Free as in Autonomy

OS options for an easy life revisited?

2007-05-26T12:55:00.000Z

OK, the question of FLOSS needing more tech support than MS Windows keeps being raised. It's time to question this conventional saw.

Small orgs have been strongly influenced by the FUD put out by Microsoft for the past decade — enthusiastically reinforced and re-transmitted by consultants and organisations set up to advise them on IT. They have been successfully convinced that Microsoft is 'easy' and needs little or no tech support whilst Linux is 'DIY' — flakey and needing an army of expensive technicians.

The contemporary reality is somewhat different. Ubuntu has come a long way, baby! But before we get into that, let's look at how small orgs actually use MS Windows . . .

The reality of small orgs' use of Microsoft technologies is that most of them are running pirated software which has not been updated effectively for years, or OEM preinstalled 9x systems which are no longer supported. They're often 'broken' in all kinds of minor ways over the years, are crawling with viruses and spyware, frequently have no effective firewalls or anti-virus software (properly updated or even installed). Their printers are endlessly and bafflingly delinquent and many have peripherals which they've never even succeeded in installing properly.

Their software is 'default' and frequently not the best choice for purpose or for their OS version. Their file management frequently consists of 'doc01.doc' 'doc02.doc' etc filed on local drives and inaccessible to anyone else. Most think that the file-manager window and default location opened by MS applications is specific to that application and that the files can't be accessed (or organised) any other way. This chaos and a miserable sense of lacking any kind of control over their computers or their data is a major contributory factor to people's 'rage against the machine'. Added to that, 'men in bowler hats' keep telling them they have to have reporting databases etc. No wonder they hate IT.

Most have their IT (such as it is) managed by an 'accidental techie' — usually an administrator or a 'mate' of someone. These accidental techies are often entirely usupported and have no access to effective training. They're at the mercy of rumour and misinformation and, in this land of the visually challenged, the one-eyed man is king.

There's also a new Microsoft minefield I'm running into recently. I've lost track of the number of times I've been asked to go and see what's wrong with someone's 'XP machine'. They tell me it's running realy slowly and keeps crashing and freezing and doing all kinds of weird stuff. I ask them its spec, they don't know, but they tell me it's 'an XP machine', it's meant to have XP, it had XP when they bought it (second hand) or it was given to them.

The reality usually is that this is a P3 machine with 128 MB RAM designed to run Win 2K. But MS culture is such that people feel a strong need to be running 'the latest thing'. So recyclers obligingly give it to them. I have to break it to the unfortunate user that they can either have a pirated version of Win 2k or a free and legal copy of Xubuntu if they want to solve the problems of slowness and instability. I point out how much longer Ubuntu will be supported. I fire up live Xubuntu to show them — they love it, they find it much more intuitive, faster, cuter, easier to use. I show them the free Ubuntu help and support, they're surprised by how friendly and clear they are. Then they demand Win 2k. Why? Because it's mainstream and suburban as a Ford car — familiar, 'safe' and 'predictable'.

I also frequently deal with PCs where an MS OS has been reinstalled inexpertly. Unaware that there are such things as drivers, their long-suffering owners don't 'get' why their screen looks like lego or their sound won't work or their printer has suddenly given up the ghost. They have absolutely no clue how to seek information or support. It doesn't even occur to them to ring their ISP's helpline if their modem won't work. They can't ring MS cos (1) their software is illegal and (2) even if it were an OEM copy, it doesn't come with free support.

Basically, Microsoft OS and apps encourage a state of infantile dependency and ignorance coupled with a strong need for unquestioning conformity. Having encouraged this woeful state of dependency, it offers no support whatsoever. How does this come to be seen as such a satisfactory state of affairs for the Third Sector that we should feel the need to protect it?

By contrast, let's look at Ubuntu, my favourite distro for small orgs (and non-techie computer-users from all walks of life).

I'll use a single example of a popular machine:

1 6 yr old Dell Dimension Workstation (P4 1.4, 500 MB Ram) which came with MS Home OEM preinstalled. This has needed reinstalling several times due to its owner's habit of letting security software licenses expire so their databases aren't updated and then unwittingly downloading destructive malware from the internet trusting in the wonder of Microsoft and installs all manner of dubious software on it.

To default install Ubuntu Dapper on the Dell Dimension, I need to:

Insert the Dapper CD

Reboot

Hit f12 and select 'boot from CD'

Using a clear visual interface and a mouse, answer when it asks where I am, what language I use and offers me a list of keyboards (no clicking through menus at all)

Watch it boot the live Ubuntu desktop

Click the 'install' icon on the desktop

Watch it install the workstation flawlessly, configure the screen correctly, automatically install/configure a USB hub, flatbed scanner (all of which I've left connected throughout) and a NIC and connect me automatically to the network, ask me to give a username and a password

Reboot once to be presented with a login screen then the desktop

Click on 'system -> administration -> printers -- Ubuntu has located the printer and just asks me to select the driver from a list (by the model number on the front of the printer). I don't need a separate CD.

All done! The Workstation is completely useable and correctly configured, it's connected to the network. All the partitions and peripherals are mounted and functional. Open Office software and Evolution PIM is already installed. Ubuntu will then put a discreet red blob on the status bar to tell you it needs updating. Click on it, give your password, and Ubuntu will update the system automatically. The machine is now useable for office and internet functions (it'll need some tweaking for media, otherwise, it's ready out of box).

If dual-booting, it will also import settings, mail and address books from Outlook to Evolution as part of the automatic install routine and automatically create a boot menu so you can choose which OS to boot into when you start up.

To install XP on the same machine, I have to:

unplug all USB devices (grrrr! much crawling around in confined spaces)

insert the disk and reboot

hit f12 and select 'boot from cd'

answer 3x as many questions as Ubuntu asks using very clunky, multi-layered dialogue boxes requiring you to look out for stuff like XP installing a default US keyboard without you noticing etc

reboot several times

Finally, I find myself on a desktop with a bunch of annoying balloons wanting to show me how wonderful XP is blah blah that I have to figure out how to turn off

My screen looks like lego, I have no sound, I'm not connected to the network, none of my USB devices is useable

VGA doesn't actually need a driver, I just have to drill down through endless menus to find where I can reset the resolution (luckily, I know what it is, a non-techie will not be so lucky!). The screen then lurches and goes black in a scary way before resizing and then giving you a few seconds to accept it (when I do this for non-techies who're watching, they frequently actually shriek involuntarily at this point).

Install USB-2 bus driver, wait for XP's hardware installer to punt balloons at me for half a minute. Check device manager (more drilling down) — USB OK

Reboot

Plug in external USB hub, wait again whilst balloons make faint popping sounds

Install flatbed scanner driver from manufacturer's CD (or download driver), plug in flatbed, wait whilst hardware installer balloons away

Install printer driver (from manufacturers' CD or download), plug in printer, wait for balloons etc.

Failure to do this tedious routine with every single USB device will result in your devices not working and possibly XP needing a(nother) re-install.

Install sound card driver from Dell CD (or log into Dell site giving an obscure number on the back of your tower somewhere, agree to having your puter scanned in order to gain access to the driver)

Reboot

Again, drilling through menus and knowing at least something about TCP/IP networking, create a network

Install proprietary (and expensive) anti-virus and anti-spyware software (usually requiring a reboot)

Install Microsoft Office

Do some upgrades that aren't done automatically and some more rebooting

Hope the 2 major service packs since this XP disk was issued don't break the drivers/anti-virus software and, if they do, go hunt around the internet and probably pay for upgrades to software/drivers that no longer work

Finally, it's useable.
I haven't enjoyed this experience personally, but I'm told that newer Dell machines have no XP disk and have to be reinstalled from a partition on the Hard Drive. Guessing that's going to be hours of fun for the non-techie !

OK, can someone tell me again why people with no tech support should be using Microsoft rather than Ubuntu desktop?

Comparing some downsides between MS Win and Ubuntu:

Many manufacturers don't provide Linux drivers or even provide Linux engineers with the information they need to write Linux drivers. Some even legally block Linux from making drivers available. If you have legacy peripherals with no Linux drivers and mean-spirited manufacturers, you may have to change peripherals.

In reality, when I moved to Ubuntu, I only had 2 devices that wouldn't work properly OOB: a Canon printer — which also hadn't worked properly on XP, I had USB 1 and it was designed for USB 2 but nothing in its marketing or packaging warned me of this. Its XP driver threw up error windows you couldn't close and was prone to freezing. Canon had not released a UBS-1 patch although the problem was known in tech forums. There was a proprietary Linux driver for the Canon, but I figured I might as well buy a Linux-friendly printer as shell out twenty quid for a driver for a flakey Canon. My son also has a very expensive Canon printer running on XP but frequently has to make use of my cheapo HP printer on Ubuntu cos his Canon isn't working AGAIN. The dirt-cheap HP has toddled along on Ubuntu for 2 years now without a glitch through 3 distro upgrades.

My iomega USB backup drive also wouldn't work properly on Linux and I can't find an external DVD writer that'll run well on Linux (thus I dual-boot). However, by comparison, it should be noted that when I upgraded to XP from Win2k, several of my peripherals refused to work, including my optical mouse and, rather more disastrously, an eighty-quid USB modem. Several bits of proprietary software (costing anything up to £70) also didn't work on XP. I gather that Vista is even worse in this respect. It was 3 months before XP drivers were released for my win2k modem — and even then I had to hunt all over the internet for them, the manufacturers' site didn't offer them. I finally got them in a crack of a BT technician's CD downloaded from usenet!!! Hardly something a non-techie is going to manage easily.

It was the same when 9x went from 16-bit to 32-bit, big driver and software mess/expense. In short, it's just part of the ongoing development of computing. As for going from DOS to graphical windows — well!!!

In short, whilst Ubuntu can throw up annoying hardware issues, this is hardly unknown on Microsoft OS? Similarly, it's not unknown for an Ubuntu upgrade to break software — but it's well-known that Microsoft upgrades frequently break software. Difference is that the Open Source community will fix it and, in the meantime, offer some free alternatives. On Microsoft, you're just as likely to have to buy new software or devices.

Ubuntu needs some tweaking to handle multi-media effectively and if you want the latest glam multi-media peripherals they're probably not going to work well on Linux. Then again, how often to small orgs without tech support actually need the latest glam multi-media peripherals? There's usually a Linux alternative available for most functions most likely to be wanted by small community/charity orgs. Again, by comparison, however, there's no annoying and intrusive DRM.

On the question of free help and support:

Free Microsoft help and even tutorials for the 'accidental techie' are getting very sparse on the internet these days. Ubuntu help and tutorials, on the contrary, are blossoming and Ubuntu helpers are increasingly sensitive to non-techie users' needs giving clear, step-by-step instructions. If you have to go onto a commandline, the exact line of code will be given. You won't be expected to figure anything out by yourself or follow arcane and insensitive instructions.

Is there really a good reason why small orgs with ad hoc networks and no tech support should not consider Ubuntu a viable alternative? Or is this 'received wisdom' due for burial?

Some people DON'T wannabee . . .

2007-01-06T16:37:00.000Z

The question of diversity has come up in relation to another e-democracy-related site of my acquaintance. Of the incredibly few female contributions there to date, the one that stands out in my memory is the plea for legalising bare-breasted protest by women. Uppphhhhh!

Why don't more women post to this site? Well, cos the overall tone of contributions is such that you can see there's no point--unless you're planning to exhibit your knockers in the name of free speech or patronise someone in the developing world where it's perfectly legit to complain that women are oppressed by uncouth, unchristian cultures full of terrorists. But definitely not HERE. If you challenge the articulation of femininity by western culture and economy, you'll probably just get unproductive hate-mail from slack devotees who feel women's most natural form of expression is being draped over a page of GQ in a thong. Or, at best, yet another deeply dull training grant from the DTI in puny competition for the construction of female identity with pink razrs, anorexia, and scantily blinging gymnastic fannies on MTV.

In my experience, it's frustrating trying to extend decentred online organisational models beyond environments where a high degree of autonomy is pretty much the default professional mode anyway and people have been brought up to autopilot getting their own way whilst politely evading conflict. Promoting e-community to people from more diverse backgrounds usually needs more facilitation than can reasonably come from any small unfunded group without keeling over. It usually becomes a mammoth "people" task--all about working with different interest groups to figure out what they actually want from ICT (if anything), developing skills, negotiating basic access to broadband PCs, and managing conflict--bugger all innovatory glam and lots of patient slog ;-)

When working with activist or charity groups, rather than the general public, the problems are characteristic of any project in that sector--picking your way through internecine and sectarian obstructionism. Again, more about patience than innovation.

Meanwhile, most online stuff aimed at "Jane-Bloggs" wanks on about cosmetics, romance, motherhood and dieting. Who can be arsed? What's scary is that this has probably been thoroughly researched--girls, next time you see a consultant with a clipboard, THINK BEFORE YOU ANSWER for the love of Goddess. You might want to question the identity you've been marketed a little more attentively . . .

It probably needs some kind of collaboration between techies and "people-people"--possibly a contradiction in terms :-p Effectively, this is usually a women-with-the-people-idea and a techie-boyfriend combo such as put the popular Friends Reunited together. Is sex really the only blandishment that will actually motivate techie-blokes to work effectively with women? And, please, c'mon, are women really the only people with people skills? And where was I when they allegedly handed them out to all women? Engrossed in my GP2X, probably.

The next problem you run into is the dominance of neo-liberalism and neo-libertarianism--very popular with techies, twenty-somethings everywhere and "post-communist" societies in particular but loathed fairly comprehensively in the UK by anyone over 35 and anyone with an income below £20k (unless they're from a former communist country, of course). OK, OK, broad strokes, but that's sorta how it goes.

The short story is that the political "tone" and focus of e-democracy is often downright annoying/alien/off-putting to people outside the charmed circle of highly-educated, highly-paid twenty-somethings and American Dream wannabees the world over who swallow it whole, often sight-unseen.

If you want to extend a genuinely interactive, decentred online organisation, you have to diversify it. For the neo-libertarians among us, I probably need to explain that this doesn't mean that you need to make everyone else exactly like you (wonderful you). It means accepting that most people aren't like you, don't want to be like you and/or lack the opportunity to enjoy the education, background/networks, income, access, and spare time that make you like you.

No substitute for experience . . .

2006-12-26T17:57:00.000Z

Thanks for your comment, John. Agree, no point in hurling money at developing electronic talking shops with no location in concrete communities of interest. It's only when you get involved in the basics of jobs, housing, childcare, law etc that you actually bark your shins against the intractable difficulties of those marginalised by "globalisation", "hypercapitalism" or whatever you wanna call it.

Studies are pretty unanimous that ecommunity functions best when combined with "Real Life" interaction. But Corporate hype behaves rather like those shoals of fish on David Attenborough progs--more instinctive shoalling than rational analysis. New Labour's neo-liberalism sucks up the Corporate-herd-hype-of-the-moment with a similar lack of rational analysis of its actual relevance to the concerns of its membership (much less its wider voting public) --which could explain why it's been haemorraging members for the past decade.

Changes to funding systems have done a great deal to discourage any kind of independent association or analysis. Cynicism sets in as everybody knows by now that if it's "off message" you might as well save your breath (the job you save may be your own). What's the point of more talking shops then?

It's important to remember that Corporate neo-liberalism is driven by the transcendental signifier of profit. Profit is not a suitable determinant for the development of political forms appropriate to human dignity. Consumer effing feedback is not a substitute for political thought and communal accountability. Gaaaaaah!

Web 2.0 systems developed to enable collaboration between highly enabled ruling-class innovators and/or to facilitate marketing and consumer feedback to save money on PR and customer service are not substitutes for effective political organisation and community activism. They're tools which can possibly be adapted to assist with organisation, development and dissemination of the ideas which cohere the body politic.

Governments should be afraid of their people, not the other way around . . .

2006-11-18T10:32:00.000Z

The e-petitions site is part of an effort to make the UK Parliament more accountable and to encourage more direct participation on the part of our population. Or looks like mob-rule, depending on your point of view.

I've always supported direct democracy (aka extra-parliamentary action) fairly unconditionally, but have been viewing recent developments with some personal trepidation--largely confirmed by a brief glance at the most popular petitions on this site.

Government-by-focus-group is scary enough. Its full-blown form of "participatory democracy" seems to consist of the government giving Murdoch free reign to warp the minds of middle-England into a highly manipulable mess of fear and loathing, and then employ an army of consultants at forty quid per hour to ask its opinion before framing mountains of half-baked, knee-jerk crowd-pleasing legislation and appointing ever-encroaching armies of half-educated QA bureaucrats to ensure that everyone's full attention is on massaging metrics rather than healing the sick, teaching the young etc etc . . . This ain't accountability, it's collective insanity.

What can you do? 90% of the population apparently has the sense to oppose war in Iraq, but would also dump asylum seekers in prison ships, repeal race relations and gender equality legislation, string up paedophiles, ban sex education and force institutions to set up surveillance of political discussion in British universities--and is apparently more concerned about preserving the right of the rump of the feudal ruling class to chase foxes around in archaic dress before ripping them apart alive than it is about anything else!!!

I went to one of those wretched expert panel thingies they have at Portcullis house a while back where the Liberal MP chairing the thing took the view that government wasn't keen on ICT because it would blow the wind of change up their trousers. Can't remember what he said exactly but there was frequent reference to "government silos" in there . . . Personally, I'd love to open up the silos of government, but that isn't the apparent effect of all this "participation". Everyone's systems seem to be under scrutiny except for those at Westminster and Whitehall.

Sorry for this blast of cynicism, but grafting "participatory democracy" onto our secretive feudal parliament, "marketised" and monopolised media institutions and chaotic education system may have rather unstable results . . . When a right-wing demagogue owns most popular media, habeas corpus has been suspended, and the secret service, army and police are apparently somewhat to the left of government *and* the tabloid readership, it's time to be afraid.

But maybe I misjudge my countrypersons--perhaps they will drag their attention from headscarves, foxes, and paedophiles and lobby for anti-trust legislation to protect genuine press freedom, for greater social equality, responsible trade, effective action to protect the world's resources and all-round quality of life, protest at the erosion of civil freedoms and political tolerance, the suppression of independent media and the demonisation of a proportion of our population. I'm not holding my breath though.

But, having said all that, I still support this kind of initiative. It's not only a failure on the part of governments to deploy digital democracy effectively but also a failure on the left to modernise and effectively develop and disseminate critical thinking. Activists often don't make good use of ICT either. At least these guys are trying!

There is, of course, the huge problem of avoiding "talking shops" being ignored and tools like e-petitions lacking deliberation (and/or being ignored). The mind slightly boggles at how government might be made formally accountable to virtual and informal popular deliberation although some folk have hopes of concepts such as "liquid democracy"--but I suspect, much as with open source organisational structures, it may be difficult to extend these beyond their originary contexts.

The problem is that, given the "rubbish in, rubbish out" axiom, unless people are exposed to a greater variety of informed opinion, perspective, and socio-economic models in media and education *and* some sort of real (and sobering) political experience it's difficult to imagine how more relevant and effective debate is likely to develop?

This diversity of critical perspectives used to originate in extra-parliamentary mass political organising and percolate gradually through formal political theory and into the broadsheets and the national political language. This kind of independent organising is the magic ingredient. Activities such as free collective bargaining or agitating for electoral reform addressed structural issues of importance to the participants and effected real economic and political redistribution--it also focuses the mind on realpolitik rather than cosy "common-sense" --well, nonsense.

The loss of the socio-economic structures which fostered this kind of mass organising along with the socially atomising effect of hyper-capitalist individualism and severe crackdowns on public demonstrations have, perhaps, led to a haitus in politically effective mass organisation of the type that governments can't ignore. This is where virtual organising could be so crucial.

I'm inclined to feel that one could not, "top down" as it were, create the perfect tool for participatory or direct democracy. Effective ICT political tools seem more likely to be developed as a way of facilitating the focused activities autonomous organisations. If the stop-the-war coalition (or someone else) had made more use of the potential of their website a couple of years ago, and hooked up more effectively with human rights organisations over the PTA etc, we might be looking at a somewhat different scenario now. But, of course, the SWP doesn't play well with others and doesn't relish the winds of change either. This, of course, also brings us to realistic fears of surveillance of politicised (well, all) digital activity and other material difficulties for political organising in the UK at the moment. Again, there are issues beyond what constitutes an effective ICT tool to consider when widening participation beyond government, NGO and activist circles.

I don't know if you can generate political activity in the same way as you can get people swapping video clips and second lives. Social interaction for entertainment may work on an entirely virtual plane, but I don't think political economy is likely to do so?

It's important, nevertheless, to resist the pompous conclusion drawn in some quarters of Britain's ruling elite that the idea of popular sovereignty is passe. Populations can expect to be "consulted" (at huge expense) but need to bite down on the "fact" that life is now too complex for them to understand and they are not in control. This smacks of the reasons the ruling class gave to resist universal (male) franchise--that non-property-owners were too thick to understand what's going on (if I may paraphrase). The problem is not that political economy now passes all understanding (it always did!) but that people are being misinformed, manipulated and increasingly disempowered by complex practices which have been largely effective at securing mass compliance with high dubious corporate agendas.

Adapt and survive . . .

2006-07-05T15:12:00.000Z

Oh God, women and technology and training. So many issues, so little time.

A group of women of my acquaintance are trying to develop a women's space within an established global new-media outfit. The established outfit is, needless to say, an eensy-weensy little bit male dominated. They use a custom content management system which hasn't been documented to speak of and which requires a rather good working knowledge of Linux server apps to deploy and maintain. The production servers are mostly maintained by techie blokes who all know each other. Many are "sympathetic" to women. There is also a small number of women (mostly in a single geographical location) who are able to deploy the system on the existing network.

I'm left musing on why a bunch of alleged Marxists appears to little grasp of the implications of restricted ownership and control over the means of production. This is a major lacuna in the whole FLOSS universe where issues of access to hardware and the skills necessary to deploy and maintain it are routinely brushed under the carpet and FLOSS represented as an entirely virtual universe of inherent equality.

Maybe I'm being 500x bitten and far too shy, but experience teaches me that a total lack of documentaion and/or assisted installation routine is usually a sign that its developers don't particularly want to deal with "non-technical" people. These guys also all-to-frequently enjoy shitting on non-techies from a great height and think that women are "differently wired" so there's no point in trying to encourage them. Sorry guys, but that's what's squirming under the "stats" proving women are useless at techie stuff and all the bollox about lofty "read the manual" stuff. I probably should add that I'm aware that loads of people are actively trying to address this etc etc.

Faced with arcane terminology and an assumption of previous knowledge of Linux system most women will just wilt and give up, confirmed in their original belief (carefully inculcated by a male bias in gender-research) that women in general, or themselves in particular, are just no good at this stuff.

At this point, the "sympathetic male" appears and magnanimously offers to take over the task for the little women and or "give advice" to women who want to learn the system. Now, instead of being faced with arcane terminology and an assumption of previous knowledge by male/techie-orientated documentation (or a blank space where documentation ought to be), women are dealing with it as a social reality in real-time. Unsurprisingly, they doubly wilt and give up again.

Happily confirmed in their prejudice of male technical superiority, the "sympathetic males" will do it for them and the women, unhappily confirmed in not being cut out for it, will slink off to catch some zzzzzz after a night of baby-disturbed sleep etc.

This slightly uneasy state of affairs can rumble along fine until an issue upon which men and women may seriously disagree comes along (and often threatens to split the women too). Now what? Tell the men where to get off? Hmm, they may very well pack up their toys and take them to their own back yard.

Now it's starting to look like the power relations within a marriage where the man works for salary and the woman works unsalaried in the home . . .

I do think it's a major issue for women's participation and we can't just agree that some (most?) women simply aren't "cut out for it". OK, lots of women have no interest in techie stuff (along with lots of men) and I completely agree that women shouldn't have to become "techies" to participate socially and creatively in other ways--but experience teaches me that its very easy to shut people (women) out if they don't have access to the skills necessary to develop independent infrastructure.

If you don't own or can't control infrastructure, you need to be careful how you deal with the people who do. This is not only because women obviously value their relationships with men and don't want to cause unnecessary grief and stress - but it's also because very very few women can run production servers, deploy and maintain content management systems etc. If we make too many waves, we'll be kicked out and we lack the means to develop these spaces for ourselves.

Not all women need to be able to do more than access the technology once it's up there, but there do need to be far more women capable of "controlling the means of production". At present, there are, at best, maybe a couple of women's servers in the world.

It seems there are uncountable numbers of women who want to contribute creatively and participate socially, but very few who are willing to grapple with the actual "nuts and bolts" of building the spaces themselves. This might be seen as confirmation that women just aren't interested in technical stuff, but I'm not at all convinced. Studies show that despite unequal representation in the field of technology, women are just as capable--if not more so. The problem is cultural and infrastructural.

It'd be fantastic to run a global network of women's production servers and be able independently to deploy the systems women need to achieve new-media independence. We don't all have to become a techie wizard, but I don't doubt that all of us could develop far more technological confidence and competence. Most of us just need enough to be able to participate and secure our PCs and communications and to participate in e-communities, but we do also need more women willing to wade in seriously and create infrastructure.

We need to create the kind of spontaneous networks of mutual technical support among women which characterise FLOSS development more generally and which can "reward" women in those important but intangible ways for taking the time/trouble to learn the stuff.

OK OK this is a bit unrealistic at the moment, but a journey of a thousand miles etc . . .

An awful lot of women find it very difficult to get the time needed to acquire these levels of technical competence--but there are also plenty of women who are retired or whose kids grown up--or don't have those kinds of domestic responsibility by choice. Although it's going to be an unpopular suggestion, it's true that when my kid was growing up I found time not only to run my own home PC network but to set up small systems for women's groups, get a PhD, write and publish, and run around doing activist stuff. Then again, I was supported by a 70s/80s feminist environment where creches were standard and there was general support for women with kids (though I wouldn't want to overestimate it ;-) I also didn't have a man to "look after", and I was young and willing to survive on nicotine, caffeine and nerves--I suppose I wouldn't recommend it . . . but it had to be done?

I'm a writer, the only reason I know how to do technical stuff is because I couldn't get community projects started without being able to create web spaces myself - and that's all I'm really bothered about. That makes me what they call an "accidental techie". I don't particularly fancy struggling with arcane and ill-documented custom apps either, but I will struggle with being in control of my own articulation and my own survival infrastructure as far as possible.

Cultures of ambiguity take II

2006-02-08T14:34:00.000Z

Ah well, loooks like we can't even rely on the EU for grubby pragmatism anymore. Silly me, what was I thinking?

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, think brats with a rather childish notion of "freedom" playing with their crayons.

Cultures full of ambiguity . . .

2006-01-28T23:21:00.000Z

Bloody Jack Straw is banging on (on BBC24) about Iran being "by culture full of ambiguity" —spookily, that's exactly what the Iranians think of us ;-)

Meanwhile, the EU is rumbling on again about European integration whilst Right and Left alike wonder which part of "referendum" it didn't understand.

The British Right bemoans frogs beseiging the White Cliffs of Dover and Uncle Sam's "special relationship" favouritism towards their more ingratiating sibling, Blair. Meanwhile, the USA apparently takes the view that the integration of Europe is a plan conceived and carried out by the Exalted Power and Glory of USA foreign policy for the benefit of lesser European mortals. It would like us to pick up more of the tab for USA (oops, I mean NATO) gunboat diplomacy and to leave us holding the baby when the bodybags start piling up indecently, but it deprecates independent thought on the part of its EU underlings (oops, I mean partners)—much less any independent action. Blair apparently deludes himself he can twist the crazed juggernaut round his cute little finger and make it play nicely with the EU.

The USA (along with the European Right and Left) probably needn't worry cos the chances of the EU ever successfully integrating the activity of pissing with the activity of chewing gum are remote. Especially since the post-colonial interests of its members don't co-incide for much of the time (Iraq was a French, not a British, postcolonial client state, for example). Integration might get a tad easier since recent EU expansion into rampantly neoliberal Eastern Europe. Merkl busting up the Putin-Schroder romance also helps roll the balance of power over to the free-marketeers—except that neocons often tend also to be nationalists prone to whinge about loss of sovereignty and a socialist "nanny superstate". Ah well, you can't win 'em all.

The Left has little time for the imperialist depravity of NeoCons or for the whole project of Fortress Europe. The EU's counter-juggernaut aspirations to see off Uncle Sam (along with "asylum seekers"—that's refugees to you and me) are hardly edifying. However, thanks to the unhinged extremism of British Conservative opposition to the EU, the left is careful to avoid any appearance of sympathy for anti-EU sentiment and the British public is prone to assume that the EU must be a good thing if it makes Conservatives foam at the mouth like that.

A couple of years ago, an EU-wide poll indicated that whilst only just over half of us Europeans-on-the-street fancy EU integration, 74% of us favour a common European defence policy. It seems we rather like the idea of orienting away from—or even out of—NATO. I suspect this may be because we hope the EU is likely to tell the USA to go boil its head next time it wants help illegally invading someone. Unfortunately, I think it's more likely that the EU just wants to forge ahead with its own invasions (at least, I think that's what they mean by a focus on "security" rather than "defence"). Or maybe that's just our culture of ambiguity talking . . .

The EU has always been "culturally-full-of-ambiguity" towards USA postwar dominance. This currently manifests in its multiple personality on issues such as Free Software, which it simultaneously supports and undermines, communications infrastructure, IP policy, common defence policy and UN reform.

Taking a global view, Fortress Europe is undoubtedly a running-dog of the USA's "war on terror", also demonstrating a fine disregard for human rights as well as democracy if there's a euro or two in it for them. As a "counterweight" to a US bullyboy, the EU is hardly a candidate for canonisation. I suppose the EU's sheer grubby pragmatism is something of a comfort set against the born-again lunacies of the USAs current regime. One should be thankful for small mercies I suppose.

Where is the Lone Ranger when you need him?

Taking freedom seriously: Take 2

2006-01-21T22:13:00.000Z

Ooops, probably should clarify previous blog as it seems to have caused unnecessary levels of misunderstanding! I do know perfectly well that the NHS has long been marketised (handed over to BigPharma) and that this is added to its previous professional arrogance and widespread petty corruption and denial. The result is not pretty, and certainly not what the architects of free universal healthcare had in mind. I'm surely not suggesting people should just obey doctors like little automatons.

There are two points here. One is that medicines should be available to anyone who needs them, anywhere in the world, free of charge. The other is that medicines designed to combat diseases can also damage health. This is as true of complementary medicines as it is of allopathic medicines (there are several essential oils which can kill in high doses for example). People are entitled to free and safe medical advice and treatment—and people have sought help from medical specialists when they're sick since time began, whether from wise-women, shamans, apothecaries or, latterly, from doctors.

People also use a whole range of unsupervised self-help therapies perfectly successfully with negligibly rare accidents. Based on a science of trial and error, community-based medicine is usually very safe and effective. Community-controlled healthcare is a model which should be developed—and of which I heartily approve. I certainly don't think it's inferior to allopathic medicine—on the contrary, I think allopathic medicine should be recontextualised within a more holistic and community-controlled model.

Hundreds of people, on the other hand, damage themselves every year either by deliberate or accidental overdoses of allopathic medicines, excessive abuse of alcohol or narcotics, half starving themselves in line with insane representations of the female body and a desperate sense of having lost control on the real conditions of their lives, or suffer disastrous results of cosmetic or obesity surgery. Well, one could argue they're a right to do these things. I'd agree that we do, ultimately, have responsibilty for our own destinies, but there are many forms of indirect and largely invisible coercion at work in a hypercapitalist context. In societies which spend really enormous sums on PR, branding, and lifestyle-creation whilst marginalising critical forms of discourse, ridiculing and economically excluding nonconformism, it seems niaive to treat "freedom" as a simple matter of human choice.

Many individuals are also damaged by doctors' medical errors and serious side-effects of drugs which have been concealed by corporate marketing. Being caught up in the Kafkaesque processes of the NHS can be an appalling experience. I'm not by any means suggesting that people should not be deeply suspcious of the NHS in general and doctors in particular. Myself and everyone I know have a bunch of horror stories about abuses ranging from bullying, errors in treatments and cover-ups, doctors refusing to discuss patients' own impressions and knowledge or explain what's going on. Not to mention dismissal of alternative and complementary therapies from which many people benefit, along with rampant gender, race, and disability discrimination—to name but a few problems besetting the NHS. Mental health is a particularly vexed struggle between patients and "the system".

The question is what to do about it? It seems to me that if the problem is that the NHS/doctors are in the pockets of the corporations, the cure can hardly be to hand it over to the "market" without restriction.

So, there's a third—and perhaps most important—point, and that's about collective action as opposed to individual solutions. In other words, should we (as a society) discuss the issues, reconfirm that everyone should have equal access to safe medical care and bond together to exert political pressure on governments and global institutions to reform and redistribute resources fairly, to be open-minded, and to treat the people who ask for their care with respect? Or should we just try to get rich enough as individuals to buy decent healthcare—or take matters into our own hands in a deregulated drugs market—just for ourselves and our families. Should we calm our consciences by telling ourselves that everyone else is just lazy/stupid/stoned and thus deserves (or perversely even wants) poverty and ill-health?

Patented medicines are usually too expensive for individuals to pay for, especially in the case of serious or long-term illness. Even generics couldn't be afforded by most individuals in many situations. This is true even in the West, and much more so in the developing world. In countries with government health services (whether in Northern or Southern hemispheres), most drugs are bought by governnmental and non-governmental health agencies and distributed via hospitals and clinics to as many of those who need them as the institutions can afford to treat, paid for out of tax revenues or donations. Some countries have private insurance schemes backed up by some limited public provision. People in countries with national health systems usually also have access to private healthcare—if they can afford it. People in countries where access to healthcare is solely or mainly on the basis of ability to pay may have to live with unnecessary chronic suffering and even die unless they have private resources or can be successfully treated by local, informal, experts.

At the moment, in the UK, the NHS is in a very sorry state. This is partly because it's always been something of a ruling class institution beset with "professional" arrogance which protects its own. But it is also because the rich increasingly refuse to pay adequate taxes to fund it (taking aside the issue of waste of tax revenue on illegal occupations of other people's countries etc). Those with least resources are burdened with disproportionately excessive indirect taxes and spot fines every time they breathe without permission. At the same time, the services which they need are run down. I think it worth remarking that the rich get their money by the extraction of surplus value from the workforce—it's our damned money! It's not like we're begging for charity. We're just standing up to a bunch of corporate muggers.

Another trend driving up costs is a ridiculous markup on patented drugs. UK doctors have a duty to use cheap generics wherever appropriate. So BigPharma does aggressive corporate marketing to convince doctors that patented drugs are necessary for pretty much everything. My own doctor (who's been my doctor for years and is a pretty decent individual) was recently giving me a lot of grief to come off a very cheap anti-histamine I've been using for 30 years and change to a patented—and very expensive—new drug which he said would have fewer side-effects. Well, the old drug didn't give me any side-effects (maybe my bio-system has got used to it!) but the new one gave me palpitations. Checked it out online—yep, the drug is known for that side effect. It's no more effective than the old one as far as I can tell. Had a 10-min argument with my doc to get a script for the old one again, and the info I got from websites really helped give power to my elbow.

I am definitely not suggesting that people shouldn't turn to the internet for self-help and exchange of knowledge about treatments they're receiving from the NHS. Indeed, an acquaintance of mine runs a website whose purpose is to enable people to exchange useful information about side-effects which BigPharma is refusing to acknowledge. But that's because she believes in collective action—struggling to reform the health service by pooling info and promoting collective action—rather than making a quick buck out of people's lack of trust in the NHS.

BigPharma has been pressuring the obliging Blair to put all kinds of prescription "lifestyle" drugs—medications aimed at correcting the results of trash-food diets etc—onto the unregulated market. This works for Blair because it reduces pressure on overloaded doctors, and satisfies corporate-fed public clamour for quick-and-dirty superficial solutions to deep social problems. It pleases the corporations because it increases their profits and their social control. I don't see this as the triumphant lifting of "nanny state" restrictions on these drugs, I see it profiteering and illegitimate corporate social engineering. First you denature food and leave workers no time to cook cos they're busy making you rich, then you sell them largely ineffective but very expensive designer drugs to try to repair the damage to their health from overwork, stress and poor diet.

I can see how people get frustrated with safety measures. I get very hacked off about the regulation that makes you buy blister packs of various pills instead of brown bottles because it reduces overdose accidents and suicides (but also puts up the price and makes the whole thing inconvenient). But I can't really complain, it seems to have saved a fair number of teenagers' lives—although addressing the reasons for a high level of teen suicide would be better than just blister-packing a hitherto convenient means of suicide. Still, something is better than nothing . . .

The issues in relation to free universal prescription versus a "free market" (actually a very expensive market) in medicines is related to the issue of controlled (narcotics) drugs but they're not interchangeable. People have always consumed psychoactive stuff such as alcohol, simulants and psychotropic subsances recreationally. People are entitled to do so—it's one's own body after all. When this turns into a vicious global trade implicated in civil wars, colonial manipulation and the drugging/desocialising of potentially angry and resistant excluded populations—well, that's a horse of another colour ;-)

People are also entitled to a fair share in the wealth they participated in producing. Even if they've been excluded from meaningful participation—perhaps especially if a third of the world's population has already been excluded economically—it's unethical to privatise medical care and restrict access on the basis of ability to pay.

Personally, I'd like to see the same sort of non-proprietary approach used in free and open source software production to be applied to the medical field of science and technology. Life-and-health are far too precious to be privatised and sold. Yes, indeed, people should be able to make a living at providing medical care and resources—you can't expect practitioners to starve in a ditch—but this should not be controlled by "market forces". Production should be determined by people for people, not by and for a tiny minority of the population disguised by some ridiculous abstraction like "the market".

Redistribution is needed. I think it's basically the right approach to fund medical services (and vital infrastructure such as information technology and power infrastructures) from resources collected fairly according to ability to pay and distributed as public services according to need. Food, medicines—the stuff of life—should be produced fairly and safely, distributed fairly, and consumed safely in the light of full and frank information available in appropriate formats.

I really don't think a proprietary "free market" model is likely to deliver this. What would be far more likely to happen if prescription drugs were deregulated in the current global context is that health would become even more dependent on ability to pay than it is now, the teenaged death-and-damage rate would most likely soar, and a lot of rather nasty people would get stinking, amoral, rich.

And don't get me started on the way that viagra and diet pills ramp up gender-FUD, I'll save that for another day . . .

Free, as in Viagra?

2006-01-14T23:53:00.000Z

The "grey" internet trade in restricted medicines such as diet pills, tranqs and viagra exploits a loophole in legislation designed to protect people from "accidental self-harm", as the Pharmaceuticals Journal puts it. "Exploit" being the right word. The UK requires that medicines powerful enough to damage health when incorrectly used can only be prescribed after a medical examination by a qualified doctor. I regard this as a hard-won right to free, safe, universal health care. Neoliberals appear to regard it as a restrictive trade practice.

I think it's pretty widely felt in the UK (including by most of my friends—and also myself, for most of my life!) that one is entitled to ignore laws regulating to controlled or prescription drugs as they are "unethical". The question of the relation of ethics and law is obviously a complex one and depends on your world view. Few of us would question that, for example, Third Reich officers accused of crimes against humanity could hardly appeal to legal sanction by the Nazi regime for ethical exculpation. If one believes in democracy as an expression of an implicit social-contract then I think one is morally bound to obey all laws issued by a legitimate democratic authority, but need not obey laws issued by an autocratic regime. If, however, you question whether "democracy" in a capitalist economy really does represent the homogenous will of the people, then things get more complicated.

It seems to me that the current Anglo-American regime is neither "democratic" nor entirely legitimate and is, in effect, a corporate plutocracy with, itself, a self-interested selective disregard for law. I don't, therefore, consider myself under ethical obligation to observe its authority if it contradicts my own ethics. I'm a leftie and, whichever flavour of "leftie" regime you might favour, you will probably be a fan of self-determination and believe that individuals are morally responsible for their own conduct. So, does that make me a fan of deregulation of markets? I think not! The world has changed a great deal since Timoth Leary "tuned in and dropped out" and this question maybe needs looking at again.

If I'm unable to control the conditions in which I need to provide for my physical and emotional needs on a daily basis, mantras such as "freedom of choice" are meaningless. If we're denied the opportunity to make ethically responsible, collective decisions about what to produce and how to organise its production for human need and fulfilment, what the hell does the term "free market" actually mean? Nuffin', really. It's just waffle.

When I left academia in a (probably unwise) fit of contempt for the whole dishonest bullshit of "marketising" public services, I was thus obliged to find a job back in the real-world. I learned to dread the interview question: "Tell me: why do you want this job?" Damned fool question! Of course I don't want it, I need it so I can pay my rent, moron!—who the hell would want to be bored witless and treated with a total lack of respect to fund a miserable existence panting after compensatory gadgets and raucously puking up on late-nite tube trains in the name of "teambuilding"? I whined to a friend that I have no idea how I'm supposed to respond to this idiotic query—chant the Brownie Promise? She recommended that I should contemplate the infinitely worse, shitty and underpaid jobs I'll end up with if I can't bag the white-collar stuff and this will help me find inspiration ;-) A wise woman.

So much for the "free" market in labour then. And the free market in commodities? Much the same thing, really. Most reasonably-paid workers regard the accumulation of bling as a reasonable trade-off for a working life of long hours, bullying, exploitation, senseless stress and "buzzword bingo". Or maybe the bling is just a rhinestone coating over the less glamourous FUD that your job may wing it's way to more pliable populations if you so much as look at hypercapitalism funny. Did I mention what crap you're in if you can't get the white-collar stuff?

You might've thought enjoying art was your own personal brush with God? Heh, nah. It's intellectual property (but not actually intellectual and not actually your property). You think sex should be about sensuality, sharing, and joy? Don't be ridiculous, it's about purchasing a pill to convert your body to a totem of masculinity (or providing a suitable receptacle). Your body, your health? Just a marketplace. And so rich kids easily believe they should have unlimited access to whatever medicines or recreational drugs are on the market, regardless of personal or public consequence.

For the record, I was a notable "head" myself in the misty, far-off days when I was young ;-) and fully agree that a hysterical "war on drugs" (drugs of the "free the weed" kind, I mean) is largely a front for support to pro-Western forces in Latin America and Asia and a sop to tabloid-induced hysteria among the voting public. The "war on drugs" is clearly unethical and a major cause of needless crime and misery. However, the drugs trade is no gentleman-hippy affair any more, either, and has not been for decades. It's now a particularly vicious form of capitalism. However, I've no urge to castigate the poor of any country for getting involved in the illicit drug trade, I'd rather see fair trade and economic redistribution obliterate the need for such dangerous and stressful careers. Farmers grow the stuff because they can't sell more conventional agricultural products on markets manipulated by Western interests. Couriers courier the stuff to pay the rent or out of ambition for wealth. Dealing provides employment for the otherwise economically excluded. The whole thing is controlled by amoral local oligarchies, foreign political interests, pandering to public stupidity and reluctance to fund a more humane response to substance abuse in Western consumer countries.

As for drug consumption, I'm not bothered about viagra or yohimbe being reappropriated to a bit of fun in the presence of informed consent to the health risks. I'm not bothered about casual ingestion of controlled drugs by well-informed folk. Consumption of these illicit substances, however, no longer really has much to do with any philsophically-motivated, if romanticised, notion of "freeing your mind" but is a highly commodified form of leisure. The drugs are lousy quality, by and large, and the culture around them seems hectic rather than contemplative—a pointless competition about who can stay awake longest. At best, "e" appears to engender a sort of lighter-waving community maudlin fit, but heavy abuse does have health consequences.

This fervent championing of an inalienable right to consume whatever pharmaceuticals you take a fancy to does not appear to be extended to the kids dying from treatable malaria in Africa for whom cheap drugs are no longer effective because of resistance. The rapidity with which organisms develop drug resistance is related to accidental misuse. Improperly supervised, we non-expert members of the public are prone not to follow courses of drugs such as antibiotics and anti-malarials properly (from laziness or confusion) thus "vaccinating" the microbes rather than killing them. For us, in the UK, with universal access to free healthcare, this is a matter of overprescribing combined with general ditsyness, although since prescription charges were introduced, it is also becoming a matter of poverty even here. In many countries, people often have no choice but to try to buy stuff over the counter, do their best, and hope for the best. A lot of people can't "freely" decide to purchase drugs on the internet cos they just don't have the money.

Is it "freedom" and "ethics" which motors pharmaceutical R&D decisions? Is it ethical to sideline research into killer diseases mainly affecting the Southern hemisphere cos the GDP of those countries won't stretch to paying BigPharma's 400% profit margins? Does humanity really need another feeble "fatstripper" pill pretending to counteract the effects of a McDiet and a media representational regime which damages self-image to the point of widespread pyschological disturbance? Is it "freedom of choice" which motivates young Colombian women to risk death or long terms of imprisonment to smuggle coke to the West and thereby fund vicious paramilitaries and interminable civil wars?

The right to commodify "intellectual property" and rip 400% profits from human misery doesn't, apparently, extend to peoples of the Southern hemisphere either. Their more holistic expertise in the medicinal properties of local flora has been systematically alienated and privatised by BigPharma.

Leaving aside global issues and returning to the youthful exuberance of the rich, is it ethics and freedom of choice which motivates a spivvy online pharma outfit to sell diet pills to youthful anorexics with no intention of following the instructions on the bottle? Or an infinite supply of addictive painkillers and tranqs to a disurbed teen? There's a reason why these medicines are supposed to be prescribed by professionals. And is it really about freedom of choice even to the consumer?

This codswallop isn't about ethics or freedom, it's about over-privileged brats demanding unlimited access to whatever drugs and medicines they want to consume but confining that "right" to a small, elite proportion of the global population. It's about profit, consumption, and arrogance.

So, the question is not, I think, whether individuals have the right to give themselves a heart-attack in pursuit of a impressive stiffie, waste NHS resources fixing their smoking diseases, or shit globs of pure fat so as to lose a couple of grammes off their arses. It's about whether some bunch of unscrupulous, arrogant breadheads have the right to place private profit over public safety—and the personal self-interest of the few over global public benefit. I'd say that was a resounding "no". The right to free universal healthcare is widely regarded as about the only politial principle uniting the British people. As for occupying the moral high-ground at the same time as undermining the principles of free universal healthcare, kiss my arse!

The Feckless Phallacy

2006-01-12T17:14:00.000Z

I'm moving a li'l flame-fest from an elist to my blog (again) cos it's getting a bit long for a list. The topic (again) is whether women are under-represented in the fields of science and technology because they lack ambition/logic and (yet again) whether the poor are poor because they lack interest in education, preferring alcohol, smoking drugs, sex and consumerism and/or are lazy and/or unconsciously want to be poor.

A couple of generations back my family were pretty-much teetotal Methodist socialists who went to chapel and sang in the choir on Sunday, read anything they could get their hands on, were extremely active in the union movement, worked till they dropped, and were part of the reason why 60% of kids from poor families in South Wales got a shot at a decent secondary education rather than 5% in England. According to the feckless proof, you'd think these paragons would own half the country, but, no, they were relatively poor. I don't recall either my great-grandfather or my grandfather ever smoking anything at all (though coughing up 50 years of coal dust), but my grandmother smoked smelly Russian fags like a steam-train — I spose that must've been the delinquency that caused all the poverty. Or maybe it was her unladylike habit of haranguing the men down at the Labour HQ about politics ;-)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestion people want to be poor. What da hell does anyone want to be poor for????

The "poor as feckless" theory needs to explain to me why it was that the first generation of the family not to go straight into menial service, down a coal mine or into the furnaces of a power station when barely into their teens coincided with the landslide Labour victory after WWII and the expansion of education with new opportunities opening up for working-class boys in all commercial sectors. OK, it's a small sample but it looms pretty big in my intuition ;-)

Spookily, all the boys of my family's postwar generation managed to shake off poverty — some of them with a vengeance. Gotta say, 100% blue collar to white-collar conversion in a single generation of the same family coinciding with a fundamental restructuring of society's resources more generally throws a bit of a curve-ball to a-historical explanations? The girls did less well though. Never mind, there's a "feckless" explanation for that, too. Girls just don't have any ambition ;-) Nothing, of course, to do with the monumental domestic responsibilities faced by aunts with my disabled grandmother's household to take on as well as their own households and kids along with crappy jobs to help make ends meet. And nothing to do with societal assumptions about women at the time, of course ;-)

Being queer, I bypassed a lot of the domestic crap and managed to bag myself a PhD — spookily co-inciding with the historical success of second-wave feminism which opened out of better opportunities for women and credibility for feminist discourses in academia. So, did the men around me re-examine their notions about girls? Nope! I was successful cos I'm hard and cold and aggressive and not really a proper woman. And my unladylike habit of spouting off about politics . . . ah well, genetics might have something going for it, after all ;-)

So, let me get this straight: if I'd dedicated myself to domestic service, that would prove that women have no brains/ambition. If I go and make something of myself, that's cos I'm not a woman. Nice bit of "male" logic there:

All women are illogical
Paula is logical
Therefore Paula is not a woman

I seem to remember Monique Wittig having a lot of fun with that
particular rubbish-in-rubbish-out syllogism way back in '78 when she announced that she was a lesbian, not a woman.

Let's go back to the poverty thing and try another one:

Everyone who genuinely wants to be rich can be rich
The poor are not rich
Therefore the poor do not really want to be rich

I think they call that particular rubbish-in-rubbish-out syllogism "The American Dream", aka "neoliberalism".

Do you see a pattern forming here? Let's see now:

Sport is not intellectual
Black people are good at sport
Therefore black people are not intellectual

Strangely, this rubbish-in-rubbish-out hypothesis didn't hold black people back when they took a break from basketball to build the stunningly logical and accurate pyramids, accumulate the library of Tumbuktu and, according to Herodotus, teach the Greeks to read and write? Oh yeah, well that must just mean that Herodotus (aka the Father of Western History) is a liar — and yet Western history is so much more reliable, somehow, than the library of Timbuktu ;-) I'll leave you to ponder that paradox at leisure.

Uncanny, too, how an expansion of the black middle class in the USA coincided with the success of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Or how about:

Boys are brighter than girls
Girls do better at science and technology at "A" level than boys
Therefore A-Levels cannot be accepted as a valid indicator of intelligence

Upppphhhhhhh! Draw your own conclusions ;-)

Seeing the pattern yet? If you do, then you are beginning to see that the "logic" which organises substantial chunks of science and economics is pretty fuckin' lame and self-serving. I'll share the cheat with you: if observation of an object's behaviour threatens the typology, the object (or the observer) is reclassified. Shift+Control.

Heads: you win
Tails: we lose

The feckless phallacy is really very simple: "rich, white men rule the world therefore rich, white men were born rule the world" — basically, it's good, old-fashioned "might is right" and "manifest destiny" stuff.

That's why political solidarity is so effective—it links resistant objects and permits alternative control of the reclassification process until the typology is breached under concerted pressure. Human "objects" can escape through the cracks before they fix it all up again. It's not fact but fiction—it can be rewritten. It only looks real because the feckless phallacy's PR team has more money to throw at it than we do . . . who knows, someday we may tear down the whole typology!

Male, female, or a bit more interesting than that?

2005-12-13T01:03:00.000Z

There's been some dicussion on whether sites such as Friendster should add a category to their gender choices such as "it's complicated".

I always thought the great thing about text-based communication was not having to reveal your gender unless you felt like it. However, dating is a special case, and I daresay people want to specify which biological characteristics and sexual preferences they have a yen for. Instead of merely adding a "fuzzy" choice to the stark binary of heterosexuality, perhaps people should be asked, instead, to state the morphology of their genitals in one box with separate dropdowns for preferred gender-role and pet perversities as well? Thus: Has: x-genitals/x-role/enjoys-x — Seeks: x-genitals/x-role/enjoys-x? Then one could do a structured search with reasonable precision and yet plenty of flexibility and a more democratic structure since heterosexuals and and us more "complicated" folk would be asked to supply the same information using the same criteria rather than the more complex among us being tacked on at the end as a catch-all afterthought? ;-)

OK OK, seriously (well, sort of), if it's just going to be the one dropdown with male/female and a fuzzy slot, "it's complicated" seems to cover the bases. It seems to be a sufficient statement of gender all round, really—in fact why bother with the "male" and "female" selections at all, are heterosexuals *really* so predictable that their genital morphology says everything there is to say about their sexuality and social role? Surely the wonders of technology could produce a more semantic tagging system for our love-life? :-P

Startling the horses!

2005-12-08T15:00:00.000Z

I went to an academic "do" last night in the Hallowed Halls of Oxbridge. Amongs much mutual congratulation and male bonhomie, Britain's principal authority on e-democracy divested himself of a policy recommendation that there should be a "Civic Commons" constituted as a coalition of governmental, media and civil organisations. Its function would be to bridge digital exclusion and address the crisis in democratic participation. The second respondent was a woman of clear analysis and compelling articulation—the only woman who spoke. The issue of gender was not raised by anyone at any point.

The discussion revolved around whether the powers-that-be are likely to take the smallest notice of participants in such e-democracy schemes or whether these would become disconnected and marginalised talking shops for the disaffected. (I sat down in a vacant seat next to a pair of high-end civil servants who looked at me like thoroughbreds taking exception to a scruffy rodent when I smiled pleasantly at them—lending colour to a pessimistic reading.)

Wine-and-weird-stuff-on-toast ensued with jolly chitchat about e-democracy. I fell into a chance discussion with a PhD student working on, of course, e-democracy. When asked what I was doing, I replied that, besides the inevitable e-democracy project, I was researching a piece on gendered discourse and homosociality in FLOSS. You'd think I'd disclosed a plot to assassinate the pope!

Like a good postgrad, he launched himself manfully at my methodology. Baulked of an easy victory here, he moved onto the sure-fire charge of theoretical "essentialism", cos everyone knows that feminism is essentialist—women, being products of the natural spere are, of course, extremely essential. I reminded him that I had just told him my method was cultural-materialist—a rigorously anti-essentialist school of thought originating at Sussex—our mutual alma mater, I might add. The rapidity with which he dropped this line of attack rather confirmed that he was just fielding a one-size-fits-all critique of feminism. Next, he tried the opposite tack—I lacked a materialist analysis (moving me from empiricism to idealism). I pointed out the historicist commitment of cultural materialism.

Abandoning academic modes of dissuasion, he suggested that women would be best served, instead, by building a "feminine" Linux distro so that women would feel less intimidated by technology—the current DfES party line, which is that women are equal-but-different and need to be provided with feminised technology. I pointed out that there weren't enough female kernel hackers in the world to produce a complete distro anytime this century. OK, he said, then we should ask "sensitive" men to build, say, something like a "feminine" Word for Windows. I pointed out that women use MS Word better than men do by and large, and no two women would agree on what constituted a "feminine" distro/package anyway. All the evidence suggests that women are natively a little more able around ICT tools than men. It's not the tools guys—heh, well not the ICT tools anyway ;-)

I put it to him that it was actually the homosocial modes of discourse constituting the social sphere of ICT which caused women to be effectively invisible and unheard there and not some property of women themselves. By now, I could see the whites of his eyes. Horrified, he pointed out to me that publicising this analysis would "damage Linux". And why would I pick on Linux instead of proprietary software development? Well, you know, FLOSS purports to be open, community-based and non-discriminatory and I'd like to see it put its money where its mouth is. Much of what one might say about FLOSS's gender constitution would hold for the proprietary world and I would be happy to make this clear at the outset—and to compare and contrast the specificities of gendered discourse in the two fields.

Why didn't I look at other forms of exclusion instead? Smiling quietly to myself at his probable reaction if I announced I would analyse middle-class exclusionary discourse instead of the gendered kind. Of course, it hadn't occured to him that the reason for social exclusion of any kind might not lie in the nature of the excluded but the tactics of the excluder.

I said, disingenously: "Really, you believe any effort to make Linux develpment and usage genuinely inclusive would damage it?". He gave me a plaintive stare and implied that I would surely not want to damage my own career. I should be better off turning my attention to enhancing my publication record? Then he thought of another place he needed to be.

Well, you know, my interlocutor was an open source fan who thinks RMS is "a lunatic" and so I imagine the "damage" he had in mind was of a marketing nature—that is, that it would damage the reputation of open source software in its corporate/public-sector marketplaces by re-invoking the very politicisation the open source movement sought to distance itself from and, worse, the taint of women in this hallowed haunt of wizards and gods and Masters of the Universe.

Actually, I think he's right—but there's more to it than mere reputation. There have been a number of attempts to theorise what holds FLOSS' army of volunteers together and what makes them donate their valuable time. The role of homosociality in this has barely been acknowledged as such in discussion of "reputation" and "community" etc. Challenging this homosociality might have unpredictable effects on the very glue of FLOSS communities—and damaging FLOSS, the importance of which I strongly believe in, is very definitely not something I would wish to do.

And, yet, this nettle needs to be grasped. Anyone who reads the bulletin boards and e-lists of women in ICT with their sorry litanies of bullying and exclusion will be sceptical that barbie computers are the answer. If FLOSS —and more widely ICT development itself—truly depends on the exclusion of women, given that ICT increasingly constitutes an important sphere of social involvement and knowledge, are we [women] expected to stand aside and accept it for the "public good" (or the sake of our individual careers)? Are women not constituent of "the public"? Or has the backlash finally painted us back into the dripping cave of the classic liberal "private" sphere?

Use it or Lose it!

2005-11-24T14:21:00.000Z

The writing's on the wall for the internet as we know it. The recent Sony DRM scandal ought to be a wake-up call for you non-FLOSS using folk out there to consider the future of the internet a bit more carefully? There's a full discussion in Saving the Net.

Evil Empire Strikes in Secret

2005-11-24T14:11:00.000Z

America gets more like a high-tech version of a mediaeval empire every day. It now seems to think it has the right to ignore the sovereignty even of its NATO "allies", swoop down, kidnap and torture our nationals and guests at will. Other European governments are protesting. What's our government waiting for?

What's it got planned for us next? Stapling our tongues? Public disembowelment?

There's a demonstration against torture next Sunday:

Mass demonstration at Downing St
Sunday 27 November 2005
Assemble at 1pm
Demonstration from 1.30-2.30pm
Activism Hotline 020 7033 1675
Email: activism@amnesty.org.uk

Tony-Tony-Tony out-out-out!

2005-11-12T14:18:00.000Z

Glad to see the Bush/Blair axis of evil under pressure. Let's hope they don't make any miraculous recoveries . . .

Handsome is as handsome does . . .

2005-10-30T02:08:00.000Z

There seems to be a strand of American culture which believes it's beyond criticism by lesser mortals. What Americans do within their own borders is entirely up to them, of course, and I wouldn't dream of criticising, much less interfering. 'Cos trying to force your values on people or interfering overseas with nations who present no immediate threat to you—well, that would be very, very wrong. But when Americans positively insist on globally exporting their culture, backed by monolithic economic, political, and military clout, it's up for grabs guys. Get over it...

Now I'm going to generalise horribly—a thing I generally try to avoid but since Caity, in her comment on my previous post, generalises about how Americans feel, I'll generalise about how Americans behave. Because i think she's right—Americans really don't deal well with criticism.

I spend an awful lot of time on the internet, in chatrooms, e-lists, forums etc. Since around two-thirds of internet users globally are American, this means that they predominate in most online social space. This would be fine, except that they often seem to have difficulty co-exising with "others". It's not even a racism thing—they can't cope with Europeans either. They seem to have a major problem accepting criticism with good grace. But it's worse than that, they actually appear to experience any expression of cultural difference as a personal affront.

Why? Is it that these "others" spend all their time bitching and carping about America? Have Americans become defensive because we shout and rant and bully? No, what happens is this: Europeans (for example) may decide to talk to each other about current affairs topics such as neo-liberalism, globalisation, socialism, firearms policy, war, or terrorism. Or differences in world-view may become evident during even non-politcal discussions with our fellow humans who happen to be American. Because, of course, not being American, we have a very different take from Americans on most of these issues. What's more, as Europeans, we're kinda used to the fact that even adjacent countries such as Britain and France (or maybe especially Britain and France ;-) will thumb their noses at each other's pet assumptions with scurrilous hilarity.

We don't expect political agreement or social homogeneity in the EU, we expect long-drawn-out political haggling in a ridiculous number of languages with everyone getting the mickey taken out of them by the rest of Europe for what we eat/watch on telly/do in bed/put in our newspapers. On the whole, we think this is very amusing (until it comes to the CAP, of course). Too many Americans, however, implicitly expect reverent assent to the fundamentals of the American world view (though they will tolerate discussion within it, of course) and if they don't get compliance they get ugly. Since there are rather a lot of them online, the rest of us tend to button our lips rather than endure a torrent of mob-handed hectoring. So we just bitch about American cultural insularity behind their backs in private windows and off-list communciations instead.

Of course this is not to say that I don't read the work of, and also personally know, plenty of open-minded and cosmopolitan Americans who are perfectly capable of intelligent discussion and self-reflexivity—some are even (gasp!) urbane and witty. Many Americans struggle under great pressure for justice, more humane economic, political and legal/penal systems, and human rights both at home and abroad. There are innovative and radical political and socio-cultural discourses coming out of the USA, some of which we enthusiastically adapt to our own purposes. But there's nothing special about American ideas. We will also adapt discourses and models from Asia, Latin America and Africa—well, anywhere which has a good idea. Resistance within America to American foreign policy is much appreciated, as is the example of Spanish resistance and France's (albeit rather chauvinistic ;-p) stand. And some of my best friends find American TV very entertaining ;-)

It should also be said that Thatcher's support for the neo-liberal transformation of global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank through the 1980s, as well as sending Britain to the slaughter as the first example of an neo-liberal national mugging, has much to answer for. And Blair's enthusiastic uptake of the more right-wing aspects of USA economic ideology and political method have been pushed on the rest of Britain not only by corporate interests but also by our very own Daily Mail readership (who love all that deceptively smiling "teeth of vim" stuff and brainless hysteria about paedophiles and terrorists and "getting tough") via Blair's American-style focus groups (wish you'd kept that one to yourselves). The paranoid fantasies, cultural insularity and badly-informed self-interest of Mail readers—which makes them notorious "swing voters" and thus vital for Blair to cultivate—hardly offers a sound agenda for running a socio-political system.

Maybe none of us, anywhere in the world, should just be looking for a handy scapegoat to shuffle responsibility onto. It can't all be Bush's fault ;-) But the point is that whilst Europeans are happy to absorb new ideas, most of us like these to be socially-orientated, if not actually socialist. Yes, Adam Smith is our fault, but we have spent the past few centuries establishing more socially-orientated governmental and economic institutions through labour movements, revolutionary and democratic processes. Few of us are gagging to be returned to the violence and disruption which characterised the British industrialisation process from the grasping cruelty of the 17th-century free-for-all to the reformist 19th century. I would totally support Asia, Africa and Latin America in trying to avoid the appalling mistakes we made through their own development processes. God forbid that we should be implicated in trying to enforce our historical errors onto other people.

Contemporary Europeans, on the whole, also have quite enough social problems of our own and don't want them worsened by further shifts to "free-market" infrastructure which will put profit over people and increase the already unacceptable divide between rich and poor in the UK with its concomitant social problems. I don't want Britain's already divided cities awash with guns and gangs swaggering about like MTV's suburban African-American marketing of "ghetto" culture. It'd be nice if people could be offered decent educational and job-opportuities instead. I liked it when our police at least had to keep up the pretence of not being armed (it kept them careful). I don't want to be charged a subscription for TV which used to be free just to make Murdoch fat. I don't want my education system awash with Coca-Cola, corporate propoganda and diets which will kill our kids by middle-age. I don't want my hospitals privatised or the aggresive marketing of proprietary pharmeceuticals. I don't want stifling, exploitative and punitive intellectual property regulations. I don't want civilians bombed and occupied in my name. I don't want manipulative scare propoganda on my TV about America's self-interested and destructive "war on terrror". I don't want America's oppressive "war on drugs" policies here either. I think the "free market" is nothing more than a euphemism for exploitation and expropriation. "Privatising" apparently just means we pay through the nose for stuff which used to be free whilst the stuff nosedives in quality (for the non-rich anyway). And it is not "Anti-American" to say so. It's a human right. And, my God, even many Americans are now saying these things!

2005-10-27T19:25:00.000Z

Hugely enjoying Terry Eagleton on Beeb 4 accusing the Cabinet of "stupidity" and "simple logical error" in assuming that anyone who wants to explore the historical roots of terrorism is "justifying" it. Go for it Prof!

Shoot At Will

2005-10-27T12:01:00.000Z

For heaven's sake—if the Americans jump off a cliff, do we have to do it too? Why is there even a discussion of extending shoot-to-kill beyond terrorist offenses (where the first person killed under this policy was totally innocent and it's wildly unlikely that a Bobby would be adjacent in the case of an actual suicide bomber anyway)? Shoot-to-kill in the presence of imminent danger to life has long been the quiet policy. Normalising it in this way would just give a license to jerk the trigger whenever plod is feeling a little panicky. And olive complexions seems to make plod very panicky.

The usual whinging reference to protecting women and children is trotted out—one wonders where this tender concern was when we bombed and napalmed women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq? What if . . . a kidnapper was holding your child? Oh puhleeezzzzz! I think in the USA, where it's been open season for the police on the population for ever, it's probably pretty rare that a shooting actually prevents imminent violence against a civilian?

More manipulation. Massaging (white) men's egos by picturing them as stalwart protectors of the little woman and her tender infant. Playing on the perversion of feminist efforts to protect women and children from male violence—mostly originating within the family—to hysterical, right-wing, obsession with "stranger danger" and wild-eyed terrorists. There's a very obvious strain of racism and homophobia underlying these obsessions.

We're currently among the safest countries in the world. If you think plod peppering the population with gunshot will make us safer, you're off your head, frankly.

Jerking your knee . . . ?

2005-10-26T23:52:00.000Z

I just heard what Iran's C-in-C of the Revolutionary Guard had to say about Israel. Whilst it's reasonable to announce your intention of defending your country if attacked, this kind of inflammatory language could hardly be called helpful. Way to go, just when Bush is salivating to go into Iran guns blazing and Blair will drag us in too (don't think he won't).

I notice that the BBC spent the entire evening reporting the uncontextualised remark about "wiping" Israel off the face of the earth and representing it as far more uncreasonable than it actually was by omitting the Revolutionary Guards' assurance that Iran would not initiate conflict. More importantly, no mention was made of Israel's prior threats to Iran. Before getting carried away, I think it important to put Iran's remarks in context: here's Aljazeera's report, UPI and the Grauniad—and if you want to know what the USA thinks, go to Google News and you'll get nothing else. Except Israel's opinion, of course. I get the feeling the Brits are being "handled" here to get behind the USA agenda of preventing Iran from developing capacity to ensure a nuclear standoff in SW Asia by invading them—against our better judgment. Attacking Israel would also be against the better judgment of most Iranians, of course.

Personally, I'd rather have a new nuclear standoff than Israel being the only nuclear power in the area (now that's scary) or terrorism as the resort of people driven by rage and a sense of powerlessness. Islamic fundamentalists involved in terror attacks on civilians say that it's time we, in the countries occupying Iraq, knew what it feels like to be the victims of large-scale bombing attacks. In targeting civilians, they are not only engaging in a bit of Biblical tit-for-tat (well, Quranic) but also making the somewhat less archaic point that in a democracy people might be held responsible for their leaders. Nevertheless, I don't enjoy having my neighbourhood bombed any more than anyone else does. Don't spose the Iranians do either and Iraqis have been unequivocal on the issue. Iran may have elected this headbanger (well, some of them did) just as some of us elected Blair and some Americans elected Bush.
But none of us deserves to be mercilessly bombed for our lack of taste in leaders and most of us did not elect any of these tossers. The Iraqis most certainly didn't elect Saddam Hussain.

Be sure, Blair will not exactly be be distraught to find an excuse to follow Bush into Iran and then we'll be embroiled with a third unjust, heartbreaking, and undoubtedly interminable war (Three? Eh? Forgotten Afghanistan? Yep, still occupied . . . ). This is not to mention the appalling suffering to be inflicted on a people who have already endured years of foreign-backed totalitarianism followed by a traumatic revolution and almost a decade of war with Iraq (whilst the West backed both sides). The sick joke is that Iran was moving gradually towards liberalisation and a sustainable democracy before Bush started in with his "axis of evil" sabre-rattling.

It's important for Brits to be aware that our government has developed a highly effective strategy of rushing through any decisions which are likely to be unpopular so quickly there's no time to build any resistance. Being Brits, he knows we'll just grumble for a bit and then get used to it. Think it'd be a good idea to take note now and start working out what you feel about the possibility of invading Iran and, if you don't like the idea (please tell me you don't), then the time to start networking about it would be now. You'll find the "get involved" page of the Stop the War coalition here.

To end on a better note, can't we focus on building bridges instead of invading yet another of our Moslem neighbours—many of whose relatives are actually British—and shedding yet more civilian blood. If we all, even just in Britain, gave a tenner, or even a fiver, to Islamic relief operations in Kashmir and Pakistan relief operations could pretty much get everyone under cover before the snow comes and prevent amputations only necessary because delay has made people's wounds untreatable. Wouldn't this be better than getting sucked along with this endless spiral of aggression? This earthquake disaster happened during Ramadan—so it might be a nice gesture to give up an evening at the pub, eat at home with friends instead (in a bit of the spirit of Ramadan) and donate the money to Islamic Relief?

Enshallah!

Who's Your Daddy?

2005-10-22T00:42:00.000Z

I recently went to see representatives of the Brasilian Ministry of Culture, including the Minister, Gilberto Gil—a much-loved Brasilian musician, singer and cultural radical—explain Brasil's ground-breaking Points of Culture scheme which utilises FLOSS technologies and has been influential in FLOSS circles globally.

During question-time after the presentation, a British member of the audience asked what the Brasilian government could do to change the policy of the UK government with regard to FLOSS, the digital divide, and democratic participation. Taking aside the question of the likely efficacy of G8s asking BRICs to sort out their governments for them (besides assorted sorry questions of rather unproductive Western guilt), I was struck by the interpretation of dependency this particular Brit placed on the demonstration of a user-controlled technology project. But it seemed to me to be all-too-familiar an attitude around here.

So what's Brasil meant do about the British Government? Threaten us with sanctions? Table a UN resolution about the disgraceful shilly-shallying and shambolic approach of Blair's lot with regard to FLOSS and other digitial issues? Or perhaps a surgical strike on Dorking? ;-)

Later in the week, I heard an anecdote from a teacher about a visit by a parent from a well-to-do South-of-England town to the headmaster of his son's school. The son had, apparently, stolen money from his father's wallet at home and the parent wanted to know what the school was "going to do about it". Well, maybe disciplining our kids is a job for Thabo Mbeki cos the ANC has a positive genius for truth and reconciliation? What is it with the Brits? Do you need Blair to cut up your meat for you too? Perhaps Kofi Annan should take a leak for you if he happens to visit the powder room?

It seems odd to ask an authority elected by someone else to take responsibility for your own government's delinquency? God forbid you'd take any fatiguing action yourself! Isn't it enough trouble to shuffle up to the local school and drop a paper in a box every four years before slumping back in front of the shiny-shiny world according to Murdoch? Perhaps it's less hassle to hope that Brasilians might have a bit more spare energy?

Well, OK, perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, half a million of us did traipse up to Parliament Square to object to the invasion of Iraq? And what happened when Blair ignored this sterling effort? Ummm, as I recall, nothing—well, except that Blair carried on and invaded Iraq, of course. In Spain, when their government ignored objections to the war making Spain vulnerable to a horrific bombing (and then tried to pretend the Basque had done it), the people of Madrid and Barcelona, more or less as one, hurled out onto the streets and ran amok. The police in Madrid discreetly withdrew leaving the night to the justifiable fury of the Spanish people who had objected to the war throughout. Apparently, even people who are generally fairly conservative were out on the rampage. That was the end of that particular goverment and of Spain's military presence in Iraq at the next election (the proximity of which saved the bother of a vote of no confidence).

The participant in the "Points of Culture" discussion had seriously missed the point of free software (in the world according to me, anyway)—which is that it's free. "Free" means autonomy and self-determination which means taking responsibility (of course, I wouldn't say no to an alternative currency for the beer either). Or, to put it another way, if you want something done, the buck stops with you and every other individual who makes up "Britain". If it's too big for you, do it collectively. Hey, why not do it collectively anyway cos it's more fun that way.

If you want jolly hand-painted FLOSS-based e-culture kits to facilitate cultural "hotspots" up and down the country, then get hold of a load of recycled equipment (not exactly a rare commodity), put the distro and applications of your choice on them, set up a project in the community of your choice and facilitate people to do whatever they like on them. Don't know how to get Linux, install or use Linux or community wifi? Ask the internet where people like Seeds for Change will be happy to help. Or work with others who might even already be emulating Brasil, such as the OpenDocumentary project.

FLOSS means getting people all enthused about controlling their own life and environment, communicating, customising, and even building their own stuff—getting people networking, discussing and collaborating. Getting people informed and organised so we can build independence and also put some collective wellie behind ensuring our government does the right thing at least some of the time. OK, most likely they'll respond with some rather unpleasant repression. Oh, wait, they're doing that anyway . . .

Long hours culture and microwave dinners, I hear you whimper. No time to get informed or do anything social—much less alarmingly political. Yep, it's a problem. Something we really should pressure the government to do something about. Maybe in the form of a less risible minimum wage and a ceiling on weekly hours (mandatory, so employers can't make you sign it away). Doing well in the "global" market—as any self-respecting BRIC knows—is not just about "flexible" labour as a "competitive advantage" but, more importantly, about managing access to your markets and currency exports and negotiating fairer trading and intellectual property arrangements. And Brasil seems to be doing rather better at this than us. Then again, they don't have the liability of our fragile service economy. Still, all this timidity based in fear of losing what we have is unbearably oppressive to the spirit—perhaps what we should principally learn from Brasil is to take a few more risks needed to build our political and economic confidence and independence.

The parties are all the same, no-one to vote for that'd be any better and don't know what's going on anyway? If there's no party any better than our current mendacious crew to vote for, then at least take action to make their more odious policies politically untenable. This might even also succeed in building new and more effective democratic structures which can tantalisingly be glimpsed in new communications and media technologies. If the news services are crap, go and find out what's going on for yourself—if TV or your newspapers seem to be lacking depth or balance, why not sample a more global range of news sources with diverse news values along with Indymedia's activist news, then synthesise an ideological mean average yourself.

There's a general human tendency, shared by politicians as well as bosses, to take the piss if they can get away with it—that is, until you make it clear you're not having it. So if you don't like bad behaviour, stand up to it. It's really bad for the spirit to sit there miserably praying things don't get any worse and trying not to think of the napalmed Iraqi women and children, torture, illegal detention and maltreatment, starvation, blood for oil or diamonds, unemployment, exploitation. Recognise that you're vulnerable when you're individualised by economic competition and reach out to other disenchanted people instead of feeling defeated and buying another expensive proprietary gadget to distract you. This will only suck you futher into emotionally isolating competition to be cool. Don't let your kids walk all over you from some vague sense of guilt cos you can't be arsed to talk to them after a long day in the rampant insanity of the contemporary workplace. Talk to them, it's better for you, better for them, and less hassle in the longrun.

Blair is not your headmaster, Bush is not your Daddy. Both may, indeed, get cross with you if you don't do as you're told, but the general idea of the democracy they keep banging on about is that they're supposed to do what you tell them.

C'mon Britan, grow up!

Bungle Blair . . .

2005-09-29T10:15:00.000Z

Well, really! OK OK I'm kinda enjoying it - and so are the BBC News 24 journalists by the look of it. Well Duh! Ungently manhandle a frail-looking 80-year-old member of the Stop The War Coalition and the CND out of the Labour Party Conference, citing the PTA, and then attempt to ban him. And then also wrestle out anyone who tries to object. Oh yeah, and best pick a time when the international media are present to film it and afford maximum glee to the anti-war-lovin' pinkos at the BBC.

That'll help sell the idea of silencing political debate to the British public ;-) You almost wonder if the Stop The War Coalition planned it all along, heh . . . Heckling's never been popular with the guys on the podium, of course. Still, heckling as terrorism??? Woweee, pretty scary!

Storming the Garden Shed . . .

2005-07-19T11:59:00.000Z

This is the text of a particularly vicious flame sent to various women's FLOSS groups recently. It's a point of view which I know 99.9% recurring of FLOSS blokes would fall over each other rushing to distance themselves from. I'm only reproducing it here because the ranting of lunatics often articulates something uncomfortable and difficult about society - but which we may yet need to unpack:

". . . Men created free software. Now women come along to
take the credit with "me too". Go to hell.

Death To women's Rights
Death To women's Liberties
Death To women's Freedoms

You are not wanted or needed. Get the fuck out of our
hobbies. You want to control all. Worthless c**** . . . "

Clearly this flamer is just a lunatic and we immediately invoke bans to shut him out of "our" virtual world. There is no need to discuss such vitriolic rubbish. But I do think it identifies, albeit in an unbearably uncomfortable way, an element of how an exclusionary mesh works.

Humans are "pack" animals and, as such, make adjustments to the group culture in order to have a sense of belonging which is crucial to human identity. If people from another cultural group (this could be race, gender, class - anything you like!) want to integrate into a group, the original group can begin to feel threatened - often against their own better judgment and in a way which the members of the original group themselves find uncomfortably impossible to explain.

If only one representative of an external group arrives, this individual will be expected quickly to learn and conform to the host culture. They will be expected to begin at the bottom of the group's internal heirarchy and gradually become more integrated as they become more competent in reproducing the group's conventions and conforming to its expectations. Groups always have mild forms of "punishment" for non-conformity and heirarchical position depends on behaving in accordance with its conventions. People find it difficult to trust someone whose behaviour they can't predict (sad, but true). This is why conformity is so important to most people.

If more arrive, the constructs of the shared culture of the host group begin to be challenged because the incomers will not understand or approve the conventions of the host group. If the incoming group is already subaltern to the host culture, they will resent being allotted to the bottom of the heirarchy. They may meet separately and create "pockets" of communication structured by the conventions of their culture of origin and try to make sense of themselves in the host environment whilst avoiding a sense of being "punished" for their difference, forced to abandon their own conventions, or allocated subordinated positions within the group heirarchy. A "subaltern" group with cultural conventions hybridised between culture of origin and new environment begins to take shape.

This may create tensions with the host group and they may try to contain the the subaltern group. Depending on the political ambience of the dominant group, this may be either by violence or by constituting the subaltern group as "a problem" and setting sociologists to research and "solve" the problem. The subaltern group will begin to feel as resentful as the original group and will begin actively and collectively to demand change. The original members of the group will begin to fear a breakdown in their comfortable sense of adjustment to the original group's well-known and understood requirements and reassuring sense of belonging to this group's culture. They may even fear that the group will be destroyed.

I think all this is perfectly natural - but at the same time it unintentionally fosters exclusion and can lead to painful conflict - as we've seen again and again all over the globe. The trick is to find ways of adjusting the whole culture to be comfortable for all without making the original members of the group feel disempowered and insecure or new members feel excluded or subordinated. Of course, the ideal is that the original members of the group make voluntary adjustments - participate in the hypbridisation process - and so can feel equally "in control" of the changes together with the incomers. But, too often, the original members of the group will draw closer together, forget existing internal conflicts, and collectively try to ward off the "threat".

We're at a crossroads in FLOSS. We can work together to build a FLOSS movement capable of adjusting, learning, and growing through inclusion, adjustment and hybridisation of culture to new FLOSS movements in the developing world and among women (bearing in mind that neither are homogenous categories and cultural categories always overlap) - or white, western men can try to pull up the drawbridge and repel the "invaders" in the name of cultural "purity". History will tell . . .

Rubbish! I hear you cry - FLOSS is not a conventional environment. This is a happy band of non-conformists and it is not possible that such a process could be occurring in our anarcho/liberatarian El-Dorado. Hmmm.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it - George Santayana

Indymedia Seizures

2005-07-01T14:12:00.000Z

There has been a police seizure at Bristol Indymedia, allegedly because of an article promoting "vandalism" which had already been removed from public view. This fresh seizure has occurred just before G8 2005 located in the UK:

Bristol Indymedia
Journalism.co.uk
The Register

This is the second seizure in the past 12 months. Indymedia ground to a halt after international server seizures which took place shortly before the European Social Forum event of 2004. The UK seizure, sanctioned by the Home Office, was probably carried out in breach of MLAT. Bristol Indymedia was one of the few servers which escaped the first seizure. According to Journalism.co.uk the Home Office gave the instruction acting on orders from the FBI. The Register suspects a cover-up of cases of police abuse in relation to previous G8 demonstrations may be behind this latest seizure and Swiss and Italian governments may be involved in another breach of MLAT.

Still sitting comfortably?

WASPS In Flight

2005-06-23T15:03:00.000Z

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing – Edmund Burke

Responding to Derek McMillan's June 22 blog:

It seems that governments and corporations could be forgiven for thinking that no one really gives a toss for civil liberties in the UK anymore. After all, it's mainly the old-guard aristos & posh liberals on the one hand and the ultra-left on the other opposing the PTA (and the ID card thing) - and the liberals and cons are more bothered about the Latin in the 1215 constitution than curbing corporate incursions into civil society. Pretty much everyone else (including most of the liberal-left) appears to think there's some kind of Gandalf-magic protecting the freedom-loving nature of the good citizens of Hobbiton-in-Albion. Cos we all know that Asia and Africa have natures prone to chaos ;-) but a police state could never happen here. Folk assure me that we British are always interning someone or other but it never touches "us" (who?). Is it that oppression is no more than mildly reprehensible as long as it doesn't look like affecting one personally?

I've talked about the PTA to various acquaintances among the chattering classes, most of whom were unaware that we had had any PTA (non-Northern Ireland) on the books prior to 2005 and were equally blissfully unaware that we were about to get a worringly extended one even 10 days before it was actually passed. All of them, right, left and liberal, earnestly or dismissively assured me that I needn't worry because "they" wouldn't "dare" to intern [white?] British people. And not to be silly and hysterical. Or be tiresomely political. Or make a mountain out of a molehill. Call me crazy, but does anyone else remember the one about not bothering when they came for the Jews . . . and the Socialists . . .

Well, I might consider following the steady stream of middle-class refugees abandoning a life of long-hours-bling-culture to flee to the pretty bits of France and Spain and drive up local property prices so that we can extend our homelessness problem far and wide - except that (a) I've got no capital and (b) it now looks like "old Europe" is about to come into line with the "Anglo-Saxon model" anyway? Meanwhile, Spanish malcontents are fleeing to leftie-resurgent Latin America. Central and Eastern Europeans are fleeing to Northern and Western Europe. Lots of fleeing going on all round. The grass just has to be greener somewhere? (I hear the swelling strains of There's a Place For Us in the air.)

I meet up (online) with plenty of American liberals who seem to share the European urge to flee - Britain seems to be destination of choice. God knows why - we're already infected with the plague of the Washington model. No point in coming here - we're already trying to get the hell out! Continental Europeans, of course, already know there's no place else to go as we troop into their vacant property in areas blighted by unemployment - the price of non-compliance with the Washington model. In the EU context anyway, since we haven't got the sense to go the whole hog like Brasil. I think people may need to strain themselves to grasp that under a "globalised" system of economic imperialism, there are not going to be many places left where you will be able to romp lightly ignorant among the flowers.

Ah well, no doubt I'm being unduly alarmist about police states etc etc. Last time I lived in a full-on police state, I was surprised to find that it just feels like the usual middle-class hush except that it's backed up by torture and arbitrary detention in addition to our own more democratic system of economic exclusion. Wait a minute though, don't we now have arbitrary detention often made on the basis of torture (carried out on our behalf in other countries)? We've even had a "debate" in the "Anglo-Saxon" axis about whether torture can be justified in "extreme" circumstances. Looks like the powers-that-be testing whether they can push that envelope on home ground or will just have to continue to do it secretly in "chaotic" tropics. And already openly in the USA prison system in general and Guantanamo Bay in particular. Once again, the British may sanctimoniously point the finger at the USA but there is clear evidence that Britain's secret services are also implicated in torture on foreign soil. There is a great deal of evidence that few of the detainees either of Guantanamo Bay or Belmarsh have any real connection with terrorism.

I'm not forgetting the internment of foreign nationals in Britain and the USA during WWII and of British citizens in Northern Ireland in 1973 (let's not get into Britain's assorted internments of colonised populations during the 19th and early 20th centuries). Britain was also convicted of torture on home ground in the European Court of Human Rights less than 30 years ago. Well it's war, Washington assures us. I'm not even going to bother assessing WASP claims that Islam has "declared war" on the West cos this is pure rhetoric. As Kenneth Clark, hardly a raging leftie, observed in his study of Western civilisation: "war is nothing more than organised theft". In that case, the claim that Islam has declared war on the West is patently absurd. And if this is war, how come the detainees at Guantanamo have been denied the rights of prisoners of war?

Well, maybe a robust burst of Anglo-Saxon is the best way to describe the forced globalisation of the Washington corporate model whipping up racism as a front for its violence and expropriation? And, sadly, whilst a million Brits can get off their arses to object to outright invasion, too many Brits don't seem to care that much about the gradual erosion of civil society by the corporations as long as they can afford the bling bling that comes with it - for some. According to a recent poll, 58% apparently back internment on the basis of insufficient evidence for conviction. Perhaps the US government is correct in thinking that the British don't care about injustice - as long as they keep their mucky, privatising, hands off the health service. And in Italy, Spain and Central and Eastern Europe the "Anglo Saxon" model is pretty popular, I hear. Well, with governments at least. But let's not call it that cos, God knows, the Med has it's own imperial glories to guard from vulgar Anglophone incursion. It'll be interesting to hear what they do plan to call it . . . The "Anglo Saxon" system seems a bit of a misnomer since I understand that the Saxons and Angles ruled by egalitarian council and slaughtered their leaders if they got too big for their boots. Of course, they weren't averse to a bit of invasion and plunder, so perhaps that's the reference?

All this "Anglo-Saxon" crap is just the current USA regime attempting to cover its lead in bullying and plundering the rest of the world by pretending (a) that this is an "Anglo Saxon" thing - by which they're hoping to implicate the British people and culture and thus pass the buck somewhat and (b) shift the terms of the debate away from such crude historical issues as military power and economic resources to some jingoistic notion of the inherent fitness of "Anglo-Saxon" culture. AKA the protestant work ethic. Blair must've lent them the British Propoganda Handbook (Northern Ireland Edition) on trying to make perfectly legitimate demands for national democratic autonomy and economic fairness look like a load of irrational religious intolerance. Mind you, they may well be right in assuming that most of the British are stupid enough to be flattered by such manipulative tosh!

Liberty's report last year on the effects of the PTA on the British Moslem community sees its effects as pretty much the same as those of the PT (Northern Ireland) Act on the Irish Catholic community in the 1970s: "A suspect community has been created against the backdrop of anti-Irish [Islamic] racism" Liberty 2004 Once again, a struggle for self-determination is not-so-subtly transmuted to a discourse of race and religion which can be used to conceal the real nature of wholesale incursions on human rights to preserve the democratically illegitimate power of the corporations and their government supporters. In that sense its oppressive nature may, indeed, pass like a shadow over the heads of folk who don't happen to be Moslem. Maybe that's what they mean by the "Anglo-Saxon" model?

Let's face it, defining nations, particularly two of the most "mongrel" nations in the world - England and the USA - by the ethnicity of some 6th-century immigrants (well, pillaging invaders actually) is a stone ridiculous revival of a 19th-century effort to give imaginary cohesion to the newfangled idea of "nation" and to justify the imperial greed and ambition of its rising merchant ruling class. Oh, wait a minute, that has a familiar ring . . . But I'm soothingly assured by my fellow countrypersons that this fresh round of internment amounts to much the same thing as before (more colonialism and war?) and it won't touch "us". I'm not entirely sure what differentiates English from Irish or protestant from Moslem people such that it's OK to intern and torture one lot and not the other? Surely the colour of your skin or your religious affiliation has absolutely nothing to do with the price of fish here?

So who the hell is this "us" and "them"? Moslems and Protestants? Bit of a strange concept in the UK given that around 7.5% of Brits actually attend a Christian church (and a good chunk of those will be Catholic) whilst 3.1% of the population identifies as Muslim. Given that this means around 90% of the population is, in fact, secular, religion is not exactly a major national divide. Or does "us" refer to the 90%-odd of Brits who indicated their opposition and the million who even turfed onto the streets to protest blood for oil? Or are we talking about the vast majority of Moslems all over the world who just want the peaceful opportunity to build their own system of self-determination and trade fairly with the West? It seems to me that most of "us" are on the same side here, Moslem or not? Maybe I'm just a romantic, but I have the distinct impression that, however badly confused by the media, most human beings in the world just want peace, economic stablity, and fair global trade?

If this is really primarily about race and culture, then what about the British Moslems of Tower Hamlets who'd rather elect an outspoken, [white] socialist opponent of war on the Washington Model than a [black] Blairite? And when Paxman tried to turn this into a discussion of the ousting of one of the very few black women MPs by a white male MP this was not only derided by British moslems but by many respondents from Africa to a BBC World Service discussion of the issue. Clearly, this is not about race (except in the view of the self-proclaimed "Anglo Saxons"). This is about self-determination, fair trade, and fair government. Many of us who don't identify as Moslem (or Christian) would nevertheless wholeheartedly back fairness in global political and economic affairs and many who do identify as Moslem are nevertheless deeply implicated in manipulating religious and cultural affiliation and violating human rights to shore up greedy, non-democratic (and Western-backed) regimes. So which "we" is so very jolly safe from arbitrary internment and torture?

An Afro-Caribbean acquaintance told me once that, shortly after the erection of the "ring of steel" around the City of London following the Bishopsgate bombing in 1993, he was stopped, searched, and held for some time by the police whilst attempting to drive into the city through said "ring of steel". He's an intellectual with absolutely no criminal affiliations or record. He wryly remarked that this was, nevertheless, perfectly understandable given the well-known prevalence of Rastafarianism among the IRA ;-) And I can't help feeling uneasy when I remember that many of the earliest occupants of fascist concentration camps were recently defeated Spanish republicans. Or that Franco built the military networks he would use for the violent overthrow of Spain's elected socialist democracy in the course of viciously suppressing an independence movement in Spanish-occupied (Moslem) Morocco.

Is there really some "magic" which makes "Anglo-Saxon" Britain somehow proof against political excess whilst its equally Teutonic neighbour just across the North Sea is apparently perfectly capable of voting in an incipient dictatorship which hypnotised the German population to collude with the internment, torture and extra-judicial execution of 12 million people who happened to be socialilst, Gypsy, Jewish, gay, of colour, mentally ill or disabled or like jazz or just not think much of fascism? Or our neighbours a little further to the South-East in former Yugoslavia which very recently produced a regime equally capable of genocide, this time against Moslems?

Just 65 years ago, Western Europe boasted three fascist regimes, two of them elected and all of them replacing democracies. Just 30 years ago, Britain was using torture on its own citizens. 10 years ago, an area of South-Eastern Europe was in the throes of genocide. It's easy to point smugly at the bizarre and scary antics of far-right religious fruitcakes romping through the political life of the USA, but overtly Neo-fascist parties have recently been electorally successful in Britain, France, Austria, and several other European countries. Why pick on Islam as so all-fire "extremist"?

Somewhere between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq I watched another BBC prog - this time they'd made a satellite link between a cafe in Lebanon and a cafe in New York and broadcast the resultant discussion. The Americans lashed themselves into hysterical fear and loathing and refused to listen considerately (or at all) to the moslems, whilst the Lebanese for the most part ruminated questions put to them carefully and divested themselves of thoughtful opinions in measured tones. Of course many Moslems all over the world are pretty hacked off by now, but that's not the same as being unreasonable or fanatical.

As Curtiz suggests in his documentary The Power of Nightmares, the Neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists are faithful mirrors of each other - indeed created one another. Islamic terrorist groups are small, national, and fragmented. There is no well-funded international Islamic terrorist conspiracy. The myth of Islamic fanatism has replaced the myth of Soviet expansionism in the nightmares of the West. Its purpose is to create a climate of fear to scare the American and wider Western public into complying with the amoral corporate agendas of the Neocons - often at the expense of their own real interests, never mind anyone else's.

Pythagoras, whose thought is at the root of Western universalism, suggested we should always keep it in mind that anything which can happen can happen to anyone. Good advice. So, if we want something to universalise it's this: none of us should feel too cosy as long as there is internment or torture or "organised theft" going on anywhere in the world. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that many, if not most, of those held both at Guantanamo and Marshalsea have no real connection with terrorism. If innocent dissidents who happen to be Moslem can be interned without a fair trial, why not eventually also dissidents who happen to be socialist? Or am I missing something?

AUT came out in support, it rained, went back in again . . .

2005-05-28T00:19:00.000Z

The AUT passed a motion recently to support a call by a range of Palestinian civil organisations to boycott two Israeli universities on the grounds that they were occupying land in contravention of a UN resolution and/or had been harassing (Israeli) staff and students carrying out historical research into the foundation of the state of Israel. This boycott was later withdrawn due to pressure from the wider membership of the AUT.

I just toddled around the web to see what the academic arguments for withdrawing the boycott were and these seem to be:

1. boycott = idiotic strategy (any idiot knows that)
2. academics exist in a realm beyond politics (any idiot knows that)
3. everyone who disagrees with a posh male academic is an idiot (idiot)
4. anyone who criticises Israeli policy re the wall or anything else is an anti-semitic idiotic idiot

Not really much room for debate there eh ;-)

Sorry boys, you'll just have to repeat the fifth form until you learn the rudiments of critical thinking. Thwacking Jones Minor around the back of the head with a copy of les mots et les choses and chortling in contemplation of the carnage should AUT finally merge with NATFHE . . .

Dumb eh?

2005-05-11T14:54:00.000Z

There's often mention of something called a "knowledge gap" which can be related to the "digital divide". This, apparently, is the mechanism by which the information rich get richer whilst the information poor get poorer. This seems to be why most of the grant money going into ICT is angled to skills development so that the digitally deprived can learn to construct Microsoft spreadsheets which will help them . . . well . . . do . . . what exactly? OK, well if that's not working it's 'cos poor people don't know how to help their children use computers the way rich people's children do. This is because they don't "value knowledge". So instead of making poor people smarter, IT is just enabling rich people to leave poor people further behind on the smartness scale. Hmm.

This assumption that economically excluded groups within capitalism possess less knowledge ought to be deconstructed. Are we measuring knowledge by the kilo or the pound? As has been a perennial source of film comedies, a yuppie abandoned in the wilderness would become dependent on "uncivilised" individuals with the specific skills to exploit that environment. Tarzan in New York is equally amusing. So, are we looking at the specific knowledges required to facilitate specific modes of social and economic life? And how do we assess the value of these different cultural/economic spaces? Is how rich they are in terms of money income going to be the dipstick again? Can the poor only "better themselves" by obliging the middle-class liberal project to elide class difference by homogenising themselves with middle class knowledge values and devaluing knowledges specific to disadvantaged environments?

I think most people would accept knowledge as a value - "knowledge" pretty much encompasses the whole of human endeavour from how to make organised communicative sounds and chip flint tools to how to build a digital library. But do we all accept that only knowledges which can be converted to money are worth anything? Because this assumption does seem to be becoming increasingly structural to academic endeavour in a marketised capitalist system and is rapidly ceasing to be "marked" as a culturally specific assumption at all.

If the point of a study is to explain and address economic exclusion in capitalist economies proceeding from disadvantaged groups becoming differently skilled, it would seem important to explore the question of what constitutes "skills" or "knowledges" and how their value is measured. The assumption that only knowledges which can be exchanged for money within a capitalist system are valuable (or exist at all) is effectively built into the formulation of a "knowledge gap" itself. If this isn't deconstructed, the study will just contribute, once again, to renewed economic enforcement of ruling class knowledge values. Renewed efforts will be made to get economically excluded groups to devalue knowledges specific to their environment and adopt knowledges for which they have no use (because they do not address the immediate environment or provide knowledges which this specific group actually can convert to money). These knowledges will be largely rejected by the recipients who can't find a use for the knowledge offered (it has no application in their context). The effects of this effort will then be measured according to the values and assumptions of those constructing the study/skills programme and the poor will be found to be "lacking" and "less" again. QED: the poor are poor cos they're "failing". This "failure" is variously attributed to low IQ, bad attitude, or in the case of the "knowledge gap" to lacadaisical parenting or willful ignorance.

As if we're not having enough fun dealing with the likes of Eric Raymond telling us that studies have proven that African people (including the diaspora) have much lower IQs than Europeans. One of these studies, to take a random example, used a sample of rural African migrants coming into Israel looking for manual work. Strangely, these individuals' lives have not prepared them to construct a pyramid out of only 3 matchsticks without breaking any, abstractly manipulate shapes with spots on them or contemplate how long a frog would take to circumnavigate the moon at a known constant speed. However, clearly ;-) they can be seen as a splendidly representative sample of a global diaspora comprising everyone from illiterate farm labourers who've never used a telephone to internationally revered academics. And that's why there are so many successful Black academics in the USA and very few in the UK - genetics, right? Ah well, silly me - thinking this was to do with the success of the Civil Rights movement in the USA . . . if only my parents had encouraged me to read Eysenck instead of Marx maybe I wouldn't be such a dummy!

I recall E P Thompson mentioning that handwritten copies of Rousseau's and Voltaire's radical essays were circulating amongst working-class Chartist activists in 19th-Century England - these activists would mostly have nothing more than a Sunday-School education. My grandmother (from a background of Methodist unionists with Sunday-school literacy) used to copy out entire library books for me by hand as a child, so I have personal experience of that tradition (contrary to the view that this is just a "romanticisaion" of the working class). So it must've been all that Voltaire and Rousseau that made my ancestors so poor and uneducated. Of course, now it would make them criminals too since copying media has become "piracy" - criminally attempting to participate in the information society without a (very expensive) license. What do you mean you can't afford to pay for information resources? Doh, you're supposed to wait till they put you on a scheme to learn job skills not just help yourself to any stuff that interests you! Don't you know that knowledge is only valuable if it's paid for? Didn't your parents teach you anything????

On a more contemporary level, British-Asian kids around me in Shadwell (one of London's many areas of bad governnment housing) are setting up bittorrents to distribute the digital music they create by hybridising diasporic forms from all over the globe - with a fine disregard for IP, no doubt. They might also be able to sort out a satellite dish to pick up global TV beyond the Murdoch menu and to deliver an impassioned critique of Western news values flipping illustratively between Al Jazeera's Arabic service, Star News and BBC News 24 with simultaneous translation between the 2 or 3 languages they are fluent in. Still, if you asked them to tell you which of three black-and-white-spotted shapes will fit in a given hole if skewed at 34 degrees they'd probably look at you like you're pathetically nuts and suck their teeth in irritable dismissal of such a pointless f***ing activity.

Of course, they might still manage to fail IT courses at school because they're not all that interested in constructing spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel which they don't have a use for. They might, on the other hand, be happy to run you up an nice little blog questioning depriving people of the right to a fair trial in the name of "democracy" . . . but, strangely, corporate employers aren't particularly crying out for this sterling range of technical, linguistic and interpretative skills . . . Dumb kids eh? Their parents clearly failed to direct them to AOL's homework area *sigh*.

Or to put it another way, why would you bother learning a bunch of alien skills and cultural assumptions which you don't understand the point of (or fit yourself up with a student loan it'll take the rest of your life to pay off - knowing, as you do, that you're still going to end up doing crappy jobs) when you know perfectly well that the primary hiring criterion for high-paid jobs in the UK is being a white bloke with the "right" background? At best, you might end up joining the the other third-generation immigrants in IT helpdesk hell for too little money to live on. Or you can haul arse up to the dole office and get too little money to live on - so you have more time to make groundbreaking music and hone your expertise in ad hoc electronic engineering and sophisticated deconstruction of news media . . .

And that's how the dumb just keep getting dumber! ;-)

Born Free in ICT?

2005-04-29T22:05:00.000Z

Lots of jolly empirical research about women seems to have concluded that the state of femininity is characterised by significant difference in biological brain function. There seems to be a concomitant drift in governmental and non-governmental discourse that ICT professional environments need to become more "women-friendly" by adapting themselves to accommodate biologically feminine traits.

Of course, what is mostly meant (reading for subtext) is that the inappropriate sexualisation and trivialisation of women has to stop. As if this could be localised to the ICT sector ;o) Other suggestions include providing tailored training for schoolgirls and giving more value to "anciallary" fields such as documentation and other "soft" contributions to ICT. Cos, of course, the lame-brained little darlings will inevitably be more attracted to the softie stuff.

Given that girls outperform boys marginally in "hard" technical subjects up until puberty it would seem to make more sense to enquire why girls apparently lose interest in the hard stuff at roughly the same time they get interested in what boys think of them? Add this to the relatively high proportion of women in ICT who identify as lesbians (relative to the population at large) and consider that lesbians are the group of women least likely to care what men think of them. Starts to look more like a case of an imposition of male expectations and desires in the socialisation of adolescent girls rather than of the biology of female brains?

If you visit a forum for (the pitiful percentage of) women professionals in ICT their main (and bitter) complaints are of bullying, exclusionary tactics, patronising attitudes, a glass ceiling, and incompatibility of the industry with childrearing responsibilities. Are we to conclude that bullying, discrimination, sexual vulgarity, and inability to wipe a baby's arse are genetic male traits? Fancy trying to read that off a brain scan or find the precise gene responsible for the trait of talking down to women? Feel a funding application coming on?

Women seem to be taking a bashing in the nature/nurture debate all round lately. Some days it seems the whole popultion of IRC is firmly convinced that women's brains are "hard-wired" differently from men's – and science has "proved it". Well ya know, at various times science has proved that the universe is geocentric, that woman have larger frontal lobes, that women have smaller frontal lobes, and that the atom is the smallest particle of an element.

The current discussion seems to be based on three kinds of "evidence": brain scans, genetic surveys, and stats based on behavioural observation/testing/surveys. Brain scans, in particular, seem to be a big flavour of the moment.

Behavioural stats merely measure what is and it seems likely that discursive effects are frequently being reinscribed as biological causes. There are endless arguments to be had about the extent to which the hypotheses influencing the design and interpretation of behavioural observations or surveys are culturall "loaded". And for a survey "proving" that, for example, infants behave differently according to gender from birth, there will be another one showing that infants are treated differently from birth by their mothers. The scientific jury is still out on the behavioural question – and as I'm thus free to think for myself, I'll choose to continue to assume that behavioural differences in infants are produced as an effect of language and environment. Well, it's hard to imagine funders devoting resources to behavioural studies which "prove" that because Italian and British people behave differently from early childhood it is clear that there are significant differences in brain structure.

Then there's genetics. OK, we (famously by now) share more than half our genes with a banana and more than 99% of our genes with chimpanzees. Just how much room for radically different "programming" of brains is there within a single species? In terms of mutation and recombination, there is more difference between two gorillas in the same valley than between a Chinese and a European homo sapiens. The theory is that the human gene poool must've been reduced to a puddle at some point. In reality, genetic differences between human individuals are greater than averaged differences between social classifications such as gender or race. This averaging is a misleading representation of human diversity. It's not like all women hover around a median and all men hover around a different median. It's that there are big differences between individuals whilst any difference between the genders as a whole is barely discernible statistically. The standard deviation is large. And whilst I don't think there's been a formal study, it looks as though deviation in ICT field is probaly much higher among both men and women. I did once ask a random bunch of men in an ICT forum to go off and take an online test actually designed to meausre AS quotient but which also shows an average differential of 2 points between "normal" male and female scores. All (not just some) came back with wildly extreme scores (at both ends of the scale). Most of these were at least 10 points +/- the 2 point average difference. Not one came anywhere near the middle.

What is also becoming clear is that differences such as complexion, shape of eye, or sexual orientation are controlled by many different genes in extremely complex and imbricated ways (much as race, gender and sexual orientation are inconsistent and complex in language and culture). Clearly, there are XX and XY individuals, but gendered identifications in discourse are rather more complex than that and this may have nothing whatsoever to do with brain structure anyway. There isn't nearly enough information about what connections there may be between human behaviours and gene cocktails to achieve anything more than highly speculative hypotheses. At most, geneticists might suggest predispositions. Spookily (as Edna would say) genes seem to be very well-read in Foucauldian models of productive multiplicity! Or is it just that I prefer to read the conclusions of scientists who are?

So that leaves brain scans. A real current favourite with those who have a predisposition (genetic?) to believe that women are inferior – or as it's usually put these days: "equal but different" (hands up if you remember where you heard that one before).(1) This field is, again, a hotbed of conjecture and conflicting studies. Current favourite is the corpus callosum – an area of the brain about which not-too-much detail is known – differences in which are frequently alleged to indicate that women are more sensitive and intuitive and crap at maths and logic. Of course, over the past couple of centuries this has been variously "proven" by conflicting stuff about frontal lobes, overall brain size, differences in grey and white matter, cranial capacity, etc etc etc. However, much like genetics, so little is really known about the precise functions of the different areas of the brain – or the extent to which their functions are interconnected – that similar reservations about the field of genetic surveys apply. Differences between individuals are greater than categorical differences. Diverse results of studies fail to corroborate each other and hypotheses are heavily culturally "loaded". And, of course, that's before you start on a critique of biological determinism.

Well, there's always gay sheep. Gays, of course, are also getting naturalised by the more conservative strands of genetic theory. Identical twin studies (remember, most of the science in genetics is statistics resulting from surveys, not repeatable experiment) indicate at most a possible 50% correlation between genes and sexual orientation. Which means that 50% of identical twins do not have the same sexual orientation. The higher correlation in identical twins might either indicate a predisposition which will only be realised half the time or might even merely record a tendency for people to treat identical twins the same as they grow up.

It's also important to remember that genetic survey has also been used to "prove" anything from higher levels of neurosis in Asians to lower IQs in Africans (everything relative to Europeans of course). Gives the "equal but different" thing a rather more obviously sinister ring, eh? I think most of us will remember where we heard that stuff before. OK, there's often the fig-leaf that this is gonna help diagnose and fight diseases somehow. Or the stats just sort of spun off research into treating something like schitzophrenia all by themselves. Or it's supposed to help combat discrimination by changing the social environment to fit alleged biological differences.

Of all these branches of scientific endeavour, I'm inclined to ask the same question: why are institutions and funders so ready to support the project of underpinning patterns of social discimination biologically? Why can't some people just accept that human individuals are, at once, pretty much the same and yet interestingly different from one another? It seems fair to say that this is more of an ideological project than a medical one most of the time. So what if gays turn out to be enjoying a choice or are compelled to same-sex orientation by genes? What? If it's a choice, do we get punished for being awkward on purpose? If it's "nature", are we supposed to get married and mimic a dominant construct of heterosexual, monogamous and monocultural "nature" as closely as possible so they can settle smugly back into hegemonic assumptions? God forbid we'd grow up, respect other people's choices and histories and do the work to adjust to each other?

I pointed out in a FOSS forum the other day that although individuals are different (no prizes for guessing that) we should not actually make assumptions on basis of gender (or other discursive categories such as race). We should not be changing the world to accommodate fanciful notions of female biology but changing the discourses which inscribe hierarchical gender difference on the world. I was told that it shouldn't be "made that complicated". Hmmm – gender construction is an algorithm lacking in elegance perhaps? Is simplistic biological determinism less taxing on the superior male brain?

Frankly, the ICT environment would be a whole lot more comfortable for me if blokes would only stop treating me differently (like a squidgy-brained specimen from another planet). Not all of them, I hasten to add. ICT blokes are often less prone to mark gender in the way they communicate than is the male population at large and more inclined to respect ability in whatever morphological package they find it. Most men, in the FOSS community at least, express what I believe is a genuine wish for more women to be involved in ICT. (Before we canonise them, this often seems to proceed from a wish to find a girlfriend who sympathises with an obsessional will to code.) Sex should be ignored in the workplace. The problem is not that women are erroneously treated the same but that women are erroneously treated differently.

(1) South African Apartheid – for all you under 30s out there!

The Economics of Free IP

2005-04-25T12:49:00.000Z

Freedom of access to information isn't only an issue of using open software formats (Free and Open Source Software) but also of commercial exploitation of IP. It's not that there's anything wrong with making a living from intellectual production, the problem arises when business models commodify intellectual production to the point of highly restricted access even for researchers and students -- much less anyone else. The Creative Commons initiative is every bit as important in ensuring access as avoiding producing documents only in proprietary formats which require the purchase of expensive software licenses to access. If not the the Creative Commons or University of Openness model, then at least the Calabash fair trade world music downloads model would be more appropriate. This, of course, flies in the face of the marketisation and commodification of both knowledge and higher educational training - and, God knows, something needs to do so!

Massive amounts of academic material now exists in digital format -- often in the open format of HTML or in the readily readable pdf format (which has a free reader -- albeit a proprietary and very buggy one). One still cannot access them, however, because they are "protected" by secure shopping and cost anywhere from $30 to $100 per article. The sheer amount of available information has led to the development of new industries organising and serving up content which are now integral to the academic process as well as affiliate pay-per-click directories of research and other text materials, access to much of which is also charged and often cumbersome.

Given that one would characteristically look at dozens of articles when doing an overview of literature, and might have hundreds drawn to one's attention during a typical year, an individual bill for academic access would have an annual cost similar to purchasing a Redmond license several times a year and costs universities a fortune. The effort to avoid accidentally infringing increasingly Kafkaesque copyright mazes wastes enormous resources for librarians and teaching staff. As the proportion of university materials held digitally increases, these costs will increasingly be passed on from the institution to individual students. (Lucky students -- already snorting speed to stay awake for studying after lectures and the increasingly necessary day-job.)

Another effect of this marketisation of academic digital materials is that they often locked away beyond the reach of Google's spiders so one does not even know they are there much of the time. On top of that, materials from academies in the developing world are frequently neglected and either never digitised at all or never made available to scholars globally. Even Google's thoroughly praiseworthy Google Print initiative has been criticised for overwhelming use of English language and minimal uptake of materials from the developing world.

Of course, the publishing bonanza is an integral part of adding market value to institutions in a marketised system. Much of this material is published by commercial publishers, however, and one suspects much of the profit is not going back into supporting academic institutions (not directly, at least). According to LISU, the average price increase in academic journal prices between 2000 and 2004 was between 27% and 94%. The University presses seemed to be around median £100-£200 whilst publishers such as Sage and Elsevier weigh in at nearer a grand with increases over the period of up to 300%. Hmmm. What's more, LISU found little correlation between "impact factor" and price increases. Good old capitalism, doesn't matter whether it's any good or not -- it's all about logo.

The authors, for sure, are rarely paid (and even then, paid peanuts). Before the digital age (when I was last publishing in print myself) we were told that the cost of paper production and distribution ate the money and that's why we didn't get paid for anything up to two years work in producing a book/article. And, in those days, print journal staff actually did relieve authoris of some of the editorial work. But print publishers have shoved more and more of the production work onto authors rather than editors. Authors now not only do most of the editorial work but also the work of positioning and marketing the resultant publication in an increasingly competitive academic marketplace. All this additional labour is also unpaid and carried out, usually, in an institutional setting where the general workload has increased exponentially in a micromanaged "marketised" HE sector. I wonder where all this money is going now that electronic media and "market forces" have reduced publication and distribution costs dramatically, shunted all the editorial and marketing work onto unpaid authors, whilst raising the cost of journal articles way above inflation?

Of course, the publishing bonanza is an integral part of adding market value to institutions in a marketised system. Clearly, academics have no other interest in supporting the economic restriction of knowledge -- and yet there is strong institutional co-operation in doing so. In the UK the dreaded "RAE" (research assessment exercise) enforces conformity. Not only is one obliged to publish for-the-sake-of-it but one is also obliged to compete for space to publish your regulation number of pieces in the most prestigious journal which will accept your stuff. Because, in effect, it's the paid-up peer journals which carry the most "points" for publication. Free access (even though peer-reviewed) journals tend to be seen as "lesser" -- "studentish" or somesuch. This prestige is also, on the whole, limited to North American and North European zones.

Academics and students will, of course, have a login to library providers of digital papers -- even then, often the institution which issues the logins does not have a subscription to some (or more often most) of the material one might want to look at. I (along with an increasing band of refuseniks) chose to work independently rather than in the marketised academic sector so usually have to pay for a library subscription as an independent scholar (or "pirate" someone else's). And for universities in developing countries, that's lots more sacks of lima beans to export if its academics are to have sensible access to global knowledge repositories.

It is also now the case in Britain that the physical university library buildings containing the repositories of printed books and journals are protected by swipe-card entry gates and security guards. A decade ago, one could walk freely into any academic library and use it for reference. A card was necessary only to borrow books. Now, it feels as though one is trying to cross a disputed border territory! One might imagine these were state secrets rather than the accumulated knowledge of the global community -- the research having mainly been paid for (in the UK at least) by the public at large (as taxpayers) who are then denied reasonable access to the research which they have paid to have carried out.

Streamlining current copyright practices in the academy is becoming an increasingly important issue because of the shift towards digitising teaching materials and increased exposure to suits for infringement. There are more collaborative systems being developed alongside the Creative Commons to "streamline" the development and sharing of academic materials. AEsharenet is an innovative project which has recently added "instant licenses" based on the Creative Commons model to their academic2academic commercial exchange model. Their rather offputting business-speek approach is, of course, not incompatible either with marketised academic culture or with FOSS licensing practices and philosophies as these also permit -- or even encourage -- commercial development. The AEShareNet model is a huge improvement on publishing house or clearing house models. It does seem to be slewed strongly towards "learning materials" per se, rather than research publication, and is studiously politically neutral in its self-presentation.

There are also initiatives to reform the peer-review journal process -- complete with headache-inducing flow diagrams for proposals to maintain existing heirarchical modes of validating research but bypass the function (or whatever functions are left) of the publisher. God forbid you'd allow the specialism community as a whole to conduct peer-evaluation of resarch through open debate.

All of these are positive engagements with "the problem" of digital development within academia. But I think the question of economic as well as legal exclusion of the population at large from the knowledge "economy" needs to be addressed and clarified in the context of social need (or even entitlement) rather than business practices and administrative infrastructure. There are moves within academia to address these wider issues and to expand the concepts and culture of the software libre movement to academic openness such as the forthcoming conference Open Culture: Accessing and Sharing Knowledge at the University of Padua, June 2005.

It's useful that governments are now picking up the social and democratic implications of FOSS, but governments also need to consider how the development of intellectual products (including software) is to be funded if access to the products themselves is to be genuinely unrestricted. I agree with RMS that work on FOSS development (as well as other forms of intellectual production) should be publically funded from income (not non-means-tested "stealth") tax revenue.

As an independent producer myself, I would hope to be paid for my work at some point because I need to pay my rent and eat. However, as a user and supporter of free information I don't want end-users to be charged for use of intellectual products or systems. The only fair way of ensuring this balance ultimately is by a fairer distribution of wealth through fairer income-based taxation alongside more open business models for digital media as well as for software develoment. It would seem more reasonable that authors are paid for the work and the public is able to access the work at reasonable cost through independent co-ops or publically supported distribution systems.

The university system should be centrally funded, as it still is in most of continental Europe, and its products freely available, not only to other academics but to the public at large (by all means free-licensed to protect the authors from plagiarism or re-privatisation of their work). Independent intellectual producers may also benefit from technologically mediated peer2peer commercial exchange mechanisms such as already exist for software and learning materials (including software) with AEShareNet. For academic publishing, the charges and restrictions associated with the production of paper journals and the peer-review system associated with them do not apply to electronic journals and, therefore, the charges levied for paper journals should not apply to the digital exchange of knowledge. Restrictions on access to research resulting purely from the marketisation of the British university system are unacceptable.

It ain't universally so . . .

2005-03-28T12:07:00.000Z

Can we work towards a universalisable ethics for a global internet? Well, I completely understand the urge to find *something* we can picture as unifying the human race under a shared conception of "natural" ethics, I'd love this to be possible myself. But, meanwhile, back in the real world . . .

The objection is not only that traditional, liberal constructs of universal ethics have represented the interests of those who control capital resources (and therefore the political executive, legislature and media) at the expense of everyone else. Because, even in a "perfect world", ethics could not be other than a set of historical constructs. Well, unless perfection included arresting time, or you believe in divinity or nature as guarantors of universal meanings.

For example, nomads in a pre-capitalist economic systems are not gonna get too excited about habeas corpus -- they have no prisons (well, unless they're put into someone else's prisons, of course!). Or take privacy -- probably a pretty cut-and-dried issue to communal-extended-family societies. It got much hotter in urbanising Europe in the the 17th and 18th centuries because governnment was increasingly perceived as intruding on the family. It's a hot issue for urbanised societies now because of fears that electronic data will be misused by corporations and governments whom few trust -- even though they're supposed to be part of a democratic order and are ostensibly under public control. Liberals see it a certain way, Moslems might think about separation of the public and private spheres quite differently. Both might value privacy and even the neocons would agree that privacy is a right, but would Islamicists or neocons agree that consenting homosexuality in private was OK? Would contemporary liberals agree that the private sphere is constituted in the inalienable authority of the male head of the family as irreducible primary unit of capitalism (as classical Liberals such as Locke saw it)?

Each might respect privacy as a value but would predicate this on different underlying value systems and would place different limits on its interpretation. So, is privacy a universal value or a contingent agreement based on shared historical circumstances filtered through diverse ethical systems?

So you would always be left with a problem of what constitutes a universally agreed ethical construct -- and who is competent to enforce its observance. Would it be voted on through the (unequal voting structure of the) UN? Proposed by the USA and rubber-stamped by the EU and then sort of implicitly agreed by "rest of world" cos, hey! ... things could be worse than nodding through the USA as universal policeman? Or just assumed by liberals (liberalism being a Anglo-American construct) to be based in "natural" rights and values? And who would police it? The world's greatest military power? Or are we just gonna frame these values, hang 'em on the wall and sing to them every morning?

I'm not saying there aren't ethical constructs which the whole world wouldn't necessarily respect -- arbitrary execution or imprisonment, for example, are things which probably freak most of us out and I wouldn't hesitate to universalise habeas corpus, fair trial and a ban on capital punishment as basic human rights. I campaign on these issues -- but I don't naturalise them and I'm well aware that whilst Europe deprecates capital punishment, nations such as the USA, Yemen and China think it's a great and moral idea (of course, none of these nations has internal consensus on the issue). And habeas corpus is a historical development originating in objections to totalitarianism in mediaeval Britain and was insisted on by the aristocracy at the expense of the monarchy. At the moment, the historical need is to protect dissidents (well, as long as they're dissing non-democratic regimes ;) and also the interests of groups such as the African and Asian diasporas which are disproportionately criminalised in the West.

Well, that's the liberal agenda, but you'll also find plenty of whites willing to countenance illegal detention and torture of Moslems because they're convinced (or cynically convince others) that breaches of democratic values are necessary to preserve the allegedly "universalisable" values of "democracy" themselves. Dunno, but where I come from, most people still consider this kind of universalised value system to be plain old colonialism. I sort of remember the British empire coming up with much of the same sort of stuff during its breakdown a mere 50-odd years ago as it battered, tortured and interned decentred oppositional groups as emergent nations constituted in the colonial process struggled for independence?

What about the suspension of emergent democracy in Algeria once it became clear that FIS (the Islamist party) would surely win the 1992 election? Should an election which would return a party inimical to democracy have been allowed to proceed? Or is a majority not allowed to *choose* a regime other than democracy? Is this reducible to a conflict of interest between men and women in Islam as so often suggested by Western feminists? India is a civil democracy -- are women getting a better deal there than in Jordan, an Islamic monarchy? Are women suddenly doing worse in Pakistan now that its unstable democratic order has been overthrown in favour of official one-party rule? Is Islam's historical record on respecting minorities worse than that of the West? I doubt it (they seem much the same -- patches of good, bad and appalling practice). For example, King Hassan of Morocco refused to hand over Jewish Moroccans to the Vichy whilst Britain cheerfully sent Jewish refugees back to be exterminated by Stalin. And what does all this mean for "universalisable" liberal values? Don't get me wrong, I'm keen on democracy (which should be as direct and participatory as possible imho) but I need to be realistic about the cultural specificity of my attachment to this idea. How do I know that a more communally-based regime couldn't work -- if it weren't destabilised by external forces? And many Islamic regimes in the past have been notable for relative tolerance (relative to contemporaneous Christian regimes, that is).

One might point to the major religions as being underpinned by similar values across diverse cultures. But these still can't be naturalised since the major monotheisms all derive *historically* from imperial cultures and you would not necessarily find the same value systems in non-imperial cultures.

So what does "universalisable" mean? Agreed to by the ruling classes of all nations? By every individual globally? Derived from "nature" or God? Godwin's problematisation of the concept of "the social contract" (which forms the basis of European notions of democracy) still seems pertinent:

If you demand my assent to any proposition, it is necessary that the proposition should be stated simply and clearly. So numerous are the varieties of human understanding, in all cases where its independence and integrity are sufficiently preserved, that there is little chance of any two men [sic] coming to a precise agreement about ten successive propositions that are in their own nature open to debate. What then can be more absurd than to present to me the laws of England in fifty volumes folio, and call upon me to give an honest and uninfluenced vote upon their whole contents at once? Godwin on Political Justice

Representative democracy is not only conceptually flawed but, historically speaking, regimes with this system are currently engaged not only in the illegal occupation of Iraq but also in torture, illegal detention without trial, illegal supply of weapons known to be used against unarmed civilians, dangerous levels of pollution, development of nuclear and bio weapons, support of external regimes known routinely to kill and torture their own subjects, all to guarantee unfettered economic exploitation -- or should I say *development*? Well that definition probably depends whether I'm looking at it as a middle-class Brit or an enslaved West-African cocoa farm-worker . . . need I go on?

OK, well state communism didn't work out so well either, so, for the time being, representative democracy seems the least-worst way of managing the current situation. One would hope that new forms of more direct and participatory democracy will emerge and reform of global institutions may open out negotiation of fairer trade and more equitable development. That North-America will not succeed in universalising minority values such as hypercaptialist development and the "free market". I think it worth noting also that values such as the Islamic ban on usury (which I heartily endorse) are irreducibly inimical to the free-market values which structure North American culture (though not, apparently, their economic practice either domestically or globally). Experience in chatrooms, however, indicates to me that most Americans believe passionately in the "free market" as an absolute value. In the rest of the world (including Europe) many regard it as imperialistic and, at best, not only its value but whether it has ever actually been practiced is hotly disputed by economists.

Difficult eh? I believe in the social contract and don't think we can manage complex societies without it. On the other hand, I can see the force of Godwin's objections -- and also the "old fashioned" Marxist objection that history is written by the victors, and so are any value systems capable of offering an illusion of "universability"? If democracy isn't derived from a concept of "social contract" then it's entirely worthless. Democracy has to be a matter of pragmatic negotiation, not of naturalised values.

I hope that moving towards more interactive, participatory and direct models of democracy which might be enabled by the internet will not attempt to universalise Western values. We have to accept that each issue has to be legislated after realistically inclusive and informed debate on *that* issue specifically and that the resulting statutes will not represent universal values but contingent agreements whereby a majority view is enforced at the expense of those who disagree. Of course, Islamist regimes would see this as a minimally revised Western liberalism -- and they'd be right! The West would not find itself a majority in a truly global context -- and I don't want my own ideas of what constitutes a fair regime overridden any more than anyone else does. Any truly mutual global order would need to negotiate differences and not attempt to override them (especially not by military occupation, torture and extra-judicial detention).

Having said all that, I even have to question the value of direct democracy -- for example, UK governments have never put capital punishment to a referendum because MPs mostly tend to the liberal view that it's wrong but know that a majority of the UK population probably would vote to have capital punishment restored (at the moment it's banned in the UK). I wouldn't put it to referendum either because I strongly oppose execution. I could say that this is because I don't think it works as a deterrent, blah blah -- but if I'm honest, my objection is primarily ethical (I think it's disgusting, vengeful and barbaric). However, opposing a referendum is against my commitment to direct democracy . . . So which value do I "universalise"?

The social contract means that we all agree to obey all laws even if we disagree with a proportion of them in order to maintain a safe and relatively equitable order as a whole. In other words, because it suits us in the long run and not because we believe in every "value" articulated in any democratic order. The problem is that many of the current "democratic" regimes are regarded by many, both within and beyond their national borders, as pretty disingenous misrepresentations of historical realities of exploitation and exclusion.

In short, I think the Marxist objection that in an economically unequal society there can be no universalisable values still holds good. If we all have the same practical interests, we will probably tend to share more values. If some of us feel that we're being exploited, pushed around, illegally occupied, economically and/or culturally excluded, etc etc etc then we're not going to buy into falsely universalised values. To have a world based in agreed values, we need economic justice first.