On the subject of "crazy entrepreneurs"

 entrepreneurs, Eric Schmidt, Europe, Google, innovation, invention, on a high  No Responses »
Jun 302010
 
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Here’s an interesting article on the subject of “crazy entrepreneurs”.  Though I agree with most of it, I strongly take issue with the simplistic approach enshrined in the following threadbare soundbite:

“Jobs are created by the private sector not by the public sector. Wealth is created by the private sector not by the public sector.  [...]“

In truth, the situation is far more complex than this, as today’s news in the Guardian indicates:

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

The close relationship between public and private which New Labour’s period in government exemplifies gives at least a partial lie to the notions expressed by Google’s Eric Schmidt.  Working in an intelligent partnership with those who know not only how to invent but also how to innovate, clever governments can do far more for a wider populace than the restricting matrix of venture capitalists and budding Edisons may ever hope to achieve.  We need the brilliantly oddball, that is true – but we also need to be clear that what drives them most is not money but opportunity.  And, on a 21st century planet where everyone’s fate is now clearly common, we can no longer take a granular approach to innovation.  Every iPod which is manufactured and sold and serves to add value for Apple obviously has its downsides – downsides which end up affecting us all.

The innovators, like our physicians before them, need a moral framework and culture before we can allow them the freedoms that Schmidt is understandably arguing on behalf of.  Otherwise, they will continue to create at the longer-term expense of future generations.

This is no longer justifiable.

This is no longer enough.

Freedom with responsibility.  Even the crazy can understand that equation.

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On the virtual coattails of search (and how it doesn’t work any more)

 a con, Nokia E63, Ovi Maps 3.0, search  No Responses »
Jun 282010
 
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I’ve been struggling – on and off – for the past month to try and load Ovi Maps 3.0 (the version with free navigation for walk and drive) onto my Nokia E63 smartphone.  Nokia’s own integrated software refuses to allow the exercise to take place, whilst resorting to Google has been a most frustrating experience.

The problem with search is that you have to ask the right question.  And, what’s more, that question needs to be new.  If you ask the wrong question – or, alternatively put, a question which has already been asked – instead of getting what you’re looking for, you’ll most likely get what someone else wants you to find.  In an evermore consumer-ridden society, this is generally that thing which makes money for that someone – not, unfortunately, something that means even-handed support.

Search is polluted.  It didn’t use to be like this.  In the good old days, when real editors of the Internet helped index utility, massaging of results was a rather more complex affair – far more difficult to achieve.  But now that algorithms depend on links – and there is so much mediocrity out there which achieves visibility by chasing already visible real estate – search has become at most a second-hand experience.  We don’t get the best any more.  We get the virtual coattails other people – less wise – are desperate to hang their websites on, in a madcap mission to be the first to chatter noisily.

So, in search, we do have an oracle but – in a sense – it only tells us what we want to know when we know how to ask wisely.  And that, my dear reader, is half the battle.  In a sense, once that battle is properly and usefully engaged, we almost certainly already know – more or less – what the answer will be.

The real power of search, then, is in its teaching us the Socratic skills of using questions to strip truth out of obfuscation.

But we must play our part and persist in the pursuit of that truth.

We cannot sit back and unquestioningly accept the results that algorithms provide.

The virtual world of search is, thus, no different from the real world of curious bewilderment.  It extends our reach – only to confuse our ability to be perspicacious.  Perhaps this is a deliberate wheeze on the part of consumer-driven economies.  To provide us with all the truths any world could expect to hold – but make it impossible to work out where reality lies.

So it is that capitalism disconcerts us all with its apparent ability to reinvent itself perpetually.  For it doesn’t actually reinvent at all: simply, it is successful at making us forget.

Such is the power of those who believe we must all welcome their ability to put a price on all our heads.
____________________

If, incidentally, you’d like to install Maps 3.0 on your E63, there is a way.  After a month of searching frustratedly, I finally asked the right question – though for the life of me I can’t remember what it was.  So it is that on Nokia’s own forums, the oracle has spoken thus.  Free navigation finally seems within my grasp.  Just need to work out now how to stop the system going online to check licences every time I try to get instructions.

Update to this footnote: turn-by-turn voice navigation now seems to be working on my E63, in combination with my external GPS device and without having to access aforesaid Internet.

So am I clever or what?

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How staring at goats is a metaphor for the Internet itself (or Web 10.0)

 "The Men Who Stare At Goats", Internet, Jedi warriors, New Earth Army, on a high  No Responses »
Jun 232010
 
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I saw the film “The Men Who Stare At Goats”  (more background here) yesterday for the first time.  I saw it again today for the second.  Today I saw it in the company of my daughter.  Yesterday, I saw it with my wife.  My wife fell asleep.  Not her sort of film.  My daughter, however, a product of two cultures (possibly three), was absolutely fascinated and entranced.

The grand achievement of this film is whilst it makes you laugh at some of the crazier paranoias of military mindsets, it doesn’t half make you uneasily aware that there is a far bigger world out there than any one of us has the right to imagine.  And whilst I was watching the film for the second time, I found myself commenting to my daughter that the idea of remote viewing which the film enshrines in its very heart and soul didn’t half remind me of what – even in its relatively primitive state – we can now quite easily do with the Internet.  That is to say, find almost anything almost anywhere without leaving the safety of our sitting-rooms.

Just imagine a Web 10.0 for example – today’s Internet with a decade’s worth of astonishing and as yet unpredicted bells and whistles.  Tactile touchscreens, all-enveloping body suits, voice- and thought-controlled inventions – all at the service of our most minimal whims.

Tools which serve to stretch and extend our reach as a species and sovereign individuals to places we never before imagined.

Just imagine where search is truly leading us.

To find out everything about everyone, wherever we may find ourselves.  For that is where the metaphor that is this film is leading us to.  In this sense, the Jedi warriors of the New Earth Army that are affectionately depicted and amusingly described by the story told will – in an inevitably social media world of ever-increasing circles (more here) – in the end most certainly be ourselves.

But in ways we cannot yet know.  Nor, indeed, understand – or even begin to usefully fathom.

If truth be told, this curious curate’s egg of a tale explains with clarity the implications around how the supernatural may empower us to good cause.  Meanwhile, the discombobulating side of living in the technological world we now attempt to usefully locate ourselves in is that even where we pooh-pooh the promotion of such super powers as the unhappy rantings of the moderately mad, we may yet find that human machines, black boxes and infinitely complex devices of the future will provide us with undeniably hard and fast realities that – one happy (or at the very least intellectually engaging) day I am sure – manage to fulfil such bizarre imaginings to the point where the supernatural becomes the mundane and therefore simply one more utility.

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On contemplating the lies of rapid gain that lead with inevitability to the falsehoods of productive pain

 a con, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, New Labour, New Toryism  No Responses »
Jun 222010
 
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I’ve been contemplating the breaking up of that economic contract New Labour forged with the poorer in society.  It was a contract with the devil as New Labour people used the language of aspiration to allow the wealthiest to keep their wealth and feel good about it.  But at the same time, through tax credits and a massive but not excessive re-investment in public services (for these were under Thatcher essentially under-invested public services), some redistribution – which would most certainly have not taken place under a Tory government – was most certainly effected.  Unfortunately, this redistribution was not organic, was not persistent, was not learned or sought after or fashioned from below but – rather – imposed from above in an unhappy command and control manner.

Now we get more of the same as British politics operates true to type and a new government aims to unroll everything that the previous government – which sought no sustainable agreements amongst the political leaders that peopled previous parliaments – attempted, in its wisdom, to force upon a voting public.

Lots of what it forced on this voting public came about because Tony Blair had the gift of the gab.  As simple as that.

And also because New Labour’s electoral machine knew how to bring to the fore most effectively such a gift.

Tony Blair was made for the narrative that New Labour developed and sold us.  But in order to sustain that narrative, tools such as tax credits – quick fixes if you like (quick fixes that could just as easily be undone as put in place; and therein lies their Achilles’ heel) – were used to generate a belief in that blessed voting public that politics could be convincingly about useful rapid gain.

Without too much data to hand, however, it is my gut feeling that nothing in life which brings sustainable and persistent happiness can be achieved quickly.

Equally, nevertheless, the reverse of the political coin that is what we might term the narrative of productive pain leads me to perceive a self-interested falsehood of monumental proportions.  What Gordon Brown, on the coattails of New Labour, managed to engineer – even in full economic crisis – was the possibility of a soft and shared landing from the conventional wisdom of cyclical capitalism.  “We’re in it all together” was the mantra and the expectation.

Something new was on the horizon.  And that something new was a breaking of that conventional wisdom.  It would have turned our whole society upside down.  After saving the banks, Brown could have saved an ameliorating form of capitalism for all our benefits.  And I mean “benefits” in the widest sense of the word.

This is not what Cameron’s Coalition wishes to achieve.  On the coattails of economic crisis – as well as Brown’s generally unhappy lack of political steam for most of his regime – the Coalition now aims to reintroduce a capitalism of Darwinian proportions, where ordinary workers must kow-tow to the miserable mechanics of a sharply hierarchical governance and power.

As companies develop their ability to empower and free up their workforces and flatten such hierarchies internally and most productively, so governments like the one we now must suffer choose, inevitably, to go in quite an opposite direction: they engender a miasma-like fear in the future (oh, this disgraceful narrative of “courageous decision-taking” so annoys and disturbs me); they shackle the public sector workers, the poor, those with the least time to participate in local and national democracy – those who most need to engage in public debate and fewest resources have to so do.  Thus it is that in reality the most deserving in society will now be caged within an inevitable sadness and loss: both economic and political, both social and cultural.

These people who now run our country only know how to effect quick fixes.  Whether New Labour for reasons I might generally have admired or the Coalition for reasons I can only suspect, they all do so love their damned button-pressing dynamics.

And I do so hate them all for precisely that reason.

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An alternative BP

 BP, logo competition, on a high  No Responses »
Jun 122010
 
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Fascinating expressions and intuitive intimations of ordinary people’s reactions to the actions of a company with what appears to be a rather long list of prior violations.  This doesn’t half seem like an accident waiting to happen.  More here in this brilliant logo competition which came my way via Slugger O’Toole (though Slugger seems to suggest that the competition is Huffington Post’s – which I don’t actually think is the case).

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Andy Burnham’s pitch (and my surprised reaction)

 Andy Burnham, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Labour leadership campaign, on a high  2 Responses »
Jun 122010
 
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Here’s Andy Burnham’s pitch to Labour Party members, which – to my surprise, of the three I think I’ve received to date – is the one I find most chimes with my current mood.  Comments inline.

Dear Miljenko,

I will always be proud of what our Labour Government achieved. But, now, Labour needs to rebuild. Too many people have lost sight of who we are and what we stand for.

To come back stronger, we need an honest debate about the last 16 years. We must bring the wider Labour family back together. Then, we will be ready to set out for this century an inspiring Labour mission that is both true to our roots and speaks directly to the voters that we need to win back.

This idea of an honest debate about the last sixteen years is absolutely spot on.  Paul at Never Trust a Hippy is coming to similar conclusions in a slightly more focussed context here.

This is what I mean by Reconnecting Labour. I have a strong sense of what we need to do and I believe I can give Labour what it needs:

* a Leader that people everywhere can identify with
* a Leader who can put the heart and passion back into our Party
* a Leader who offers a real contrast to the Cabinet of millionaires that now run our country

This last point may be populist – but Burnham is no demagogue.  The country is now being run by a cabinet of millionaires.

I come from an ordinary family and am proud to represent my home area in Parliament. My feet are firmly on the ground and I’ve never forgotten where I come from. This is why I can give a real voice to the millions of families who fear a Tory Government cutting without compassion, leaving them with no breadwinner or taking away hope from their children.

This goes to the heart of the issue to hand.  Cutting without compassion is what we will get if we allow a government run by high-level decision-makers used to understanding the world through executive summaries to control our futures.

We may not have much choice, of course.  This government may be locked into power for the next five years.  But at least let us ensure the reasons behind our suffering remain clear and visible for all to see and understand.

But I’ve also got the right experience to lead, having done some of the hardest jobs in government, including Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It was a huge privilege to serve as Labour’s Health Secretary and my proudest moment in politics was to bring forward the NHS Constitution which secures our Party’s finest achievement for this century.

But there is much more I want to do. My own life experience has shown me that we still live in a very uneven country, where children without connections find it hard to get on and where life chances are determined by the postcode of the bed you are born in. We still live in a country where families on low to middle incomes often find the odds stacked against them. And we still live in a country where older people live in fear of the costs of care.

The second paragraph again describes realities as seen by foot soldiers.  Yet it is coupled with the first which indicates Burnham would be no procedural pushover; that is to say, he would not be lost at sea when dealing with the buffeting storms, the inertias, of civil service machinations and mandarins.

Labour will reconnect with people by bringing forward inspiring ideas to meet the challenges of a new century that are in the best traditions of our Party. That is why I will continue to argue for a National Care Service – free at the point of use – to give older people peace of mind.

My mission is always to break down elites wherever they exist – and that means looking at how we run our own Party too. For too long, we’ve taken members for granted. We need to listen more. Under my leadership the party, you the members – our MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs and councillors – together with the trade unions and affiliates will all play as one team. No more squabbling and turf wars. At times of crisis in the last Parliament, I always put loyalty to our Party first.

This statement is weaker – elites grow up partly, but quite often, because too many people put loyalty to the organisation they belong to before they do to the logic, rationales and realities of a situation.  Burnham had me in his pocket up to this point – but then sort of lost me in a sudden New Labour flurry of command and control-ism.

It is because I have never had any time for factional politics that I can unify our movement.

Yes.  Quite.  We can all agree on that.  But – in reality – how can this be achieved?  Unification around the lowest common denominator or a healthy level of dissonance which leads to true renewal?

And it is by pulling together that we will expose this Government and present the British people with a credible, principled, and more visionary alternative – a unifying force for all those people who want to live in a country with a fairer spread of health, wealth and life chances.

I do not stand for the leadership lightly. I have never had anything handed to me on a plate and have worked my way up from my local branch to the Cabinet table. I now stand to lead the Party I love and have served at every level for 25 years because Reconnecting Labour is my life’s passion not a slogan.

Yours,

Andy

Anyhow, and even despite my reservations expressed above, this gently flawed pitch from Andy Burnham has allowed him to leap up my list – and quite curiously sort of made me wonder if we really do need the telegenic Milibands to rule the absolute heights of the political roost after all.

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Uppers and downers from Spanish quarters

 a con, credit crunch, filesharing, LinEx, on a high, welfare  No Responses »
Jun 092010
 
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This story from TechDirt today cheers me up mightily.  It shows that at the very least Spanish judges seem to understand the history behind sharing intellectual property – and the difference between sharing altruistically and making money out of such content:

Once again, adding to the increasingly long list of similar rulings in Spain, a Spanish court has ruled that a popular file sharing site, CVCDGO, did not actually transfer or host any copyrighted works, and therefore did not violate copyright law. This is the same thing that numerous Spanish courts have found.  [...]

The tangential observation which the judges in this particular case made is however what most cheered me up:

In their ruling, judges Ocariz, Gutierrez and Campillo said that “…since ancient times there has been the loan or sale of books, movies, music and more. The difference now is mainly on the medium used — previously it was paper or analog media and now everything is in a digital format which allows a much faster exchange of a higher quality and also with global reach through the Internet.”

I suspect that the decade-long influence of Spanish initiatives like LinEx has impacted on the judiciary here, and allowed it to see beyond the simple restrictions of current law towards a wider and more sophisticated understanding of the digital era.

If the supporters of traditional copyright law believe in analogous comparisons to justify their stances in relation to virtual worlds, they must accept all the analogies which the real world provides – and “filesharing” things such as books, videos, DVDs, paintings, music and so forth are all perfect examples of rights and tools we have had since time immemorial.

That, anyhow, is today’s upper from the Spanish quarter.  The downer can be found here (in Spanish), as the Spanish authorities begin to grapple with the deficit that clever and wealthy people have left behind them.  One of the measures which seems to be currently on the table (or not as the case may be – “let’s see how people react” appears to be the strategy at the moment) is charging a fiver to visit the GP, a tenner for A&E.

This depresses me enormously.  The capacity of politicians to ignore the morality of a situation – to unfairly assess the just relationship between blame and punishment – continues to surprise and sadden me.  If we are all scurrying around now like headless chickens, worrying how best to cut the most from our public services, it is entirely due to the fact that a society of the rich – which requested that it be left in peace to do its ingenious business and that it be allowed to flourish under a light-touch regulatory regime – ended up effecting a massive fail in almost everything it aimed to achieve when the credit crunch finally hit home eighteen months or so ago.

They are to blame.  They should suffer the most – if, indeed, we feel suffering is a suitable solution and remedy to the ills we currently face.

Personally, I don’t think suffering should be a tool any government or organisation should gladly contemplate using on anyone.

But then I’m not in government.  Like most of us, I’m just waiting for the punishment which is not fairly mine to be applied to millions of families who can only look on with bemusement – and possibly fear.

People’s capitalism?  Oh what a stupid oxymoron that is.

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Why should I get involved?

 broken politics, crowdsourcing, in a hole, Labour leadership campaign  No Responses »
Jun 082010
 
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It’s probably not the best time to try and answer a question like this.  A general election has been lost.  A Labour leadership election has yet to catch the imagination of the wider voting public.  Arguably, it has yet to catch the imagination of those Labour Party members who have the right to vote.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has the surreal idea of crowdsourcing the deficit cuts.  An idea so surreal I’m inclined to believe I should get involved.

Meanwhile, I wonder what good – in reality – I can do.

Don’t you ever ask yourself this question? 

Being on the losing side of politics or business reminds one of how Darwinian real life can really be.  No excuses.  No pardon.

I suppose that’s why, of late, I can’t help going back to the thought that tools such as tax credits were a mighty distraction.  Instead of effecting a redistributive policy which would engender an organic change in the way we do things here in Britain, they encouraged a society to live with a situation poorly ameliorated and – in the event – just a tad psychologically unhappy.

Out of a desire to speedily remedy rank injustice, New Labour used sticking-plaster economic policy.  A sticking-plaster economic policy which – with a change of government – could just as easily become unstuck.

So I come back to my original question: why should I get involved?

I’m on the losing side, in both politics and business. 

It’s not my turn.

It’s not my time.

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Like London buses

 on a high, online publishing  No Responses »
Jun 082010
 
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I’ve just received two emails from quite different sources asking me to publicise new online publishing efforts.  So, in the interests of plurality, and with nothing but an altruistic desire on my part to multiply the number of virtual conversations, here are the links in question.

Firstly, The Glottal Stop, which amongst other things aims to focus our attention in a fortnightly fashion on a particular subject of debate.  At the moment, the question in hand is proportional representation.

Meanwhile, a gentleman called Keith Gilmour has brought my attention to what I presume is a new site of his called “The Fix Broken Britain Campaign”.  There are some things I could happily agree with on this site – quite a few others I would find rather more firmly resistible.

More here, anyhow.

Always happy to oblige.

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On why the iPad (and Apple) is old media (and old hierarchy too)

 Apple, Google, in a hole, iPad, iPhone, John Naughton, Microsoft  No Responses »
Jun 062010
 
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John Naughton quotes an apposite paragraph from his own column in the Observer today.  As follows:

The essence of the iPad is that it’s a good device for passive ‘consumption’ of preprepared multimedia content. That’s why the old media dinosaurs are salivating about it: it seems to offer them a way of regaining control of the customer – and of ensuring that s/he pays for content. And one can understand why they are so charmingly deluded about this: all apps have to come through the iTunes store and can be charged for. No wonder Murdoch & co love the device. They think it’ll rescue them from the wild west web, where people believe that content should be free. Yeah, and pigs will also fly in close formation.

It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS…

To all you Apple fans out there, you must agree that this multitasking bit is surely rubbish.  I guess if it’s the case on the iPad, it must be on the iPhone.  Contrast that with my Symbian-driven Nokia, which frequently runs quite simultaneously phonecalls, Skype, Gmail, Mobbler and a whole host of other apps without a peep of a problem.

Apple is not only an example of old media – it’s also an example of how to perpetuate the fetish of hardware that was Microsoft’s achievement over the obsession with interactive content that is Google’s.  Apple is a curious beast.  Almost New Labour in its ability to maintain old hierarchies whilst giving the impression of being the newest of the new.

It will fall.
____________________

Further reading: Privacy and the 21st century

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Open source "wherever possible"?

 on a high, open source, open standards  No Responses »
Jun 062010
 
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This is an interesting development.  (Thanks to Paul for pointing it my way.)

In the response to a pretty innocuous parliamentary question from Tom Watson, new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude makes a statement which could, on the face of it, be of monumental significance for UK e-government.
The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges – and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software. Any future development of websites run by the Cabinet Office will be assessed and reviewed against these criteria.

The comments at the foot of this piece also make useful reading.

There is of course a middle way of sorts.  For those unhappy with such a declaration of principles (not myself, I hasten to add), we can always mandate the use of open standards (examples of open standard file formats here) – even where the software licences themselves are not open source.  But these do have to be real open standards.

In such a way, we can avoid vendor lock-in and our intellectual property will always be ours. 

Want more evidence on how beneficial this can be for society in general?  Read and watch this.

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I blame the car (or on losing the connection between foraging and food)

 in a hole, obesity, Roland Barthes, the car  No Responses »
Jun 052010
 
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I realise now why we are being assailed by what essentially amounts to a pandemic of obesity.  I blame the car.  On what do I base this assertion?  Recent experience, that’s what.  As I find myself currently without access to a car, all food is being brought from the local supermarket via a forty-minute round trip.  This means I buy less, walk more and eat with greater thought.  Nothing like that feeling that every mouthful will later equal a certain cost in aching limbs.

The connection between foraging and food is something that the car has allowed us – in the wealthy and lazy Western world – to mainly lose to that greater or lesser degree.  Oh, it’s true of course.  Our supermarkets do require us to pace those weekend kilometres as we trek our way round aisles loaded with far more choice and product than even we could ever possibly have the time to consume.  But the car takes away the pain of transportation between purchase and consumption that – in other parts of the world – people still have to deal with.

And – in the light of the facts – a little bit of that pain is a jolly good deal.  A car-based society is not exactly the positive the TV spots and magazine ads make it out to be. 

We’re fat because we drive – because we are enthralled by that cathedral of latterday society which Roland Barthes so eloquently referred to.

It’s as simple as that.

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On the subject of authenticity

 authenticity, on a high, positive discrimination, Tom Watson  No Responses »
Jun 042010
 
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Tom Watson gets this one pretty much absolutely right:

I’d love to see Ed Miliband contend with his own Walter Wolfgang moment, as Harold Wilson is seen to do. “I would ask you all to extend to our friend the courtesy that he is not extending to the meeting,” says Harold as a young dissenter is hurled through swing doors at the back of the room.

We don’t see that kind of behaviour today because modern politicians do all that they can to avoid their own Mrs Duffy moment. They’re terrified of unscripted interventions. And the nation is losing out as a result.

Furthermore, when he also says:

All the frontrunners for Labour’s leadership are insipid-looking, clean-shaven boys from the suburbs. I can only get away with saying this because the nation knows we also have a prime minister and deputy prime minister who don’t yet shave. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are mollycoddled middle-class white men whose idea of an early shift is the Today programme radio car interrupting their morning cappuccino.

More here in a similar vein.

But it’s not so much real people we’re looking to get involved here.  Everyone, after all, is real.  Rather, it’s more a question of releasing and freeing up that representative streak people have.

Perhaps better than “representative” is the word “authenticity”.

Paul seems to be touching on a similar subject today when he concludes:

As I’ve said, I like the idea of Labour being representative of the general population in all of these ways. I think that it may make for a better electoral performance and a better quality of policymaking.

But I keep going back to the notion that MPs should represent the nation as a whole and the idea that particular interests have to be at the table cuts against this preference.

There are many large companies these days which believe in the concept of mirroring the diversity of their client populations in the constitution of their personnel.  Not so curiously, this is not out of some sudden and altruistic early 21st century revelation and conversion to multiculturalism but rather the result of a hard-headed analysis of how to ensure value is added in customer-supplier relationships.  Put crudely, if you speak the language that your customer speaks, you will understand more accurately – and therefore more profitably – their needs. 

I use the term “language” in its widest interpretation here.

If many large companies can be usefully compared to some small countries, in both the best and worst of senses, then it would be fair to see the potential for applying these hard-headed business analyses – which, these days, impact more and more on recruitment policy – in the context of the demographic and cultural make-up of political parties and, by extension, the governments that proceed from such organisations.  If shareholder- and market-driven companies choose unashamedly to use quotas and positive discrimination to break down the glass ceilings that are assailing deserving candidates, why cannot politics at its very highest levels employ the same tools?

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Privacy and the 21st century

 Buzz, cloud computing, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Norway, on a high, privacy  No Responses »
Jun 032010
 
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We have always valued our privacy.  Entire civilisations and ways of thinking have been built around the right to keep from others the things we most value – sometimes keep the things we most value from the people we are most supposed to love.  Affairs, sexual predilections of all kinds, contacts, influences, business relationships and income have all been protected by this rather vaguely and yet at the same time firmly expressed attachment to not saying or being seen.  I’ve spoken before on this subject, in relation to Facebook playing fast and loose with our understanding of where our data ends up.  Then there was the hoo-ha raised by the recent issues with Google’s new social networking tool Buzz.

But yesterday I stumbled across this article, published by the BBC late last year, which has made me radically rethink my assumptions on the matter:

Every year, Norway’s tax authorities publish details about people’s income and wealth, and every year sifting through the data gets easier.

The story goes on to point out:

In what has become an annual ritual, the newspapers fill their pages with articles about the country’s highest earners, whether in politics, industry or in showbiz.

Many care more about how their own financial fortunes compare with those of their neighbours, friends and family, and again; nothing is secret.

Searching through the tax authorities’ database is easy. The websites of every self-respecting media organisation have their own search engines where typing in the first and the last name of anyone you know will produce detailed information.

Astonishing, right?  Can you imagine how this would go down in a country like Italy for example?  Or, indeed, how the essentially libertarian mindsets of the English in their homely castles would feel about the neighbours knowing exactly how much they really would have to spend to properly keep up with all these suddenly public Joneses?

And yet … and yet …

For more years than I care to remember, Google has been driving the concept of simple and unlimited access to information.  Information unleashed, in fact.  Then there are the more recent uncertainties of cloud computing.  The grand utility of having all your data online, and accessible from any computer, makes our intellectual property portable to an extent unheard of in the century that was Microsoft’s.  Both approaches are virtuous – but in very different ways.  Microsoft promised a personal treasure trove of information which was the home PC: protected, inviolable and easily configurable.  The operating system wasn’t up to the challenge – but the idea was, all the same, seductive.  And whilst Bill Gates was able to convince us that leaky software was a natural and inevitable extension of such freedoms, we hardly ever cared to look elsewhere.

Then – as I say – along came Google; along came search, access, the browser and finally the cloud.  All of a sudden the machine is no longer our fetish: it’s the content we busily pursue rather than the black box we need to access it that enchants us.  As we have lost our attachment to an individual object, so perhaps we have become used to the idea – the quid pro quo even – that our information need not be so private.

And so it is that I wonder if Google, Facebook, untold unintended government leaks of personal data and intended freedom of information initiatives like Norway’s aren’t acting together in some powerful consonance – along with wider and instinctive movements to a more public and online expression of existence and relationship – and thus leading us to a moment in civilisation where we don’t need to hide behind privacy.

Wouldn’t it just be wonderful if we didn’t covet privacy?  So many unhappy things would simply slide away into insignificance.  So many excuses for controlling others would become irrelevant.

Bring it on?  Maybe so.

After all.

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Two ideas

 Carter, democracy, Felipe González, Obama, on a high, Roosevelt  No Responses »
Jun 012010
 
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I really do wish I could find enough bilingual readers to make a bilingual blog a viable proposition.  Two ideas from the intelligence of Felipe González stand out from this report in the Spanish newspaper El País today.  The first phrase as follows:

La democracia actual es una mezcla entre lo mediocre y lo mediático.

This loosely translates as “Democracy is currently a mixture of the media and the mediocre.”  A beautiful turn of phrase – which I have to say sounds much better in the original Spanish.

The other thought that struck me was this one, on the subject of Obama:

No sé si será como un Franklin Delano Roosvelt o terminará como un Carter.

Again, this roughly translates as: “I don’t know if he will be a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or if he’ll end up like a Carter.”

I remember now why I so used to like hearing González speak.

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