On an Internet of Things … whither a democracy of people?

 democracy, in a hole, Internet, Paul Birch  No Responses »
May 212013
 

Via Paul Birch on Twitter today, a project he’s set up with other founding partners came my way.  It’s called Help Me Write – and looks to be a fascinating combination of brainstorming anteroom, blogging front-end/signposter and – potentially – a return of that much maligned figure the content-aggregator (though edited perhaps exclusively by humans).

My first attempt at trying out the beast is already on my list of things I would like to write:

Will a web/Internet democracy become even less representative?

There is a perception that representative democracy now bats on behalf of the direct interests of the few. If such a democracy is to use the web to function – from daily interaction with government agencies to voting – it will depend on infrastructures which the few already own and will benefit financially from in the future. What does this mean for democracy itself – in particular its ability to act in a neutral way when its “means of production” are not?

The thoughts that have led up to this proposal are as follows.  Firstly, this study which shows us how political parties no longer represent the direct interests of more than the top six percent of the population:

Present social movements, as “Occupy Wall Street” or the Spanish “Indignados”, claim that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies. In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate: politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.

Secondly, the move towards an utterly connected “Internet of Things” – note the language used: things not people – as per this post of mine on an introduction to the subject from the European Commission:

[...] If you thought mixing the real and virtual worlds was already getting messy, you’ve seen absolutely nothing yet.  I reproduce their preamble below (the bold is mine):

The Internet of today offers access to content and information through connectivity to web pages and to multiple terminals (e.g., mobiles, TV). The next evolution will make it possible to access information related to our physical environment, through a generalised connectivity of everyday objects. A car may be able to report the status of its various subsystems using communicating embedded sensors for remote diagnosis and maintenance; home information about the status of the doors, shutters, and content of the fridge may be delivered to distant smart phones; personal devices may deliver to a central location the latest status of healthcare information of remotely cared patients; environmental data may be collected and processed globally for real time decision making.

Access to information relating to our surrounding environment is made possible through communicating objects able to interact with that environment and react to events. This makes possible new classes of applications such as smart homes with automated systems to monitor many aspects of daily living, smart grids and intelligent energy management, smart mobility with better control of traffic, or smart logistics with the integrated control of all processes in the entire distribution chain. There are endless examples of this evolution of networked devices, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

Finally, there’s this definition in thirty all-too-sorry words of the creature that is modern corporate capitalism:

[...] here’s the text of the poster below:

People were created to be loved.  Things were created to be used.  The reason the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.

This is, then, why I wonder if on an Internet of Things any kind of a democracy of people will be at all possible.  Not just because the “means of production” will be owned by those who own us anyway.  No.  After all, this has been generally the case throughout our often sad and unhappy histories – and, even so, the human spirit has still managed to break free.

No.  If truth be told, it’s much more because any society which chooses to define the future in terms of what it can do with objects is giving up on all the options it could have had to define the future in terms of what those objects could do for people.

Just imagine if we’d been sensible enough to call it an Internet of People instead of an Internet of Things.  Yes.  I know what you’re going to say.  An Internet of Things is simply a tool at the beck and call of humans.  But remember the definition of modern corporate capitalism – it’s a warning if there ever was one of a future far more trying than this present.

As John Naughton reminds us, and Larry Elliott before him, the dominant mode of business is a business not of people but of things.  It’s hardly surprising that someone should have defined the next wave of connectedness thus.  What’s most worrying about it, however, is not the way such organisations repeat their behaviours.  What’s most worrying about it is that democracy itself – currently beholden only to ballot boxes, paper-based procedures and other remnants of quite ancient times – will shortly migrate to this still undefined Internet of Things; will shortly be defined from top-to-tail by corporate capitalism.

And then where will people be able to find even a niche?  Then where will people even exist?

On being democracy’s product

 a con, democracy, democratic deficit  No Responses »
May 202013
 

I’m not going to link to too many other posts in this evening’s cogitations.  I’ll just run past you some thoughts I had earlier on whilst tweeting sadly.

As an ordinary voter, I get the feeling Parliament’s been gamed for a while.  Whatever I do to try and influence the outcomes will fail.  Whilst dedicated politicians, businesspeople and assorted characters make it their living to maximise incomes from the runaround that is Parliament, Parliament itself has become a tool not to represent voters but to divert income through legal means into the pockets of those who most effectively have learnt how to use it.

The question is: how might voters possibly win this game whose rules and procedures they cannot dedicate the time to clearly understanding?  In the past, we relied on MPs and businesspeople to operate as short cuts which made society work on behalf of wider constituencies.  We deposited our confidence in their dedication to wider and more respectable causes.  We allowed them to do stuff on our behalf.  Now too many simply despise us.  Now too many suggest if we want to sort stuff out, we get involved ourselves.

Even as, through savage economic crisis, the time to do so and the energy to do so and the space to do so is being retired progressively from our workplaces and home lives.

And whilst so many of them are involved in the business of technology, making their wealth on the backs of our carefully groomed and materialist instincts, just imagine the cause célèbre if they even dared to impose, say, a mobile phone as difficult to manipulate and make work for the user as business and politics has become for the voters.

No one would buy it, now would they?  Everyone would, in fact, cackle grossly.  No greater shame in a materialist society than to engineer something materially unpleasant.

Yet, quite curiously, transnational business and modern “representative” democracies do carry on wilfully ignoring the interests of their “users”.  In fact, modern life is more and more becoming like Facebook: none of us is a real client of democracy any more; all of us are just product to be packaged, repackaged, sold and resold.

Democracy and business no longer add value to our lives, except inasmuch as social networks add value to our relationships.  Whilst they tell us that being infinitely connected makes us better human beings, the reality is quite different:

[...] There are now two classes: those addicted to work, and those forced to work. But this isn’t quite accurate. Whether we are working for our employers (who pay us) or for Mark Zuckerberg (who doesn’t), most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return.

This, then, is what is also happening to our democratic discourse, which – in a way – reached its zenith during the Big Society con.  Great idea, for sure: in reality, though, a sting of almighty proportions.  Under evermore economically stringent conditions, who was ever going to have more time to spend on democratic participation?  Of course it was designed to distract – but what’s more, if it had taken off, only those rich semi-retired straight white males who populate free-time-land would’ve had the time, inclination and wherewithal to make any kind of policy at all.  And where would that have led us, hey?  Not here, I can assure you.

So it is that in much the same way as Facebook has used the participatory impulses of all socially-minded humans to turn us into meat for the shareholder and advertiser mincer, dedicated politicians and businesspeople have used the supposedly liberating tool of politics to make us all the sheer – and mere – product of democracy.

Not product as in a result of a sparkling chemical reaction where nothing is lost or destroyed.  Not product as in a consequence on its way to further development, expansion and intelligence.  Not product as in a finishing school where a whole future opens out.  Not product as in a university of life which contains the seeds of grand learning and fulfilment.

Product, rather, as in that which loses all independence or radii of action.

Product as in that which gets moved around on fork-lifted pallets.

Product as in that which we have now all become.

This is what being democracy’s product – for the sad majority of us all – means today.

____________________

Update to this post: further reading, nailing the fundamental reasons behind all the above, can be found over at John Naughton’s site today.  More here:

[...] Whenever I hear corporate executives bleating about not being evil or about how passionately they care about ‘corporate social responsibility’ I’m reminded of our two domestic cats. They are charming animals, and I lecture them daily on the need to be kind to small mammals and the birds who throng to our garden. All to no effect: they are cats and they do what cats do. They follow their instincts. Same goes for corporations. They exist to maximise shareholder value. Period.

Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: Coalition Britain

 capitalism, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, democracy, in a hole, politicians, specialisation, specialisations  No Responses »
May 182013
 

If we believe in a history of the masses – not just in one of heroes and heroines – there has to be more to what is going on between Cameron & Co and the rest of civil society than simply the bald intention to fill corporate pockets with even more dosh than they already possess.  There must be bigger movements at play here than simply stupid incompetents being stupidly incompetent.

Firstly, it would appear there is a massive battle being fought between a society of professionals on the one hand and a society of the unprofessionalised on the other.  So it is we have doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers fighting painfully disagreeable rearguard actions with people who have few actual qualifications to be what they end up acting out: in the main, alpha businessmen and women and politicians of all colours and levels.  These latter two “professions”, if the label can (or should) be usefully applied, currently have few training paths to prepare them for the roles they carry out – supposedly on our behalf but more generally on their own.

Secondly, there does seem to be a recognition out there that specialisation – the very stuff of both charlatans and experts – may in some insidious way itself be destroying society.

In another universe then, quite parallel to Cameron & Co’s, we might appreciate the attempts of what we could charitably describe as Wannabe Renaissance Men (WRM) (there would appear to be few women, thankfully, of the same mettle) to break through the Chinese Walls of self-interested sectors.

The problem, of course, is that these WRMs I describe really aren’t.  They’re not doing what they do in order to break down barriers that divide society but, instead, in order to re-establish – using the most unpleasant methods possible – those barriers which most benefit them at a quite individual level.  It would seem they have so convinced themselves their might is right that anything can be justified – precisely and simply because of who or what originates the acts in question.  And we are so taken aback by the astonishingly unexpected nature of these acts – so massively and confusingly outside our moral scope – that we find ourselves mainly giving in:

Govt using practices we instinctively know are wrong but our inexperience of such immoral behaviour is restraining our outrage. #Disabled

Yes.  It’s possible that Cameron & Co are able to sleep at night because they truly believe themselves on a crusade against evil and interested parties.  They see themselves as cavaliers – as latterday buccaneers of magnificent breaking-the-rules ambitions – in much the same way as top-flight businesspeople often feel themselves hard-done-to by a comfort-seeking society which fails to appreciate the real emotional hardships they run the gauntlet of in their uncertain rise to the top.

No wonder these creatures all become self-seeking and selfish.

No wonder they believe we must become like them.

But, in reality, Cameron & Co are anything but Wannabe Renaissance Men – anything but the far-sighted finally able to shrug off a lazy society’s shackles and liberate a democracy of the dreadfully slumbering.

They sense something that perhaps all of us should sense, it is true, but they are utterly incapable of performing the service civilisation requires of them.  As Pope Francis mentioned the other day, their money is ruling the vast majority instead of serving the same.  And unable to reconfigure it, they have given up at the first hurdle; they have given in and become its hugely detrimental servant rather than its master.

Renaissance Men?  They wouldn’t know a flying machine if it hit them on the noggin.  They’d assume it was a brutal and violent attack by dangerously trained beings on their self-taught, unqualified and intuitive impulses.  Out of such inferiority complexes are born the actions of the essentially brutish.

So who’s lost their moral compass?  Is it ourselves – lost in a sea of society-defining media?  Is it the journalists themselves – as yet another suspiciously discrete body of professionals too?  Or is this actually a case of the pyramid so taking over everything we do, think, say and believe that a 21st century of gloriously compulsory education has only prepared us properly for outright submission?

Maybe, even, Cameron, Gove and their cohort of evil politicos are right in some of what they say – even as they wrong in most of what they do.  Specialisations are destroying society; sectors which know so much about their own workings are never going to be entirely direct about the changes which might prejudice them.

Maybe we are all Wannabe Renaissance Men (and Women, of course).

Maybe that’s the problem.

Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: the diarrhoea of an amateur democracy.

Coalition Britain, in fact – multiplied, now, a thousandfold.  And controlled by those with the biggest chips on their shoulders history has seen.

From a society of supposedly meritorious conduct, those who least deserve to be in charge are those who have most benefited from a social democracy that urged us to value citizens in terms of what they were instead of what they did.

And so it is that the moral black hole this Coalition of half-baked humans inhabits is bound to fail, time and again, to properly impact on our sense of right and wrong.

We’ve been taught for far too long that what you do isn’t what you are.

To such an extent that what they are is affected in no significant way by what they do.

And even as they lambast us for our relativistic ways, they continue to ruthlessly take full advantage of the room for manoeuvre such generous morals do allow.

Where money can’t buy you love – and doesn’t even attempt to

 a con, democracy  1 Response »
Apr 182013
 

Kath has a really interesting concept in a piece I’ve already quoted from which can be found over at Speaker’s Chair at the moment (the bold is mine):

When Thatcher came to power, the country had already descended into a pit of economic and industrial chaos. Trade unions leaders were guilty of militant savagery. Successive governments, Conservative and Labour, were guilty of appeasement.

At the same time – that is to say, during the 1970s – this report claims to provide statistical evidence which shows that most political parties represented the median voter.  A reality which has changed radically from 2009 onwards:

Present social movements, as “Occupy Wall Street” or the Spanish “Indignados”, claim that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies. In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate: politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.

I find these two judgements fascinating in their overlap.  If you think about it, they do suggest that a representative democracy which truly represents the ordinary voter inevitably leads to a process whereby ever-increasing and competing constituencies are progressively bought off, presumably via a pork-barrel politics of one kind or another.

This would appear not to be only morally wrong but also economically and socially disastrous.  So are we saying that an equilibrium of forces in democracy is bad for society?  The legislative log-jams you get in the US would seem to indicate, at an anecdotal level, that this might be the case.  But if the paper I quote from above correctly supports Kath’s assessment of the dynamics behind 1970s’ British politics – that is to say, an example of appeasement pure and simple – it’s a pretty poor road and destination ahead for the idea of trying to represent anyone.  In a more fractured and niche-like age, if we aim for a responsive environment, then we will only get pulled in separate directions – with the results Kath’s 1970s brought us; with the results that latterday American governance generates.  Meanwhile, if we aim for a more prescriptive environment, little more than an encroaching fascism of private largesse will emerge – a private largesse where powerful centres of control and understanding impose their will aggressively on the multitudes.  In much the same way as is happening right now.

Of course, if you’ve got this far in today’s post, you will I am sure be inclined to vigorously argue: “Balance, above all!”  A little bit of appeasement, a tad of real leadership – and most voters will be expected to feel relatively, even sufficiently, represented.

How to recover the idea of fairly representative democracy in two easy steps.

But with our report on the political dynamics of OECD countries to hand, the changes that have taken place since those appeasing 1970s would seem to indicate that there are other dynamics at play which make such balance a chimera.

So what if it is no longer possible to contemplate a democracy of either appeasement or leadership?  What – even – if the appeasement of the 1970s has actually led directly to fascist tendencies in modern Western democracy?

A society where money can’t buy you love – and doesn’t even attempt to.

Appeasement, leadership and representing voters: in the end, if you try and do it right, you’ll end up with a fudge-stamping Thatcher who’ll turn things upside down in favour of the richly wronged.

And in the end, you’ll have appeased, led and represented practically everyone but the voters.

Orphaned souls as they are in the hardly grand scheme of things.

How business embraced 20th century Communism – and why democracy should now do the same

 Apple, Bill Gates, Communism, corporate Communism, democracy, democratic deficit, Google, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, revolution, sorted  1 Response »
Apr 042013
 

I already wrote, a while ago now, on the subject of singular ways of doing things and planned economies in general.  First this, on the Google self-driving car project:

In the face of a wider defeat of Communism, Soviet socialism initially decided to turn in on itself.  Is this now happening at the hands of Google and wider movements towards automation in the US?

I then go on to develop the idea, concluding in the following way:

This is the End of History coming back to bite us in the backside.  As Communism/one-country socialism collapsed in its grandly political structures, and for a while there was little else we could do but argue the battle was dusted and done, even so it would appear that its instincts were continuing to work away at its evermore grand and commercial manifestations.

The monolithic state which hopes to re-engineer everyone in a one-best-way mindset, whilst disparaged and in the process of being dismantled by capitalist evangelicals almost everywhere, is suddenly reappearing in Google’s corporately admirable attempts: attempts where it looks to automate dangerous processes such as the freedom to kill people with cars out of the frame of everyday living.

The American Dream without the freedom to choose between life and death?  Whatever next my friend?

Prior to this piece, and as linked to within the quote above, I also suggested we could see the iPhone as a perfect argument in favour of planned economies:

Yesterday, late at night (excuse the incongruences if they exist!), I suggested the following:

[...] I am a child of a technological society – and continuous improvement is the essence of my belief system.  I simply cannot accept that we can refine to a millionth degree a computer, an iPhone or a piece of civil engineering – and yet find ourselves unable to improve the 19th century boom-and-bust cycle of traditional economics.

A Facebook friend responded this morning by arguing in favour of planned economies.

I then went on to argue the following:

The iPhone an argument in favour of beginning to plan our economies all over again?  I think so.  And as I also pointed out in my Facebook response this morning:

[...] where before perhaps our analytical tools were not up to the job, I don’t think this is going to be the case today. [...]

If we are capable of sophisticating our manufacturing processes and consumer durables to such an extent as Apple’s iPhone, we can – where there’s a political and social will, of course – do the same with our societies and economies.

Is this a case of convergent evolution?  A case where the clearest example of 21st century corporate capitalism shows the way forward for a different kind of 21st century socialism?

A return to a sadly failed 20th century model of planned economies – only now, in the light of Apple’s experience, with the potential for a huge new lease of life.

Then more recently, in a series of posts which started with this one, I suggested we might create a parallel series of institutions, by most importantly recovering the positive values we might associate with the concept of “revolution”:

[...] Revolution is a dangerous and difficult word.  It connotes all kinds of disruption, violence and bloodshed.  From the French to the Bolsheviks to the coarsely violent recriminatory ends of the Spanish Civil War, the Balkan Conflict and even our experience with Iraq, revolution has no happy memories for history.  At least, for the history they teach us.

Yet I wonder if revolution must always be like that.  We could define revolution in a different way.  Disruptive, yes – it would have to remain so.  But not necessarily unseamless in its implementation. [...]

I go on to expand the idea thus:

Of course, any revolution of the old-style Bolshevik kind would, in a modern world, be almost certainly doomed to failure.  Modern society requires complex specialisms to function, and such complex specialisms would almost certainly not happily function under the kind of coercion a traditional revolution would require.  Too many tenuous threads of communication would break down under the brute force of full-throated change.

And yet, even so, I find myself coming back to 1950s Japan.  Within twenty years of losing a war at the final hands of two nuclear bombs, the Japanese car industry had effected a revolution of its own.  Non-violent, intellectual, process-driven and intelligent – all these things and more as per Deming’s philosophies and mindsets.

A revolution of a disruptive nature which, nevertheless, was not bloody.

And so we come to the present.  Over at El País today (in Spanish here; robot English translation here), we get a fascinating report on a Bill and Melinda Gates gathering in Seattle, where the headline idea is “‘Positive disruption’ as a driver for global change”.  This fits very nicely, at least from a conceptual – even if not institutional – point of view, with some of the ideas I’ve been mulling over above.  Though, to be honest, I think I’m looking for even more disruption when I say, as I did in my first Revolution ’13 piece, that:

[...] We could design, from the ground upwards, a parallel set of institutions which would, like the design of a Japanese car’s dashboard unit, only ever be included in a new model when entirely ready.  In so doing, and through accessible and inclusive techniques such as crowdsourcing – even where this might necessarily involve only the crowdsourced input of a hierarchy of predisposed specialists – we could avoid the biggest danger of disruptive revolution: the non-collaboration of key workers.

In such a way, key workers and process-owners who had crossed the line – and had effectively become criminals too big to jail (the money-laundering cases which have come to light in important banking communities come to mind here) – would no longer be able to hold a wider society to ransom.  The gradually more expert revolution-engendering structures would one day not only reach but outdo the efficacy of their corrupted compatriots.

At which point substitution could take place.

Either way, it’s clear that social-democratic and neoliberal evolutions have really rather had their day.  And to be honest, it’s the planned and statist Communism of the 20th century – though with a Deming-like participative twist – which has won the battles thus far.  The only difference from the 1950s is that the secrecy, fear and closed nature of its environments now find their location in transnational corporations – sometimes, psychotically fearful of each other; at other times, in consumer-prejudicing cahoots.  So it is that Orwell’s “1984″ did finally come true in one important respect – that is to say, in the sense of shifting international alliances, where histories and relationships are continually written and rewritten.  Where he went wrong was in conceptualising its happening between nation-states of a dictatorial cut.  In truth, right now, for most people out there, what corporations do with each other has far more impact on their daily existences than what simple little and relatively powerless countries ever manage to effect.

Which, if you’ve cared to follow me to here, brings me to my final point.  I would like to suggest that democracy, right now, is set up to fail.  Whilst business has successfully moved on from democracy’s ideological rejection of 20th century Communism and all its tenets – examples as already mentioned range from Google’s anti-American self-driving instincts to Apple’s anti-American centrally planned economy – democracy itself is mortally hidebound by its utter inability to contemplate a retread of a Soviet-style revolution.

All this time we’ve been saying that it’s business which should be more like democracy when, in reality, what we may have had is a democracy which business has fashioned to divide, conquer and keep meek.

Set up to fail, then?  Is that a fair assertion?  Have now-Communist-like businesspeople – now-Communist-like at least in their tools of choice – deliberately made democratic practitioners everywhere so terrified of committing the same revolutionary and disruptive acts that out of this conceptual cul-de-sac no Western democracy anywhere will ever manage to emerge?

Maybe not.  Maybe so.  Maybe, on reflection, we should park the possible reasons for why we’ve arrived at this place for just a few gentle moments.

For there may be a much bigger goal on the horizon.  If we can convince the businesspeople who have already embraced this revised version of 20th century Communism I describe above to contemplate facilitating a similar move in our democratic institutions and environments, perhaps the “positive disruption” that I find myself voicing and calling for – in the same curious company today as Bill and Melinda Gates – can find a broader range of adepts and enthusiasts out there, and much sooner than we think.

As well as end up helping to save from global disintegration not only our species but also the democratic instincts which have so ennobled its political practice.

The day that propaganda was outsourced #DailyFail

 a con, Daily Fail, Daily Mail, demagogy, democracy, democratic deficit, propaganda  No Responses »
Apr 032013
 

I wasn’t going to write about the subject of the Daily Mail‘s horrible journalistic instincts, but this piece from Left Foot Forward this morning deserves a thoughtful link and read.

In the light of its thesis – it talks about how newspapers such as the above-mentioned treat the miseries of the poor compared to the miseries of the rich, as well as how very wrong wild polemic is in both cases – I’d like to quote something I posted on Facebook last night, explaining as I was the situation in question:

“Vile Product of Welfare UK”, I think the headline runs, on man and woman found guilty of manslaughter of six kids. I felt someone should write a companion piece on corporate negligence: “Vile Product of Corporate Britain” – start with the Cabinet, eh?

Of course, neither the former nor the latter is a correct response to crisis.  Not all corporates are dens of iniquity; not all poor people are repositories of good.  But there are two thoughts I’d like to leave you with, before I finish this morning’s post.  The first on partiality in one’s political points of view, as enshrined in this tweet:

So when people rioted, wasn’t society but personal responsibility. And when a man kills kids, not personal responsibility but society. Huh?

And the second on propaganda, as enshrined in this tweet:

Bet you after lurid stories of pre-privatisation NHS improprieties, we’ll now get accusations the Welfare State eats kids for breakfast. Oh.

It’s kind of true – and it’s kind of sad.  When the blessed Fourth Estate, a supposed pillar of our representative democracy, becomes corrupted as a result of its extension into representing the interests of government or opposition, then a questioning tool of real significance becomes a propaganda tool of miserable inhibition.

And I sorry to make such casual observations, but – at least as far as the effect of the propaganda process is concerned – using events to take the focus off something you don’t like, as the Daily Mail would appear to have done this morning, is about as close an equivalent to spinning news about the Jews as an allegedly civilised society could engineer.  By damning a whole Welfare State for the actions of two parents, we are rapidly arriving at a point where anything and everything becomes possible to argue.

Only media like the Daily Mail and its hangers-on would ever find it in themselves to do any such thing.  And it’s such a shame really: whilst the debate is about this number or that, it could really be – should really be – about competence: in the case of Iain Duncan Smith, our beloved Minister for No-Work and Haircutted-Pensions, we should be talking about his lack of leadership, his inability to manage change and his absence of real ambition for his adopted country.

But no.  We must – instead – all choose to use broad brushstrokes in our callous and unyielding descriptions of each other, as we – almost criminally – prefer to lose the arguments in political hullabaloo.

Not a good day for our democracy.

Not a good day for our future.

Not a good day, the day that propaganda was outsourced.

Redressing the balance of prejudice (or more on the 94 percent)

 citizen politics, civic journalism, democracy, democratic deficit, on a high, prejudice  No Responses »
Mar 252013
 

I’ve said it before – will not stop repeating it.  We all have prejudices which none of us will be able to undo entirely.  In moments of crisis, their cruel instincts will return – and although we may fight them, that battle must be fought first.

Like democracy, fighting our own personal prejudices is a never-ending war of attrition.  For prejudices are a little like ancient one-celled organisms: they burrow deep down and hide in the permafrost of our thought patterns and assumptions.

Generally malignantly so.  Inaccurately, in all cases, for sure.

I have to return to the subject of redressing the balance of prejudice today.  Firstly, the Cyprus crisis described in Robert Peston’s awful nutshell:

So here is the Cyprus “rescue” in a nutshell:

  1. An economy that will be starved of credit, and will therefore shrink rapidly and very painfully for citizens
  2. An economy whose main industry, offshore banking, is being shut.

And as he concludes:

What should give the eurozone’s leaders some pause for thought is that at some point the people of countries in financial difficulty may begin to wonder whether they are right to be paying this steep bill to preserve the euro.

I’ve already recently commented on the prejudices enshrined in economic acronyms such as PIGS.  Suffice it, I think, for me to remind you of my post.  And they are most definitely prejudices by the supposedly lily-white North about the wastrels (as I previously described them) of the lazy and corrupting South.  The people themselves are not their political actors.  I know, for example, the European Spanish quite well, having lived there for sixteen years.  Three trivial but striking reminders of their creative abilities to think outside our restricting Anglo-Saxon boxes:

  1. They use toothpaste as an easy-to-hand substitute for burn cream.  It works.
  2. They use scissors to “carve” a roast bird.  They work.
  3. They never use queues if they can possibly avoid it, but – instead – group themselves with friendly natter until it’s their turn.  How do they police this turn?  Not by silent and rigid observance but by, simply, asking a simple question on entering the shop: “Who is the last?”  And then keeping tabs on just one person in the muchedumbre.  And that works too.

Lateral thinking; imagination; and a humane organisational brilliance.

Apply that to a whole society, to a whole civilisation, and you soon discover why the Spanish, lazy and corrupting wastrels of the South, can create a wonderful literature and culture out of a fascinating mix of the major religions – and, at the same time, secularise society out of sheer humanity; can revolutionise football to play to their strengths – and, at the same time, fight off the awful physical prejudices of the North; and can produce some of the most vibrant and honest figures of latterday citizenship – even as the country’s business and political classes convert themselves to intellectual dust.

The problem is our prejudices lead us to define other countries, countries we do not know, in terms of the results of the behaviours of the top 1, 3 or 6 percent:

Collin Crouch summarized in his book “Post-democracy” several years of research in Northern democracies. According to the author, the power of the working-class in rich countries has evolved in a parabolic way. After the Second World War their power was in a minimum, but workers started to gain power and representation during two or three decades reaching their peak in the seventies. By that time, they had managed to bring their political agendas to different governments. Those governments implemented Keynesian policies which robust the access of workers to public and private goods. The situation started to change in the seventies when the companies displaced the activities of manual workers to the periphery. Little by little, all governments shifted their policies to favor large transnational corporations. The labor unions were weakened and the power of workers declined.

The quality of democratic representation also evolved in a parabolic trajectory. In the seventies, different parties favored different individuals according to the party’s ideological background, but this situation changed later. According to the author, politicians only represent the economic elite now-a-days. Therefore. elections certainly occur in rich countries but they lack real representation.

The author of the above-quoted paper goes on to suggest, via evidence from other studies, that economic elites “capture” democratic institutions for their own purposes.  This hardly seems a counter-intuitive suggestion.  And yet we continue to paint the stereotypes with as broad a brush as before.  Even as we realise the elites have almost certainly hijacked our own institutions for their own purposes (there is certainly empirical evidence to indicate it might be a possibility), we cannot avoid seeing the rest of the world through the prism of prejudice and assumption.

It’s time, therefore, as Rob Marchant argued recently, for a new kind of internationalism.  One not based, however, on the practices and beliefs of the top 1, 3 or 6 percent – nor even on those who would aspire to be amongst their population – but, rather, one based on the possible reality that 94 percent of us are, more or less effectively, unattended by our political parties.

That this is ongoing, and even getting worse, is indisputable.  I do continue to dispute that there is little we can do about it, though.  I think there is plenty we can still act on to recover our democratic sphere.  As I tweeted to a dear Twitter friend of mine last night:

@ilegal Times of strife temper our lives. Sure we are better, more perspicacious & more human as a result of choosing to fight oppression.

Something practical for the next step then?  How about informing, training and upskilling ourselves better, in order to ready ourselves more effectively for that fight I mention?

Here’s one event to be getting on with, anyhow.  Organised by Manchester University for the 13th-14th of June 2013, it’s called “Citizen Media: New Mediations of Civic Engagement”.  It has this wordpress.com site at the following address:

citizenmediacolloquium.wordpress.com

and you can currently find more background on the event at this post.

I’ve decided to attend for two reasons: 1) it’s accessible from where I live; and 2) it looks like I’d certainly have a lot to learn.

Keep engaged then – democracy was ever thus.  A permanent battle which, perhaps, we thought a little casually was permanently won.  Well.  Nothing in this life is permanent.

Except, perhaps, the prejudices which burrow deep inside our souls.

OFPolitico – the new independent regulator for politicians

 democracy, democratic deficit, free press, Leveson inquiry, MPs, MPs expenses, political parties, politicians, politics, regulation, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Mar 182013
 

The Royal Charter deal hacked out by hacked off politicians, presumably fed up to the back teeth of the whole sorry mess, is currently being resisted by those it is designed either to channel or shackle – depending, that is, on your point of view.  Yes.  It’s true.  Such an intervention by Parliament in the doings of the free press could lead to a police state some way down the line.  Alternatively, in the light of so many recent and documented events in #hackgate land, it could just as easily lead us to a useful downsizing of the existing and perniciously cosy nexus of politicians, the media and/or police.

Some thoughts to be getting on with, in no order of importance:

  • Just because you’re “anti-press abuse” doesn’t mean you’re “anti-press”.  In fact, if you truly love a free press, you’d surely prefer it not to abuse its potential reach.
  • Wishing to prevent the abuse of the powerless by the powerful is compatible with wishing to hold the powerful to account.  The problem of giving or not the media free rein arises when powerful media and powerful politicians become, essentially, indistinguishable actors and actresses in our democracies.  This is lately more a case of an economically shackled press which, whilst acting as if it believes in freedom, really believes in corporate self-interest.  The free press they claim we’re on the point of losing has never been free in the way they would sell it us.
  • Self-regulation of newspapers clearly failed: it was the media players who once had the chance and the media players who cocked it convincingly up.  It’s clear that something really important needs to be done: if an independent regulator is the only way forward, then let it be so.  If there is another way, of course, then let disinterested parties with no conflicts of interest, either political or financial, decide.
  • A free press should exist to inform and illuminate our democracy, not to allow certain individuals to lever power on the backs of their media ownerships.  There is nothing in the least salubrious nor free about a society where monopolistic media units decide who speaks, on whose behalf and when.  Especially when fifty percent or more of all copy is (freely!) sourced from the same wire services or cut-and-paste press releases.
  • Finally, while we need the service efficient and effective journalism may once have managed to provide, the financial pressures on all media organisations – a haemorrhaging of resources in some cases these days – no longer guarantee in themselves the service a good democracy requires.  It’s a joke to say that a latterday Citizen Kane will hold power to account in the public interest.  It’s a bad joke; an irony of the toughest kind.  Yes.  He or she will hold power to account – but only in a very personal sense; only in terms of the interests of his or her shareholders, of his or her publishing corporations, of his or her global financial needs.

Where I do, however, agree with the newspaper professionals is here.  As per the Guardian article linked to above (the bold is mine):

Trevor Kavanagh, the associate editor of the Sun, said it was worrying “when three political parties get together and their final verdict is welcomed so enthusiastically by Hacked Off which is definitely seeking to shackle and gag the free press. We simply do not want politicians to have control whatsoever in what goes in or doesn’t go into newspapers.“

This is fair enough.  We might go further, of course.  We, the public and sovereign voters, simply do not want newspapermen and women to have control whatsoever in who gets in or doesn’t get into power. 

But perhaps, in the circumstances, that’s a bit of cheap shot.  (On the other hand, perhaps it’s not.)  Which brings me to my final point tonight.  If self-regulation is clearly past its sell-by date for newspapers and other media, and the evidence thus far would seem to indicate this is singularly the case, perhaps self-regulation is also past its sell-by date for politicians and other professional leader-types.  We’ve had so many scandals in relation to MPs’ expenses, revolving doors and all kinds of self-enrichment scams subsidised on the ever-weakening backs of the taxpayers that, hardly surprisingly, the evidence would appear to bear out the assertion: leaving all the above, as well as salary increases and living and working conditions various, in the hands of interested parties like MPs is bound to lead to similarly systemic abuse.

Not to mention the conflicts of interest that lobbyists pay highly to take advantage of and which no one, but no one, is doing anything about.

Time for an independent regulator for MPs and other parliamentarians then?  It would be a good moment for the suggestion to gain traction.  As the “free” press lost some of its choking and often self-interested stranglehold over politicians via the introduction of truly independent regulation, so a counterbalancing institution would be slotted into place to control – in an equally systematic manner – potential abuse of a political nature which newspapers might formerly have dealt with and uncovered.

That it required the actions of the Telegraph and other papers for the abuse of MPs’ expenses to come to light should not be forgotten, of course.  But what equally must not be forgotten is that the system of oversight which should have brought it to light in the first place was more or less as self-regulated as the systems which the very same press subscribed to in their own industry before Leveson.

And look where that led us all.

In both cases, it is significant that a bacterial-like culture of self-enrichment and deception spread out as it did.  So if the only solution for a corrupt British press is a new independent regulator, perhaps we should demonstrate how competent and even-handed British democracy still can be by putting in place – as soon as is practicable – an exactly similar institution to channel – or shackle, depending on your point of view – these professional enablers and leaders of our sacred body politic.

Peopled by representative persons without political or financial interests in the matter, it could be a kind of supreme court of the citizens.

A democratic circle which would serve to satisfactorily complete a dirty undemocratic cycle in the most elegant and sustainable way possible.

Revolution ’13: Time To Benchmark A New Democracy

 brainstorming, crowdsourcing, democracy, on a high, revolution, sorted, total quality management  4 Responses »
Mar 172013
 

W Edwards Deming was a clever soul.  Here, you can find out more about what he achieved for the Japanese economy from the 1950s onwards.  And whilst he was a clever American soul, recognition for his total contribution to 20th century manufacturing was not, ultimately, terribly forthcoming from his homeland – at least, not in time to save, from one or other of its periodic slumps, what had become a rather lumbering and wasteful US car industry.

Which is why a tweeted train of thought of mine just finished thus:

Do to Western liberal civilisation what the Japanese car industry did to the US in the 1950s & 1960s. Benchmark democracy into renewal.

So what was I going on about?  What did I mean by this?  Revolution is a dangerous and difficult word.  It connotes all kinds of disruption, violence and bloodshed.  From the French to the Bolsheviks to the coarsely violent recriminatory ends of the Spanish Civil War, the Balkan Conflict and even our experience with Iraq, revolution has no happy memories for history.  At least, for the history they teach us.

Yet I wonder if revolution must always be like that.  We could define revolution in a different way.  Disruptive, yes – it would have to remain so.  But not necessarily unseamless in its implementation.  Let us take, for example, as an example too close to hand, the case of the Cyprus haircut.  Here, under the guise of financial stability – and, presumably, the European Union’s future continuity – we get a banking fraternity prepared to break the solemnest and most primal capitalist assurances in order to maintain its own sectorial integrity.  This is a pretty unhappy development – and is almost certainly a line which, once crossed, will inevitably be crossed again.

Of course, any revolution of the old-style Bolshevik kind would, in a modern world, be almost certainly doomed to failure.  Modern society requires complex specialisms to function, and such complex specialisms would almost certainly not happily function under the kind of coercion a traditional revolution would require.  Too many tenuous threads of communication would break down under the brute force of full-throated change.

And yet, even so, I find myself coming back to 1950s Japan.  Within twenty years of losing a war at the final hands of two nuclear bombs, the Japanese car industry had effected a revolution of its own.  Non-violent, intellectual, process-driven and intelligent – all these things and more as per Deming’s philosophies and mindsets.

A revolution of a disruptive nature which, nevertheless, was not bloody.

So how about we took Deming’s approach and applied it to all those systems and sectors a modern democracy and civilisation requires to function decently?  And how about we involved citizens in this process from beginning to empowering end?  We could design, from the ground upwards, a parallel set of institutions which would, like the design of a Japanese car’s dashboard unit, only ever be included in a new model when entirely ready.  In so doing, and through accessible and inclusive techniques such as crowdsourcing – even where this might necessarily involve only the crowdsourced input of a hierarchy of predisposed specialists – we could avoid the biggest danger of disruptive revolution: the non-collaboration of key workers.

In such a way, key workers and process-owners who had crossed the line – and had effectively become criminals too big to jail (the money-laundering cases which have come to light in important banking communities come to mind here) – would no longer be able to hold a wider society to ransom.  The gradually more expert revolution-engendering structures would one day not only reach but outdo the efficacy of their corrupted compatriots.

At which point substitution could take place.

It might, of course, even be the case that final substitution would not be necessary: the breathing-down-the-neck nature of such competition could automatically lead to better behaviours in these erstwhile miscreants as per standard free-market forces.  But either way, a non-blood-spattered revolution would be engineered; a new democracy would have been benchmarked; another society would have been made.

In a way, 1950s America is pretty analogous to the days we are living: societal dislocation in the recent past; societal dislocation on the horizon.  But out of such dislocation, the observant, ingenious and intelligent Japanese were able to recover a semblance of prior glories.  And recreate, to an astonishing degree, the whole concept they had of their manufacturing industry.

If the Japanese were able – through the thoughts of one perspicacious man – to create a kind of superpower out of tragic catastrophe, why can’t we contemplate – via some of the same concepts – the idea of creating a better democracy out of current desolation?

After all, there will be few of us able to trust liberal evolution any more.

And, after this weekend, there will be no one able to trust any of these socioeconomic crabs which currently hold sway.

Nor any of their sideways movements.

Creatures which – pincer-like – now make and shake our predictable decay.

Who cares if it’s too late to save political parties? Democracy marches on!

 code, democracy, Lawrence Lessig, laws, lawyers, Parliament, Peter Watt, unclassifiable  1 Response »
Mar 142013
 

Peter Watt has a useful overview of the impact the interconnected world is having on politics.  You can find this post here today over at Labour Uncut.  It’s worth reading in full.

Essentially, Mr Watt argues that the political classes attribute the current fractures in society to economic crisis.  I think I made the same point recently, so am unlikely to find myself disagreeing.  Where I do think I diverge from the aforementioned classes – and in this so does Watt – is in assuming that if only we can sort out the economic crises currently assailing us, everyone and everything will revert to its former stasis and equilibrium.  In Watt’s own words:

[...] Following this logic through and when the economy upturns, then political business as usual will resume.  Labour and the Tories will battle it out for supremacy with Lib Dems battling for scraps or possibly further coalition.

But as he goes on to say (the bold is mine):

The result of this assumption is essentially conservative; it is the politics of no change in how we do our politics.  The countdown has begun to May 7 2015 and the only question is which of the big two will be the largest party the day after.   Whilst others may be suffering from the economic situation or the rapidly changing world, the world of politics appears unaffected.

To be honest, I would be inclined to argue that of the two, suffering from a rapidly changing world has to be the most significant challenge.  And by a massive margin.  A while ago I wrote a rather involved piece on the need to create a parallel parliament of coders to the one we already have: that is to say, the one of lawyers we have become so accustomed to.  In this I argue, as per Lawrence Lessig, that 21st century software code is a set of laws in much the same way that 19th century law was a set of societal codes.  Both required, and require, interpreters; authors too; and champions, of course.  But the difference between the two for our democracies is that the software coders do their law-writing behind closed corporate doors, as they fashion our online constitutions in terms of their companies’ diktats, and in accordance with shareholder requirements.

In a democracy it was never thus.  At the very least, Parliament was held to be sovereign – even if sometimes its ability to deliver was compromised.  As I point out in the post in question:

But if what Lessig has sustained for quite a while now is in any way true, the kind of profession which dominates our democracy is entirely the wrong one for our times.  If more law is being made in the online constitutions we now all operate under for our communication, peer-to-peer exchanges, commerce and gaming than is being made in our parliaments, surely we need a parliament stuffed with those who understand the new tools.

Otherwise, we depend on the good faith of people working behind closed corporate doors to create online and connected offline worlds with a sensibility and sensitivity to the needs of a wider democracy.

Hardly the essence of representative democracy, now is it?

Which brings us to my last point.  Watt argues thus:

But more and more people care less and less about the world of politics.  If they notice what is going on at all they don’t very often see anything that has much relevance to them.   In a world that is increasingly interconnected the communications from the parties are still essentially in broadcast mode.

And whilst he’s right as far as he goes, I think he could have gone further.  People care less and less about the world of party politics.  But not less and less about politics.  In fact, human beings are innately political – as well as in the thrall, sometimes despite themselves, of intrinsically democratic impulses.

And so it is that even Watt, from his position as professional politician, appears to attribute distaste for the political processes in question simply to a lack of bidirectional communication: that is to say, dialogue.

The famous listening mode of so many unhappy political experiments, perhaps.

Meanwhile, I would argue, especially in the light of my coder post, that in fact the fracture goes much further than that: people love democracy, love politics, love the cut and thrust of open and honest debate – and none of what Watt describes has changed that love one iota.  What has substituted the whole idea of 19th century lawmaking is the very worldwide web itself.  Via open source communities, via forums and social networks, people express and embrace their instincts for democracy – and slowly but all too surely move away from expressing their democracy within the space of party politics.

In a sense, party politics is now to democracy what HMV was to music and video sales.  And as Facebook, Twitter and a whole host of other social communication tools have been created in corporate skyscrapers without the oversight of our duly elected representatives, so our democracy has slowly but all too surely become a plaything of sub-democratic means.

Not just the traditional politicians and businesspeople, and those infamous revolving doors – but also the voters and citizens themselves in peer-to-peer ways and without apparent mediation, communicating with each other via the freemium software tools of highly intelligent individuals who are way ahead of the rest of us.

And yet … and yet … these democratic instincts – which all of us humans continue to exhibit – do seem to be marching on.

The real question, I suppose, is whether the majority of politicians care to pay attention to any of this.

Whether they notice that whilst they demonstrate how irrelevant they are to improving our sorry lot, their erstwhile dependants may be choosing to rebuild their own lives quite without them.

It won’t even be a question of having to regain someone’s lost trust.

It’ll be far more a question of ultimate redundancy.

On doing good by doing bad

 civil war, dark side, democracy, disruption, dissent, in a hole  No Responses »
Feb 282013
 

It’s an old topic but both Norman and Chris feel obliged to revisit it.  Clearly, there must be something which keeps it up in the forefront of our minds.  It does in mine too – most days of my lapsed Catholic existence.  So why might this be?  Norman quotes from John Lloyd, writing in New Statesman (the bold is mine – and I particularly draw your attention to the use of the word “armoury”):

[...] the responsibility to protect remains a powerful moral imperative. It must remain part of the armoury of those states with the power and the will to stop tyranny where it is possible to do so and where intervention is likely to work – as it did in Sierra Leone, in Kosovo and ultimately in Bosnia. It may work in Mali. More thought needs to be given to how it might work in Syria. For the left, the responsibility to protect should be part of aprogressive view of global problems. That the principle has become synonymous with a kind of refurbished imperialism is a sign of decadence.

Meanwhile, Chris suggests the following:

One message of Lincoln is that even decent men must sometimes use unpleasant means to achieve worthy ends. [...]

Now there have been plenty of arguments over what the British Coalition government has been doing to its people over the past three years or so.  Most explanations on the left of the political spectrum seem to centre on stories of conspiring neo-conservatives looking to replace sensible British socialism with the corporate capitalist landscapes they already shape in the US to fill their ever-deepening pockets.  In fact, I wrote yesterday about two examples of where this might already be happening – first of all, in Greece; second of all, here in the UK.

On the right, meanwhile, the publicly acknowledged discourses seem to focus on seeing life in terms of the deserving and the undeserving.  We get language such as “scroungers” and “shirkers”, contrasted violently with those who “strive” for what they have.  Hard-working families versus disabled couch potatoes who cause local councils any number of financial problems at the expense of the “economically viable” in society.

Not such a massive gap between such attitudes and New Labour’s aspirational socialism, to be honest.  Something we, perhaps, do not readily recognise enough – nor often enough either, it would seem.

Yet it seems to me that without wishing to demonise any human being a priori – that is to say, solely on the basis of their politics – we need to examine if there isn’t a far more profound and fundamental fault-line causing all this awful disenchantment; all this societal dysfunctionality; ultimately, all this cruel mismatch between what we start out exhibiting, as birth gives way to initial innocence, and how we end up in the hours before death.

Can we honestly say that any human being ends up doing more good than bad?  If progress – real progress fairly conceived – is the measure of how efficient, competent and inclusive our democracies and wider civilisations are supposed to be, how on earth can we define this “doing good by doing bad” as any kind of convincing progress?

And here, exactly here, it seems we finally find our fundamental fault-line: whilst we on the left sincerely believe in a supportive human existence, you on the right sincerely believe in a warlike human existence.  Whilst we construct strange caverns of political duplicity to get past you all kinds of Machiavellian intentions – witness New Labour’s famous socialism by stealth, for example, in the honestly held and understood (even where failed) intention to create a tapestry of humanity – you perceive precisely our best efforts as terrible weaknesses bound to lead us all to damnation.  For you, the world is a violent place of conflict.  To deny this reality is to play manipulative games of self-deception.

On doing good by doing bad?  That is – perhaps – what the right has done since time immemorial.  Not out of a desire to do evil at all.  Simply out of a nonchalant acceptance of the animal within us.

“Transformative reconciliation” was a phrase which came my way via Twitter this early afternoon.

We certainly need more of that right now.

But, perhaps, in the violence the right is inflicting on us now – out of this firmly-held belief that since violence is inevitable whatever one does, better a doing-good style of violence than an entirely doing-bad one – “transformative reconciliation” isn’t even for those of us on the left to perform.

No.  The Tories are not Nazis.  At least, not yet.

But the battle enjoined may have a similar sense and insensibility.  It might be the case that we on the left have to consider John Lloyd’s terminology very carefully.  When he says the responsibility to protect “must remain part of the armoury of those states with the power and the will to stop tyranny”, perhaps – equally – we must apply it to our internal conflicts back home.

A war of a kind then?  Even if only figuratively couched?

Time to do good by doing bad?

I hardly suggest this lightly.  Democracy is a precious figure which, once lost, is truly hard to regain.

I just know that – somewhere along the road we are blindly treading – this Britain of mine, this homeland of mine, this nation of mine, will begin to look just a little like the earthquake-ridden anterooms, which, located all those years ago along all those Balkan fault-lines, destroyed millions of lives, as well as their corresponding tranquillities, that we felt post-war Europe had awarded us.

As a Spanish general recently observed (page in Spanish): “The fatherland is more important than democracy.”

So is that the terrible place we are slowly being driven towards by the righteous Tories?  (Or, indeed, by our stealth-riven selves?)

And if so, how on earth should we properly react?

By doing bad ourselves too?

Is that really the only way?

The downsides of Googlefying council meetings

 democracy, Google, in a hole, politicians, politics, publishing, WikiLeaks  No Responses »
Feb 182013
 

About eleven years ago I was studying in Spain for a Publishing Master.  There were many great and good craftspeople who taught us the ins and outs of a very particular trade – a very special trade.  At the time, I was looking to set up an online publisher.  I was aiming to cut costs in the industry by using technology to combine the roles of various skillsets in one individual.  This wasn’t the paused, many-handed and time-honoured way of publishing – but in time it has come to pass, and ten years later we live in a quite different world.

What really was focussing minds ten years ago, however, at least in Spain and at least in this course, was what was seen as the evermore pervasive and encroaching danger of an American search-engine upstart called Google (the bold is mine):

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” [...].

Google’s aims were clear – as least to the Spanish tradition of editors.  Whether you liked the idea or not, whether you were prepared to collaborate or not, whether you accepted the terms as laid down by the powerful or quixotically attempted to resist their impositions, Google’s ultimate aim was to turn your thoughts, your lives, your very own selves and – finally – even your carefully guarded intellectual property into nothing more nor less than the virtual equivalent of the water that since time immemorial succeeds in seeping everywhere.

In the name of transparency, openness and sincerity (TOS), Google would one day be ripping out the very heart and soul of your entity.

And so that, as well, has come to pass.  Online caches of all kinds mean that however careful a maintainer of your content you are, anything and everything you post is likely to come to someone’s preserving notice and instincts.

But, what’s more, instead of being used to promote the transparency, openness and sincerity (TOS) I mention, it’s become a sorry old tool of a most traditional bent: a tool which, in hindsight, my dear Spanish opponents were right to fear – and perhaps even right to resist.  Google’s asserted desire to make knowledge available to all comes at a massive cost.

The cost is the Googlefying of you, me and the cat’s mother.

*

The Americans have consistently trashed WikiLeaks for opening the door to all kinds of communications they firmly argue are better kept secret.  And yet, from their very own apple-pied backyards, we have Google invading every corner and content we could possibly conceive.  The instinct to bare souls is shared too: you and I, our friends and family … all of us spill our bleeding-edge thoughts into the ether that now embraces everyone.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the Googlefying instincts which a decade of brutal exposure has engendered should have now reached the chambers of our democracies.  This story, for example, from 2011:

AN internet blogger has been arrested after she tried to film a Carmarthenshire Council meeting from the public gallery.

Now it would appear that no crime had been committed, nor local law infringed.  The council in question simply took exception to its proceedings being recorded in such a way.  I’m sure that the immediate reaction of most people in the Twitter- and blogosphere would be one of anger and surprise.  And I suppose I’d feel pretty obliged to go along with such reactions – if only it wasn’t for the history of Google I’ve just gone and recounted.

Images and video are such cruelly permanent matters.  Can we honestly argue that our democracy is entirely better for encouraging the kind of politicians who thrive on television appearances and firmly taped and registered political events?  Many would argue, of course, that the transparency they bring is only ever going to improve the transparency of our political processes.  But I’m really not sure this is the case any more.  Images and video seem – of late, anyhow – to promote the worst kind of manipulation our body politic has seen for a very long time.

And if the arguments people have used against WikiLeaks – a dumping mechanism of all kinds of unwary data which makes private truth-telling and negotiation impossible to promote – are to be considered at all sustainable in any way, then equally the Googlefying of our wider world – of which random and unannounced filming of council and other democratic process is simply one of many examples on the horizon – needs to come under a far closer scrutiny.

From a very personal perspective, I would like to see far more politicians who can speak to the public without falling into the temptation of speaking to the gallery.

So ask yourself this, then: which, in the end, will the Googlefying of the world really encourage?

On fighting democracy

 democracy, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Feb 132013
 

Like many of you out there, I’ve bemoaned and wailed about and screeched over what the last few years have been throwing at us.  We’ve had plenty of such targets to take aim at.  I don’t – in fact I won’t – enumerate them here yet again.  Suffice to say that we know where we stand.

Now to be honest, it’s just occurred to me that maybe we’ve had all the wrong targets in our sights.  Maybe we’ve been railing against the symptoms of our misery – its most obviously superficial manifestations – instead of focussing our ire on the real cause.  And maybe the real cause is the bankruptcy of the very idea of Western democracy.

Whilst there was a slack we could work with, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, we could argue that little by little a wondrous process of gradual progress sanctified our societies.  Yes, of course.  There were so many cases of three steps forwards, two steps back.  Sometimes – take the First and Second World Wars, for example – there were even cases of three steps backwards and very painfully achieved two steps towards something we could barely describe as civilisation.

And so many times we compromised on basic principles out of a fear of these terribly harsh times.

Nowadays, we berate the European Union and what we perceive to be its anti-democratic institutions – but when it was set up by those who had just experienced the outrageous evils of Nazism, our primary instincts were – above all – to embed an (inexpertly) even keel in our awkward and still not properly empowering ships of state.

Nowadays, in the shadows of participatory structures such as social networks, virtual connections and open data movements everywhere, and rather than looking to the good we have achieved, we focus more on the repressive instincts of moderately frightened nation-states – nation-states which feel obliged to look out for the interests of a citizenship that perhaps cares less and less for their centralising mindsets.

And so it is we rail against our governors and political leaders; their business sponsors and their privileged wastrels; the super-rich and the (f)rankly undemocratic; those corporate figures which cream off taxpayer resource with such aplomb, as they deposit it aggressively in tax-havened pockets.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s our very concept of democracy which has created all this mess.  This democracy isn’t failing in its primary intention.  It’s actually succeeding all too well.  The object of this democracy isn’t to share stuff around.  The object of this democracy is to make money for those who already have it.

And in that, it functions most perfectly.

We have to rethink our perception – rethink the frame.

For the gradual – and sometimes halting – progress which happened in the slack between the Industrial Revolution and somewhere towards the end of the 20th century was actually a kind of mirage.  It confused us – it made us think we were achieving a virtuous little-by-little advancement; an advancement that made everything else less seriously tragic.

It helped us, most certainly, to salve guilty consciences.

It helped us to forget that a life properly lived demands serious markers in the sand.

So back to rethinking the frame.

Let us not remember any more the greedy individuals who – choosing, as they have done, to operate within systemically generated abuse – have helped to destroy our economies.  Let us not envy those who – having won out through abusive ambition – stand at the very top of the pyramids which run the stratospheres of human action.  Let us not care about those who – ripping wealth out of communities, finite lives, working people and their families – are sipping generous alcoholic beverage under magically beached sunsets.

Instead, let us imagine that they are all nothing but the very average carbuncles on a profoundly sick body.

It’s time not to fight for democracy – but, rather, to fight against it.

Big vs small government? You’re asking the wrong question

 big business, big government, democracy, Good Democracy, on a high, Peter Levine, small business, small government  No Responses »
Jan 292013
 

I’ve been wondering, as is my wont, on issues I can do nothing about.

The big play at the moment seems to be between the proponents of big versus small government.  I tweeted a link this afternoon to a piece on A Better People.  The piece describes how some of the functions of tax collection might be replaced with the process of crowdfunding:

With the rise of the internet, however, another approach to funding government is becoming more viable – crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding involves asking people to provide funds for worthwhile projects on a micro-scale, many individuals each donating a small amount.

This isn’t a totally new approach. Rich philanthropists have donated millions for worthwhile causes, communities have come together to fund (and build) small public works and individuals have adopted park benches and potholes for many years.

However the internet has lifted crowdfunding to a new level, with the potential to cost-effectively raise millions of dollars through tiny individual donations in a managed way.

The only response to my tweet at the time of writing was (I think) to indicate this would be the way forward in order to cut big government.  I fail, however, to see how this conclusion was arrived at.  Let me explain.

In our modern civilisation, government is always big.  In reality, there is no getting away from this big government.  Sometimes, this government is located in that part of society where politicians are voted for and we regularly (though not as frequently as we might prefer) get to throw them out.  This kind of big government may attempt – as I feel is right – to mediate between the needs of the voters, the economic engine of business and other interested parties out there.  It may, however, on the other desultory hand, and as I believe is happening right now, give in to the demands of moneyed citizens and allow them a permanently exaggerated influence over the resulting democracy.

There is, of course, quite a different big government.  This is the kind of big government which results from the kind of response (I think) the tweet I mention above was making.  Here, the proponents of such government make out it is actually small government.  They aim to ensure politicians we vote for have as few resources as possible to dish out and share (or not) amongst the commoners.  What such proponents fail to realise is that big government – just like energy (a matter which is never created, never destroyed, only ever converted) – will always find a place to install itself.  In this case, then, those moneyed citizens I mention above gain not just a permanently exaggerated influence over this now sad body we call democracy but – in truth – a de facto control over everything.

This is how big government slides into a different landscape: it becomes the exclusive tool of the rich and wealthy instead of a bulwark against the abuses all of us at some time or other might be inclined to contemplate.  From the hateful big public government feared by the small governmenters – that beast which cannot always be properly controlled – it becomes the fearful big private government despised by the state-enamoured socialists and social democrats.

The only conclusion I can come to as a result is that big government is a given; is inevitable; and needs to be accepted.

In a complex society such as the one we now inhabit, the question is not big versus small government.

The question is what type of big government.

Which leads me on to consider the confusing issue of democracy.  If we believe in it, we should implement it above and beyond the immediate requirements of efficacy.  And if we believe in it thus, big government should serve – above all – the democratic instincts which allow a populace to express its voice on a regular basis.

If, however, we feel at all that time is short – that decisions taken speedily are more useful than decisions taken ultra-democratically – the kind of big government we should really be contemplating is quite a different beast.  Here, it should be populated by pyramidal hierarchies where few people are in charge.  The principle being that a bad decision taken quickly is better than any decision at all – whether good or bad – which finds itself being taken over a wearisome period of time.

And if we believe in a democracy of greater complexity, a “good democracy” to use Peter Levine’s terminology, where the needs of citizen empowerment are matched against the efficiency of the process, where indeed the definition of efficiency contemplates the degree to which ordinary citizens are afforded the opportunity to take part, the kind of big government we should aim to create will combine aspects of both the big public government we are accustomed to complain about as well as the big private government we are generally led to believe benign.

Or which we are, in fact, mostly oblivious of.

Big versus small government?  I think it’s clear what I feel on the subject.  The real question now, I suppose, is whether those who prefer to posit the argument around the aforementioned axis do so out of ignorance or do so with an unfortunate – and quite ill-natured – intentionality.

A question for another day perhaps?

What say you?

Yes, we need to spend more money on our MPs (but definitely not on their pay)

 democracy, MPs, on a high  2 Responses »
Jan 122013
 

Yesterday, I discovered there was science to back up my behaviours as incorrigible blogger:

[...] unthinking work responds positively to the attractions of monetary payments.  They dangle a larger carrot in front of you – or threaten you with a larger stick for not working harder – and, verily, you end up working harder.  But when it comes to using your brain to think, more money actually makes you perform worse!  Time and time again, the data proves the latter.  An astonishing – and apparently counter-intuitive – conclusion.

Where, then, do our MPs fit into this frame?  Paul describes the three main theses thus:

There are three basic camps on MPs’ pay.  The first camp maintains that all MPs are thieving bastards and should be paid less.  The second camp says that MPs may or may not be thieving bastards but that their pay should be held down so that they are “in touch” with the people they represent.

Then there’s the camp who go with the “to get the right MPs doing that important governing thing really well, you have to pay a good rate, and the current ones’s nowhere near enough.  They’re the ones taking the high ground, telling the other two campas they need to be more rational, or at least not Chairman Mao.

I think, however, that Paul misses out a fourth – one I have arrived it in the light of my aforementioned post on the dumbing down of processes in a thinking society.  That is to say, we have to decide whether the job of an MP is equivalent either:

  1. to that of a manager-driven and wage-slaved legislative worker bee; or
  2. to that of a self-motivating and cognitively-enhanced legislative thinker.

If the former, then we can structure the debate as Chris also seems to have done (the bold is mine):

The news that MPs think they deserve a £20,000pa pay rise is neither surprising nor relevant. Not surprising, because we all think we’re underpaid. And not relevant, because pay does not and should not depend upon desert. Instead, the question is: if we paid MPs more, would we get better governance? I’m not sure.

But I don’t think the former, that is to say, that of legislative worker bee, should hold true – and if it does at the moment, then we have the wrong people in the job (and maybe utterly the wrong system in operation).  It is, of course, arguable that this is exactly what we have – but perhaps precisely because of the assumptions that currently underlie the arguments surrounding our MPs’ responsibilities.  Bound hand and foot, as they are, by political-party loyalties and whips – as well as all the related behaviours which such a relationship engenders – too much of what they seem to do these days involves amplifying centrally sourced, structured and engineered messages which party hierarchies wish to disseminate.  Instead of being those self-motivated thinkers I suggest they might in other circumstances aspire to being, they tend far more often to act as simple cogs in an echo-chamber machine.  Original thought is squeezed out by monolithic postures – and the nearest they ever get to being those original thinkers I am asking for is when they are asked to scrutinise new legislation which, in itself, is all too often couched in rubber-stamping process.

Little impact or influence do they ever seem to have if we care to measure them in terms of concepts such as true innovation, grassroots connection and individual investigation.

So how could it be?  Let’s go back to the social media examples I started out with.  Whilst I worked full-time as a data-entry processor for a large banking corporation, outside my working day I was also blogging on this site.  The job I carried out here was far more complex, cognitive and wide-ranging than punching numbers ever managed to be.  Whether it had – or indeed has – any intrinsic value, only you have a right to say, of course, but even a minimal appreciation of what I’ve been writing will surely admit it’s been more complex than simple manager-driven data-processing.

I was, then, both worker bee and self-motivated cognitive thinker.  For the former, I worked harder as bonuses were dangled in front of me; for the latter, the bonuses involved the very personal satisfaction of writing a rounded piece, some hits stats which allowed me to believe some people had found it useful enough to read and the distant thought that at some distant time life might reward me differently for what I was doing.

But all of the above could not have been even contemplated if the technology to research my posts – and publish them once written – did not exist; was not cheap; and, above all, wasn’t seamlessly connected to thousands of other thinkers similarly engaged.

The cognitive stuff so many of us produce these days exists, therefore, not because of our pay but – rather – because of our tools.  It is access to these splendid tools that really drives us to continue wanting to turn our unformed imaginings into consequential trains of thought – and, equally, turn our consequential trains of thought into cogent and understandable posts.

If, then, we are to assume that MPs in the future should be, more often, self-motivated cognitive thinkers than manager-driven worker bees who are assumed to be blindly responsive to stick-and-carrot remuneration packages, the above examples of blogging and social media would seem to indicate that, yes, it’s time for us to consider a significant investment in our democracy – but not with the managerialist instincts that so often lead us to foolishly construct pyramidal hierarchies with highly-paid CEO-types balanced problematically at their tops.

We need to put more money into democracy, it is true – but definitely not into MPs’ pockets or, even, political-party coffers.

Where then?

In my opinion, the fourth approach we need to resolve the conundrum of MPs’ remuneration would run as follows:

  1. We would need to flatten the pyramid of responsibility.
  2. We would need to pay MPs the kind of salaries which good university teachers – ie good enablers and facilitators of learning, development and research environments – would expect to receive.
  3. We would need to ensure MPs’ back-office operations are resourced enough to develop and research legislative ideas and innovation as effectively as any decent university-based research department.
  4. We would need to spend far more on enabling and creating policy environments of truly original and organic thought around each and every MP in Parliament.

Finally, think tanks, lobbyists and journalists with ready copy to peddle would have to be banned from all legislative negotiations: if possible, we might consider passing specific legislation to summarily eliminate them via parliamentary phaser gun; if not, at the very least we should aim to taser them into frequent and blabbering submission.

The latter is, of course, a joke.

The rest, though, is anything but.  What do you think?

Law, order and pathetic politics

 Coalition, demagogy, democracy, in a hole, PCC, police  No Responses »
Nov 182012
 

This tweet just flitted past my eyes:

RT @SophieBryce Yvette Cooper totally right to say we shouldn’t read that much into a vote with such a low turnout. #bbcsp

I don’t think I agree.  I assume they’re talking about the Police and Crime Commissioner elections.  In this case, the Daily Mail – as quoted by the BBC – would seem to have got it about right:

The Daily Mail describes the elections as a day of apathy at the polls and a day of political bloodbaths for the three major parties, a dark day for democracy and a crushing rebuke to Britain’s political class.

To be honest, if Yvette Cooper does seriously think we shouldn’t read too much into a vote with such a low turnout, then she’s on the point of losing her erstwhile honed and sharp political touch.

That an election which apparently cost the taxpayer a hundred million quid should have generated such a resounding lack of interest surely does require us to read quite a lot into it: not only into what happened but also into what didn’t.

Personally, I’ve always been in two minds about what’s been touted by its proponents as a process which would increase public oversight over our policing.  That such oversight is needed is absolutely clear: phone-hacking, Hillsborough, Orgreave and the most recent paedophile and sex abuse scandals just show us how operational decisions can go astray when the “danger” of the light of democratic examination is kept well away.  But I’m really not sure that concentrating such oversight in yet another “elected” and potentially populist public figure of demagogue-like instincts is precisely the best way to go.

We need more democracy but not more personality politics, and I’m afraid what the PCC elections appear to be delivering – to a populace which clearly doesn’t care for it – is rather more of the latter and rather less of the former.

This election is clearly an example of pathetic politics: a politics which hasn’t known how to communicate with its voters, hasn’t known why it should communicate with its voters and doesn’t care too much whether its voters voted or not.  In truth, these PCC elections are a perfect definition of Coalition politics.

We  half-voted for them in 2010 – and they’ve now gone and transmuted a once vibrant and discursive body politic into a cadaver of banal promises and underhand machinations.

The turnout, financial cost and degree of acceptance from the public all define, as never before, what Cameron & Co have failed to deliver. This is a paradigm for a group of political leaders who see politics not as a public good which needs to be tended to but, rather, an aggressive tool to be used in order that they may remain in a job.

Remain in a job whilst so many others lose theirs.

So bright ideas, maybe.

But implementation, a big fat zero.

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