Wallflowers at the Revolution

Posted on by

Nice rant by Frank Rich in the NYT.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

En passant: it’s been interesting to hear the frustration of intelligent US citizens about the non-availability of Al Jazeera on American cable channels and networks. It’s the old story: “600 channels and nothing on TV”.

Joe Stiglitz on Tunisia: Democracy’s great but…

Posted on by

Sobering piece by a Nobel laureate

Virtuous though democracy is – and as Tunisia has shown, it is far better than the alternative – we should remember the failures of those who claim its mantle, and that there is more to true democracy than periodic elections, even when they are conducted fairly. Democracy in the US, for example, has been accompanied by increasing inequality, so much so that the upper 1% now receives about a quarter of national income – with wealth being even more inequitably distributed.

Most Americans today are worse off than they were a decade ago, with almost all the gains from economic growth going to the very top of the income and wealth distribution. And corruption American-style can result in trillion-dollar gifts to pharmaceutical companies, the purchase of elections with massive campaign contributions and tax cuts for millionaires as medical care for the poor is cut.

NoteSlate: a low-tech alternative to paper?

Posted on by

NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

Interesting blurb. Supposedly coming to market in June at a price of $99.

What news organisations still don’t ‘get’ about the new media ecosystem

Posted on by

As usual, Dave Winer nails it.

I watched the Thursday night video feed of the Columbia panel on Wikileaks instead of going there in person. After trying to listen to Keller [Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times] on Fresh Air and giving up half-way through, in disgust — I just couldn’t imagine sitting through his schpiel about the social behavior problems (he perceives) of Julian Assange. I don’t care, and frankly I think it’s irresponsible of a person in Keller’s position to take the focus off the substance, which is so interesting and vital.

Yep. One of things that really struck me as a small-time bit player in coverage of the WikiLeaks story was how difficult it is to counteract a wrong-headed media narrative once it gets going. (We saw that earlier in the coverage of the BP oil-drilling catastrophe, btw.) On the day when I was interviewed by the BBC and other networks I was trying to say that Assange wasn’t the story — the big story was what WikeLeaks meant for governments everywhere. But even as I was being interviewed, Assange was heading for a British Court, and it was impossible to get any interviewer’s attention for the bigger picture. And it’s still going on: all this emphasis on Assange’s peculiarities. The Egyptian protestors are lucky that they haven’t thrown up a charismatic individual ‘leader’: if they had, we’d hear correspondingly less about what was actually going on.

But back to Dave:

He [Keller] also said he had never met Assange.

Amazing he has so much insight into the flaws of a man he had never met!

Maybe amazing isn’t the word…

Emily Bell, the interviewer, kept the discussion away from Assange’s socks, and got some very interesting things on the record from the panel. For the purposes of this story though, I’m only going to look at one new bit of info. Both the Times and the Guardian are thinking about replacing the technology of WikiLeaks with their own. Instead, imho they should be thinking about creating their own Twitters, platforms for their news people to congregate in realtime and mix with the members of their communities. Both organizations should be doing much more to cultivate community. And Twitter is much more of a threat to them than WikiLeaks.

[…]

It was so revealing when Keller said that his audience had moved to the Internet. Yes, but.. His sources have too. And there are so many more sources today than there were when we were growing up. It may be the biggest single change in the way news works.

Understanding the social aspect of news, and leading us with great information and gestalts — that’s what the Times and Guardian do best. It’s less important how the leaks make their way to their desks. News is now an environment, not a publication. It lives and breathes. That’s what the news orgs still haven’t been willing to embrace.

Spot on.

Economics of the music business

Posted on by

This graphic is a snapshot of a section of Ben Johncock’s ingenious and sobering visualisation of the sales in various formats a solo artist would need to achieve to earn the US minimum wage.

Ben’s point is that from the point of view of the artist the worst option of all is Spotify. But I was also struck by the asymmetry of the label vs. artist proportions (white vs purple numbers in right-hand column) on iTunes.

CORRECTION: Many thanks to all the readers who emailed to point out that the dazzling visualisation is the work of the incomparable David McCandless. The link to his graphic is here. The link was also at the bottom of Neb Johncock’s original post, but I missed it. Mea culpa, as we say in Ireland.

Wanted: more subversive innovation

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of innovation which will lead to a new generation of distributed, secure technologies (like the TOR networking system used by WikiLeaks) which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged, “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.

What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed.

LATER: Useful post about how to ensure that your domain names aren’t snaffled by the Feds.

The limits of television

Posted on by

One of the mot paradoxical aspects of the last week is that, on the one hand, we have seen endless loops of TV footage of what’s going on in Cairo, and yet the only times I’ve felt that I had any real insight into what it was like has been when print journalists on the ground reported what they were seeing — as, for example, with the report by Robert Fisk that I blogged the other day. Here’s another remarkable account — this time by the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof.

Inside Tahrir Square on Thursday, I met a carpenter named Mahmood whose left arm was in a sling, whose leg was in a cast and whose head was being bandaged in a small field hospital set up by the democracy movement. This was the seventh time in 24 hours that he had needed medical treatment for injuries suffered at the hands of government-backed mobs. But as soon as Mahmood was bandaged, he tottered off once again to the front lines.

“I’ll fight as long as I can,” he told me. I was awestruck. That seemed to be an example of determination that could never be surpassed, but as I snapped Mahmood’s picture I backed into Amr’s wheelchair. It turned out that Amr had lost his legs many years ago in a train accident, but he rolled his wheelchair into Tahrir Square to show support for democracy, hurling rocks back at the mobs that President Hosni Mubarak apparently sent to besiege the square.

Amr (I’m not using some last names to reduce the risks to people I quote) was being treated for a wound from a flying rock. I asked him as politely as I could what a double-amputee in a wheelchair was doing in a pitched battle involving Molotov cocktails, clubs, machetes, bricks and straight razors.

“I still have my hands,” he said firmly. “God willing, I will keep fighting.”

The courage of these protestors is awe-inspiring, given the savagery of the regime they are opposing.

Posted on by

The Daily Digger costs a modest 99c a week, which looks like a fairly cheap way to get a daily newspaper. The only problem is that you have to buy an iPad in order to read it. This chart comes from a lovely blog post by Bryan McComb in which he calculates how long it would take before a Daily Digger subscriber would be better off buying the iPad version rather than purchasing Murdoch’s New York tabloid from a newsagent. The breakeven point comes in November 2014.

(And, yeah, I know that iPad owners don’t buy the device just to read the Digger. But still, the calculation illustrates how cheerfully we early adopters write off substantial expenditure.)

Egypt: how to negotiate the transition.

Posted on by

Fascinating and thoughtful post by Maciej Bartkowski and Lester R. Kurtz contrasting the different ways in which the Chinese and Polish pro-democracy movements approached the task of dealing with the regime. This part of the piece deals with the Polish ‘Roundtable’:

When the Roundtable met, sitting next to regime representatives was almost the whole spectrum of oppositionists, from conservatives and liberals to social democrats and the main social actors: trade unions, intellectuals and the Catholic church. In the main room of the Council of Ministers office where the round table was set up, 60 negotiators from the government and opposition were seated side by side. The leader of Solidarity, Lech Wałesa, and the minister of interior Czesław Kiszczak, co-chaired the main sessions. The round table discussions were divided into three ‘tables’ for political reforms, economic and social policies, and union and party pluralism. Each table was co-chaired by two representatives – one from the government and another from the opposition. Simultaneously, the more detailed and technical discussions concerning the main themes of the ‘tables’ were taking place in twelve ‘sub-tables’ and in a number of working groups bringing together more than three hundred government and opposition leaders. If negotiators could not agree on some issues they were submitted to higher ‘tables’ for further discussions, and in case the disagreement continued the main leaders were then involved in trying to come to an accord.

It was agreed from the beginning that the negotiations would be public and its main sessions televised. Given censorship in media that existed prior to negotiations, the Roundtable gave the opposition an opportunity to present and explain their views openly and reach out to the public. The negotiations took almost two months to conclude. The Roundtable led to legalization of the opposition, the establishment of a bi-cameral parliament with open elections for 35% of seats in the lower chamber and for all seats in the Senate, freedoms of expression and press, and freedom to set up political and civic organizations. Most importantly, the round table negotiations built trust among the parties involved that they would adhere to democratic principles despite political differences and thus led to the peaceful transformation of the Polish state.

The problem with Egypt — as the authors observe — is that whereas in Polant the Communist regime was relatively coherent in terms of ideology and control, the Mubarak regime is a ragbag of security agencies, kleptomaniacs and cronies.

So why isn’t the UK providing consular support for Bradley Manning?

Posted on by

From openDemocracy.

The brutal treatment of the young soldier, who has not been convicted of any offence, has been described by Amnesty International as “unnecessarily severe”, “inhumane” and “repressive”. It is widely believed US authorities are treating him harshly to obtain a plea bargain that implicates WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief Julian Assange as a co-conspirator. But there is a twist to this tale. Bradley Manning is a dual UK-US citizen under the right afforded to him by jus sanguinis. His mother is Welsh and his father American; he was born in Oklahoma though sat his GCSEs at a Welsh secondary school. He should therefore be entitled to consular assistance.

As according to a guide issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) called “Support for British Nationals”, the UK would not normally offer consular support to dual citizens unless the citizen is a minor, facing a capital sentence, or if “having looked at the circumstances of the case, we [the FCO] consider that there is a special humanitarian reason to do so.”

Manning is not a minor, and nor is he facing a capital sentence (though some prominent US politicians have called for a treason charge, which could result in the death penalty) but his situation is certainly of serious humanitarian concern. Given the severity of Amnesty International’s condemnation of Manning’s treatment, and the additional involvement of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, it seems clear that Manning has a “special humanitarian” case. A spokesperson for the FCO said that they could not comment on individual cases, however confirmed that “in instances of mistreatment, we would potentially look to intervene.”

The piece goes on to observe that

though the UK may wish to keep a distance from Bradley Manning for political reasons, UK authorities – whether they like it or not – were implicated in the investigation from the beginning. In July last year, shortly after Manning was charged, American ‘officials’ reported to be F.B.I agents made an unannounced visit to the Welsh home of Bradley Manning’s mother, Susan. Accompanied by a Detective Sergeant from Dyfed-Powys police force, they are believed to have searched Bradley’s old bedroom. Earlier this week Dyfed-Powys police would not confirm or deny this – saying only that they “facilitated a request from an American agency to accompany them as they conducted their investigation last year.”

It appears then that while UK authorities have been happy to comply with the Americans on UK soil as they seek evidence to prosecute Manning, they remain reluctant to get involved in an issue that has the potential to put serious strain on the notorious “special relationship.”