No contact

Apple Inc., it seems, is moving into sweeping up the way we, or at least the smart and affluent we, pay for our goods and services.

Apple HQ

Soon the mobile phone - the 'device' - will become not just the all-pervading tool for communicating, for gathering factual information, for publishing our doings to the world, for finding out where we are and where we are going, but for buying everything from coffee to cars. We need take nothing else with us, but we need to have our mobile with us wherever our mobile lives take us, from Iceland's frozen mountains to Afrique's sunny shores.

No more cards: just the phone.

Which sets me wondering - what about those other cards, so far repelled in this country (whatever that means after 18th September) but still lurking in the background? The identity card.

GCHQ

Are not our mobile phones making an an increasingly fair bid to becoming our de facto identity cards? Increasingly they contain a vast bulk of our personal information, our personal history and our communications. Our governments already have pretty comprehensive access to them. In their Apple apotheosis they are linked to our persona by our fingerprints and now they are set to become, perhaps, essential to our acquiring our daily bread. What more could our governments ask for?

Galactic HQ

Terrorist, terrorism, terror, security

“The collection is broad in scope, because more narrow collection would limit our ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it may assist counter terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.”

Jame Clapper, United States Director of National Security

Tweets without end

The end is less nigh than we thought - or maybe not.

I read (in a newspaper) that it is possible to subscribe to a service that coverts tweets into a link, thus freeing them of the limit to 140 characters.

Apparently as the Chancellor of the Exchequer was leaving Margaret Thatcher's funeral service in St paul's Cathedral (though perhaps not quite on the steps), where he was caught on press cameras with a tear trickling down his cheeks, he felt obliged to tweet a comment on how moving the occasion was, in order to regain seeming control of the perception of things. Is there a new career path as tweet-writer for the great and mighty opening up?

"...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey

Emasculation

The whole trend of innovation now in mobile electronics technology seems to be to integrate the thing into our bodily functions. Move your head, or even your eye, and it does something, believing you to have instructed it. Speak a few particular words and it's off again, assuming, like your most boring friend, that you just must be speaking to it. The logical extension is just to implant the thing in our heads, like that man from the BT research lab did all those years ago. How far we have advanced from those early cumbersome back-packs that the pioneers of electronic extension of our thoughts and perceptions so bravely shouldered for the future benefit of humanity. (Unfortunately, according to my link, the future seems to have run out in 2009.)

The future - gloves included

The man from Google, and perhaps others, think this is the way forward and that it is less 'emasculating' than having the thing at arm's length.



The present - always more scarey

Yet perhaps I am wrong about the future logical extension: there is clearly an appeal in the demonstrable gadget, in fiddling with things (it is well known that part of the appeal of smoking is being able to do something with one's hand all the time) and showing them off to others. Put it in the brain and all the person is left with is having to demonstrate by what they do, rather than what they have, that they are smarter than the next person. How unsatisfying is that? It would be taking us right back to the days of differential and unalterable innate human intelligence amongst individuals. Anyway, what about the yearly upgrades? Just keep your head up and don't move your eyes.

Social media

The Israeli Defence Force has a Twitter account. I'm not sure whether or not it has a Facebook page. 

Is this the tip of the iceberg? It now seems obligatory for every faceless organisation or eminent personage to Tweet in a way that was once the province of the unknown individual who could string 140 characters together.

Yet the courts know differently of course and famously people have been proscecuted for facetious threats to public security on Twitter and, most recently, detained for posting pictures of burning Remembrance poppies on Facebook. It is not an offence to offend, but grossly to offend is. But that clearly is not a rubric under which Defence Forces, of whatever nation, might come undone. I am not sure whether it was the UK that led the way in the particular change in nomenclature when in 1964 it merges the old War Office into the new Ministry of Defence.

As Twitter itself puts it, "Follow your friends, experts, favorite celebrities, and breaking news."

Bot world

'Automated trades comprise 70% of the Wall Street stock market, whereas in the UK over 30% of equity trading is conducted by algorithms. The pressures of global capitalism led by and built upon this "black box" trading are forcing us to be economically reliant on the algorithm, prompting technologist Kevin Slavin to suggest that we are now "living in an algo-world" – or as novelist Daniel Suarez describes it, a "bot-mediated reality". Automated softwares perform the analysis of medical x-rays to find abnormalities, while risk-assessment algorithms decide a person's suitability for a credit card based on their financial history. Our lives are in their hands, if indeed they have anything resembling hands.

'But increasingly it's getting personal. In the online environment of social media, Edgerank algorithms edit and remix our Facebook identities, determining which friends we interact with. Google's page-rank algorithm anticipates what we want to find, creating what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble, where we see what Google thinks we want to see.

'Bots create 24% of tweets. Half of the internet traffic clicking through our websites and profiles is not human. Even Wikipedia is not immune: 22 of the 30 most prolific Wikipedia editors are bots. And as increasing numbers of us use online resources and social media in connection with our jobs as well as our personal lives, we need to realise how many of our "co-workers" are in fact algorithms, because we will have to live up to their standards. Bots are becoming our peers.

'It used to be an insult to speak of someone "behaving mechanically", but now such behaviour is becoming both economically and socially desirable. It pays for bloggers to write articles optimised for search engines and crawler bots rather than human readers. Twitter, on the other hand, asks us to reduce our social discourse to 140 characters of hashtags, links, and @ handles, in imitation of the code webpages are written in.'

Is this blog written by a bot, I ask myself - or do I?

More for the little people

Leona Helmsley, the American billionaire tried for tax evasion in 1989, famously observed, as it was claimed at her trial, 'We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.' Although Helmsley was convicted and, briefly, imprisoned, the principle of which she availed herself has flourished, internationally, ever since.

Now in the UK we have a new measure, or an 'updated' one, proposed for the little people: communications surveillance. This is touted as simply a necessary measure to keep check on serious crime and terrorism. Some of its supporters claim that it is doubly necessary as we face threats associated with the Olympic Games and the Queen's Jubilee. It is a sign of our times that every occasion for celebration and jubilation turns into a focus of yet more hazards and attack, against which the security services must take new measures to protect us - measures of course that will be permanent not temporary. The government is sensible enough to avoid references to the Olympics and the Jubilee since this new legislative measure cannot possibly be on the statute book before the year after they take place, but the current climate of apprehension will help them get it through.

Yet serious criminals and terrorists, as well as the internet savvy, will be able to avoid the surveillance without difficulty. It is the little people and their imagined conspiracies and threats who will be affected. One has only to note the exhaustive triviality of past physical monitoring of people who were clearly no threat to the state or society, and the ability of the authorities to overlook information they already had access to in advance of major outrages, to see the way it will work out.

Knowledge shall set you free

What can be at once more gratifying and more frustrating than viewing a book online?

There on your screen is some book from a distant library that for reasons of remoteness, rarity and cost one would probably never be able to hold as a physical copy. The pages turn, floating across your screen, in an unreal, cinematic fashion, remote, efficient. There is an electronic equivalent for flipping through the pages and the finger stuck in page twenty-seven. Now this page, now that; never quite convenient.

The screen is both a window on vast possibilities and a cruel restriction: always a window, never a door. There is somewhere, unseen, ungraspable, a logical step-by-step equivalent of the tottering pile of books on your desk.

We have recreated our own - far superior - version of the medieval chained library.

Hereford Cathedral library

Foreign travel

The British government has asked Washington to hand over a man held by US forces in Afghanistan after the appeal court ordered a writ of habeas corpus be issued seven years after he was detained.


The court ordered the writ last week after hearing that Yunus Rahmatullah was detained by UK special forces in Iraq in 2004, and then handed over to US forces who flew him to Bagram prison, north of Kabul.


The court heard on Wednesday that the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence had asked the US government to transfer Rahmatullah to British custody so that he could be released.


However, the US defence department replied three days later that the responsible official "is currently on travel", and that it would respond at some unspecified date in the future....


Rahmatullah, 29, is a Pakistani man who denies being a member of a terrorist organisation, but whose lawyers admit was in Iraq to wage jihad. For several years after his detention his family assumed he was dead.


He was one of two men captured by the SAS and handed over to US forces who were subsequently rendered to Afghanistan. The transfer to US authorities was permitted under the terms of a memorandum of understanding between the two countries that also allows the UK to demand their return.


The court also referred to an article of the Geneva conventions which forbids occupying powers from removing civilian prisoners from an occupied country other than in narrowly defined circumstances....


Ministers of the last Labour government repeatedly denied any knowledge of the matter before finally admitting in February 2009 that it had known about it for the previous five years.

Correspondence

I have a faith in the power of correspondence - literary correspondence that is, but with the deeper meaning of the word given full weight - to create reality. a belief that if a letter (or even an email) expresses with sufficient skill and power the interweaving of the recipient's history, statements and opinions with one's own concerns and desires it creates a version of reality that cannot be gainsaid.

It is, I suppose, a belief little different from a belief in witchcraft spells, or in voodoo - of from a belief in, an understanding of, the power of poetry, or indeed of any form of art.

Yet it is inferior to voodoo (or witchcraft or art) in that, unlike them, it requires for its efficacy that the recipient should be a believer too. Whilst the modern sceptic dismisses the pricklings in his limbs until he rapidly and unaccountably expires, the recipient of the letter passes his eyes over it without its logic and architecture impinging upon him in the slightest. So that it is, ironically, not a lack of superstition that causes my literary witchcraft to fail, but a lack of imaginative faith in rationality and the inter-relationship of expression, thought and truth.

The heyday of my faith was probably the eighteenth century , when sense was a matter of general agreement among educated gentlemen, and the great example of the power of literary correspondence was to be found in Dr Johnson's famous epistolary rebuke to Lord Chesterfield:

"The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it."

Lord Chesterfield was so much a fellow believer that, rather than attempt the impossibility of replying to such a letter, he kept it on display and exhibited it to his friends and visitors as an outstanding work of expression.

I like to think (probably erroneously) that it was a recognition of the possibly over-weening power of expression to create its own reality that lead Dr Johnson to advise aspiring writers to strike out anything in their work that they thought particularly fine.

The eighteenth century is normally regarded as a prosaic culture, but there was something heroic in its belief in the power of rationality and human agency, which in some of its strongest authors resulted in outbursts of exuberance, malice or even madness, as one may find, for example, in Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift. Elsewhere, as T S Eliot observed, 'It crushed a number of lesser men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.'

Language, especially figurative language, has the power not only to encapsulate our thoughts but to betray us, almost seamlessly, into accepting further ideas that were not part of our original perception.We all know the feeling of 'swimming against the tide': finding that our efforts do not produce the results we think they should, that they are resisted by some large force 'out there'. But the strength with which we recognise part of the metaphor can blind us to how badly the rest of it fits. Those of us who indulge in sea bathing (including Le Corbusier) know vividly that swimming against the actual tide always gives a far greater sense of achievement, of disciplined productive effort, of pleasure and progress and an enhanced fitness for further work, than does swimming with it - when you may get somewhere faster, but in something of a physical mess. Some people might even be more likely to get a few admiring glances from people on the beach. Is that the metaphor or the thought doing the work?

Transpiration

Egg in the batter, egg in the batter!
We make cake and nothing's the matter.

(With apologies to Maurice Sendak.)


Whether it be Tony Blair justifying military attack on Iraq, the US administration describing the death of Osama bin Laden, or the Metropolitan Police accounting for the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller caught up in the G20 demonstrations, or, more recently, Mark Duggan whose fatal shooting by the police was the immediate stimulation of this year's London riots, the pudding recipe seems always to call for much egg. We are offered copious detail which, usually when things have quietened down a little (it may be days, it may be years) has to be withdrawn. Quite how it got there in the first place is never explained.

Truth will out; but it knows its place.

Junk

In the old days a person's address was usually a piece of public information, and one could send a letter to more or less anyone without thinking one had transgressed basic standards of civilisation. One might not get a reply, or it might not even get read, but that was a different matter.

Now that we are most of us on the internet, knowledge, or, worse, use of a person's email address without their explicit sanction is regarded as the most intimate kind of personal violation, even though an email can be consigned to oblivion with a single jab of a finger, whilst a letter had to be torn and thrust into the fire (preceded of course by an exhaustive risk assessment).

We should take a lesson from the eighteenth century, when they managed to combine a pronounced idea of the Polite with the most pointed kind of personal communication and remark, and decorum and scurrilousness could rub shoulders. It is perhaps because we nowadays have no real notion of politeness that we hem ourselves around with absurd protocols of appropriateness.

Perhaps in these times of unemployment we should all be enabled to recruit the kind of personal 'filter' that royalty has long relied upon: "Her Majesty desires me to convey..."

Media lens

http://www.medialens.org/

Atomisation 2: concision and elaboration

Thank you for this draft of hemlock. before I drain it to the dregs, could I just remark that there seem to me to be essentially two forms of discourse or desription.

The most fervently recommended today is, supposedly, concision, consisting in the isolation and abstraction of 'key points'.

A whole apparatus of techniques exists to support this approach: the bullet point, the executive summary, the abstract - as though the essence of an argument, of a conception, is something that could be abstracted from its context - the overhead projector, those boxes on the printed page. This is brevity, the less that is more, the distillation. It runs from executive jargon all the way to the new-age spiritualist aphorism. Modish, cliché-ed coinages are its handmaid.

Lurking in the despised shadows is another mode, that of elaboration, where the essence of a thing is approached, about and about, through the ebb and flow, relationship and counter-relationship, where the qualification may assume greater importance than the proposal. Here is no brevity, no magic bullet, only the flow and flux of a mutating thing.

Pity, like a naked new born babe, striding the blast...

Atomisation 1

When we nowadays talk, as we so frequently do, about 'communication', we often are referring to techniques to facilitate primarily verbal communication between physically distant individuals: the (nearly obsolete) letter, the telephone, the email, 'social media' - even blogging, though now we are getting more into the territory of publication rather than inter-personal communication.

It must have been very different in the days of settled societies, when personal mobility was heavily circumscribed. People of course talked to each other, but personal social interaction was not necessarily verbal. It consisted to a considerable extent in simple physical presence in the course of quotidian lives, in the interchange of goods and services. That was not necessarily stimulating, but the unexamined assumption that stimulation is always beneficial is a product of our own times.

It is significant that we do now talk about communication so much - its success or failure, its techniques; despite its unprecedented quantity in our time, it is always thought there is not enough of it, that the solution to all problems lies in 'more' or 'more effective' communicaton. There is far less consideration of what we might be communicating or of whether it is desirable that we should seek to develop new realms within ourselves for communication. With it of course goes the whole modern fixation with the virtues of 'self-expression'. In modern times the unexpressed life is the life not worth living.