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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.

Maybe it’s time for a new kind of content – CGI porn anyone?

computers, Iceland, ideas, Internet, pornography, sexual abuse, technology, unclassifiable, web, websites No Responses »

Mar 022013

This, from Iceland, on their campaign against online porn, is absolutely spot-on (the bold is mine):

Jónasson’s adviser Halla Gunnarsdóttir told the Guardian this week that the country is “not anti-sex, but anti-violence”, and that “what is under discussion is the welfare of our children and their rights to grow and develop in a non-violent environment”.

As I pointed out recently, sexual abuse is primarily the abuse of power – and any society which criminalises the former should also be prepared to criminalise the latter. Similarly, the generation of pornography – indeed, the generation of any content which involves the exploitation of people who would not otherwise participate, were their financial, or other, circumstances different – is, above all, an analogous abuse of power.

Iceland’s current move to remove such violence from its children is entirely coherent with earlier reported moves:

The draft legislation follows laws passed in 2009 and 2010 that criminalised customers rather than sex workers and closed strip clubs.

The problem of course, in this particular case, is that the tools which they wish to use involve filtering an open Internet. Tools which replicate the interventions in human rights that less salubrious regimes across the world are currently using. Tools which would give these regimes the kind of democratically-stamped approval to continue in their oppressive ways.

A difficult call for everyone who believes in freedom of information.

There’s another matter, however, which I’d like to raise in this post: we must accept we live vicarious lives. From latterday social media to traditional Hollywood films, this commonplace existing through the actions and creations of others is more or less generally accepted. No one really questions, for example, the right Daniel Craig has to earn a living from the explicit violence of putting imaginary bullets through anonymous bit-parted actors – nor even the creeping-up-behind naked actresses in movie-lit showers of sexual abandon.

Is it fair, then, to say that Daniel Craig and his cohort of stars are being exploited in order to put violence of one kind or another on silver-plattered screens for our repeated delectation and delight? And if it is fair to say so, should we strive to prevent such processes too?

I’m not really sure we shouldn’t, to be honest – if, that is, we’re really going to get serious about the abuse of power more generally. Interfering with the freedom of information flow is, undoubtedly, a very big issue. But so is what I assume to be the increasing exploitation of sex workers as a result of that insatiable content-black-hole that is the worldwide web.

A suggestion then. Not just a rant. Maybe it’s time for a new kind of content. Given that the instinct for sex is about as old as Adam and Eve’s adult teeth, has anyone considered CGI porn as a wider solution to sexual exploitation – and its corresponding abuse of power – which so many people currently find themselves affected by?

How would this work? Groups of existing sex workers could form officially-sanctioned cooperatives with the right to apply for government-funded training courses. These courses would serve to train them up in computer-generated film-making. There would, of course, be strict control over the content – a kind of Hays Code for our time. Just because the content was computer-generated wouldn’t give the creators the right to reproduce and duplicate in the virtual world the kind of abusive relationships we were aiming to eliminate in real life.

In such a way, the whole balance of power would be altered. Sex workers could find a gainful living as unexploited, and unexploiting, generators of porn; porn users would be safely educated away from the violent stuff through a plentiful, cheap and consistently benign exposure to non-violent (perhaps even government-subsidised) narrative; and, most importantly, the Internet could then be properly policed as per the canons of the code in question.

Obviously, there would still be significant and unresolved issues: people would almost certainly, for example, not find it easy to agree even on a definition of non-violent porn. But nothing was ever solved by an overbearing awareness of the challenges.

Technology, in part, got us to the bind we now find ourselves in. Technology, properly shared out and distributed, and through a generous and intelligence analysis of the whole process involved, could serve to get us out of it.

If only we were prepared to be coherent.

Dec 102012

Ariel has an interesting article over at the Guardian which not only describes current behaviours in mainstream and social media but serves as an excellent repository of such behaviours – in this case, in relation to the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. Whilst during the riots last year in Britain, social networks and social media served to put the authorities on the back foot, lessons since then have clearly been learned. When Ariel headlines the article in question as “The first social media war between Israel and Gaza”, he could just as easily describe it as one of the first social media wars, full stop. This, for example:

From the start, the Isreaeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hamas shared clips on YouTube, and posted messages and images on Facebook and Twitter (also here), which initiated heated debates on the platforms. Many reporters followed these and actively participated in the discussions, which made social media an important element of both reporting and criticism of the conflict.

This should hardly surprise us. That manipulation of social-media news and its transmission takes place must be self-evident to anyone with any experience of how stories in such contexts surge. Recent cases of sex-abuse allegations have generated claims and counter-claims which can hardly depend only on the dynamics of sheeply flocks. But in the argument that Ariel develops, we get a further strand of behaviours that add a far more complex interest to the mix. For he also describes and defines the following processes:

[...] Unlike any other war in the past, the Israeli-Gaza conflict has been characterised by the mass virtual participation of ordinary people via social media. [...]

And this has led to the more mainstream media feeling obliged to take onboard, and within their own frames, websites and even offline print, such popular – and, maybe, populist – content. In a post-blogging Facebook generation, where the very fact you’re an amateur communicator adds weight, veracity and conviction to what you tell, it must be the case that, in order to be able to properly convince, latterday industrial media has had to acquire a journalistic equivalent of what film-makers learned to call cinéma vérité. A kind of post-modern approach to communication, perhaps. A veneer of “realistic” edginess to their product where once smooth and house-ridden styles were sub-editorially imposed as unquestioned – and unquestionable – good practice.

Some further thoughts, then, on where this might all be leading us:

We need to look beyond the tools and their physical manifestations – it’s always easy to notice the technology and think that content must inevitably follow suit. What’s clearly missing in all kinds of media at the moment is the instinct to reflect and think behind the headlines before putting virtual pen to paper – the impulse to leave, for a few days as a draft, a piece of work usefully unpublished. Blogging is as guilty of this as any newspaper columnist out there. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.
I would also ask us to keep in mind that whilst the free press belongs to limited liability industry, free speech should belong to unlimited liability people. And the rights and responsibilities, as well as the punishments for transgression and so forth, should be quite different in each case. If we believe that international corporations are better guarantors of our free press than the laws of representative democracy, then the real problem doesn’t lie in statutory underpinning or not – it lies in a democracy which isn’t representative enough. No amount of any social media under the evermore fierce gaze of Western governments is going to fix a system as broken as that.
A people’s press, then, perhaps? A kind of Fifth or Sixth Estate? We need statutory protection for free speech here in the UK at the very least if we are to propose such a model.
The ideal? Maybe an osmotic world of information exchange where industry and people interface to their mutual benefit. But not under the current weight of English and Welsh libel laws.

A couple of final thoughts. First, in relation to these words from Ariel (the bold is mine):

Just as cyber-war and cyber-terrorism have become prevalent, social media warfare is here to stay. It seems that the fight for public opinion will keep growing in importance, and play a more central role in future conflicts. The fact that opposing parties can communicate directly with the public will increase the pressure on journalists to stay relevant.

To these words I would be inclined to add that the above-mentioned three battles will shortly form part of a new Holy Trinity of communication. Just as industrial media was kept in the shadow and practice of the security services throughout the whole Cold War and its aftermath, leading to the corruption that recent phone-hacking scandals have uncovered here in Britain, so now social media will be in the eye of and form a target for such institutions. It could hardly be any other way. If amateur communicators are making more of the news their peers are wanting to read than the news outlets themselves, no veneer, however thick, will fool any member of the post-Leveson generation. There is no way back. And the security services probably know this well before the newspaper industry is able and prepared to take it on the chin.

Second, these are all matters which have interested a lot of us recently – both readers and writers, both amateurs and professionals. Such a post-Leveson moment as this will surely serve to define at least the next fifty years of communication in Britain – and people really don’t realise what’s happening.

We’re sleepwalking into the future of so many unfreedoms.

Social media warfare being just one more sorry battleground they’ll fashion in order to restrict our ability not only, not primarily, to freely exchange our thoughts but also – far more importantly – to be able to evaluate their narratives.

Because if the future is going to work as I think Ariel believes, the ability to sift and determine where truth really lies will become far greater and relevant than it currently might be.

A world of multiple and simultaneous intertextualities?

Almost fit for a new generation of Johann Haris … and I mean that in as complimentary a fashion as you care to allow me.

If Google’s search is now a publisher, what does that make Twitter (the corp)?

a con, Facebook, Google, Internet, laws, libel law, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Nov 262012

Today, the Guardian publishes a fascinating story – a story that may have the most far-reaching of implications for democracy, free speech, online behaviours and the wider publishing industry. Essentially it describes how an Australian jury has come to the conclusion that Google’s search engine is actually a full-blown publisher – not simply an automated disseminator of access to interesting, timely and relevant content.

Now if Google’s search, a “simple” aggregator of content, can be accused and sentenced as a publisher – or, presumably, re-publisher of sorts – by a legal system I assume is pretty similar to our own (for it’s hardly going to be more restrictive in matters of freedom of expression I would, at the very least, have thought), just think what kind of intellectual precedent the case could set for our more thoughtful judges over here in England.

Just think, in fact, what they might say about Sally Bercow and that tweet which referred “innocently” to a trending topic generated by Twitter’s very own corporate mathematics.

Just think what they might now have to consider in relation to Twitter’s responsibility for that topic and trend in the first place.

As I just tweeted on Twitter itself:

So algorithms and the companies which create them *can* be held responsible for the content they enable. Twitter (the corp) – watch out!

Meanwhile, a few days ago I was already arguing the following:

What I’m really saying with all of this is that Twitter’s Terms of Service attempt to argue that its software simply distributes and does not publish. It takes no responsibility for the bringing together of such content – and it consequently allows form to come under one legislation and content, thus defined, to belong entirely to the user. (Though we know that even this is not true: a user cannot normally access more than a limited number of tweets back in time, whilst companies pay Twitter good money to access on a massive scale such ancient thoughts and occurrences.)

My argument, however, would run as follows: deliberately dumbing down individual ideas into 140-character gobbets and then bringing them together automatically to create interesting streams of thought involves not just the process of distribution but also the process of transformation. We are not just talking about giving someone else the tool to publish off their own bat: microblogging (ie Twitter) is essentially different from its much more discursive and single-authored precursor – which is to say, the blogging you see in front of you right now. Microblogging, essentially, is collaborative writing which involves many many others – and in order for it to work someone, or something, needs to sort and filter the information.

That is to say, give it shape. Edit and give sense and sensibility to what would otherwise be a morass of idiocies.

So who are the authors who write in a microblogging site like Twitter? Obviously the individuals who post. But also, surely, if we’re being realistic, the software which joins as a seamless whole the activities of so many busy worker bees; which is programmed and designed from ground up to prioritise speed of transmission over reflection; and which aims above all to indicate the latest over the lasting.

Which is why we finally come to the question I pose at the top of this post: why is a company like Twitter’s social-media software not also legally responsible for what it – basically – creates? Or at the very least enables?

But if this Australian case now proceeds to open the floodgates for “simple” search engines to be taken to court on any and every matter libellous matter arising (the truth being, of course, that they’re not all that simple – levering as they do billions of dollars of advertising revenues), just imagine how this might all impact – as the implications bed down – on the usage and abusage of social-media networks such as the above-mentioned Twitter and the inevitable Facebook.

That it spreads the burden of responsibility for statements made in a bespoke software constitution is to my mind only reasonable. That it may mean we lose all the virtues of Web 2.0, as well as online communication more generally, should however serve to stop us in our tracks – and make us seriously wonder if this is now going to be all for the best.

Do we really want the law to become even more wound up in our daily discourse? Is this really the right way for the interactive web? Do we really not know of any other way of exercising order which does not remove more and more our ability to communicate freely, spontaneously and democratically with other citizens?

As the Guardian concludes in its excellently measured piece:

If the Australian decision is followed by courts elsewhere search engines and platform providers will have to be a lot quicker in dealing with requests to take down material when they are contacted by a potential claimant and they will have to be more responsive to requests to sever links to defamatory content if their “not our responsibility, contact the webmaster” response opens them up to liability.

For those of us who put material online it might mean a more hostile legal landscape. The lesson will be that not only do you have to watch what you say online, search engines will have to do so as well.

And so is it that I fear a massive return to the deep web and its darknesses, if something is not done very quickly. Just as I also wonder whether the battles are already well on their way to being quite unpredictably – quite hazardously – lost.

I do still choose to believe that there must, surely, be another way to guarantee a future world of intelligent sharing.

It’s just that I’ve become evermore totally ignorant of the proper means to engineer and implement such a goal.

Is the Internet predisposing us to a certain kind of politics?

Dave Semple, Internet, Though Cowards Flinch, unclassifiable, web, websites 7 Responses »

Aug 232012

David’s post on not posting any more is throwing up a whole host of interesting ideas. Coupled with the news that Though Cowards Flinch has been included in the British Library web archive, isn’t time – dear ex-blogger – to reconsider what is clearly a premature retirement?

In the meantime, your capacity to comment on and analyse with commitment what is closest to your being continues to please me. In response to my own thought …

It may of course be that the Internet and web are best-placed to transform certain kinds of politics over others. Perhaps better suited to everything-goes libertarianism than socially supportive and human-transforming ideologies?

… Dave responds thus:

[...] Whilst I wouldn’t agree that the internet has transformed any particular ideology, I think you’re on to something trying to separate out whether or not particular ideas or models of campaigning have been more or less altered by the internet.

We can’t ignore the online epiphenomena of real-world politics, like Ron Paul or Barack Obama and their online coterie.

But at the same time, the actual power-relations of the capitalist state exist in the real world. If you don’t want to challenge those, then the internet is your dream come true, because it is just another way of beaming centrally-approved content into the homes of millions. It worked for Obama, and when he got elected, that movement of millions who supported him, gave online donations etc, was promptly ignored.

Anyone that doesn’t want to challenge capitalism, which is a relation between people and not an abstract idea, can exist in the aether – as a media face or a net personality, cultivating a select corner of the available total audience. With all their twitter profiles, this is how our current political elite exists. A socialist can’t exist like that, because a socialist wants to challenge people’s passive acceptance of (or even disorganised resistance to) capitalism.

If Dave and I together have reached any point of interest here, it is that – in quite a coherent way, considering the original Internet was created by the American military to allow communications to survive the buffeting of a nuclear war – with the Internet underneath and the worldwide web on top, such structures are best suited, intrinsically so in fact, to perpetuating corporate capitalisms in their more or less purest forms. And that those who would get something for nothing should beat the copyright giants of the world (and here I refer to the recent battles around SOPA, PIPA and ACTA) is entirely in consonance with a periodical tendency of capitalism to chase its own tail. Not renewal, though – simply a process of vicious dog-eat-dog.

That there are no ground rules in that pure ideal of the Internet and web at their most paradigmatic is something which reminds me – even if not you – of capitalism at its most simultaneously hands-off and interfering. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you are free to be free as long as the freedom you want is the freedom I offer.

This is what I think Dave is getting at when he concludes:

The best way to win that argument is not simply to make it abstractly, it is to organise. Organisation changes the conditions of struggle, turning them from hopeless to hopeful, and it happens in the real world, as it too is a relation between people. That is why the internet cannot and never will play a “transformative” role in socialist politics. It can merely assist, like distributing leaflets and socialist newspapers and having branch meetings.

And whilst the Internet underneath and the web on top can assist far more easily those who would reproduce its underlying ideologies, this does not mean – once we become aware of the game – that we cannot refashion them to our own ends.

We do, however, have to become aware of the game: for if we use the Internet and web without too much consideration of their natural states, we run the risk of being shaped without our knowledge, permission or adult consent into believing that everything-goes libertarian freedoms are preferable to socially transforming alternatives.

And nowhere – in my book at least – will I care to accept that perpetuating an existing order is less interfering than creating a new one.

Creativity crisis? What creativity crisis?

books, creation, creativity, Facebook, Facebook generation, film, in a hole, music industry, online constitutions, social media, social networks, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Apr 252012

My thoughts on this matter continue to emerge. Bring yourself up to date, if you wish, by reading this and its associated posts.

Just a couple more ideas to throw into the mix.

The social web’s major achievement seems to have been to convince people to work for global corporations for free. Not only for free but also in exchange for handing over personal data such as names, locations, dates of birth and so forth. We spend hours every day inputting what starts out as our data in a process whereby it essentially becomes their data – much of which in a discrete sense is of very little value. But bundled together, as sparse data often has been over history, it takes on a whole new life and existence.

So where has that selfsame history brought us? Whilst the 20th century was characterised by the multiple players of the industry of film taking over from the single authorship of the previous century’s novels, the 21st century will be characterised by a virtual sweat-shop of voluntary and addicted labour inputting its individually irrelevant datasets in order that algorithms and clever software manage to tease creative content out of the mix.

The creativity crisis both Chris and Rick speak so eloquently of is, in fact, no crisis at all – for there is plenty of employment to go around; the only slight problem from a living-your-life point of view being that it’s manifestly unpaid.

If we feel that the creative arts are inadequately funded, it’s because we’re looking in all the old places to create them. The new and brightest locations for creativity exist in the online constitutions which convert the product of evermore humble data-inputters across the globe into interesting and engaging Web 2.0 content. And funding isn’t necessary because the dumbing-down of process which characterises such corporate bodies everywhere has now also been applied to the end-users of such tools. Which does beg the question: who, in fact, could justify paying anything to anyone for simply liking or commenting on an article? In essence, we’ve been sold the donkey that what we do is ephemeral and worthless by itself – when in reality, using such dumbed-down processes which gather together and combine disparate data in new and unusual ways, it is really rather valuable, permanent and complex.

Are the machines on the point of taking over then? I would argue, with billion-dollar stock market flotations and user populations in the hundreds of millions, the modern social web has already turned us into industrialised cogs – freeloading as it does quite brutally on the back of our own falling standards of living as we work for zilch.

This software I talk of serves to take the basest of another’s data and turn it into a financial gold which is then stripped of all authorship and right to proper remuneration.

A virtual alchemy finally exists, then, in the 21st century. And its objects and goals – and victims too – just happen to be ourselves.

Oh, and one final thought to be going away with: if you believe in remunerating content providers properly but at the same time are thinking of using collated datasets of social content to run your businesses, think for a moment where all the latter information comes from – who produces it, under what conditions and how.

You may discover that the phrase “two-faced” comes to mind as you fight to impose your copyright laws on end-users of film, video, music and journalism – end-users who in a separate context you’re effectively employing unwaged in order that you might market better such legally protected products.

Yes. Web 2.0 is a classic example of getting something for nothing. Which doesn’t stop the most fervent supporters of copyright, even as we speak, resorting hypocritically to its charms.

How, sooner or later, they will have to pay us to tweet, like and post

Facebook, on a high, social media, social networks, software, sorted, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Apr 242012

One of those nights. You just can’t stop chasing the trains of thoughts.

I suggested earlier on that for particularly local copyright reasons, users of social media in countries like Spain and France might one day be able to argue they had a moral right to be paid for their labours. I then suggested that – without such payments – we were, effectively, in a state of 19th century sweat-shop capitalism.

My attention was then drawn to this brilliantly argued piece from David which paralleled my own – but did so with far more evidence and far less rhetoric.

Finally, via David again, the following project came to my attention: “User Labor – A framework for sustaining user labor across the web”; a fascinating idea from a couple of years ago now, whose overview runs thus:

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor, which is currently a monetized asset for the service provider but not for the user herself. We believe that universal, transparent, and self-controlled user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable social web.

So what do we have at the moment?

copyright issues in some jurisdictions – which may lead us to argue the social web could theoretically be obliged to remunerate users;
an economically unsustainable, as well as manifestly immoral, state of affairs whereby more and more work is done for large social web companies without remuneration – thus converting the predicted knowledge society of intelligent labour into a rip-off society of addicted users;
a formal proposal to structure the metrics of measuring user value – and so allow us to define exactly how much value is added by our Web 2.0 activities;

Then to the above three factors, we can add a fourth: as the law encroaches evermore closely on social media and networks – in particular, at least in the UK, Twitter – and as such encroachment expands the number of responsibilities such previously garden-fence discourses now display, there must come a time when such expanded responsibilities will include their corresponding rights. We can’t, after all, have responsibilities without rights. Now can we?

And rights generally obtain a return of some sort or another.

You want to make me legally responsible for my tweets? You want me to sanction their permanent profit-generating nature where before you claimed they were ephemeral? Then duly reward me for their production.

With a tool and approach such as “User Labor”, you can’t even say it wouldn’t be possible to measure our worth.

In times of a massing unpaid employment, we now have the legal, economic and moral imperatives – as well as the technical tools – to carry out a massive shift in how our social web operates. So what’s stopping us? Perhaps a simple public recognition of where all those knowledge society jobs they promised us have gone and disappeared to.

For they haven’t really disappeared at all: they’re called tweeting and liking and posting and commenting – and, whilst they all earn huge amounts of money for some people on the planet, we as very ordinary users have been conned into doing them for nothing!

Whilst, in the meantime, unemployment of the traditional kind just carries on soaring.

Can you really see no connection with the fact that almost one billion people punch data into Facebook on a regular basis for absolutely no compensation whatsoever?

Really not?

Is Google’s greed to blame for Facebook and Apple?

Apple, empire-building, Facebook, Facebook generation, freedom of expression, freemium, FreeTheInternet, Google, greed, paywall, paywalls, social media, social networks, unclassifiable, web, websites No Responses »

Apr 162012

Sergey Brin, of Google fame, argues the following:

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive,” he said. “The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.”

There are other things in this interview which I do agree wholeheartedly with. This for example:

He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet [...].

To that list, in fact, we might care one day to add the UK.

Especially in the light of other news from yesterday which indicates that the Russians may be planning to embrace similar controls on their Internet in the future.

But when Brin talks about the carve-up of the free and open Internet, I am inclined to want to take the position that Google itself is not entirely without blame. Brin is clear that some of the forces ranged against his – and our – baby include the following:

[...] the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

Whilst I agree that the entertainment industry wishes to have its cake and eat it – for I might argue that if an existing structure isn’t appropriate for your distribution needs, why take the decision to distribute on it in the first place? – the walled gardens of Facebook in particular are surely a reaction to Google’s monopolistic dominance of the aforementioned freedoms it avows it is in favour of. As I wrote some time ago on the subject of pernicious paywalls, the worldwide web in its native form is a truly beautiful thing:

To date, the Internet can be characterised and defined by two things: firstly, it has been more a space of discourse, more a flat hierarchy of multiple communication impulses, than a controlled business channel of traditional producer-consumer relationships. Anatomically speaking, more like a global brain with its extensive network of redundant neurones sparking off each other than an intestinal system which helps process a beginning, a middle and an end.

Secondly, its fundamental tool – the hyperlink – has changed how we read information quite profoundly: the promiscuity of search has taken over from the power of a previously framed narrative. Through that promiscuity, we look for answers to questions which tumble out of thoughts we must – over and over again – addictively pursue. Neither is that beginning, middle and end predestined any longer – nor, often, repeatable. The uniqueness of the narrative experience that each user of hyperlinks brings to the often very private storytelling they engage in as they surf the Web keeps millions of people obsessively tied to their PCs at the end of a multitude of long working days.

These two defining concepts – space and linkage – are what have made the Internet the force that it is today. And for the vast majority of publishers who currently connect to the Web, this Internet is exactly the Internet they need. They’re not looking for a mass-market reach to publish their content; instead, they have friends, colleagues and interest groups who actually choose to read what they are publishing, and do so night after night without prompting – quite without the seduction of competitions, bingo, free CDs or tickets to the cinema.

Google, however, has built an advertising empire on a set of hidden search algorithms which it allows to be massaged quite blatantly. From sponsored ads which sit at the very top of its search results to websites and their URLs which creep up the rankings via carefully lodged supporting links from key sites across the web, the industry of search engine optimisation (SEO) is to Google what, in its heyday, the concept of third-party ecosystem was to Microsoft. It sells the basic idea and principle to eager paying customers; it supports the legitimacy of the search model in question; and, finally, it helps keep other players firmly out of the market – essentially in order that Google, quite paradoxically, might convince a whole planet that when it monopolises the open Internet it is actually making all of us as free as could be.

No mention, for example, of all the data it has collected on us in order that its model of a “free” Internet might be better monetised on behalf of its shareholders.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I like Apple’s business model either. Nor is Facebook quite what I thought it might be even a couple of years ago. But I do get the impression that whilst Google’s landgrab did take place on a relatively open Internet, its ways and methods since then have only served to create a simulacrum of openness – a simulacrum where in reality those in power can move their favourite souls up and down the popularity stakes almost at will.

That original dream of Google’s, to make useful information available to anyone, has been gamed, distorted and messed around with – even, I might suggest, and quite arguably, by the company itself.

On such an open Internet, who wouldn’t want to create parallel universes?

Facebook and Apple aren’t the reason we’ve lost that dream.

Facebook and Apple are simply the symptom of Google’s greed.

Can anything big behave as if it were small?

ACTA, Big Agreement, Big Capitalism, Big Society, Big State, FreeTheInternet, Internet, on a high, open web, PIPA, small business, small government, SOPA, sorted, Splinternet, web, websites No Responses »

Feb 112012

As I logged onto Twitter an hour ago, a long line of tweets came my way in which I had been included in the early hours of this morning. Brian started the ball rolling by linking to a post of mine on the subject of what I tentatively called the “Big Agreement” – where a new contract would be drawn up between interested parties on what to do about both the “Big State” and “Big Capitalism”, neither of which were appearing to be especially relevant to a 21st century society with evermore devolving instincts.

The final tweet in the line of tweets in question was this one from Frances Coppola:

@brianfmoylan @eiohel @legalaware Big Society, Big State, Big Corporates, Big Capitalism….big is the problem

Now whilst I am inclined instinctively to agree, I do wonder if the problem is size or – on the other hand – behaviours. After all, we do have a perfect paradigm of vastness in 21st century life which actually behaves like very small: here, I refer, of course, to the Internet and its various bits and bobs. In essence – with its billions of pages of data and interactivity, its millions of connected servers and its ability to find and remember what’s relevant and apposite – it both acts like a human brain on a very discrete scale as well as performing the tasks of a globalised entity.

Very big then – or very small?

I’m inclined to believe it is both.

I’m not sure, therefore, that Frances is right to assume big can never act small for all our benefits. In reality, the very fact that so much of modern lawyerly energy is being expended on trying to shoehorn the current web and Internet into the traditional business models of content industries across the world is a clear indication that the aforementioned elements of virtual communication are currently big enough to attract the attention of these corporate behemoths – but too small in some aspect or another for them to be able to fully trust the selfsame Internet’s ways of seeing and doing.

So it is that I might argue we need to examine how the web and the Internet manage to carry off this wonderful sleight of hand with such apparent aplomb.

For the experience such behaviours provide us with is surely applicable to other areas of human endeavour.

And, if only we were able to stand back and analyse with intelligence, we might take advantage greatly of such clear examples of overwhelming achievement – as we continue to strive to create more responsive public and private sectors.

Do we really want more macho Darwinism in left-wing blogging?

blogging, crowdsourcing, Darwinian capitalism, in a hole, Labour Uncut, left-wing blogging, online constitutions, politics, Rob Marchant, software, websites No Responses »

Jan 032012

This piece by Rob Marchant over at Labour Uncut – on why we must continue with our critically, and sometimes apparently internecine, political blogging – has many things going for it. But I am inclined to take issue with the following argument:

LabourList and Labour Uncut, started more recently, have been doing a sterling job in taking back the internet agenda for Labour, but we still see much apparent discomfort in the comments sections. We fall into easy habits, talking of “loyalty” and “unity”, in order to try and keep party thinking aligned. It is easy to confuse “unhelpful comment” and “comment that I disagree with”. But all comment, in the end, is helpful. Robust debate is, on the contrary, an overwhelming positive, and it is precisely this Darwinism of ideas that can lead us all to arrive at a decent, defensible common view of where the party is at and where it needs to be. The wisdom, in the words of James Surowiecki, of crowds.

This was my response:

The Darwinism of Ideas is all well and good in theory. But I have two reservations: firstly, in terms of the intellectual debate that should be conducted, it closely mirrors in its dynamics precisely the kind of capitalism which is currently being imposed on us. And secondly, precisely because this capitalism – and its analogous debate – does not take place on a level killing-field, the ideas which will win out will proceed from those with the biggest clout (the biggest virtual networks, the largest number of real-world followers etc.) and not necessarily because the ideas themselves have intrinsic virtue – or are of intrinsic value to the Labour Party as a whole, and by extension those who might wish to vote for it in general elections.

Less macho Darwinism, more humane communication I think might be the order of *my* day.

Crowdsourcing ideas is – of course – an undeniable positive of many modern virtual environments. But we shouldn’t conflate “robust” with “trolling” – nor argue in a rank relativism that “all comment is helpful”: much of what Marchant describes that takes place on the Internet is clearly so unhelpful as to impede an effective crowdsourcing of absolutely any procedure or process.

The million eyes of interested participants that good crowdsourcing environments coordinate are of course grand pluses we should observe and learn from in the way that Marchant suggests. But as in the politics he so clearly understands, the constitutional structure of the environment you are dealing with is key to ensuring those million eyes act with either intelligence or a wasteful energy.

And it does so happen that on the few occasions I have commented on the Labour Uncut website, comment moderation has always been in place.

Hardly an inspiring example of where the crowd is shown to be in the driving-seat.

So before we go down the lazy route of justifying the tool of Darwinism in the very hub of all our debate, let us be accurate about the systems we use to give precedent and priority to some choice thinkers over that crowd.

And if we are truly interested in giving the crowd its head of steam, let us be consequential and act in good faith when we create the environments in which such a crowd should be allowed to perform.

White space

Google, Google Reader, unclassifiable, websites, white space No Responses »

Dec 022011

No. Not that white space. What I’m really looking to question is the wisdom of so much webby white space. With all the changes Google is making to its products – and the terrible existential tenterhooks it has us on as to whether a product will continue to function properly after the changes are implemented (or, even worse, remain in its portfolio) – this white space they’ve decided on is surely a step back in more than one way or another. In the olden days, when we had bulletin boards and text thingies and images didn’t exist and everything was so much simpler, surely we used a lot less electricity in lighting up our monitors.

Nowadays, with all this blankness which blinds, the energy consumption must have gone right off the graph. Instead of complaining for complaining sake, then, couldn’t we instead – perhaps – petition Google on this basis to put things back as they were?

Not geek conservatism but geek conservationism. The difference is linguistically slight – but the real-world implications are absolutely massive.

One final thing. I’ve been adding up exactly how much I pay to Google – between one website domain and another – and I think I’m now getting pretty close to $70 a year. So how much do we need to pay to the behemoth before it stops arguing that when it makes changes we have no right to complain “because you’re the product and getting this all for free”?

Does Facebook punish those of us who protect our privacy?

Facebook, privacy, unclassifiable, websites No Responses »

Oct 222011

This is only anecdotal, of course. But even so …

Well, here goes anyhow. Up until recently, I was browsing whilst logged on to Facebook with one browser only. Then, in order to protect my online privacy, I had this bright idea:

“Frictionless sharing” has taken a bit of a beating recently. Here’s an idea which came to me this morning:

I’ve started browsing with Facebook open in my secondary browser and all other browsing in my primary. Will that help keep Mark Z at bay?

Can anyone confirm if this will help to maintain privacy – and yet allow us to continue to take advantage of Facebook’s undoubted virtues?

Now, a short time before this wizard of a wheeze of mine, Facebook had switched me over to its revamped interface: the one with that stream on the right-hand side which tells me all day what Andrew is listening to on Spotify, and that fixed navbar at the top which I have to admit is an improvement. At the same time, I began to find that every post I posted onto Facebook direct (that is to say, rather than via my Twitter feed) was coming up, at least on my Facebook feed, as a “latest top story”. This had never happened to me before: I have relatively few friends on Facebook and am not the most active of users. I don’t as a rule get priority for anything I write or notify people about.

So then it was that I decided to start separating my browsing out: the vast majority in my primary browser and the Facebook-related stuff in my secondary. The following day – almost immediately, can you believe it? – I stopped getting pride of place as “latest top story” – and since then nothing has changed.

Now I’m not asking for Facebook to reinstate this foolishness. I don’t even feel peeved about it. I do however wonder whether it’s right that the site should be allowed to measure the value of its participants in terms of the number of websites that users allow Facebook to see they are accessing. And remove a certain degree of priority and visibility to those who refuse to give up all their data and browsing history.

Apart, that is, from name, date of birth, age, place of residence … well, the list is not quite endless, but it’s surely coming close to being so.

And, in any case, I’m probably wrong – this is probably only anecdotal.

Any clever clogs out there who can confirm either way?

Local newspapers and crime stories – are the police now involved in a kind of insider trading?

free press, Greater Manchester Police, hyperlocal journalism, in a hole, local journalism, newspapers, police, police state, policed state, radio stations, social media, Twitter, websites No Responses »

Sep 122011

Here’s a lateral thought for you. This just came my way via Greater Manchester Police’s Twitter feed:

A man has been charged after an armed robbery at a Heaton Moor post office. bit.ly/oRW4NY

It not only tells us what’s happened – as far as Twitter’s 140 characters allow it to – but also provides us with a link to more background on the GMP’s own website. Now if I did this, off my own bat, by either religiously attending court proceedings or listening to the police radio (if, indeed, such a thing is either possible or legal in this age of scrambled and unhackable communications), I could fairly be accused of taking the bread and butter of local news reporting away from the organisations which currently sustain – probably with difficulty – traditional newspaper and local radio infrastructures. And yet here we have a massive state institution – in this case a city-wide police force – providing free information via both standard website technologies as well as social media; information which surely, in the medium term, is likely to prejudice the exclusive nature of local news media and their consequent ability to stay in business.

Couldn’t we then, thinking analogously of the financial services sector and the strict regulations relating to the taking advantage of privileged information, argue that what’s beginning to happen here is a trading of what we could almost call “insider information” – for the benefit of a public institution which acquires further popularity at the expense of private sector alternatives?

That is to say, a subsidisation and enforced replacement of a series of services previously provided by what we had termed the “free press”.

This subsidisation involves an ever greater number of hits for the state websites and Twitter feeds in question, which in turn require resources the taxpayer must be asked to support out of the public purse – whether the aforementioned taxpayer is interested in the information under discussion or not.

Whilst provided exclusively by local newspapers and radio stations, these services were paid for – or not as the case may have been – in that clearly-understood way we used to call the free market. If as a consumer you wanted this kind of information, you paid for it. If you didn’t, it didn’t cost you. The implications of the police replacing such a “free press”, however, by a state-run and state-paid-for alternative – which eventually means local news reporting is no longer commercially viable – is surely a rather more worrying question for all of us out here … whatever our political beliefs.

It does mean, firstly, that the state is creating an infrastructure of information which – in the hands of others quite different to those who rule the police today – might easily be used against its subjects, especially in times of societal disorder. It also means that the “free press” will collapse into a specious non-existence as its business model goes out the window of subsidised state-operated alternatives. And finally, if the government has its way on locally elected police commissioners, it would place in the hands of individuals at the mercy of political winds (or not, depending on your point of view) a powerful network of communication.

Without, any longer, that local “free press” to hold it back and provide the necessary oversight.

As I say at the top, just a lateral thought. But one you might, nevertheless, care to come back to in a couple of years.

Klip.me, the Internet and Amazon’s Kindle

Adrian Short, Amazon, Internet, Kindle, Klip.me, legibility, on a high, readability, sorted, websites No Responses »

Aug 252011

A brilliant little tool called Klip.me has just come my way via Adrian Short’s Twitter feed. This is what the tool currently says it does:

ABOUT

Klip.me is a service focus on Web Reading, help user to get better mobile reading experience.

This service support Kindle (Email), Android (Native App) and iOS (Web App), in the future it will support more devices.

Klip.me Browser Extension/Bookmarklet based on MooTools, back-end services running on Google App Engine, part of the UI design reference form V2EX.

The Team

We are a small team, most of the time we are in Xiamen, a quiet coastal city in China

This service is a work in progress, any feedback is highly welcome and will help us in adding new features.

*** English is not our native language, it is a little difficult for us to reply emails, usually it might be a little slow for response, and we can not reply every messages, but we will read all your feedbacks and suggestions. You are welcome to tell us if there are spelling / grammatical errors, we will fix them as soon as possible.

Essentially, by using Klip.me, you can send the content (I assume only text content, and potentially some images) of any web page to your Kindle-, Android- and Apple-enabled devices, for reading later at leisure. In the case of the Kindle, which is the example I am most familiar with, it involves configuring your device to accept emails from Klip.me and thus allowing you to send and convert the content you’re interested in. If you don’t want Amazon to charge you the standard 3G charge for conversion of 20p per 1MB or part of, you need to ensure you configure your device for the emails in question to be sent to your @free.kindle.com address, and then use wifi to download the content.

More background and support can be found at Klip.me’s blog.

In the meantime, here is a piece I recently wrote on the reading experience Kindle provides, with some links to other posts I’ve also been minded to produce.

One of which being the most read piece 21stCenturyFix.org has ever had!

BestOfTheRest.org: a call for editors, content curators and non-mainstream authors to participate in a new editorial project on cultural identity

blogging, cultural DNA, cultural orientation, cultural rub, editing, ideology, Kindle, monetisation, Munguins Republic, on a high, publishing, RSS, websites, writing, www.BestOfTheRest.org 2 Responses »

Aug 242011

Tris has kindly posted an article of mine, with fearsome photo included, over at Munguin’s Republic tonight. This post is in relation to a call for editors, content curators and non-mainstream authors for the project BestOfTheRest.org. If you have any online comments on the subject, I’d be grateful if in the first instance you might make them over at the Republic itself. Below, you can find an even longer version (as is my unfortunate wont!) of these proposals, with further background to the ideas which are driving it.

____________________

Introduction

Tris has kindly offered me the opportunity to post a piece here at Munguin’s Republic on an editorial project called BestOfTheRest.org, which I’m working on at the moment.

Most of you will have never heard of me, so if you want to find out more you can go to 21stCenturyFix.org, which is where I blog. In particular, this post which tris kindly and productively engaged with, and which relates to this initial post on the subject of BestOfTheRest.org itself.

In short, I’ve been a language teacher in Spain, a volunteer for a while on an open source site, a discreet blogger for longer than I care to remember – as well as, lately, working in a back-office operation in a bank, a job from which I now find myself redundant. I’m also a trained editor, having studied publishing in Spain whilst I lived there.

Proposal

The editorial project I’ve mentioned is looking to use simple web technologies and Kindle/KindleApp/tablet and other devices in general in order to generate interest in the sharpest non-mainstream media writing which is currently produced in England, Scotland, Wales and, if possible, the two Irelands. In order to do so, I am looking for people in each geographical area to take on the responsibility of curating the writing in their area, and producing short (maximum 300 to 900-word) engaging and quirky daily overviews which pull together, link to and quote from non-mainstream authors. This content would then be distributed via an open website with comments facility as well as a single RSS feed, to Kindle and KindleApps to begin with, but hopefully other pay-for-subscription systems in the future.

Any income so generated would be split between the editor/curators. Meanwhile, the project is open to the idea of micro-payments to authors who are linked to and quoted from, and who in any case would benefit from increased visibility and be supported with an author-specific intranet/website containing editorial guidance and input. This intranet would also contain information on how to monetise content using parallel channels, for those authors interested in such options.

It’s a new untested market, so it’s probably quite a tall order – but, even so, the start-up costs are pretty small, so “all” we would be spending (often not negligible, mind) is our own free time.

As an example, and in order to test the technologies, I’m currently trialling distributing my own blog via Kindle here and here. If you have a Kindle, you can subscribe to a 14-day trial subscription to see how it works. After the 14 days, if you decide to continue it costs £1.99 a month for blogs which post multiple times a day.

Ideology

Now every decent editorial project should have an ideology behind it. In my opinion, the ideology of this project will depend in part on who finally participates – but, initially, into the mix, the two axes I would be looking to focus on are:

traditional party political formations
the identities which make up England, Scotland, Wales and the two Irelands

It’s having at least two axes that really interests me, precisely because you end up adding the most value to thought by crossing frontiers on a regular basis (a very short post of mine and its related comments from tris highlight this advantage in its very absence here).

My only personal contact with nationalisms of any kind, in the absence of a positive example of English nationalism, is with what happened in Croatia at the time of its independence. This was a desperate situation which may have required desperate measures, and some of the things done in the name of Croatia were as unhappy as very many done in the name of the ex-Yugoslavia. So I understand the reticence many people have to nationalisms and nationalist parties. What they neglect, of course, here in the UK, to notice is that the established political parties in the UK, one of which I am a paid-up member, also form part of a clearly identifiable appeal to the “greater nationalist” sentiments of Great Britain.

We should not forget that New Labour’s slogan was “New Labour, New Britain”.

So if I am inclined to prescribe the ideology of BestOfTheRest.org – apart from serving to make visible new writing and ideas – then it would be something along the lines of the following: “Cultural dissonance, that frontier between identities and ways of doing, where channelled constructively, is where all progress lies. If we want to progress in remaking our politics for the benefit of all identities, we need to be clear of the importance of understanding that all political DNA is connected; ideas which may attract or repulse have a historical set of links which tie them together. That is what we must remember – and act accordingly.”

The Spanish have a saying pertinent to the argument: “Hablando se entiende la gente” (“By speaking we understand people”). From my little contact with Munguin’s Republic and its team of editors/writers and commenters, it’s easy to see that the blog demonstrates the value of such positions, as well as such editorial approaches.

BestOfTheRest.org can only hope to be equally editorially coherent.

Conclusion

In the meantime, the request for help and support is now out there. From around England, Scotland, Wales and the two Irelands, we need the sharpest writing, sharpest writers and sharpest editors from non-mainstream media to want to collaborate in this proposal and shape its future.

Finally, apologies for the extension of this piece – all I can say in my favour is that I did run it past tris prior to its appearing on the web. Any comments online are most welcome, whatever their nature. And any comments you’d like to send me offline, please do me the favour of emailing to mil@bestoftherest.org, and if possible CC-ing tris into the conversation.

Why I’m stuck with Labour

CLP, dysfunctionality, envelope-stuffing, in a hole, Labour, Lord Snooty, Munguins Republic, political newbies, politics, SNP, tribalism, websites 14 Responses »

Aug 182011

I’m a member of a highly tribal political party – the British Labour Party. It’s a party which tends to eye with suspicion anyone who is not similarly partisan.

It welcomes you with open arms when you inhabit the position of newbie – but woe betide you if you acquire a reputation for critical adherence.

By nature, I’m not a tribal person. It’s not in my temperament. Even my nascent business’s name is made up of one Spanish and one English word. I prefer to occupy a frontier space than to be within a homogeneous whole. I’m described in at least one notable place on the Internet as a “clarifier” – as I recently pointed out the word “clarifier” often equals “pedant”. But I’d rather not consider myself a pedant (who would!) – instead, I prefer to see myself as a person in search of a truth.

In times of crisis, tribalism takes over. And truth is the first casualty of such tribalism. In an exchange of opinions with commenter extraordinaire Lord Snooty, of Scottish political website Munguin’s Republic fame, we discussed the tribalism I mention. In particular, the first comment of the exchange in question is the one which most caught my attention:

Mil

I have posted something of the same vein, albeit less eloquently than yours at Munguin’s Republic

http://munguinsrepublic.blogspot.com/2011/08/in-which-andy-is-in-trouble-rbs-invests.html?showComment=1313570779461#c5903861751157483888

You are wasted as a Labour Party member and should move to Scotland. You would probably be very much at home in the SNP

And it’s taken me a while to come to terms with what I assume is this honestly and sincerely expressed point of view.

Firstly, I’m really not sure whether what I do has any virtue at all. I can only bear witness to my take on life – and feel I am obliged to do so, even as I am unsure of its worth. But if it does have virtue, my next thought is this: why is my political party so unable to take advantage of my skills?

A while back, I helped set up the first Labour Party website in the place I live. It even won an award from Conference the following year. For many reasons I shan’t go in to fully here, eventually the project began to fall apart – until I was summarily dismissed from my responsibilities via an ill-judged email which reached me, without prior notice, in the very same instant as it did all the other members on the CLP mailing-list.

It became patently obvious that what the Party really wanted of its membership – and certainly of me right then – was the virtual equivalent of envelope-stuffers.

For as one of those newbies I mention at the top of this article, those welcoming CLP arms were always everything you could hope for – on condition that you expressed a wondrous eagerness to limit your political participation to the mighty task of folding election material and preparing it for its delivery.

And whilst that’s how I started out, as administrator of the site … well … anyone who gets involved with online communication will confirm what I’m about to say: you really can’t end up limiting yourself to the pain of waiting two weeks to a month for an editorial line to automagically fashion itself, and thus give birth to a new post.

At the time in the place I live, the Tories were doing a splendid job of communicating their narrative on the state of play. It became awfully frustrating to have done such a decent job in setting up a website – only to see its potential vanish in a mire of political indecision.

Fleet-footedness quickly becomes flat-footedness in an online world.

That’s what happened, I suppose.

I suppose as well – and even though I like politics very much – I’m not a political figure, nor very political with others.

All that greasy-pole stuff and flesh-pressing really doesn’t float my boat.

So maybe when Lord Snooty says I’m wasted in the Labour Party, he really means I’m wasted in politics.

He suggests I move to Scotland and look for a place in the SNP. I don’t think I’ll ever leave Labour though – too much history and family tie us together.

But I realise now it is with a very heavy heart that I stay where I am.

The word is “stuck” rather than “liberated” – and it’s not a good place to be. It’s more like a very old marriage where love has simply evaporated and rather suddenly gone. All that’s left in its place is a gentle affection for the things that used to be.

Meanwhile, something’s not working in Labour – and it wasn’t just when I tried to work with the people who owned that part of it closest to my home. If that had been the real issue, then all would have soon been well by simply excising the Party of people like myself.

So the fact that people like myself – reasonably adept at online tools, reasonably fluent in verbal and written communication – cannot now easily find a place to participate in the organisation that is current Labour post-Blair is surely a sign of a certain dysfunctionality.

I hope the dysfunctionality’s only on my part – for the good of you all.

Yet I’m worried that it’s also on the part of the Party.

And that’s far more serious.

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