“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
A borderless world?
One of my mantras is that for the first 20 years of its existence (up to 1993) cyberspace was effectively a parallel universe to what John Perry Barlow called ‘Meatspace’ (aka the real world). The two universes had very little to do with one another, and were radically different in all kinds of ways. But from 1993 (when Andreessen and Bina released Mosaic, the first big web browser) onwards, the two universes began to merge, which led to the world we have now — a blended universe which has the affordances of both cyberspace and Meatspace. This is why it no longer makes sense to distinguish (as politicians still do sometimes) between the Internet and the “real world”. And it’s also why we are having so much trouble dealing with a universe in which the perils of normal life are turbocharged by the affordances of digital technology.
This morning, I came on a really interesting illustration of this. It’s about how Google Maps deal with areas of the world where there are border disputes. Turns out that there are 32 countries in the world for which Google regards the border issue as problematic. And it has adopted a typical Google approach to the problem: the borders drawn on Google’s base map of a contested area will look different depending on where in the world you happen to be viewing them from.
An example: the borders of Arunachal Pradesh, an area administered by India but claimed as a part of Tibet by China. The region is shown as part of India when viewed from an Indian IP address, as part of China when viewed from China, and as distinct from both countries when viewed from the US.
There’s a nice animation in the piece. Worth checking out.
Wildcat Currency review
My Observer review of Edward Castronova’s book, Wildcat Currency: How the Virtual Money Revolution Is Transforming the Economy
We think of money as being a factual, straightforward thing. But actually it’s very mysterious. I have a piece of paper before me as I write. Printed on it are some images, lots of hieroglyphics and the words “Twenty Pounds”. If I wave it in front of a shopkeeper, it produces magical effects: in return for it, he gives me a newspaper and other pieces of paper and some bits of metal. But actually my £20 note is just that: a note. A piece of paper. What gives it its magical properties is, Professor Castronova explains, “a social process that enshrines a good as a unique artefact called money; once enshrined, that artefact serves money’s three functions, well or poorly”.
What are these functions? A medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. As it happens, my £20 note fulfils all three functions quite well. But so did cigarettes in prisoner-of-war camps and, in days gone by, the shell of Cypraea moneta, aka the cowrie. For most of recorded history, money took almost as many forms as there were societies, or at any rate rulers, and it’s only in relatively recent times that we have converged on a relatively small number of currencies together with a very small number of super-currencies, chief among them the mighty US dollar and its enfeebled fiscal cousins, the pound sterling and the euro.
Even as this process of monetary consolidation continued, however, strange new kinds of currencies were bubbling up…
Waiting for…?
The garden, Leckhampton, Friday afternoon.
Bletchley Park and the erosion of the freedoms it was set up to defend
This morning’s Observer column.
It’s terrific that Bletchley Park has not only been rescued from the decay into which the site had fallen, but brilliantly restored, thanks to funding from the National Lottery (£5m), Google (which donated £500,000) and the internet security firm McAfee. I’ve been to the Park many times and for years going there was a melancholy experience, as one saw the depredations of time and weather inexorably outpacing the valiant efforts of the squads of volunteers who were trying to keep the place going.
Even at its lowest ebb, Bletchley had a magical aura. One felt something akin to what Abraham Lincoln tried to express when he visited Gettysburg: that something awe-inspiring had transpired here and that it should never be forgotten. The code-breaking that Bletchley Park achieved was an astonishing demonstration of the power of collective intelligence and determination in a quest to defeat the gravest threat that this country had ever faced.
When I was last there, the restoration was almost complete, and I was given a tour on non-disclosure terms, so I had seen what the duchess saw on Wednesday. The most striking bit is the restoration of Hut 6 exactly as it was, complete with all the accoutrements of the tweedy, pipe-smoking genuises who worked in it, right down to the ancient typewriters, bound notebooks and the Yard-O-Led mechanical pencil that one of them possessed.
Hut 6 is significant because that was where Gordon Welchman worked…
Tribes with flags
I have mixed feelings about the NYT‘s Tom Friedman, but sometimes he does hit the target. This morning he has a bleak assessment of the options for Syria and Iraq, and indeed for the Middle East generally. In a nutshell, he argues that
a unified Iraq and a unified Syria can no longer be governed vertically [i.e by dictators] or vertically [i.e. “by having the different sections, parties and tribes agree on social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens who share power”]. The leaders no longer have the power to extend their iron fists to every border, and the people no longer have the trust to extend their hands to one another.
His conclusion is bleak:
It feels both too late and too early to stop the disintegration — too late because whatever trust there was between communities is gone and Maliki is not trying to rebuild it, and too early because it looks as if Iraqis are going to have to live apart, and see how crazy and impoverishing that is, before the different sects can coexist peacefully.
He’s right. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Ralf Dahrendorf and his views about how complex and fragile a plant democracy is, and how it can only grow and flourish in complex soils which take a long time to evolve. Friedman sees it that way too:
Pluralism came to Europe only after many centuries of one side or another in religious wars thinking it could have it all, and after much ethnic cleansing created more homogenous nations. Europe also went through the Enlightenment and the Reformation. Arab Muslims need to go on the same journey. It will happen when they want to or when they have exhausted all other options. Meanwhile, let’s strengthen the islands of decency — Tunisia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Kurdistan — and strengthen our own democracy to insulate ourselves as best we can.
Well, yes but… A futile but sobering counterpoint to that would be to reflect on how so much of this Middle Eastern mayhem is a legacy of European colonialism, and of the way the soi-disant ‘peacemakers’ in Versailles created all these fake and untenable countries by drawing arbitrary lines on maps.
The canopy
Stand by for a deluge of Magna Bollocks
We are about to be deluged with establishment cant about Magna Carta, on account of its approaching 800th anniversary. A splendid antidote to this is provided today by Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy.net.
any authentic celebration of Magna Carta would be a sober, serious challenge to the status quo, unlike the celebratory website proclaiming “The Magna Carta has been the most valuable export of Great Britain to the rest of the world”. For all its eulogies it cannot bring itself to reproduce the actual Magna Carta itself, let alone the Charter of the Forests.
This is not to make an anachronistic claim that the Magna Carta was ‘progressive’. It was a feudal deal. It is the myth that matters: an inspiration to challenge arbitrary, despotic power; a seed for a democratic constitution; a right to be ruled by law; and even, thanks to its companion Charter, a claim that land be held in common not enclosed for profit.
To snuff out all such radicalism, the official celebrations of its 800 years will be funded twelve months hence by £1million from chancellor George Osborne and we will be palmed off with an assortment of Magna Bollocks, to express gratitude to Britain’s ruling order gifting liberty to the globe.
That is how Margaret Thatcher saw it after 1989. Unable to prevent the unification of Germany she planned to use a Paris Summit on European security in November 1990 to launch a Magna Carta for Eastern Europe. I attended the press conference, in the ballroom of the British Embassy and asked her, “Prime Minister, why, when you called upon this Summit to entrench rights across Europe, do you not agree with Charter 88 that we should have entrenched rights in the United Kingdom?” She replied, “We are in this Summit to get rights way across the European Divide… to call for the Community to extend democracy to other countries…”.
Within three days, British democracy such as it was, forced Thatcher to resign. Let’s hope that the curse of the Magna Carta brings down our present bunch of manipulative populists. Eight hundred years of rule by Barons is enough. It is the peoples’ turn. We do not just need a Magna Carta for the World Wide Web as Tim Berners-Lee has called for, we need a democratic constitution: to govern Parliament now that it has been corrupted and suborned, to define our relations with Europe and secure our claims to privacy, liberty and, in a digital age, our metadata.
Right on. Earlier in the piece, Barnett recalls the time that Professor Peter (now Lord) Hennessy, who taught modern British political history at Queen Mary College, to meet the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir (now Lord) Robin Butler.
One of the students innocently asked what is the British constitution. Butler answered, “something we make up as we go along”.
“Who is this ‘we’ that makes it up?” asks Barnett.
It is certainly not ‘We, the people’. When Sir Robin was speaking, he was part of the last remnants of the old Establishment. Now the British Constitution is something GCHQ makes up, as it goes along.
The Internet of Things: it’s a really big deal. Oh yeah?
This morning’s Observer column. From the headline I’m not convinced that the sub-editors spotted the irony.
Like I said, everybody who is anybody in the tech business is very turned on by the IoT. It’s going to make lots of money – oh, and it’ll change the world, too. Of course there are some boring old creeps who keep raining on the parade. Spoilsports, I call them. There are, for example, the “security” experts who think that the IoT opens up horrendous vulnerabilities for our networked society. Hackers in Azerbaijan could get control of our “smart” electricity meters and shut down the whole of East Anglia with the click of a mouse. Pshaw! As if the folks in Azerbaijan even knew there was such a place as East Anglia. Or some guy in Anonymous could remotely jam the accelerator in your car so that you drive into your garage at 130mph even when you have your foot firmly on the brake. As if!
That’s why it’s *sooo* annoying when the media publicise scare stories about security lapses involving connected gadgets. I mean to say, how could TRENDnet have known that its “secure” security webcams weren’t really secure at all? It’s not its fault that a hacker broke into the SecurView camera software and told other people how to do it. The result, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, was that “hackers posted links to the live feeds of nearly 700 of the cameras. The feeds displayed babies asleep in their cribs, young children playing and adults going about their daily lives”.
This is *so* unfair. Poor old TRENDnet makes security *cameras*. Why should it know anything about internet security?
The Hedgehog in the Fog
Tired of the World Cup? Watch this instead.