Poppies

Why are they such evocative flowers? I photographed these earlier this evening on a roadside verge near where I live.

Technological determinism and the future of the BBC

One of the most disturbing and misleading myths current at the moment is the notion that technology must ultimately determine everything. So the commercial and anti-BBC lobby argues that the advent of multi-channel TV automatically makes an organisation like the BBC — funded by a general tax on every viewer — unjustifiable in political terms. What this view overlooks is that decisions about media are (and should be) ultimately made by politicians, not by technology. There’s interesting corroboration for this view in Paul’s Starr’s magisterial study of the history of US media, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, (Basic Books). He shows that at every stage in their evolution, US media were shaped by political choice, not by technological determinism. Or, to quote James Fallows’s excellent review,

“The decisions [Starr] describes are striking to the modern reader not so much because they turned out a certain way, but because they were made at all. They suggest a belief that societies and their governments can affect the path that technologies and markets take, rather than an acceptance of whatever the path turned out to be as inevitable. This concept seems utterly missing from current discussions of the media. Regulators and the public feel there is little they can do to steer the content or quality of the media (with the feeble exception of the F.C.C.’s punishing broadcasters for vulgarities that would barely be noticed on cable). Members of the media feel they have no choice but to give, immediately, what the market demands.”

So what’s the 8-digit code for launching a nuclear missile then?

Er, same as it always was during the Cold War — 00000000. How do we know? Interesting testimony from a former Strategic Air Command chap. Quote:

“Last month I asked Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles. These long-range nuclear-tipped missiles first came on line during the Cuban missile crisis and grew to a force of 1,000 during the McNamara years — the backbone of the U.S. strategic deterrent through the late 1960s. McNamara replied, in his trade-mark, assertively confident manner that he personally saw to it that these special locks (known to wonks as ‘Permissive Action Links’) were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.

When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: ‘I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?’ What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the ‘locks’ to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the ‘secret unlock code’ during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.”

And to think that all through the period I slept easily in my bed, knowing that these missiles could only be launched with the most stringent safety procedures. Remember all those documentaries showing Minuteman crews shadowing one another and being tested for psychotic illnesses etc.? But then I was born naive, as my mother always said.

A licence to abuse: Max Bowden on Abu Ghraib

“The scenes depicted in the photographs are a graphic example of what often takes place in a prison environment where controls and supervision are inadequate. Prison guards have been abusing inmates for as long as there have been prisons. In a now infamous 1971 psychological experiment at Stanford University, in which one randomly selected group of students was permitted to play the role of “guards” over another group of “inmates,” abuses began almost immediately, and at one point involved forcing inmates into sexually humiliating role-playing. People don’t like to admit it, but the propensity for cruelty is in all of us, and it rises to the surface for many when they are given complete authority over other human beings. Add the unique environment of war, in which culture, religion, race, ethnicity, and ideology often separate guards from prisoners, and abuses are sadly and extremely likely.

The fact that the pictures were taken at all, and the cheerful expressions on the faces of the American bullies, suggest an atmosphere in which these soldiers had no reason to fear being punished for their behavior. It seems doubtful that the photos were meant to be used later to intimidate other prisoners, as has been suggested. If that had been so, the guards would probably have tried to look threatening. These photos have the appearance of grotesque souvenirs. The smiling faces of the tormentors suggest that apart from lacking moral judgment, these soldiers felt licensed to abuse.” [From The Atlantic.]

In Camera

At the head of Alan Hollinghurst’s interesting review of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood is this picture of Isherwood and W.H. Auden setting off for China.

Note the Smoking carriage sign behind them — sign of a vanished age. Being a photographic buff, my eye fell immediately on the camera hanging languidly from Auden’s neck. It’s a Leica. Shows impeccable taste. And then I was reminded of the famous Dorothy Parker joke. She reviewed Isherwood’s book, I Am a Camera, in one line. “Me no Leica”.

Unearthed images

A friend of Dervala’s was clearing out an old hard drive and came on some evocative photographs of the World Trade Center towers, including this lovely one.

She writes:”These are accidental portraits of the buildings that were the city compass (and camera hogs, too). We looked for them whenever we surfaced from the subway or climbed onto a roof deck. We triangulated from them on bridges and in strange conference rooms, and steered by them in tug boats and canoes. The towers were Downtown. More useful than True North, in the self-appointed center of the word.”

Those photographs — again

There’s a fascinating article in The Chronicle by Susan Brison, who teaches philosophy at Dartmouth, on the significance of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. She puts them usefully into a wider context. For example:

“The rape of women by invading armies is a well-known tactic of war – so well known that it has typically been taken for granted – but what are we to make of peacekeepers who rape? Do they consider it torture? Apparently not. Michael A. Sells reported, in The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, that ‘in the summer of 1992, U.N. peacekeepers under the command of Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie frequented the rape camp known as Sonja’s Kon-Tiki, in the town of Vogosca near Sarajevo. Even after they learned that the women at the Kon-Tiki were Muslim captives held against their will, abused, and sometimes killed, U.N. peacekeepers continued to take advantage of the women there and to fraternize with their nationalist Serb captors.’

In an interview on National Public Radio, Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, noted that civilian contractors working for DynCorp, a U.S. company hired to train police in the Balkans in the early ’90s, were involved in serious sex crimes, including “owning” young women as sex slaves. The site supervisor was so confident that sexual abuse of women would not be considered torture that he even had himself videotaped raping two young women. (Sound familiar?) Not only were the contractors never charged with criminal activity, but the company was later hired by the United States – to train the police force in post-Saddam Iraq.”

In this connection, guess how many of these private ‘contractors’ there are in Iraq? Answer: 15,000. That’s ten per cent of the total US ‘peacekeeping’ effort.

The way we live now – II

There’s a fatuous example of “lifestyle journalism” in today’s New York Times. Headed “A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date”, it’s about how the Blackberry [a portable email device] has become an essential accessory for Washington’s thirtysomething elite. Just listen to the breathless gush of the prose:

“A YEAR ago, Tripp Donnelly saw his BlackBerry as a social liability — an accessory with all the sex appeal of a pocket protector. But now the gadget makes the rounds with Mr. Donnelly, 31, even when he sheds his jacket and tie for a night of barhopping or clubbing. He started keeping it with him when he realized he was missing social e-mail from the growing population of Washington women who were carrying BlackBerries themselves.

‘It’s made it much more efficient, much more direct,’ Mr. Donnelly said of the effect on his love life. ‘A 15-minute phone conversation can be abbreviated into a 10-second, one-sentence e-mail.’ Mr. Donnelly, a Clinton White House staff member who is now a managing director of the wireless communication company InPhonic (which once distributed BlackBerries, but no longer does), said he uses his BlackBerry to correspond with “a handful” of women in Washington and beyond. In one recent exchange, he asked a Bush campaign worker out on a first date.

He: ‘You and me — tomorrow night — dinner.’ She: ‘Sure.’ And that was that.”

There’s lots more in this vein. The piece even has the mandatory 9/11 reference.

“The BlackBerry gained a foothold in Washington two and a half years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks left many in the city incommunicado when cellphone services were overwhelmed. BlackBerries worked fine that day (the proprietary network that carries their signals, for a monthly fee, has far less traffic than the networks used by cellphones), and shortly afterward the House allocated more than $500,000 to outfit its members with them.

Since then, lawmakers have started using their office budgets to provide BlackBerries to even junior staff members. With them, business can be conducted at any hour of the day or night; it is not uncommon, for example, for the staff of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, to receive to-do lists sent from his BlackBerry after midnight. In 2001, perhaps a few dozen BlackBerries were in use on the Hill; there are now more than 5,000.”

The interesting thing about this is why Washington’s policymaking elite clearly hadn’t realised that there was a technology for doing this without resorting to the expense of buying Blackberries. It’s called SMS.

The way we live now

Once upon a time, people went to the office to work. Now…

Persistent inactivity

Last Friday, Cambridge railway station’s display server was again displaying an inactive ‘Active Desktop’. Yesterday, it was still inactive. And here’s how it was this morning:

Wonder how long this will go on. Maybe we should offer them a Linux server?