leading people astray. A teenager buying a Big Mac is Loving It because a multi million dollar campaign guided the decision. There is no reason to stop McDonalds spending their profits on advertising - but there are good reasons to spend government money on telling kids to reduce their butt sizes. And in any case, we all know people will fuck up with or without guidance.

The middle way on drugs - embrace and control - is probably better than bombing third world poppy fields because we can't control our own citizens consumption. The libertarian view however definitely doesn't work in any place where peoples lives involve the accurate control of equipment - clearly a surgeon with acid flash backs is risking more than self abuse.

There is plenty of unwanted paternalism. I don't quite know why governments want to put various chemicals in the water supply in order to improve health. Its not so much bad as inappropriate. Given the amount of treatment that mains water actually receives it isn't as if there was any "purity" in the first place. But like raising money with a window tax, there are more direct ways of achieving the same objective. Are the fiddlers who come up with these schemes evil control freaks? No, they just have too narrow a vision.

People have been making decisions for me well before I was born. That's just fine. I don't feel subjected or restricted by most of the sensible ones. I definitely do not require people to know me before they can speak for me. Most deeply immoral decisions were wrong out of the box - well before others were forced to accept them.

Our Brand is in Crisis

2006-03-25T15:33:00.000Z

It’s interesting to see democracy in action, and sometimes out of action. In a sort of disaster story called "Our Brand is in Crisis", a documentary team followed a high powered American campaign consultancy around the Bolivian elections as it tried to support a pro Western capitalist in the face of growing indigenous unrest.

The result was that Gonzales Sanchez de Lozada ("Goni") won, but was shortly after herded out of office by violent riots that propelled left wing populist Evo Morales into power. Goni ran back to safety in Washington DC.

The term "indigenous" points to a specific problem in South America, where gringos seem still to have power over native Indians. The consultants held unending focus groups and kept the patriarchal and patronizing Goni on message. It was perfectly clear no one trusted the guy, but he was just a little less dangerous than the other chancers. The spin doctors did not exactly pick up on the depth of anger people were feeling.

The reason that professionals appeared to be ignoring what the majority were saying is of course because they thought the majority were wrong. And they may well have been. This is one of the laughable problems with democracy. No issue is evenly understood by everyone, so the temptation to filter out the wrong answers is overwhelming. The wily politician knows that passion beats intelligent argument hands down when dealing with people, especially desperate ones. And eventually politicians use emotionally charged issues to carry them forwards and leave details behind for others to sort out.

Simple observation (as well as The Economist) tells you that no peasant society will do anything but gently decline in a global world economy. Coz someone can always dig up stuff from the ground cheaper than you can. But full engagement with the world economy is a harsh ride for the same reason. Are your bananas from the Windward Islands or from Costa Rica? As Ice Cube warns black rappers who try to please mainstream record labels, "they'll be another nigga next year".

No serious person is concerned about politicians selling peerages. Of all the ways they can raise money, this is one of the more harmless ones. Giving vain old rich people the right to sit in a redundant legislative body in no way disenfranchises me. But how does this look to a small holder in Iraq? Bad, especially if the same people are "helping" to bring order to your country. In Bolivia’s case, coca is a big factor. Why should a farmer put up with U.S. crop eradication programmes when cocaine is so popular in that country?

Ultimately this is the problem with exporting liberal democracy; the target population has to buy into capitalism , along with its associated moral relativism. Of course if they already do, as with the Baltic States, they will embrace democracy for themselves anyway.

But when I became a man, I browsed for childish things

2006-03-21T02:24:00.000Z

All I remembered was a theme tune, some garbled images and some dramatic moments involving magic. That was more than enough to rediscover the children's television serial "Ace of Wands". I was not particularly surprised to see a multitude of sites remembering a 70's show of no great academic significance. "Sadly, series one no longer exists because the videotape was wiped to save space". A crime indeed; someone tell the Hague. At least my memories are in good hands with Google.

I didn’t feel guilty wasting time on this network navel gazing; it’s no more than scratching a vague itch. But nevertheless, I accept that no problem in my life or anyone else’s could be solved by reliving how Tarot guards with mystic hands.

The biblical reference in the title does not, of course, refer to the change in television viewing habits through the years. It is assumed that there are attitudes, desires and emotions that must be left behind once you step into adulthood. Today, most people in the West have the time and resources to ignore all that. Do you remember your parents saying to you that you can't always have what you want? Today, selfish individualism is not just an enshrined right; it’s the cornerstone of capitalism. Entire livelihoods depend on the fact that "I want it in pink". The Middle Youth culture is certainly thriving. Its a bit beyond lads mags, girl fights, and nostalgic repeats of The Sweeney. Stories of parents too hung over to send their kids to school are no longer signs of urban depravation. The truism that you are as old as you feel seems to imply that acting like a kid keeps you young.

The school of hard knocks cannot force you into maturity either. The film The Road to Guantanamo on over the weekend featured the British Asian kids captured in Afghanistan and held illegally because the CIA believed they supped with Osama. In this re-enactment, it appeared the victims faced their circumstances with little more than schoolyard bravura. "Nah, I wasn’t with the Taliban, I was working in Curries" was probably not the battle cry of a budding Che Guevara.

Is a tendency towards the juvenile, or social neoteny, a natural human condition when the environment allows? We know domesticated dogs have lost their wolf like tendencies in order to live with humans successfully. Perhaps this is a similar process. Playing Grand Theft Auto is probably more socially responsible than the more adult pursuit of corruption or aerial bombing. But when it displaces keeping up with the news or communicating with offspring then it seems less benign.

I've often assumed we fall short of our stated ambitions because we grow lazy or have other distractions. Its possible that these ambitions are just not sufficiently fun. A lot of people complained that the various Live Aid charity events had worryingly juvenile tag lines such as "lets end poverty by holding hands" etc. Perhaps the assumption that adults should seek economic reality is misplaced; simply connecting any issue with youth culture is the best goal.

The internet is certainly the place to find plenty of mature material (as well as just "adult material"). Google counts 12 million hits on the loose phrase "Will the human race destroy itself?", certainly many orders of magnitude greater than "Is Tinky Winky gay?". But its not the lack of the serious, its the prominence of the silly that is interesting. The increase in juvenilia in the media, mistaken for dumbing down, is probably just a reflection of what keeps readers attention. But like sugar in tea, I suspect it's hard to give up.

Join the dots

2006-03-09T01:23:00.000Z

Syriana is a fairly serious film looking at the effect of the oil industry on various characters. There is no scenario building; few exposition scenes; no helpful mood music. The minimal style forces the viewer to pick up the plot where they can, as if they are watching a soap unfolding from the middle.

We don’t know George Clooney is a dodgy CIA agent when we first see his first scene in Tehran. We see him walking away from a missile for cash trade, after which the purchaser’s car explodes. He doesn't look back - so we assume he is a dodgy agent. You get the idea.

This style of film works well for simple genres. Slasher movies are a good example. The question is always in which order the teens will die horribly. Students of the accepted slasher canon can quickly match the stereotypes, enjoy the twists and rate the movie. But that’s because the director knows the audience has seen ten similar movies within memory. These films push the boulder downhill – they do little or no creative work and just play with ideas that are already out there.

Syriana is not so simple. There is no back catalogue of Middle East / Oil industry / Political Intrigue movies I can think of. Yet the characters are familiar enough. We have the weak Emir, who looks astoundingly like a Saudi king. We have the earnest prince, and his half wit brother. We have a dogged lawyer, a naive Middle East analyst, an evil Washington fixer and a young-Muslim-destined-to-fall-prey-to-fundamentalists.

But hold on a moment. Where are these stereotypes from? How do I understand what is going on? Sadly it’s in the news. The news now works with so many half completed templates and join the dots references that we have all built a battery of stereotypes just to finish off the work that the journalists don’t deliver. Indeed it is not the films fault that we are more comfortable watching docu-soaps than being presented with a fully investigated story.

Let’s take a current example of a government minister who left her husband due to his financial concerns.

1. Labour minister => must be a liar.
2. Husband doing business in Italy => must be corrupt.
3. They lived together => they must both be involved.
4. Party threatened => require spin.
5. Print “Separation of convenience”
6. Next news item

Its a fair cop, take her away. Every inference is simply based on previous vaguely cobbled together cynical inferences. You may think the government would wish to intervene and help out a (possibly) innocent minister. Not really – this inference engine is mainly of their own making. Straight from their mouths, to your brain, without any cogs being engaged. That’s how they like it. The media have just become the pipe for feeding this process.

I really don't want my mind to work this way, yet when watching the film in the cinema the whole thing seems natural. Why do I know that these Muslims are in a Mudrassa? I’ve never even seen one. I have been programmed to accept that a vulnerable Muslim must necessarily become a suicide bomber when things go wrong. In a moment, a bearded man will ask him to join the real struggle – ah, there we go. Where will he get the munitions? Oh yeah, there is one left over from scene one. Ties up nicely. Whats for dinner?

Fag end

2006-02-18T19:44:00.000Z

In a sparsely filled Pitcher and Piano, on a weekday night, I think I witnessed the final end of public smoking. Only feet away from the centre of London, the place felt dead. The few patrons in isolated spaces smoked furtively in a poorly ventilated space. The lack of a no smoking area doomed the place to a mundane clientele who could go nowhere else. Smoking used to be a shared social experience to match the food and drink in a restaurant, pub or bar. It sometimes signified intrigue, camaraderie, or rebellion. But now its treated like speeding or masturbation - a filthy little quirk of the self obsessed.

For a parliament led by a government on the wane, this was one decision there was little problem with. Its a rare example of a loss of liberty that a government can happily own up to causing. This is not a good time for big government anywhere. Most of the democracies in the West are either unpopular, untrusted or hamstrung. The media spends its time with Parisian pyro vandals, unfunny Danish cartoonists and Abu Hamza. Mainstream politicians are keener than ever to prove their worth.

Democracy and capitalism form a protective bind around each other that makes problems harder to reach. You are forever free to think, free to express yourself and free to trade. By warping thinking, nicotine poisoning effectively broke free trade with a product that the addict is not free to stop buying. The profits returned to consolidate the position.

Most systems have weaknesses, and indeed most people judge systems by how self regulated they are. The tobacco industry lodged itself, like the cancer it helps make, deep within the society it infected partly by pretending to be part of it. By removing cigarettes from bars and clubs, some of the hold is released.

For a short period, New Labour have managed to unbundle personal freedom from democracy with various results. Initially it was fox hunting; identity cards will be next. But that’s just the political manifesto. In the publics mind the questions have gone way beyond this. Do I have the right to insult you? Or threaten to kill you if you insult me? With a dearth of handy moral guidelines around, these questions feel easier to answer than they are to understand.

By the time the law comes into force, smoking in public will already be fading from the memory. But personal freedom may still be under scrutiny. Perhaps a number of policy units have come to the same conclusion: we are increasingly ready to pass up on individual rights for tangible national benefits. Or maybe these benefits are simply being better sold. While its true that rights forfeit are hard to get back, this may just be a necessary correction to a society keen on personal freedom but less so on the responsibility that should go with it.

Silo

2006-02-03T01:11:00.000Z

In the slightly over excited world of information technology, "silo" can be a derogatory word. Why so? Picture, if you will, an agricultural store; isolated in the middle of a lonely country setting. Now instead of thinking about a container of grain or somewhere to put your missiles, think about data.

The silo represents the traditional way of storing information - in an isolated system. So a bank would store details on their customers, and the dry cleaners next door would do the same. But it would never occur to the bank manager to exchange data with a neighbouring business - even if they shared the same customers.

Of course the bank also had the problem of identifying its real customers as opposed to fraudsters. After all, it only has its own information to go by - a name, an address and an account number. That's not the way natural identity works.

Casual identity is based on a large number of people recognizing you. If I get abducted by aliens, my friends will eventually wander down to a police station and give various accounts of who I was and what I looked like. Different people know different things about me, so an accurate enough picture of me builds up after a while. So maybe the bank would benefit by talking to the dry cleaner after all?

Well so much for the silo. Welcome to the new world. Your digital data - i.e. the recorded decisions, the web registrations and the form details you fill in - are traded, exchanged, compared, sifted, and mined. Usually this is done with your implicit permission. We sort of accept this because in most cases we gained some service, advantage or security. Oh sure, the small print said the company promised not to sell your details directly to anyone. But they never said what they would do with your data within their own company, or that they wouldn't sell services based on what they know about your data.

Google knows you by your search profile. Your mobile phone supplier knows where you are. Your local high street security staff have you on video. Barclaycard know your spending patterns, and Tescos knows when you buy your groceries.

Thats all been true for sometime. But now Google know what you buy, Barclaycard know where you are and Tesco knows what you want. Its no longer enough to think of our digital identities sitting in tidy boxes.

Of course when I get a polite call from my bank just checking that my card hasn't been stolen because I'm buying more jewelry in Swansea than I usually do, it all feels worth it. And when a pervert is stopped from working in a school because he downloaded kiddy porn it even feels like the way things should be.

But its harder to calculate the side effects of these cascading data relationships. Your new habit of extreme ironing may be viewed as an insurance risk that suddenly your insurers seem to know about. Details of that gay chat call you made once in a hotel could percolate to the public arena. That link to an insulting cartoon you left on your blog has now been referred to by another blog that has now attracted hate mail.

So what personal information do you own, what is yours to keep private, make public or give away? Did you leave that decision with someone else? It may be time to resolve these issues soon, because the market is already open.

Nonce

2006-01-18T23:01:00.000Z

The age of increasing information capture makes it very hard to escape your past. A hundred years ago a complaint about a kiddie fiddling schoolmaster would simply result in him moving to France. Social stigma was always localised. But today your identity is no longer a bright moving spot through time, but a messy blur tracing your life through puddles of data.

Parliament has very sensibly realised that politicians are not best placed to vet teachers. All parents want to keep known paedophiles away from their little darlings without reserve, so restricting the flow of information is clearly the way to go. The problem is the length of time information remains active; you can no longer have walled off phases in your life.

There are various ways your character can be tarnished through your actions. Interestingly, most of them can be erased through time or movement. A bank robber can be reformed while in prison - apparently. Even an axe murderer can happily appear on breakfast TV if the period he slayed in is seen as nostalgic. Mira Hindley is an exception - somehow she is stuck in an unforgiving rut.

A bad political viewpoint can be reversed, with brief embarrassment. Brief bouts of mental illness can be recovered from. You can clean yourself of drugs. Gaiety can be "resolved" through inactivity or heterosexual marriage - in a tabloid sort of logic. But neither time nor political correctness will save anyone from substantial rumours concerning child abuse.

It is ironic that so many offenders have been caught with child pornography on their hard drives, because it is the power of computing that is trapping paedophiles. I have no clue as to the inner mental workings of a nonce; the point is that neither does a personal record. It is not for anyone other than a panel of experts (cringe) to pronounce on the fitness of a deviant or former deviant. But that panel now has to make decisions based on data from maybe twenty years or more in the past and from any continent.

Thinking will probably have to change as data builds up, even though public fear of major deviancy is not about to alter. As major war crimes are conveniently forgotten, it still seems the age of data driven continuous prurience is upon us. So leave the kids alone.

Charles Kennedy - nothing ventured, nothing gained

2006-01-02T18:17:00.000Z

Liberal Democrats have recently showed some displeasure at their leader, Charles Kennedy. They have noticed that he isn't very good. I'm surprised it’s taken this long for complaints to surface. His minor personal problems loom over his miniscule political footprint.

He was elected mainly because people knew who he was, not because of what he wanted to do. This is a very common practice in the US, and works for charismatic Hollywood entertainers. I'm not sure appearing on "Have I got News for you" quite measures up in that way.

The Liberals have often complained that the English parliament has always supported the two party system. It has indeed: for many decades it was dominated by the descendents of Tories and Liberals. The Labour party is a relatively new phenomenon in Westminster, whose power grew with the voice of the working class socialist movement.

Today, socialism is a museum piece but the Liberals still cling to their minority status. Their leaders have presented themselves as good dinner party guests with a few good ideas here and there. Charles Kennedy has been accused of having less drive and apptitude than the current leaders of the two major parties. In fact, he has less of these qualities than many of the leaders of parties that ritually lose their deposit in general elections. He is also very short on original ideas.

Almost no Liberals are fooled by their increase in seats in the last election - Kennedy garners votes from voters who don't like politicians. Any port in a storm. By saying nothing about immigration in the last election, the Liberals probably picked up votes from the Conservatives. But that is unlikely to work again.

Initially, he wanted the Liberals to stop their tacit support of the Labour party. In return New Labour moved to the centre anyway. In response some Liberals have taken up "old Labour" positions. I doubt this was intentional.

Kennedy was against the war on Iraq. In fact that might very well be the only thing he is known for. Was this a conviction?

"In 2003, Mr Kennedy took the decision - after much soul-searching - to oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq.

He spoke at an anti-war rally in London's Hyde Park, but backed British troops once the invasion was underway - a move which led to criticism from some peace activists"

So he clearly is not a pacifist, he just didn't fancy the war. That’s fine, but its just a reaction to events that many of the public also had. He has no known interest in global politics, and inevitably hasn't been an effective anti - war voice.

There is no reason for a leader to lead from the front. But its useful to be able to define which direction is forward. The Lib Dems themselves have been astonishingly slow to realise that their influence has diminished because they "own" so few political areas or ideas.

The Liberals are starting to look at the very market liberal idea of a flat tax. This moves towards transparency and simplicity that is already working in Eastern Europe. It's a promising policy - but Kennedy prefers to talk about local income tax. This older idea is mooted to be fairer than Council Tax, but its a much smaller idea.

For self interested reasons the liberals have always pushed Proportional Representation as an alternative voting system. But they have even stopped talking about this. Consequently no one is talking about PR anymore.

In his New Years message, he chose to attack bits of government policy. He spoke about the increasing gap between rich and poor. This indicates that Mr. Kennedy wishes to focus on more state intervention - which may surprise members of his own party, many of whom left the old socialist Labour party.

Whereas some Liberals have supplied a strong condemnation of ID cards, Mr. Kennedy simply states that the system would be expensive. That’s true, but this doesn't differentiate ID cards from any other project. Its hard to tell whether he actually has any objections to it.

In the same way as he hasn't supported any new ideas or had much to say on hot current issues, he hasn't successfully defended himself. He used the familiar Premiership manager method of saying that the board backs him - mainly. Needless to say he is unlikely to survive another season.

Sieg Heil! But not in a bad way

2005-12-24T03:11:00.000Z

Apparently he is "a fascist but not a racist".

Di Canio, a talented footballer who once plied his trade near the volatile streets of West Ham is certainly a character, as they say.

"I made the Roman salute because it's a salute from a comrade to his comrades and was meant for my people. "

Oh, and apparently it was not meant as a political statement. So, that's OK then! I could at this point quote Silvio Berlusconis opinion on the matter, for he is amongst other things the Italian Prime Minister. But a bent politician will do anything to raise his fortunes, so lets leave him in his sty.

As much as I am in favour of the EC, it does mean having to accommodate political basket cases like Italy. If Italy was in the Middle East, it would have been liberated by now (or should I say, again) . Perhaps the Mafia would have ran the insurgency. Mussolini would probably recognize the current scene from the one he last saw before he was hung upside down. Unlike Germany, Spain and Japan, Italy has only very recently attempted to embrace any sort of democratic stability in order to leave its chaotic past behind.

But that's up to them. Its really up to us to discourage European footballers from goading fans with extremist stances. The press felt it necessary to point out that Jews would be offended, and went to Shaka Hislop (a black colleague from his West Ham days) for some condemnation. The embarrassing assumption is that everyone else would understand.

Unfortunately this little incident, added to other recent little incidents elsewhere go to prove that we are entering a period of increasing activism that European governments will not be able to tap into. No broad movements, just explosive bursts of outrage. The punches and kicks from the kittens in the bag who fear they are close to the river. All we need is a strong leader to free us from our bonds and unite us into one unstoppable force.

Have a happy New Year.

Its Full of Stars

2005-12-21T03:02:00.000Z

One of my big disappointments in life is to live through the lull in big science. Exploration of the final frontier had been a subject of interest since the Renaissance, and the seed for reams of dubious fiction. The moon landings were one of the great moments in human history. Since then, we have suddenly become considerately more parochial. Governments feel that space is too big, too expensive and too pointless. We send out the odd robot to keep scientists busy, but public interest in what is beyond our solar backyard has been fairly tepid. Why is this? Why has our collective gaze moved from the galaxy to our naval?

The idea of the recent reality TV show Space Cadets was quite simple. A group of sufficiently gullible yoof was duped into believing they were destined to be the first tourist members of a Space Shuttle mission. They were flown out to a disused hanger in Ipswich which they were told was a Russian space centre. They launched into space with the help of a simulator and sound effects.

The combination of reality show and hoax is not original, and the issues it brings up are already familiar. Can anyone be fooled if enough illusion and special effects are applied? Were the contestants actually actors and were thus fooling the viewers? One realised quickly that it didn't matter; reality shows follow their own logic that the contestants and audience seem to understand.

At no point did the training exceed pub games or a Big Brother test. So in the mind our dupes, an astronaut was not a hard thing to become. When they first laid eyes on the nose cone of their balsa wood shuttle, our would-be Armstrongs did exclaim how “awesome” it looked. How it was “almost like a movie”. Hmm, was reality wasted on these people? Would they request to go back into the Matrix?

Once aboard the simulator our astronauts were told their orbit was in "Near Space", and hence they would not experience weightlessness. Given that amongst the population as a whole, many still believe the Sun goes around the Earth perhaps this level of ignorance is not extraordinary.

The program makers were probably hoping for a daring game to see how far they could take things. But it turned out that none of the contestants were sufficiently interested in the science bits to seriously question anything at all. And I guess we have the answer to our question. While the contestants were self evidently not overly bright, they did understand what space represents to most of people - an idea wholly unrelated to normal life. However excited the prospect of the trip made them, no part of the bogus training surprised them because they had no serious expectations. They would have behaved the same way had they been told they were off to feed aliens.

Somewhere and somehow in the last few decades space has simply become - out of this world. Even simple ideas like the inability to get into space by common flight, because flying requires an atmosphere just didn't occur to our budding Dan Dares. Despite the Space Station, there has not been enough hard space science in the media for basic ideas to take root. Star Trek is as venerated as NASA, and comes in Dolby sound.

Ultimately, there is no reason to set up a manned mission to Mars. It’s just a far away rock. But space exploration will quickly become a rich mans hobby unless it gets back into the limelight. If the galaxy is just a backdrop to a humiliation, then I fear we may never leave home.

Atomic

2005-12-08T22:52:00.000Z

Job searching has re-introduced me to the joys of London commuting. The first shared cold of winter; trying to read on the tube when tired and uncomfortable; the cost of a travel card, which makes driving good value. And that slightly fetid light that illuminates the underground network.

Interview questions are often repetitive and self supporting. Frankly, it’s somewhat inappropriate that an IT company drags you half way across the capital to spot a missing semi-colon. If an IT company can't use IT to stop unnecessary journeys, then my guess is we are not close to becoming a less energy dependent society.

Energy saving has caught on over the last few years. I see that LPG is more clearly available at the pumps. Some roadside devices have solar panels - while normal for Arizona, it’s now less of a joke in the UK thanks partly to global warming. Everyone is up for recycling their waste these days. But this all is just peanuts; the real debate is the return of civil nuclear energy.

New Labour seems ideally suited to re-sell, or re-badge, nuclear power. How about New Clear Power? Or is it Nuke Liar Power? I suppose its more UnClear Power. Most people would chose to bleed to death very slowly as opposed to walk round with a primed hydrogen bomb that others call safe, and that is why coal and gas defeated nuclear power in the first place.

A lump of fossil fuel represents a great energy package - and it can still be dug out of the ground. While this remains true, no politician is going to waste their time explaining to an electorate why they should be martyrs to history and go without for the sake of the future. Or that was the thinking.

But burning fossil fuel is a dirty process, and that is the bigger issue today. A conventional coal fired station probably releases more radioactivity into the air than a properly working nuclear equivalent, in addition to the sulphur and carbon waste. Wind farms can contribute a trickle of energy to a Western nations constant energy thirst. But no, you can't run Britain on wind. If you wouldn't put a sail on a train and expect it to work, then erecting a few windmills and expecting them to run every major cities daily commuter services is clearly unreasonable. Nuclear Plants can and do provide a serious chunk of our power needs - the question is about their true cost.

Perhaps the disappearance of the Soviet Union has dimmed memories of the problems that creating a drifting radioactive deathcloud can bring. And seeing a plane flown into tower blocks makes the idea of nuclear terrorism with civil plants seem slightly arcane. There are just much more direct ways of getting a bang for your buck.

Maybe the stark unreality of alternative power has made everyone re-assess the once evil nuclear power. Electric cars are still not really here yet. Eco houses are just isolated architectural musings. Liberal Democrats are still naff. And buying power from the French is really quite galling.

Either way, when the idea of new nuclear plants was floated recently, complaints were muted. Apolitical youth are much less likely to wear badges these days. I don't know how many have any idea how power is produced in the first place. The banner wavers are more interested in complaining about McDonald’s abuse of cows. So maybe the way is open to start again after a short ignorable public debate.

Nuclear power does need to be respected, not necessarily feared. One day someone will come out with a good use for the waste. Probably. There will be some badly hushed up mini disaster. Definitely. But there isn't any point entering more decades of navel gazing while fossil fuel drains away. None of this stops research into workable mass market alternative energy anyway.

Meanwhile, there are some new fresh faced MPs from constituencies on the coast who are suddenly getting promotions and great starts to their careers. Guess what the payback will be? But I don't care - there won't be any plants built in London.

One Minute's Silence

2005-11-27T18:15:00.000Z

I hadn't been to a football match for many years, and hadn't been to Loftus Road for half that again. So being present for a minute’s silence for a footballer I had never witnessed seemed a slightly fraudulent experience. Spurred on by Shahid's excellent post I feel like making some living-in-London posts. So a rare Saturday football match seems to fit the bill.

As it was, the club went for one minute’s applause for George Best to celebrate the great man. This avoided the issue of the silence being broken by a handful of idiots. I doubt that there would have been any issues at the ground where Best played his last game for Manchester United.

The average Queens Park Rangers fan is not that young. Only those in their forties can easily remember the last time the club was successful; and many probably had seen Best play. QPR is not fashionable, and there is plenty of good football in London these days to entertain those whose wallets can stretch to Premiership prices.

When England won the world cup, people celebrated the achievement. But the football was not that pretty. Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton aside, the England team was workman like. After the failures of the 1970s, a large gulf seemed to appear between the British game and the Brazilian game. Hooliganism reached a peak (or nadir) in the 1970s. Our game was not the beautiful one.

But George Best was a rule apart. He was not from Rio, but he was still sexy. He played champagne football in every sense. He turned the idea of an honest hard working British style on its head. This chimed more with the sixties and seventies zeitgeist as Britain struggled to turn into a modern country.

The super hoop fans started to file out of their Shepard’s Bush ground as the match finished in a 2-2 draw. It began to rain, and I ducked into a cafe for a quick cappuccino. The cafe was entirely North African; groups of thin black males sipped coffee around small tables. The satellite channel had a Premiership show on it, with Arabic subtitles. Before going home I grabbed a meat pattie from one of the better West Indian takeaways.

As with all grounds, the police show up in numbers on match day. But there was no tension. There were no malcontents hanging around street corners, taking in the atmosphere and waiting for trouble. The Hull City fans faced taunts of "your just a town full of wankers" during the match. This seemed fairly tame; Hull has recently been voted worst city to live in the UK. I remember London fans waving five pound notes at impoverished Northerners in the Thatcherite eighties. Leaving the cafe, I saw an American tourist asking a mounted policeman for directions - a classic mistake as the young cop would not have been from the area.

The QPR fans are nearly all white to a man, woman and child - the only black faces were ground staff and players. But there was not a sniff of the casual racism I remember from way back when. One of their play makers was a skilful but diffident black player. He tended to control the ball before passing it. This actually winds up English fans who like their football fluid, their tackles hard and attacks to be fast. Apart from the occasional wish for him to "put his foot in" the melee, there were no suggestions that he wasn't willing to work for the team - the consistent chide that John Barnes faced for years.

On the radio, commentators continued to heap praise on George Best, though original quotes ran low. The voice of one of his wives comes on, as she describes passing a bedraggled man walking in the middle of the road against the traffic - and deciding that she could no longer look after two children. But in general his memory is used in a positive manner, even if his life seems impossibly comic strip today.

Motivational speaker

2005-11-20T02:33:00.000Z

As an atheist, I very rarely get to hear a sermon. So I was almost looking forward to hearing a motivational speaker who was due to speak at a careers fair I wandered into. Preaching about Money and Success to suits is serious business, unlike mumbling about Good and Evil to a congregation of middle class parents who want a church school for their kids.

Its trite to say that the West’s true religion is capital; most peoples unanswerable questions are probably the same as they ever were anywhere. But there is the sense of smugness about our economic security that approaches Righteousness. I'm wary that the response to the challenge of Islam is that "our answers are better than yours" - yet the answers all seem to be economic. Hence the modern notion of the "failed state", or even the "banana republic". Economic failure is the ultimate evil - it’s worth fighting wars over. Salvation is to be found in the successful adoption of capitalism. So China is accepted into the fold, for they have seen the Light. Their former trespasses (like driving tanks over protesters in Tiananmen Square) are forgiven. Amen.

I always associated motivation with being fooled in some way. Motivated to charge from the safety of the trenches, or face Monday mornings. To be fair, Richard Denney talked about happiness quite a bit - not just how to make money. He did it in a style designed to be absorbed by the irreligious majority, i.e. happiness as a commodity. There are three keys to happiness! I'm sure that (1) sharing problems, (2) looking forward to the future and (3) smiling at tramps on the tube do undoubtedly make the world a better place. Indeed, that sounds almost Christian.

He talked about the power of the negative, and about positive attitudes. You can do anything with the right attitude, etc. I was not particularly surprised that the word "truth" was never mentioned. You may remember Donnie Darko’s response to negativity which got him in trouble - "I'll tell you what he said - he asked me to forcibly insert the Lifeline exercise card into my anus!"

But afterward the speech I certainly felt better - I'm human and a rousing speech has exactly the same effect on all the troops. I'm even tidying my desk, a definite sign of motivation if ever there was one.