Daily Archives: December 20, 2015

The (non)sharing economy

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This morning’s Observer column:

A euphemism is a polite way of obscuring an uncomfortable or unpleasant truth. So pornography becomes adult entertainment, genocide becomes ethnic cleansing, sacking someone becomes letting him (or her) go. People pass away rather than die; toilets become rest rooms; CCTV cameras monitor public and private spaces for our comfort and safety; and shell shock evolved into battle fatigue before finally winding up as post-traumatic stress disorder – which is really a way of disguising the awkward fact that killing people in cold blood can do very bad things to your psyche.

The tech industry is also addicted to euphemism. Thus the ubiquitous, unfair, grotesquely unbalanced contract which gives an internet corporation all the rights and the user almost none is called an end-user licence agreement. Computers that have been illegally hacked are “pwned”. The wholesale hoovering-up of personal data by internet companies (and the state) is never called by its real name, which is surveillance. And so on.

But the word that is most subverted by the tech industry is share…

Read on

History’s contradictions

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Lovely Observer piece by Will Hutton:

Sometimes dealing with the past is easy. A few months ago, the college where I am principal (Hertford, Oxford) handed back a precious 16th-century atlas to its rightful owners – the Humboldt University library in Berlin. A British soldier had been offered it in exchange for a packet of cigarettes in the devastated streets of Berlin in May 1945. His father was an Oxford professor and for most of the last 70 years the Ortelius atlas had been first buried in his room and then locked in the college safe.

The 70th anniversary of the end of the war seemed as good a moment as any to return it. But what struck everyone at the small ceremony was how affected the German delegation, including representatives from the embassy and Humboldt University, were by what we were doing. It was a symbol of Germany’s relationship with Britain within a peaceful EU, an act of friendship all the more valuable because it had been freely offered and a recognition that history had moved on.

But more often than not history’s legacies are more unforgiving – a minefield in which yesterday’s and today’s realities seem irreconcilable…