Category Archives: General

Technological voyeurism

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This morning’s Observer column on the ‘citizen reporting’ of the London bombings. Excerpt

I find it astonishing – not to say macabre – that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.

Especially when one realises what was in this ‘amateur’ material. Some of the cameraphone video clips sent to ITV News, for example, were so graphic as to be ‘unusable’, according to the channel’s editor. I haven’t seen the clips, so can only imagine what they contained.But I can guess: images of human beings blown to pieces, missing limbs, intestines, perhaps even heads – sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters whose privacy has been invaded in the most intrusive way, even as they lay dying.

I suppose there will be arguments about how this imagery and footage is justified because it conveys so vividly the horrors of which terrorists are capable. But I don’t buy it, and I don’t think broadcasting organisations should either.

I’ve had some feedback already from this, mainly from people saying that I shouldn’t blame the technology. I agree: the problem is what the technology reveals about human nature.

Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber

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John Howkins drew my attention to this extraordinary interview in Time Magazine. Unfortunately, you need to be a subscriber (or be willing to pay $1.99 for a peep) to read the piece in full, but here’s a sample:

One day soon, this somber young man plans to offer up a final prayer and then blow himself up along with as many U.S. or Iraqi soldiers as he can reach. Marwan Abu Ubeida says he has been training for months to carry out a suicide mission. He doesn’t know when or where he will be ordered to climb into a bomb-laden vehicle or strap on an explosives-filled vest but says he is eager for the moment to come. While he waits, he spends much of his time rehearsing that last prayer. ” First I will ask Allah to bless my mission with a high rate of casualties among the Americans,” he says, speaking softly.

What’s striking is the discrepancy between the calm enthusiasm of this chap and the prevailing portrait in the British media of suicide bombers as carpet-chewing psychopaths. (Which is one reason why I was puzzled by reports that the CCTV footage of the suspected London bomber at King’s Cross station allegedly showed them laughing and joking even as they went to their deaths.) We’re never going to make headway against this until we try to understand what makes these people tick. (And even then, of course, we may not be able to do anything about them.) Grim realities.

Worse than Watergate

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Frank Rich, in a wonderful NYT Op-Ed piece on the scandal enveloping Karl Rove and the Bush White House.

WHEN John Dean published his book “Worse Than Watergate” in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse “gates” thereafter. But it’s hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

The Bush Administration’s proposals for the Net: live translation

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In an extraordinary presentation last week, Michael D. Gallagher, Assistant Secretary at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), outlined new “US principles” regarding the internet’s Domain Name System. They are:

1. The United States Government intends to preserve the security and stability of the Internet’s Domain Name and Addressing System (DNS). Given the Internet’s importance to the world’s economy, it is essential that the underlying DNS of the Internet remain stable and secure. As such, the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.

2. Governments have legitimate interest in the management of their country code top level domains (ccTLD). The United States recognizes that governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to the management of their ccTLD. As such, the United States is committed to working with the international community to address these concerns, bearing in mind the fundamental need to ensure stability and security of the Internet’s DNS.

3. ICANN is the appropriate technical manager of the Internet DNS. The United States continues to support the ongoing work of ICANN as the technical manager of the DNS and related technical operations and recognizes the progress it has made to date. The United States will continue to provide oversight so that ICANN maintains its focus and meets its core technical mission.

4. Dialogue related to Internet governance should continue in relevant multiple fora. Given the breadth of topics potentially encompassed under the rubric of Internet governance there is no one venue to appropriately address the subject in its entirety. While the United States recognizes that the current Internet system is working, we encourage an ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders around the world in the various fora as a way to facilitate discussion and to advance our shared interest in the ongoing robustness and dynamism of the Internet. In these fora, the United States will continue to support market-based approaches and private sector leadership in Internet development broadly.

Translation:

1. We don’t trust anybody else to run the Internet’s Root Servers, so we’ll continue to do it, thank you very much.

2. Other countries can do what they like with their national domains, so long as they accept Principle 1.

3. ICANN can manage the technical details and do the donkey work.

4. The UN has no serious role to play in any of this.

Learning from eBAY

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From my column in today’s Observer…

Amid all the ponderous guff in the election campaign about ‘trust’, one interesting fact has been strangely absent from the discussion. We are all agreed that politicians rank low in public esteem, down there with estate agents, property developers and other kinds of spiv. But there is another occupational group that ranks even lower than these creatures of the deep. I refer, of course, to journalists. We are despised by the public – yet the fact that we shape the public’s attitude toward politicians remains unremarked. Thus we have a really weird vicious circle.

The public reviles politicians on the basis of images and impressions that are exclusively mediated by people who are widely regarded as equally loathsome and contemptible. This reduces the election to something akin to choosing a bride using reflections in the distorting mirrors of a funfair.

On this day…

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… in 1916, a group of Republican dreamers and rebels led by Patrick Pearse launched the Easter Rising in Dublin, seizing control of the GPO and declaring a Republic. The revolt was not widely supported and was easily crushed by the British, who then — with exquisite incompetence — turned victory into defeat by the way they treated the insurgents, thereby engendering a 180-degree turn in public support for the nationalist project. Yeats wrote a wonderful poem — Easter 1916 — about it, and lodged the phrase “a terrible beauty” in our consciousness.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Google share price finally exceeds average employee IQ

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Neat headline, eh? Not mine, alas, but from Good Morning Silicon Valley, reporting on Google’s extraordinary last quarter.

So what if 98 percent of Google’s business comes from advertising. So what if it has a limited track record and can’t be bothered to explain the dynamics of its business. The company is spitting out money like a runaway slot machine. After the market closed Thursday, Google reported first quarter sales and earnings that blew the doors off even the most optimistic of Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company reported a nearly six-fold increase in profit on revenue that nearly doubled from the comparable period a year ago. Net income for the quarter totaled $369 million, or $1.29 a share, compared with $64 million, or 24 cents a share, for the same period a year ago. Revenue for the quarter was $1.26 billion, a 93 percent increase from the previous year. Wow. The profit results in particular were well beyond The Street’s expectations, and giddy investors eagerly bid up Google shares in after-hours trading. By late Thursday Google’s shares had reached $223.97 — well more than twice the $85-a-share valuation of the company’s initial public offering only last August. “They basically made a mockery of our numbers and Street expectations,” Derek Brown, a senior analyst at Pacific Growth Equities, told the L.A. Times. “It was an extraordinary quarter.”

The world is flat

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If you read nothing else today, read the excerpt from Tom Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat: a brief history of the 21st century in the Guardian. Friedman had the brilliant idea of asking Dell to describe the process by which the laptop on which he wrote the book was made. It’s such a good idea that one hates him for having it. And it makes a very profound point in the simplest, most unobtrusive way.

Years ago, Friedman proposed “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”.

The Golden Arches Theory stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of McDonald’s, it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries didn’t like to fight wars any more. They preferred to wait in line for burgers.

He’s now come out with a new, updated, theory: the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, the essence of which is that the advent and spread of just-in-time global supply chains in the flat world are an even greater restraint on geopolitical adventurism than the more general rising standard of living that McDonald’s symbolised.

The Dell Theory stipulates: no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, such as Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain, because people embedded in major global supply chains don’t want to fight old-time wars any more.

En passant: imagine the chaos there would be in the electronics and computer industries if China ever invaded Taiwan.

Later…Not everyone thinks of highly of Tom F, however. Here, for example, is a splendidly dyspeptic rant by Matt Taibbi which positively oozes bile from every participle. Sample:

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

Environmental Heresies

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Stewart Brand has written an essay on what he calls “Environmental Heresies” which has ruffled a lot of feathers. Here’s the gist:

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.