On the Further reading page of this website, among a number of other significant Arthurian texts, I recommend Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Yesterday the section read:

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (1983)
A necessary corrective to White’s public-school boyishness, Bradley’s epic revisionist version sees the Arthurian story through the viewpoints of its women, notably Igraine, Morgause, Morgan le Fay and Guinevere.  It’s less feminist than is sometimes imagined, though, and the mystical guff about Atlantis becomes annoying.

Today that last sentence has become:

It’s less feminist than is sometimes imagined, though, and parts of it are troubling in the light of recent allegations about Bradley’s personal life.

Somehow, given the accusations of violent and incestuous abuse made against the late Bradley by her daughter, the mystical guff seems suddenly less of an issue.

The allegations against Bradley haven’t been proven in a court of law,  of course, and there’s now no reason why they ever would be. Whether we believe the upsetting childhood memories of a woman who has no obvious reason to lie and who’s making herself very publicly vulnerable by giving her account, is a matter of individual judgement. Personally, I’m don’t see how any of us can have the confidence to dismiss it, and this seems to be the consensus except among the most partisan fans of Bradley’s work.

I must admit I have some misgivings, then, about continuing to recommend The Mists of Avalon to readers of The Devices. The book deals, sometimes rather graphically, with aberrant sexuality including rape, incest and relationships involving varying degrees of psychological and physical abuse. Knowing (or believing, or suspecting) what we do now, it’s difficult to approach these passages without some disquiet.

I’ve never, in fact, been a huge fan of The Mists of Avalon (my thoughts on first reading it in 2012 aren’t altogether flattering, and I seem to have given it a rather harsh two stars on Goodreads). The temptation simply to disown it at this point is a strong one, but I think that would be to sell the book short. Regardless of its author’s character, it’s been massively influential on presentations of the Arthurian story (and on fantasy in general) over the past few decades, and its more-feminist-than-usual take has been an inspiration and comfort to many readers — including, from what I gather, some who have themselves been victims of abuse.  Those qualities may be subjective, but they aren’t imaginary. For so many readers to have found them in the book, they must be there to be found.

The principle of separating the art from the artist is a questionable one. The Guardian frames the question at length, and The Washington Post re-examines The Mists of Avalon in an effort to answer it, but they don’t have any definitive answers, and nor do I. (The commonality between reality and art in this instance is surely relevant, though: I imagine that few of the fans pledging never to read another of Bradley’s novels boycott the elegant fonts designed by self-confessed paedophile rapist Eric Gill.)

In the end, the decisive factor was that my Arthurian reading list also recommends Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory. Malory was, most historians agree, a convicted rapist who wrote his masterwork in prison.  It’s difficult to resolve at this remove exactly what ‘rape’ involved in Malory’s case (since the party whose consent was legally required for sex to take place would not necessarily have been the woman’s), but contemporary records also accuse him of robbery, kidnapping and affray. Yet to exclude Le Morte D’Arthur — a book as crucial to the evolution of the King Arthur story as The Lord of the Rings is to modern fantasy, or The War of the Worlds to science fiction — from such a reading list on the grounds of its author’s character would be virtually impossible.

The Mists of Avalon isn’t anything like as seminal as that — much of what it does is merely rewriting Malory from a neopagan perspective, and that of his neglected women — but its lesser influence is nonetheless crucial in our modern context. The book’s reputation may well founder in the future, but that influence will remain. Meanwhile Bradley, like Malory, is dead, and cannot profit in any way from the continuing popularity of her work.

In fairness, then — and it’s a fairness owed to the book and to its appreciative readers, not to its author — The Mists of Avalon has to stay.

#799, 5th September 1998

“You can interpret the lyrics,” huffed a Nazi goon caught nicking this song for the BNP’s website, “any way you want.” The specific double meaning of “if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists” eludes me, but it’s true enough that the Manic Street Preachers’ lyricists had a taste for the oblique. Simple polemic was rarely their style: on their early records they favoured harsh, dense word-blocks, crushed by the transition to song into something barely singable, their uneasy imagery delivered by James Dean Bradfield as a compressed bark. But for all their rough treatment, the words mattered – for The Holy Bible the band took out double-page ads printing the record’s scorched, self-lacerating lyrics in full. They made records About Things, things number ones only occasionally break bread with: self-harm, depression, the decline of class consciousness. And here, apparently, the Spanish Civil War.

But one of those things is not like the others. Why on earth make, in 1998, a record about the Spanish Civil War? Old battles had never been the Manics’ territory: they preferred live issues, current problems of culture and psychology. A song praising the Republicans in the Spanish conflict is not addressing a live issue: and, to be honest, there weren’t a lot of obvious 1998 analogies you could make for it. “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” is a magnificent title, but tolerate what? What line were the band drawing? Was it all a better-read version of Father Ted’s omniprotest: Down With This Sort Of Thing?

So I’d like to suggest that something more is going on here, but before digging into what, it’s worth asking how we got to this in the first place. “If You Tolerate This” is a fanbase record, as surely as anything by Boyzone is. The Manics had been the most startling beneficiaries of the post-Oasis interest in British bands, hitting form and accessibility at just the right time for big, gestural rock to succeed. And to be horribly cynical about it, the tragedy of Richey Edwards established their bona fides as a serious band at the same time as his absence meant they could stumble into the mainstream without lyrics like “He’s a boy / You want a girl so cut off his cock” chewing up their column inches. “A Design For Life” was a remarkable single, a band pushed by guilt and circumstance into speaking plainly, seizing their platform and using it. They released it as a group with sympathy and a small, utterly devoted audience: they left it a band with a huge, solid fanbase.

It made “If You Tolerate This…” – first single off the follow-up album – into a big moment, the kind of release other singles shuffle out the way of. But as is often the case, the fanbase flexed its muscles a record too late. “If You Tolerate This…” has none of the painful confidence of “A Design For Life”. It opens brilliantly – cold, Radiohead-style bursts of treated guitar, pulsing out and back like the respiration of some great, dying machine. But once it gets going and the strings and solos kick off, it’s the band settling into the cement shoes of lugubrious arena rock – footwear they found all too comfortable.

So while it’s lovely to see them at Number One, what’s initially disappointing is that for the first time in their career, it didn’t feel like the group were over-reaching themselves. That had been a large part of their appeal. The earliest Manics made much of a love for Public Enemy and Guns’n’Roses, but the process they applied to those influences was pure indie pop: make a Quixotic attempt to match your idols with a tenth of their budget and technique, and trust that something inspiring comes out of it. They stood in relation to glam metal as Orange Juice stood to Chic and disco – a doomed, glorious tilt at a form that might end up wonderful in a different way.

Everything Must Go took the same trick and used it for stadium rock – gambling, successfully, that rough-hewn attempts at anthemic rock and thoughtful, sorrowful lyrics would rub well together. But it meant that when “If You Tolerate This…” came out, the surprise had become expectation. The band, inevitably, chortled about “subverting the mainstream”. But the idea of the Manic Street Preachers having a hit with a single about the Spanish Civil War felt right: was, instead, instantly comfortable and appealing enough by itself that the weary reality of it could be shrugged off.

What redeems the record – lets it wring dignity from tedium – is that this gap between reputation and reality is exactly what the song is wrestling with. The crucial moment in “If You Tolerate This…” is the breakdown before the final chorus – “And on the street tonight an old man prays / With newspaper cuttings of his glory days”. It’s picking up on the “monuments put from pen to paper” part earlier – the way remembrance of heroism, even well-meant remembrance, turns into romance and abandons the messy subjectivity of the lives in question. And even as it acknowledges this, the song has been playing around in that romance – the title slogan, the rabbits quote, the totems of a long-gone, righteous struggle.

It’s easy to see why this might resonate with the Manic Street Preachers. They had become a group defined by a gap: a vanished friend who was turning into stories and slogans himself. In a season of youth in the charts, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” was less a subversive gesture, more a memento mori from a band that had finally found their place and were settling into a dependable success. Listen to Bradfield’s despairing, exhausted “aaaand” as he slides into the chorus – “If you tolerate this then your children will be next” is a warning, but not an avoidable one. History itself – the process of sorting and discarding, of turning fighters into forgotten men while their words survive – is the “this” that cannot be tolerated. But always is.

One’s abilities are also one’s limitations: to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Tim Jenison, the hero of Tim’s Vermeer (2013) is a technologist, the co-founder of a company that produces software for visual imaging. When Jenison looks at a Vermeer, he sees a special effect, a reproduction of the real: he even refers to Vermeer’s paintings as photographs and likens them to video images. This documentary, the work of Jenison’s friends Penn Jillette and Teller (the latter directed), tracks Jenison’s effort to crack the secret of Vermeer’s paintings (the use of optics) and recreate The Music Lesson by staging its scene and painting with the use of lenses and mirrors. Thus the film’s title.

But Tim’s not Vermeer (as he would readily acknowledge), and Tim’s painting is not a Vermeer. As seen on DVD, Tim’s not-Vermeer appears to be a doggedly literal and lifeless facsimile.¹ It seems likely that Vermeer’s paintings owe something to optics. But a painting is not merely a transcription, a reproduction of the real by mechanical means. Vermeer may be, as Jillette suggests, the greatest artist “of all time.” But why? Because his paintings look like photographs? The idea of art that runs through Tim’s Vermeer is sadly naïve.

I like what William Carlos Williams says in Spring and All (1923), a book of twenty-seven poems and a prose commentary on matters of imagination and representation:

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

Art is not a transcript, not a copy, Williams says, again and again, in a various ways. His prose has a curious relevance to optics-based art: reversing the instruction that Hamlet gives the Players — “to hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” Williams insists that Shakespeare “holds no mirror up to nature” in his work. The power of imagination, rather, “is to give created forms reality.”

“Plagiarism after nature”: that’s what Jenison seems to think Vermeer is all about. What’s missing is a consideration of the artist’s imagination. The Music Lesson is, after all, a composition of Vermeer’s making, not something that he happened upon and transcribed. What elements went into the composition? What’s compelling about it? What might it suggest to a viewer whose interest in art goes beyond how-did-he-do-that?

What my relatively unlearned eye sees in The Music Lesson: an arrangement of planes, contrasts of light and dark, a variety of textures, a deeply quiet scene (despite the music-making) that has much to do with decorum and intimacy. The figures in the painting are alone and not alone: an artist’s easel is visible in the mirror. I am pretty sure that if I were to travel back in time to Delft, I would not see anything resembling this painting — except this painting.

An excellent site for learning more about Johannes Vermeer: Essential Vermeer. Here is that site’s page for The Music Lesson. For Vermeer and optics, start at this page: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura. And for a large version of The Music Lesson, try this one.

¹ In truth, a facsimile of a facsimile. Jenison received permission to view the painting (part of the Royal Collection of Great Britain), but he worked from reproductions.

Are we ready for a five and a half week long campaign?

We’ve all known for four years that the Fixed Term Parliament Act lays down that the next general election will be held on May 7th 2015.

One thing a lot of people have missed is that the formal campaign period will be far longer than we’ve seen in the past. The 2013 Electoral Registration & Administration Act 2013 extends the length of the statutory timetable for from 17 to 25 working days. Add on all the public holidays and weekend days and you get to five and a half weeks.

That is a lot longer than we are used to and adds a new unknown into this election

My guess is that the parties will defer things like manifesto launches until after Easter Monday which takes place on April 6th.

A key factor during the campaign period is that the broadcasters are under strict rules and those parties designated as being “major” will get guaranteed air-time. Those that aren’t won’t.

This could make a huge difference to UKIP which enjoyed “major party” status in the run up to the Euros on May 22nd. Although it topped the national vote share on that day there is no guarantee that a party which failed to win a single seat in 2010 will be officially designated a major party for the general election.

Winning a by-election between now and then could make a big difference to its case.

Mike Smithson

2004-2014: The view from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble

Follow @MSmithsonPB

Monday

Back to the roof of St Asquith’s. As we look out across the great expanse of the Water, my companion asks if I think we might have a tsunami.

“Good grief, woman!” I reply. “This is no time to worry about Japanese food. There could be a tidal wave at any moment!”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• On the roof of St Asquith's
• Introducing Freddie and Fiona

The ghost in the MP3.

From the Independent website:

Cabinet members have received an "urgent plea" to stop clogging up the statute book with unnecessary new criminal offences. ... 

Mr Hughes sent every Secretary of State a letter last week calling for prudence over introducing new criminal offences. At the end of this year Mr Hughes will publish figures on the number of new criminal offences that have been introduced in this Parliament, as well as those that have been removed or amended. 

Mr Hughes said: "I wouldn't be surprised in the first year of using this comprehensive methodology if there is a net increase in offences across the UK since 2010." 

A Whitehall source added: "This letter could be described as an 'urgent plea': let's try and keep the statute book as simple as possible.

This issue is a good test of the Coalition's intellectual and moral coherence. The Agreement that formed it seemed to promise a break from Labour's unrelenting invention of new crimes:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

But in power the temptation to follow Labour's example has proved harder to resist.

It may just be the shortage of money or administrative convenience that have led Simon to issue this plea, but I am glad he has done so.

Bob Heer reminds me that in 1988, DC Comics put out a book called The History of the DC Universe and they included an essay by Bob Kane about the creation of Batman. Here's an excerpt from it…

I called in my friend Bill Finger who was a pulp writer just starting out to write for the comic books. He made several suggestions which enhanced my crude Batman sketch. He told me to remove the eye-balls from the slits in the mask to make it appear more sinister looking, and also to bring the eye-mask that I had originally drawn down over his face into a Bat-cowl. After awhile the first innovative Batman sketch was completed.

However, I soon refined his early look by elongating the short ears on the Bat-cowl, scalloping the side of the long gloves and changing the stiff bat wings into a scalloped bat-cape which would billow out behind him when in action to make him appear like a large bat.

I would like to pay homage now to my good crony, Bill Finger, who was truly the unsung hero on the entire Batman mystique. He helped me considerably on the innovative sketches on Batman and became the chief and best writer for most of the Batman series from 1939 to the 1960s. His unique style of story telling created the somber, mysterioso mood of the early stories which prevail once again with the current writers on Batman, removing it from the "campy" style of the Batman TV series. Bill also created many of the bizarre super villains such as the Joker, Scarecrow and Catwoman. I created the Penguin, The Riddler, and we collaborated on other villains along the way.

I regret that I did not give Bill a byline, which he richly deserved, but somehow the policy in those days was to give credit only to the original creator and not to the writers who came in after the fact. Bill, I wish you were around now for me to give your just dues for your invaluable input into Batman. I thank you now and God bless you eternally.

There is some dispute over the creation of the Joker. Jerry Robinson was Bob's main art assistant in those days. In fact, the way a lot of people think Bob Kane drew in the early forties was actually the way Jerry drew. Jerry, who always impressed everyone as a man of great integrity and certainly not a credit grabber, claimed he created the Joker. Bob insisted it was Bill Finger and it may well have been; not that Jerry was fibbing but it's likely he contributed something, Finger contributed something and then different definitions of creatorship are in play here.

In any case, it seems pretty clear Bob Kane did not create the Joker and yet last I looked, his contract with DC said they had to say he did. They have to say Bob created all the Batman mythos, Batman included.

So here's another time Bob admitted Bill Finger deserved a byline — "richly," in fact. Even if "the policy in those days" justified not giving it to him then, what justified not giving it to him in 1988?

There is much talk on the Internet about the announcement that some time next year, Bob Kane will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I mentioned it here and joked that protestors would show up for the ceremony with signs that said "WHAT ABOUT BILL FINGER?" Apparently, some folks are talking about actually organizing something of the sort. I'm thinking I may even go out and join them.

For those who don't know: Bill Finger wrote the first Batman story and most of the early ones that established key things about the character and his world. He was a friend of Kane's and a very good writer, and while Kane argued with some accounts of exactly what Finger had invented, even Bob had to admit that Bill made a vital contribution to the property.

In Kane's 1990 autobiography, he stunned many with the following paragraph. The book, like most of the "Bob Kane" art in the comics, was largely the work of someone else. Still, Bob wanted this in there so it's as good as if he'd typed the words himself…

Now that my long-time friend and collaborator is gone, I must admit that Bill never received the fame and recognition he deserved. He was an unsung hero. I often tell my wife, if I could go back fifteen years, before he died, I would like to say "I'll put your name on it now. You deserve it."

But Kane did not do this and I really wish he had. He could have picked up the phone, called Paul Levitz or someone at DC and said, "Look, as long as it doesn't impact how much I'm paid, I'd like to add Bill's name wherever mine appears." If he had, Finger's friends and family would not have to deal with this injustice.

I suspect that it's caused some pain to Bob's loved ones, as well. They can't be pleased by that little black cloud that still hangs over Batman and Bob Kane. No one is. Had he made that call, people would not now be discussing Bob as someone who wronged a friend who made him rich and famous. We'd now be hailing Bob as a helluva great guy who, like the fellow in the cowl, righted injustices.

Around 1946, when DC was afraid of him suing them over ownership of Batman, he secured a very lucrative contract with the company. One of its provisions stated that Bob Kane — and only Bob Kane — would be credited as the creator of Batman and that hero's major supporting players. Kane often acknowledged that certain supporting players were created by others but he insisted on his credit and thereafter refused to give it up or modify it.

His deal also called for him to "draw" a certain number of Batman pages per month. I put "draw" in quotes because everyone at DC knew Kane was not going to draw them by himself and some probably suspected he'd do what he did, which was to hire someone else to do all of that work. Early on in this arrangement, Kane may have occasionally redrawn a figure here or there but at least 99% of the art was by a ghost, usually Sheldon Moldoff. DC was paying Kane a high-enough rate that he could pay his ghost and then live quite well off the remainder of the money. At the same time, many Batman stories were done outside this arrangement with DC editors commissioning the usual freelancers to produce work that would also be signed with Kane's name.

Due to the fluctuating art styles, fans got hip that "Bob Kane" art was drawn by many people. Even as a kid, I noticed that some Batman stories did not look like others appearing simultaneously. Some of it was obviously the work of the whoever was drawing the Supergirl strip…which was not signed "Bob Kane."

If a fanzine blew the whistle, they sometimes received an angry letter from Bob or some friend of his scolding them for spreading stupid lies. In at least one, he was outraged by the suggestion that Bill Finger was in any way, shape or form a creator of Batman.

Kane's main "proof" that Finger didn't create any part of Batman was that Finger's name did not appear on the strip. If you read that letter to which I just linked, follow that up by re-reading the above quote from Kane's autobiography — written years later, when Finger was dead and Kane was much more secure in his financial position. Taken together, the logic goes roughly like this: "The proof that Bill Finger didn't create or co-create Batman is that I didn't allow his name on the strip." It still is not there.

In the mid-sixties, Kane negotiated a new deal and the timing couldn't have been better for him. Batman, after many years of not being a hot property, was on TV and bigger than ever. Moreover, the folks who owned DC Comics were itching to sell the company to a big corporation and so had to make sure that Mr. Kane would not queer that sale. He got an awful lot of money or at least what seemed like an awful lot at the time. Thereafter, his working arrangement with DC changed and he no longer supplied pages that he'd allegedly drawn. Instead, DC editors hired all the artists and those men were credited. So, for the first time, were the writers.

Sadly, by this point, Bill Finger was not one of them. As reported by author Les Daniels in DC's official history: "A group of veteran writers, including Bill Finger, Gardner Fox and Otto Binder, pressured DC to provide pensions and insurance; they ended up losing their jobs." (Gardner Fox was the other writer who wrote early, formative Batman stories, as well as being the unquestioned creator of many of DC's top characters.)

Since then, DC has credited Finger for writing certain stories and credited ghost artists for drawing them but the company continues to take heat, probably undeserved, for the absence of any creator credit for him. I don't know the current status but a few years ago, certain folks at the company were actively trying to persuade the Kane family to waive that provision and permit, "Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger." Last I heard, they refused to entertain the notion despite the fact that sole credit is probably doing Bob's reputation more harm than good.

In the meantime, friends and fans of Mr. Finger have done what they could. Each year at Comic-Con International in San Diego, I present the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, a trophy that goes to a writer whose body of work has not received proper recognition and/or reward. It was suggested by Finger's old friend and co-worker, Jerry Robinson, who himself made early, important (and anonymous) contributions to the world of Batman. DC is one of the sponsors of this award and next month at Comic-Con, I will co-present this year's alongside Bill's granddaughter, Athena Finger. I'll also be on a panel with her to discuss her grandfather and his work.

If I can, there are a few things I will say on that panel in defense of Bob. One is that his original sin of credit-hogging was committed at a time when the industry was not as sensitive on this issue as it is today. No, Bill Finger did not get his name on work he did on Batman. He also didn't get it on 95% of the non-Batman work he did and there's no indication he objected.

Most writers and artists of comic book before the mid-sixties remained largely anonymous and didn't seem to mind. Many writers regarded comics as something they were going to write until something more prestigious and/or lucrative came along. Even the man born Stanley Lieber has spoken of inventing "Stan Lee" as his pen name for comics, figuring to save his real moniker for novels he would someday write. Most artists did not sign their work even when working on comics where it was permitted and all they had to do was write their name somewhere on page one.

Also worth mentioning is that back in the forties, the role models for most guys who did comic books were most guys who did comic strips. In the newspaper strips, it was pretty much standard for one person to get all the credit no matter who did what. That didn't make it right…just sort of customary.

Someone else could write without credit. Most of you know the feature Flash Gordon and many of you know it was created by the great Alex Raymond, who drew it from its inception. I'll bet not ten people reading this know the name of the guy who wrote it for a lot longer than Raymond drew it and who some think contributed as much to Flash Gordon as Finger contributed to Batman. The writer's name was Don W. Moore.

Someone else could draw without credit. Almost all artists who produced newspaper strips had ghosts to help them with the workload and sometimes, those ghosts wound up doing more of the art than the guy whose name was signed to the strip. In fact, sometimes they did it all, including the signing of that name.

Someone else could even write and draw without credit. After the Mutt n' Jeff comic strip was established and bringing in enough cash to permit him to do so, Bud Fisher reportedly never did anything on it; just enjoyed life and let someone else sit at the drawing board day and night. The unrelated Ham Fisher did much the same thing with his Joe Palooka and the Fishers were hardly unique. All those great guys who wrote and drew Disney comics in the newspapers and comics? Anonymous.

The absence of Bill Finger's name on the Batman feature back then has to be viewed in the context of that era. And it might also be fair to recall that Finger did not seem to make a huge stink about it during his lifetime…a little stink but not a huge one. Finger passed away in 1974. He lived through the Adam West era, reaping virtually no attention or rewards as his characters and storylines, for which he was paid meager, comic book money, turned up on a hit network TV series. He did co-write one episode but that was about it. Then came the period when DC wouldn't hire him at all. Fortunately, that ended though not in time to do him much good.

I met Bill Finger ever-so-briefly less than a year before he died. I was up at the DC offices and an older man I did not recognize was walking around. With my vast interest in veteran comic creators, I had to know who he was and Nelson Bridwell, an editor there, told me. I immediately went looking for the older man to express my long admiration for his work but to my great disappointment, could not find him. It seemed like he'd left the office and I'd missed my chance to meet Bill Finger.

A half-hour later as I was leaving the building, I spotted him coming out of a little newsstand and notions shop in the lobby. I went up, introduced myself and said something like, "Your writing has always been an inspiration to me…which is a nice way of saying that I steal shamelessly from you." He laughed, asked me a little about myself and we then spent five minutes talking about New York taxi drivers and the subway system. Not a word about Batman or Bob Kane or anything that I would have liked to discuss with him.

I knew Bob somewhat better. I met him in 1968, which was a time of transition in his life. He'd made that new deal with DC and under it, the guys who actually drew the comics were finally being credited. In fact, that first day I met him, I showed him the current issue of Batman which was the first to credit anyone else — in this case, Irv Novick. Kane knew it was coming but I don't think he was emotionally prepared to lay eyes on a Batman story with a name on it that was not his. He stared at it a long time then closed the comic and changed the subject.

I probably spent time with Bob on about a dozen occasions, not counting his funeral. I was one of only four people connected with the comic book field present at Forest Lawn that day, the other three being Stan Lee, Mike W. Barr and Paul Smith. We'd all decided independently to attend but one of Bob's friends or relatives kept pointing to us and announcing, "The comic book industry sent an official delegation to honor Bob." I can't recall "the comic book industry" ever acting as one in anything.

The other twelve or so encounters were interesting, though I was never sure which Bob Kane I was going to get. Sometimes, he was the Bob Kane who'd single-handedly created Batman and drawn every single story for around 27 years. Other times, he'd realize that I — and others present if others were present — knew better and he'd talk about the other artists ("my ghosts") and Bill Finger, acknowledging, though perhaps undervaluing, what he believed they'd done.

I may be dead wrong about this but my sense is that he was troubled by Finger's lack of recognition and financial benefit but at the same time, terrified that even the slightest thing he did to rectify matters might slightly diminish his own income and celebrity. He is not the only person in comic book history credited with creating lasting, valuable properties who feels that way about past collaborators. One in particular has really disappointed me over the years.

None of what I wrote above defending Kane mitigates my belief that Bill Finger's name should appear in connection with Batman every time Bob Kane's does. It isn't so much that I object to Bob having his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bob Kane was at the very least one of the two people responsible for the creation of one of fiction's most enduring, popular characters. That sidewalk up in Hollywood is full of the names of people who achieved a lot less than Bob did by any accounts. The problem is all the places, including that pavement, where Milton "Bill" Finger goes — and if nothing changes will continue to go — unmentioned.

Before I close this off, I want to get back to that line in Bob's autobiography and I'll quote it here again to save you the chore of scrolling back up to it…

Now that my long-time friend and collaborator is gone, I must admit that Bill never received the fame and recognition he deserved. He was an unsung hero. I often tell my wife, if I could go back fifteen years, before he died, I would like to say "I'll put your name on it now. You deserve it."

When that book came out, that little admission — the first-ever, I believe, from Bob — gladdened the hearts of some who said, "Well, at least it's something." I didn't feel that way. If anything, it had the opposite effect on me.

It would be one thing if Bob seriously believed he deserved sole credit; that what he recalled doing constituted the act of creation and what Finger and others did was all merely embellishing his creation. I wouldn't agree with that but I have met some people — in comics and other forms of entertainment — who have some strange, self-serving ideas about what constitutes the act of creation or even writing. Often, their definition is, "Whatever I did."

If that had been Bob's view of who created Batman, I wouldn't have concurred but it would be a matter of his definition of "creation" versus mine and others. When he admitted Bill deserved credit but did nothing to make that happen…well, that's when I lost a lot more respect for the guy.

I did not lose it all. Bob was kind of intermittently nice to me. Our first two meetings, he was willing to spend an awful lot of time with a 16-year-old kid who was interested in comics and when he figured out that I wasn't buying this line about him drawing it all, he told me about Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson and many of the other folks who did the work signed with his name. Finding out I was an aspiring writer, Bob asked to read some samples of my work, did…and told me I had no talent for writing and should give it up. I still intend to take his advice but I've been working so steadily as a writer for the last 46 years that I haven't had time to look for another career.

Later, I logged hours with him at conventions or at gatherings involving Jack Kirby or Julius Schwartz. Twice, he joined dinner parties I was hosting up at the Magic Castle and a few days after one of them, I ran into him in Greenblatt's Delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes — not always but sometimes — he was quite cordial and I was able to talk to him the way I talk to any veteran of the comic book field. (If you're ever in Greenblatt's, check out the back stairwell. There's a nice framed drawing up there of Batman and Robin that Bob did for the proprietors.) I helped arrange for him to make a guest appearance on Bob, the situation comedy I wrote for in which Bob Newhart played a comic book artist and later, Mr. Kane phoned to thank me for that. That was gentlemanly.

Even after a few unpleasant encounters in which Bob (Kane, not Newhart) was too busy being The Creator of Batman to talk to anyone, I still did not lose all my respect for the man. The guy did something that gave us one of the five-or-so greatest characters ever in comics. How many people reading this can ever claim that? I would love to be able to celebrate him for that without my mind instantly going, as so many minds do at the mention of Bob Kane, to how Bill Finger remains seriously undercelebrated. Bob could have fixed that and he didn't.

Since then, the cry to credit Bill Finger has only grown and it will not go away. When Bob receives that deserved honor of a star on or about Hollywood Boulevard, there may well be protest signs about and I may be holding one of them. I just hope that someone in his family or close to them will realize that unless they do what Bob said should be done and didn't, an ever-expanding group of people will not think of him as the creator of Batman. They'll think of him, first and foremost, as a guy who didn't do right by the man he himself called "…my long-time friend and collaborator."

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June 24th, 2014: I have been informed that while we may not know much about dogs, we have considered bats! PHEW. Midas Flesh #7 comes out tomorrow! SECOND-LAST ISSUE, you guys! What crazy things will happen in it?? HINT: ALL THE CRAZY THINGS. Here's a preview! – Ryan

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June 26th, 2014: Midas Flesh #7 is out now! SECOND-LAST ISSUE, you guys! What crazy things will happen in it?? HINT: ALL THE CRAZY THINGS. EVERY SINGLE CRAZY THING. Here's a preview! – Ryan

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I have recently visited China. It was not, strictly speaking, my first trip to the Middle Kingdom, since I visited Shenzhen last year and have visited Hong Kong twice before. However, it was certainly the first time to visit the heartland of China- Ningbo in the Yangtze delta and Beijing. I had always felt somewhat reluctant to visit an officially still Communist state, since Soviet Socialism remains in my mind the moral equal of National Socialism. Both systems embody a contempt for the individual, whether that contempt is manifest as race hatred or class hatred is rather beside the point. Of course I was aware that Deng Xiaoping had ended the most egregious repression, and have written on this blog that the arrest of the Gang of Four was an act of liberation in its way as powerful as the fall of the Berlin wall. Nevertheless I had rather ambivalent feelings as I boarded the flight to Beijing.

The first thing to say about China is that it is now in many ways a highly advanced country. The images of thousands of bicycles and party cadres in Mao suits is as hopelessly out of date as Capitalists in stovepipe hats. Beijing now looks like Los Angeles, only cleaner, better planned and more modern. It is a city of cars, and of new highways. The statistics speak of hundreds of millions of people being lifted out of poverty, and the reality is, if anything, even more impressive. Modern China is as advanced as anywhere in the world. Of course the economic numbers still speak of uneven and incomplete progress, but in the vast and burgeoning cities at least, the impact of huge and well educated populations speaks of a genuinely emerging powerhouse. Of course such power carries with it growing pains: once the price advantage of cheaper Chinese labour carried all before it; now the more complicated geometry of competitive advantage is leading to some industries leaving China, while others are refocusing their investments. Yet far from speaking of Chinese decline, these changes speak of emerging opportunities as the economy matures and develops. Higher value added and new technology, together with an immense investment in physical and human infrastructure, through education, is permanently strengthening the economic and social structure of the country.

The rise of the Chinese educated elite is, perhaps the most impressive thing about the country today. Unlike the cynical anti-intellectualism that is the stock-in-trade of the UK, and to a degree the USA, China genuinely believes in the power of knowledge. Education is the imperative for success and in a way the social disruption of the bloodbath of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution has reset Chinese society- purging society of the bureaucratic obscurantism that was the cause of national weakness for centuries. Nevertheless, the process of political change is on a different time scale compared to the rapid economic and social change and it is clear that there are now significant friction points. 

China's leaders, however, still deeply fear the instability that tore apart the country after the fall of the Manchu dynasty. No matter what their vision for the future, the contending forces inside the Chinese Communist Party value order and stability above all. And of course there ARE contending forces in the Party. The late Zhao Ziyang, a former Prime Minister, deposed after the Tian-an-men protests of 1989, in his memoirs, smuggled out of the country after his death, was convinced that the future for his country should include Parliamentary democracy, while others speak for a neo-Maoist centralised state. In fact the high organs of the Party navigate a kind of centre ground, neither abandoning repression nor utterly crushing freedom of expression. The atmosphere, however, that I found was one where great changes are in the offing. The private frustration over corruption has a limited official sanction for discussions in the media, but this public forum is inadequate to the task. The fact is that, privately, much of the public conventional wisdom is openly derided. There is a real sense that the Party is now becoming a brake on Chinese progress, and not- as before- its agent. More pluralist ideas are the common place of individual discussion and the public discussion about corruption, environmental degradation, poisons in the food chain and so on telegraphs much greater questions about the legitimacy of the Party.

Yet the Party cadres clearly know this, and indeed many of them indeed support more democratic openness. In a sense the central bodies are reluctant to impose too great restrictions, partly because they fear a backlash, but also because many do them simply do not believe in repression. This was what I did not expect: the political establishment of China is itself already far more diverse and pluralist than its public face would make you believe. The discussion is not about whether political changes are coming, but rather how far reaching these changes should be.

One evening our delegation was taken to a karaoke bar, and in a private room, we relaxed and got to know our hosts for the evening. Drinking contests were had, and hopefully we did not lose too much face, even as we sang different songs. One of our hosts selected a song: George Michael's catchy "Freedom". We came to the chorus, but only the backing words were shown, nevertheless we sang the magic words "Freedom, Freedom, you've got to give for what you take". At the end our host looked me in the eye and in the old Soviet way that I remember so well, he knew I knew. We said nothing, but I gained a very large bear hug in return.

China is not free. Yet the power of Freedom is strong and I think there is a deep and powerful wish in the country to open up society and the political life of the country to match the unquestioned economic development. If Taiwan or (South) Korea can emerge from authoritarianism I think China can too. After all the great achievements since 1976 rest upon the end of the evils of Maoist totalitarianism and the emergence of a system that was merely authoritarian. 

What could China not achieve if it could make a peaceful leap from authoritarianism towards a democratic system?

It’s been understood for decades that, if you take a simple discrete rule—say, a cellular automaton like Conway’s Game of Life—and iterate it over and over, you can very easily get the capacity for universal computation.  In other words, your cellular automaton becomes able to implement any desired sequence of AND, OR, and NOT gates, store and retrieve bits in a memory, and even (in principle) run Windows or Linux, albeit probably veerrryyy sloowwllyyy, using a complicated contraption of thousands or millions of cells to represent each bit of the desired computation.  If I’m not mistaken, a guy named Wolfram even wrote an entire 1200-page-long book about this phenomenon (see here for my 2002 review).

But suppose we want more than mere computational universality.  Suppose we want “physical” universality: that is, the ability to implement any transformation whatsoever on any finite region of the cellular automaton’s state, by suitably initializing the complement of that region.  So for example, suppose that, given some 1000×1000 square of cells, we’d like to replace every “0” cell within that square by a “1” cell, and vice versa.  Then physical universality would mean that we could do that, eventually, by some “machine” we could build outside the 1000×1000 square of interest.

You might wonder: are we really asking for more here than just ordinary computational universality?  Indeed we are.  To see this, consider Conway’s famous Game of Life.  Even though Life has been proved to be computationally universal, it’s not physically universal in the above sense.  The reason is simply that Life’s evolution rule is not time-reversible.  So if, for example, there were a lone “1” cell deep inside the 1000×1000 square, surrounded by a sea of “0” cells, then that “1” cell would immediately disappear without a trace, and no amount of machinery outside the square could possibly detect that it was ever there.

Furthermore, even cellular automata that are both time-reversible and computationally universal could fail to be physically universal.  Suppose, for example, that our CA allowed for the construction of “impenetrable walls,” through which no signal could pass.  And suppose that our 1000×1000 region contained a hollow box built out of these impenetrable walls.  Then, by definition, no amount of machinery that we built outside the region could ever detect whether there was a particle bouncing around inside the box.

So, in summary, we now face a genuinely new question:

Does there exist a physically universal cellular automaton, or not?

This question had sort of vaguely bounced around in my head (and probably other people’s) for years.  But as far as I know, it was first asked, clearly and explicitly, in a lovely 2010 preprint by Dominik Janzing.

Today, I’m proud to report that Luke Schaeffer, a first-year PhD student in my group, has answered Janzing’s question in the affirmative, by constructing the first cellular automaton (again, to the best of our knowledge) that’s been proved to be physically universal.  Click here for Luke’s beautifully-written preprint about his construction, and click here for a webpage that he’s prepared, explaining the details of the construction using color figures and videos.  Even if you don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty, the videos on the webpage should give you a sense for the intricacy of what he accomplished.

Very briefly, Luke first defines a reversible, two-dimensional CA involving particles that move diagonally across a square lattice, in one of four possible directions (northeast, northwest, southeast, or southwest).  The number of particles is always conserved.  The only interesting behavior occurs when three of the particles “collide” in a single 2×2 square, and Luke gives rules (symmetric under rotations and reflections) that specify what happens then.

Given these rules, it’s possible to prove that any configuration whatsoever of finitely many particles will “diffuse,” after not too many time steps, into four unchanging clouds of particles, which thereafter simply move away from each other in the four diagonal directions for all eternity.  This has the interesting consequence that Luke’s CA, when initialized with finitely many particles, cannot be capable of universal computation in Turing’s sense.  In other words, there’s no way, using n initial particles confined to an n×n box, to set up a computation that continues to do something interesting after 2ⁿ or 2^{2^n} time steps, let alone forever. On the other hand, using finitely many particles, one can also prove that the CA can perform universal computation in the Boolean circuit sense.  In other words, we can implement AND, OR, and NOT gates, and by chaining them together, can compute any Boolean function that we like on any fixed number of input bits (with the number of input bits generally much smaller than the number of particles).  And this “circuit universality,” rather than Turing-machine universality, is all that’s implied anyway by physical universality in Janzing’s sense.  (As a side note, the distinction between circuit and Turing-machine universality seems to deserve much more attention than it usually gets.)

Anyway, while the “diffusion into four clouds” aspect of Luke’s CA might seem annoying, it turns out to be extremely useful for proving physical universality.  For it has the consequence that, no matter what the initial state was inside the square we cared about, that state will before too long be encoded into the states of four clouds headed away from the square.  So then, “all” we need to do is engineer some additional clouds of particles, initially outside the square, that

1. intercept the four escaping clouds,
2. “decode” the contents of those clouds into a flat sequence of bits,
3. apply an arbitrary Boolean circuit to that bit sequence, and then
4. convert the output bits of the Boolean circuit into new clouds of particles converging back onto the square.

So, well … that’s exactly what Luke did.  And just in case there’s any doubt about the correctness of the end result, Luke actually implemented his construction in the cellular-automaton simulator Golly, where you can try it out yourself (he explains how on his webpage).

So far, of course, I’ve skirted past the obvious question of “why.”  Who cares that we now know that there exists a physically-universal CA?  Apart from the sheer intrinsic coolness, a second reason is that I’ve been interested for years in how to make finer (but still computer-sciencey) distinctions, among various “candidate laws of physics,” then simply saying that some laws are computationally universal and others aren’t, or some are easy to simulate on a standard Turing machine and others hard.  For ironically, the very pervasiveness of computational universality (the thing Wolfram goes on and on about) makes it of limited usefulness in distinguishing physical laws: almost any sufficiently-interesting set of laws will turn out to be computationally universal, at least in the circuit sense if not the Turing-machine one!

On the other hand, many of these laws will be computationally universal only because of extremely convoluted constructions, which fall apart if even the tiniest error is introduced.  And in other cases, we’ll be able to build a universal computer, all right, but that computer will be relatively impotent to obtain interesting input about its physical environment, or to make its output affect the gross features of the CA’s physical state.  If you like, we’ll have a recipe for creating a universe full of ivory-tower, eggheaded nerds, who can search for counterexamples to Goldbach’s Conjecture but can’t build a shelter to protect themselves from a hail of “1” bits, or even learn whether such a hail is present or not, or decide which other part of the CA to travel to.

As I see it, Janzing’s notion of physical universality is directly addressing this “egghead” problem, by asking whether we can build not merely a universal computer but a particularly powerful kind of robot: one that can effect a completely arbitrary transformation (given enough time, of course) on any part of its physical environment.  And the answer turns out to be that, at least in a weird CA consisting of clouds of diagonally-moving particles, we can indeed do that.  The question of whether we can also achieve physical universality in more natural CAs remains open (and in his Future Work section, Luke discusses several ways of formalizing what we mean by “more natural”).

As Luke mentions in his introduction, there’s at least a loose connection here to David Deutsch’s recent notion of constructor theory (see also this followup paper by Deutsch and Chiara Marletto).  Basically, Deutsch and Marletto want to reconstruct all of physics taking what can and can’t be constructed (i.e., what kinds of transformations are possible) as the most primitive concept, rather than (as in ordinary physics) what will or won’t happen (i.e., how the universe’s state evolves with time).  The hope is that, once physics was reconstructed in this way, we could then (for example) state and answer the question of whether or not scalable quantum computers can be built as a principled question of physics, rather than as a “mere” question of engineering.

Now, regardless of what you think about these audacious goals, or about Deutsch and Marletto’s progress (or lack of progress?) so far toward achieving them, it’s certainly a worthwhile project to study what sorts of machines can and can’t be constructed, as a matter of principle, both in the real physical world and in other, hypothetical worlds that capture various aspects of our world.  Indeed, one could say that that’s what many of us in quantum information and theoretical computer science have been trying to do for decades!  However, Janzing’s “physical universality” problem hints at a different way to approach the project: starting with some far-reaching desire (say, to be able to implement any transformation whatsoever on any finite region), can we engineer laws of physics that make that desire possible?  If so, then how close can we make those laws to “our” laws?

Luke has now taken a first stab at answering these questions.  Whether his result ends up merely being a fun, recreational “terminal branch” on the tree of science, or a trunk leading to something more, probably just depends on how interested people get.  I have no doubt that our laws of physics permit the creation of additional papers on this topic, but whether they do or don’t is (as far as I can see) merely a question of contingency and human will, not a constructor-theoretic question.

There has been more inaccurate material written about the "Orange Book" than just about every other recent Liberal publication combined.

From the Ministry of Justice website:

For the first time ever, the Government has set aside a dedicated pot of money specifically to support men who have suffered sexual abuse including rape. We'd like your views and ideas on how we can spend this £500,000 fund in the best possible way to meet the needs of as many men as we can.

Submit your ideas via that website. The extra money was announced by Damian Green in February.

According an article written by the Minister for Equalities today, the Spousal Veto seems set to remain in legislation in England and Wales:

From 10 December there is also good news for married transgender people. You will now be able to change your legal gender without ending your marriage, provided you and your husband or wife agree to remain married.

It is entirely possible that this not intended to be such an announcement but is simply sloppy and insensitive drafting by the Civil Service who should, if they are paying attention, be well aware of the coverage the spousal veto has been getting. The announcement today was partly a cover for the less positive news arising from the publication of the response to the consultation into civil partnerships. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport have decided that they are not going to legislate for mixed-sex civil partnerships – something that is bound to end up facing continued legal challenge.

Sadly, the technical paperwork underlying the announcements also fails to shed any light on the issue but the inclusion of the 10th December date means we at least know that the government must have decided for sure by that date, when the first conversions happen.

A number of people, myself included, have already contacted the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to ask for clarification.

Stephen Tall today celebrates the tenth anniversary of the much-maligned, much-magnified and in my view surprisingly dull Liberal Democrat essay collection The Orange Book with a provocative article: “Why looking back on the 2005 Lib Dem manifesto depresses me. And why The Orange Book means the 2015 manifesto will be better.” So…

Dear Stephen, you’ll be delighted to know that you’ve provoked me into thinking (and so much that it would be overdoing it a bit to submit this as a comment to you). You may be less delighted to read that I didn’t agree with very much you said…

I might summarise your article as saying ‘The Orange Book came up with some new ideas and provoked lasting debate in the Liberal Democrats, while the party’s 2005 Manifesto was largely coasting along on old policies and not very interesting*’. I’d mostly agree with that – which shows the problem with short summaries, as I mostly don’t agree with your article, and where for me you fall down fatally is in basing all your arguments on short or partisan summaries rather than at any stage examining the documents themselves.

*[Though some might ask which of those two is more useful for a political party to campaign on in a General Election.]

It’s terribly tempting to demonstrate that today’s article isn’t up to your usual standards by cutting and pasting your own words: individually, most of the criticisms are defensible. Collectively, it’s shockingly lazy and lacks all credibility except when based on hindsight.

But I’ll provide some of the context you don’t instead.

My Own Biases and My Review of The Orange Book

I’ll start with a little about my own biases. I read both The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism and Freedom, Fairness, Trust: The Liberal Democrat 2005 General Election Manifesto when they were new; I’ve not read either in any detail for a few years. In my much more active and much less ill past, I spent a few years as a ferocious critic of the Lib Dem policymaking process, getting more amendments passed by Conference than anyone save the party’s Federal Policy Committee… Then spent about a dozen years as a directly elected member of the party’s Federal Policy Committee, including some as its Vice-Chair, trying to write my amendments in at source rather than from the outside, and including work on three General Election Manifestos, of which the 2005 one was the last and in my view the least interesting (or most honed, for campaigning purposes).

One of my first substantial articles I wrote on starting this blog in early 2006 was what I think of as an even-handed review of The Orange Book (your mileage may vary). You can read it here in full, but here’s another partisan précis. I didn’t see it as anything like the coherent package it would suit its admirers and detractors to be; I thought its timing was a deliberate and cynical attempt to advance its authors rather than to advance its ideas; I praised David Laws much more than some of its contributors; I thought some chapters dull, silly or disturbingly authoritarian, but most in the Lib Dem mainstream; and I thought two chapters were absolutely crucial. One of them was by David Laws, defining Liberalism, which I said was well worth a read, mostly interesting, and wholeheartedly Liberal – with some significant caveats. The other was by Paul Marshall, who in your article comes across as your main source for framing both documents, and his introductory chapter was one of the most leaden failures in any book on Liberalism I’ve ever read.

In The Orange Book’s defence, the authors did at least get their fingers out and try to come up with some big ideas – and whether it’s truth or legend, they did win a reputation for setting off debate. That’s no mean feat, though I criticised crucial writers for “leaving [their] philosophical innovation stalled somewhere around 1908”. To be fair, although poor health gets in the way, it is also true that I’ve not only failed to launch the big idea for the party I keep meaning to, but that its philosophical innovation arguably hails from 1859. So the most remarkable thing about The Orange Book is that they did it, and then managed to get lasting attention for it.

Either way, when it comes to The Orange Book: Rewriting History, I was around for that history and require more than Paul Marshall’s highly spun hindsight as the sum total of evidence.

The Orange Book, the 2005 Manifesto and the Context

Stephen, you quote glowingly a speech by Paul Marshall long after the fact in which he puts down the 2005 Manifesto and praises his alternative by highly selective presentations of each. Let me provide a little more revealing context.

I called The Orange Book an alternative manifesto because in its timing and in its introduction (to say nothing of the editors’ spin all over the press) that is precisely how it was promoted. So it’s not unreasonable to make some direct comparisons. Way back when I reviewed The Orange Book myself, I said that Paul Marshall’s introduction was the weakest single chapter: a dully written and incoherent attempt to make an alternative manifesto of a series of disparate essays (to the obvious embarrassment of some of its authors), Mr Marshall showed more effectively than any other Lib Dem just how difficult it is to write a manifesto, because his attempt at one was so pitiful.

Not only was The Orange Book a shambles as an alternative manifesto, it was utterly useless in every regard (save to our enemies) as any basis for the actual manifesto. It was published to coincide with the party’s own pre-manifesto that was the culmination of two years’ consultation. I mean, how much “foresight” was that? Any ideas in The Orange Book, good or bad, could only be portrayed as ‘splits’ and completely useless as contributions. Imagine what the current manifesto co-ordinator – David Laws, I think his name is – would say if you were to publish an alternative manifesto in Autumn this year when his own carefully negotiated version had already been printed and circulated to every Conference representative? Had The Orange Book been published either a year earlier or a year later, it would have been timed to make a genuine contribution to ideas and been the target of far less opprobrium. In context, deliberately timed to get attention rather than to advance its ideas, it wasn’t taking part in a debate. It was merely willy-waving.

Then there’s the Manifesto itself. I’m sure you’ve read both the 2005 Manifesto and The Orange Book, but your article gives the impression that you’re taking Paul Marshall’s skimpy press releases as the entire basis of your critique of one and praise for the other. Well, I’ve said what I thought of Mr Marshall’s introduction to The Orange Book: now for the Manifesto, which I also read in full (many times, back then, as I was one of the many with a hand in writing it). Was it unambitious? Yes, in some places it was. There was a drive to cut down the length and the promises of 2001 and 1997, each of which I thought were more interesting manifestos, and I was exasperated at how hard I had to fight to get even a tiny box about our ideals into it, but as for “unrealistically high spending commitments”?

It turned out some of them were, in hindsight. In context, they weren’t. Like the 2001 and 1997 manifestos, they were based on months of hard arguing and hard costings to cut down our promises to what we could afford – as our (and the IFS’) understanding of the general economic framework went at the time. No other party bothered. It turned out that the general economic framework of the time was a bloated absurdity that vanished in a puff of debt, but no-one knew that yet. Let me turn back to sage, prophet and incredibly boring wordsmith Paul Marshall: hilarious that he now attacks that manifesto for “unrealistically high spending commitments” when his own alternative manifesto took exactly the same general economic framework as truth (just swapping what turned out to be “unrealistic” tax cuts for the spending, all based on an understanding of wealth we didn’t have).

One of my key criticisms of The Orange Book – unlike Mr Marshall’s conveniently partial claims today, from before the financial crash – was in its flagship approach to financial markets, one of the less convincing arguments written by David Laws. I wrote:

“He mentions opposition to monopoly and 1930s market failure, but that brief aside merely draws attention to this as his biggest blind spot. While many Liberal policies over the years have been directed against private monopoly, he fails to address other monopolies than state ones, or what to do in the event of other market failure – as well as raising the question, if he admits the market failed in 1930s (and that’s the only point at which he’s prepared to admit any such thing), does he have any alternative answer to such catastrophic failures or would he just have shut his eyes and hoped it would go away?”

Which, though ‘I told you so’ is never very appealing, is why The Orange Book had no predictions and no solutions when a massive market failure inevitably came along all over again.

Neither did the 2005 Manifesto, you might rightly point out (though you didn’t, merely implying by elision that it lacked the foresight that The Orange Book had, and which I’ve just noted that it didn’t). What the Manifesto did have was a lot more than the ten points you published as if they were the Manifesto in its entirety. I’ve read through your article twice and I still can’t believe you’re writing as if that’s all there was, and certainly as if it was all you’d read. That’s bizarre, because you link to the whole thing, which sets out the costings right at the front and then has 38 more pages than the one you present as if it was the whole thing.

What Was the Point of the Ten-Point Plan?

Ironically, after a two-year consultation process in which the Manifesto was written between the Leader’s team, the Federal Policy Committee and the Parliamentary Spokespeople, the ten-point list was presented at the last minute by the Campaigns Department as a fait accompli, and none of the people who’d written the full Manifesto liked it. It was literally given to the FPC at the final meeting (again, after two years) to sign off the final draft of the Manifesto, and when FPC members started to move amendments – this one’s not a priority, this one doesn’t get across what the policy means, this one’s actively misleading, and so forth – we were told that we couldn’t change a single word because the posters had already been printed. So rather than a representative summary, even, of a far longer document, this list was something cobbled together in haste by the Campaigns Department without consultation because for the first time in any election the party literally had more money than it knew what to do with, as a very large donation (best not to say whose, in retrospect) had come in long after the local spending caps had come into force and so the only thing left to spend it on was posters.

I didn’t think they were very good, but whether they were or they weren’t, Stephen, what they certainly were not was the full Manifesto.

So that’s the context of the time. If you want to make up your own mind, the 2005 Liberal Democrat General Election Manifesto is here, The Orange Book is… Hey, where are all these libertarian pirates putting bootleg pdfs of it online? Well, I bought and read a copy, anyway, and you can still buy it at full price long past its sell-by date and bore yourself silly typing out long chunks to support your case. Just don’t make up your own mind on the basis of toytown spin and abuse from either side.

The Orange Book – The Legacy?

I wasn’t at Centre Forum’s meeting this week to – what? Celebrate? Commemorate? Build on? Bury? – The Orange Book, but I’d be fascinated to hear what people had to say, and to what extent that was based on the book itself, or merely on the legend. Stephen, you seem to be firmly a champion of the legend, and so your most interesting paragraph is your last, despite its assertions not being based on anything in the rest of your text:

“The Orange Book helped wake up the party, stimulating a much better quality of debate across the spectrum of views. Without The Orange Book, it’s doubtful we’d have the Social Liberal Forum. Without SLF, Liberal Reform wouldn’t exist. I like dialectic in political debate and the challenge and counter-challenge which often (not always, but often) ratchets up standards. Certainly it gives me confidence that our 2015 manifesto will be a marked improvement on its 2005 version.”

I’m not convinced that it did. If anything, the self-indulgent timing of The Orange Book’s publication harmed its case and set back debate in the party. Most of it wasn’t of very good quality anyway. But I’m prepared to go along with your conclusion that it helped factionalise the Liberal Democrats into opposing teams shouting vituperate caricatures of each other – which is, obviously, always a sign of “a much better quality of debate”. Personally, I find both the self-identified “Orange Bookers” and the self-identified “Social Liberal Forum” and others depressing, lazy and unambitious for Liberalism – as well as each far smaller within the party than their self-importance would suggest. I agree that dialectic, debate and challenge and counter-challenge can ratchet up standards, but if carried out mostly by organised factions it can also lead to groupthink, entrenched positions and a lazy, never-ending exchange of misrepresentation instead of a thousand positive ideas blooming.

So here’s my own caricature: rather than arguments about the basis of Liberalism, what we all stand for and how we can inspire more people with it, much internal debate has become a values-free mud-fight about short-term economics, where one side is mean (but against debt) and the other generous (except to future generations), both say they are the only true Liberals while saying little recognisably Liberal, and neither has much to say that appeals to me.

Once again, my favourite contribution to Mark Pack’s “What do the Liberal Democrats Believe?” is on the basic conviction that unites social and economic Liberals:

“All POWER (be it government, business or other people) can both PROTECT and THREATEN LIBERTY.
“Economic and Social Liberals put different emphasis on the BEST DEFENCES and the BIGGEST BULLIES.”

Stephen, what would you say that unifies rather than divides, and yet remains interesting? That’s the sort of inspiration I hope for from the 2015 Manifesto.

Yours always in hope, despite curmudgeonliness

Alex

There are three types of captain: those with tactical nous, those with great man-management skills, & those who lead from the front.
— Samuel Honywill (@SDHoneymonster) June 23, 2014

This tweet was discussed on the Geek & Wilde podcast on the evening of the fourth day of the Headingley test. They argue that the great captains have all three qualities and that quite good ones can survive on only one. Coming to the conclusion that Alastair Cook at present offers none of these three qualities, they call on him to resign.

I have been interested in the parallels between cricket captaincy and political leadership ever since I reviewed Mike Brearley's The Art of Cricket Captaincy at the time of the election for the election of the first Liberal Democrat leader in 1988.

Drawing parallels between politicians and cricket captains in that review - David Steel was Colin Cowdrey, Paddy Ashdown was Brian Close and I forget who Alan Beith was - helped me develop the idea of Lord Bonkers a couple of years later.

But what I am worrying about this evening are the parallels between Nick Clegg and Alastair Cook.

This is the keynote talk I just gave at YAPC::NA 2014 in Orlando, Fl.

YouTube video below: click the link below to read the full text instead.

Keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2034

No, that's not right ...

This should be titled Keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2014. What's up with the title?

Obviously I must have had some success with the experiment on applied algorithmic causality violation — that's time travel as applied to computing — that I was thinking about starting some time in the next twenty years, in my next career, as a card-carrying Mad Scientist.

Or maybe that was some other me, in some other parallel universe.

But this isn't the file I remember writing, it's some other talk about a conference that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen now if I read you their keynote. It's probably not a good idea to read it to you — we wouldn't want to cause any temporal paradoxes, would we? So I'm not going to go there — at least, not yet. Before we take a look at the state of Perl in 2034, we need to know where we stand today, in 2014. So please allow me to start again:

The world in 2014

Back in the 1990s I used to argue with Perl for a living. These days I'm no longer a programmer by profession: instead, I tell lies for money. I'm a science fiction writer. As my friend and fellow-writer Ken Macleod observes, the secret weapon in science fiction's armory is history. So I'd like to approach the subject of this keynote sideways, by way of a trip down memory lane, from the year 2014 — late in English summer afternoon of the computer revolution, just before the sun set — all the way back to 1914.

To the extent that the computing and information technology revolution is a late 20th and early 21st century revolution, we can draw some lessons about where it may be going by observing the trajectory of one of the other major technological revolutions that came before it — the mass transportation revolution.

Like all technological revolutions, the development of computers followed a sigmoidal curve of increasing performance over time. Each new generation of technology contributed to the next by providing the tools and machines needed to bootstrap their successors.

The computer revolution started slowly enough, but the development of the transistor galvanized it, and the integrated circuit, and its offspring, the monolithic processor-on-a-chip, up-ended the entire board game. Over a fifty year period, from roughly 1970 to 2020, we grew so accustomed to Moore's Law — the law that the transistor count of a dense integrated circuit doubles roughly once every two years — that we unconsciously came to mistake it for a law of nature. But in reality, it was nothing of the kind: it merely represented our ability to iteratively improve a process governed by physics until it converged on a hard limit.

In the case of Moore's law, the primary governing constraint was electrical resistivity. As you shrink the length of a circuit, the resistance decreases: you can use lower voltages, or lower current flows, and run at a higher frequency. Physically smaller circuits can be made to switch faster. We build smaller integrated circuits by increasing the resolution of the lithographic process by which we print or etch surface features. But we are doomed to run into the limits of physics. First, we lose energy as heat if we try to switch too fast. Secondly, current leakage becomes a problem as our circuits become smaller. And thirdly, at the end of the day, we're making stuff out of atoms, not magic pixie dust: it's not obvious how to build circuits with tracks less than one atom wide.

Similarly, if we look back to an earlier century we can see that the speed and cost of mass transportation followed a similar sigmoid development curve between roughly 1830 and 1970.

And for me, one of the most interesting things about this sort of technological revolution is what happens after we hit the end of the curve ...

Addressing YAPC::NA in 2014 I feel a lot like a fat, self-satisfied locomotive boiler designer addressing a convention of railway design engineers in 1914. We've come a long way in a relatively short period of time. From the first steam locomotive — Richard Trevithick's 1804 Merthyr Tydfil Tramroad engine — to 1914, steam locomotives surged out of the mines and ironworks and onto permanent roads linking cities all over the world, crossing the American continent from east to west, reaching the dizzy speed of almost a hundred miles per hour and hauling hundreds of passengers or hundreds of tons of freight.

Speaking from 1914's perspective, it is apparent that if the current rate of improvement in the technology can be maintained, then steam locomotion has a bright future ahead of it! We can reasonably expect that, by 2014, with improvements in signaling and boiler technology our 200 mile per hour passenger trains will constitute the bedrock of human transport, and we, as boiler engineers, will be the princes of industry.

Pay no attention to those gasoline-burning automobiles! We can safely ignore them. They're inefficient and break down all the time, away from the race track they're no faster than a horse-drawn carriage — cobblestones and dirt trails hammer their suspensions, quite unlike our steel rails lying on carefully leveled sleepers — and the carnage that results when you entrust motorized transport to the hands of the general public is so frightful that it's bound to be banned.

As for the so-called aeroplane, it's a marginal case. To make it work at all requires an engine that can produce one horsepower per pound of weight — a preposterous power to weight ratio — and it's ability to carry freight is marginal. We might eventually see an aeroplane that can fly for a hundred miles, at a hundred miles per hour, carrying up to a ton of mail or a dozen passengers: but it will never displace the mature, steadily improving technology of the steam locomotive from its position at the apex of mass transportation.

So, that's the view from 1914. What actually happened?

Well, as it happens, our locomotive boiler-maker was absolutely right: 200 mph steam-powered trains are the backbone of passenger transportation.

Admittedly the steam is heated in Électricité de France's nuclear reactors and the motive power conveyed to the trains by overhead electrical wires — the French aren't stupid: nothing makes a steam boiler explosion worse like adding fifty tons of reactor-grade uranium to the problem — but it's not too much of a stretch to say that the European and Chinese high speed rail networks are so efficient that they're taking passengers away from low cost airlines on routes of less than 500 miles.

But in places where we don't have a determined government building out the infrastructure to support shiny 200mph atomic-powered trains, or where we have to travel more than about 500 miles, airliners ate the railways' lunch. The steam engines of 1914 and their lineal descendants were nowhere near the theoretical limits of a Carnot heat-cycle engine, nor were they optimized for maximum efficiency in either power output or weight. Gas turbines offered a higher power density and lower weight and made long-haul air travel feasible. At the same time, the amount of infrastructure you need to build at ground level to support a given air route — namely two airports — is pretty much constant however far apart the airports are, whereas the cost of railroad tracks scales linearly with the distance. A 2000 mile railroad route costs at least ten times as much as a 200 mile railroad route, and takes ten times as long to traverse. Whereas a 2000 mile plane journey — given jet airliners traveling at 500 mph — costs no more to build and little more to operate than a 200 mile route. Furthermore, a big chunk of the duration of any airline flight is a fixed overhead, the latency imposed by pre-flight boarding and post-flight unloading. Assuming two hours at the start and one hour at the end of the journey, a 2000 mile flight may take seven hours, only twice the duration of a 200 mile flight. So air wipes the floor with rail once we cross a critical time threshold of about three hours.

As for automobiles, our railroad engineer of 1914 overlooked their key advantage: flexibility. It turns out that many people find personal transport to be more valuable than fast or efficient transport. So much so, that they were willing to pay for an unprecedented build-out of roads and a wholesale reconstruction of cities and communities around the premise of mass automobile ownership. At which point the cobblestones and dirt trails were replaced by concrete and tarmac, driver and vehicle licensing laws were enacted, and cars got a whole lot faster and safer.

Mind you, even as the steam locomotive fell into eclipse, it wasn't all plain sailing for the aircraft and automobiles. Today's airliners actually fly more slowly than the fastest passenger airliners of 1994. It turns out that physical limits apply: we are constrained by the energy density of our fuels and the ability of our airframes to deal with the thermal stress of high speed flight through air.

Concorde, the type specimen of the supersonic airliner, was a gorgeous, technologically sophisticated, white elephant that, in the end, couldn't compete economically with aircraft that flew at half the speed but consumed a fifth as much fuel per seat. Concorde, in service, crossed the Atlantic in three hours, with a hundred passengers, while burning a hundred tons of jet fuel. A Boeing 747 would take twice as long, but could fly twice as far with nearly five times as many passengers on the same fuel load.

Automobiles have more subtle limitations, imposed largely by our requirements for safety. They operate in close proximity to other people and vehicles, not to mention large animals: they have to be able to protect their precious cargo of passengers from the forces of impact if something goes wrong, while not imposing undue safety externalities on innocent by-standers. Furthermore, they have to be manually controlled by poorly-trained and absent-minded ordinary people. We have speed limits on our highways not because we can't build 200 mph cars — we can — but because we can't reliably train all our drivers to be as safe as Michael Schumacher at 200 mph.

Now, the fact that we don't have 200 mph automobiles in every garage, or Mach 4 SSTs at every airline terminal, or 200 mph nuclear-powered express trains on Amtrak, shouldn't blind us to the fact that the mass transportation industry is still making of progress. But the progress it's making is much less visible than it used to be. It's incremental progress.

For example, the first-generation Boeing 747 jumbo jet, the 747-100, carried roughly 400 passengers and had a maximum range of just over 6000 miles. Today's 747-8 can fly 50% further on 30% more fuel, thanks to its more efficient engines, with 460 passengers in equivalent seating. Other airliners have become even more efficient. With Pratt & Whitney and Rolls now moving towards commercialization of geared turbofan engines, we can expect to see up to 30% greater efficiency in the jet engines of airliners in service in the next 30 years. But 30 years is also the span of time that once separated the Wright Flyer from the Douglas DC-3, or the Spitfire from the SR-71.

(Incidentally, I'm going to exclude from this discussion of incremental change the implications of the Tesla Model S for the automobile industry — an electric car that people actually aspire to drive — or Google's self-driving car project, or Volvo's equivalent. These are properly understood as developments emerging from the next technological revolution, the computing and information field, which is still undergoing revolutionary change and disrupting earlier industries.)

The point I'd like to emphasize is that, over time, a series of incremental improvements to a mature technological field — be it in engine efficiency, or safety design, or guidance technology — can add up to more than the sum of its parts. But it's nothing like as flashy or obvious as a doubling of performance every two years while a new technology is exploding towards the limits physics imposes on what is possible. Linear improvements look flat when they follow an exponential curve, even if they quietly revolutionize the industry they apply to.

And that, I think, is what the future of the computing industry looks like in 2014.

2014: the view forward

As of 2014, we're inching closer to the end of Moore's Law. It seems inevitable that within the next decade the biannual doubling of performance we've come to expect as our birthright will be a thing of the past.

We had a brief taste of the end of the exponential revolution in the early noughties, when the clock frequency wars that had taken us from 33MHz 80386s to 3GHz Pentium IVs in just one decade ended, killed by spiraling power consumption and RF interference. There will come a point some time between 2020 and 2030 when we will no longer be able to draw ever finer features on our atomically perfect semiconductor crystals because to do so we'd need to create features less than one atom wide. For a while progress will appear to continue. We will see stacked architectures with more and more layers plastered atop one another. And we'll see more and more parallelism. But the writing is on the wall: barring paradigm shifts such as the development of a mass-producible room temperature quantum computing architecture, we're going to hit the buffers within the next few years.

An interesting side-effect of Moore's Law, seldom commented on, is that each successive generation of chip fab — necessary in order to produce circuit features at ever finer resolutions — also double in price. Once the manufacturers of the highly specialized equipment that goes into fab lines can no longer up-sell Intel and the other foundries on new hardware, there are going to be interesting repercussions. We may see a vast shake-out in the hardware side of the manufacturing business. For example, in aerospace, between 1965 and 1975 roughly half the US aerospace engineering faculty found themselves thrown out of work. Or we may see a short-lived commodification of semiconductor manufacturing plant, as the suppliers desperately compete to stay in business and the cost of a new factory drops by an order of magnitude. Either way, once the manufacturing costs of the factories are amortized we can look forward to the commodification of the chips themselves. There seems to be no market-imposed lower floor to the price of computing machinery: that is, the cheaper we can make chips, the more uses we can find for them.

At the same time, improvements in the efficiency of microprocessors at any given lithographic scale may continue for some time. Power consumption can be cut. Incremental design improvements can be applied. A 64-bit ARM core from 2034, made using a 7-nm process, will undoubtedly out-perform a 7-nm 64-bit ARM core from 2020, both on energy efficiency and manufacturing cost — both factors in the all-important total cost of ownership per MIP.

But by 2034 the kind of progress we see in hardware will resemble the slow, incremental improvements in the transportation industry of today rather than the wildly surging sigmoid curve we experienced during the hey-day of the semiconductor revolution.

And we're going to be dealing with a world full of ubiquitous dirt-cheap low-powered microprocessors with on-die sensors and wireless networking, which remain in production for decades because there is no prospect of a faster, cheaper better product coming along any time soon.

2034: The view backward

Okay, so I'm eventually going to give you a digest of what I found in the YAPC keynote that my time-travelling future self sent me from 2034.

But first, having taken a look at the world of 1914, I'd now like you to bear with me as I describe the experiences of an earlier me, visiting the world of today by time machine from 1994. Then we're going to borrow his time machine and visit the world of 2034 together.

The world of 2014 actually looks a lot like 1994. And this shouldn't surprise us. Change is gradual. Most of the buildings around us today were already here 20 years ago. Most of the people around us were already alive back then, too. The world of 2014 is a wrapper around the smaller, less complicated world of 1994, adding depth and texture and novelties. And so my earlier self, visiting from 1994, would have found lots of things about the future unsurprisingly familiar.

My 1994 self would have been utterly underwhelmed by the automobiles and airliners and architecture and fashion changes visible in 2014. After all, these are ephemera that follow constant — if unpredictable — trajectories. The appearance of URLs in adverts everywhere might have made 1994-me raise an eyebrow — the world wide web was new and shiny and kinda slow and clunky in 1994 — but it was at least a thing and I was aware of it, so predicting that it would have spread like weed would have been an easy target. Nor would the laptops everyone here is carrying have been particularly remarkable. They're slimmer, shinier, cheaper, and much more powerful than the laptop I owned in 1994, but they're not a fundamentally different type of object.

What would have weirded 1994-me out about the 2014-present would have been the way everyone walks around staring at these little glowing slabs of glass as if they're windows onto the sum total of human knowledge. Which, after all, they are. Yes, the idea of ubiquitous wireless networking and pocket computers with touchscreens that integrate cellular phone services with data is the kind of thing that trips off the tongue and any vaguely tech-savvy science fiction writer from 1994 could be expected to understand. But that such devices are in every hand, from eight years old to eighty, would be a bit of a reach. We tend to forget that in the early 1990s, the internet was an elite experience, a rare and recondite tool that most people had little use for. 1994 was still the age of CompuServe and AOL — remember AOL, that's kind of like a pre-internet version of Facebook? Computers were twenty years newer than they are today: older folks didn't know how to type, or use a mouse, and this was normal.

But the mere existence of smartphones would only be the start of it. The uses people made of their smartphones — that would be endlessly surprising. Cat macros. Online dating websites. Geocaching. Wikipedia. Twitter. 4chan.

If 1994 me had gotten onto 2014 twitter, that would have been an eye-opener. The cultural shifts of the past two decades, facilitated by the internet, have been more subtle and far-reaching than 1994-me would have imagined. Briefly: the internet disintermediates people and things. Formerly isolated individuals with shared interests can form communities and find a voice. And once groups of people find a voice they will not be silenced easily. Half the shouting and social upheaval on the internet today comes from entrenched groups who are outraged to learn that their opinions and views are not universally agreed upon; the other half comes from those whose silence was previously mistaken for assent.

Once technologies get into the hands of ordinary people, nobody can even begin to guess where they're going to end up, or what kind of social changes they're going to catalyze. The internet has become a tool for revolutions, from Egypt to Yemen by way of Ukraine; it's also a tool for political repression.

(And I'm straying off-topic.)

Now, let's go and borrow that time machine and take a look at 2034.

2034 superficially looks a lot like 2014, only not. After all, most of 2034 is already here, for real, in 2014.

The one stunningly big difference is that today we're still living through exponential change: by 2034, the semiconductor revolution will have slowed down to the steady state of gradual incremental changes I described earlier. Change won't have stopped — but the armature of technological revolution will have moved elsewhere.

Now for a whistle-stop tour of 2034:

Of the people alive in 2014, about 75% of us will still be alive. (I feel safe in making this prediction because if I'm wildly wrong — if we've undergone a species extinction-level event — you won't be around to call me on my mistake. That's the great thing about futurology: when you get it really wrong, nobody cares.)

About two-thirds of the buildings standing in 2034 are already there in 2014. Except in low-lying areas where the well-known liberal bias of climatological science has taken its toll.

Automobiles look pretty much the same, although a lot more of them are electric or diesel-electric hybrids, and they exhibit a mysterious reluctance to run over pedestrians, shoot stop lights, or exceed the speed limit. In fact, the main force opposing the universal adoption of self-driving automobiles will probably be the Police unions: and it's only a matter of time before the insurance companies arm-wrestle the traffic cops into submission.

Airliners in 2034 look even more similar to those of 2014 than the automobiles. That's because airliners have a design life of 30 years; about a third of those flying in 2034 are already in service in 2014. And another third are new-build specimens of models already flying — Boeing 787s, Airbus 350s.

Not everything progresses linearly Every decade brings a WTF moment or two to the history books: 9/11, Edward Snowden, the collapse of the USSR. And there are some obvious technology-driven radical changes. By 2034 Elon Musk has either declared bankruptcy or taken his fluffy white cat and retired to his billionaire's lair on Mars. China has a moon base. One of Apple, Ford, Disney, or Boeing has gone bust or fallen upon hard times, their niche usurped by someone utterly unpredictable. And I'm pretty sure that there will be some utterly bizarre, Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns to disturb us all. A cure for old age, a global collapse of the financial institutions, a devastating epidemic of Martian hyper-scabies. But most of the changes, however radical, are not in fact very visible at first glance.

Most change is gradual, and it's only when we stack enough iterative changes atop one another that we get something that's immediately striking from a distance. The structures we inhabit in 2034 are going to look much the same: I think it's fairly safe to say that we will still live in buildings and wear clothes, even if the buildings are assembled by robots and the clothes emerge fully-formed from 3D printers that bond fibres suspended in a liquid matrix, and the particular fashions change. The ways we use buildings and clothes seem to be pretty much immutable across deep historical time.

So let me repeat that: buildings and clothing are examples of artifacts that may be manufactured using a variety of different techniques, some of which are not widespread today, but where the use-case is unlikely to change.

But then, there's a correspondingly different class of artifact that may be built or assembled using familiar techniques but put to utterly different uses.

Take the concrete paving slabs that sidewalks are made from, for example. Our concrete paving slab of 2034 is likely to be almost identical to the paving slab of 2014 — except for the trivial addition of a dirt-cheap microcontroller powered by an on-die photovoltaic cell, with a handful of MEMS sensors and a low power transceiver. Manufactured in bulk, the chip in the paving slab adds about a dollar to its price — it makes about as much of a difference the logistics of building a pavement as adding a barcoded label does to the manufacture and distribution of t-shirts. But the effect of the change, of adding an embedded sensor and control processor to a paving stone, is revolutionary: suddenly the sidewalk is part of the internet of things.

What sort of things does our internet-ified paving slab do?

For one thing, it can monitor its ambient temperature and warn its neighbors to tell incoming vehicle traffic if there's a danger of ice, or if a pot-hole is developing. Maybe it can also monitor atmospheric pressure and humidity, providing the city with a micro-level weather map. Genome sequencing is rapidly becoming the domain of micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS, which as semiconductor devices are amenable to Moore's law: we could do ambient genome sequencing, looking for the tell-tale signs of pathogens in the environment. Does that puddle harbor mosquito larvae infected with malaria parasites?

With low-power transceivers our networked sidewalk slab can ping any RFID transponders that cross it, thereby providing a slew of rich metadata about its users. If you can read the unique product identifier labels in a random pedestrian's clothing you can build up a database that identifies citizens uniquely — unless they habitually borrow each other's underwear. You can probably tell from their gait pattern if they're unwell, or depressed, or about to impulsively step out into the road. In which case your internet-of-things enabled sidewalk can notify any automobiles in the vicinity to steer wide of the self-propelled traffic obstacle.

It's not just automobiles and paving slabs that have internet-connected processors in them in 2034, of course. Your domestic washing machine is going to have a much simpler user interface, for one thing: you shove clothing items inside it and it asks them how they want to be washed, then moans at you until you remove the crimson-dyed tee shirt from the batch of whites that will otherwise come out pink.

And meanwhile your cheap Indonesian toaster oven has a concealed processor embedded in its power cable that is being rented out by the hour to spammers or bitcoin miners or whatever the equivalent theft-of-service nuisance threat happens to be in 2034.

In fact, by 2034, thanks to the fallout left behind by the end of Moore's law and it's corollary Koomey's law (that power consumption per MIP decreases by 50% every 18 months), we can reasonably assume that any object more durable than a bar of soap and with a retail value of over $5 probably has as much computing power as your laptop today — and if you can't think of a use for it, the advertising industry will be happy to do so for you (because we have, for better or worse, chosen advertising as the underlying business model for monetizing the internet: and the internet of things is, after all, an out-growth of the internet).

The world of 2034 is going to superficially, outwardly, resemble the world of 2014, subject to some obvious minor differences — more extreme weather, more expensive gas — but there are going to be some really creepy differences under the surface. In particular, with the build-out of the internet of things and the stabilization of standards once the semiconductor revolution has run its course, the world of 2034 is going to be dominated by metadata.

Today in 2014 we can reasonably to be tracked by CCTV whenever we show our faces in public, and for any photograph of us to be uploaded to Facebook and tagged by location, time, and identity using face recognition software. We know our phones are tracking us from picocell to picocell and, at the behest of the NSA, can be turned into bugging devices without our knowledge or consent (as long as we're locked out of our own baseband processors).

By 2034 the monitoring is going to be even more pervasive. The NETMIT group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are currently using WiFi signals to detect the breathing and heart rate of individuals in a room: wireless transmitters with steerable phased-array antennae that can beam bandwidth through a house are by definition excellent wall-penetrating radar devices, and just as the NSA has rooted many domestic routers to inspect our packets, so we can expect the next generation of spies to attempt to use our routers to examine our bodies.

The internet of things needs to be able to rapidly create dynamic routing tables so that objects can communicate with each other, and a corollary of that requirement is that everything knows where it is and who it belongs to and who has permission to use them. This has good consequences and bad consequences.

Shoplifting and theft are going to be difficult to get away with in a world where unsold goods know when they're being abducted and call for help. That's good. Collapsing and dying of a stroke in your own home may also become a rare event, if our environment is smart enough to monitor us for anomalous behavior indicative of a medical emergency.

On the other hand, do you really want your exact pattern of eye movements across the screen of your smartphone to be monitored and analyzed, the better to beam tailored advertisements into your peripheral field of vision while you check your email? Or every conversation you have in any public space within range of a microphone to be converted via speech-to-text, indexed, and analyzed by the NSA's server farms for the Bayesian spoor of conspiracy? Or for your implanted cardiac defibrillator to be rooted and held to ransom by a piece of malware that doesn't know it's running on a life-critical medical device?

Arguably, these are the paranoid worries of a poopy-head from 2014, not a savvy native of 2034 who's had two decades to get used to the emergence of these new phenomena. To an actual denizen of 2034, one who's been sitting in the steadily warming saucepan of water for two decades, the concerns will be different.

The worst thing about the internet of things is that it's built atop the seventy year old bones of ARPAnet. It's insecure by design, horribly flawed, and susceptible to subversion. Back in the early days, national security bureaucrats deliberately weakened the protocols for computer-to-computer communications so that they could monitor at-will, never quite anticipating that it would become so fundamental to our entire civilization that by so doing, they were preparing the field for entire criminal industries and rendering what should have been secure infrastructure vulnerable to what is unironically termed cyber-attack. Vetoing endpoint encryption in TCP might have seemed like a good idea in the early 1980s, when only a few hundred thousand people — mostly industry professionals and scientists — were expected to use the internet, but it's a disaster when your automobile needs a reliable, secure stream of trusted environment data to tell it that it's safe to turn the next corner.

But.

We hit the buffers at the end of the railroad track of exponentially accelerating semiconductor tech. The industry downsized, and aged. There's no money to develop and roll out new standards, nor the willpower to do so: trying to secure the internet of things is like trying to switch the USA to driving on the left, or using the metric system. Pre-existing infrastructure has tremendous cultural inertia: to change it you first have to flatten it, and nobody much wants to destroy western civilization in order to clear the ground for rolling out IPv8.

So here's my takeaway list of bullet-points for 2034:

• It's going to superficially resemble 2014.

• However, every object in the real world is going to be providing a constant stream of metadata about its environment — and I mean every object.

• The frameworks used for channeling this firehose of environment data are going to be insecure and ramshackle, with foundations built on decades-old design errors.

• The commercial internet funding model of 1994 — advertising — is still influential, and its blind-spots underpin the attitude of the internet of things to our privacy and security.

• How physical products are manufactured and distributed may be quite different from 2014. In particular, expect more 3D printing at end-points and less long-range shipment of centrally manufactured products. But in many cases, how we use the products may be the same.

• The continuing trend towards fewer people being employed in manufacturing, and greater automation of service jobs, will continue: our current societal model, whereby we work to earn money with which to buy the goods and services we need may not be sustainable in the face of a continuing squeeze on employment. But since when has consistency or coherency or even humanity been a prerequisite of any human civilization in history? We'll muddle on, even when an objective observer might look at us and shake her head in despair.

And now, the state of Perl in 2034

(I'm reading from the keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2034 by Charles Stross, recovering Perl hacker, science fiction writer, and card-carrying Mad Scientist — Paratemporal Meddling Management Group, speciality: screwing up history).

Frankly I'm kind of astonished to be standing here, talking to you about a programming language that first escaped into the wild forty-five years ago. And not just because my continued existence is a tribute to medical science: it's because the half life of a programming language, back when people were still inventing new programming languages, was typically about ten years.

Programming languages come and go, and mostly they go.

Back in the dim and distant past, programming languages were rare. We rode out the 1950s on just FORTRAN LISP, and the embryonic product of the CODASYL Conference on Data Systems Languages, COBOL. Then the 1960s saw a small pre-Cambrian explosion, bequeathing us ALGOL, GOTO considered harmful, BASIC (as supporting evidence for the prosecution), and a bunch of hopeful monsters like SNOBOL4, BCPL, and Pascal, some of which went on the rampage and did enormous damage to our ideas of what computers are good for.

Then, between about 1970 and 1990, compiler design wormed its way into the syllabus of undergraduate CS degree courses, and the number of languages mushroomed. Even though most sane CS students stick to re-implementing Lisp in Haskell and similar five-finger exercises, there are enough fools out there who suffer from the delusion that their ideas are not only new but useful to other people to keep the linguistic taxonomists in business.

Student projects seldom have the opportunity to do much harm — for a language to do real damage it needs a flag and an army — but if by some mischance a frustrated language designer later finds themselves in a managerial role at a company that ships code, they can inflict their personal demons on everyone unlucky enough to be caught within the blast radius of a proprietary platform and a supercritical mass of extremely bad ideas.

Much more rarely, a language designer actually has something useful to say — not just an urge to scratch a personal itch, but an urge to scratch an itch that lots of other programmers share. The degree of success with which their ideas are met often depends as much on the timing — when they go public — as on the content. Which brings me to the matter at hand ...

Even twenty years ago, in 2014, Perl was no longer a sexy paradigm-busting newcomer but a staid middle-aged citizen, living in a sprawling but somehow cluttered mansion full of fussily decorated modules of questionable utility. That people are still gathering to talk about new developments in Perl after 45 years is ... well, it's no crazier than the idea that people would be drafting new standards for COBOL in the 21st century would have seemed if you'd put the idea to Grace Hopper in the early 1960s. Much less Object-Oriented COBOL. Or the 2018 standard for Functional COBOL with immutable objects.

So why is Perl still going in 2034, and why is there any prospect whatsoever of it still being a thing in 2134?

By rights, Perl in 2034 ought to have been a dead language. The law of averages is against it: the half-life of a programming language in the latter half of the 20th century was around a decade, and as a hold-over from 1987 it should be well past its sell-by date.

Perl, like other scripting languages of the late 20th century, was susceptible to a decade-long cycle of fashion trends. In the 1990s it was all about the web, and in particular the web 1.0 transactional model — now dying, if not dead, replaced by more sophisticated client/server or distributed processing frameworks. While Perl was always far more than just a scripting language for writing quick and dirty server-side CGI scripts, that's the context in which many programmers first encountered it. And indeed, many people approached Perl as if they thought it was a slightly less web-specific version of PHP.

But Perl isn't PHP — any more than it's Python or Ruby. Perl 5 is a powerful, expressive general-purpose high level programming language with a huge archive of modules for processing data and interfacing to databases. Perl 6 — if and when we get there — is almost a different beast, essentially a toolkit for creating application domain-specific sub-languages. And while Perl and its modules were once a bit of a beast (as anyone who ever had to build perl 5 from source on a workstation powered by a 33MHz 68030 will recall), by todays standards it's svelte and fast.

If what you're juggling is a city-wide street network with an average of one processor per paving slab, generating metadata at a rate of megabytes per minute per square metre of sidewalk, it pays to distill down your data as close to source as possible. And if those paving slabs are all running some descendant of Linux and talking to each other over IP, then some kind of data reduction and data mangling language is probably the ideal duct tape to hold the whole thing together.

But Perl also has a secret weapon in the language longevity wars. And that secret weapon is: you.

Back when I went to my first YAPC in London in the late 1990s, I had no idea that I'd return to one in Orlando in 2014 and see several familiar faces in the audience. And I'm pretty sure that 2034 my future hypothetical self will recognize some of those faces again in the audience at YAPC::NA 2034.

Perl has a culture — curated since the early days via the perl5-porters mailing list and the comp.lang.perl usenet group, and elsewhere. I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but for better or worse Perl tends to attract die-hard loyalists and has a culture not only of language use but of contribution to the pool of extensions and modules known as CPAN.

And Perl was invented just late enough in the semiconductor revolution that it stands a chance of still being in use by a die-hard core of loyalists when the progression dictated by Moore's law comes to an end, and everything slows down.

If a technology is invented and discarded during a technological revolution before the revolution matures and reaches the limits dictated by physical law, then it will probably remain forgotten or a niche player at best. In aerospace, perhaps the classic examples are the biplane and the rigid airship or Zeppelin. They worked, but they were inefficient compared to alternative designs and so they are unlikely to be resurrected. But if a technology was still in use when the revolution ended and the dust settles, then it will probably remain in use for a very long time. The variable-pitch propeller, the turbofan, and the aileron: it's hard to see any of them vanishing from the skies any time soon.

Perl is, in 2014, a mature language — but it's not a dead language. The community of Perl loyalists is aging and greying, but we're still here and still relevant. And the revolution is due to end some time in the next ten years. If Perl is still relevant in 2024, then it will certainly still be relevant in 2034 because the world of operating systems (research into which, as Rob Pike lamented, stagnated after 1990) and the world of programming languages are intimately dependent on the pace of change of the underlying hardware, and once the hardware freezes (or switches to incremental change over a period of decades) the drive to develop new tools and languages will evaporate.

Just keep going, folks. Focus on modules. Focus on unit testing. Focus on big data, on data mining and transformation, on large scale distributed low-energy processing. Focus on staying alive. Perl is 27 in this year, 2014. If Perl is still in use in 2024, then the odds are good that it will make it to 2034 and then to 2114.

Let's hope we get that cure for old age: people are going to need you to still be around for a long time to come!

Thank you and good night.

Anti-transgender protestors held a picket at London Dykemarch on Saturday 21st of June, chanting transphobic slogans in an attempt to drown out my keynote speech.

As I gave my speech, a group of 6 protestors started trying to shout me down, and distributed leaflets amongst the gathered crowd calling me a “lesbian hating man”, claiming that I was part of a “male” takeover of lesbian spaces, and accusing me of appropriating a lesbian identity.

Two of the protestors have since been identified as Dr Julia Long of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, and Dr Lynne Harne, of Bristol University. Both lecture in women’s studies and both are involved in developing equalities policy.

Both academics have previously been involved in the London “RadFem” conferences, which are notorious for their trans exclusionary policies and their lineup of transphobic speakers. The conference lost its venues in 2012 and 2013 due to its transphobic-hate focus, having to find alternate venues at the last minute.

This is the latest incident in a campaign of transphobic harassment of me, coordinated via social media, which has been going on for several months, ever since I declined to engage in a panel discussion with journalist Julie Bindel, also noted for transphobic writing in the past.

Since then, a series of coordinated complaints about me were sent to the Liberal Democrat Party and Cambridge City Council, each of which was investigated and found to be invalid. I have had my blog targeted for a denial of service attack and my email hacked, and have received anonymous hate mail accusing me of abusing my position as a councillor to obtain a “sex change operation” – a charge which would require me to invent a time machine for it to be true.

My family was targeted, with harassers claiming that my wife left me because I “could no longer satisfy her sexually” after “mutilating” myself (my wife and I are together and very happy). The abusers wrote blogs calling me a “privilege denying t****y”, and described my vagina as a “f**khole”.

More recently, one of the harassers made their intentions clear, saying that, “Sarah Brown should gracefully bow out of public life”. It seems that any trans person who has any kind of public profile is considered “fair game” by these people.

The stress of the constant harassment, coinciding with my reelection campaign caused me to seek medical help for acute anxiety and depression. I spent around 3 months on antidepressants and tranquillisers and much of that period is still a black hole in my memory. After losing my seat, and while coming off the antidepressants, I finally snapped back at one of the people who had claimed responsibility for involvement in the harassment campaign, in response to constant provocation, telling her to, “suck my formaldehyde pickled balls”.

I regret saying that, but it was done after months of provocation, the destruction of my mental health and the targeting of my family. This was used as “proof” that I am a “violent male”, and the justification for picketing the London Dyke March.

I am not the only transgender woman to suffer this kind of abuse. I am deeply concerned that any transgender woman who dares to have any kind of participation in public life is subject to this kind of relentless hounding, I am deeply concerned that prominent academics, involved in researching and developing equalities positions and in a position of responsibility over students, some of whom may be trans themselves, see fit to picket a Lesbian Pride march, chant transphobic slogans and hand out transphobic material.

This abuse is performed in the name of “feminism”, and many mainstream media feminists either turn a blind eye, or actively endorse these activities. Enough is enough – this persistent abuse of transgender women by a vocal minority of transphobic radical feminists, pushing discredited transphobic ideology from the 1970s should not, and must not be tolerated.

Cool term, huh?  Liquid surveillance. I learned it from Neil Richards’ 2013 paper “The Dangers of Surveillance” in the Harvard Law Review (thanks to Jesus Olmo for the link); it’s a useful label for that contemporary panopticon in which “Government and nongovernment surveillance support each other in a complex manner that is often impossible to disentangle.” My recent IAPP talk looked at privacy from a biological point-of-view; I’d recommend Richards’ overview for its legal and historical perspective on the same subject.

But while we come at the issue from different directions, both Richards and I disagree profoundly with David Brin. We both think that privacy is something worth protecting.

As a number of you have noticed, the good doctor took exception to my Scorched Earth talk of a while back. We’ve since gone  back and forth over email a few times. David was miffed by my failure to give him a heads-up when I posted my transcript, and fair enough; that was thoughtless of me. He also objects to my simplistic “rainbows and unicorns” caricature of his transparent society. Also fair enough(1), these days anyway; the dude does seem to have changed his tune since back in 2003 when he expressed the hope that the authorities would “let us look back”. Nowadays he takes the more defiant stance that we’ll fucking well look back whether they “let” us or not.

My argument wasn’t so much that we shouldn’t look back as it was that the silverbacks would come down hard on us when we did. I wholeheartedly endorse David’s current perspective, even though he sometimes gets so caught up in his own heroic defiance that he has an unfortunate tendency to describe the rest of us as mere “whiners” in comparison.

 

Quibble Appetizer

He uses the word repeatedly— here, when he engages me, and here, where he takes on the URME line of surveillance-foiling full-face masks.  Privacy advocates— hell, people who walk down the street wearing masks— are just a bunch of moaners who keep “whining ‘don’t look at me!‘”

I think Dr. Brin might be protesting a bit too much. Has he ever worn a mask in public, or (like Ladar Levison of Lavabit) given the finger to authorities who show up with their hands out? These are not craven acts. Wearing a mask in public is the very opposite of hiding: it doesn’t avoid attention, it draws it. It’s not just a middle finger raised to a gauntlet of cameras; it’s an invitation to any badge-wearing thug within eyeshot, even in those places where wearing a mask isn’t outright illegal.  It’s about as whiney, moany, and hidey an act as— well, for example, as getting out of your car during a protocol-violating border search to ask what’s going on. (Or as David puts it on his blog, “scream and leap”.)

I’m quibbling, though. So the dude slants his semantics for dramatic effect; I’m Mr. Unicorns-&-Rainbows, so I can’t really complain. Besides, I think Dr. Brin and myself are pulling in the same direction. We’re both outraged by abuse of power; we both regard our governments as— if not an outright enemy— an adversary at least, a group organism whose interests cannot be counted on to align with those of its citizens. We both think it needs to be resisted (and if we don’t, I’m sure David will set me straight, because this time at least I’ve given him a heads-up.)

I still think he’s dead wrong about privacy, though.

 

The Trouble With Transparency

I’ll give him some points right out of the gate. The use of cell phone cameras has depressed the number of incidents of police misconduct, has even resulted in charges now and then.  That’s a positive development.

I don’t know how long it will last.  Laws written by cats have a way of adapting when the mice figure out a workaround.  Sneak cameras into factory farms and you may get public outrage, grass-roots momentum, the passage of more humane animal-treatment laws.  Then again, you might get laws that outlaw undercover journalism entirely, redefine anyone who documents the abuse of agricultural animals as a “domestic terrorist”. Record video of police assaulting civilians and you’ll certainly get a lot of front-page coverage for a few days. You may even get public enquiries and actual charges, at least until the next Hollywood celebrity overdoses on horse tranquillizers and moves the spotlight.

But how much of that theater results in conviction?  The Mounties who killed Robert Dziekański in the Vancouver International Airport got off the hook, despite video footage of their actions.  James Forcillo is back on the job after repeatedly shooting a crazy man to death in an empty streetcar, despite hand-held recordings from multiple angles establishing that the victim was not a threat. (He’s since been charged; conviction, in my opinion, is unlikely.) And the cops who vandalized, robbed, and assaulted bodega owners in Philadelphia were never even charged, despite video showing them cutting the local securicam wires before partying down.

Of course, anyone can google for newspaper headlines showing this corrupt cop or that crooked politician getting away with murder. That’s called arguing by anecdote and— while the anecdotes are valid in and of themselves— you can’t hang rigorous statistics off that kind of cherry-picking. My sense is that we’re in an arms race here; the authorities are still coming to terms with the presence of ubiquitous civilian surveillance at street level, the cops haven’t quite internalized the fact that they might be suddenly accountable in a way they never were before, but I expect countermeasures to these countermeasures. (Which, now that I think of it, serves as a rejoinder to David’s suggestion that I’ve never heard of Moore’s Law. I confess the term does sound familiar— but I think it applies to both sides in the struggle, so rather than a monotonic climb to a transparent utopia, I see something more cyclical. Maybe that’s just the ecologist in me.)  Brin himself points to a patent that would let the authorities shut down every inconvenient cell-phone and tablet within reach (interestingly, he proposes a response similar to my Cylon Solution from back in March).  I expect that generally, those in charge will figure out how to put back whatever rocks we manage to turn over.

But that’s just my sense of things, and I could be wrong. So let’s be optimistic and grant the point.  Let’s assume that our cell phones and skeeterbots permanently level the playing field down here at street level, that cops no longer get away with assaulting civilians whenever they feel like it, that our masters and their attack dogs finally have to treat us with a modicum of respect.

It will be an improvement. Not a game-changing one. Because even in this optimistic scenario, society is only transparent down here on the street, where the cell phones are. Elsewhere, the glass in the windows is all one-way.

Take a Man’s Castle, for starters. Even Brin draws the line at domestic privacy: his Transparent Society ends on our doorsteps, explicitly allowing that our homes, at least, will remain unsurveilled. It may have seemed a plausible extrapolation back in the nineties, before Moore’s Law and Surveillance Creep produced such a litter of unholy love-children: the television in your bedroom that reports your viewing habits and the contents of your thumb drives back to corporate headquarters. The back doors built into every Windows operating system from Xp on up. The webcam that counts the people in your living room, so that it can shut down your TV if it sees four faces when your subscription to Game of Thrones is only licensed for three. And of course the government, lurking overhead like a rain-swollen overcast sky, turning all of corporate America into its bitch with a wink and a National Security Letter (and even an actual warrant on rare occasions). The Internet of Things has barely even got off the ground, and these are only a few of the intrusions we’re already facing.

And don’t even get me started on LOVEINT…

David, dude— it was a beautiful dream back in 1998, and how I wish it had turned out that way. But do we have back-door access into Dick Cheney’s web-surfing habits? Did I miss some memo about the White House camera feeds going public-domain last week? That giant supercomputer complex going up in the Utah desert: when it goes online, will they be using it to help mothers keep track of their wandering children? Do we know what books David Cameron keeps on his Nook, do we know what passages of Mein Kampf he tends to linger over?

Will any of these insights be within our grasp in the foreseeable future?

And that’s just in people’s homes, in the private little bubble that we all agree should remain sacrosanct. Is it better when you step outside, and lose not just the reasonable expectation of privacy but of anonymity to boot? If you were attending a rally to protest— oh, I dunno, illegal drone strikes on foreign nationals— would you feel not the slightest chill when informed by one of our Boys in Blue that yes, you’re perfectly free to exercise your right to public dissent— but before you do we’re going to take down your name and address and bank details and employment history and phone records and any past interactions you may have had with Law Enforcement stretching back into childhood? Would it make you feel any better to know that no Boys in Blue were exploited in the making of this film, that all those data— and orders of magnitude more— were collected by an unmarked autonomous quadrocopter talking to a computer in the desert?

Is it okay that someone without any relevant qualification can access psychiatric records of people in other countries, the better to arbitrarily restrict their freedom of movement? Is it acceptable that people who’ve never been convicted of any crime— who’ve never even been charged with anything— have lost jobs, been turned down for educational programs, been denied travel, all because the police keep records of everyone they come in contact with for whatever reason, then hand those data out at the drop of a hat? Would all that somehow be redressed, if only we had guerrilla cellphone footage of some asshole behind a desk stamping REJECTED on a job application?

Don’t count on enlightened legislation to turn the tables. The original surveillance program that grew into PRISM and Stingray was regarded as illegal even by many in the Bush Administration; the White House went ahead and did it anyway. None of those folks will ever be held accountable for that, any more than they’ll be charged with war crimes over the waterboarding of prisoners or the dispatch of flying terminators to assassinate civilians without due process.

I have a friend who practices law in California. The last time we hung out she told me that what disillusions her the most about her job, the thing she finds most ominous, is the naïve and widespread fairytale belief that the law even matters to those in power— that all we have to do to in order to end government surveillance is pass a law against it, and everyone will fall into line. It’s bullshit. Only mice have to obey the law. The cats? They can take it or leave it. (I passed that message on to Canada’s Privacy Commissioner when we chatted after my IAPP talk. In response, she could only shrug and spread her hands.)

The damnable thing about David Brin is, he’s right: If the watchers watch us, we should damn well be able to watch them in turn.  Where the argument fails is in his apparent belief that both sides will ever have comparable eyesight, that an army of cellphone-wielding  Brave Citizens (as opposed to the rest of us moaning whiners) is enough to level the playing field. Yes, Moore’s Law proceeds apace: our eyesight improves over time. But so does theirs, and because their resources are so vastly greater, they will have the advantage for the foreseeable future. (Of course, if someone’s planning on crowd-sourcing their own supercomputer complex in the desert— complete with legislation-generating machinery to legally protect its existence and operations on behalf of the 99%— let me know.  I’d love to get in on the ground floor.)

Don’t get me wrong: I agree that we should look back whenever we can. Even when the gorillas beat the shit out of you. Looking back is necessary.

But it is not sufficient.

 

The Opacity Alternative

If we can’t level the field by spying on the authorities, the obvious alternative is to try and limit their ability to spy on us. Neil Richards argues not only that privacy can be protected but that it must be, because personal privacy is essential to a functioning democracy. His argument seems compelling to me, but I’m not a legal scholar (and I’m not entirely sold on the whole democracy thing either), so I’ll leave it to Richards to defend Richards. Brazil, at least, seems to be on board with his outlook, given the recent passage of their “Internet Bill of Rights“.

For my part, it just burns my ass that these fuckers arrogate unto themselves the right to watch me from the grasses.  I don’t like being targeted.  I don’t like being prey. So it resonates when Edward Snowden tells us that we don’t have to ask the government to give us back our privacy: we can take it.

Brin’s response is: Tough noogs, Bub. The Internet Never Forgets.  You can’t burn data to the ground when they’ve already been copied and recopied and stored in a million backup repositories throughout a network designed to remain operational after a nuclear war.

He’s got a point.

My porn-surfing habits from 2011 are probably immortal by now. I’ll never be able to disown this blog post no matter how many religious conversions I experience down the road. CSIS probably knows all about that little sniper reticle I superimposed on the forehead of a cat-cuddling Stephen Harper last decade. Those ships have sailed.

But that doesn’t mean we have to keep launching new ones.

There’s no shortage of online posts listing the various ways one might protect one’s privacy, from asymmetrical haircuts to sticking your cell phone in a Faraday Cage. Some are really obvious: if you don’t want your TV spying on you, don’t get a smart one(2). (Dumb TVs are cheap these days— we just bought one a couple of weeks back— because everyone’s clearing their warehouses to make room  for new devices that come with HAL-9000 as standard equipment.  When you can’t get a dumb TV any more, go dumber: my last 47-incher was basically just a monitor with a bunch of input jacks.) Keep your deepest secrets on a computer that’s completely isolated from the internet. Encrypt everything. Stay the fuck away from Facebook.

Start a Cylon Solutions boutique that specializes in backlash technology, machinery too dumb to be used against you(3). Start a franchise. Make it a thing. Hell, if vinyl staged a comeback decades after the entertainment industry banished it to the wilderness— if analog tech has become cool again for no more than the audio aesthetic— how much more potential might there be in a retro movement founded on the idea of keeping Harper and Obama out of our bedrooms?

Of course, not everyone cares enough to put in the extra effort. I was ranting to a friend the other day as she booted up her smart TV, ran down the usual list of grievances and suspicions and countermeasures. She listened patiently (as you know, I do tend to go on sometimes), and finally drawled “You know, your arguments all make sense, but I just don’t really care.”  A lot of people, seduced by the convenience of the tech and unwilling to make their own soap from scratch, are indifferent to the panopticon. I wish them well.

But to many of us the Snowden revelations have provoked a backlash, a renewed interest in drawing a curtain back across our lives. That backlash seems to be provoking an uptick in privacy measures that are actually easy to use, convenient enough for even the surveillantly-indifferent to embrace. Cyberdust is a free app that encrypts and anonymizes your communiqués, then burns them to the ground after they’ve been read no matter how often David Brin weighs in on the impossibility of such a feat (although you may want to stay away from Snapchat for the time being). Chrome’s new “End-to-End” encryption add-on has got so much recent press it’s barely even worth embedding a link. (Let us take a moment to reflect on the irony of Google in the role of privacy advocate.) And Snowden’s gift has also weakened the nonelectronic channels through which government spying often passes— the security letters, the secret back-room demands for data which corporations were only too happy to turn over before their clients knew what they were doing. Now it’s out, and customers are deserting in droves; see how Apple and Facebook and Microsoft have seen the light at last, now that their bottom lines are threatened. See how they’ve all pledged to give up their evil ways and join the Occupy movement. It’s not just Teksavvy and Lavabit any more; now even the lapdogs are showing a couple of teeth. (Whether they actually bite anything remains to be seen, of course.)

There may even be some utility yet to be squeezed out of direct legislation, notwithstanding my skepticism about cat-authored laws. Sure, if you tell  the spooks they can’t spy on you, they’ll just do it anyway and lie to Congress about it afterward.  But what if you pass a law that cuts their budget— reduces their allowance so they can’t afford to spy on you, whether they’re allowed to or not? We’re about to find out, if the House of Representatives’ recent amendment to a Defense appropriations bill makes it past the Senate.

If worst comes to worst, just break the law.  It serves them, not us, and they can’t put all of us in jail.

Yes, they are vast and mighty and all-seeing, and we are small and puny, but we are scattered and so very many in number. We can’t keep the spooks out if they really want us— but they don’t really want most of us. The only reason They See All is because the technology makes it so damn easy to target everyone, to err on the side of overkill. Tangle up that driftnet enough and cost:benefit changes; at some point they’ll go back to using longlines.

There are things we can do, is what I’m saying. It’s what Edward Snowden is saying, too.  It’s what Neil Richards and  Bruce Schneier and Ann Cavoukian and Micheal Geist are saying. It what activist organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and national governments like Brazil and a myriad others are saying. We’re saying we can burn things, and here’s how. We’re saying we can take it back.

We’re saying that David Brin is wrong.

About this, anyway.  Because— and I’ll say it again— I am totally on board with the way the man rallies his troops to join battle on one front. What I diss is his unconditional surrender of the other.

To me, that’s the very opposite of being a Brave Citizen.

 

Deleted Scenes and Extras

In a way I believe Ed Snowden’s inspirational example has misled us, misled me. In hindsight I think I was wrong to write that he “looked back”— as though he was one of us, just some guy on the street staring at the gorilla.  He wasn’t. He was the gorilla; he was a trusted part of that network, he was Agent Smith, he was one of the watchers. That’s the only way he had access to all that information in the first place: not through “souseveillance”, not by looking back, but simply by being a gorilla who happened to grow a conscience. We can’t aspire to follow his example because no matter how hard we stare, we will never enjoy the access he once had.

In a way, that doesn’t even matter—because whether Snowden was a true metawatcher or just a gummint voyeur plagued by a sense of ethics, the real metric of progress is whether the Society has grown more Transparent in the wake of his revelations. Will the next Ed Snowden have an easier time, or a harder one, casting a spotlight on the powerful? Does anyone really believe that the keyholes he peeked through haven’t since been plugged?

Obama, finally exposed, utters mealy-mouthed platitudes about transparency and accountability while continuing to lie about PRISM and Stingray and all those other programs with Le Carré names. Debate is suddenly “welcomed”, our leaders are suddenly willing to contemplate new restraints on their unbridled power. And yet their minions continue to lean on local law enforcement to keep their yaps shut about ongoing surveillance efforts, rewarding them with AVs and machine guns for their cooperation. And over in that dark corner, Thomas Drake— a conscience-afflicted NSA employee who leaked unclassified documents to the press concerning the unconstitutional and illegal surveillance by the US government on its citizens— found himself charged with espionage by the simple expedient of taking unclassified documents found on his computer, reclassifying them after the fact, and then laying charges for possession of retroactively-forbidden fruit.

Think about that. If the state doesn’t like what you’ve done, it will reverse-engineer reality to make you a criminal. The law itself becomes quicksand, rewritten on the fly to favor the house: more than once US courts have thrown out suits alleging violation of amendment rights simply because the programs committing those offenses are “state secrets”. If the court doesn’t know a program exists, it can’t pass judgment on what that program may have done to you; and if the program is secret, the court is not allowed to acknowledge that it exists.

In the light of such Kafkaesque rationales, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that criminality may ultimately be inevitable to anyone who truly values their privacy. Even if your countermeasures are legal today, they may not be tomorrow. If you’re not a criminal now, you might be then.

Might as well say Fuck the Law, and take your countermeasures. Avoid the rush.

 

 

---

(1) Although seriously: artistic license, right? A cheap laugh before a cold audience. I say it was worth it.

(2) You could always get a smart TV, put tape over its eyes, and keep it isolated from the web— but how long before the onboard AI simply refuses to run your favorite shows until you “confirm your identity” through an internet link?

(3) Brin urges his own Brave Citizens to adopt similar tactics, albeit to prevent the cops from protecting their own “privacy” rather than to further the protection of your own.

This actually happened the other day. I type these up from memory right after they occur…

HIM: Mr. Evanier, how are you? I'm Darryl with Whatever Construction and I spoke to you about six months ago about some work you wanted done on your house when you were ready for it.

ME: No, we didn't speak six months ago. We've never spoken.

HIM: Oh, yes we did, sir.

ME: Oh, no we didn't, sir.

HIM: Hey, I'm sorry. This is what they tell us to say.

ME: Congratulations. You're the first one in over a hundred of these calls to be honest about it so I'm going to do you a favor. There's no way I'm going to have your company do any work in my house so don't waste any more of your time with me. Go call someone else and see if you can make some money.

HIM: I appreciate that but could I ask you one question?

ME: Sure.

HIM: You don't happen to need any toner for your copier or printer, do you? Because I also make calls for a company that sells that shit.

You know…if I needed toner, I might actually have bought some from the guy.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Yes, I know, I know, I know. I use this blog and its Twitter for whining about the weather all the time. But I’ve just read this by A Quiet Week, about her experiences with summer-onset depression, and it made me realise that I’ve never actually attempted to explain “my weird heat thing”; I really don’t think it’s that, the symptoms really don’t match up (as I said in the comment, its presentation far more closely resembles anxiety, and I don’t have any problems with light in its own right) but it’s definitely more than just “I’m autistic, and heat and humidity overload my senses just like sudden loud noises do”, too. Actually, I’d quite like it explained myself!

So. Let’s start from the beginning, with that sentence as the foundations; I’m autistic, and heat and humidity overloads my senses just like sudden loud noises do. Except more. And for longer. And it’s much more difficult to get away. And I have no idea when it’s going to end or, once it does, when it’s going to come back. And I don’t sleep very well, to boot. In short, heat and humidity overload my senses just like sudden loud noises do, but constantly. As you’d expect, this is exhausting and draining and generally not fun, so once I do feel better (generally after a cool shower), I’d very much like to avoid the cause of it.

So I do that – or I panic about it. Obsessively.

If I can help it, I sort of gravitate towards the shade as a force of habit; if the road is small and minor enough, I’ll cross for it. Think of it as one giant game of “the floor is lava”. If I can’t do that, it’s not necessarily the end of the world, but I’ll worry about it until I can. If I have to go out there at some point, but not at a specific time, I’ll put it off. The same applies to buildings/rooms that I know set me off, although they tend to fit more into “worry and procrastinate” than “avoid”. At the very least, if heat is present, it’s always a consideration. I also end up wearing and re-wearing, washing and re-washing, a fairly small section of my clothes, those which at some point were deemed loose enough and thin enough and breathable enough to not pose a risk. And, as my Twitter followers will know, I don’t ever bloody shut up about it. It takes over.

Then the guilt and self-consciousness and self-loathing start. Because, well, it’s only June. And you’re only in England. It can’t be that bad. I mean, it’s not like it’s actually made you feel ill. You shouldn’t have to psyche yourself up to go to the shop ten minutes from here because it looks really warm outside. You really over-react, because you’re as pathetic as usual. I guess I see it as a sign of weakness that, if it can’t be eliminated, should at least be vaguely hidden. And it’s only going to get worse. Quick, magically make yourself less pathetic before it gets even worse. There’s a lot of frustration about not being able to make the problem go away. I end up feeling trapped, and that makes me panic even more; I’ve also got a bit of a thing about being trapped and/or suffocation, so it’s probably that.

What’s more – and this is where things start getting really weird – that panic arises almost to the same level at the thought of other people being vaguely too warm. Even other people who I know couldn’t physically care any less and are therefore almost definitely fine. Maybe it’s because that means it really is “that bad”, but this also crops up when it’s not currently warm where I am, when I read or hear about it in another place, another time, fiction even. So many things can “set me off”; not in a way that’s at all debilitating, just a few minutes of “okay, I’ll pretend I don’t know that information and deny any feelings related to it” to “AAAAAAGH IT MADE ME THINK ABOUT THE THING AND I’M AWARE OF THE THING QUICK MAKE ME UNTHINK IT I CAN’T UNTHINK IT” followed by “WHY DID THAT FREAK YOU OUT, SILLY PATHETIC BRAIN”. For example, the weather-related bits of the World Cup coverage sometimes set me off. Festival sets sometimes set me off if it looks like a hot day. Other people’s posts about the weather sometimes set me off. Stuff about much more extreme weather elsewhere sometimes sets me off. A particularly Tumblr post during last year’s UK heatwave explaining that yes, America/Australia, it really is that bad because nobody’s used to it, set me off pretty badly; I should probably blacklist the topic, but I have no idea how people would tag it, and it’s really hypocritical of me considering I talk about it all the time. I’ve been set off by a fairly small part of a novel before, too, although that had the effect of making me read to the end of the chapter, so the character in question would be out of there and – in theory – I wouldn’t have to think about it any more. Again, this isn’t really major, but it’s confusing. If it’s just about my own hypersensitivity, which I know isn’t typical of most people, why do I get so obsessively concerned about everybody else?

Not really sure how to conclude this, other than “answers on a postcard please”. Sometimes it feels like it’s such a big deal and it’s inescapable, and other times it feels like a minor inconvenience that sometimes freaks me out a bit too much. At any rate, I guess this post will come in handy for linking to in future posts. Because believe me, this topic’s going to come up again… and again… and again…

Tagged: actuallyautistic, Autism, sensory processing, summer

Here's a list of 22 Things You Should Never Say to Someone Who Doesn't Drink. I am such a person. Have never had a drink of alcohol — not even beer or wine — and doubt I ever will. A couple of the items on that list seem worthy of sober comment…

4. "I'm going to get you to drink." No, you're not, the same way I'm not going to get you not to drink. People get to make their own decisions, and trying to change mine on alcohol will be a failed endeavor.

I haven't encountered this much since I hit around age 30 but before, I found myself around a number of people who made it their personal mission to get non-participants involved in liquor and/or other mood-changers. Once at a party, the host (one of them) went to get me a 7-Up and, being the suspicious type, I spied and saw him pour something else into the glass. I think that's one of the assholiest things I've ever encountered in my life and I told him so and went home.

By the way: I'm really a non-drinker. I've since quit 7-Up and all carbonated drinks, too.  My body has decided it wants nothing stronger than water and I don't miss other liquids at all.

7. "You must think I'm such a mess." No, I don't think you are such a mess because you are drinking and I'm not.

I never think that drinking alone makes someone a mess but I have been around some people who…well, let's just say that if they weren't drinking and could see how they looked and acted while drinking, they might stop drinking. But that's their choice.

10. "Do you think you're better than us?" Alcohol's a beverage, not a measure of moral superiority (or inferiority). So no, I just don't want to drink.

I've had this exchange. I do not have any moral condemnation of anyone who drinks unless they do something awful because of it.

Many years ago, someone I cared a lot about was killed by a drunk driver. Amazingly, the driver thought he should not be punished because he was drunk at the time and therefore not in any position to be responsible for his action. He tried to claim Temporary Insanity and his lawyer made the offer that his client would plead guilty (or maybe No Contest) to a charge of public drunkenness if the prosecutors would drop this irrelevant stuff about the dead girl.

That, by the way, is not the reason I don't drink. I wasn't the least bit interested in it before that, either. But yeah, I guess I do feel morally superior to someone who lets himself get into a condition where he doesn't know what the hell he's doing and harms others or even, as has been the case with a few friends, themselves. This is a pretty tiny percentage of those who drink.

18. "You must have so much dirt on everyone, watching us sober." Of course, my favorite hobby is to collect blackmail and is the sole reason I don't drink. Actually, I'm not judging. Please stop judging me.

Actually, I do have "dirt" on some people because I was sober and could remember things they said while drinking but I pretend I never heard them. Once in a while though, it's hard to get them out of your mind and I'm afraid a few of them have — shall we say? — colored my view of three or four individuals.

My main gripes relating to the way those who drink deal with those of us who do not are (a) people who assume my not drinking is some criticism of them and (b) people who assume there's nothing I want more than booze. I've had folks mix me a drink, come up and hand it to me on the presumption they everyone must love it as much as they do. Then they get annoyed with me that they made that mistake.

As a person with many food allergies, I also have to cope with the social discomfort of people preparing or giving me food I can't eat. Not being able to eat certain things is not exactly like choosing not to drink but it often gets you to the same clumsy situations. One time, I went over to pick up a date…and I thought I was taking her out to a restaurant of mutual choice. It was my second — and as it turned out, last date with this lady.

She greeted me at the door wearing an apron over other garments and announced, "I have a surprise for you," a phrase I have come to dread when it relates to food or drink. She'd spent all day cooking a meal for the two of us…and there wasn't a single item there that I could eat. Well no, there were carrot sticks but a dish of them is not exactly fine dining.

She'd also mixed a whole pitcher of martinis (I think that's what they were) for us to share despite the fact that I'd told her on our first date that I didn't imbibe. That information somehow does not register with some people. It seems so natural to them, I guess, that they can't grasp that it isn't for everyone. I have that same problem with people who pour me unwanted coffee because, you know, everyone drinks coffee. I don't.

That second date did not go well. She felt stupid or angry or…well, I'm not sure how to describe it. I had somehow made a mess of the evening and caused her to waste the cost of the groceries and a whole day over a hot stove by not being able to eat asparagus. Whatever, it was surely my fault for not being a normal human being. She also got a bit drunk — the nasty kind of drunk — because she downed all the martinis and that further ensured there would be no third date.

I get along fine without drinking alcohol or even coffee. I get along fine without eating the things I shouldn't eat. I'm utterly respectful of your right to control what goes into your body. I just ask that everyone be that respectful of mine and recognize that what's good for you may not be good for me.  Once in an awkward while, people just don't seem able to do that.

Jonathan Edwards was a slave-owner.

That can be surprising because we tend to think of slavery as a strictly Southern calamity. Edwards was a New Englander who later became president of the college in Princeton and we Americans often prefer to forget that American slavery was once common in places like Massachusetts and New Jersey. Edwards was a clergyman and an intellectual, so unlike George Whitefield — another prominent figure in the Great Awakening — he was never involved in a Southern plantation wholly dependent on slave labor. But Edwards’ New England household was run by slaves.

We know their names, or, at least, we know the names that Edwards called them. There was Venus, a girl whom Edwards purchased in 1731, right off the slave-ship in Massachusetts. Years later, Edwards would condemn the slave trade while defending slave-keeping itself, but he hadn’t yet arrived at that distinction. In 1731, Edwards saw the presence of slave-ships in Massachusetts as a convenience, not an abomination. And so he purchased Venus, who was probably about 14 at the time.

Fourteen.

And we know the names of others from Edwards’ will and the executors of his estate. The inventory of Edwards’ “possessions” lists “a negro boy named ‘Titus,’” And his will provided for the sale “in open market” of “two negro slaves, viz.: the one a negro man name Joseph, the other a negro woman named Sue, and is wife to the said Jo.”

I invite you to take a moment to reflect on those names — those biblical names of Titus and Susanna and Joseph. Joseph.

This was a thing that pious white Christians once did. They purchased enslaved persons, stole their labor, and called them by names like Joseph or even Moses. This makes the “man of his time” excuses that much harder to swallow. Theirs was a generation that knew Joseph. That exempts them from even Pharaoh’s poor excuse. I tell you that on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the land of Egypt.

My seminary class titled “Paradigmatic Issues in American Christianity” was a lot more interesting than that sounds. (It would almost have to be.) We read a good bit of Jonathan Edwards in that class and Edwards, too, is a lot more interesting than you might expect.

A class on “American Christianity” had to include a big chunk of Edwards. He was hugely influential in his time and put his stamp on so much of American Christianity that he continues to be hugely influential in our time, even if that influence isn’t always traced back to him consciously.

It’s unfortunate that Edwards is best known these days for the fire-and-brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” because that skews our idea of the man and our expectations of him. He had a curious and agile mind and he liked to chase after ideas to see where they led. That can be fascinating — even when, as I often do, you completely disagree with him and feel he’s racing down a wrong turn.

One of my favorite bits from Edwards was his discussion of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. That term, as I’ve said before, can be misleading, causing people to think it means something more like utter depravity. The idea isn’t that we humans are superlatively depraved by original sin, or that we are wholly depraved, but rather that our sinfulness taints every aspect — the totality — of our being. “Pervasive depravity” might be a more helpful term for this idea.

Edwards set out to challenge the idea that this fallen nature was somehow located in a single aspect of humanity. He didn’t want his readers to think that it was a matter of flesh vs. spirit, or body vs. intellect — that we were pure minds trapped in sinful bodies, or some such. So he methodically reviews various aspects of human nature — the mind, the will (whatever that is), etc. — rejecting in each case the idea that this is the unique location of our sinful depravity. It’s a fascinating passage (I can’t find it just now) in part because Edwards offers a survey of 18th-century ideas about human nature and human personality. One gets the sense that if he had been writing in the early 20th century, he’d have engaged the Freudian ideas about “id” and “superego,” systematically engaging and contending against the belief that any one of those was somehow uniquely the seat of human sinfulness.

For Edwards, every aspect of human nature was, in some way, corrupted by sin (both original sin and individual sin). He doesn’t emphasize this quite as much, but he also believed that every aspect of human nature was also, in some way, a reflection of the image of God. So the rottenness is everywhere, but nowhere are we thoroughly rotten.

I bring this up here because I think it illuminates our task when evaluating the heritage of white Christianity bequeathed to us from the theologians of slavery. The rot is pervasive — infecting every aspect of white Christianity in America. As Edwards argued, this depravity is not confined to a single location — a single misstep that can be identified and excised with surgical precision, leaving the remainder intact and unperturbed by that correction. Its roots are woven and interwoven throughout the whole. The depravity is total.

I also bring this up because I do not want anyone to mischaracterize what I’m exploring here as “attacking Jonathan Edwards.” I’m not attacking Edwards, or even criticizing him. No criticism from the likes of me is needed. The man owned slaves. He bought and sold human beings and stole their labor for a lifetime. He bought and sold children. He thus stands condemned as a simple matter of fact. Nothing I say or refuse to say could possibly add or subtract from that grave condemnation. And if you don’t already see that, then I’m afraid nothing I have to say about it will be of any use, as we apparently lack any common language or moral framework.

What I’m trying to do here, in part, is to apply Edwards to Edwards. His understanding of total depravity provides a helpful description of what this task entails, but it also provides an explanation for why this task is necessary. And I suspect that — at least on the abstract, intellectual level — Jonathan Edwards would agree with that.