Daily Archives: January 6, 2008

The mother-in-law for Foreign Affairs

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I was idly browsing and came on this picture of David Miliband and wondered if he was the youngest Foreign Secretary ever. He has amazing hair — like astroturf that’s been sprayed jet black. Will it go grey as the strains of office multiply?

And then I came on this passage in Janet Flanner’s New Yorker dispatch from Paris for June 23, 1948:

The most worried, wearied, unthanked, and necessary public servant in any government today is its Minister for Foreign Affairs. He is like a mother-in-law — in the bosom of the family, yet not of it. Essentially, he is related to a world outside, a go-between harried by what the family thinks is its due and by what the neighbours say it deserves, which is invariably a lot less.

She was writing about Georges Bidault, the French Foreign Minister of the time, but her observation is generalisable. For example: As Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was pathologically suspicious of the Foreign Office. Just as the Ministry of Agriculture was effectively the ministry for farmers, she reasoned, so the Foreign Office was the ministry for foreigners, and so she installed her own policy advisers in Number 10 and ran an independent foreign policy from there. Gordon Brown is also a control freak, so perhaps it is legitimate to worry about young Miliband’s hair.

We’re the World Food Program and they’re McDonalds

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That was Nicholas Negroponte’s way of describing the difference between the OLPC project and its erstwhile ‘partner’, Intel. The quote comes from a revealing interview in Fortune. Excerpt:

When Intel joined us we thought we could move toward that being a reference design more and more, and less toward them selling the Classmate itself.

But oddly it went in the other direction. And then they started using their position on the board of OLPC as a sort of credibility statement. When they disparaged the XO to other countries they said that they should know about it because they were on the board. They even had somebody go to Peru, which was a done deal for OLPC, and rant and rave to the vice minister in charge. He dutifully took copious notes and was stunned.

Fortune: And he shared them with you?

Yeah. It was unbelievable. “The XO doesn’t work, and you have no idea the mistake you’ve made. You’ll get yourselves into big trouble,” and that kind of stuff. We kept the sale of course, but when one of your partners goes and does that, what do you do? It first happened in Mongolia. And at that point [Intel CEO] Paul Otellini called me and basically asked to not be thrown off the board, because they were going to change their ways. But they didn’t.

Fortune: Why, do you think?

He’s got 100,000 people and he can’t control all of them. That’s part of his problem. When I sign a nondisparagement clause that means all our people. He said we’ll get a machine ready for CES and make a joint statement together there. As recently as three days ago we still thought we were going to introduce it. We had asked them to do very very small things and they just decided not to.

Fortune: Do you wish OLPC and Intel could be less acrimonious?

Well, we weren’t acrimonious for 7 months. But they signed an agreement and didn’t do one single thing in the agreement.

Fortune: Like what?

Nondisparagement is the easiest. That clause they violated all over the place. They said they’d work on software, but they didn’t touch it. We said we’d work on the architecture together, and that wasn’t done. We said we’d work on a processor and to this day don’t have a spec on it. The nonfulfillment on theiir side was so continuous I don’t even know what to say.

Fortune: So the real issue was they were competing with you?

We’re like the World Food Program and they’re McDonald’s. They can’t compete. They are both food organizations but for completely different purposes. If the Classmate were in the hands of every single child in the world, that would be pretty good. Could it have better power characteristics, a better display, etc.? Sure, that would be good. But I don’t care if kids get the XO so much as that they get laptops.

Fortune: So what happens now?

Nothing different. We’re sort of unemcumbered, so we can move forward with clarity, to be honest with you.

Leopards like Microsoft and Intel never change their spots. They can’t.

Who owns your birthday?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Watching Scoble in action is like taking a puppy for a walk. He is insatiably curious, and he follows every lead, no matter how daft. When some new social networking service appears, you can bet he will overdose on it. He was a predictably early subscriber to Facebook, on which he rapidly acquired 5,000 ‘friends’ (the maximum permitted by the service, apparently). He is also, needless to say, a subscriber to Plaxo.com’s contact-management service and became interested in seeing how much overlap there might be between his Facebook friendship network and his Plaxo contacts. Which is where the fun began…

Speak, memory

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Craig Raine has an interesting piece on memory in today’s Guardian. He writes about “the discrepancy between the original experience and that experience when it is hallowed by remembrance”.

The effect is something like cropping in photography. At the beginning of The Waves, Virginia Woolf gives us the childhood memories of Rhoda, Louis, Bernard, Susan and Neville as highlights, ordinary epiphanies: Mrs Constable pulling up her black stockings; a flash of birds like a handful of broadcast seed; bubbles forming a silver chain at the bottom of a saucepan; air warping over a chimney; light going blue in the morning window. These mnemonic pungencies are different from the bildungsroman of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as that novel gets into its stride. They resemble rather the unforgettable anthology of snapshots Joyce gives us at the novel’s beginning – a snatch of baby-talk; the sensation of wetting the bed; covering and uncovering your ears at refectory. Or Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, when Augie is a kind of ship-board unofficial counsellor, the recipient of emotional swarf: “Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory”; “He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver”. Cropped for charisma.

He has interesting things to say about Proust, Joyce, Hemingway and Nabokov. As always with Raine, sex comes into it. But his central argument — that the pleasure we get from memories comes from the act of rememberance, not the actual memories themselves — seems spot-on to me. And it accords with my experience this morning, when Julia Langdon’s radio programme triggered memories that had long been buried in my subconscious.