Now that Mark Zuckerberg’s company is worth more than $200 billion — $201.55 billion at the time of this writing … my favorite comparison — now making the rounds on Twitter — is with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crown jewels, oil producer Rosneft, natural gas monopoly Gazprom and state-owned lender Sberbank. Their combined market cap is $202.3 billion, meaning that Russia’s vaunted energy wealth plus its financial power is worth about as much as a company with 7,000 employees that had just $7.8 billion in sales last year, compared with Gazprom’s $165 billion.
Sometimes, events deserve the adjective ‘historic’
Harold Wilson famously observed that ‘a week is a long time in politics”. Well, we now have a week to go before the Scottish Referendum, and my hunch is that it will be the longest week in recent history. The Westminster political establishment has finally woken up to the thought that the Scots might actually do it! and blind panic would be a polite euphemism for their belated reaction to that terrible thought. Today the three party leaders are on their (separate) ways to Scotland to plead with the inhabitants not to break up the United Kingdom. Cameron has a pathetic appeal to the Scots in today’s Daily Mail, which makes me wonder what planet he inhabits. The idea that Scottish voters would be moved by anything in the Daily Mail is bizarre. The SDP leadership must be wondering if they are dreaming, because every intervention by Cameron in the debate has the immediate effect of boosting the ‘Yes’ vote.
What’s bugging the Westminster elite, of course, is the realisation that if the Scots actually do vote to opt out of the ‘United’ Kingdom, then the consequences for the rump that remains are profound. In particular, the post-imperial hubris that has enabled Westminster to pretend that Britain was still a world power, with a ‘seat at the top table”, will finally be exploded. Without Scotland, for example, UK-lite will struggle to maintain its fleet of nuclear submarines (once seen as the guarantor of that top-table seat). And the puncturing of post-imperial delusions will, no doubt, be a good thing.
But other consequences of Scottish independence will be less palatable. Cameron will be ousted as the Tory leader who conceded the vote that led to the break-up of the UK. He will most likely be replaced by Boris Johnson in a Tory party in which the so-called Euro-sceptics (i.e. Euro-phobes) hold the upper hand. Scottish secession also means that the Labour party (which has always had a lot of Scottish seats at Westminster) will never again be able to form a majority government. A Johnson-led Tory party will have an inbuilt majority in England and Wales, and will move to take the UK out of the EU. Which means that the ‘soft’ border between Northern Ireland (still part of UK-lite) and the Irish Republic will once again become a hard border — with frontier controls and all the other paraphernalia deemed necessary to keep foreigners out.
And then there’s the transition problem. If the Scots vote Yes, then Scotland will become a foreign country on March 16, 2016. But the next UK general election is in May 2015 — which means that for 10 months Scottish MPs will sit in Westminster, the government of which will be negotiating the details of the divorce with the Scottish government.
And so on. You can see why the folks in Westminster are now changing their underpants twice a day (as they say in Australia).
Which is why the Referendum really does deserve the adjective “historic”.
Phew!
An asteroid just missed Earth. The rock known as Pitbull is 60 feet in diameter—similar to the asteroid that blew up over Russia last year. It was 25,000 miles (40,000 km) away at its closest point, or just beyond the orbit of geostationary satellites.
From Quartz
Keeping one’s distance
One of the difficult balancing acts involved in writing about digital technology is how to keep up with it without drinking its Kool-Aid. In that context, I’ve just come on an observation that Walter Benjamin once made about being a critic.
“Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society.”
He wrote that in 1928. So maybe nothing changes.
Celebgate: what it tells us about us
My Observer Comment piece on the stolen selfies.
Ever since 1993, when Mosaic, the first graphical browser, transformed the web into a mainstream medium, the internet has provided a window on aspects of human behaviour that are, at the very least, puzzling and troubling.
In the mid-1990s, for example, there was a huge moral panic about online pornography, which led to the 1996 Communications Decency Act in the US, a statute that was eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But when I dared to point out at the time in my book (A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet), that if there was a lot of pornography on the net (and there was) then surely that told us something important about human nature rather than about technology per se, this message went down like a lead balloon.
It still does, but it’s still the important question. There is abundant evidence that large numbers of people behave appallingly when they are online. The degree of verbal aggression and incivility in much online discourse is shocking. It’s also misogynistic to an extraordinary degree, as any woman who has a prominent profile in cyberspace will tell you…
Why Facebook is for ice buckets and Twitter is for what’s actually going on
Tomorrow’s Observer column
Ferguson is a predominantly black town, but its police force is predominantly white. Shortly after the killing, bystanders were recording eyewitness interviews and protests on smartphones and linking to the resulting footage from their Twitter accounts. News of the killing spread like wildfire across the US, leading to days of street confrontations between protesters and police and the imposition of something very like martial law. The US attorney general eventually turned up and the FBI opened a civil rights investigation. For days, if you were a Twitter user, Ferguson dominated your tweetstream, to the point where one of my acquaintances, returning from a holiday off the grid, initially inferred from the trending hashtag “#ferguson” that Sir Alex had died.
There’s no doubt that Twitter played a key role in elevating a local killing into national and international news. (Even Putin’s staff had some fun with it, offering to send human rights observers.) More than 3.6m Ferguson-related tweets were sent between 9 August, the day Brown was killed, and 17 August.
Three cheers for social media, then?
Not quite. ..
Quote of the day
“If our data is the new oil of the 21st century, then how come we’re not all sheikhs?”
Hannes Grassegger
Ireland is disappearing its young people
Remarkable Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole.
Very quickly but rather quietly, Ireland is doing a remarkable thing. It is disappearing its young people. In April 2009, the State contained 1.423 million people aged between 15 and 35. In April 2014, there were 1.206 million in the same age group. That’s a reduction from one generation of more than the entire population of Limerick city and county. This is the age group of rebellion, of adventure, of trying it out and trying it on. It’s the generation that annoys its elders and outrages convention and challenges accepted wisdom. It is demography’s answer to the stultification of groupthink. It is not always right but without its capacity to drive everyone else up the wall, smugness settles over everything like a fine grey dust.
The biggest reason for this loss of nearly a quarter of a million young people in five years is emigration. People of my age remember the 1980s, the Donnelly visas and the flight of the Ryanair generation, and assume that what’s happening now couldn’t be as bad. They’re right – it’s not as bad, it’s much worse.
In the entire, miserable decade of the 1980s, net emigration was 206,000, a figure seen at the time as a shocking indictment of political and economic failure. In the last five years alone it is 151,000. And most of this emigration is of people between 15 and 44: in 2012 and 2013 alone, we lost 70,000 people in this age group. The percentage of 15- to 29-year-olds in the population has fallen from 23.1 per cent in 2009 to 18 per cent in 2014. And it’s not just that the young generation is physically shrinking. Many, even those who have stayed, have emigration in their heads as an active option. They are, mentally, half here.
Why are they going? Largely because they’re browned off. It’s been clear for quite some time now that most of those who are leaving are not, in a simple sense, economic refugees…
He’s right. Many of those who have gone had jobs in Ireland.
Dave Eggers has seen the future. Well, a possible future anyway…
Yesterday’s Observer column.
Fifteen months have passed since Edward Snowden began to explain to us how our networked world works. During that time there has been much outrage, shock, horror, etc expressed by the media and the tech industry. So far, so predictable. What is much more puzzling is how relatively relaxed the general public appears to be about all this. In Britain, for example, opinion polling suggests that nearly two thirds of the population think that the kind of surveillance revealed by Snowden is basically OK.
To some extent, the level of public complacency/concern is culturally determined. Citizens of Germany, for example…
Thinking about the End
Great talk by Martin Rees.