From the monthly archives:

November 2010

The WikiLeaks delusion

November 30, 2010

Julian Assange, founder of wikileaks

There is a lot of great stuff in the latest WikiLeaks release. And generally I support WikiLeaks’ work (if not its crazier utopian-anarchist mission). And I applaud anything that provides greater insight into what governments are doing “in our name”, especially when what in said in private is different from the public.

BUT then several things make me uneasy about Cablegate – including 1) that the release is unlikely to improve transparency in the long run, 2) that Julian Assange, the group’s founder, clearly has an agenda other than transparency, and 3) that the release is unlikely to improve relations between peoples (what is drearily known as “diplomacy”). I think the release does more harm than good. It fills in lots of detail, but is more voyeuristic than revelatory. We knew the big things already (for instance, that Saudi Arabia wants the US and Israel to attack Iran, and take the blame for it). The rest is largely gossip: that Hilary Clinton thinks Cristina Kirchner is mentally unstable, that Prince Andrew is a buffoon, that Muammar Gaddafi travels the world with a “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse. And so on.

Such stories are fun, but the larger impact is counter-productive. I think it’s worth keeping conversations confidential if they’re likely to, say, produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace, allow the US to reach a deal with Iran on the nuclear issue, or help reset US relations with Russia or the Muslim world. These things are important. And, despite what Assange believes, absolute transparency doesn’t necessarily make the world a safer place. Probably the opposite. Politicians need to be able to talk privately without everything reaching the media. This is what they tell us they need – I don’t see why we shouldn’t believe them. As Andrew Sullivan says:

I favor greater public scrutiny of government actions. But it also seems quite clear that it is impossible to conduct international relations in total transparency. The world does not operate that way – from corporate or office decision-making to statecraft. There will have to be times in which certain views and policies will need to remain secret, and the ability of foreign ambassadors and analysts to give candid, clear advice to policy-makers without having them published in the global media, is vital to a successful foreign policy. The Wikileaks model is therefore a step backwards in many practical respects.

I also find Assange’s disgust at the world of international relations a bit childish (or perhaps affected):

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

I don’t like that the US spies on other countries, that it bugs the UN, that it lobbies for its companies – but then what country doesn’t do these things? That is how the world works. Everyone bugs the UN, FFS.

You can’t blame the Guardian and others for publishing. What editor would pass up 250,000 documents like this? The main reason for the release anyway is technology: that a low ranking soldier could zip thousands of files and distribute them so easily, that the US government decided, after 9/11, to invest in an information-sharing system for 3 million employees. The long-term issue is how diplomacy can be conducted in a world where confidentiality is increasingly hard to achieve. And for the rest of us: how willing we are to exploit technology to give us access to things that were previously hidden. On the one hand, technology will provide lots of benefits, including helping us root out wrong-doing. On the other, we still need important processes like diplomacy to operate effectively. The end-logic of WikiLeaks is that it makes government impossible.

(Image: New Media Days)

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Newspaper > newsletter

November 27, 2010

Clay Shirky makes a good point: the Times paywall isn’t an attempt to save the newspaper, but the re-casting of the newspaper into something different – a newsletter:

One way to think of this transition is that online, the Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience. (In this case, the Times is becoming the online newsletter of the Tories, the UK’s conservative political party, read much less widely than its paper counterpart.)

This fundamentally changes the Times’ role, socially-speaking. Emily Bell:

… the essence of Shirky’s point is that without being a broader participant in public life, newspapers are altered into small exclusive information clubs. And what we think of as a ‘newspaper’ as a whole entity rather than just monetised journalism changes completely. Twitter is closer to being ‘a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community’ than some newspapers if you accept that as a definition. I would accept most of what Clay Shirky says as being true: newspapers have to change so radically to fulfill their role in a digital age, that they will inevitably not look like newspapers at all.

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RSA piece

November 24, 2010

My article for the RSA about the limited social value of business schools and management degrees:

In his 1954 book The Practice of Management, the great American management thinker Peter Drucker wrote that “no greater damage could be done to our economy or to our society than to attempt to ‘professionalize’ management by ‘licensing’ managers … or by limiting access to management to people with a special academic degree”.

At the time, Drucker was worried by what he saw as a new phenomenon for managers to be trained at business schools, rather than ‘learning on the job’, as they always had. He disagreed that management could be a profession, like medicine or law, because it was essentially something you learned by doing, not in the classroom.

Despite his reputation, society has completely failed to take Drucker’s advice. Since the 1950s, thousands of business schools have opened around the world with the express intention of teaching management, and the skills and knowledge imparted there have come to be seen as increasingly important in the world’s boardrooms, not to mention its governments.

Today, more than half the US’s senior managers are alumni of business schools. And things are going the way of MBAs in other places too: India, for example, has seen a huge boom in management education over the last decade. Having had practically no business schools twenty years ago, it now has as many as 2,500, and graduates a staggering 500,000 MBA students a year.

Read the rest over there.

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Another bank bailout

November 22, 2010

James Meek says the Irish bank bailout is not what it seems:

What is being presented as a loan by the British government to the Irish government is, in fact, a loan by the British government to the remnants of Ireland’s commercial banks, which are melting down. And the reason the British government is lending to the Irish banking system is because British commercial banks lent so much money to Ireland in the boom years. British banks hold less than £10 billion worth of Irish government bonds. But they hold something like £130 billion worth of other Irish debt – property loans, business loans and so on. George Osborne is not, as he claimed, helping Ireland because it is ‘a friend in need’. He is to all intents and purposes bailing out British banks.

It has been depressingly easy for the Cameron administration to hypnotise the British public into forgetting that our current economic plight is a result of reckless lending by the country’s banks rather than reckless Labour borrowing. £7 billion, the government must feel, is a small price to pay to avoid another British banking crisis, and to avoid the country waking up and remembering that we are much more like Iceland than we ever were like Greece.

This seems to be a common confusion with sovereign debt crises. The line is “the IMF is bailing out X (say Argentina)” – but actually it’s the country’s creditors who are getting paid. It’s a subtle difference maybe, but an important one. Ireland’s problems are related to its over-reaching banks. The state’s problems came later when it decided to stand behind all their debts.

Meanwhile, Felix Salmon – who knows a lot about national debt crises from his time in Ecuador – says the 80-90 billion euro package isn’t nearly enough. He’s not alone.

What a mess.

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British or French?

November 22, 2010

Apparently there’s evidence that British colonialism has produced better long-term outcomes than French:

Taken together, the moral of these studies could be that colonalism isn’t great for a country’s future political and economic wellbeing, but if a country is going to be colonized, they’re better off with the British than the French. It’s also very possible that the legacy of colonialism — whether positive or negative — manifests differently in national rather than local governance. Although on a purely anecdotal level, the French vs. British distinction seems to hold there as well.

I’m sure the people involved didn’t enjoy either, but there you go.

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What is a magazine on the web?

November 22, 2010

Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan about the future of magazines:

I wonder – more radically – if a “magazine” can really exist online at all. What is a magazine after all? They didn’t exist until widely available paper and printing presses (the first ones emerged in the eighteenth century). They were ways in which a group of people became a collective by connecting themselves to a physical object – a bunch of pages bound by a stapler – and selling that physical product. Take away the physical product and what do you have left? A reader can simply choose which of the writers he or she wants to read online and ignore the rest. Or a reader can simply read whatever her friends point out to her on Facebook or by emails or social media more generally. The stickiness of one writer to another becomes much less sticky. And the data that reveals just how many readers an individual writer attracts tears one more veil of mystery from the aura of a “magazine.”

Sullivan is surely right that social media increasingly disaggregates one article, one writer from another, thus decreasing the value of a magazine. The Internet hands curating power to the reader. Why rely on the good taste of an editor? In the future, writers will still be congregated together for various reasons – economies of scale (though less important than offline), marketing, advertising, identity – but the ties are likely to be looser and less meaningful.

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Outta Compton

November 21, 2010

What a game cricket is. These guys are from Compton, LA.

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The judgment problem

November 21, 2010

Since it’s Sunday and we are in a reflective sort of mood:

I’ve long thought that one of the biggest, most testing, important questions in life (by which I mean, how to live a good, honest, authentic, generous, expansive life) is when, or at what point, we judge – judge our friends, our family, people on the street, the world around us. On the one hand, we know that it’s important to judge. Not judging would mean living like automatons, Stepford Wives drifting through existence, implicitly condoning and approving all the putrid crap that constitutes the modern world, the way people behave towards each other, the environment, etc. On the other hand, we also know that judgement is subjective, self-serving, and very possibly born of arrogance, irritableness, some deficiency in our ability to emphathise, our education or upbringing. It’s also the case, practically speaking, that judging is exhausting and self-defeating. It costs us something, because it requires a hint of vindictiveness or bitterness that corrodes us. It is easier to go with the flow.

I don’t have any sort of code for when we should judge. We have to decide at what point to intervene. I do know that it gets more difficult as you get older – at least it does for me. Growing up, I always imagined that I would get wiser, that accumulated experience would make it easier to judge situations, people, complex moral questions. Actually it gets harder. Increasingly, because you understand the yes-butness of everything, you begin to second-guess your own feelings and thoughts (I do anyway). So often I’ve been wrong about my first impressions that I no longer know whether to trust them – even though we’re always told that these are the best sort of impressions (being unvarnished by pre-conceptions and prejudices, etc).

Anyway, I was thinking about this this morning as I was reading this 2005 commencement speech by the late-David Foster Wallace. As I’ve said before, what I like about DFW is his unusual honesty, unaffectedness, and love of language. His question is not exactly the same, but it’s similar. I’ve tried finding a quote that will somehow summarise his point – but really it’s better if you just read the whole thing, if you are interested (it’s not that long). I’d recommend it, if at all you are looking for a jolt of wisdom.

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Regrets, I’ve had a few

November 18, 2010

Bronnie Ware, a nurse who cares for the dying, lists the regrets most frequently expressed by her patients:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Maybe a little cheesy for some tastes – but chimed with me. Via Ben Casnocha’s excellent blog.

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#twitterjoketrial no longer funny

November 17, 2010

Further developments in the ridiculous case of Paul Chambers, the accountant convicted for sending a text to his girlfriend (see previous post here): he has lost his appeal at crown court, and will have to take his case to the High Court if he wants it overturned. He’s already been fined £1000, been forced to pay £2,000 in costs, and lost two jobs since the whole affair started. Thankfully Stephen Fry and others are now providing publicity and other help. But the fact remains that something like this can occur here, in Britain, in 2010. As Charonqc says, it’s absurd that the justice system is incapable of distinguishing between a joke and a serious statement of intent.

More fulmination here.

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