In the banana republic that is Cameron’s England, the shittiest government website in the world

 a con, David Cameron, Department for Work and Pensions, digital economy, digital literacy, digital world, England, Iain Duncan Smith, in a hole, web, websites  10 Responses »
May 052013
 

This has to be the shittiest government website in the world – the worst, biggest and bitterest digital abyss you’ll ever experience, in fact.  And it’s all here in Cameron’s England for the delectation and delight of those with the right to claim Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance and Overseas State Pension.

No.  Not those websites.  Those are pretty decent; informative and easy to read.  No.  I’m talking about the website behind this Inquirer story.  The website you are supposed to use to claim the benefits the former websites so informatively inform you about.  Read it and be prepared to be absolutely flabbergasted by IT-shite of the very highest (ie the very lowest) order.  This is how it starts out, at least at the time of writing this post:

About this service

You can only use this service for:

  • Attendance Allowance (AA)
  • Disability Living Allowance (DLA adult and child)
  • Overseas State Pension – if you are a non-UK resident (including Channel Islands).

Rather ominously, it then goes on to say:

This service doesn’t work with some modern browsers and operating systems. Tell me more

We are considering how best to provide this service in future.

You may want to claim in another way.

Here then are “some modern browsers and operating systems” which this online piece of bollocks doesn’t work with:

Operating systems and browsers

The service does not work properly with Macs or other Unix-based systems even though you may be able to input information.

You are likely to have problems if you use Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Windows Vista or a smartphone. Clearing temporary internet files may help but you may wish to claim in another way.

There is also a high risk that if you use browsers not listed below, including Chrome, Safari or Firefox, the service will not display all the questions you need to answer. This is likely to prevent you from successfully completing or submitting the form. You may wish to claim in another way.

OK.  So let’s see what systems it does manage to negotiate:

What the service was designed to work with

The service was designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available.

Microsoft Windows 98:

  • Internet Explorer versions 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows ME

  • Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows 2000

  • Internet Explorer version 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2
  • Firefox 1.0.3
  • Mozilla 1.7.7

Microsoft Windows XP

  • Internet Explorer 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2
  • Firefox1.0.3
  • Mozilla 1.7.7

What?  You do have to be joking, right?

“Many of these are no longer available.”

What the fuck (pardon my French) is the Department for Work and Pensions playing at?

What the hell makes it think it has the right to implement/perpetuate such a frightful piece of web estate in order that the disabled, those in need of care and pensioners various can access online services and exert their solemn rights, via insecure (not to say unobtainable) software such as Windows 98 and Netscape?

For Christ’s sake, this has to be the most unpleasant piece of casual government cruelty to those least advantaged, to those least able to defend themselves, in many a cold-comfort moon.

This is a shocking disgrace.

Words are literally failing me.

Words … are … literally … failing … me.

Amazon, HMV – and the end of fate itself

 a con, Amazon, analogue world, customer service, digital world, high street closures  No Responses »
Jan 152013
 

Change.  We hear so much about it.  A change for the better.  It’s a common enough sentiment.  And if you’ve ever worked for a large company with communication issues (they’re always “issues” or “challenges” – never, God forbid, “problems”!), they’ll also tell you that change is a given: that not only can you not avoid it, you shouldn’t.

The key to getting on in life, therefore, is knowing how to frame the change which’ll benefit you.  Some thoughts on the subject of HMV, for example:

Funny how memories of #HMV parallel memories of #Borders: places where tactile & unconditional browsing were allowed. #HumanNeeds perhaps?

And then this:

Today’s 2-speed economy: jobs at risk as HMV teeters on brink while Goldman explores ways to minimise tax on its traders’ 6-figure bonuses

Meanwhile, John Naughton has this to say (the bold is mine):

So today’s news that the High Street music store HMV is going into Administration has been a long time coming, but really it’s been on the cards for a long time. There are reports that the music/movie industry will try to rescue it. If true, then that merely confirms how poorly managed those industries are.

Whilst I understand what John is arguing – that digital music in the recording studio should find its way to the consumer just as digitally – I’m not sure I agree any longer that the change he and many others have framed for us here, both with respect to music and video as well as books, is entirely a list of unsullied positives.

My views are beginning to coalesce around another set of opinions, quite different from my previous attachment to the digital way of doing things.  This other tweet from yours truly yesterday encapsulates exactly what I mean:

@ZM_01 Net taught us to search for & buy what we want; led us away from buying stuff we stumble across. @mikejulietbravo @lisabriercliffe

So what Amazon and other online retailers (are there any others of any significance?) achieved in this puzzling last decade wasn’t only giving the customer what they wanted.  Far far more importantly – and, arguably, even destructively – they managed to change and re-engineer our expectations.  The felicitous synchronicity of stumbling across the intellectual stock your local IP shop actually had in store, of coming across something quite unexpected, of taking a risk, of finding a new direction, of allowing your flesh and blood shopkeeper to intuitively recommend the wildest of things, of buying something you hadn’t intended to buy which might, nevertheless, prove to enrich your life in unpredictable ways … well, all of the above has been lost to something much more levered, messaged and structured: by using advertising to match market reaction to availability, the big and smaller companies which now attempt to organise our purchases have ripped away from the vast majority of consumers the habit and custom of chancing.

There will be many, like John, even myself only some years ago, who would argue that Amazon is to blame.  To blame to the extent that its business model – its warehouse infrastructures, its wondrous-to-behold website, its ability to use tax schemes to screw down its costs – has destroyed the competition.

But, to be honest, whilst I would blame Amazon for what’s happening to HMV, I wouldn’t say the former’s business model – not even its unhappy tax history – was primarily the cause of the latter’s woes.  Instead, it’s how Amazon has re-engineered our expectations: as citizens and human beings, we’ve become professional and hidebound consumers.  We prefer the repetition of an experience already consolidated to risking the danger of not fully maximising our product and service outputs.  Even when we do shop in bricks-and-mortar environments, we are never very far from our smartphone app: the one with the barcode scanner which allows you to doublecheck prices almost everywhere.  No longer do we enter our IP shop, thinking of the content we might happily come across.  Instead, we enter wondering if we’ll find what we already expect to encounter: and if it’s more expensive, then we whip out the smartphone and proceed to order with one-day delivery.

All the time that this is happening, we are only thinking of maximising those outputs.  Rather than allow ourselves to be amazed primarily by the words, the notes or the images someone has so carefully put together, we are incessantly looking and pursuing those dirty goals of buying whatever it may be at the lowest possible cost.

When the corporates framed this change as aimed at improving customer service, we really did not understand the huge disservice they were in the process of doing us.  For the real and only customer service such a frame has improved is that which attends to and services the top-flight managers and executives – as well as occasionally the shareholders – of the companies I am referring to in this post.

Meanwhile, as we learn to buy only what we are expensively told to and informed about, we lose all possibility – ever again – of casually and unexpectedly finding what fate might have otherwise so excitingly thrown up.

Yes!  This is the end of fate, my dear friends.

The end of the very workings and mechanisms of destiny itself.

On digital literacy – and a bit of space between the ears

 digital economy, digital literacy, digital world, learning, learning from experience, literacy, on a high  No Responses »
Nov 092012
 

It was announced today that George Osborne has taken the decision to invest in public space research.  Whilst I uncharitably wondered at first whether this was to do with the space between his ears, I then concluded that Britain’s most prolific serial entrepreneur, Richard Branson, might have had some long-term beady eye placed on such a development.  You get suspicious like that these days: corporate Communism makes you so.  Whilst it’s bad to use public funds to support the ill and needy survive as best they can, the corporate Communists agree as one that such funds can be shovelled hand over fist into public-sector ventures of a readily privatisable nature.

But maybe I’m seeing shadows where there really are none.

You know me – a conspiratorial sort to the very end.

Something, now, in relation to the Twitter rumour-mill.  As I wrote this morning and a couple of days ago now, the thought of paedophilia strikes at the very heart of our souls and beings.  And where there has been abuse, whether allegedly sexual or manifestly political, there will be a desire to strike back.  It would seem that such a desire has already been consumed, if these declarations are anything to go by (more on this matter here).  There is nothing worse than a mob getting lynch-hungry – even as there is nothing more common than an establishment hurriedly re-establishing itself.

To be honest, I’ve never understood why accusations of sexual abuse are considered so inevitably defamatory where accusations of political abuse are par for the course.  That a government – or, indeed, any politician – can be accused of deliberately destroying whole communities and not take legal action against its accusers seems a ridiculous and foolish state of affairs.  It just shows how much we misunderstand sex and sanction the exercise of the establishment’s power.

Anyhow.  The English and sex clearly do not happily mix in public.

And so I come to the subject of digital literacy, as raised by the BBC yesterday:

Some 16 million people in the UK lack basic online skills, a survey suggests.

The report, conducted by consultancy firm Booz & Company, defines basic skills as using a search engine, sending and receiving emails, completing online applications and accessing information online.

To be honest, I think it must become apparent to anyone who thinks about this subject just a little that to conceptualise digital literacy as knowing where to poke a few words into a search engine is like designing a primary school IT curriculum around using Microsoft Office.

Ah.

Well.

As we were.

The truth of the matter – especially in the light of the flurry of sexual abuse rumours alluded to above – is that the kind of literacy we need a lot more in this country involves the evaluation of web information as it flows and surges, like a virtual Hurricane Sandy, back and forth in that space we all share between our sometimes inattentive ears.

And I don’t just mean the public.  I also mean the police, journalists, politicians and society wonks in general.  As the BBC report unsurprisingly sustains (the bold is mine):

Annika Small, chief executive of the Nominet Trust, a charity set up to find ways of using the internet for social good, welcomed the plan.

“It is shocking that 16 million people don’t have basic skills and there is a lot of work going on to encourage people to use the internet,” she said.

But, she added, the skills identified by the report “seem to set the bar quite low”.

“Once people have found something relevant to them online and have discovered the power of the internet, their skills become quite sophisticated,” she said.

Digital literacy should be seen as a lot more than just pressing software buttons.

If we are to make of social media a tool of social gain – instead of allowing it to deteriorate into antisocial pain – we must surely propose training not only our children but also our economically productive and democratically involved adults and elders to participate more fully in a literacy which might one day serve to benefit us all.

For if, in the future, we can guarantee that everyone participates in ensuring society develops in as kindly a way as possible, perhaps the alleged and recognised cruelties of the past forty years can be avoided with reasonable certainty.

Only then will our society recover some semblance of sincerity and truth.

Out of literacy, learning has always come.  And learning is the key to clearing away the evil cobwebs of unhappy ignorance.

These days, you see, it’s not just knowledge which engenders power.

It’s knowing how to do two things: assess the true value of what you long ago already suspected – and understand how best to communicate those suspicions.

Timing is everything.

And that’s what latterday literacy should be all about.

And will this digital biology signal the final triumph of capitalism over humanity?

 advertising, algorithms, Apple, biology of politics, capitalism, code, coding, commerce, competition, digital economy, digital world, in a hole, on a high  No Responses »
Mar 312012
 

Here’s a fascinating article, which came my way via Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter feed, on the subject of whether the sciences of code and networks shouldn’t be considered biological.  Some choice phrases which caught my attention – and which I hope will encourage you to read the piece in full, even if at first glance you may feel it isn’t something which should necessarily interest you:

[...] we now live in a world [...] increasingly run by self-replicating strings of code. Everything we love and use today is, in a lot of ways, self-reproducing exactly as Turing, von Neumann, and Barricelli prescribed. It’s a very symbiotic relationship: the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there’s no reason life won’t use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that’s what’s happening.

[...]

What’s, in a way, missing in today’s world is more biology of the Internet. [...]

[...]

[...] In 1945 we actuallydidcreate a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality.

[..]

[...] money is a very good example, because money really is a sort of a gentlemen’s agreement to agree on where the money is at a given time. Banks decide, well, this money is here today and it’s there tomorrow. And when it’s being moved around in microseconds, you can have a collapse, where suddenly you hit the bell and you don’t know where the money is. And then everybody’s saying, “Where’s the money? What happened to it?” And I think that’s what happened.

[...]

What’s the driver today? You want one word? It’s advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it’s the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they’re trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

This is one of those articles you come across every so often which opens up to a non-expert like myself a whole wonderful new world of ideas in brilliant clarity.  I am not a computer scientist nor particularly adept at so many of the specialities mentioned quite by-the-by in this beautiful text, but in so very few lines I am immediately able to appreciate that we will shortly become some of the least important entities on the planet.

There will come a moment when the self-replicating code thus described will become very much more complicated than even our own precious DNA.  What then, say you and I?  What will happen then?  Should we fear this moment or simply hope – a little ant-like – that we may be so very insignificant that we will not pose a threat worth bothering about?

Software as neo-nature; money and receptor audiences; how to see advertising as a virtuous tool to a different dimension here on Planet Earth.  Who would have thought it?  What’s really driving our futures is no longer the porn-focussed technologies of the Nineties and Noughties but the ability of commerce to gather together consumer-motivated individuals in $100 billion Facebook-ed packages of stock market worth.

In reality, we need not fear these new lifeforms at all – as long as we are prepared to maintain our firm attachment to the advantages of conspicuous consumption they all now seem to be offering us.  As the piece concludes about Apple’s progressive encroachment:

Why is Apple one of the world’s most valuable companies? It’s not only because their machines are so beautifully designed, which is great and wonderful, but because those machines represent a closed numerical system. And they’re making great strides in expanding that system. It’s no longer at all odd to have a Mac laptop. It’s almost the normal thing.

And there will come a time, just mark my words, when any Luddite-like attempt to resist the charms of these “creatures” (and here I refer to the self-replicating code of the article more than its containing black boxes and physical manifestations) will result in automatic isolation, digital excommunication and – possibly – literal extermination by a evermore tentacled virtual and commercial enclosure.

How smart might that smart meter become?  Now have you ever thought about that?

And pushing the thought a little bit further, will this digital biology signal the final triumph of consumerist corporate capitalism over humanity – even as if we believe we are in the midst of its final days?  Because it jolly well could you know.  It jolly well could.

In such a way, then, from 18th century sole traders where individuals were all important and all inscribing on both sides of the transactions to those eternal anonymous 20th century corporate bodies where individuals were important insofar as they formed part of masses whose behaviours could be predicted to commercial ends, we move into an ambush of technological proportions where – perhaps – we will end up witnessing our total downgrade as entities: no longer anything but servile generators of content which the self-replicating numbers take over, feed off, mould, channel, distribute and shift.

We may, in fact, arrive at a situation whereby the humans finally become the machines and the machines finally become the humans.

Maybe it’s already happened.  The capitalism that’s failed us is the human-run one – that’s the one we’ve seen come crashing down around us over the past couple of years.  It’s through the emotion-ridden intervention of humans that we have arrived at the current misery we’re suffering from.

The machine-run one, however, the one run entirely by and for machines that is, may only just now be on its starting-blocks …

Calling all 21st century politics and politicians!

 copyright, copyright madness, digital literacy, digital world, Lawrence Lessig, on a high, Open Rights Group, political parties, politicians, politicking, professional politicos, sorted, technology  No Responses »
Mar 262012
 

I wrote yesterday on the Open Rights Group’s 2012 Conference, held in London on Saturday at the University of Westminster.

Here, now, you can find the keynote speech given by Lawrence Lessig.  Lessig is best known for his work on copyright, but of late his accumulated wisdoms have led him to investigate the real reasons behind the destruction of our democratic discourse.  In the speech you can find below, you will see examples taken from the fields of technology and copyright which – whilst entertaining in themselves and of vast interest to the geekier ones amongst us – have a much greater relevance to the much wider context of general political activity.

Mr Lessig is an obsessive seer of connecting strands.  He understands how our society works by taking many different-angled bites at the apple of our behaviours.  I would beg you, therefore, whether you consider yourself a geek or a politician, to take the time out to see and listen to what he has to say.

His is no longer a discourse limited to the rarefied concepts and theory of copyright law.  He speaks universally – and deserves universal attention.

Many thanks, by the by, for Open Rights Group’s herculean efforts which brought him to British shores this weekend.

Recognizing the Fight We’re In from lessig on Vimeo.

Knowing how to count on ten fingers is digital literacy too

 digital literacy, digital world, film, literacy, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Oct 042011
 

Here’s an interesting idea:

We use the internet for everything – from dating and gossip to hobbies and work. We also, crucially and increasingly, use it to form our most basic and closely held views about the world. And there is a huge amount of bad, wrong, misleading and malicious information, often masquerading as the genuine article.

Teachers are worried that young people are not being equipped to tell the difference. The 500 teachers polled rated their pupils’ ability to recognise bias, apply fact checks and verify sources to be below average.

Other surveys indicate that around one in four 12-15 year olds make no checks at all when visiting a new website.

Some form of ‘digital fluency’, encompassing both traditional critical thinking skills and specific knowledge about how the online world (say, how search engines operate) works needs to be put at the heart of education.

This issue reminds me a little of when I first started studying film at uni.  We were grandly – and, in the event, quite rightly – informed we would learn not how to “watch” a film but how to “read” a film.  And yet what was most interesting was how much film language we already knew.  You try and imagine now what it would be like to see a Hollywood film for the first time – and if you can properly imagine it, you’d know how lost you would feel.  Film is so ever-present that – as a language and medium – it has entered our very souls; to such an extent we may even dream in its cross-cutting, close-up and cutaway techniques.

I know I certainly do.

It does occur to me, however, that perhaps this call to digital literacy – similar in appearance and apparent sensibility to the industrially spoonfed and popcorned moviegoers of the 20th century, with their film schools, film studies and film festivals – is not a little misplaced.  Most young people, I would imagine, studies and surveys notwithstanding, are much better positioned to understand and sense Internet falsehoods than their elders who still read the Daily Mail and the Sun.  And if they aren’t, then it’s precisely what they’ve experienced in the home through their parents use of mainstream media which has led them to uncritically take as read the stories they come across when surfing the Internet with their smartphones.

The real problem isn’t a virtual digital literacy, then – but, rather, a far longer and deeper tradition than that: knowing how to count on ten offline and real-world fingers.

And those who really need the kind of digital literacy I am talking about are those voters in that section of society who believe every supporting prejudice their cosy columnists choose to write about.

The respective values of digital and analogue information

 analogue world, digital world, in a hole  No Responses »
Nov 202010
 

I was on the receiving end of the following conversation just now, via my old-fashioned telephone line (the name has been changed to protect the deceased’s anonymity):

“Can I speak to Mr Smith?” “He died several years ago.” “So when would be best time to contact him?” (Cold-call contact centre dialogue.)

The lady who made the call came on the line with a lovely – though in the circumstances highly inappropriate – laugh in her voice.   I suggested that, unless she was able to call beyond the grave, her chances of contacting him were minimal.

Needless to say, she eventually got the message and put the phone down.

Meanwhile, a Twitter follower tweeted me this in response:

@eiohel Personnel guy: How many children do you have John? John: Three Personnel guy: (looks at printout) No, you’ve only got two, John!

And I responded thus:

@moridura Well quite. It’s amazing how people listen so carefully to electronic information and filter out the analogue with such glee.

Which, of course, in the two examples above, is exactly what has happened here.  Both the contact-centre woman and the personnel guy had in their possession electronic information – a database on a computer screen in the first case, a printout from a computer screen in the second – whose veracity they judged overwhelming.  Trained and accustomed to respond to digital stimuli, they were unable to accept – as equally valid and worthy of consideration – the analogue equivalents they were then presented with.

This is what living in a virtual and digital age is becoming to mean.

We interpret language and human responses as virtual noise and judge virtual noise and computed information to be imposing.  And this is not good at all.