Adieu, mon amis
So the UK will be leaving the EU. That, at any rate, is my reading of David Cameron’s speech. Yeah I know that a week is a long time in politics, that the Tories might not win the next election, etc. etc. But if it comes to an In/Out referendum then I’m pretty sure a majority of the Great British Public will want out.
To an Irishman, the way the EU issue tears British politicians apart is slightly comical. Why is it that the Tory Right has such a visceral hatred of Europe, or at any rate of the EU? But actually it isn’t just the Tories. Most of the working-class people I know are also hostile to Europe. UKIP seems quite popular in the less well-heeled areas of the UK, for example.
There are some good reasons for being sceptical about the EU. It is, for example, an elitist, undemocratic project. It’s wasteful and sometimes corrupt. And the anti-EU forces in the UK make these points ad nauseam. But actually I suspect that what really underpins British dislike of the Union is a kind of imperial afterglow. The British have never been wholeheartedly European for the simple reason that being so would be tantamount to acknowledging that Britain is ‘just’ another country — the same as states like France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark: countries which were conquered by invaders and which Britain helped to liberate in the Second World War.
The reason this is interesting from an Irish perspective is that my countrymen saw Europe in exactly the opposite light: it enabled us to escape from the shadow of our former coloniser and become just another country. So — at least until the bailout after the banking meltdown — we gloried in being part of the Union.
Chronic inequality isn’t just immoral: it’s also bad economics
Terrific Oped piece in the New York Times by Joe Stiglitz.
Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.
Stiglitz argues that America’s skyrocketing inequality is economically as well as spiritually indefensible for four reasons:
1. The American middle class (funny how they never talk about the ‘working class’ in the US) is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven the country’s economic growth. “While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle — who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators — have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996”.
2. “The hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.”
3. The weakness of the middle class is reducing tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks. Lower tax receipts mean that “the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.”
4. Inequality is correlated with more frequent and volatile boom-and-bust economic cycles.
Worth reading in full.
Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war on internet freedom
This morning’s Observer column.
Even those of us who shared his belief in open access thought this an unwise stunt. But what was truly astonishing – and troubling – was the vindictiveness of the prosecution, which went for Swartz as if he were a major cyber-criminal who was stealing valuable stuff for personal gain. “The outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron,” wrote Lawrence Lessig, the distinguished lawyer who was also one of Swartz’s mentors. “It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behaviour. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The ‘property’ Aaron had ‘stolen’, we were told, was worth ‘millions of dollars’ – with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.”
The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope’s famous rhetorical question: “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” It would be possible to write off the Swartz prosecution (as some have done) as the action of a politically ambitious attorney general, but actually it fits a much more sinister pattern. It was clear that a decision had been made to make an example of this cheeky young hacker and in that sense this grotesque prosecution sits neatly alongside the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, not to mention the hysterical reaction of the US authorities to WikiLeaks…
The prevalence of online bile
I’ve just been reading “Why I write”, a thoughtful post by Dave Winer about why he blogs and what’s happened to him as a result. As a long-time reader of Scripting News, I’ve often been struck by the anger, abuse and hostility he attracts, for reasons that have always baffled me. Dave is opinionated and quirky, sure, but he’s also rational, thoughtful, decent and humane. In fact I’ve often seen parallels between his blogging and that of the late Aaron Swartz — the same lack of pretentiousness, for example, and the same willingness to admit to ignorance, difficulty or failure.
In his post, Dave writes about the abuse he has attracted and how he has had to learn to live with it.
So when someone gets on a soapbox and starts trying to rev up a crowd to hate me, and when they lie to do it, I have to learn not to give that any weight. What I do now is ask a friend to have a look and tell me what they see. Since the ranting isn’t about them, they won’t take it personally. If they say it’s something I should pay attention to, I would — but they never do. The most recent time it happened, a friend came back and said the person is a sadist. But my mind still circles around the abuse. I have a hard time not thinking about it. So what do I do? Write about it, of course. Now it’s on the web, and hopefully out of my way.
One more thing. I remember being at a conference, chatting with someone and I saw at the other end of the room someone who had been a friend but had started trashing me on the Internet. I excused myself and walked over to the guy and sat down next to him, and asked why he was doing it. He started repeating the nonsense he was saying online. But I didn’t think he really believed it, so I pressed him and asked why he wasreally doing it. He said he had cancer, and was in chemo, and was in a lot of pain. I felt sick myself in that moment. I said you know that’s terrible, but it’s no reason to do and say things that hurt me, and make me feel bad. We all have our struggles. Me too. He agreed, and we’re friends again, but now when I see him online, I can’t forget how used I was, and why, and the pain comes back, his pain and mine. This really sucks.
It does. But it’s very common online. Just look at the comments under most prominent publications, or at any of those that allow anonymous commenting. And it makes me want to ask: why do people behave like this? Is it really the case that the world is full of angry, bitter, envious, bigoted people? And is the Net somehow responsible for the tsunami of bile? Does cyberspace have a fatal attraction for people of a particular disposition or mentality? Or is it just that humans have always been like that, but until recently lacked the technology — or, more accurately — the medium that would enable them to broadcast their vituperative anger to a wider audience than just their immediate social circle?
My hunch is that it’s the latter — in other words that we’re up against a harsh truth about human nature. At any rate, that’s the argument I’ve generally used against technophobes who blame the Net for the supposed pandemic of pornography that they claim is engulfing us. (Because I write about the Net, and once wrote a history of the network, people seem to hold me personally responsible for what they see as its deficiencies!) My case is that if there is a lot of porn on the Net then doesn’t that say more about humans than about technology? For if people weren’t obsessed with sex then surely the ‘demand’ for porn would decline, and with it the supposedly abundant online supply? On this logic, blaming the Net for pornography is the equivalent of shooting the messenger who brings bad news about human nature. And doesn’t the same apply to the phenomenon of online bile?
I suppose a philosopher would say that the abusiveness of much online commenting is really a symptom of the fact that most people don’t know much about logic and even less about how to construct an argument. This view ignores the difficulty that conflicting value systems are what Thomas Kuhn called “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no independent logical framework that would enable us rationally to assess the relative merits of different values. There’s no way of convincing someone that Keats is a greater poet than Dylan, say; or that Bach is greater than Beethoven or Mozart. But even when online disagreements are about factual issues, the inability — or unwillingness? — to engage in rational argument is deeply frustrating.
It also makes one wonder about a bigger, but related, issue — whether or not the Net is enlarging what Jurgen Habermas called the “public sphere”. I used to think that it would inevitably have this effect. Now I’m not so sure. And I have a hunch that Dave Winer isn’t sure about it either.
We expect too much of geeks
Wonderful reflective post by Dave Winer. Sample:
Computers are amazing things, they really are, in ways most non-technical people aren’t even aware of. For example, when I learned about the process of bootstrapping compilers I was blown away. Still am actually. I tried explaining it to everyone I knew who wasn’t a programmer. The only person who got it, sort of, was my uncle, a mechanical engineer. He could see using a hammer to make a hammer, so what’s the big deal. How about using a specific hammer to make itself? How about that! His eyes glazed over. Yours probably are too. But ask someone who has made a real life compiler and see how mystical they get.
So we programmers in a sense are a secret society. Until you learn the handshake you aren’t one of us. And we can be pretty arrogant about it. Until the computer kicks our ass. Or the market. Or users. Then we learn really quickly that what we learned in school was just the beginning. That when we thought we understood everything that was just the arrogance of youth. It’s functional. Because how else could you take on the world if you understood how huge and complex and fucked up the world actually is! :-)
This is when depression sets in. All of a sudden you see that you are not all-powerful, you can’t handle everything the world throws at you. But then what do you do if you’ve told everyone you can deal with it, that you’ll come out on top? When I got to that point, which I remember very clearly, I felt I couldn’t possibly face failure. I was locking up the office of Living Videotext one night, knowing the next day I would be firing half the company, and having no idea how we were going to bail it out. Yes, you can get lower than that. But between the two paths, one up and the other down, there wasn’t much margin for error.
He’s such a wise old bird. Which of course is why I read him.
So tablets are just the latest version of the PC?
Interesting chart from Business Insider. Their commentary reads:
In November 2010, Facebook held an event at its headquarters to talk about new mobile products.
After the presentation, a reporter asked Mark Zuckerberg why there was no talk of a Facebook iPad app. At that point, the iPad was only a few months old, but it was already a phenomenon. Facebook hadn’t yet rolled out an app.“iPad’s not mobile, next question,” said Zuckerberg to laughs from the audience. He followed up saying, “It’s not mobile, it’s a computer, it’s a different thing.”
Apple had successfully marketed the lightweight, portable iPad as a mobile device. So the reporters in the room were incredulous that Zuckerberg didn’t call the iPad a mobile gadget.
Two years later, it’s clear that Zuckerberg was right. The iPad isn’t any more of a mobile gadget than a MacBook Air. The iPad is just a PC.
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
HMV and the perils of shipping atoms to ship bits
Long ago in his book Being Digital
That future took some time to materialise, of course. The Net wasn’t an immediate threat in 1983 because in the 1980s the only people who had access to the network were researchers in pretty exotic labs. But even there one could see harbingers of things to come; for example, in the 1980s some of those researchers were digitising music and sharing it across the network, just as they shared other types of file. But then the pace quickened: the advent of the Web in 1991 — and particularly of the first graphical browser in 1993 — began to turn the Internet into a mainstream phenomenon; MP3 compression technology crunched music files to a tenth of their original size, thereby making them much easier to transfer; Shawn Fanning wrote software (Napster) that made it easy for ordinary folks to share music files and — Bingo! — the die was cast. (For a fuller version of the story see From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg.)
So today’s news that the High Street music store HMV is going into Administration has been a long time coming, but really it’s been on the cards for a long time. There are reports that the music/movie industry will try to rescue it. If true, then that merely confirms how poorly managed those industries are.
Aaron Swartz’s Politics
There’s been a lot already written about Aaron Swartz (much of it helpfully curated by Seb Schmoller), but this long post by Matt Stoller is simply wonderful at explaining how a clever, curious and agile outsider went about trying to understand the dysfunctional politics of the US. (Aaron worked with Matt as an intern in a Congressional office in 2009.)
Read it and despair.
As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.
More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.
Well worth reading in full. Thanks to Seb for pointing me to it.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? The real scandal of the Aaron Swartz case
When Aaron Swartz was arrested in 2011, the first thought that came to mind was Alexander Pope’s famous question.
As usual, my friend Larry Lessig nails it:
Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April.
Yep, especially the observation about the architects of the banking catastrophe dining with the Obamaa and the Camerons of this world.
LATER: Seb Schmoller has had the good idea of putting links to the best tributes in one place.