Processing

Like so many other well meaning middle class lefties, I get an organic vegetable box. And not just any old veg box, a hyper localised community based north London vegetable bag scheme. The word ‘woke’ could be applied to every aspect of this scheme in a way that would guarantee Michael Gove would hate it on principle. I think I’ve made my point, it is truly righteous and unapologetically so. It is, of course, also managed entirely online. Putting aside the issues with exclusivity that this automatically imposes (and that I’m sure the scheme’s management committee have agonised about endlessly) it is relatively convenient. Apart from collecting my bag weekly and forgetting to book holidays, I don’t have much interaction with it day to day, although recently I have been so busy that I failed to notice that they’d moved to a new platform. When I finally caught up with their details of this move, I’m afraid I became the sort of middle aged moaner I never believed I could be (but secretly always have been). The reason for this outburst of grumpy old man syndrome? They’re changing my direct debit to a recurring card payment. So what? I put my card details in and forget about it right? No. My bank requests re-authentication of card payments every few months, which means a recurring card payment fails and I have to log back on to the website to input my payment details again. Even if my bank didn’t do this, I would have to re-input my card details every time I got a new card (either because it had expired or because it was defrauded due to being stored on an increasing number of websites that do recurring card payments). I never have to do that with direct debit. “So what?” I hear you say, “so you have to re-input your card details, it’s not a big deal. Is this all you’ve got to complain about when people are dying in horrific wars?” Well yes, there are horrific wars going on and I feel bad about that every day, but honestly nothing is going to be gained my me adding to the noise around that, although I may come back to that noise. Also my point isn’t that I have to input my card details every now and then and what a hassle that is, but that I have to do it when the technology already exists, and has existed for longer than internet commerce, to allow me not to have to do that. I keep being told that technology is going to make my life easier, so why do I keep finding examples of it making my life a bit more shitty?

Over the last few years all the great technological leaps forward we have been promised have turned out to be more effort for us. Crypto was supposed free us from the shackles of fiat currency and modern banking, building trust into the transactions, except it turned out you needed to know how to secure a crypto wallet in order for that ‘trust’ to mean anything and even if you mastered the technology, the chances were you’d just end up in a pyramid selling scheme. AI was supposed to write all the documents we couldn’t be bothered to write ourselves, except it turns out to be a bit shit, so we have to edit its output, or learn how to give it ‘the right prompts’ (in other words, pseudo programming with inconsistent outcomes). Hell, it turns out even self-driving cars need someone to drive them.

I think I wrote about this nearer the time, but in the early noughts when it was almost obligatory to have an iPod and spend hours converting your CDs to MP3s so you didn’t have to face the hassle of carrying around a CD Walkman and some CDs, I didn’t. I mean it wasn’t just my contrarian approach to trends, definitely being young and skint played a part, but mainly I didn’t see the point. I didn’t see why I should spend endless hours of my life ‘taping’ albums I already owned so I could listen to them. This struck me then as a failure of the technology that would ultimately be rectified, and it was, eventually. However, as in all things when it came to technology in the early noughts, Apple had set the trend, indeed the template, for how new technology should be adopted. The basic premise is, if you want to be an early adopter (which is a desirable thing to be obviously) you are going to have to work for your tech. I guess this was always an aspect of being an early adopter: you accept (in some cases even embrace) the fact that if you want to be first to use new technology, you’re going to be the one to find the bugs. This is born out of the DIY mindset of the home/college computing and garage startup communities. In those communities, early adopters were fellow geeks trying out beta versions of new tech to help out their friends or out of a sense of community duty, trusting that when their turn came, others would return the favour. Apple particularly has always leveraged coming ‘from’ this community, ever since Apple 1 kits were first assembled by home computing fans in the 1970s and in many ways they’ve been successful in retaining much of that community, for many years painting themselves in opposition to the always more corporate, always more overtly proprietary Microsoft. Along the way, they collected other niche communities, notably around design and creative industries, making sure everyone felt part of the club. There was always a sense that if you wanted to be in the club, you had to make sacrifices. In the bad old days that meant only being able to run the programmes that had been written for a Mac or only using files that were Mac compatible. So at the turn of the millennium there was a small army of devoted followers ready to sacrifice their spare time to be able to listen to their CDs at an inferior sound quality on a futuristic looking Walkman thing. A combination of all sorts of millennial nonsense meant that this small group of geeky types were somehow seen as mainstream cool for the first time. It was like Britpop but with tech. In the process, giving up your free time and labour to help develop/test/confugure your technology went from being something you did to be part of a community to something you did if you wanted the cool tech first. With the iPod, Apple enclosed the developer commons and made sure that we all thought it was a good idea to help them out. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countless giant corporations got massive by exploiting the labour of their workers, at the start of the 21st century, Apple got massive by exploiting the labour of their customers and capital has never looked back. All sorts of technology could be pushed out there without any content or real use case, often not entirely finished, but as long as it had a buzz about it, countless users could be relied on to find a use case for it/populate it/debug it. This is baked into the iOS release cycle, with no one who just wants to use their phone accepting the .0 release of a new version of iOS.

The car industry used to complain that it was only tech that was allowed to get away with this sort of thing, but then along came Elon Musk and cars were suddenly allowed to be sent out on the road needing regular massive software fixes. I mean it can’t be a coincidence that he’s the only space billionaire not to have flown in one of his own rockets. I joke, but obviously the Musk approach of building untested rockets and then blowing them up has entirely un-hilarious environmental consequences.

This world allows people to plough billions of dollars into something like ChatGPT and then claim that it is useful technology because people are using it. Weirdly ChatGPT has almost no actual use cases, but we’re told it’s the future and we should both be in awe of it and fear its apparent intelligence. Of course in the tech world that Apple built, OpenAI can rely on a veritable army of people willing to devote their spare time (or even their employer’s time if they can justify it) trying to find a use case simply because some rich bloke in California said there must be lots of them. Whenever I point out that ChatGPT is basically useless, someone responds by sending me some virtually unreadable copy that was generated by the LLM as an apparent rebuttal of my argument. To me this proves me right; to them it proves them right. Regardless, if someone cares about their output they are not going to just get ChatGPT to generate it and then send it out there unedited, they are going to have to trawl through it, fact checking and adding in a coherent narrative. Of course for the average tech evangelist this is all thoroughly acceptable, we have to make sacrifices for the technology to reach its full potential. So we carry on, increasingly doing the work that the technology is supposed to do for us in order to make it work. It is almost irrelevant whether AI becomes malevolent AGI and enslaves us all because we are already being trained to serve the machine.

This mentality doesn’t just work wonderfully for glorifying the provision of free labour and free ideas to the machines of capital, it is also really helpful for creating an impression that the machine is not at fault. In the 20th century we got used to the idea of corporate responsibility, which is a mechanism whereby a company becomes a form of being - a kind of meta person - and can therefore be blamed for any damage ‘it’ causes whether to people, property, the environment or the economy. Of course because it is not actually a person, a company cannot go to prison or be held truly accountable for its actions. Sure, companies can be fined and in very exceptional circumstances broken up, but largely they are just treated like giant children, who don’t really know better and occasionally need a slap on the wrist, whilst the board and executive that run the company (actual grown ups who allegedly do know better) get to make all the decisions that allow the company to inflict all the harms it does with impunity, because they are just acting ‘in the interest of the company’ (that interest being to make money for those same people). With the user developed product, this derogation of responsibility can be mediated through the product, especially if it is ‘AI’. In this instance the creators of the product can legitimately say they had not expected it to do a particular thing because they may genuinely not have. Much of the perception of ‘intelligence’ with current ‘AI’ comes from the fact that the level of complexity within the programme means that its programmers don’t know what it will do in many circumstances: a bit like assuming a coin is intelligent because you can’t predict whether it will land on heads or tails. But this unpredictability and the fact that it gets defined as intelligence is allowing companies to embed corporate (un)accountability in their products. Every time someone gets a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to do something stupid (so literally every day) the response is that they didn’t use the right prompts or that the model will be ‘trained’ to get the right answer by more people inputting these kinds of things, making the outcome either the fault of the user or the ‘naïveté’ of the algorithm. Of course in the world that Apple built, we are are happy to take on the responsibility for the harms caused by the algorithm as well as feeding it data and cleaning up its mess all on our own time.

It is hard to see how this leads to better technology, or even vaguely useful technology. If the aim is to create enough novelty around wasting people’s time whilst making sure you’re indemnified against the product causing harm, you will never even bother to try and create technology that even vaguely reaches for the lofty goals claimed by almost all tech firms. In this context, it’s hard to see any of the headline technology of the last 30 years as anything that solves a pre-existing problem, more as a novel way of doing an existing task or even just a novelty in search of a purpose. There is technology that has made positive changes in that time, but with a very few exceptions, it isn’t anything created by the most profitable or highest value companies in the history of the planet. Yet we still allow ourselves to be sold the idea of incomplete, untested, purposeless technology as a marker of progress and its subsequent ubiquity as a sign that it was needed.

As with everything it has ever done, Apple is not the inventor of this kind of reassignment of corporate responsibility to the user, famously when the plastics industry first foisted their not-actually-disposable-at-all packaging on humanity and the planet, they funded the first anti-littering campaigns, placing the responsibility for the non-biodegradable litter that they had created squarely in the hands of the consumer. Famously it worked too. My 6 year old child knows that littering is wrong but can see no problem with getting endless amounts of plastic tat from shops and vending machines (she will sometimes accept my feeble attempts to save the planet as a reason why she can’t have it though - baby steps). The problem with all new technology is that it takes this relationship as the basis for all products and services, and indeed promotes it as desirable. So we end up believing that everything is either our fault or the fault of other ‘consumers’. Due to the ubiquity of technology in our daily interactions, this mindset has permeated throughout society. We blame Brexit on the people who were convinced that years of austerity and neglect would be undone by ‘taking back control’. We blamed the 2008 financial crisis on subprime mortgage holders and tax payers (at least that’s who we made pay for it). ‘We’ blame the atrocities of 7th October 2023 on the Palestinians. ‘We’ blame the ensuing genocidal actions on the Israelis (some, even more incorrectly blame it on Jews). In all cases we blame the ‘users’ rather than the products, the citizens not the country, the people not the system. This is simply the replication over and over of the reactionary lie that people's circumstances are purely a result of their own actions and nothing to do with the systems that cynical elites bind them in and force their complicity with.

Whilst this remains the case, we’ll continue to spend our time fretting about whether we put the recycling in the right bin or what actual practical value we might possibly extract from ChatGPT whilst the world burns at an ever more alarming rate. We march onwards like the members of some weird death cult, grinning at the destruction we’re not being paid to wreak. Unless we stop and ask what all this stuff is actually for and whether it does actually benefit us un any way, or whether it’s just more work for us to do to enrich corporations at the expense of our health and future.

So I’m not going to apologise for questioning the payment service my veg bag supplier uses, I’m not going to apologise for questioning the orthodoxy of progress attached to anything new, especially if it is a new thing that simply reinforces old structures of power, exploitation, consumption and destruction (as most seem to be). It’s probably going to be a bit annoying for everyone around me, but only if they don’t like thinking about things.

Poverty

There are many ways to lose money. Being a 21st century parent is basically a license to do so. There is a point at which children realise that almost every TV programme has toys associated with it and, given that your average 6 year old can binge watch a single series of an entire programme in a few days, that carries the potential of multiple new toy demands per month. Such things can be shrugged off/put off till birthdays or Christmas, when the child will have inevitably moved on to another programme (inevitably just days before said occasion, after you’ve already bought the toys for the now passed fad), but sometimes something sticks, or you need a goal with an attached reward. This can be a toy but generally in the lower cost bracket this could be a (video) game.

As with almost everything in tech, games manufacturers are actually even better at squeezing cash out of you than the traditional ‘analogue’ media/toy tie-ins (to which they are also often corollary). The ‘free’ game with in app purchases model is hardly new, but it really has been finessed into an almighty piss-take in the world of kids' gaming. Witness the countless games where the free download contains one out of a possible ten small furry creatures with giant doe eyes or two out of a possible 20 locations. These are pretty obvious though, and funnily enough will either be accepted (and entered into the pantheon of pester) or rejected pretty quickly by my daughter. In many ways the more interesting games are the ones where everything is ostensibly ‘available’ but you either have to wait a genuinely long time (for a child, like 7 hours or 28 hours) for some of the most exciting items/features (even after you’ve earned the in-game currency to pay for them) or they’re priced in the game’s second currency, which can only be accrued at a glacial pace through gameplay. Of course waiting can be avoided or second currency can be instantly accrued through the simple application of the parent’s credit card. My daughter has a zoo building game that applies both of these concepts together: you can only buy certain things with serious amounts of the second currency and even the things you can pay for with the primary currency (such as zoo expansion) take an increasing amount of time to arrive after purchase unless secondary currency is deployed to get instant results. Obviously as a lefty liberal parent I find this repulsive and infuriating in equal measure. How dare these people attempt to make money from a game. Well not that, I don’t mind paying for things, it’s just I expect value for my money, what’s my ROI? If I drop £6 to pay for a game my daughter is going to play for a month or so, that seems bearable, if I have to pay £2.50 just to get her unicorn breeding program accelerated and then another £2.50 to expand the zoo in under a(n actual human) weekend and so on, I want real tangible results. I want to see a real fucking unicorn in my living room at the end of all that expenditure.

Perhaps by thinking about ROI (but excluding my woefully 20th century expectation of actual real world returns) is the right way to go about this. What is the game teaching my child after all, but the reality of the 21st century economy? The sooner she learns that you don’t really get anywhere in life without a serious injection of generational wealth the better. If a zoo game can help her realise the harsh reality behind her privilege then so much the better right? Except of course it isn’t teaching anything harsh, it is gamifying privilege. Kids will either get bored and quit, pester their parents into funding their success or (if they’re really determined) grind out the hours in soul crushing tedium to reach a fraction of the attainable goals. These are the only options allowable in the current version of the game of life. Those who don’t have a benefactor of some form are destined to struggle through or drop out altogether. I’m pleased when my daughter gets bored of these simulacra of modern capitalist orthodoxy and drops out, but this is also a form of privilege. There is nothing in this system that allows you to drop out without a benefactor and that is what needs to change.

When I was a kid and I didn’t like the way the world was structured or I thought it was unfair, I was told by my elders and betters to grow up because that was how the world works. Now I’m very much grown up, I realise that their absolutist view of the world was not only miopically incorrect but also part of the problem I had originally identified. I realise that it is easier to tell a child that there is no alternative to the orthodoxy, but unless you truly believe that (or you are too afraid of change to contemplate it) then you are simply reinforcing the dominance of that orthodoxy. The broken system in which we live is largely sustained by the fact that the assumptions underpinning it (endless growth, trickle-down wealth, the efficiency of private enterprise, an ideal 2% inflation, etc) are treated as immutable constants in the equations of life, liberty and happiness. We look at the propaganda of the past, at the unquestioned belief systems that underpinned the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church for example and comfort ourselves that we could never be so deluded as to commit so unquestioningly to a belief system. Yet here we are in the streets protesting against the few feeble attempts our rulers have been allowed by their paymasters to implement in an attempt to to avert a species wide catastrophe because we are so entirely convinced that the system is good for us, even as it makes us poorer, less healthy and more lonely each and every year.

So I’m not sure what response I want most from my child when she runs up against cold hard capital. In many ways a child is the ideal capitalist subject: driven solely by novelty and a desire for continuous accumulation. Refusing them their every desire doesn’t teach them the limits of happiness through acquisition, it merely confirms their place in the capitalist caste system, whilst maintaining (or even enhancing) the desire for greater consumption. It would be great to find a way that she can transcend the urge to endlessly consume, but I can’t exactly cut her off from literally all of society. For now I’m just content that when she discovers there is a fiscal limit to her desires, she says “I wish there wasn’t any money.”

Perfidy

Recently my feed on LinkedIn (such as it is) has been peppered with posts about various of the most ‘popular’ conspiracy theories. This is all thanks to a single colleague who I connected with because, well they seem nice enough in person, and we’d really only ever talked about work at work. I mean it’s LinkedIn, we’re connected because we’re colleagues and I’m not going to disconnect with someone because I don’t agree with them, I’d have to disconnect with solidly 80% of my connections in data science if I was to go down that path. But also it’s LinkedIn, I thought I got to avoid this type of nonsense by not being on Facebook. I’m expecting my LinkedIn feed to be full of cutesy marketing videos, baseless claims about AI tools that are going to solve all the world’s problems by 2025, meaningless motivational nonsense and the occasional interesting post from friends whose job is actually doing something to make the world a better place.

Anyway here I am, confronted with the ‘truth’ in my LinkedIn feed of all places and I have to say I’ve learned a lot from it. For example I wasn’t previously aware that the ‘fascist’ government of Jacinda Ardern (famous for that classic fascist move of relinquishing power of her own volition before her democratic mandate had expired) was responsible for killing tens of thousands of New Zealanders and covering up the fatal impacts of the coronavirus vaccine (along with the current administration, the mainstream media and every other government around the world). Some people would think that this is simply a conspiracy theory, but I’ve seen a link to a website that explains it. I’ve seen a video of someone sat in a car near where a whistleblower is being arrested (apparently unable to walk round the corner and video the actual arrest) talking about it. It turns out that whilst the truth is relatively easy to find, it’s very hard to document in the manner that everything else is documented these days.

Last week, Davos week, I was learning about the German farmers and how their ‘fascist socialist’ government is oppressing them by raising the price of diesel and banning fertiliser at the behest of Klaus Schwab and the WEF. In protest, they’re driving their tractors to Berlin and apparently are willing to drive all the way to Davos if they don’t get what they want, because compared to a hike in fuel duty, the diesel cost of driving a tractor the 850km from Berlin to Davos is nothing. Apparently this too is being ignored by the global mainstream media, because when a nation’s farmers protest it is usually headline news around the world. It turns out this is part of a conspiracy to stop us all eating meat and make food the preserve of global elites. Why else is Bill Gates buying up so much farmland?

I know very few of the verifiable facts in this case. I suspect the German government has increased tax on diesel and hasn’t exempted farmers. Maybe they’re also banning certain types of fertiliser that are causing considerable environmental damage. What I find amazing is that this fits conveniently into a grand conspiracy theory: the Great Reset, which I have to say I don’t really understand. What are these global elites trying to achieve by making us live in 15 minute cities and eat less meat? What’s their end game? Surely it’s easier to lord it over the proles by just giving them shit jobs, selling them junk food, junk tech, junk culture and raking in the profits? Surely there are more subtle ways to get power, say by letting government ministers holiday for free on your island/yacht/space ship. Surely there are easier ways to make money, such as taking advantage of conflict to increase the price of fuel or get governments to pay you ’free money’ to deliver poor quality ‘public’ services. But no, apparently the global elites are more concerned with controlling us, so we are a bit more healthy and a bit less destructive of the environment.

The are two problems here, the first being there is clearly some basis in fact for the claims made in these conspiracy theories. Some policy makers do indeed think that we should eat less meat and use less diesel (although not nearly enough in my opinion), but that is not a conspiracy, merely a response to the recommendations of countless scientists, who have actually looked into this stuff. Obviously the conspiracy theorists will conclude that the scientists are in on it, which leads to the second problem: there are conspiracies, just not the ones popularised in these theories. They can be arrived at by a simple process of looking at facts. As a scientist, what is going to make me more money, doing independent academic research that shows the products of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet are making that same planet uninhabitable, or doing ‘research’ funded by those very wealthy companies that casts doubt on the scientific consensus? As a scientist, what is my motivation for showing the cause and impacts of climate change? Why would I do what Klaus Schwab told me and why would I do it in collaboration with tens of thousands of scientists around the world? On the other hand if I’m an oil baron, hanging out with Klaus Schwab and my billionaire mates at Davos this week, what is my motivation to make people believe that the actions that would stop me accumulating obscene wealth at the expense of humanity’s survival are actually just part of a sinister global conspiracy? What indeed? It seems almost too obvious that those in power would help undermine the message that their wealth accumulation is killing people. Almost, but not. I suspect the reason people ignore the real ‘conspiracies’ is because they are so obvious as to be depressingly mundane.

The German farmers have every right to be angry, they should be protesting, against a system that forces them into debt to have to spend a quarter of a million euros on a tractor that relies on fossil fuels that will only rise in price, that has a support contract that means they have to pay the manufacturer for any repairs and can be sued if they attempt to repair their own tractor themselves. They should be protesting against a system that forces them to buy seeds that are genetically modified to need artificial fertilisers that are literally killing the land they are trying to grow things on. The people who make spectacular amounts of money out of these systems of exploitation must laugh all the way to the bank every time they hear people protesting based on conspiracy theories that add to their profits and obfuscate their impact. They must revel in the reputation washing that comes along with it. Bill Gates is the centre of many of the most preposterous conspiracies and he must love it, because the more he’s accused of putting 5G chips in our bloodstream via the covid vaccine or whatever, the more people look away from the very real harms caused by his extreme techno-solutionist neoliberalism, or even just his private jet use. There is a sinister conspiracy and if you like, you can see it centred around the WEF, after all that organisation believes “the world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations” (ie those who already have wealth and power), which is a fundamentally anti democratic position. The Great Reset was hilariously a policy put forward by the WEF as a way of mitigating the impacts of what they do. They saw it as throwing humanity a bone, a way to make the plebs feel considered as something other than resources, tiny cogs in the wheels of the apocalyptic money machine. So we should be angry at these people, they don’t really consider us as anything other than subjects, they don’t really have our best interests at heart and they do benefit from a system that oppresses, controls, manipulates and kills us. It’s called capitalism. I dream of a day when that conspiracy appears in my LinkedIn timeline.

Putrefaction

One of the most startling facts about the failure of the privatisation of our water system was that based on the current rate of replacement, it will take Britain’s water companies 2000 years to replace the existing water infrastructure. Whilst it doesn’t surprise me that the asset strippers currently running our privatised utilities don’t care what the long term impact of their actions is, I would have thought someone, somewhere would have given more thought to what the delivery requirements for a utilities company  might be and maybe, like, put some targets in place or something. Maybe a regulator or someone. Unfortunately, as both Ofgem and Ofwat have ably demonstrated, our utilities regulators are little more than a PR mediator for the utilities companies in their continuing mission to extract as much cash out of the public whilst flagrantly disregarding anything that could be described as regulation. How else does one account for the fact that the water companies make huge profits whilst our seas are literally full of shit?

I was visiting a friend who lives locally recently. Like me, they live in a Victorian terraced house that has been modified to a greater or lesser extent in line with each of the home redevelopment trends of the last 50 years. As anyone who has an old house built on London clay will tell you, these houses have cracks in them. This is not surprising, over 150 years a house is going to move a bit and the plaster is going to crack. What is surprising in my friend’s house is the size of some of those cracks. On the pavement outside one front corner of their house a fairly mature tree is sucking a lot of moisture out of the ground and causing that corner of the house to gradually sink down the hill. We’ve spoken about this and there’s some vague plan to look at underpinning the house with the neighbours at some point in future, “or maybe we’ll just plaster it up, sell it and let it be someone else’s problem.” To some extent we all do this, we make decisions about what we need to deal with in our house and what we can leave for the next person, it is just more pronounced in my friend’s case. Hopefully, due to the process of ownership change, some surveyor will identify the point at which is can no longer be deferred as someone else’s problem and becomes an issue that must be addressed, but that is not guaranteed, as anyone who has ever bought a house knows.

The field that my chosen profession exists in, data, is a crazy place to be. I’ve just been to a conference sponsored by a cloud data storage provider that has expanded almost exponentially over the 10 years of its existence (and certainly in the last five years). They deserve their success, their product is very good. However, it occurred to me during one of the sessions where someone was exalting their ability to let their customers scale endlessly that they were offering this without owning the physical infrastructure to back it up. Of course their product is cloud based and the cloud can scale quickly, that’s the whole point of it. However, because it’s cloud based, it sits on someone else’s cloud (be that Amazon, Google, Microsoft or let’s face it, no one else) and regardless of what each of the cloud providers want you to believe, these resources are not boundless or endless. They currently have enough capacity to absorb pretty much any request a single organisation (or even many thousands of organisations) can throw at them because they have truly massive warehouses full of servers just waiting to do some computing. These things are truly mind boggling in size and in mass very un-cloud like, but they are not infinite. They cannot grow endlessly. Sure the business plans for the companies that own these behemoths are to expand them, or build more where needed, but that is based ultimately on finite space and finite resources. Currently there is a lot of both, the cloud is a product of a certain kind of abundance, created by the bizarre economic conditions that come from never really fixing the problems of the 2008 crash, but even for the giants of tech, this too will eventually change. As Dwayne Monroe points out far more eloquently than I could, we won’t be piling all our data into the cloud in 100 years time, yet the ubiquity that we assume for such services causes us to make decisions about computing infrastructure that may have far reaching consequences.

In a different area, but possibly at the same scale, there is a classic xk:cd cartoon that depicts the whole of the World Wide Web being dependent on someone’s hobby project that they haven’t looked at for several months. The cartoon is funny because it is based in fact, there are several key pieces of web core code that are someone’s labour of love, and whilst I’m sure the repositories sit on GitHub and cold be forked and fixed in an emergency, the response cold easily similar to the pandemic COBOL hiring surge.

As states in America rolled out pandemic support packages at the start of the pandemic, the massive increase in usage of their online portals put a strain on their core benefits processing systems. These systems were programmed in COBOL and therefore very reliable, and consequently no one had touched them for years. When the demand on the systems caused by the unemployment surges of the pandemic occurred, they creaked a bit and no one in the various state IT departments knew what to do, so they put the call out. But COBOL is not a cool and trendy programming language, so there weren’t a hell of a lot of young people out there who knew how to write it. Ultimately, people stepped up, with some coming out of retirement to help with the work of enhancing the systems and some younger people choosing to be trained in the language. The knowledge within the COBOL community (and indeed the community itself) increased as a result, but what if covid hadn’t happened and more years had passed until these changes were needed? What if another 10 or 20 years had passed before a similar crisis had prompted such action? Many of the retired experts may have died and that contextual knowledge would have died with them. Obviously it’s ridiculous to say that all knowledge of the language would be lost, there are plenty of manuals, but the ability to respond quickly to required changes or to make urgent repairs would have vanished entirely. It would be interesting to follow up on those communities in a few years time, to see if that knowledge truly has been retained.

Since the 1970s the neoliberal idea that the market will solve humanity’s challenges, drive innovation and instil efficiency has prevailed. If you want to see the true effect of this playing out in an accelerated timeframe, the tech sector is the place to look. Each time a ‘new’* idea comes along, gangs of entrepreneurs seize upon its potential to be a solution and set about looking for problems to apply it to. Of course once they’ve run out of ways of trying to make their own lives easier (by getting literally everything brought to their door), they look to the perennial problems: what you and I might call public services. Because these perennial problems come with a guaranteed income stream and user base (or taxpayers as they’re commonly known), they are very attractive. Of course this new solution will do something exciting with whichever public service/utility it is applied to, so deserves to get all the majority of the money earmarked for that service/utility, regardless of how much of that money was really required for boring stuff like maintenance. It is understandable that the tech bros and VCs are novelty junkies, but when endless layers of novelty are piled on top of each other with no thought to underlying infrastructure, they become precarious.

In Hong Kong each slope is registered with an individual code, often very visible on a sign attached to it. Slopes are important there. The fact that the majority of the modern city is built on the side of, or at the bottom of a slope means that one of those slopes losing structural integrity due to a typhoon or monsoon rain would be catastrophic. The maintenance of slopes is therefore taken seriously by the highway maintenance department. People check these things, people maintain these things, it’s not massively sexy, but it is massively important. An acquaintance once told me, somewhat disparagingly, that Hong Kong has a policy of making sure everyone has something to do, so lots of people do cleaning or maintenance jobs. In the west we think of this as a waste of time, a waste of labour, inefficient, anticompetitive, demeaning, but what is lost if a person spends some of their day sweeping bits of a building and maybe doing a bit of light maintenance and then the rest of their time hanging out, being part of a community, just making sure nothing falls apart? The problem is, for the endless growth of modern capital to work, we must be persuaded that this is not enough. We must be distracted away from the everyday, from the mundane, from making sure that the basic infrastructure of our existence is functional. And as long as we keep layering novelty on top of novelty, underpinned by the assumption that the victorians engineered everything to last for eternity or that COBOL is in some way a self-sustaining language, or even that people will continue to care for the sick even when they are not paid enough to avoid ill health themselves, then we will carry on just fine until the day we discover that there is no longer actually anything under our feet. We are in effect becoming a Wile E Coyte society.

*these ideas are rarely actually new, the blockchain for example was invented in the 1990s, but yet in 2020 it was still being hawked as cutting edge technology

PPP

I have finally found myself at the true arse end of market capitalism. I am a man of privilege, these things don’t usually happen to me, but it is important to realise that the people who pay the people who run my country want this kind of thing to happen more often. It was a relatively trivial incident, but in what it represents it was deeply troubling.

I was stupid enough to go out for drinks with old friends in Shoreditch during the tube strike. When we finally left the pub later than we perhaps intended, my friends instantly got an Uber to their relatively cool bit of southeast London. I didn’t try Uber at first, my prejudice against loss making tech firms hell bent on destroying public transport infrastructure forced me to try another (probably equally exploitative) app. I put in my (still zone 3, but much less hip) destination and watched for a few minutes as the app failed to convince any drivers to drag their arses all the way out to my particular part of north London when there was a tube strike on and there was plenty of rich pickings to be had locally. The app asked if I wanted to go for a more expensive option. Sure I did, but none of the higher paid drivers were interested either. Exasperated, I swallowed my principles and opened Uber. Surely east London would be awash with drivers only too happy for a solid fare to the arse end of somewhere. It wasn’t. Again, various cars briefly flashed up on the display, presumably as drivers saw the route and thought “sod that”. I stared at my phone for several minutes more, but nothing resolved itself. I stared pointedly at the drivers in the parked cars across the road, all of whom I imagined were swiping left on me. No one wanted my fare. I cancelled the request and started walking. This is fine for me, I’m a middle aged white man, waking through the almost entirely gentrified environs of East and North London is an entirely innocuous experience for me. If I’d been a young woman it probably would have been fine too, but it might not have felt it. That is not the whole point though (even whilst being a pretty good one). 

I am an infrequent user of taxis and an even less frequent user of Uber but I still view it as a service. A few years ago, stood outside my hotel at 6am shortly after the T6 typhoon warning had been declared, with the concierge hopelessly waving at all the taxis heading home with their lights off, I turned to Uber. The app duly informed me that surge pricing was in effect, but that was no problem because work were paying. A 20-something local duly showed up in a mean looking Prius (if such a thing is possible) and drove me to catch the last flight out of Hong Kong before they closed the airport. This particular example, where the market triumphed, is the kind of thing Uber loves: I needed to catch my flight, I had the means and someone was happy to name a price for the required service. Market economics in effect, everyone wins, but what if there hadn’t been anyone available to drive me to the airport (unlikely in Hong Kong where people drive for Uber just for the excuse to drive - but still) or what if no one had wanted to ride the fine line around what typhoon rules apply when (again unlikely given Uber drivers in Hong Kong are mainly young men)? The market would have had no answer to that. No amount of money I could have offered would have got me a lift to the airport. Of course it was a much more mundane example that stranded me in Shoreditch on a Friday night a few years later: all available drivers simply believed they could get a better fare. I was not able to offer more money (or maybe I was and I just didn’t have the knowledge of how to game the market) and I was not able to talk to them to discuss terms. The market, mediated in this way, had failed me. I’m sure Uber’s response to this would be to add the ability to up the fare offer as a passenger (enhancing the concept of transport as commodity exchange), but that wouldn’t solve the problem for everyone. At some point the transport market would become unaffordable, or ~ if there is no one available supply side ~ simply unavailable. This is why we have public transport that gets you near to where you want to go for a fixed price: everyone knows how to use it, how much it will cost, when and where it is available. 

Companies like Uber have an open policy of wanting to undermine public transport infrastructure in order to create greater dependency on their products. And we should call them products; we can’t call them services if they don’t provide a service. The problem is they’re sold to governments and authorities as services, they are sold as alternatives to genuine service infrastructure, but they shouldn’t be. Increasingly the Uber model is creeping into all aspects of what used to be service provision. Cash strapped local authorities are presented these products by venture capital backed tech execs with examples of where they’ve delivered alternatives to infrastructure they’ve undermined elsewhere. It’s effectively free! It will cost you nothing (except possibly the increased marginalisation of your most vulnerable communities). The public servants are wowed, the tech bros move in with their heavily subsidised product and smother the existing service. Once they are the only game in town, like my Hong Kong taxi driver, they can charge what they want. And provide ‘services’ at their discretion: there is rarely any kind of agreement or service level expectations for these products. The tech firms have no actual agreements with the local authorities save any licences required to meet minimal requirements (and sometimes not even those - what’s a few million quid in fines to a tech giant?) and a few vague promises in some fancy PowerPoints. 

 Whilst the rest of us gradually fall out of love with the reality of a patchy service delivered by a flashy app, (mainly right wing or at least neoliberal) governments can’t help but keep falling in love with them. It’s only a matter of time before the public service one of these technological ‘innovations’ is more essential than public transport (assuming you don’t think that is essential enough) and people start dying because they haven’t got the money or the supply isn’t there. I’m sure many people think that couldn’t happen because such injustice would not go unnoticed, but it would. Big technology has the ability to deflect the responsibility for events it doesn’t facilitate, even when (according to its publicity) it should have facilitated them. In my case there is no evidence that I couldn’t get an Uber on that Friday night during the tube strike. There is no assessment of the root causes and plan to resolve the issue. As far as Uber is concerned, its product was working optimally that evening: matching available drivers with the customers they wanted to take. In this way, if we don’t stop it, our services will be replaced by products that obfuscate away any requirement to delivery, and public infrastructure as we know it will disappear in a cloud of vapour-service.* 

 *in tech the term vapourware refers to ‘software’, usually built for demonstration purposes, that is little more than a front end. It cannot undertake the genuine operations of the final product, although it can be set up to appear as if it is fulfilling these functions so a client can see what it should do. It seems fitting then to describe these products as vapour-services, as they only appear to deliver the service they intend to replace.

Profusion

For a certain type of middle aged man, what passed as entertainment even before the war in Ukraine was looking up facts about heat pumps on the internet. And so for a little while the suggested content pushed when I opened up YouTube on my phone was videos of heating engineers moaning about how much they hate heat pumps. Whether this is the only video content Google can find on heat pumps or whether this is the content certain vested interests have paid to be pushed whenever someone shows an interest in a profit-damaging shift away from fossil fuels I can’t tell. Either way it was depressingly tedious.  

Of course this way of serving content works and so eventually I found that I had watched the of best part of twelve minutes of some 50-something man in branded overalls listing all his grievances with heat pumps. As most of them seemed to be that they’re a bit of a faff to fit, they were easy enough to dismiss, but one fact stuck in my mind. It wasn’t a revelation to me, I knew it already, but the manner in which it was presented caused me to doubt, to worry, to genuinely reconsider whether I should be aiming to install a heat pump. It was the fact that a heat pump will only heat your radiators to 40-45°c. This is a much lower temperature than a regular combi boiler will pump out central heating. So I wondered, what if that means I won’t be able to heat my house in winter? What if I spend all this money doing the right thing only for my family to spend their winters wearing three jumpers round the house because of the input temperature of the fancy new system? 

Fortunately, I can experiment. My boiler has a temperature setting, so I set it to 45°c to see what would happen. Whilst the heating stayed on for longer each time it came on, it used less power and maintained a more consistent temperature throughout the house for longer. So what was the drawback? On the video, the heating engineer said the lower temperature means you won’t get the instant response of heating your home when you turn the heating on, and I’m sure you won’t, but that’s what programmable thermostats were invented for and also my experiment would tend to suggest that instant response is part of the problem. With the boiler output set at a higher temperature, the house heats up then cools down quickly without ever getting warm. I live in a 140 year old terraced house, it is double glazed and has some loft insulation, but nothing out of the ordinary, so what made this heating engineer believe that this form of heating will be worse for my house, rather than better (as my experiment showed)? 

I’m amazed by the number of pizza/chicken delivery places there are near me. Every week a leaflet for some hitherto unknown purveyor of fast food drops through my letterbox. I can only presume that very few people in my part of London ever do their own cooking. The latest one had the usual offers of increasingly startling quantities of chicken/pizza, but instead of the usual accompanying vat of cola, these came with a free energy drink. Now I’m not an expert, but I don’t think people about to undertake endurance sports are likely to want to consume large amounts of pizza or fried chicken immediately before they start. Also I’m not sure the endurance sport community were the target audience for these leaflets. The point of energy drinks is to provide a large amount of additional energy for high intensity or endurance activities so I really don’t understand why you would want to consume one whilst sitting in your joggers tucking into your bargain bucket. I’m a water, tea or booze kind of guy though so I’m probably not the target market either. Still, I can just about understand drinking a regular fuzzy drink to wash down your fast food, but energy drinks barely function as a drink, there’s not really enough liquid for that. 

My mother-in-law lives in a relatively isolated village on the Welsh border, so needs a car to get about. I regularly apprise her of the advances in electric vehicle technology and she always asks the same question: “is there a four wheel drive version?” Of course there are four wheel drive EVs, but they are universally expensive. By contrast she can get a four wheel drive petrol Subaru for relatively little money. I have repeatedly questioned her need for four wheel drive. Years ago I bought a dreaded SUV after being unable to get through flood waters round to her house in a regular height car, but I have never seen evidence of a need for actual four wheel drive. I have pointed to articles that say for country driving the kind of tires you have makes a much greater difference than four wheel drive, but to no avail. The local Subaru dealer is clearly making a killing by convincing pensioners that their well-being, indeed their whole way of life, relies entirely on four wheel drive vehicles. Throughout the twentieth century, we were wowed with feats that relied on a certain degree of over-engineering: climbing Everest, the space race or Concorde relied on materials and processes that had to operate beyond the extremes that their situations placed them in. Very expensive equipment operating in hostile environments needs overcapacity as a fail-safe usually because someone’s life depends on it. We have taken this necessity from extremes to simply be good engineering sense and ‘just to be on the safe side’ we overpower our central heating, we drive around cities in massive off-road vehicles, we buy extra food that we then throw away. We do it because we are told to, the supposed experts that we rely on to advise us about our heating or our vehicle choice have never questioned this orthodoxy of overcapacity because it has never failed them (and most likely allows them to charge more). No one bothers to find out what the sensible capacity is, so we end up wasting masses of energy and material just to avoid the effort of finding out. 

Like so many things our society currently defaults to, this orthodoxy of overcapacity needs to be challenged.

Patronising

The pandemic turned me into a republican (just to be clear, not the American kind with a capital ‘R’, a weird love of guns and hatred for women). I’d always been monarchy agnostic: not anti them, just, like a lot of people I guess, fairly ambivalent towards them. I supposed they didn’t really do any harm. Now I don’t know how I supposed that for so long.

It was during the first lockdown, if you can remember that weird balmy spring, where the sun seemed to shine every day as we sat in our homes, isolated, unaware of what stresses, strains and sorrows afflicted others in our neighbourhoods. We made a good fist of it, we got food for isolating neighbours, we got tipsy on Houseparty with old friends and those of us with kids and jobs forced ourselves into sleep patterns that we’ve never quite adjusted from since. About six weeks into this elongated pause, the queen made a speech. I didn’t listen to it, I couldn’t see the point. I supposed its intended purpose was to comfort a worried nation, like an animated version of one of those irritating “Keep calm and carry on” posters, but I couldn’t understand how the words of a 90-something aristocrat with what I presume is a limited knowledge of epidemiology was going to comfort anyone. Then I realised that the monarch’s purpose is never to reassure per se, but to reinforce the status quo. If people find that reassuring, that is because they have been trained from birth to seek reassurance in stagnation. The pageantry, the endless images of royals bestowing their presence on worthy, sick or vulnerable people and the speeches are all designed to train us to believe that the wellbeing of our nation depends upon the perpetuation of a system that rewards a small number of people for being born. The fact is that there is no rational or logical argument in favour of monarchy, much like religion, it relies on belief: a belief that some people were born to rule. 

We are told that the advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that our head of state doesn’t represent a particular political party, so can represent all the people. However, simply by existing, the queen is a living embodiment of the core conservative principle that some people just are better than others and therefore shouldn’t have to pay tax. Everything that the queen does is in service to this idea. If a politician visits a hospital, it is in order to infer that some policy they enacted had a direct impact on making that hospital work; if the queen visits a hospital it is in order to infer that the hospital simply wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for her sprinkling of platitudes and inane questions. We have to believe that as a nation we can’t function without a patronising pat on the head from our head of state now and then. And that weird dependence, this strange form of Stockholm syndrome extends to the patricians who rule us, allowing them to lie to us and steal from us whilst we gratefully vote for them time after time. 

Those politicians have shown us daily for innumerable days that they do not represent us, they represent the interests of themselves and others like them: a very small minority. It is this minority that our monarch’s patronage favours, and it is this minority alone that she represents: the international elite. Indeed, until recently the European monarchs had to breed amongst themselves in order not to sully the blood line. It is only in the last 40 years that they allowed selected commoners to join their ranks. Like Margaret Thatcher allowing people to buy their council houses it has been a PR coup: adding only a tiny number to the ranks of the elite whilst convincing the rest of the great unwashed that ‘happily ever after’ was within their grasp if they just played the game right. Kate was allowed to marry her Prince Charming because she played the game right: her parents had earned enough money to send their child to a good school where she had learned to be a good proto-aristocrat. She was perfect: ‘common’ enough to show how modern and diverse the monarchy was (having once bought a dress at Primark or whatever) whilst still being elite enough to show the people who really deserves a happily ever after. Meghan was an even greater gift: she was allowed a glimpse of her happy ever after with the coaches and horses and waving crowds, but when it turned out not to be happily ever after, she left. This allowed the constant stream of racist articles about why she was not fit to be royal to pivot to vindictive racist articles about her lack of gratitude for the crumbs that had been brushed her way from the royal table. She has become the establishment’s daily illustration of why the undeserving are undeserving, even if they have money. These stories  have been a valuable addition to the daily rounds of propaganda aimed at ‘proving’ what passes for our constitution is based on something more mysterious and intangible than inherited wealth, institutionalised corruption and systemic racism. 

As we all build up the the Jubilee ‘celebrations’ and the bunting is hung out, the jingoistic rhetoric seems to get ratcheted up. People will tell you that those who don’t want to celebrate the queen mustn’t love their country, but this is the kind of absolutist argument employed by those who fear genuine debate. The monarchy is just another cabal of rich people who have successfully managed to weave this unquestioned absolutism into a complex pageantry. They are no different from any other rich people who wish to retain family wealth, they have just convinced us that they are. I really love my country and I want a sensible debate about what is best for it to include whether unquestioning worship of inherited wealth and power is a good basis for a functioning democracy that (cl)aims to be meritocratic. I want to be able to sing a national anthem that celebrates my country, rather than droning on about keeping an old rich person alive. I have no objection to the royal family as people*, they can keep their wealth (as long as they pay inheritance tax) they can keep the properties (as long as the same rules apply to them as to all other property in the country), but they should have no constitutional role in this country. Until that changes we cannot say we live in a fair society. 

*apart from the fact that they seem like fairly objectionable people, but that is just a standard trait of privilege as far as I can tell.