We trading something for nothing.

Recently, my Kindle bit the dust. I’d been getting quite into the Kindle thing – reading it in the bath… downloading books on an ad-hoc basis… using it to browse the web. There is a remorseless logic to the digitisation idea: if the spread of knowledge is correlated to the cheapness of reproduction, then the Kindle and its ilk are at the apogee of what should be a new enlightenment.

And then the screen got cracked. It can’t so far as I can tell, be replaced.

£120 of technology was lost in an instant thanks to a stray stiletto heel/bra clasp in a suitcase (not one of mine, I hasten to add: I only wear flats and prefer to go braless on holiday). And not only that, my access to the many books I had bought went with in a flash. Sure, I can read them on my iPhone’s Kindle App, but scrolling through a dense, 300 page novel on a 2 inch screen with your thumb is not an optimal reading experience.

I picked up my battered, nigh-on 15 year old copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William H. Shirer (which I can’t recommend enough). I paid £8 for this book before boarding a flight to Seattle back in the days when knowing HTML was enough to make one a web expert. It is battered, well-thumbed and has a couple of loose pages which correlate to my favourite passages of the book – those few months in which Europe finally tipped into war.

This isn’t a tedious books-are-better-than tech rant, however. But it is about the colossal change in our vision of what ‘ownership’ has come to mean. My £8 bought me ownership of an actual thing that depends on nothing more than shelf space and will be mine until I destroy it or pass it on in some way. By contrast, the works on my Kindle were digital bits to which I had merely bought the “rights” to. I had the right to read a work on my Kindle – nothing more. It may seem unlikely, but one day Amazon will be no more and then what of this ‘right’? It cannot to be transferred to a bookshop or other provider.

What we have steadily been engaged on for many years is the substitution of nothing for something.

The same is true of music. Once you paid for the physical artefact – a vinyl disk or a CD. Now you you often merely pay for the rights, tied a specific device. The license I have to play Bobby Gentry’s Ode To Billy Joe does not extend beyond Apple devices and so, when the inevitable day comes that I move onto something else I will have to buy the “right” to listen to it on another device. It’s about the smartest move the digital industry ever made.

For Apple and Amazon, one can see the logic. Producing a trillion digital copies of an MP3 or digitised book is probably cheaper than producing mere hundreds of physical copies. They take almost no storage space, and can be distributed instantly around the world with no need for physical intermediaries such as shops and personnel.

But there is a more corrosive effect beyond trifles such as music.

Just as music has become a digital commodity, so has the ‘news’ become an endless procession of noisy nonsense. Facts once had to be winkled out, fought over and verified. Today, one can simply make a ‘fact’ from spurious digital data and win the fight for the world’s attention in the space of a few minutes. Extrapolate outwards from a survey of less than a hundred people are merrily claim that “86% of people would choose super miracle formula Fombulin A”.

The “hockeystick” in the field of climate science is a cherishable example of the genre. Shown many years ago now to be based on flawed, partial data and riddled through with unfounded assumptions and mistakes alike it still squats in the public imagination as the default visualisation of what’s happening to the Earth’s temperature.

Enraptured by the power of this shit, corporations and governments alike choose partial slices of ‘data’ every day and release it through media outlets that are world leaders in gullibility and anti-think. This is bad for you. That is good for you. “Science shows x”. “Economists believe y”. Buy this. Sell that. An endless wall of 24 hour bollocks that stretches as far as the mind can picture.

I don’t know about you, but this shit bothers me.

Posted in Pointless Futurology, Technology | Comments Off

Seeing the Bigger Picture.

The Romanian Government has collapsed. You don’t care, but you probably should. Europe is crumbling at the edges. Greek nationalism (remember nationalism – died and was buried with the advent of the EU? R.I.P.) is growing – evidenced by their refusal to play ball with either bankers or the ECB. It was this seeming intransigence that led to the plan being tabled for the EU to take over the economic governance of Greece: an annexation in all but name and an extraordinary thing to be put on the table in the age of “democracy”.

Barely noticed in the tumult is Hungary’s growing need to fund its debt and the likelihood of it becoming on EU budgetary assistance, or Portugal’s relentless slide into dependency on the ECB. For well over a year now, the EU has been overriding national sentiment and elected bodies to pursue its corporatistic vision.

Prognostication is a mug’s game (I’ve been predicting that the end game is just around the corner for nearly 2 years) but it’s clear that the pace of events is changing. The Merkozy ‘fiskalunion’ compact – so loudly trumpeted just weeks ago – may get signed into legislation (despite Cameron’s phantom ‘veto’) but the Europeans may as well pledge to send men to the moon, for all the connection with reality such a deal has.

The real end game isn’t being played out in the corridors of Brussels, or being stage-managed by grandstanding politicians and central bankers. It is being played out in the minds of countless millions who have seen their democracies sacrificed, their futures shattered and their identities trampled in the name of saving a distant bureaucracy and a roster of too-big-to-fail institutions via “economics” which have the use and relevance of trailing a finger through fish innards or staring at the stars. How long will it simmer before boiling over?

The demagogues come in times of tumult to feast on discontent and the truth is that the politicians know that they no longer command legitimacy  - hence their panic at the mention of plebiscites and democracy. As ever was, a nexus of money and power is coalescing to preserve itself and – has as always happened – an opposing force will arise: either the inchoate rebellion of the masses (see: the “occupy” movement, only with more point) or the emergence of nationalistic strongmen who suddenly find receptive ears.

Melodramatic? You’re right. Go buy some Facebook shares and rejoice.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

EXCLUSIVE! The Ken Bates Algorithm

So Leeds have sold Johnny Howson. Christ. After some research carried out by members of LULZSEC, I can reveal that the club is run by a simple algorithm.

$batesmotelcomplete = false;
$batesmotelcost = "4500000";
$fanhappiness = 100;

$players = array("howson","becchio","kisnorbo","rachubka","lonergan","taylor,"cairns","connolly","bruce","O'Brien","Lees","Bromb
y","White","O'Dea","Varynen","Brown","Lloyd Sam","Clayton","Pugh","Townsend","Nunez","Forssell","Snodgrass","Somma","McCormack");

$buyers = array("Norwich","Ipswich","Leicester","Grimsby","Accrington Stanley","Rushden and Diamonds","Farsley Celtic")

function pickaclubanyclub($array)
	{
	$club = array_rand($buyers,1);
	return $club;
	}

function sell($player,$buyer)
	{
	if($player && $buyer)
		{
		$value = "Hardly seems to matter";
		return $value;
		}
	}

function firemanager($name)
	{
	mysql_query("delete * from lufc_staff where name='$name' and position=='manager'");
	}

while($i=0;$i< $batesmotelcost:$i++)
	{
	foreach($players as $player)
		{
		$buyer = pickaclubanyclub($buyers);
		$price = sell($player,$buyer);
		$i = $i + $price;
		}
	$fanhappiness --;
	if($fanhappiness <= 20)
		{
		firemanager("Simon Grayson");
		echo "Leeds fans are a bunch of ungrateful cunts - without me they'd be in the second division. Oh.";
		$hidein = "Cayman Islands";
		$stroke = "Beard";
		}
	}
Posted in Humour | 2 Comments

It was 15 years ago today…

Well,  not quite to the day, but I finally got around to dusting off some old music from back in the day. It was the mid-90s and in that long-forgotten era I still had hair, my BMI was within normally accepted limits and David Cameron was just a twinkle in Tony Blair’s eyes.

As I’ve mentioned before, at this time we could truthfully claim to have been the 3rd or 4th biggest band in Leeds. And here’s what we sounded like, in case you are curious enough to sit through these examples of bouncingly gauche bubblegum guitar pop.

Wasting Your Time

Planet Monday

The Weatherman

Now. You tell me how come I’m not sitting in a country mansion lecturing you about poverty and fair trade. There’s not much justice in the world!

Posted in Music, Musicians | Comments Off

Naught but fog

Some irrelevancy, yesterday

David Cameron’s much touted ‘veto’ of the alleged ‘treaty’  at the EU ‘summit’ last week is still setting the political discourse of the media alight. Variously, it has been cast as an example of heroism, treachery, genius or stupidity.

And yet the ‘summit’ was actually a meeting of the EU council, which meets routinely anyway. The council has no legislative power and so could not in any case draw up a ‘treaty’ for Cameron to veto. At best reading, attendees suggested the outlines of some proposals for a future agreement and Cameron indicated that Britain wouldn’t take part in that agreement were it to be formally proposed.

To pretend that he has bravely/foolishly taken any sort of actual action at all is the merest nonsense. That the press are hyperventilating about this phantom series of events tells you all you need to know about the seriousness with which they ply their trade.

The statement of the outcome of the council is, naturally, vague but confirms this:

“The fiscal compact agreed today will be made legally binding by an international agreement. The agreement will be open to the EU member states that are currently not members of the euro area. All EU member states apart from one said they were considering participating.”

The ‘compact’ is basically another one of these things the EU likes so much – an unenforceable set of rules – including limiting ‘structural deficits’ to 0.5% of GDP – and more submission to European bodies – “Member states undergoing an excessive deficit procedure will have to submit to the Commission and the Council for endorsement the structural reforms they plan to take in order to meet the requirement to correct excessive deficits.”

Or in English: “give Brussels the power of veto over your budgets”. Now check again for the weasel words in the first quote: “all EU member states but one said they were considering participating.”

At the moment, everyone is hedging their bets. Everyone fears the secrets of their balance sheets being exposed to the glare of the market and so are trying to hide under Germany’s wings so at this stage of course they would agree to consider any plan that might help them. A ratified treaty that maketh not.

And in reality, what would such an agreement mean? An unelected government of technocrats being parachuted in to do Brussels’ bidding – as in the case of Italy – or the threat of popular plebiscites overridden – as we saw in Greece. Whatever it is, it ain’t your Grandad’s democracy. Only in the corridors of the EU apparatus would anybody imagine that sovereign states will readily hand over their independence to an unelected body of technocrats, or that that will take place with the sanguine acceptance of the peoples directly affected.

So we have the weird spectacle of the press disagreeing or agreeing with a veto that never was, against a treaty that doesn’t exist and that has no agreement other than in principle from other members anyway.

Furthermore, enshrined in this putative agreement is effectively the requirement not to run deficit spending programs in the future, which is the knee-jerk response to being caught out so badly this time. And yet the EU’s medicine has done knack-all to save poor Greece (worse off now than at any point during the crisis) and, bizarrely, runs counter to the anti-cuts, Keynesian model of deficit spending that has characterised what most states have actually done.

In short, this whole thing barely qualifies as a dog’s breakfast, much less a dinner, and is no solution to anything other than the need for various politicians to stride about, chests puffed out, declaring themselves to be the hardest kid on the estate. Nonsense.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

Back in the saddle…

So that’s it then. Brain recovery complete. Barring the scar – which I’ll bear forever as a reminder of my little brush with mortality – I am fully functional member of the community again.

I was lucky. In the hospital were a Polish guy who had been there for almost 7 months – constantly hovering on the edge of infection and with parts of the tumour so deep in his head that they could never be removed – and David B of Pontefract, undiagnosed and unable to work for 7 years.

Me? I found out on a Wednesday and breezed back out of hospital the following Thursday. The dice fell well for me, for once.

So I’m back in the chair, in my office, looking at the unholy mess that still remains to be cleaned up, left there by the SEO agency who were running things before I took over. At home, the kids (who have largely been oblivious to everything) continue to rampage around the place, leaving a trail of biscuit crumbs everywhere they go, just like their dad. And on Friday the 3rd, I returned to the live stage once more at the Duck and Drake, Leeds, where for 2 hours I played out my little rock star fantasy once more – with an extra big contingent of friends there for the ride to help celebrate.

There’s even a little upside: being unable to drive for several months mean that I am morally obliged to drink at all social events!

So a quiet thank you to the various people who’ve helped me through this little spell… the neurosurgeons at the LGI… colleagues old and new… the countless friends who’ve sent me little messages or packets of sweets… my family who’ve constantly checked up on me and run innumerate errands on my behalf and, of course, The Wife, who has experienced the whole thing probably worse than I have: from watching me jitterbugging around on the bedroom floor in the middle of the night to having my head cut open to doing everything in the house and with the kids while I stared vacantly on from the sofa.

And a little thank you to you too for reading and leaving messages, if you have. It’s been a rough old ride, but it’s been nice to know you’ve been there for the journey, kind of.

Next week: incontinent swearing and despair recommences as per.

Posted in meningioma | 6 Comments