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…

Technology’s echo chamber

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Nick Bilton has nice piece in the New York Times about the echo-chamber effect one gets when too many people of the same mindset are gathered together in the same location. The peg for it is Twist, an App for folks who are tired of having to text one another about ETAs when rushing to make meetings. Bilton’s question: does anybody else other than frenetic Silicon Valley types need such a thing?

Is Twist a great idea, or are Mr. Belshe and Mr. Lee [Twist’s inventors] falling into a local propensity for creating a product for technophile friends rather than the public?

Sometimes, Hollywood screenwriters create scripts filled with inside jokes that only people in Hollywood could appreciate. Sometimes, New York media writers write about other New York media writers. And sometimes, tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south create companies best appreciated by other people who live and breathe technology.

Twist is hardly the only start-up whose target audience does not seem to extend far from San Francisco Bay. Among many, there’s BlackJet, which offers “affordable private jet” solutions for people in the area. And there’s Swig, which connects people with local liquor stores that provide home deliveries.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that we are guilty in the Valley of designing things for ourselves, and we are not the target market,” said Andy Smith, who is the co-author of “The Dragonfly Effect,” a book about marketing, technology and entrepreneurship.

Voltaire and the autonomous car

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This morning’s Observer column.

The best is the enemy of the good,” said Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire’s rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best. Which is why working for him was such an exhausting business and also why Apple’s products became so distinctive.

As it happens, Voltaire’s maxim may also be useful in explaining what will happen in the field of autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars…

That spaghetti harvest

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It’s amazing what’s on YouTube. At dinner I was talking to someone who hadn’t been born when the famous Panorama April 1 spoof went out. Suddenly occurred to me that it might be on YouTube. And — Lo! — it was, complete with time-code.

Analogue nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

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This morning’s Observer column.

Instagram filters represent an interesting contemporary phenomenon – what one might call analogue nostalgia. Digital technology enables anyone to take photographs that are – technically – flawless, in the sense of being sharply focused and properly exposed. Some cameras even have features such as smile detectors so that they won’t shoot until they detect at least a rictus grin. They have elaborate systems for controlling or eliminating the “red eye” effect of direct flash photography. And, of course, if you don’t get a satisfactory picture first time you can keep going until you get something that looks acceptable on the camera’s LCD screen.

All of this would have seemed like attaining Nirvana to earlier generations of (analogue) photographers. And yet the popularity of things such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Pixlr-o-matic and other apps for creatively mangling photographs suggests that the effortless perfection offered by digital technology has come to seem, well, boring. So just as painters abandoned realism once photography arrived, Instagrammers, Hipstamaticians et al now seek ways of creatively degrading their imagery so that it looks different, arty or just plain cool.

How to write about climate change

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The key trick is to write about a global problem in a way that brings it home to readers without patronising them or over-simplifying it. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert does this better than most, as for example here:

A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not.

Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored at the observatory ever since, and they’ve exhibited a pattern that started out as terrifying and may be now described as terrifyingly predictable. They have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of four hundred parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO2 levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were fourteen degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some seventy-five feet higher.

She goes on to write about the decision that Obama has to make soon — about whether to approve the Keystone pipeline (for which the Canadian government is lobbying fiercely) which would bring oil from Canada’s tar sands to the US. And she points out something that I didn’t know (but should have), namely that tar-sand extraction is a fiercely energy-intensive process:

Tar-sands oil is not really oil, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It starts out as semi-solid and has to be either mined or literally melted out of the ground. In either case, the process requires energy, which is provided by burning fossil fuels. The result is that, for every barrel of tar-sands oil that’s extracted, significantly more carbon dioxide enters the air than for every barrel of ordinary crude—between twelve and twenty-three per cent more.

At the Google Big Tent last week, I said that we need a theory of incompetent systems, i.e. systems that can’t fix themselves because the necessary remedial actions run counter to the short-term (and sometimes the long-term) interests of significant components of the system. Global warming is an example, which is why we — ie humanity — won’t fix it. The planet will fix it in due course because it’s a homeostatic system (I’m with James Lovelock on that): the trouble is that the planet doesn’t give a monkey’s curse for us.

This thought was received by the audience in depressed silence.

Emergence and media feeding frenzies

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Anyone who studies systems (and I started life as a systems engineer) knows that emergence is the most potent and mysterious property they have. One sees it in behaviour or properties exhibited by the whole system that cannot be inferred from studying its components in isolation. (For a metaphor, think of the pungent smell of ammonia, an emergent property of a system comprised of two odourless gases — nitrogen and hydrogen.)

What brings this to mind is the media frenzy that has accompanied the brutal killing of an off-duty soldier in a part of London. As Simon Jenkins points out in a fine column, what the killers seek is worldwide publicity for their rationalisations for hacking a British soldier to death. And that is precisely what the media have given them.

The first question in any war – terrorism is allegedly a war – is to ask what the enemy most wants you to do. The Woolwich killers wanted publicity for their crime, available nowadays at the click of a mobile phone. They got it in buckets. Any incident is now transmitted instantly round the globe by the nearest “citizen journalist”. The deranged of all causes and continents can step on stage and enjoy the freedom of cyberspace. Kill someone in the street and an obliging passerby will transmit the “message” to millions. The police, who have all but deserted the rougher parts of London, will grant you a full quarter hour for your press conference.

There is little a modern government can do to stem the initial publicity that terrorism craves. But it has considerable control over the subsequent response. When the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, pleaded for calm and for London to continue as normal, he was spitting into a hurricane. Terror could not have begged for more sensational attention than was granted it by Britain’s political community and media.

Where does the idea of emergence fit into this? Well, I’d bet that if one asked any individual journalist involved in covering this story — from the humblest reporter thanklessly knocking on doors in run-down council estates, to the editors of national newspapers and broadcast networks — they would agree that it’s crazy to acquiesce in the terrorists’ desire for publicity. But they’re all caught in a system that makes it impossible to do otherwise. So the crazed feeding frenzy is the emergent outcome.

The other interesting aspect of the story is the way in which right-wingers — e.g. former Home Secretary John ‘Lord’ Reid and the intelligence nerd Lord Carlile — immediately began talking up (on Newsnight on the evening of the murder) the need for a revival of the Communications Data Bill (aka Snoopers’ Charter). Gruesome news provides not only a way of burying bad news; it also enables politically-motivated folks to slip in repressive legislation under the radar.