We need not just Orwell and Kafka to deal with the NSA story. We need Borges too.

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The New York Times had a splendid editorial the other day, arguing the case for clemency for Edward Snowden, among other things.

Among the NSA violations unearth by the controversy, the editorial pointed out that the Snowden leaks

“revealed that James Clapper Jr, the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)”

According to the Guardian_, this prompted Robert Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to write to the _Times to deny the allegation. In his letter Litt refers to one of the key Senate advocates of NSA reform, Senator Ron Wyden, and continues:

“Senator Wyden asked about collection of information on Americans during a lengthy and wide-ranging hearing on an entirely different subject. While his staff provided the question the day before, Mr Clapper had not seen it. As a result, as Mr Clapper has explained, he was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications. In that context, his answer was and is accurate.

“When we pointed out Mr Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed. I spoke with a staffer for Senator Wyden several days later and told him that although Mr Clapper recognized that his testimony was inaccurate, it could not be corrected publicly because the program involved was classified.”

Litt concluded: “This incident shows the difficulty of discussing classified information in an unclassified setting and the danger of inferring a person’s state of mind from extemporaneous answers given under pressure. Indeed, it would have been irrational for Mr. Clapper to lie at this hearing, since every member of the committee was already aware of the program.”

If you wanted a case study in why this kind of surveillance threatens democracy, then this is it.

Beyond gadgetry lies the real technology

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This morning’s Observer column.

Cloud computing is a good illustration of why much media commentary about – and public perceptions of – information technology tends to miss the point. By focusing on tangible things – smartphones, tablets, Google Glass, embedded sensors, wearable devices, social networking services, and so on – it portrays technology as gadgetry, much as earlier generations misrepresented (and misunderstood) the significance of solid state electronics by calling portable radios “transistors”.

What matters, in other words, is not the gadget but the underlying technology that makes it possible. Cloud computing is what turns the tablet and the smartphone into viable devices.

Streaming kicks in

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So the next phase begins. This Billboard report confirms that we’re on track to reach David Bowie’s prophetic insight (made in 2002) that one day music would be like water — available everywhere by turning a tap.

For the first time since the iTunes store opened its doors, the U.S. music industry finished the year with a decrease in digital music sales.

While the digital track sales decline had been expected due to weaker sales in the first three quarters, the digital album downturn comes as more of a surprise as the album bundle had started out the year with a strong first quarter.

Overall for the full year 2013, digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from the previous year’s total of 117.7 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

While industry executives initially refused to attribute the early signs this year of digital sales weakness to the consumer’s growing appetite for streaming, in the second half of the year many were conceding that ad-supported and paid subscription services were indeed cannibalizing digital sales.

Conspiracists and conspiracy theorists

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From David Runciman’s LRB review of Alex Ferguson’s fourth shot at autobiography.

Alex Ferguson is a conspiracist, which is not quite the same as being a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracists see patterns of collusion and deceit behind everyday events. Their default position is that someone somewhere is invariably plotting something. Conspiracy theorists go further: they want to join up the dots and discover the overarching pattern that makes sense of seemingly unrelated happenings. They are looking for the single explanation that underwrites everything. A conspiracist thinks that nothing is entirely innocent. A conspiracy theorist thinks that nothing is entirely incidental. Conspiracists can be devious, suspicious, confrontational and difficult to be around but they are also capable of making their way in the world, leveraging their paranoia into real power. Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts.

Interestingly, though, Fergie and Gordon Brown share an obsessive interest in the assassination of JFK.

Greed is good: Boris Johnson

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Interesting snippet from the Mayor’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture:

Like it or not, the free market economy is the only show in town. Britain is competing in an increasingly impatient and globalised economy, in which the competition is getting ever stiffer.

No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.

Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

And for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.

My colleague Andrew Rawnsley picked up on this in his Observer column, and perceives a link to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision.

Aldous Huxley called Brave New World, his dark depiction of a future for humankind in which everyone is conditioned to know their place, a “negative utopia”. Children are born into various castes, which are sub-divided into “Plus” and “Minus” members. Each caste is designed to serve predetermined roles in society from which they can never break free. There are the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons who are bred to do the menial tasks and chemically manipulated to prevent them from wanting to be anything more than they are. At the top sits a tiny elite of Alphas who wield the power.

I don’t know whether the mayor of London is familiar with Huxley’s novel. He might like one of its conceits: to sustain the placidity of the population, recreational and promiscuous sex is strongly encouraged by the state. I am sure he would protest that this was not his intention, but the vision of society that he promotes is not entirely remote from Huxley’s chilling dystopia. The mayor, who presumably regards himself as an Alpha Plus, is effectively telling the person who cleans his office, whom he dismisses as an Epsilon Minus, that their unequal fates are preordained at birth.

“Why on earth enter this territory?” asks one close ally of David Cameron. “Anything that has the whiff of eugenics is just not smart. A lot of people read that and thought, ‘Oh, fuck, Boris. Do you really want to say that?'”

The good news, as Rawnsley observes — and doubtless Tory strategists agree — is that Johnson is doing sterling work reinstating the Tories as the Nasty Party. Long may he continue in this important work.

The dangers of linear thinking

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Some years ago I watched a mildly-exciting film called The Day After Tomorrow, in which a huge ice-storm plunges the United States into crisis. There are vast rises in sea level (I recall a scene in which a large ship appears to be sailing down Wall Street) and an amusing scene in which a bunch of frozen survivors huddle together in the New York Public Library and keep themselves warm by burning books and possibly bound copies of scientific journals. Some people tried to interpret it as an allegory about global warming, which was patently ludicrous because everybody knows that that is a slow process in which the earth warms by degrees, CO2 concentrations increase linearly and so on, enabling us to watch the orderly, predictable approach of the apocalypse and have time to make the necessary preparations for our survival, if not for the billions of wretches who are too poor or too geographically-challenged to head for the hills.

This way of thinking about processes seems to be hard-wired into the human consciousness. We think in linear terms, of quantities and critical indicators changing monotonically, and this influences the way we think about climate change (to the extent that we think of it at all). Sure, we concede, the climate is changing, and the direction of travel doesn't look good, but it will be quite a while yet before we really hit the critical level and so we don't have to worry too much about it just now.

If the earth's climate were a simple system then that might be a rational strategy. But it's not: it's an exceedingly complex system, which means, among other things, that it's intrinsically unpredictable, is capable of having multiple stable states, and may switch between them with great rapidity. In popular terms, what popularisers like Malcolm Gladwell call "tipping points" are examples of the sudden discontinuities that interactions between feedback loops within a complex system can produce.

What brings this to mind is some stuff I've been reading over the Christmas break, notably this interesting piece in The Nation which collates a number of different sources of information and research to suggest that we might be heading for a significantly nonlinearity which would have a dramatic — and, more importantly – rapid impact on mankind's prospects.

The article and some of the associated links are worth reading at leisure but, in crude terms, the scenario it explores stems from attempts that people are making to assess the implications of the rapid disappearance of arctic sea ice — a process that is definitely under way. One impact of that will be some melting of arctic permafrost, which in turn will release vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere in a relatively short time.

Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for forty years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears. “The fall-off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,” Wadhams told a reporter. According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (US Navy researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier—by 2016.)

British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests that if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return,” and “catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant planetary emergency.”

Why is this such a big deal?

In the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2). It is twenty-three times as powerful as CO2 per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the planet on a twenty-year timescale—and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff. “The seabed,” says Wadham, “is offshore permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We are now seeing great plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian Sea…millions of square miles where methane cover is being released.”

According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

So we could be at the beginning of a big 'methane burp'? Nobody really knows what the impact of that might be (though there are some apocalyptic conjectures). For me, the main implication is that linear thinking about climate change might be dangerous.