Happy Bloomsday

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Cricket_at_TCD_with Finns_Hotel

We were in Dublin a couple of weeks ago and on a glorious summer’s evening found ourselves in Trinity College, watching a desultory cricket match. Suddenly I noticed that the (redbrick) building that used to be Finn’s Hotel was visible in the background, and I was delighted to see that the sign painted on the gable end has survived. I didn’t have a zoom lens, so the enlargement of that part of the image will have to do.

Joyce fans will not need reminding that Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid in Finn’s, and the first time James laid eyes on her was when he was walking down Nassau Street and saw her emerging from the premises. On the evening of June 16, 1904, he picked her up from the hotel and they walked southwards together for what was to become the defining moment of his life. The rest, as they say, is history. And we celebrate the results of it today.

Finns_crop

Irrationality on stilts

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gun and terrorism graphic

When all else fails, the supposedly clinching argument of the National Security State is that infringements of our liberties is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to protect us from the awful prospect of terrorism. The same state, however, seems remarkably unconcerned about things that are much more dangerous than terrorism — as Conor Friedersdorf points out a in fine essay in The Atlantic.

In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack — by far the biggest in its history — roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S. 

Let’s put that in context. That same year in the United States:

71,372 died of diabetes.

29,573 were killed by guns.

13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.

That’s what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let’s take a longer view. We’ll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.

Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483 — in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.

Learning from history

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On Thursday, Professor Margaret Macmillan gave the 2013 Lee Seng Tee Lecture at Wolfson. Her topic: the origins of the First World War. One of the factors she identified was the weakness of political leaders unable to control or restrain their military establishments. In the Q&A afterwards she mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s ability to resist the belligerent demands of his generals for military action against the Soviet Union and Cuba. Macmillan identified two factors which led Kennedy to resist. One was his bitter experience of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which had resulted from his willingness to accept military advice. The other was the fact that he happened to be reading Barbara’s Tuchman’s wonderful book, The Guns of August, about the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, and how the world slipped into catastrophe.

What is Facebook for?

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Answer: Facebook’s purpose is to perpetuate Facebook. Forget all the crap about connecting people, etc. It exists simply to perpetuate itself, like a malign organism.

This thought was triggered by a terrific essay by Paul Ford on the essence of Facebook, as revealed by its Android cuckoo, Facebook Home. Finishes with this memorable summary:

The moral vision of the Dynabook posited that people would use technology to manipulate code and data, to create models of the world—as many as they needed in order to understand it. In contrast, Facebook has a single model of the world, unapologetically monolithic: the canonical graph of the relationships between more than a billion human beings. If the company is to grow, it must insert itself between people and their smartphones; there are still simply too many moments spent watching things, or reading things, or making things, that it does not own.

George W. Obama

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Terrific, biting NYTimes column by Maureen Dowd.

The president calls the vast eavesdropping apparatus “modest encroachments on privacy.”

Back in 2007, Obama said he would not want to run an administration that was “Bush-Cheney lite.” He doesn’t have to worry. With prisoners denied due process at Gitmo starving themselves, with the C.I.A. not always aware who it’s killing with drones, with an overzealous approach to leaks, and with the government’s secret domestic spy business swelling, there’s nothing lite about it.

Google’s choice: between a rock and a very hard place

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My Observer Comment piece about the dilemma facing Google and the other Internet giants: do they co-operate with the National Security State? Or look after their users’ (and their own commercial) interests?

The revelations of the past week explain why Schmidt was so preoccupied with the power of the state – especially of the national security state, which is what our democracies are morphing into. The apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, Google’s vehement insistence that it has “not joined any programme that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers” and, on the other, the assertions to the contrary in the leaked National Security Agency slide-deck that demonstrate the extent to which Google (and the other internet companies) are caught between a rock and a very hard place.

The rock is that the national security state, as embodied in the National Security Agency, GCHQ and kindred agencies, shows no sign of withering away. Au contraire. In the end, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple will be compelled to obey the state’s orders. If they don’t, their executives will find themselves sharing jail cells with the likes of Bradley Manning.

The hard place is corporate terror that their users will become alienated by the realisation that personal communications cannot be safely entrusted to internet companies based in the US. Crunch time has arrived for Google & co, in other words. I look forward to the second, revised, edition of Schmidt’s book.

Memo to user: you’re not a customer

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This morning’s Observer column.

A reader writes: “Dear John Naughton, As you write about the internet, I wondered if you knew how long it takes Yahoo to get back to people. I have an iPad, but went to the library to print a document (attached to an email). Yahoo knew I wasn’t on my iPad and asked me to name my favourite uncle. I replied, but Yahoo didn’t like my answer, so locked me out for 12 hours. I can’t get into my email account. Getting to the Help page is really difficult. Do you ever speak to anybody at Yahoo? I had to open another non-Yahoo email account, so I opened a Gmail account and it looks to have the same problem. Not easy to get in touch with anybody when things go wrong. I am sure I am not the only one who wants to discuss my problem with a human being. Yours sincerely…”

Dear Reader, I hear (and sympathise with) your pain, but we need to get something straight…