Ethics, politics and networks

I was invited to give the closing Keynote at the 2004 HEAnet Conference. Text can be found here if you’re interested.

O’Rourke on Colin Powell

There’s a nice interview of Colin Powell by PJ O’Rourke in The Atlantic. I particularly like this exchange:

SECRETARY POWELL: Our great strength is the image we still convey to the rest of the world. Notwithstanding all you read about anti-Americanism, people are still standing in line to come here, to get visas and come across our borders.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Voting with their feet?

SECRETARY POWELL: Voting with their feet. So there’s something right there.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Back in Lebanon in 1984, I was held at gunpoint by this Hezbollah kid, just a maniac, you know, at one of those checkpoints, screaming at me about America, great Satan, et cetera.

SECRETARY POWELL: Then he wanted a green card?

P. J. O’ROURKE: At the end of this rant, that’s exactly what he said: “As soon as I get my green card, I am going to Dearborn, Michigan to study dental school.” And he saw no disconnect.

SECRETARY POWELL: He’s there now. He’s not going back to Beirut.

P. J. O’ROURKE: He hated America so much and wanted nothing more than to be an American.

SECRETARY POWELL: They respect us and they resent us. But they want what we have.

BL to provide wireless net for readers

People using the wonderful British Library near King’s Cross will be able to access the net via a new wireless LAN. Hooray! Charges are £4.50 an hour or £35 a month.

Don’t blame us!

Christine Happel sent me this delicious picture.

The subversion of language — contd.

For decades one of the most objectionable aspects of British tabloid journalism has been its sanctimonious determination to ‘name the guilty man/men’ whenever there’s been a disastrous accident or a horrific organisational cock-up. This always seemed to me (and my academic colleagues) as a desperately wrong-headed way to look at complex issues. Often, these large-scale failures reflect not so much the deficiencies of individuals as the complexity of the systems in which they are enmeshed. So (we argued) they are more productively viewed as systemic failures.

But now, guess what? The phrase ‘systemic failure’ has been picked up by the government’s spin machine — and used in a novel way: to ensure that nobody has to take responsibility for what goes wrong. It’s not clear when this started but my colleague Ray Ison thinks it may have begun with the Butler Inquiry into the failure of UK Intelligence services in the run-up to the Iraq war. I’ve just looked at the report and can’t find the word ‘systemic’ in it anywhere, but Ray’s right in one respect. Lord Butler decided that the cock-up over intelligence about WMD was a “collective failure” and then used that to argue that it would be inappropriate to fire John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intellegence Committee which cleared the infamous (and ludicrous) dossier on which Blair took the country to war.

Whatever its provenance, though, it’s clear that ‘systemic failure’ is now synonomous with “nobody’s responsible, Guv.”

Politics and the English language — again

New Labour has finally decided to ban smoking in public places, including most pubs and all restaurants. In this they are copying the example of the Irish government, which has had an actual smoking ban in place since last January. The result there has been (in my experience) much more pleasant pubs into which one can now safely take one’s children. And in case you think I’m a priggish non-indulger, think again: I’ve been a keen cigar smoker for decades!

It will be interesting to see how the tobacco and drinks industries combine to fight the proposed legislation. If they follow the Irish example, they will form a lobby group with the word ‘hospitality’ somewhere in its name. (The Irish version was ‘The Irish Hospitality Alliance’.)

This attempt to capture language is an old stunt, well known to George Orwell, who wrote a wonderful essay (“Politics and the English Language”) about it. “Political language”, Orwell wrote, “… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Political speech and writing, he says at another point, “are largely the defense of the indefensible”.

So it is with the tobacco lobby. It cannot say outright that it desires to make profits by giving young people lung cancer and heart disease, so it talks about the consumer’s “freedom to choose”. And it suborns words with attractive connotations — like ‘hospitality’ — to serve in its sordid cause. To an Irishman (and indeed to people from many other cultures), hospitality is a sacred thing: it means welcoming people, including strangers, in a generous spirit, and sharing with them what you have. The idea of that a pub owned by a faceless brewing multinational could be ‘hospitable’ is absurd. Strangers are welcome in such establishments in proportion to the amount of money that can be extracted from them. No dosh, no ‘hospitability’.

Fenced in

At the top of the Connor Pass in Kerry on Saturday.

Why is so much software so flaky?

Basically because software companies are able to escape liability for the flaws in their products. Imagine what it would be like if automobile companies could escape liability for lethal defects/features in their cars. Well, that’s the position with software today. It follows that if we wanted to make Cyberspace safer the quickest and most effective step would be for governments to legislate to change this. Nice essay on this subject by Bruce Schneier.

Microsoft’s ‘peace offensive’

You may have noticed that Gates & Co have been shelling out cash to companies that had complained about its monopolistic practices. Dan Gillmor has written an acute analysis of this phoney amicability. Quote:

“Microsoft’s $536 million settlement with Novell, which had sued on antitrust claims, was big money for Novell. It was less than pocket change for Microsoft, which at last count had nearly $65 billion in cash and short-term investments — and not a dime of debt.

In a slew of financial settlements with companies Microsoft has trampled over the years, the payout for wrongdoing is roughly $3 billion to date. That represents about three months of profit for a company that literally can’t spend its cash fast enough, and is giving shareholders a one-time bonus of $3 a share early next month. That payout will put only a temporary dent in the cash hoard.

What does all this mean? Simple. When governments fail to enforce the rules of capitalism, monopoly profits can buy one’s way out of almost any kind of trouble.

When the Bush administration made its odious deal to let Microsoft off the legal hook in 2001, it was giving the company an essentially free pass to do whatever it wishes in the future. There was no other way to look at it.

The administration’s cave-in was a relatively clear statement. Under this president, competition policy is industry’s job, not government’s, even if that means a dominant lawbreaker can buy itself out of antitrust troubles with a small dollop of profits recycled from its monopoly.

Promises to the contrary, there’s precious little evidence that Microsoft has made truly meaningful changes in its business practices — or that its leaders see their legal battles as anything but the frustrations of competitors defeated in a tough marketplace. The company continues to dominate almost all of its customers, ‘partners’ and competitors, while the government is at best indifferent, at worst a cheerleader.”

Next parish America…

… is what they used to say about Slea Head in Co. Kerry, the westernmost part of Ireland. We went there yesterday, and it was easy to believe it.