One thing that seems to entertain my colleagues no end is how averse I am to getting in a taxi. I'm not a big fan of taxis, the only reason I can think for this is that I don't like being beholden to a single stranger on a one-to-one basis and being forced to spend my time in what is essentially their space. In a train, the driver has their own personal space and they are not there solely to transport me personally. I don't have to have an awkward conversation with a train driver, I don't have to quietly ignore the fact that I disagree strongly with many of their views for fear that disagreement will stop the train from reaching its destination. If the Brexit vote has shown me anything, it is that I am generally happier being ignorant to what most of my fellow citizens think, and fortunately what's left of British reserve still displays itself on public transport where I may remain essentially anonymous and untroubled by the opinions of others. Also I like driving (although this may have something to do with how infrequently I actually do it), so having to pay someone to do something that I'd rather be doing myself - my way - seems fairly masochistic to me.
So you can probably guess that I'm not the biggest Uber fan to start with. I mean it's like someone looked at all the things I don't like about taking taxis and thought "how can we make him just a little bit more uncomfortable?" The answer of course is:
a) make it clear that you really are just sat in someone else's car
b) make it explicit that your driver is judging you and that judgement has consequences beyond the current journey.
That is not to say that I haven't used Uber at all, I have the app and in an emergency I'll use it. About a year ago I was stood outside the lobby of my hotel in Hong Kong at 5.30am waiting for a taxi to take me to the airport. A typhoon was heading for the city and the T8 (the point at which you are not supposed to travel - the signal everyone wants before office hours, but not during) was expected just after 6am. It was already getting wet and pretty windy and all the regular taxis were heading in the opposite direction with their lights turned off. After a few minutes of the porters trying in vain to flag me a taxi, I turned to Uber. Of course the app dutifully told me that due to demand the price of my journey had doubled, but I wasn't that bothered: free market economics, supply and demand, and (ahem) it was going in expenses anyway. So five minutes later a Prius turned up with a young driver only to happy to race a typhoon to the airport. The T8 was raised about halfway to the airport, but we made it fine and my plane left on time (one of the last to do so that day I believe). In such circumstances I couldn't help but be grateful for the pure market force that Uber unleashes, regardless of the potential risk the driver would be taking on his return journey, a risk he essentially balanced against a reward of effectively an extra £20. Of course you can't rule out the possibility that he was doing it for the kicks. People in Hong Kong often drive for Uber as a hobby, meaning that it's not uncommon to hail a regular Uber and get a ride in a Tesla. I guess it's an excuse to do more driving in a car that is unlikely ever to leave the city, plus it earns them a little petty cash. I can't imagine that, in a city that expensive, many people earn their primary living driving for Uber.
In London, of course, is is a different matter and there are plenty of people who now rely on Uber to make a living. I'm sure many of them are thankful for many of the light touch aspects of their relationship with their employer, although obviously Uber would argue that it is not their employer, so as not to have to take responsibility for their welfare. Indeed Uber seemingly doesn't like to take responsibility for anyone's welfare, as it turns out they've been a little sketchy about doing their drivers' background checks, and perhaps more disturbingly about reporting incidents in their drivers' cars to the police. Basically they're not keen on dealing with anything that would involve taking responsibility for the processes that generate their revenue in the way that a normal company would have to. Uber is like the teenage younger brother of the tech giants, it sees that they get away with dodging taxes and not taking responsibility for nazi propaganda on their servers and thinks "the world owes me a living for my genius, I basically don't have to do anything in return, they should thank me for making the world a better place." And this is the problem, tech companies are so pleased with themselves for changing the world that they think that means they don't have to think about the consequences of that change. Of course the biggest problem is that we don't expect them to.
Uber have famously run into problems in London, with TFL refusing to renew their license. This seems fair enough to me. We wouldn't allow an airline to fly planes if they didn't comply with CAA regulations, so why would we let a taxi firm operate in a city if they don't conform to the local transport regulator's guidelines? Of course Uber would argue that they are not a taxi firm, but a platform that allows individual taxi drivers to connect with customers. Be that as it may, to the user it is Uber that offers the service and it is a regulated seruyvice. Even if they treat both their drivers and passengers as customers (which they don't) they are still the company providing that service within a regulated space. Just because they have managed to find a way to avoid paying most of the costs of operating a taxi firm, doesn't mean that they can avoid the responsibilities.
Of course this being the internet age, Uber instantly set up an online petition and half a million people were only too happy to sign it, because never mind a government selling arms to repressive regimes or a thousand other things you could add your digital signature to petitions against, never mind the fact that regulations around transport are designed to keep people safe (just like regulations around fire safety in buildings), people want stuff that's cheap and convenient, and that's what they'll sign a petition for. So if you signed that petition and your Uber catches fire and burns you to death, or your Uber driver attacks you because he's a psychopath and his background checks were incomplete, or your Uber is involved in a crash in which you're injured but you have no recourse to compensation because it turns out it wasn't properly insured, just remember that's what you wanted, you signed a petition asking for it. Well done you.
I am not saying any of these things will happen if you get an Uber, but without proper regulation, there is no way of knowing they won't. Increasingly companies rely on us prizing convenience over pretty much everything else to justify a world in which they have no responsibilities. Every day we sacrifice a little more of our privacy, our safety or our children's future for a marginal increase in convenience and large corporations use our ambivalence to the consequences to justify taking no responsibility. Indeed it seems they can rely on us rallying to their defence when upstart public bodies try and do something in our better interest. It turns out that we'll do more in the name of convenience than we will in the name of safety, social justice or humanity. Not only do we ignore things that may be in our best interests, but we resent them, we actively work against them. When you think about it, it's hard not to conclude that we deserve whatever is coming our way in the near future, when we've become utterly infantilised fat blobs staring at our phones, waiting for our pizza/taxi/blowjob to turn up whilst the forest fires/hurricanes/floods carry off our worthless, useless bodies.
Friday 13 October 2017
Friday 29 September 2017
Photo realist
As part of a general clear out I have been going through all my photos, the physical ones. I'm throwing a lot of them away, I mean obviously the destruction of hundreds of photos of unknown people's feet in unidentifiable locations will be a tragic loss to the world, but in the name of space saving, they have to go. The sorting process has been a trip down memory lane for me, at least when I come across a photo of a person. It turns out that I am actually not that fascinated by all the unidentifiable buildings ("erm... another cathedral... Bourges?"), forests, hilly landscapes and urban wastelands that I have visited in my life. It turns out that all those photos are just a needless byproduct of being a pretentious tit and they're going in the bin.
Of all the photos left, all the wheat in this sea of chaff, Miss P was heard to comment that "photos from the 90s are so grungy", and on both a conceptual and visual level I guess she'd be right. She clearly saw this as a big minus. Me, not so much. That is my past, it is filled with memories (mainly happy - who takes photos of unhappy events? Christmas excluded of course*) and they are not diminished by the fact that many of the photos are out of focus, or badly framed, or the fact that I (and almost all of my male friends) have long centre-parted curtains in many of them. That is how we were, and close enough to how we looked to aide the recollection of the events documented. When we took photos and then put them in albums or boxes, or wherever, that was all they were: an aide memoir, a register of the highlights of our lives.
Photographs obviously still serve the purpose of capturing memories, indeed I think I may have previously argued that we are in some way outsourcing our memories to social media via the images that we store there. However, the other aspect of this method of storage changes the images and their purpose significantly. I read recently that the average young person takes 20 versions of each selfie before deciding which one to share with the world and presumably delete the rest. This must consume a hell of a lot of time, presumably making selfie taking and editing an activity in itself.
"What did you do at the weekend?"
"Oh, mainly selfies."
Not that all the hours of my youth were gainfully employed. I've been thinking about this recently and marvelling at the amount of time I spent basically doing nothing. What luxury. The internet basically allows people to socialise these periods of doing nothing, to rebrand them as productive periods, because god forbid we should be idle even in our leisure time. Everything must have a product, we must always be promoting ourselves at the very least; winning at the game of life and that means being seen to be winning at the game of life. The photos of my youth are largely dull and inconsequential, but then so are most of the photos on most Instagram accounts, it's just that they are presented as having significance. And if we start to believe that presentation is significance, then we stop bothering to look for significance or meaning in anything else.
I am old enough for many of my friends to be managing 'millennials', and there is a constant refrain that they are obsessed with position and promotion without really understanding the need to become expert (or even competent) at your current job first. Whilst the ambition is impressive, the lack of understanding of the substance that needs to back up that ambition is worrying. I'm probably being alarmist and massively out of touch and I'm sure I'm the mug for working myself to the bone in the hope of (relatively) meagre reward. In all likelihood work itself will change massively and sooner or later the only requirement for a management position will be an impressive portfolio of photos of you looking managerial.
To the outside observer, most of the activities of my youth were dull and inconsequential, but to me they were significant and life affirming. We took photos of them occasionally to remember the event, not to present it to the world. Indeed we often worried that the 'world' (and especially our parents) might see them. Of course, all the statistics seem to suggest that we had better reason than any other generation to be wary of sharing details of our leisure activities. We were so busy doing things our parents wouldn't approve of that we forgot to get identified as a generation (for the last time we are not generation X, they were older and more boring). Of course it's hard to know if the suspicion over sharing our lives came from the nefarious nature of the activities themselves or whether the lack of an easy platform to share meant that we tried more nefarious activities out of boredom. Either way we grew up less scrutinised and less polished. The photos prove it: they are terrible. With no concept of needing to present, there is no need to conform to a definition of good presentation. If you are not constantly subjected to the image of conformity, you are less likely to feel the need to conform. My generation consumed only the media they deemed fit, not the media that was deemed fit for them. As a teenager, my worldview was formed almost exclusively by the NME, Melody Maker, Select, the Word, Naked City and Eurotrash. It was a very narrow worldview, but equally it was (relatively) distinct, it was not informed by a standardised aesthetic or dictated by the tyranny of the majority. Your teenage years are the time when you are allowed to experiment, to find your place in relation to society. By definition social media require that place to be somewhere inside of society, a society defined and regulated by its media. Is it surprising then that the youth of today confirm so neatly to what society expects as good behaviour when they consider every aspect of their lives in terms of it being submitted for review? Orwell's dystopian vision was of a malevolent state judging its citizens' actions against its own interests, but perhaps just as frightening is an extra-national, extra-governmental entity judging all citizens actions against an ever shifting set of criteria based largely on commerce and prejudice. Even more scary is its citizens' willingness to submit to the scrutiny and to conform. God help us if someone does work out how to control all those criteria, especially if that someone is Robert Mercer.
Obviously I'm biased, my generation had freedom from the tyranny of internet judgement and we did what we pleased; we liked the idea of sticking it to the man or changing the world, but were largely too wasted to actually get round to doing it. Many millennials seem genuinely motivated to change their world and appear to have at their disposal a fantastic tool to do so. But I can't help but worry that internet activism ends up being just another one of the criteria of conformity: with your 'cause' being simply another aspect of your online identity, just as subject to the judgements of the moral majority as your selfie haircut. There is no doubt that the photographs of my youthful activities are not pretty, indeed they could accurately be described as grungy, but they recorded the activities that me and my friends chose, not those in which the rest of the world expected to see us engaged.
*I think I count Christmas as a neutral mainly
Of all the photos left, all the wheat in this sea of chaff, Miss P was heard to comment that "photos from the 90s are so grungy", and on both a conceptual and visual level I guess she'd be right. She clearly saw this as a big minus. Me, not so much. That is my past, it is filled with memories (mainly happy - who takes photos of unhappy events? Christmas excluded of course*) and they are not diminished by the fact that many of the photos are out of focus, or badly framed, or the fact that I (and almost all of my male friends) have long centre-parted curtains in many of them. That is how we were, and close enough to how we looked to aide the recollection of the events documented. When we took photos and then put them in albums or boxes, or wherever, that was all they were: an aide memoir, a register of the highlights of our lives.
Photographs obviously still serve the purpose of capturing memories, indeed I think I may have previously argued that we are in some way outsourcing our memories to social media via the images that we store there. However, the other aspect of this method of storage changes the images and their purpose significantly. I read recently that the average young person takes 20 versions of each selfie before deciding which one to share with the world and presumably delete the rest. This must consume a hell of a lot of time, presumably making selfie taking and editing an activity in itself.
"What did you do at the weekend?"
"Oh, mainly selfies."
Not that all the hours of my youth were gainfully employed. I've been thinking about this recently and marvelling at the amount of time I spent basically doing nothing. What luxury. The internet basically allows people to socialise these periods of doing nothing, to rebrand them as productive periods, because god forbid we should be idle even in our leisure time. Everything must have a product, we must always be promoting ourselves at the very least; winning at the game of life and that means being seen to be winning at the game of life. The photos of my youth are largely dull and inconsequential, but then so are most of the photos on most Instagram accounts, it's just that they are presented as having significance. And if we start to believe that presentation is significance, then we stop bothering to look for significance or meaning in anything else.
I am old enough for many of my friends to be managing 'millennials', and there is a constant refrain that they are obsessed with position and promotion without really understanding the need to become expert (or even competent) at your current job first. Whilst the ambition is impressive, the lack of understanding of the substance that needs to back up that ambition is worrying. I'm probably being alarmist and massively out of touch and I'm sure I'm the mug for working myself to the bone in the hope of (relatively) meagre reward. In all likelihood work itself will change massively and sooner or later the only requirement for a management position will be an impressive portfolio of photos of you looking managerial.
To the outside observer, most of the activities of my youth were dull and inconsequential, but to me they were significant and life affirming. We took photos of them occasionally to remember the event, not to present it to the world. Indeed we often worried that the 'world' (and especially our parents) might see them. Of course, all the statistics seem to suggest that we had better reason than any other generation to be wary of sharing details of our leisure activities. We were so busy doing things our parents wouldn't approve of that we forgot to get identified as a generation (for the last time we are not generation X, they were older and more boring). Of course it's hard to know if the suspicion over sharing our lives came from the nefarious nature of the activities themselves or whether the lack of an easy platform to share meant that we tried more nefarious activities out of boredom. Either way we grew up less scrutinised and less polished. The photos prove it: they are terrible. With no concept of needing to present, there is no need to conform to a definition of good presentation. If you are not constantly subjected to the image of conformity, you are less likely to feel the need to conform. My generation consumed only the media they deemed fit, not the media that was deemed fit for them. As a teenager, my worldview was formed almost exclusively by the NME, Melody Maker, Select, the Word, Naked City and Eurotrash. It was a very narrow worldview, but equally it was (relatively) distinct, it was not informed by a standardised aesthetic or dictated by the tyranny of the majority. Your teenage years are the time when you are allowed to experiment, to find your place in relation to society. By definition social media require that place to be somewhere inside of society, a society defined and regulated by its media. Is it surprising then that the youth of today confirm so neatly to what society expects as good behaviour when they consider every aspect of their lives in terms of it being submitted for review? Orwell's dystopian vision was of a malevolent state judging its citizens' actions against its own interests, but perhaps just as frightening is an extra-national, extra-governmental entity judging all citizens actions against an ever shifting set of criteria based largely on commerce and prejudice. Even more scary is its citizens' willingness to submit to the scrutiny and to conform. God help us if someone does work out how to control all those criteria, especially if that someone is Robert Mercer.
Obviously I'm biased, my generation had freedom from the tyranny of internet judgement and we did what we pleased; we liked the idea of sticking it to the man or changing the world, but were largely too wasted to actually get round to doing it. Many millennials seem genuinely motivated to change their world and appear to have at their disposal a fantastic tool to do so. But I can't help but worry that internet activism ends up being just another one of the criteria of conformity: with your 'cause' being simply another aspect of your online identity, just as subject to the judgements of the moral majority as your selfie haircut. There is no doubt that the photographs of my youthful activities are not pretty, indeed they could accurately be described as grungy, but they recorded the activities that me and my friends chose, not those in which the rest of the world expected to see us engaged.
*I think I count Christmas as a neutral mainly
Wednesday 27 September 2017
Plane Privilege
I have always loved flying. From the first time I got in an aeroplane age 9 to fly to Majorca, I've loved it. I find take off thrilling: the momentary sense of falling when the plane first leaves the ground, everything rapidly shrinking to model then map scale, the clouds flicking past, the guaranteed blinding sunshine. I love it. I never ever get tired of looking out of aeroplane windows (unless it's nighttime and cloudy below). It is a massive privilege that no human ever experienced until about 110 years ago and, if we carry on the way we're going, no human will be able to experience in 110 years time.
In the last 18 months I have flown over 130,000 miles for work and that is not a brag, I am slightly ashamed of that fact. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working off my carbon footprint. Most of the time when I fly back home, my flight is the first to land in Heathrow and I always think about my friends who endlessly tweet about plane noise from Heathrow early in the morning. Sorry guys.
Such a ridiculous amount of flying inevitably brings with it 'rewards': I have fairly rapidly climbed through the ranks of the frequent flyer programme of a well known airline and have recently reached 'the top' (although people who care about these things assure me that there is a special club for people who presumably rarely actually ever get off a plane) only to discover that the first class lounge seems designed solely to hide all the total pricks who think that flying a lot makes them automatically superior to everyone else, so that you good people don't have to put up with them striding around and bellowing into their phones anywhere else in the airport. In my limited experience of them, first class lounges are barely any nicer than their business class counterparts. They always have champagne, but often less choice of other things. What pervades in all that I have encountered is the overwhelming sense of entitlement emanating from their occupants. There is a feeling that being afforded the massive privilege of being able to travel vast distances comfortably and quickly, whilst being plied with free booze and food in some way renders them übermensch. Once you begin to believe this fallacy, there is no end to the shitty ways you think it is acceptable to behave. I have seen a man sit in his aeroplane seat and watch whilst a member of cabin crew picked his work up from the floor and put it away in the overhead locker. He did not thank her. He was not busy doing anything else, he was simply sitting there watching, being fat and self-important. No one in business class ever seems to look out of the window. No one ever seems to gaze down at the world in wonder. I'm sure there are others, but usually it feels like it's just me who stares out of the top deck of an A380 and wonders how the hell it's going to get off the ground.
This a shame, but I guess it is the shame of all privilege: that those party to it will rarely take the time to appreciate it. They are either too accustomed to it to understand that it is a privilege or too busy worrying if someone else has more. That is most notably the case when you are able to fly in comfort, but to some extent all flying is a privilege that will always be afforded to only a minority of humanity past, present and future. Maybe remember that next time you get the opportunity to gaze down on your world from 30,000 feet.
In the last 18 months I have flown over 130,000 miles for work and that is not a brag, I am slightly ashamed of that fact. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working off my carbon footprint. Most of the time when I fly back home, my flight is the first to land in Heathrow and I always think about my friends who endlessly tweet about plane noise from Heathrow early in the morning. Sorry guys.
Such a ridiculous amount of flying inevitably brings with it 'rewards': I have fairly rapidly climbed through the ranks of the frequent flyer programme of a well known airline and have recently reached 'the top' (although people who care about these things assure me that there is a special club for people who presumably rarely actually ever get off a plane) only to discover that the first class lounge seems designed solely to hide all the total pricks who think that flying a lot makes them automatically superior to everyone else, so that you good people don't have to put up with them striding around and bellowing into their phones anywhere else in the airport. In my limited experience of them, first class lounges are barely any nicer than their business class counterparts. They always have champagne, but often less choice of other things. What pervades in all that I have encountered is the overwhelming sense of entitlement emanating from their occupants. There is a feeling that being afforded the massive privilege of being able to travel vast distances comfortably and quickly, whilst being plied with free booze and food in some way renders them übermensch. Once you begin to believe this fallacy, there is no end to the shitty ways you think it is acceptable to behave. I have seen a man sit in his aeroplane seat and watch whilst a member of cabin crew picked his work up from the floor and put it away in the overhead locker. He did not thank her. He was not busy doing anything else, he was simply sitting there watching, being fat and self-important. No one in business class ever seems to look out of the window. No one ever seems to gaze down at the world in wonder. I'm sure there are others, but usually it feels like it's just me who stares out of the top deck of an A380 and wonders how the hell it's going to get off the ground.
This a shame, but I guess it is the shame of all privilege: that those party to it will rarely take the time to appreciate it. They are either too accustomed to it to understand that it is a privilege or too busy worrying if someone else has more. That is most notably the case when you are able to fly in comfort, but to some extent all flying is a privilege that will always be afforded to only a minority of humanity past, present and future. Maybe remember that next time you get the opportunity to gaze down on your world from 30,000 feet.
Thursday 23 February 2017
Potholes in my lawn
When I get to the end of my life, one of the only concrete achievements I will be able to point to is the fact that I was once in a band that released an album. We even got a single of the week in the NME the week of my 21st birthday, which was back when the NME was still cool. I know, right! Occasionally, when I'm worried people see nothing but the middle aged professional systems geek me, I wheel out these facts to prove that I was once marginally cool. If my guests are particularly (un)lucky I'll wheel out the album at a dinner party, or at least queue it up on Spotify (I don't actually own a physical copy).
It was on just such an occasion that I went searching for our album on Spotify and came up blank. It wasn't there. It had disappeared. I looked in a playlist where it had been (not that I listen to it all the time mind you) and found that it wasn't there. Some time later I found an option in Spotify that shows or hides 'unplayable' tracks and when I changed this setting, the album reappeared although only as a set of greyed-out tracks that were no longer playable. As the days went past, I noticed a whole bunch of tracks by other (more significant) artists were also greyed out. For whatever reason some music had simply been removed from Spotify. I had no way of knowing if that is because of licensing issues, artist refusal, administrative incompetence or some other reason entirely; all I knew was it was no longer available. I only knew this because I went looking and changed the default settings on my account, had I not been such a vain tosser I might never have noticed that music disappears off my playlist all the time. In effect Spotify has final say over what music I listen to. Obviously with music, there is a simple solution to this: buy CDs or at least mp3s that are not then at the mercy of the whims or licensing negotiations of an Internet music provider. With other things it is not so easy. In the 19 years that it has been in existence, we have become very reliant on Google; we trust it to tell us everything that is out there, but how can we be sure that what google tells us is everything is everything. The truth is that we can't.
One of my favourite albums growing up was De La Soul's '3ft High and Rising'. I know every word of that album because I practically wore out a tape copy I'd borrowed off a neighbour when I was 13. I have a vinyl copy, but I never listen to it because my record player has been unplugged for 3 years (and also because I am extremely precious about it). This means that I never listen to that album, because it does not exist in the digital world. I have looked: it is not on Spotify, Apple Music or any other digital service that I am aware of. I'm reliably informed that this is because it doesn't have clearance for the myriad famous samples that appear on the album, samples that if you love that album are an instant hook into the original the first time you hear it: a pre-vetting of some great music, expanding the horizons of young hip hop fans the world over. Unfortunately the shortsighted commercial imperative of absolute copyright enforcement overrides any consideration of longer term financial gain through association and '3ft High and Rising' remains unavailable in any digital form. This means to all intents and purposes it no longer exists; as how much of our reality is defined by its online identity? The kids could go looking for it in record shops, but they're unlikely to do so in any numbers as there is no awareness of it. Some might see the vinyl revival as a sign that the kids are turning away form the digital world, but mainly they are buying novelty vinyl versions of digital tracks, or popular classics on reissue. Vinyl records look retro cool above all else; an instagram fad for a generation of image collectors.
In the pre-digital world there was always a popular version of the cultural truth that was occasionally contradictory to, and occasionally complimented by subcultures. Now there is no 'subculture' that can exist without the validation of the popular cultural truth, as this is defined. Really there is no subculture, because all culture is validated and defined by the framework of the digital hegemony. Furthermore, cultural history is filtered through that same framework: there are many albums from my youth that I cannot find online and so do not really exist in cultural fact any more. Whilst some people will fight for the right to be forgotten online, there will be vast chunks of late 20th and very early 21st century culture that will be forgotten simply because they never existed online in the first place. Im sure it was always the case that chunks of cultural history just disappeared, but at least in the past they would have been forgotten due to any number of random factors, not just the binary dead hand of digital commerce.
This week Google and Microsoft announced that they will put illegal file sharing sites further down the rankings of their search results. We should note this, because this is how your reality is now defined: extreme right wing organisations can make up anything and remain right at the top of search engine rankings, but if someone wants to share music without paying for it, that's too morally repugnant for us to be exposed to. I am not a defender of music piracy in particular, but its singling out for banishment from search engines certainly speaks to the priorities of the companies who govern what form of truth we are exposed to. Unfortunately, we don't know what else we are being 'protected' from. We don't know what reality they have decided for us.
It was on just such an occasion that I went searching for our album on Spotify and came up blank. It wasn't there. It had disappeared. I looked in a playlist where it had been (not that I listen to it all the time mind you) and found that it wasn't there. Some time later I found an option in Spotify that shows or hides 'unplayable' tracks and when I changed this setting, the album reappeared although only as a set of greyed-out tracks that were no longer playable. As the days went past, I noticed a whole bunch of tracks by other (more significant) artists were also greyed out. For whatever reason some music had simply been removed from Spotify. I had no way of knowing if that is because of licensing issues, artist refusal, administrative incompetence or some other reason entirely; all I knew was it was no longer available. I only knew this because I went looking and changed the default settings on my account, had I not been such a vain tosser I might never have noticed that music disappears off my playlist all the time. In effect Spotify has final say over what music I listen to. Obviously with music, there is a simple solution to this: buy CDs or at least mp3s that are not then at the mercy of the whims or licensing negotiations of an Internet music provider. With other things it is not so easy. In the 19 years that it has been in existence, we have become very reliant on Google; we trust it to tell us everything that is out there, but how can we be sure that what google tells us is everything is everything. The truth is that we can't.
One of my favourite albums growing up was De La Soul's '3ft High and Rising'. I know every word of that album because I practically wore out a tape copy I'd borrowed off a neighbour when I was 13. I have a vinyl copy, but I never listen to it because my record player has been unplugged for 3 years (and also because I am extremely precious about it). This means that I never listen to that album, because it does not exist in the digital world. I have looked: it is not on Spotify, Apple Music or any other digital service that I am aware of. I'm reliably informed that this is because it doesn't have clearance for the myriad famous samples that appear on the album, samples that if you love that album are an instant hook into the original the first time you hear it: a pre-vetting of some great music, expanding the horizons of young hip hop fans the world over. Unfortunately the shortsighted commercial imperative of absolute copyright enforcement overrides any consideration of longer term financial gain through association and '3ft High and Rising' remains unavailable in any digital form. This means to all intents and purposes it no longer exists; as how much of our reality is defined by its online identity? The kids could go looking for it in record shops, but they're unlikely to do so in any numbers as there is no awareness of it. Some might see the vinyl revival as a sign that the kids are turning away form the digital world, but mainly they are buying novelty vinyl versions of digital tracks, or popular classics on reissue. Vinyl records look retro cool above all else; an instagram fad for a generation of image collectors.
In the pre-digital world there was always a popular version of the cultural truth that was occasionally contradictory to, and occasionally complimented by subcultures. Now there is no 'subculture' that can exist without the validation of the popular cultural truth, as this is defined. Really there is no subculture, because all culture is validated and defined by the framework of the digital hegemony. Furthermore, cultural history is filtered through that same framework: there are many albums from my youth that I cannot find online and so do not really exist in cultural fact any more. Whilst some people will fight for the right to be forgotten online, there will be vast chunks of late 20th and very early 21st century culture that will be forgotten simply because they never existed online in the first place. Im sure it was always the case that chunks of cultural history just disappeared, but at least in the past they would have been forgotten due to any number of random factors, not just the binary dead hand of digital commerce.
This week Google and Microsoft announced that they will put illegal file sharing sites further down the rankings of their search results. We should note this, because this is how your reality is now defined: extreme right wing organisations can make up anything and remain right at the top of search engine rankings, but if someone wants to share music without paying for it, that's too morally repugnant for us to be exposed to. I am not a defender of music piracy in particular, but its singling out for banishment from search engines certainly speaks to the priorities of the companies who govern what form of truth we are exposed to. Unfortunately, we don't know what else we are being 'protected' from. We don't know what reality they have decided for us.
Wednesday 15 February 2017
Pelican
I'm forever amazed by people who stand at pelican crossings waiting for the lights to change, but not pressing the button. They appear genuinely ignorant to the fact that the lights will not change if they do not press the button. Eventually, many just cross the road in exasperation, tired of waiting for lights that appear to be never going to change. I find this astounding because it hints at a lack of understanding of the world that I couldn't bear to live with. I realised the other day that I know the phases of all my local traffic lights. I imagine that this is not unusual, but maybe it is. Possibly many more people know the phases of their local traffic lights without realising it, but I'm not sure how many people actively consider this knowledge to be something that contributes to their sense of place or identification with their local area. It is entirely possible that I am what would these days be described as 'a little bit on the spectrum', that this would account for some of how I familiarise myself with an area being about a high level familiarity with the basic mechanics of that area. I'm not saying I stand at road junctions and learn the phases of the traffic lights, I too am barely consciously aware of the process of gaining this knowledge. I just realised it for the first time the other day. I guess the difference comes at the point when one is assessing an unfamiliar road junction, which one does based on an accumulated knowledge of all similar or comparable road junctions. However, if we assume this approach is common to all, there are a startling number of people who have not yet established that where a set of pedestrian lights are not at a road junction, they will not change to favour the pedestrian until the button is pushed. There are a startling number of people who don't press the button when it's there, just in case. There are a startling number of people who have no active or intuitive understanding of even the most basic technology in their environment. I personally find this worrying.
As we increasingly rely on technology to make decisions for us, the idea that we may not have even a cursory understanding of how those decisions are made is deeply troubling. I'm not saying that I am fully aware of the intricate workings of the Google algorithms, but I understand the broad principles behind them and I think about the rules that they operate by. Not all the time, not when I'm looking for a single piece of information that I am in little doubt will have a single answer (or am aware of the context that will confirm that piece of information for me). But when I am looking for more subjective information, I will know to filter the results, which I will do based on my own bias rather than any knowledge of how to account for algorithmic bias. Quite often I'll filter based on a single news agency, sometimes before I even search, so I'm not necessarily even exposing myself to all the options before limiting them. This is possibly because I am a old enough to approach information on the World Wide Web with with the pre-web view of single source news from a trusted source. Of course this allows for an understanding of the bias at work; I often find the opinions in the Guardian infuriating, but at least I understand the context in which they are generated; if I were to read a piece in the Times about the BBC I would understand the context that it is only ever viewed as a limit to potential revenue for News International. I know that the facts presented will be as accurate as they can be, accounting for the omissions of each bias, because a newspaper trades on its reputation as a purveyor of truth and so must be wary of straying too far from it. Google and Facebook actively avoid any claims to be a source of truth, yet that is how we think of them and they certainly don't discourage that view. As consumers of news, information or facts we need to be aware of the source; the 'delivery platforms' - the new intermediaries of news - can obfuscate source whilst fooling us into ascribing the trust that we would normally reserve for a news agency to the information that they deliver unvalidated, unverified and seemingly unfiltered. Of course we should also be aware that this last is not true: in an attempt to tailor our experience, to make the data we receive 'more relevant' (mainly in order to determine what advertising we will respond to best) the delivery platforms do filter our data, heavily. They give us the information they think we want, regardless of its source or veracity. This distinction is important: the delivery platforms tell us what they think we want to know, whereas a traditional news agency will tell us what they think we ought to know. When approaching information from each of these sources we don't need to know anything more about the process involved in delivering that information as long as we are aware of the principle that underpins it.
We don't need to know the details of the wiring of our local traffic lights, but it helps to know when to push the button.
As we increasingly rely on technology to make decisions for us, the idea that we may not have even a cursory understanding of how those decisions are made is deeply troubling. I'm not saying that I am fully aware of the intricate workings of the Google algorithms, but I understand the broad principles behind them and I think about the rules that they operate by. Not all the time, not when I'm looking for a single piece of information that I am in little doubt will have a single answer (or am aware of the context that will confirm that piece of information for me). But when I am looking for more subjective information, I will know to filter the results, which I will do based on my own bias rather than any knowledge of how to account for algorithmic bias. Quite often I'll filter based on a single news agency, sometimes before I even search, so I'm not necessarily even exposing myself to all the options before limiting them. This is possibly because I am a old enough to approach information on the World Wide Web with with the pre-web view of single source news from a trusted source. Of course this allows for an understanding of the bias at work; I often find the opinions in the Guardian infuriating, but at least I understand the context in which they are generated; if I were to read a piece in the Times about the BBC I would understand the context that it is only ever viewed as a limit to potential revenue for News International. I know that the facts presented will be as accurate as they can be, accounting for the omissions of each bias, because a newspaper trades on its reputation as a purveyor of truth and so must be wary of straying too far from it. Google and Facebook actively avoid any claims to be a source of truth, yet that is how we think of them and they certainly don't discourage that view. As consumers of news, information or facts we need to be aware of the source; the 'delivery platforms' - the new intermediaries of news - can obfuscate source whilst fooling us into ascribing the trust that we would normally reserve for a news agency to the information that they deliver unvalidated, unverified and seemingly unfiltered. Of course we should also be aware that this last is not true: in an attempt to tailor our experience, to make the data we receive 'more relevant' (mainly in order to determine what advertising we will respond to best) the delivery platforms do filter our data, heavily. They give us the information they think we want, regardless of its source or veracity. This distinction is important: the delivery platforms tell us what they think we want to know, whereas a traditional news agency will tell us what they think we ought to know. When approaching information from each of these sources we don't need to know anything more about the process involved in delivering that information as long as we are aware of the principle that underpins it.
We don't need to know the details of the wiring of our local traffic lights, but it helps to know when to push the button.
Wednesday 1 February 2017
Protest
Living in London and working in Surrey (mainly), I have the dubious honour of getting stuffed by both the train and tube strikes. As a hangover from my 'radical' youth, I default to unfettered support for anyone sticking it to The Man, even when they are making my life measurably more shit in the process. However, after several months of this fun and games, I am still not entirely sure what it is all about. I mean I understand the fundamental beef is about doing away with certain roles: manned ticket offices in the case of the tube and guards on trains opening and closing doors in the case of the trains. I think in both cases, the unions see these changes as the start of the process of getting rid of the staff associated with those jobs entirely. They're probably right: the companies involved will swear blind that they want to keep all the jobs, but if they make the job so meaningless that no one wants to do it, they will probably be able to get rid of the staff without firing most of them. This is a variation of the approach to privatising public services, where you starve it of cash, then complain that it's failing before selling it off to a company who can miraculously make a profit out of it with increased investment. However in this context the company are already making a profit, they just want to make more of a profit by getting rid of costly people. Helpfully, in the case of Southern Rail, they don't even need to risk their profits, as the government underwrites the franchise and pays all their fines. Fundamentally, the rail companies' mates in the government are using taxpayer money to break the unions on the this 'test case' so that when it happens on other franchises that they don't bankroll, the precedent has already been set and the unions have no support. Next time a Tory tells you they're all about competition and free markets, maybe explain this little bit of government intervention to prop up monopolies at the expense of the taxpayer.
However, whilst the process is unquestionably wrong and indefensible (unless you think that the purpose of government is to siphon taxpayers money straight to shareholders), I am less sure about the rectitude or otherwise of the outcome. In this instance probably only a little uncertain: having more human beings on trains and in stations is clearly preferable, as people are helpful in a range of situations. Also removing people from the service will not result in a cost saving to the consumer, as nothing ever does: train fares seem to be the one product that have an automatic increase built in, so cost savings are simply passed on to the shareholders as profits, along with a whole bunch of your taxes. So as a commuter, there is clearly no benefit to me in the changes that the unions are resisting. Of course the train operators will argue that the changes are merely a result of progress, of new technology etc. That may be so, but it doesn't necessarily equate to something better. It is not like there is a clear environmental impact of sacking railway workers. It's not like there being job losses in North Sea oil because the energy companies had finally decided to take renewables seriously. It would be hard to argue against that, although doubtless some unions would. The problem for the left is that increasingly workers' rights to remain in their jobs might well conflict with other concerns that impact humanity.
The labour movement was built on the assumption that, whilst the power structures that ruled heavy industry were wrong, the existence of that industry itself was unquestionable. Now that there is so much more to question about the industrial process and its impact on our world, a movement that defends employment at all costs no longer rules the moral high-ground. The automation of increasing numbers of jobs raises questions about labour as a concept, let alone as a movement. The left must think about how it protects workers' rights when traditional concepts of work are being deconstructed. Our value as data points in the information system will gradually overtake our value as more physical cogs in the machine. As companies look to exploit our data instead of our labour, we need to consider how we take back ownership of that means of production. At the moment there is no union defending those rights.
However, whilst the process is unquestionably wrong and indefensible (unless you think that the purpose of government is to siphon taxpayers money straight to shareholders), I am less sure about the rectitude or otherwise of the outcome. In this instance probably only a little uncertain: having more human beings on trains and in stations is clearly preferable, as people are helpful in a range of situations. Also removing people from the service will not result in a cost saving to the consumer, as nothing ever does: train fares seem to be the one product that have an automatic increase built in, so cost savings are simply passed on to the shareholders as profits, along with a whole bunch of your taxes. So as a commuter, there is clearly no benefit to me in the changes that the unions are resisting. Of course the train operators will argue that the changes are merely a result of progress, of new technology etc. That may be so, but it doesn't necessarily equate to something better. It is not like there is a clear environmental impact of sacking railway workers. It's not like there being job losses in North Sea oil because the energy companies had finally decided to take renewables seriously. It would be hard to argue against that, although doubtless some unions would. The problem for the left is that increasingly workers' rights to remain in their jobs might well conflict with other concerns that impact humanity.
The labour movement was built on the assumption that, whilst the power structures that ruled heavy industry were wrong, the existence of that industry itself was unquestionable. Now that there is so much more to question about the industrial process and its impact on our world, a movement that defends employment at all costs no longer rules the moral high-ground. The automation of increasing numbers of jobs raises questions about labour as a concept, let alone as a movement. The left must think about how it protects workers' rights when traditional concepts of work are being deconstructed. Our value as data points in the information system will gradually overtake our value as more physical cogs in the machine. As companies look to exploit our data instead of our labour, we need to consider how we take back ownership of that means of production. At the moment there is no union defending those rights.
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