The clueless in pursuit of the unattainable

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This morning’s Observer column.

Oscar Wilde described foxhunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. If Wilde had been able to see the diminutive tyrant who is currently president of France going on last week about bringing the internet to heel, he might have updated his hunting metaphor to “the clueless in pursuit of the unattainable” perhaps.

Sarkozy was speaking at the eG8, a gathering of those whom the French government thinks are the important players in the online world. But in a way, he was just acting as a mouthpiece for the political, judicial, commercial and security establishments which are becoming increasingly hysterical about the way the internet is upending their respective applecarts. In that sense, Sarky was echoing the fulminations of England’s lord chief justice that “technology is out of control”, by which he meant, as Peter Preston has pointed out, is beyond his control.

Establishment panic about the net’s disruptiveness is matched by renewed outbreaks of an age-old neurosis – moral panic about the impact of new communications technology on young people…

Remembering Garret

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Today’s Irish Times feels strange: Garret Fitzgerald’s weekly column is missing. Noel Whelan has a nice tribute to him.

My favourite story, however, is one he used to tell against himself. It involved an occasion when he had to overnight in a Rosslare hotel either because he had just missed a ferry departure or because his ferry was delayed until the following morning. Unusually, he found himself in the hotel room with no reading material. Intellectually frustrated, he searched the bedside locker where, apart from the usual Gideon Bible, he could only find two telephone books. This was in the days when the entire Republic’s numbers were encompassed in two volumes.

Putting the Bible to one side, he sat and read one of the telephone books. However, there was an objective to his reading. He was anxious to prove to himself a theory he had that once people from the counties of Leinster gravitated to study or work in Dublin, very many stayed there. By cross-referencing his own detailed knowledge of the concentration of particular surnames in particular counties with a reading of the 01 phone book, he apparently confirmed his theory.

Garret’s addiction to statistics was legendary. When he worked for Aer Lingus, it was said that he knew the international airline timetable book by heart. At his funeral last Sunday, his son John addressed this remark to the staff of the Central Statistical Office:

For over half a century you have enthralled our father and provided much to stimulate him. He was your biggest fan and he probably drove you mad.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Middle East

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Any foreign power hoping to promote peace, stability, and democratic inclusion in the Middle East must account for the Israeli-Palestinian divide, the Sunni-Shia divide, the Muslim-Christian divide, widespread anti-Semitism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the security of oil supplies pumped by weak regimes, Al Qaeda and related radicals, tribalism, corruption, and a picturesque lineup of despots. For half a century, the region has made outside idealists look like fools, turned realists into complicit cynics, and consigned local heroes—Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat—to martyrdom.

Steve Coll, writing in the New Yorker.

Education = civilisation?

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Here’s a depressing thought: two of the bloodiest current operators in the Middle East both had a good Western education. Saif Qadaffi went to the London School of Economics, and produced — or had produced for him — a respectable PhD dissertation (I’ve read some of it, and it looks academically respectable). And Bashar al-Assad, currently presiding over murder and torture in Syria, trained as a doctor in London (which means, among other things, that he subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath). So the belief that a good education civilises its recipient needs to be taken with a large helping of salt.

Tom West RIP

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Gosh: here’s something from a vanished age. Tom West, the engineer who created Data General’s Eclipse 32-bit mini and was immortalised in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine has died at the age of 71. He was rightly credited with saving Data General (DG) after DEC announced its VAX supermini in 1976

The Register carried a nice obit. Sample:

He was a folk singer towards the end of the 1950s and worked at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, before returning to Amherst and gaining a bachelor’s degree in Physics. He continued working at the Smithsonian, going to other observatories and ensuring that the time was precisely synchronised.

West then joined the RCA corporation and learned about computers, being largely self-taught, and then joined Data General and worked his way up the engineering ladder.

DEC shipped its VAX 32-bit supermini in 1978. This was in the era well before Intel’s X86 desktops and servers swept the board, when real computer companies designed their own processors. The 16-bit minicomputer era had boomed and DEC was the number one company. DG was the competitive number two sometimes known as ‘the bastards’ after a planned newspaper ad that never ran, and was a Fortune 500 company worth $500m. But 16-bit minis were running out of address space (memory capacity) for the apps they wanted to run.

DG launched its own 32-bit supermini project known as Fountainhead. It wasn’t ready when DEC shipped the VAX 11/780 in February 1978 and suffered from project management problems, so it is said. West, far from convinced that Fountainhead would deliver the goods, started up a secret back-room or skunkworks project called Eagle to build the Eclipse MV/8000, a 32-bit extension of the 16-bit Nova Eclipse mini. He staffed it with an esoteric mixture of people, some of them recent college graduates, and motivated them not with cash, shares or external incentives but by the sheer difficulty of what they were trying to do. It was described as pinball game management. If you got to succeed with this project or pinball game the reward was that you got to work on the next, more difficult pinball game.

Gordon Haff (who worked with Tom) described Kidder’s book as “perhaps the best narrative of a technology-development project ever written” and I agree with him. Its real significance, though, was that it was the first book to awaken the non-tech world to the idea that the computing business was a really vibrant, intriguing phenomenon.

Narrative Drift and mainstream media

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Very perceptive blog post about the BBC Social Media ‘summit’ by Adam Tinworth. Sample:

My abiding impression of the BBC Social Media Summit was of a bunch of people who are still trying to incorporate social media into their pre-existing narrative. They are trying to rope new communication technology onto the conventions of the past. They are using petrol engines to pull carriages once pulled by horses, while others are busy pottering around in cars.

Those who believe that Twitter is mainly about “broadcast” for mainstream organisations are not just wrong, they are wilfully ignoring the experience, successes and failures of many others. And that was one of the most powerful messages that came out of the summit to me – that some people will work very hard to exclude the experiences of others that challenge their own preconceptions of their working environment. I’ve called this “special pleading” in the past. Every single market we serve at RBI has given me reasons why social media won’t work in their market. Most memorably, someone from Computer Weekly gave me a long speech on why people in the tech industry would never, ever use social media. Ever single piece of special pleading has been proved to be false.

Elements of the “mainstream” media have already started to change their narratives. Alan Rushbridger’s mention of “mutual media” was probably the most compelling sentence uttered in the entire day. But then compare the name of his publication – The Guardian – to the Telegraphs, Mails, Heralds, and Mercurys – broadcast names all, in their own ways. His implies a relationship with the people they serve beyond that of those-who-are-speaking and those-who-are-listening. The others do not.

Until the mainstream of the “mainstream” media learn that 10,000 quiet voices can be more powerful than a single loud one, then days like last Friday will have elements that are useful and even compelling – and I think the talk from Al Jazeera was one of those – but ultimately be dominated by too many voices raging against the irrelevance of their own story. They no longer have an angle, and they hate it.

And while we’re on the subject, why does every conference now have to be a “summit”?

#PRfail. Or how not to get attention

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Aw, isn’t that nice. This email just popped into my mailbox from a PR firm which shall be nameless.

Hi John,

I’m getting in touch because I thought you’d be interested in hearing about a new celebrity mobile video service launching today. It’s called Sparkle.

Sparkle brings you video messages from the stars, direct and unedited. It is the only subscription-based mobile video service that guarantees regular authentic, never-before-seen footage of genuine stars. Sparkle connects you via video message directly from your favourite celebrities’ mobile phone to your own, at least three times a week.

Sparkle is launching to coincide with the Gumball 3000 Rally 2011. Celebrity Gumballers including Hollywood’s Christian Slater, the cast of Dirty Sanchez, hip-hop star Eve and Sparkle Ambassador Tamer Hassan will film and share their Rally experience in real time only on Sparkle.

We’d like to give you the chance to test Sparkle for free.

Note the cheery familiar tone, and the assumption that a tech blogger might be interested in news about celebs — which suggests a complete failure to do any background research on the intended recipient of such trash!

And the funny thing is that until this moment I thought that Sparkle was some kind of domestic cleaning product. It isn’t — but it’s a lot of other things besides.