So where are the Telcos? In the government’s pocket, as usual.

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So the Internet companies have finally realised that the damage done to their interests by the NSA is serious enough to flush them out into open opposition. Jeff Jarvis has an astute Guardian comment post which points out that some important companies are missing from the lost if potential refusniks.

Please note who is missing from the list – the signators are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Apple, LinkedIn. I see no telecom company there — Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, the companies allegedly in a position to hand over our communications data and enable governments to tap straight into internet traffic. Where is Amazon, another leader in the cloud whose founder, Jeff Bezos, now owns the Washington Post? Where are Cisco and other companies whose equipment is used to connect the net and by some governments to disconnect it? Where are the finance companies — eBay, Visa, American Express — that also know much about what we do?

The reason the Telcos are not in the list is that they have always been part of the national security system, so they’re unlikely to discover civil liberties anytime soon. In Britain, for example, I remember a time when anyone who worked for British Telecom — even in lowly capacities — had to sign the Official Secrets Act. Why? Because they might be instructed to tap someone’s (analog) phone. For all I know, it may still be a requirement for employment by BT.

Beyond the bubble

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Yesterday’s Observer column.

The bad news, therefore, is that we’re in a new technology bubble. If you are impolite enough to mention this in Silicon Valley at the moment, however, then people will cut you dead. That’s par for the bubble course. The folks who are caught up in one do not appreciate well-meaning attempts to rain on their parade. When the Celtic tiger was roaring in my beloved homeland, for example, a lone economist named Morgan Kelly dared to say that the tiger had no fur – and was roundly abused for his pains.

The good news is that when the current technology bubble pops there will be less collateral damage than last time. This is largely because it costs so much less to start a technology company nowadays and the funding models (and therefore the investment risks) are different…

EasyJet 4, Ryanair nil

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I don’t do much long-distance travel (sheer laziness) but I do fly short-haul quite a lot, using budget airlines — mainly Ryanair. This afternoon, I flew with EasyJet to Copenhagen to speak at the Neils Bohr conference and was reminded of how comparatively civilised EasyJet is compared with its raucous competitor.

Reflecting on the difference, four factors stand out:

  • The EasyJet website is relatively straightforward to navigate. There are none of the annoying hidden traps for the unwary with which Ryanair tries to nudge naïve customers into buying travel insurance, priority boarding, car rental or ‘special’ Ryanair cabin bags. One has the feeling that the EasyJet site is actually trying to help one book a flight as quickly as possible.
  • There’s no scramble to board and no scrum to find a seat when you get into the aircraft. Why? Simple: Easyjet assigns everybody a numbered seat on booking.
  • During the flight, it’s relatively quiet. There’s nobody constantly on the public-address system trying to flog you scratch cards, ‘duty-free’ crap, rail or bus tickets, or electronic ‘cigarettes’.
  • EasyJet planes have pockets in the back of the seats into which one can stuff books, water bottles, Kindles and other paraphernalia while you’re settling in and trying to find the seat-belt.

    • In other words, there’s nothing sophisticated or complicated about the things that make EasyJet a more enjoyable travelling experience. Why then doesn’t Ryanair adopt them? After all, they give EasyJet a competitive advantage. I have friends who, when coming to visit us in Provence in the summer, will fly to Nice rather than to Marseilles or Toulon simply because EasyJet flies to Nice — even though the resulting road trip to the house is significantly longer.

    Why the NSA has landed us all in another nice mess

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy will fondly remember Oliver’s complaint to Stanley: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” In a future remake, Hardy will be played by Barack Obama, suitably enhanced with a toothbrush moustache, while Keith Alexander, currently head of the NSA, will star as Laurel. The scene in which this particular bit of dialogue occurs is the Oval Office, which for the purposes of the scene is littered with flip charts summarising the various unintended consequences of the NSA’s recent activities, as relayed by Edward Snowden.

    One chart, supplied by the Department of Commerce, lists the collateral damage inflicted by the revelations on major US internet companies…

    Read on…

    New Yorker cartoons

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    I love the New Yorker, even when I feel reproached by the accumulating pile of as-yet-unread issues. Leafing through some this morning I came on two cartoons that made me laugh out loud.

    One shows a pantomime horse with a speech-bubble coming from the rear asking “Are we there yet?”

    The other showed a group of beggars on a street corner. One says to the others, “Remember — we’re not begging. We’re crowdfunding.”

    The issue-a-day men

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    There was an interesting conversation this morning on the Today programme between Evan Davis and the chancellor, George Osborne. The peg for the conversation was the government’s announcement that it was going to intervene in the so-called “pay-day loans” market – by capping interest rates, among other things. Davis made the point that the government had already set up a new banking regulator – the Financial Conduct Authority – to oversee the financial services and asked the perfectly reasonable question: why was the government suddenly doing the job that the FCA had been set up to do?

    Osborne did not have a satisfactory answer, but I do: it’s a headline-grabbing piece of pseudo-activism aimed at persuading the public that the government is on the job. They’re concerned because Ed Miliband appears to have captured the initiative with his proposal to cap energy prices, and generally to take the cost-of-living crisis (that’s the crisis that ordinary people are experiencing) seriously.

    And then I was reminded of something perceptive that Alistair Campbell said last week during his sojourn in Cambridge. He pointed out the way in which, in recent months especially, David Cameron appears on TV on an almost daily basis, expostulating on an issue or problem about which he feels absolutely passionately and about which he is determined (clenched fist, emphatic gesture) to do something. But every day it’s a different issue. Campbell sees this as a symptom of a leader who is now devoid of strategy and so is driven to following the day-to-day vagaries of public opinion and tabloid obsession, like a kitten chasing a moving patch of light.

    What GDP doesn’t compute

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Deciding that the health of a nation’s economy can be measured by a single number is as daft as thinking that a single measure of “intelligence” (the IQ) can sum up an individual’s capability and potential. As Howard Gardner pointed out many years ago, there are many different kinds of intelligence, and each person occupies a different point in that multi-dimensional space. Similarly, the health of an economy needs to be measured along several axes. But we seem to be stuck with GDP because that’s the only thing economists know how to calibrate.

    To the measure’s age-old contradictions, the internet has now added a really puzzling one. The world of traditional “production”, in which industries and businesses produced goods and services and in the process created value that could be measured and included in GDP, has been augmented by a parallel universe in which there is a great deal of activity, most of which is invisible to the bean-counters who compute GDP.

    Take Twitter…

    Read on…

    What was lost in Dallas

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    The CRASSH Blog, edited by Sally Lewis, launched today. My contribution is an Observer TV column about Jack Kennedy that I wrote 20 years ago. This was long before the paper had an online edition, so this copy had to be resurrected from my clippings file.

    I saw Jack Kennedy once, in the flesh, at close range. It was during his visit to Ireland in 1963 and my father – who had been responsible for some of the arrangements – had wangled a good viewing position for me. For a brief period, long enough for every detail of the scene to be etched onto the memory of an impressionable schoolboy, the President stood about 15 feet away from me…

    Read on…

    Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia

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    Jack Kennedy wasn’t the only one to die 50 years ago today. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley passed away too. Here’s my Guardian piece about Huxley.

    On 22 November 1963 the world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honoured with a plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted.

    There are various reasons for this: The Chronicles of Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a CS Lewis Society of California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana.

    Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention. And yet there are good reasons for regarding him as the more visionary of the two…