Vote for Toxoplasma gondii

Posted on by

Terrific rant by George Monbiot. Sample:

While Labour has liberated billionaires, it has trussed up the rest of us with 3,500 new criminal offences, including provisions that allow the police to declare any demonstration illegal. It has introduced control orders that place people under permanent house arrest without charge or trial. It has allowed the US to extradite our citizens without producing evidence of an offence. It has colluded in kidnapping and torture. Britain now has more CCTV cameras than any other nation, and a DNA database that is five times the size of its nearest competitor. The number of prisoners in the UK has risen by 41% since Labour took office.

This government blocked a ceasefire in the Lebanon; sacked Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan after he complained that the regime was boiling its prisoners to death; gave aid to a Colombian military that collaborates with fascist death squads; announced a policy of pre-emptive nuclear war; and decided to waste our money on replacing Trident. But worse, far worse than any of this, it launched an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands have died. This is the government that colleagues of mine on the Guardian want to save.

There’s a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that colonises the brains of rats, altering their behaviour to attract them to the scent of their predators. The rats seek out cats and get eaten, allowing the parasite to keep circulating. This is New Labour. It has colonised a movement that fought for social justice, distribution and decency, rewired its brain and delivered it to the fat cats who were once its enemies.

Yep. But it still leaves me with the problem of who whom to vote for.

Footnote: Toxoplasma gondii

Inexorable decline…

Posted on by

… in the percentage of the vote going to the two big parties.

The TV debates aren’t responsible for the Hung Parliament that will follow Thursday’s election as surely as night follows day. A quarter of a century of decline in the combined Labour and Conservative share of the vote means that the two party stranglehold over UK politics is on its way out and Clegg’s TV performance was just a tipping point.

One of the wonderful things about the web is the accessibility of data. The Guardian has published all of the Guardian/ICM polling data since 1984. At Election 10 we took the combined Labour and Conservative share for every poll and created the graph above. In 1990 the two parties were claiming almost 90% of the vote between them this has shrunk to a little over 60% and it has been a steady consistent decline. A continuation of this would mean a government taking power that was opposed by around 65% of the population. Even our bizarre electoral system can’t sustain this.

Hmmm… I’m not sure about that optimistic conclusion. The British system can support a good many constitutional absurdities. But isn’t it interesting what a good long run of data can show, eh?

[Source.]

Danah Boyd on how privacy on Facebook is eroding

Posted on by

danah boyd is one of the sanest and best-informed observers of social networking. This is a good (but too brief) Technology Review interview with her on the subject. Sample:

Danah Boyd: People started out with a sense that this is just for you and people in your college. Since then, it’s become just for you and all your friends. It slowly opened up and in the process people lost a lot of awareness of what was happening with their data. This is one of the things that frightens me. I started asking all of these nontechnological people about their Facebook privacy settings, and consistently found that their mental model of their privacy settings and what they saw in their data did not match.

TR: What’s been driving these changes for Facebook?

DB: When you think about Facebook, the market has very specific incentives: Encourage people to be public, increase ad revenue. All sorts of other things will happen from there. The technology makes it very easy to make people be as visible and searchable as possible. Technology is very, very aligned with the market.

TR: Some people dismiss concerns about this sort of situation by saying that privacy is dead.

DB: Facebook is saying, “Ah, the social norms have changed. We don’t have to pay attention to people’s privacy concerns, that’s just old fuddy-duddies.” Part of that is strategic. Law follows social norms.

TR: What do you think is actually happening to the social norms?

DB: I think the social norms have not changed. I think they’re being battered by the way the market forces are operating at this point. I think the market is pushing people in a direction that has huge consequences, especially for those who are marginalized.

Change You Can Bereave In

Posted on by

Nice, acerbic NYT OpEd piece by A.A. Gill.

These are not three of the most engaging or noble statesmen the nation has produced. Mr. Cameron, the Tory, is personable — your mother would like him. A fresh-faced character who tries, and fails, with emotionally winning oratory. He always sounds like the coxswain urging the rowing team to pull together and straighten their straw boaters.

We look at Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, and try in vain to imagine him going toe-to-toe with leaders like Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or even the Queen of Tonga. In any other decade, the best he could have hoped for would have been a post as a junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, an ambassador’s bag-carrier. He speaks five languages but can’t say boo in any of them. His children all have Spanish names.

Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair’s shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist’s luck. He wrestles with an Old Testament temper, and it’s said that he has no friends. Certainly, none of them have come out to contradict this. Last week he was recorded by an open microphone petulantly calling a respectable working-class woman he had just spoken to in the street a “bigot.” Off the record, his advisers say they are quite relieved — it’s usually so much worse.

Are “Digital Journalists” really “scabs”?

Posted on by

Sylvia Paull has an angry post headed “The new scabs: digital journalists”.

ABC announced a layoff of hundreds of journalists this week and said it would work instead mostly with “digital journalists,” people who can do a variety of tasks, such as blog, tweet, and take digital photos. This is the first time I’ve heard the term “digital journalist,” and I’m not sure what distinguishes such a journalist from every other journalist who now must use the Web to report and communicate except that they are certainly much cheaper to hire.

A digital journalist probably doesn’t accrue vacation time, sick leave, or a pension. A digital journalist probably works on a contract basis and like many of the freelance journalists I know who once worked for a news organization, they write for several media rather than just one.

I wonder whether graduate schools of journalism now produce journalists or digital journalists. And can someone go from being a journalist to being a digital journalist, or does the journalist have to downgrade his or her reporting and communications skills first?

I can understand her anger/irritation, but the mindset implicit in her terminology is revealing. Mass-media print publication was a mass-production culture: and it prompted the rise of trade unions to provide protection from employees employed to work on what were effectively production lines. The term ‘scab’ (i.e. strikebreaker) comes from the early history of campaigning by unions who used withdrawal of labour as a weapon.

But the era of mass-production print is drawing to a close, and with it most of its associated baggage, including large bodies of unionised workers. It’s difficult at present to see what will replace the print system, but you can bet that it won’t be the licence to print money represented by ownership of printing presses and distribution networks in the analog age. A new business model for journalism will, I’m sure, eventually emerge, but it won’t be one that generates the vast profits enjoyed until recently by many traditional publishers. It’ll be leaner, more innovative, less stable and more competitive. So when leaders of the print culture portray the Net as the great destroyer of journalism, what they’re really complaining about is that it’s a destroyer of their cosy old local monopolies. For them, the undermining of journalism is just collateral damage.

None of this is meant to imply any enthusiasm on my part for what ABC has done, btw. The big danger in all this is that a new set of monopolists (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) will turn everyone into sharecroppers.

Paxman’s nemesis

Posted on by

For me, the most memorable moment of the election campaign so far was not Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” but Jeremy Paxman’s humiliation at the hands of the economics spokesman for the Welsh Nationalist party. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a great admirer of Paxo, whom I knew slightly (and liked a lot) when I was the Observer‘s TV critic. He’s one of the ornaments of the UK journalistic scene, and a great adversarial interviewer. His Newsnight interview with Michael Howard is one of the classics of the genre. He’s also — unusually for a TV professional — quite a good writer.

But he met his match the other night. At first, the interview appeared to be following the standard script. The Welsh Nats are a joke in metropolitan circles, of which Newsnight is the epicentre, and Paxo’s approach embodies this contempt. The question implied by his body language is “Who is this provincial hick and why are we bothering with him? Oh well, let’s get it over with.” And note the elegant sarcasm implicit in the reference to the “august position” of the interviewee, who is chairman of the Principality Building Society. I ask you — a building society!.

But then… Well, see for yourself.

The most revealing bit is Paxman’s exasperation at being asked to consult pages of tedious statistics, and his pique at being accused of not doing his homework. His interviewee is daring to hold him — Jeremy Paxman — to account. But imagine how his inquisitorial indignation would be stoked if a politician sighed impatiently when asked to examine a page of statistical evidence containing what Paxo regarded as clinching evidence of malfeasance.

Memo to future Paxman interviewees: master the detail and stick to it. Challenge him on statistics — the more detailed the better. Remember that grandees like Paxman don’t do detail. It’s below their pay-grade. And make sure the result goes straight onto YouTube — in case the BBC pulls it from iPlayer.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Sadly, there is no cure for megalomania. But venture capitalists ought to start funding the search for a cure, because it’s costing many of them a lot of money, and is likely to cost even more in the future.

Here’s how it works. A smart entrepreneur – a Harvard dropout, say, or some guy who made a lot of money by selling off his last venture to some clueless multinational – starts up a web business which grows like crazy by attracting millions of subscribers who use its services for free. Pretty soon, it's got 400 million of them and everyone is saying: “Wow! 400 million users! That must be good for something.”

Then several things happen. Firstly, the proprietor of the sensation du jour starts drinking the Kool-Aid and contracts the aforementioned megalomania. He begins to fantasise that he could own the whole internet. Secondly, thousands of other entrepreneurs think “Wow! He could own the whole internet. We need to make sure our stuff has hooks into his stuff. Otherwise, we’re toast.” And then the mainstream media, whose insights into this could be written in 96-point Helvetica bold on the back of a postage stamp, are going around saying, “Jeez, this stuff is the real deal. How do we get onside?”

The polo-mint election

Posted on by

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/5516949/]

Well, well. Someone suggested last week that this should be called the “polo mint campaign” because it’s got a large hole in the middle of it: the silence of all three parties on what they will do to reduce the deficit. I ranted about this the other day. Today the Financial Times, no less, wades in on the same theme. Its first Leader, “Winning office but not a mandate,” says, in part:

This week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies quantified the size of that silence. It revealed that the Liberal Democrats were the most forthcoming of the main parties, but even they had only told voters about one-quarter of the retrenchment that they would impose upon the country. The UK’s politicians are suffering some kind of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed, the parties are not only refusing to address the deficit problem. They continue to promote expensive hobby-horses. The Lib Dems are pushing a large tax change and the Conservatives pledge dear public sector reforms and tax cuts. The Tories, in common with Labour, also promise not to cut some large departments.

Little wonder that opinion polls show voters still believe that “efficiency savings” alone can rein in the deficit. But they are in for the shock of their lives – and will respond with fury when they learn the truth. Their anger, moreover, will not be directed at bankers or bureaucrats. It will be aimed at the politicians who hid their plans from the public.

Britain now faces a period of public austerity without any detailed consensus about retrenchment, and no broad public support for it. That will make the task of balancing the books more difficult and poses a risk to the credibility of any future plan to rein in the country’s gaping fiscal deficit.

Whoever wins this election will not be able to claim that they have a mandate to cut the state. That will, in part, be their own fault for choosing silence and short-term electoral advantage over outspoken courage. The public might not like hard truths, but they were barely given a chance to hear any. The next government’s silence in this election campaign could cost them the election. After this.

It’s not every day the Pink ‘Un and I find ourselves in agreement. So let us celebrate unanimity while we still can.