Video of part of his valedictory address to the American people. Has some interesting resonances for today.
Evening in Provence
Walking down to dinner this evening, I came on this view, nicely framed by trees.
Evening in Burgundy
Late evening, looking for a restaurant in Semur-en-Auxois.
Nothing to hide so nothing to fear? Oh, yeah?
One of the most infuriating episodes of the NSA/Snowden/Tempora story was Foreign Secretary William Hague’s patronising little speech to the Commons, arguing that “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear”. I had a go at this in a direct way, but felt that the Hague view (which is widespread, nay ubiquitous, among our ruling elites) needs a more considered, philosophically-informed riposte. And, lo and behold, up it comes on OpenDemocracy, in the form of a terrific interview with Quentin Skinner, the historian and political philosopher, in which he discusses various conceptions of liberty.
When asked about surveillance, he said this:
The idea that there is no problem with surveillance as long as you have nothing to hide simply points to the complacency of the liberal view of freedom by contrast with the republican one. The liberal thinks that you are free so long as you are not coerced. The republican agrees, of course, that if you are coerced then you are not free. But freedom for the republican consists not in being free from coercion in respect of some action, but rather in being free from the possibility of coercion in respect of it.
When William Hague told the House of Commons that no one has anything to fear so long as they have done nothing wrong he was missing an absolutely crucial point about freedom. To be free we not only need to have no fear of interference but no fear that there could be interference. But that latter assurance is precisely what cannot be given if our actions are under surveillance. So long as surveillance is going on, we always could have our freedom of action limited if someone chose to limit it. The fact that they may not make that choice does not make us any less free, because we are not free from surveillance and the possible uses that can be made of it. Only when we are free from such possible invasions of our rights are we free; and this freedom can be guaranteed only where there is no surveillance.
I think it very important that the mere fact of there being surveillance takes away liberty. The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it’s true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It’s no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won’t necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.
The situation is made much worse once you come to know — as all of us now know — that we are in fact subject to surveillance. For now there is a danger that we may start to self-censor in the face of the known fact that we may be being scrutinised by powerful and potentially hostile forces. The problem is not that we know that something will happen to us if we say certain things. It’s that we don’t know what may happen to us. Perhaps nothing will happen. But we don’t know, and are therefore all too likely to keep quiet, or to self-censor. But these are infringements of liberty even according to the liberal account. Surely the liberal and the republican can agree that, if the structures of power are such that I feel obliged to limit my own freedom of expression, then my liberty has to that degree been undermined.
On this day…
… in 1947, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hats!
NSA can search your emails but not its own employees’ messages
Who said satire was dead? The NSA Can’t search its employees’ emails.
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.
“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.
The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.
I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.
A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.
Now the question is: do you believe the NSA’s answer?
Decline, like stuff, happens. And our governments lie through their teeth.
Paul Krugman has a terrific column in the New York Times about the way conservatives are trying to turn the story of Detroit’s decline into a moralistic tale about public debt. Excerpt:
So now the deficit scolds have a new case to misinterpret. Never mind the repeated failure of the predicted U.S. fiscal crisis to materialize, the sharp fall in predicted U.S. debt levels and the way much of the research the scolds used to justify their scolding has been discredited; let’s obsess about municipal budgets and public pension obligations!
Or, actually, let’s not.
Are Detroit’s woes the leading edge of a national public pensions crisis? No. State and local pensions are indeed underfunded, with experts at Boston College putting the total shortfall at $1 trillion. But many governments are taking steps to address the shortfall. These steps aren’t yet sufficient; the Boston College estimates suggest that overall pension contributions this year will be about $25 billion less than they should be. But in a $16 trillion economy, that’s just not a big deal — and even if you make more pessimistic assumptions, as some but not all accountants say you should, it still isn’t a big deal.
So was Detroit just uniquely irresponsible? Again, no. Detroit does seem to have had especially bad governance, but for the most part the city was just an innocent victim of market forces.
What? Market forces have victims? Of course they do. After all, free-market enthusiasts love to quote Joseph Schumpeter about the inevitability of “creative destruction” — but they and their audiences invariably picture themselves as being the creative destroyers, not the creatively destroyed. Well, guess what: Someone always ends up being the modern equivalent of a buggy-whip producer, and it might be you.
Sometimes the losers from economic change are individuals whose skills have become redundant; sometimes they’re companies, serving a market niche that no longer exists; and sometimes they’re whole cities that lose their place in the economic ecosystem. Decline happens.
One of the most infuriating things that have happened to our politics in recent times is the way utter nonsense — whether about Western policy in Afghanistan, or economic policy at home — is not only peddled by governments, but believed by their credulous citizens. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, even a half-wit can see that the US-NATO campaign has been a disastrous failure; and yet ministers (and generals) continually claim the opposite (while no doubt confiding the truth to their diaries in preparation for later memoirs).
In economic policy, the public has apparently swallowed the falsehood that the current dire state of our economies is a punishment for welfare states living way beyond their means. In fact, the reason we’re having to endure “austerity” is because commercial banks — i.e. private, not public institutions — went berserk and had to be bailed out by governments with public money.
As Robert Kuttner puts it in “The debt we shouldn’t pay”,
Public debt was not implicated in the collapse of 2008, nor is it retarding the recovery today. Enlarged government deficits were the consequence of the financial crash, not the cause. Indeed, there’s a strong case that government deficits are keeping a weak economy out of deeper recession. When Congress raised taxes in January at an annual rate of over $180 billion to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, and then accepted a “sequester” of $85 billion in spending cuts in March, the combined fiscal contraction cut economic growth for 2013 about in half, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Moreover, some of the causes of public deficits, such as Medicare, reflect to a large extent inefficiency and inflation in health care rather than profligacy in public budgeting.
It was private speculative debts—exotic mortgage bonds financed by short-term borrowing at very high costs—that produced the crisis of 2008. The burden of private debts continues to hobble the economy’s potential. In the decade prior to the collapse of 2008, private debts grew at more than triple the rate of increase of the public debt. In 22 percent of America’s homes with mortgages, the debt exceeds the value of the house. Young adults begin economic life saddled with student debt that recently reached a trillion dollars, limiting their purchasing power. Middle-class families use debt as a substitute for wages and salaries that have lagged behind the cost of living. This private debt overhang, far more than the obsessively debated question of public debt, retards the recovery.
The debt debate reminds Kuttner of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. “In a grand inversion, minor characters have usurped center stage, while the more important ones are out of sight.”
Yep.
Ballmer apocrypha and the irrelevance of Microsoft
Apropos my column, Jean-Louis Gasseé has an hilarious spoof Steve Ballmer memo reflecting on how Microsoft screwed up. Worth reading in full, but here’s an excerpt:
For all these years, we scrupulously followed McKinsey’s “Not A Single Crack In The Wall” advice, we’ve managed to successfully Embrace and Extend each and every possible threat to the Windows + Office combo.
While we initially underestimated these new tablets, their threat soon became obvious and we started thinking of ways to protect our franchise.
That’s when I took the company in the wrong direction.
To prevent these tablets from penetrating the Office market, I followed our Embrace and Extend strategy and endorsed the creation of hybrid software and hardware: The dual-mode (Desktop and Touch UI) Windows 8 and Surface tablets.
The results are in. Windows 8 hasn’t taken the market by storm. The Windows 8 tablets manufactured by our hardware partners are sitting in warehouses. We just took a $900M write-off on our RT tablets, now on fire-sale.
It doesn’t matter who actually proposed or implemented the failed strategy, I endorsed it. What matters most — the only thing that matters — is what we’re going to do now.
And while we’re on this topic, Benedict Evans has a very perceptive post arguing that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that Microsoft peaked in 1995. Excerpt:
Just as overnight success can take a lifetime, so overnight collapse can also take a long time. There are founders creating companies today who weren’t born when people were still actually scared of big bad Micro$oft. It stopped setting the agenda 18 years ago. Windows 95 was the moment of victory, but was also the peak: it came just at the moment that the Internet started taking off, and Microsoft was never a relevant force on the internet despite investing tens of billions of dollars.
But you needed a PC to use the internet, and for almost everyone that PC ran Windows, so Microsoft’s failure to create successful online services didn’t seem to matter. Microsoft survived and thrived in the PC internet era, despite appearing to be irrelevant, by milking its victory in the previous phase of the technology industry. PC sales were 59m units in 1995 and rose to over 350m in 2012. Of course, that’s now coming to an end.
Though it looks like we’ve passed the tipping point, this process isn’t going to be over quickly. PC sales aren’t going to zero this year. But the replacement cycle, already at 5 years, will lengthen further and further, more and more apps will move to mobile or the cloud, and for many people the PC will end up like the printer or fax – vestigial reminders of an older way of doing things. Microsoft may yet manage to turn Windows tablets and phones into products with meaningful market share, but it will never be dominant again.
LATER: Lovely piece in Slate which explains Microsoft’s decline in terms of the storylines of The Wire.
You can always get what you want. But is it what you need?
My review of Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire
Open a street map of a city – any city – and what you see is a diagram of all the possible routes that one could take in traversing or exploring it. But superimpose on the street map the actual traffic flows that are observed and you see quite a different city: a city of flows. And the flows show how the city is actually used, as distinct from how it could be used.
This is a useful metaphor for thinking about the internet and digital technology generally. In itself, the technology has vast – some think limitless – possibilities. So narratives like those of Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their recent book tend to sketch out all the things that networked technology could enable us to do. But what we will actually wind up doing with it is, at any point in time, largely unknown.
In that sense, Ethan Zuckerman’s book provides a welcome antidote to the current narrative of technological determinism. His central thesis is that while the internet does, in principle, enable everyone to become a true cosmopolitan, in practice it does nothing of the kind. Cosmopolitanism does not just involve being tolerant of those who are different from us. As the Ghanaian American philosopher Anthony Appiah puts it, true cosmopolitanism “challenges us to embrace what is rich, productive and creative about this difference”. Much of the early part of Rewire is taken up with demonstrating the extent to which the internet, and our use of it, fails that test…