I will finish this thing if it kills me.

But, it isn’t really about Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Because that movie’s just garbage, and you shouldn’t see it. Somewhere in a file on this very computer is a twenty-page dissection of everything that’s wrong with ST: ID, that no doubt is still growing and growing all on its own now, and will eventually claim all the available memory on this machine…because if you want to know what the real problem with ST: ID is, I will tell you:

The problem with it is EVERYTHING.

Spoilers follow.

*

Weren’t we just talking about bad sentences? So often the truly terrible is used to prop up the merely bad, to distract from it enough that it can slip its cynical incivility right under your radar. The truly terrible, in a movie, is something we’ve all gotten adjusted to…it may annoy, it may even offend, but it remains “disposable crapness” at its heart. Just another dumb thing; unimportantly awful. But the merely bad stuff…

That can be so much worse.

For example (and believe me the examples just keep coming with this movie, but this is my favourite one), while watching ST: ID with a friend who genuinely loved Star Trek 2009 — I didn’t love ST: 2009, but I did tolerate it — a posture I am coming to regret — anyway as we kept pausing the thing more and more to complain, question, and mock, I found myself thinking of something that you really shouldn’t expect to find yourself thinking of while watching a Star Trek movie, which was:

Isn’t it sickening how people continue to furrow their brows over whether or not it would be defensible to have recourse to Josef Mengele’s alleged “research” IF there was something in there that would help cure cancer or whatever? I mean, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have Phil 100 topics, but we can’t possibly be this hard up for them, can we? Can’t possibly be so hard up for them that we need to ask if our opinion of senseless acts of torture would change if it turned out they weren’t senseless after all?

Do we really think it such a fun game to imagine that the only thing holding back the cure for cancer is all this bureacratic red tape that makes it socially-unacceptable for us to be sadistic monsters?

There’s an equation here that we should be ashamed of being willing to tolerate, even hypothetically. Because Mengele wasn’t doing science. What Mengele was doing was equivalent to firing a bunch of newborns out of cannons to see how aerodynamic the different races are. And then if a Jewish baby had flown the straightest he would’ve done the experiment again and again until it showed the Jewish baby was actually the least aerodynamic. That’s about the level of “science” we’re talking about.

But, what if it could save lives?

Okay, it can’t save lives. It was just fucking torture. It was the senseless torture of innocents (redundant!), in an attempt to extort information from their unwilling flesh, that said flesh just didn’t ever possess in the first place. Because there was no information like that. This was seventy years ago, that this happened, and it wasn’t even science then. What can one really hope to learn, from a vivisection of identical twins that was performed a lifetime ago?

That sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many?

Or that “it’s complicated”, or something?

NO. That’s actually what we don’t learn, from the example of Josef Mengele. One might as well suppose that what we learned from Mao is that you shouldn’t wear white after Labour Day. The real Phil 100 topic, in fact, ought to be “is it right to reason on the example of Mengele as though he had been doing science”…don’t you think? Well, I just ran someone over with my car, and then went back to make sure I got their dog too; perhaps that was science.

Yet the idea is out there. Just a thing, a dumb water-cooler thing, a pop-culture reference: “Mengele’s experiments”. Like that thing where you only use one-twelfth of your brain, or how the Eskimos have 500 words for snow, or how Mussolini made the trains run on time, or Galileo was locked up for saying the world wasn’t flat, or any other stupid “meme” from which a perverse narrative of causation may be assembled. Just consider for a moment what it would mean for us if the lesson of Mengele was that sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many! Jesus Christ, but what a frighteningly obtuse moral that would be! We think it’s bad to say that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but actually the reverse formulation is just as bad, and we should be careful we don’t get stuck with either of those things…

Or worse: with both of them. How does one begin to argue for the idea that “torture is sometimes okay”? One begins, Clarice, by wanting it to be okay. By assuming it is okay, already.

And that’s called begging the question. Not just asking it!

Begging it.

But, what does this all have to do with Dr. McCoy, you ask?

I was recently reading a bit of Film Crit Hulk on the subject of convolution — the movie that is all plot-mechanics, in which characters never make choices but simply react to inexplicable happenings all around them — but I think I’m disposed to be a little less merciful than Hulk, and conclude that the love of convolution doesn’t so much indicate an overwhelming interest in one thing, as a disinterest in others. My generation of SF filmmakers has a lot of good qualities, but they also have a lot of bad ones, and one of the worst is their breezy nonchalance when it comes to politics. “The Dark Knight Rises” toys with the French Revolution as though it were just another pop-culture touchstone, hey remember the French Revolution, everyone? That’s the one where Spock had a beard? The new TV show Agents Of SHIELD plays the same distasteful game with — and I can hardly believe this wasn’t just a dream I had — NINE-FUCKING-ELEVEN, as though referencing 9/11 was simply something a competing show had done to great effect, whose popularity they wished to emulate. So the politics gets stuffed into the hat, but the magician can’t pull it out again because apparently he doesn’t know it wasn’t just another rabbit…c’mon you guys, doesn’t it make sense that the events of the Avengers movie would’ve been just like another 9/11, and then in the wake of it a covert black-ops team would be operating without oversight to black-bag American citizens off the streets of major American cities in order to…

…What?

Why are you all looking at me like that?

Sigh…okay, okay, you’re right…we need more comic relief…

And just like that, Grant Morrison starts looking a bit more like Bill Moyers, doesn’t he?

I don’t know how long it may take Illogical Volume to get around to watching Agents Of SHIELD, mind you; just as I’m advising all of you to avoid ST: ID (hmm, there’s a joke in there somewhere, isn’t there?), I’ve already advised him that Agents Of SHIELD is something he may not wish to get in on the ground floor of…but, what the hell, I also figured maybe I can tempt him by teeing off on the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek, which also bandies the name of 9/11 around a wee bit…and just as incompetently. “Convolution”: it’s a term I like quite a bit, but it’s a bit like naming the absence of a thing rather than naming the thing itself: looking at the compensation for a lack as though it had been a positive choice to have the lack, a matter of studied craft or ambitious theory, rather than pure necessity and plain old brass tacks. Hulk points out that for a passive moviegoer (which is a fine thing to be, don’t get me wrong) the replication of a thing is good enough to be considered the thing nine times out of ten, and maybe that’s true…but what excuses a filmmaker being so passive that he or she doesn’t seem to notice the difference either? Watching this movie, my friend and I (and he LOOOVED ST: 2009, I’ll say once again) didn’t just hit the pause button over and over to discuss why it sucked, but also how it sucked. All those shout-outs to the Seventies…

“Run, Indy!”

“Hell, the fall‘ll probably kill ya!”

“Never tell me the odds!”

(Remember in Mystery Men how Ben Stiller’s character just kept on meaninglessly harping on old Partridge Family episodes and Laugh-In catchphrases? Sort of like that but with Steven Spielberg…)

…Right down to the truck from Duel bumping the Enterprise from behind at Warp 15,000 or whatever plus twenty miles an hour, you know? And these are things that perhaps one expects from committee-thunk pieces of crap like the remake of Total Recall, where it’s pretty certain that the alleged writer didn’t know what the hell do they put in these “story” things anyway?…but where Christopher Nolan shits the bed pretty bad in “TDKR”, here J.J. Abrams seems to be insufficiently aware of the location of the bed (in the fridge? under these magazines? could it be in the bathroom, or the garage?) to be capable of shitting it with any efficiency to speak of, and in my opinion that’s something that really does cry out for an explanation. Because you heard it here first, folks: ST: ID doesn’t have a story.

Doesn’t have a story!

It only has a bunch of myoclonic twitches, masquerading as a plot!

And what’s the reason for it all, is what I bet you’re wondering…so we’ll get back to that directly, hopefully in no more time than it takes to freefall from the Moon to San Francisco, but FIRST…!

It’s Dr. McCoy’s turn, at last.

So there’s something funny about Benedict Cumberbatch’s blood, and McCoy idly wonders what it might be…so he does what any medical man would do, and jams a great whack of it into a handy Tribble that he has lying there on his desk. Oh, you bet your sweet bippy he does! Because why wouldn’t he, right? After all, Reader, if I jammed a bunch of my blood into you, you’d…uh…

Well, you’d probably die, but never mind that right now, the Tribble isn’t you, it isn’t a human being for heaven’s sake, it’s just a…

Uh…

…Totally alien life-form from another planet! Whose pint-sized body you’re only jamming about eight ounces of extra fluid into, so don’t worry about it having an allergic reaction, because it’ll probably burst before the blood affects it…

Hell, the fall‘ll probably kill ya…

…And besides, as anyone who knows anything about Tribbles is well aware, it’s really easy to make more of them, so WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE!! where we do lots and lots of super-harsh animal experiments that aren’t scientifically valid in the slightest, because the good of the many outweighs the good of the few — or the one, sorry Mr. Tribble — I capitalize your race’s name because it’s clear no one else will bother to do so — and in just a little while we will badly need for nothing to happen in this movie, and as always someone has to stay in the plane. Besides, Trekkies like Tribbles; they’re cute.

And anyway we’re going to save it!

So it’s win-win!

HRM. There’s a lot I’m not saying, here. I’m not talking about how if you feel your G.I. Joe guy doesn’t have a big enough gun, then you can just take away the gun that comes with him using pliers, and then glue a big old Oh Henry bar into his hands…and then suddenly budda-budda-BLAM, Klingons! Behold, I teach you the Superman! And I’m also not talking about how uninterested I am in whatever similarities or differences there may be between Khan and Kirk, or Khan and Spock, or really Khan and anybody, because okay maybe it’s true that Spock has lost all but a handful of his people and he’d do anything to protect those that are left, and Khan is in the exact same position, but you know what I like to do with Neapolitan ice cream? I like to melt it in the microwave until it’s just a sort of pinkish-grey slurry of sugar and guar gum that all has the same trivial, unnameable flavour and wouldn’t it be cool if Khan fought Spock…

I am, in fact, not saying a whole bunch of stuff like that. Because that’s why the first draft of this goddamn review went to twenty pages in a heartbeat. Because there is no story, and EVERYTHING IS WRONG. If one thing were right, the whole movie would collapse. If the truly terrible things were taken out, it would only reveal the merely bad things. This movie can’t afford to be good!

This movie needs its shittiness!

Because without it, something about its makers is bound to be revealed. So forget the “cold-fusion device” about the size and shape of a screwdriver set that upon exploding apparently freezes all the magma in a planet’s crust…forget all that! And forget that no one gathers together their entire operational command in one well-known place with windows when there’s been a major terrorist attack…forget that too! Because that’s only truly terrible, and thus easy to forgive or ignore…because it simply isn’t very important. Concentrate on the essentials, not the details. Like:

McCoy tortures that Tribble.

Don’t you think?

And also:

Leonard Nimoy loads and aims New Spock just as surely, and in exactly the same way, that Admiral Marcus loads and aims New Kirk.

Does he not?

This is going to be really hard to finish in the time it takes to freefall from the Moon to the Earth, at least in the time it takes to do that in the Abrams Star Trek universe…Star Trek: now with less science than Lost In Space…but I’m going to press on, Bloggers, and I hope you’ll come with me to the end. I’ve already made it fabulously short, and I’m about to make it shorter, but the ride may be slightly jumpy and it’ll all be just a bit incomplete. It all comes down to politics, and the inability to handle politics that leads to “convolution” in my generation’s SF filmmakers, sheerly for the want of any better option. For characters and the stories they reside in to have political dimensions is a very common thing, and ST: ID is obviously a movie where politics is not only included but employed…but it’s employed with an ineptitude so extreme that you wonder how the people putting it in didn’t know that they were going to fuck it all up.

Until, that is, you realize…

…That they may not have thought there was anything to fuck up. In every scene, as Hemingway might say, motion is mistaken for action…Uhura and the Klingons bellow the word “honour” at one another for a couple of seconds, but then before anything can actually happen it all just goes budda-budda-BLAM, and I’m just not sure that’s only a matter of craft, you know? Or even philosophy. I may not have loved ST: 2009 as my friend did — may not have been successfully snowed by it, is what I mean — but there were choices in it, that were made, that I could occasionally agree with. I’m damned if I can see the choices in ST: ID, though. I am beginning to think there just weren’t any…

And therein lies — as promised! — the crux of the matter. That our assumptions can be dangerous is something everybody knows, but not everybody knows when they’ve picked one up from somebody else, and that’s twice as dangerous; for the most part these little bugs ride along with us harmlessly, but out there in the larger environment they sometimes run into other bugs they can connect to, and from these connections a narrative can grow. And maybe it seems harmless enough, when that happens!

But if you don’t understand politics, you’re not going to be in a very good position to evaluate the “harmlessness” of its narratives, so how it seems doesn’t really fucking matter. I saw McCoy pick up a Tribble, and thought of Josef Mengele’s undeserved reputation as a scientist. Should that have happened? Honestly, should it have? I saw Kirk break the Prime Directive and create a vassal state for Starfleet because it was easy…and it’s played for laughs. Does that seem right to you? So, sure, it’s primally shitty when Spock yells “KHAAAN!”, but it’s still only “truly terrible” — in other words it’s stupid, okay, but it doesn’t reinforce superficial and illiberal narratives while flying a false flag.

Not to mention: while claiming ignorance that any of this might be going on, anywhere but in the mind of a “bad fan”.

A non-passive moviegoer?

Is that what being a Bad Fan is, now?

Here’s me, from the twenty-page first draft, because if I’m just going to point this out again I might as well cut-and-paste it:

“…We have the Superman, but notably he is NOT a eugenical superman, being instead a product of good old-fashioned couldn’t-make-a-superman-if-we-tried genetic engineering. There are assumptions bundled up here that Space Seed never suspected, but perhaps it would’ve been most surprised by the assumption that no one would really want to see Khan’s superiority interrogated — that no one would be interested in knowing about the dichotomy between Khan and Kirk, or Khan and Spock, or even Khan and Scotty or Khan and Sulu for that matter. In part, this is made hard to get at through Khan being made simply a technological product instead of an ideological one…and his past never really comes into conflict with the future he finds himself in. He’s been here for years already, by the time we meet him; already has acquired a mastery of society and technology that surpasses that of the future-native Kirk…who, hmm, actually is a technological product himself, if you think about him as being an alternate Kirk generated by time-travel meddling? But you know, I wouldn’t even bring this up if they didn’t keep harping on it…

…And more on that in a minute, as a variation on our theme, but first there’s the little matter of there being no conflict of perspective between Khan and Kirk, and no perceptible differences in the way they engage with the environment of the future. Khan is also far more (and far less!) than he’s ever been, here: a scientific genius whose genius has simply been built into him, and a murderous asshole because it’s his nature to be a murderous asshole. I’ve talked before about how a belief in biological determinism is the antithesis of everything the Star Trek franchise has ever stood for, and you can sort of see how even this Khan might make an interesting dialectic with even this Kirk…or Spock…on this basis, but even that Kevin Sorbo show with its “Nietzchean” (gah!) human subspecies made a better stab at that symbolism than ST: ID does. Everyone here just accepts everything about Khan, right down to the ground, and even when it looks like they may be slightly inclined to question the smallest part of it all, out pops Leonard Nimoy to remove all ground for doubt, really in exactly the same manner that Admiral Marcus attempts to encourage appeals to his own authority in order to justify his warhawk ways and his notions of collateral damage and political expediency. But, this kind of politics — though it definitely sucks, and we will definitely get to it — isn’t the most important politics on display, here. Technology — all technology — is simply supreme in the environment of ST: ID, never questioned because never noticed, and Khan is part of it so of course he clicks with it, and even adds on to it himself. Khan is technology, in a sense — the spirit of a greater technology — by being what the power of the Golden Age looks like in a world where technology is all the philosophy there is. Admiral Marcus treats him just this way, unthinkingly: he needs Khan because Khan is better, purer, more efficient and inventive. A better tool. BETTER.

The movie never questions this either. Kirk never questions it. Spock never questions it. The genetically-engineered Superman is superior to Saturnian alien races, too, you’ll notice: Spock and Khan meet as two dangerous skinny guys, not as advanced purebred vs. exotic mutt, and so in the bankrupt logic that eschews engagement with politics because it would taint the sweet escapist fun of pretending that Admiral Marcus was our only problem after 9/11 and now that he’s gone we’re fine…why then, naturally the bad guy was set up to win because he’s BETTER and STRONGER and SCRIPTWRITING 101 and also NOW BLOW THIS THING, KID, SO WE CAN GO HOME. Of course the stubbornness of this construction isn’t helped by there being so many aliens around the action of ST: ID — why should Spock, or the Klingons, represent anything in particular to us besides “the history of that Star Trek show”, if they’re so far behind the curve of “unusual” as to even have five fingers? Hell, fuck Spock, Starfleet’s LOADED with aliens that could probably squash Khan like a bug! Kirk should’ve been friends with THEM! But, who am I kidding, it isn’t that it doesn’t happen because it’s made structurally difficult; rather, that structure isn’t created because the movie doesn’t care about what could come from it…”

No, I dont think it’s enough to claim ignorance. A certain eschatalogical promise suffuses these new Star Trek products — that Kirk will achieve his Kirktastic destiny no matter how the new timeline has changed things, that nothing can stop it! — and it seems the filmmakers don’t believe it’s even necessary to support this. And, you know…maybe they’re right!

Because that contention really isn’t supportable, is it?

But don’t look at me! Because I sure as hell didn’t fucking put it in there.

And don’t get me started on the title.

This was lazy, careless garbage with no story and no clue…but on the plus side, it comes MST3K-ready pretty much out of the box, so actually I shouldn’t not recommend it, should I? Still: fuck this ship, and all who sail in her. This is my generation of SF filmmakers, the ones with all my background and all my interests and twice my talent and they’re fucking up royally.

It’s a goddamn embarrassment.

(sudden crash as something flies through the window)

I shall become a bricklayer.

The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. 

- Franco Moretti

People often compare the Borg, the cyborg gestalt from the Star Trek franchise, to Doctor Who's Cybermen.  Both races were conceived as humanoids physically augmented with technology, hence a certain superficial visual resemblance, particularly between the Borg and the earliest Cybermen, from 1966's 'The Tenth Planet'... which has just been released on DVD, if you want some way for this post to be halfway relevant to anything.

Borg

Cyberman

But the Cybermen were written by various different writers, under different conditions, with different levels of interest and different levels of knowledge of past depictions, over the course of nearly five decades.  The Borg, by contrast, were written by a small number of tightly associated people, under the aegis of a carefully controlled franchise, over the course of just under 15 years.  The two 'races' differ markedly in the circumstances of their production and in cultural profile.  As noted, the Borg's various appearances weren't separated by the same kinds of time-lags, and weren't a product of the same kind of radical turnover/variety of 'authors'.  Also, the Borg's concentration in time, and their near-immediate claiming of a significant and visible role in global 90s narrative culture (owing to their success and the global success of Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs), gave them a prominent position within a concentrated historical moment: the 1990s.  The Cybermen, by contrast, disappeared from television during that same historical moment, and before that they had only enjoyed a smaller cultural spotlight in one country - Britain - during the late 1960s.  By 2006, when the Cybermen tried to reclaim their place in culture, and went on to be more globally recognisable than they'd ever been before (owing to the international success of 21st Century Who), the historical moment of the Borg was long over.

Even so, the similarity of the Cybermen and the Borg is real, and rests upon kindred incoherent anxieties about capitalism.


1.

There's a real incoherence at the heart of the Cybermen.  They are definitely communistic monsters, expressing a 'Soviet-version' of the associations between the loss of individuality and collectivism.  They seek the total upgrade of the universe, working towards a chilly utopian telos lacking any inequality or freedom.  But they are also deeply corporate monsters.  They merged or allied themselves with International Electromatics in 'The Invasion'.  IE was an expression of capitalist standardisation and mass production.  Everything they make is the same, from their disposable radios to their CEO's offices.  This is explicitly linked to capitalist production and business practices, and is implicitly linked with the uniformity of the Cybermen.

Someone's not a very efficienct typist.

In many ways, the alliance between Tobias Vaughn and the Cybermen is a business partnership, with the invasion a hostile takeover.  The partnership is possible because, in Vaughn's ultra-streamlined corporate context, there is a synergy with the Cybermen.  In the new series, the alt-world Cybermen actually emerged from a corporation, Cybus Industries.  They were a Cybus product, complete with a corporate logo on their chests.  (With their divided nature, it's fitting that they take over Battersea Power Station, which began life as a venture of a private company, got nationalised and then closed down, and has since been waiting for a private venture to find a use for it.)  The Cybus-Cybermen are linked with the internet, computer software and mobile phone technology, even acquiring the concept of conversion as an "upgrade" which expresses deep ambivalence about the frenetic rush of capitalist technology in the digital age, and the word "delete" (an everyday word now owing to home computing and text messaging) as a euphemism for 'kill'.  Moreover, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine #410 (June 2009), the Cybermen behave like the psychopathic corporation described by the 2003 documentary film The Corporation, and the accompanying book by Joel Bakan.  More than this, the Cybermen

conform to the lean mentality of business.  Like so many companies, they use aptitude tests to secure the best candidates for Cyber-conversion: what else are the Tombs of Telos but a (somewhat unusual) recruiting station?  The Cybermen's standardised functions sound suspiciously like a corporate hierarchy, with job titles (Controller, Leader) to match.

Yes, I'll go on the record: I quite like this.

(At the time, I told Simon I thought this connection was tenuous; but he was right and I was wrong.)   Also, remember how the Cybermen adapt themselves so well to England during the Industrial Revolution in 'The Next Doctor'.  It's a flawed episode certainly, but it might just be the best televised Cyberman story (which is faint praise, but there you go) because it connects the Cybermen to the innate and submerged unease about industrial capitalism that has always lurked within them... and, in the process, does a much better job of noticing the problems usually glossed over by Steampunk than Moffat managed in 'The Girl in the Fireplace'.  Steampunk fetishizes the commodities of the Industrial Revolution (literally, in the case of cosplayers, etc.) while forgetting the conditions under which they came into being, i.e. the horrors of primitive accumulation, the factory system, imperialism, colonialism, etc.  Moffat has his clockwork men trying to cut the head off a French aristocrat (which doesn't really get at the nub of the problem for me) while Davies has his retro-industrial monster as a rampaging mad god, built by the sweated labour of (mostly) poor children, stomping through Victorian London, driven by the gothic returning-repression of a victim of respectable philanthropy.  This is, of course, the much-maligned Cyber-King... the product of a smooth and fruitful union between the Cybermen and the methods of high Victorian capitalism.  SF has always been very much about the products of capitalist modernity and industry running amok.  The Cyber-King shows us a literal intersection of this with the Cybermen.  It is itself a massive factory, filled with workers, made of chimneys and pipes and dark, satanic mill-wheels.


2.

I've written here about how the Cybermen are a Soviet version of the same set of associations that make the (Nazi) Daleks tick: namelessness, robotic/cyborg nature, collectivism, 'totalitarianism'.  It's intially tempting to simply characterise the Borg as also an expression of the bourgeois liberal horror of collectivism, or of the widespread mainstream idea of collectivism, i.e. of communism.  However, the Borg share much the same ambivalence as that already detected in the Cybermen.  Indeed, in many ways, they express the same ambivalence much more clearly and completely.

You will be assimilated.  Your culture will adapt to service ours.

It's actually rather unconvincing to describe the Borg as collectivist monsters in the Soviet sense.  Apart from anything else, they appear at the precise moment when the Soviet Union had never looked less collectivist or less threatening.  They arose in the immediate post-Cold War era, making their first appearance just before the demolition of the Berlin Wall.  The Borg appeared just as communism was crumbling. Glasnost, perestroika, decay, strife, queues for cabbage, branches of McDonalds opening in Moscow. Walls were about to fall. The Enemy had never looked more wobbly and vulnerable.  The Borg, by contrast, are monolithic, powerful, undefeatable in their first appearance. So, in short, they weren't Russians in 1989.

There is a deep sense of ambivalent confusion embodied within the Borg.  While they undoubtedly speak to the horror of collectivism as widely perceived (loss of individual freedom, political tyranny, etc.) they also represent a lurking horror of capitalist rationality, of rationally self interested utility maximisers  This is the de facto herd of individual rational actors who are supposed to make up the population in mainstream economics, all of them seeking their own rational self interest and thus giving rise to an unstoppable (and, for the late C20th left/liberal, sometimes destructive) market system.  It isn't necessary for us to accept the scandalously absurd descriptions of capitalism offered by mainstream economics to acknowledge that many people do accept them, worry about them, or about what they perceive to be their effects.  If our culture doesn't really run on rational self-interest and maximised utility, that doesn't mean that people can't perceive ruthlessly rational self-interest and utility maximisation in the system... and fear them.

Sometimes people fear the effects of capitalism and perceive then as the effects of what they think of as socialism.  Such people are a constant source of titilated anxiety for liberals, as the obsession of American liberal publications with the Tea Party shows.

I didn't know this, but apparently Barack Obama is a Marxist.  He's also black, which seems to worry some people.

The fear of such mentalities usually coincides with an idea that they float freely in a society that is split, but not fundamentally divided on lines of class.  Thus, the acceptance of anti-social ideas - or the pushing of rational ideas to anti-social extremes - is something that happens within decentralised pluralities.  This liberal fear is of dangerous ideas spreading virally through society.  The memetic view of religion pushed by Richard Dawkins is an example, albeit an example of dangerous 'irrationality'... but then, for Dawkins, it is the genes or memes which are the selfish rational actors, not the people who carry them... thus making the people a bit like drones.  These kinds of fears are always tied to a fear of the decentralised crowd: the 'mob', in one form or other.  Look at the view of consumerism that sees it as a kind of emotional disease which has infected all of 'us'.  What is that but a fear of the decentralised crowd, mobilised en masse by a dangerously selfish rationale of consumption?  This left/liberal complaint rests upon assumptions based in, or at least supported by, mainstream economics: that the movements of the market are determined on a large scale by the trends created by the small scale rational choices of selfish actors.  This very decentralised crowd - an orderly mob - is the personality of the original Borg.

One essential trait of capitalism is the impulse to turn everything into more capitalism.  It exists to convert all resources into commodities or productive forces, i.e. to turn everything into capital which then dominates further production, to assimilate everything and convert everything into itself.  It is, as Q called the Borg in their debut, "the ultimate user", going after everything it identifies as something it can consume, utilise, transform and make into an image or aspect of itself.  You don't have to be a Marxist to notice the ravenousness of the system.  Indeed, non-Marxist currents of left/liberal thought in the 90s - often very much the same currents that were working out theories of consumerism - developed this idea further than the moribund, disoriented Marxism that was clinging on (at the extreme margins) at the time.  (There is also the left/liberal unease at the Western cultural imperialism, itself piggybacking on neoliberal expansion in new markets... just look at the above image of the McDonalds in Moscow, an emblem of such processes in the 90s.  The worry is about the assimilation and homogenization of other cultures.  The relevance of this is obvious.)

It isn't necessary to accept as true the notion that the market 'works' because of atomised individuals flocking in formations of rational selfishness, or the details of the attendant left/liberal critique of consumerism, in order to see how these ideas - if accepted - might become a source of anxiety to liberals within a triumphant capitalist world.  We can see how such liberal anxities - about an all-conquering capitalism, newly unrestrained, ravenous and consumerist, fueled by a dangerously selfish form of rationality which supposedly permeates society in a decentralised way - might well manifest as something like the Borg... something unstoppable, ruthlessly utilitarian, utterly self-involved, blankly arrogant, destructive, acquisitive and all-consuming, and manifested as a monolithic force composed of an aggregation of atomised individuals.

Liberalism - particulary C20th Liberalism - has always had the divided character that both supports capitalism, and capitalist notions, as liberating or at least optimal, while at the same time fretting over the imbalances, inequalities and injustices which seem - puzzlingly - always to beset the system.  Liberalism in the 90s was uniquely placed to have bad dreams about this contradiction, about the horrors lurking within the best of all possible worlds, precisely because of the seeming final triumph of the 'market system'.

Speaking of liberal bad dreams, just look at the 'Descent' two-parter, which becomes a clunky parable about the rise of fascism (complete with red, white and black banners) by showing the disoriented, individualised Borg spellbound by a charismatic warmonger who offers them unity and purpose.  Hands up anyone who spots the contours of the classic liberal interpretation of the rise of Hitler.  The bewildered people, dizzy after a catastrophe, become mesmerised by the false promises of a demagogue.  Here again, the Borg express liberal anxieties about the faultlines in the capitalist millenium.

The Borg are a nightmare that liberal capitalism had about itself.

This is, of course, why the Borg are a dark mirror held up to the Federation.  If the Federation is the ultimate flowering of liberal hopes for capitalism (or, at least, Western liberal modernity) as a liberating, utopian force, then the Borg are the atavistic 'dark side' of the same system, repressed but - in the classic gothic move - returning with a vengeance.


3.

Gothic is, of course, very much the word.  It can hardly be a coincidence that, as they evolve, the Borg develop features of previous such liberal nightmares about capitalism.... and that these features make them more and more openly gothic.  They acquire the decadence of aristocracy, and with it the traits of vampires.  The Borg gradually became the nomadic nosferatus of the Trek universe, spreading their plague with a bite and an infection of the blood.  From Star Trek: First Contact onwards (i.e. from the moment they are shown to have a Queen), they are shown to shoot tubes into the neck (often leaving two little puncture marks) and assimilate by pumping Borg nanotech into the veins, which are often seen to ripple and turn greyish green beneath the skin as Borgness (i.e evil) flows into them.  They become the Undead, the moment they start being lead by Countess Dracula.

This can hardly be an accident, this confluence of vampirism and aristocratic hierarchy.  The greatest C19th Gothic vampire story - Dracula - traded on the disdainful, fearful, insecure, resentful, supercilious inferiority-complex felt by a rising professional middle class for aristocracy, something that Stoker took from the iconoclastic Byron's 'Lord Ruthven' and which ended up getting taken up by C20th vampire pop-culture.  The vampire is nowadays quite unpicked from his/her previous semiotic entanglement with aristos, when he/she appears in his/her own person (the semiotic entanglement of female vampires with lesbianism is a whole different essay).  Your actual fanged, blood-drinking coffin-sleeper can be an emo youth these days.  But when vampirism is subtextually invoked in a disguised form - as in the later Borg - it also tends to bring its blue-blooded baggage with it, albeit in submerged ways.  Hence, the Borg get a Queen when they get vampiric.  (Of course, the Queen also comes from the bee-hive analogy... which is part of the 'surface level' of the semiotics of the Borg, the thematic miniscus that the writers consciously 'get'.) 

Also, as has long been understood, the vampire is connected to fears of monopoly capital vs free trade.  What can be more monopolistic than the vampire, converting everyone into copies of itself, threatening to infect the race with its bacillus and reconfigure us all in its own image?  The vampire is a nightmarish figure of exponential expansion... to the point where one of the great mid-C20th vampire stories - Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - takes them to their logical extreme and puts them in the majority, their monopoly achieved, the last non-vampire brought to the point where he - the rarest of creatures - will become their folklore.  It isn't hard to see that these vampiric traits and significations fit the Borg like a glove.  The nightmare of capitalism as the great user, the great converter of everything into itself, becomes - in the liberal imagination - the nightmare of monopoly, restriction, control, all configured in terms of a return of the feudal and aristocratic.  The Borg eventually slide perfectly into this set of associations.

"It's 3 for 2 on Dan Brown at Waterstones!"

As they become vampires, so the Borg drones among them also become zombies.  The zombie, initially to do with slavery and imperialism (i.e. as the Haitian black slave reduced to mindless physicality, pure labour), later became transformed by Western horror into being profoundly about things like class and - once again - consumerism.  George Romero's Dawn of the Dead makes the zombies (with their grey faces) into mindless consumers of more than just flesh; they become the shambling and clownish denizens of a shopping mall.  Again, the Borg absorb the gothic category of the zombie, absorbing also the imminent critique of consumerism, which gained traction in the period after 'the 60s' when the global tide of struggle and protest receded, along with the Black Power movement, etc.  The dodgy basis of this critique is, as we've seen, the fear of the decentralised mass of atomised individuals collectively infected with, and ruthlessly acting upon, bad and empty ideas about what will make them happy.  As it fits perfectly onto the zombie, so the zombie - now containing this anti-consumerist anxiety - fits perfectly onto the Borg drone.  Indeed, the reconfiguration of the Borg as vampire/zombie is an almost inevitable development as soon as the idea of 'assimilation' takes shape.  This idea was itself almost inevitable given that the Borg emerged into a world of strong capitalism confronted by weak, disorganised communists... which almost immediately gave way to a post-communist world in which capitalism seemed to have been finally vindicated, to have emerged triumphant, unbeaten and unbeatable, challenged and challengeable no longer.  If Dracula was the nightmare that the liberal bourgeois world had about its own systemic terrors in the 1880s, the vampire-Borg are recognisably a version of the same nightmare reshaped in the global political landscape of the 1990s. If the zombies are the insane consumers of the 70s and 80s, the zombie-Borg are their inheritors in the 90s: organised and unbeatable.


4.

The Borg drive to consume, adapt and utilise all technology they come across is also an echo of primitive accumulation, the process by which capitalism assembles the material and materiel it needs in order to function and expand.  Capitalism achieved this, most drastically, via enclosures, which gradually brought the land out of feudal forms of ownership and control, and into the new bourgeois forms of property.  Attendant on this process was the steady appropriation of the common lands, and the displacement of millions of people, no longer able to make a living from the land and thus forced into cities, into factories.  Proletarianization.  Essentially the same process was repeated in the great colonial empires of the C19th-20th, with mass deracination a constant product.  Primitive accumulation was also built on the ruthless suppression of women, pushing them into new roles that accompanied the atomised bourgeois family, subjugating unpaid female labour to the reproduction of employable workers (both in terms of the creation of new people and the maintenance of already existing workers, ie husbands who needed feeding).  Primitive accumulation reached its horrific apogee in the slave trade, with millions of Africans abducted, traded, bought, sold, dragged in chains to plantations in the 'New World, sold again, and forced into the work upon which the 'New World' was 'opened' to the conquest and expansion of Western capital.  The genocide of native peoples in these 'New Worlds' - as in the gradual expansion of the United States across the American West - was a similarly crucial aspect of the rise of the modern capitalist world.  The shockwaves of these epochal crimes still reverberate today.  Modern sexism and racism are creations of this era, to name only the most obvious such legacies.  Capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" as Marx puts it.  If we decide (as I think we should) to see Stalin's Russia as a 'state-capitalist' form, in which a bureaucratic class of managers takes the place of private capitalists but, essentially, still runs a capitalist economy (with wage labour and surplus value) albeit a heavily state-controlled one, then we can see just the same process of primitive accumulation and disposession taking place when Stalin industrialises Russia.  Ironically, the 'failure' of 'communism' thus helps prove Marx's analysis of the nature of capitalism.  And the very 'mirror-image' aspect in the relation between Western 'free market' capitalism and Soviet state capitalism... especially for those liberals who, like Chomsky, see Western capitalism as also statist in a different way... is part of how figures like the Cybermen and the Borg develop with these incoherences and ambivalences within them, especially their dual capitalist/collectivist (Soviet) nature.

There are problems with relating the Borg to capitalism, partly engendered by such incoherences.  Capitalists are not a collective intelligence, much as they share underlying class interests and allegiances.  They are, as Marx put it in Capital vol.3, "hostile brothers", constantly at each other's throats, compelled to competition.  Indeed, capitalists have personal interests that are at war with the capitalist class as a whole, let alone their direct competitors. But remember, the idea is not that the Borg correspond directly to capitalism, but that they express ways in which capitalism is perceived, particularly by sections of liberalism.  It certainly looks, much of the time, as though capitalists share a single mind, especially when they flock to the same investment opportunities.

But even this hive-minded collectivity can be seen as expressing liberal anxieties about capitalism.  It certainly functions much in the way I described here (as an elision of the nameless, the robotic, the cybernetic and the collectivist... reliant upon the assumption that all alternatives to capitalist freedom lead straight to totalitarianism) but the thing about the collectivism of the Borg is that they collect people as a workforce.  To become part of the collective is to become a drone, a worker.  In this way, assimilation echoes that proletarianization of humans which took place during primitive accumulation.  The Borg appropriate human bodies, acquire an incoherent and heterogenous mass of people, and assemble them into a concentrated mass of drones (i.e. workers), crowded together and co-operating in a factory-like area of technological and industrial production.  A hive of activity.  This collecting of drones can be read as a retelling of the historical process whereby peasants were forced off the land and into the towns and factories, of how complex social and familial ties were destroyed by the coming of a more atomised (and supposedly more rationalised) society, of how human labour was violently reorganised into massively concentrated and complex sites of industrial or intellectual work (i.e. the factory system, the office).  And don't think that the element of compulsion invalidates the analogy.  The story of the creation of the proletariat is the story of centuries of ferociously violent and venemous compulsion.  Even 'free labour' (ie those other than black people dragged to plantations in chains) found that they had to submit to capitalist wage labour or starve... and if they tried to find 'unlawful' ways to avoid starvation, they found themselves liable to be tortured and murdered by the state.  For centuries, anyone considered to be resisting the drive to the assimilation of all workers - ie tramps, bandits, beggers, those who clung to the forest or the land, those who refused in any way the imperatives of working for the new system - were considered objects of terror and evil, whipped and beaten into line, or executed. There was a lot of this, because the transition to wage labour was bitterly resented and resisted.  It still is, in every place where it continues today as neoliberalism restructures the world.  But there is no alternative.  The "archaic culture" (to use Borg phraseology) of the pre-capitalist world was "authority-driven" by God and Church and King, Headman and kin-group, season and harvest and tide... but the new culture smashes all such distinctions, all such old ways.  (Of course, capitalism is authority-driven in different ways... but then so do the Borg prove to be.)  All that is solid melts into air.  The culture of the people must adapt to service the capitalist system.  Freedom is irrelevant.  The worker, separated from the land and thus from any way of producing the means of life for him/herself, has the freedom to work or starve.  Death is irrelevant, since the workers are an amorphous mass of 'hands', each instantly replaceable.  And, as we've seen, capital spread across the globe.  From 1989-onwards, it really looked as if there was no way left for anyone, anywhere to resist it.  Resistance is futile.

Even as some of the anxieties the Borg express rest upon a classless view of society, formed of a decentralised 'mob' (one way of seeing the uniform Borg), so other anxieties they express rest upon a deep awareness of the reality (and potential threat) of the working class.  This shouldn't surprise us.  The gothic has never been internally consistent; indeed, part of its unique power is its ability to allow dialectical oscillations of meaning within single signs.  The 'assembledness' of the Borg, mirroring the same assembledness of the proletariat, is deeply gothic, in that a very similar thing occurs in Frankenstein.  The monster is a proletarian monster, assembled just as surely as the proletariat was assembled, a collective whole constructed from heterogenous parts artificially brought together in the process of production, made from the assembled fragments of the poor (the kinds of people who were dug up by grave robbers and sold, on the C18/19th 'corpse economy' to anatomists).  Maybe some of the paupers who furnished Victor Frankenstein with parts were hanged for 'crimes' that amounted to violations of private property, or refusal to meekly accept entry into the wage labour system (see above).  To quote Moretti:

Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of 'a Ford worker'). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificialcreature.

Denied a name and individuality, the assimilated person is a Borg drone, like 'a Ford worker'.  Collective; in the capitalist workplace, quite different to pre-capitalist forms of collectivity from which the proletariat were drawn.  Literally collective, in the case of the Borg, but also bodily concentrated, like the proletariat, in a totally 'rationalised' space.  Artificial; a new class, surrounded and dominated by machinery (ie capital).  Literally artificial in the case of the Borg; a newly synthesised race, surrounded and penetrated by technology (ie capital).

So, once again, the Borg express liberal anxiety over capitalism.  Once again, the anxiety is ambivalent.  And, once again, the anxiety is both relevant to the 90s context and a reiteration of older liberal anxieties.   The faceless, mindless, collective entity: the mob.  Engulfed in the horror of labour under capitalism.  To be pitied.  Also to be feared.  This ties directly in with the faultlines in the Godwinian liberalism with which Frankenstein is soaked (Godwin was Mary Shelley's father).  Godwin's Political Justice and Caleb Williams demanded democratic reform, and savagely criticised injustice and inequality, but recommended fireside chats with educated people as the only form of agitation.  He begged Shelley not to get drawn into organisation among the proletariat themselves, saying "Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!".  Mary's monster is many things, but among these he is the terrifying threat of the monstrous proletariat, back for revenge for the way he has been abused and mistreated.  Also, remember the fear that makes Frankenstein finally and irrevocably reject his creature: the fear that, by making him a mate, he will allow this new race to breed, expand and cover the world.  Conversion and monopoly again.  As noted, there is ambivalence and incoherence embedded in the Borg, and it's deeply gothic.  The liberal terror at capitalist monopoly, expressed by the vampire, has a flipside in the liberal terror at proletarian takeover, expressed by Frankenstein's monster.  The Borg reiterate both.  In so doing, they express perhaps a submerged fear of the 90s liberal: that he faces either the eternal, capitalist 'end of history' (an unstoppable juggernaut) or, in the absence of Soviet style communism as a domineering force on the left, some new and unknown and uncontrollable way in which the disavowed and repressed underlings of the world will return to express their displeasure.  The Borg become the system, and its own internal gravediggers, in one.


5.

Another aspect of both the Cybermen and the Borg is their basis in fears of bodily mutilation.  From the start, the Cybermen threaten to physically invade the humans.  Becoming like them implicitly involves the cutting-up and dismemberment of the human body.  And this dismemberment, this invasion of the body by technology, is linked to work.  Both 'The Tenth Planet' and 'Earthshock' show remnants of the physical body (hands and jaws) still integrated into the machinery.  'Attack of the Cybermen' has Bates and Stratton (and the other rejected subjects the Cybermen use as slave labour, pure working meat), with their arms (the things they work with) replaced with cyber technology.  The Cybermen started with Toberman's arms too.  He was also a slave, remember?  Lytton ends up being the only human we see in the process of conversion in the classic series.  Again, the Cybermen have made the arms a priority.  On the whole, however, the suggestive emphasis on arms notwithstanding, Doctor Who never made as much as it could've done from the horror of Cyber-conversion, despite such things being very much in the wheelhouse of Eric Saward at just the time when SF/Horror cinema started concentrating on the meshing of the body and the machine.

This penetration of the body by the machine is explored far more thoroughly by the Borg in the various Star Trek franchises.  The Borg episodes, and the movie, repeatedly focus on machinery that infibulates and conjoins with the body.  We see cables plugged directly into head sockets (very 90s, via Cyberpunk) and various body parts removed and replaced by technological appendages.  As noted, the Borg insert tubials into their victims and inject their essence, causing the skin to turn zombie-grey.  Indeed, the Borg adopt something that is only obliquely hinted at with regards to the Cybermen: cellular bio-mechanics, ie nanobots that restructure the body on a cellular level, and which allow technology to grow and sprout and breed like an organism.  This is all deeply connected with perennial fears generated by capitalist modernity: the fear of bodily invasion and mutilation.

David McNally's brilliant book - Monsters of the Market - states and explores this topic in greater detail (and if you find what I'm saying here interesting then you should totes go and read McNally because I'm getting tonnes of it from him).  Pared right down to the bone, the idea is that capitalism not only disciplines and punishes the body of the worker (see above), it also breaks up her life experience, dividing labour, subjecting her to the rigours of a new kind of measured and organised time, dissecting her life into sections of work (whether at home or 'at work'... because home isn't a workplace, oh ho no).  There is, for instance, the working day, and then the various subdivisions of the day.  The day is made up of "dead time", when the worker must labour for the capitalist to make her wage.  This is the alienation of life activity from the worker, just as the products of her labour are alienated from her control.  The result is that the workers experience working life as a kind of living death.  The intersection of dissected life and dead time finds literal expression in the "corpse economy", ie the punishment of proletarian bodies even after death in the dissection halls of the ruling class, often via the theft of bodies by 'resurrectionists' and their sale to anatomists.  This was fiercely resisted by the London crowd of the C18/19th (that ever-present mob of bourgeois nightmare) at public executions, when riots would break out as people attempted to stop the bodies of the pauper criminals being handed over for further, posthumous, punishment.  The cultural expression of all this is in tales of evisceration, dismemberment and anatomisation... and in the various nightmares of capitalist modernity which centre upon terror of (and terror of becoming) the living dead.  It stretches right back from that evening in 1816 when Frankenstein and the Vampyre were simultaneously born, right up to today as we swim in a cultural sea of zombies.

Again, it isn't hard to see how the Cybermen and the Borg tie into this.  If, as I've tried to show, both (most explicitly and clearly the Borg) are totally products of liberal anxieties about capitalism (as both unstoppable system and generator of the terrifying mob) then the mutilation fantasy implicit in both can be interpreted in light of McNally's ideas.  Capital not only surrounds and controls the worker, embedding the worker within technology and the factory and the office, etc., it also penetrates the worker physically, looms over the worker as a force that historically and potentially violates/punishes the working body.  The product of this violent interpenetration is the creation of an army of the walking dead.

(By the way, there's a lot more to be said about this issue with relation to other Doctor Who stories and monsters.  I'm getting dizzy just contemplating how to apply these insights to 'Revelation of the Daleks' or 'Parting of the Ways'.  Let alone most of the Hinchcliffe era... which fumbled its one attempt at Cybermen inexcusably.)

Look him in the eye and tell him he's not gothic.

This is all gothic, you see.  It's gothic all the way down.  Listen to the language we're compelled to use.  It's the language of death.  Gravediggers, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, zombies.  The Cybermen are steeped in it too.  Think of their first appearance, wrapped in bandages like mummies, their white faces skull-like with their big round empty eye sockets and their inexpressive straight mouths.  Think of their appropriation of the cursed-Egyptian-tomb narrative in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'.  As I've noted in the past, whatever its flaws, 'Attack of the Cybermen' is probably the best Cyberman tale of the 80s because it remembers that the Cybermen are bodily imperialists who convert you into a zombie... and also because it seems more in tune with wider society than other later-Cyberman tales.  It hooks into the decade of Thatcher, with its smash 'n' grab crooks run by a suave pinstriped businessman (Lytton), and its decidedly more anxious post-Falklands approach to militarism than 'Earthshock' manages (depicting the Cybermen as military conquerors of the Cryons).  It's better, if still pretty weak.  But at least it reconnects the Cybermen with work, bodily mutilation and economic factors.


6.

The Cybermen never quite attain the clarity and force of the Borg, precisely because of the different circumstances of their production (I mean, their TV production) which means that, once they're out of the 60s, they never again hook directly into the anxieties of their age the way the Borg do.  Indeed, the Cybermen have lots more decades to try covering than the Borg did.  Born into the post-Cold War world, the Borg had a field of distinct cultural anxieties to connect with... and, in many ways, they manage it.  The Cybermen are a product of the 60s.  Alongside those left/liberal anxieties about the self-interested rational actor that we mentioned earlier (expressed by the Cybermen as "logic"), they are also born from worries about the "white heat of the technological revolution", about technocratization (not least, of the Labour Party), about computerization, about the ambivalent potentialities of new tech that (50 years on from Wilson's speech) has indeed proved to have deeply ambivalent legacies.  This was the post-war boom world, worrying about exactly what kind of utopia was going to be built, given that it was ostensibly going to be built by exactly the same kind of scientific instrumentalism that also built Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  You might be tempted to bring up the word Luddite... but, of course, the Luddites were fighting the dispossession and disenfranchisement brought by just such ambivalent new technology.  And Luddism is a profound inflection within Frankenstein; not in the crude sense of worry about 'the dangers of science' and 'playing god' (the mainstream philistine view of the book) but in the sense of worry about the failure of the Enlightenment project, of modernity itself, in the face of social injustice.  None of which is to say that the Cybermen don't contain some pretty reactionary anxieties about the future of technology... not least their Soviet inflection.

This incoherence and ambivalence - found within the Cybermen and Borg - expresses the liberal anxiety over the splits in society (fundamentally, we're talking about class), and the desire to heal them, to resolve them.  The splits are forced together into one (splitless; classless) form, a monolithic threat that must be destroyed... and yet, when destroyed, the monolith becomes a great mass of equally-threatening rubble within which totalitarianism will plot against democracy (cf 'Descent').  So even the liberal fear of 'extremism', unleashed by any challenge to the system, finds expression in the Borg.  There is something about the splits that always adapts to any attempt (within Liberalism) to contain or eradicate it.  Parenthetically, this may be way the concept of 'adaptation' is so central to the Borg threat, with their seemingly endless ability to adapt to new assaults (while also, of course, hinting at unease about the constant revolutionising of production... something hinted at in the evolution of the Cybermen and their latter-day concept of the "upgrade").

We know that the years since the recession have produced a slew of zombies.  Indeed, Time Magazine called zombies "the official monster of the recession", and there's been lots of talk about "zombie banks" and "zombie economies" and "zombie capitalism".  The economy continues after its death.  As noted, the zombie has, in the past, stood for rather conceptually dodgy ideas about consumerism run amok... which has an obvious relevance to the credit crunch, if a superficial one that tends to blame the victims.  But, as also noted, the zombie was also an expression of horror at slavery, at the reduction of the worker to labouring meat.  (There is, by the way, a resurgence of zombie tales in those parts of Africa being restructured and socially demolished by neoliberalism... including Nigeria.  Ahem.  See McNally, again, for details.)  In zombie cinema, the zombie runs riot and smashes up the world.  And, if the world as it stands is not to your liking (if, for example, you're not a fan of recession, neoliberalism, imperialism, austerity, corporate rule and drastic inequality), there is pleasure to be taken in this spectacle, this violent carnival.  The zombie is the faceless, mindless, proletarian mob of bourgeois nightmare, in open urban rebellion. Which we could do with, to be honest.  That's why it's a shame that the Borg have disappeared from our age.  In the absence of any apparent desire on the part of present-day Doctor Who to make the Cybermen engage with this crisis, the Borg would be uniquely placed to exploit it and express it.  In many ways, having been born at the moment when capitalism seemed (to many) to have achieved a triumphant 'end of history', the Borg really ought to come back now, at the moment when capitalism-in-crisis seems to have begun a catastrophic version of the same thing.



*


It's only fair to acknowledge that this post is deeply indebted to the work of Franco Moretti and David McNally... indeed, any genuine insights here are almost certainly theirs; I've just adapted them to my topic.  It's also necessary to stress that I diverge from them in my own directions, that I fail to do their ideas justice above, and that any consequent errors are entirely my own.

*

ADDENDUM: I should've made it clear somewhere above that ambivalence and anxiety were built-in to the idea of the 'end of history' from the start, even in the work of Fukuyama.  That's important. 

The Huffington Post today carries a frank interview with Tim Farron by Mehdi Hasan who asks whether he a a Lib Dem leader in waiting.

Farron tells Hasan he is a social liberal not a classical liberal and, making the distinction between free markets “with a referee”, which he supports, and “laissez faire”, which he dismisses.

On energy, Tim admits he is uneasy with the decision to approve the Hinkley Point reactor:

The most fundamental thing is that we keep the lights on and so that the investment is justifiable in that sense. Personally, I don’t think the time has come for us to go down the nuclear route again.

On the free schools row, Farron defends David Laws, dismisses Jeremy Browne’s criticisms, and speaks with pride at the Lib Dems having “massively watered down” the Conservatives’ free schools policy. But he admits the last few days could have been handled better:

It was a bit messy, wasn’t it really? I am sure we can do these things better in the future.

Farron is typically pragmatic on the way the coalition works. If more of the ‘nasty’ Tory policies are blocked, he says, then “we get more of our things blocked.”

The government is doing things that the Liberal Democrats wouldn’t do it if it was just up to us.

On immigration, he derides proposals to demand security bonds from some overseas visitors. He spells out the benefits of immigration – £7 billion a year – but accepts it needs to be managed. And on those Go Home poster vans he asks:

To be honest with you, was it a massive failure or was it a clever move to get some headlines?

Farron shrugs off rumours that Jeremy Browne might defect:

I imagine that Grant Shapps is just trying a bit of mischief, just as I often say that [Tory MP] Rory Stewart should join the Liberal Democrats. It’s not an unusual tactic.

He said he was “very ashamed” of the fact that only seven out of 57 Liberal Democrat MPs are women:

I might have selected a women into the cabinet.

Tim talks about his Christianity. The God Delusion is on the shelf above his head, a copy of the Poverty and Social Justice Bible on his desk.

I guess I get a lot of my anger at injustice from my faith.

So, asks Husan, what about the coalition’s record on social justice?

I’d give them 5 out of 10.

On the downside, he cites the bedroom tax. On the upside, fairer taxation, increased state pensions and getting the children of asylum seekers from behind locked doors.

Mehdi Hasan also asked Tim the question: “Is he a leader in waiting? Should Clegg fall under a bus, he’d be the favourite for the job, wouldn’t he? There’s a long pause. Farron leans back.”

I have no idea. Well, I will do my best to keep [Clegg away] from any buses. That’s part of my job actually. There is a sense that Nick’s standing is improving…”

I would not care to read that book again.

Back in the febrile environment of the days after the failed 21/7 attacks of 2005, the Daily Express ran a headline which has stayed lodged in my memory.  "BOMBERS ARE ALL SPONGEING (sic) ASYLUM SEEKERS" it screamed, while underneath the legend ran: "Britain gave them refuge and now all they want to do is repay us with death".  Quite apart from how the Express decided to prejudge the trial of the men, it was just about as inflammatory a statement on a 21st century front page as can be imagined.  Not long after, with the rest of the tabloids also in full panic mode, Tony Blair declared that the "rules of the game are changing", and the tone was set for the next five years of foiled plots, parliamentary battles and repeated fearmongering.

Tomorrow, I can't help but suspect the Express won't be splashing on the conviction of Pavlo Lapshyn, who pleaded guilty today to the murder of Mohammed Saleem, as well as conspiracy to cause explosions, having planted bombs outside 3 mosques.  Lapshyn had been here in the UK for just 5 days before he stabbed Saleem to death, out of what he told police was a purely racist motivation.  He was caught only thanks to old fashioned detective work, albeit using modern technology, as officers identified him using CCTV footage, then took his picture round local businesses, until he was finally identified as the work experience student recently arrived from Ukraine, living in a flat at the back of the software firm he had won a placement with.  Inside they found further unfinished devices, making clear that had he not been apprehended, Lapshyn's one man campaign against Muslims would have continued, and possibly resulted in further fatalities.

That no one was injured or killed by his bombs was by luck rather than judgement.  Each device had been more powerful than the one before, and it was only due to prayers starting later at the Tipton mosque during Ramadan that the congregation hadn't been caught in the blast.  Packed with nails and other shrapnel, it made clear the bomber's intentions were deadly serious.  Coming in the aftermath of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, the police have found no evidence Lapshyn was acting out of a sense of vengeance, or that he had any interest in far-right politics in this country.  It seems, simply, that his hatred for non-whites had reached such a peak that he wanted, like others before him, to foment racial conflict.  His move to England gave him the opportunity to act on his beliefs.

There was comment at the time, including from the police themselves, about the apparent lack of interest from the wider media in the series of attacks.  West Midlands' deputy chief constable David Thompson pondered whether there would have been more coverage of their appeals for information if it had been another faith being targeted during their main festival season.  One suspects that rather than it being purely down to attitudes towards Muslims, the biggest contributing factor was the attacks had all taken place outside London, such is the bias towards the capital when it comes down to it, both in terms of interest (amongst journalists themselves) and resources.  It should also be noted however that both the Daily Mail and Telegraph felt the need to question the claims of Tell Mama, a charity that measures attacks on Muslims, after it reported a large increase in such incidents after the murder of Lee Rigby, including on mosques.  Lovely as it would be to think that we've reached a point where every potential terrorist incident isn't reacted to by the entirety of the media descending on an area for a week, on this occasion it was more down to a combination of indifference, the scale of what had happened, and where it had took place.

Thankfully, the lack of wide coverage was probably beneficial.  Almost no one knew who Lapshyn was, and the very few who did failed to recognise him due to the poor quality of the initial CCTV footage released.  Had he been aware there was a massive search on for him, he may well have attempted to leave the country; instead, he felt safe enough to carry on as he had done since he arrived.  What we didn't know previously was despite politicians keeping an extremely low profile during the search, the home secretary had been suitably exercised to contact the West Midlands force, while MI5 was also involved.

As much as the case gives pause for thought over the the way all involved approached it, as well as how it has since been reacted to, it also reinforces a few things we already knew.  First, and regardless of where the perpetrator is from, far-right terrorism remains a threat, and it's one which the media has repeatedly ignored or minimised, whereas it has willfully exaggerated that from jihadists, impugning the Muslim community in the process.  Secondly, just as those who become Islamic extremists tend to sup from the same sources, so too do those on the far-right: the Turner Diaries is the far less intellectually stimulating version of a lecture from Anwar al-Awlaki, let alone Sayid Qutb's Milestones.  Lastly, it further suggests that the threat from "self-starters", regardless of their ideology, is increasing, while that from major, large cell, easier to foil plotters continues to decrease.  The security services and police can't stop those who don't share their plans or aren't loose with their tongues.  Tempora and Prism aren't useless, but the privacy trade-offs when they might be fighting yesterday's battles are far too great.  Some recognition that Muslims are just as much targets as everyone else wouldn't go amiss either.

If you are not familiar with the popular BBC game Show, Pointless, the rules are very straightforward. 100 members of the public are asked a question and given one minute to give as many correct answers as they can to the question posed. Contestants are then asked to give correct answers which no one guessed, or in other words are 'pointless'

Since I have been President I have worked hard to try and make sure members views are heard in the heart of government.  Banging on ministerial doors to try and make policy after policy better and more liberal.

Over the summer the ‘Go Home’ vans came onto our streets.  At the time I joined Sarah Teather and, oddly, Nigel Farage to oppose them. (Who says politics doesn’t give you strange bedfellows!)

My view was clear both then and now: The vans represented the worst kind of divisive politics and they wouldn’t work.

It is important that our borders are protected and secure, but this policy – driving a van around some of the most diverse communities in London – is not the way to deliver that.

I am delighted that Theresa May looked at the evidence – something that colleagues like Julian Huppert asked her to do – and decided to bin this idea.  She saw that the maximum number of illegal immigrants that went home because of them was the grand total of…one!  Our campaign to scrap the ‘Go Home’ vans has worked. But I don’t think this is a campaign win for just our party, I think it’s a win for the millions of decent people who were outraged at these awful things.

It is time for us to stand up and proudly say that immigration is a blessing.  It is good for our society and our economy.  Our health system, care services and many other parts of our economy would collapse without immigration. We should be proud that we as a party refuse to walk into the trap of the politics of division.

I want to thank all the members who got in touch with me on this issue.  Its down to you that we managed to scrap this divisive, wasteful and pointless idea.

I guess we can chalk this up as Norman Baker’s first ‘liberal win’ in the Home Office.  I look forward to many more and he should know I’ll be supporting him on issues like this every step of the way!

* Tim Farron is President of the Liberal Democrats.

Final week campaign poster – May 2010

All parties will be campaigning for change

In recent weeks there have been a number of GE2015 projections all based on one common idea – that incumbents governments recover in the final period leading up to polling day.

Certainly that happened in 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2010, but we didn’t see that effect in 2005.

Looking forward to May 2015 one big ingredient is missing – there is no incumbent government to be swung back to.

Instead all the parties will be campaigning on a change platform. The Tories will be trying to make the case to stay in government without being constrained by a coalition. The LDs will seek to highlight the areas of policy where they say they made a difference and how they would operate in the fiture

General Elections are almost always a clash between two big competing propositions – “it’s time for change” versus “don’t take the risk of doing something differently“. This time only the former is applicable.

There’s another factor as well – the fixed term parliament act. Knowing the election data has had an extraordinary impact on our politics. All parties have been able to plan on the basis of a long game.

Mike Smithson

Historically, surveillance was difficult and expensive.

Over the decades, as technology advanced, surveillance became easier and easier. Today, we find ourselves in a world of ubiquitous surveillance, where everything is collected, saved, searched, correlated and analyzed.

But while technology allowed for an increase in both corporate and government surveillance, the private and public sectors took very different paths to get there. The former always collected information about everyone, but over time, collected more and more of it, while the latter always collected maximal information, but over time, collected it on more and more people.

Corporate surveillance has been on a path from minimal to maximal information. Corporations always collected information on everyone they could, but in the past they didn't collect very much of it and only held it as long as necessary. When surveillance information was expensive to collect and store, companies made do with as little as possible.

Telephone companies collected long-distance calling information because they needed it for billing purposes. Credit cards collected only the information about their customers' transactions that they needed for billing. Stores hardly ever collected information about their customers, maybe some personal preferences, or name-and-address for advertising purposes. Even Google, back in the beginning, collected far less information about its users than it does today.

As technology improved, corporations were able to collect more. As the cost of data storage became cheaper, they were able to save more data and for a longer time. And as big data analysis tools became more powerful, it became profitable to save more. Today, almost everything is being saved by someone -- probably forever.

Examples are everywhere. Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple collect everything we do online at their sites. Third-party cookies allow those companies, and others, to collect data on us wherever we are on the Internet. Store affinity cards allow merchants to track our purchases. CCTV and aerial surveillance combined with automatic face recognition allow companies to track our movements; so does your cell phone. The Internet will facilitate even more surveillance, by more corporations for more purposes.

On the government side, surveillance has been on a path from individually targeted to broadly collected. When surveillance was manual and expensive, it could only be justified in extreme cases. The warrant process limited police surveillance, and resource restraints and the risk of discovery limited national intelligence surveillance. Specific individuals were targeted for surveillance, and maximal information was collected on them alone.

As technology improved, the government was able to implement ever-broadening surveillance. The National Security Agency could surveil groups -- the Soviet government, the Chinese diplomatic corps, etc. -- not just individuals. Eventually, they could spy on entire communications trunks.

Now, instead of watching one person, the NSA can monitor "three hops" away from that person -- an ever widening network of people not directly connected to the person under surveillance. Using sophisticated tools, the NSA can surveil broad swaths of the Internet and phone network.

Governments have always used their authority to piggyback on corporate surveillance. Why should they go through the trouble of developing their own surveillance programs when they could just ask corporations for the data? For example we just learned that the NSA collects e-mail, IM and social networking contact lists for millions of Internet users worldwide.

But as corporations started collecting more information on populations, governments started demanding that data. Through National Security Letters, the FBI can surveil huge groups of people without obtaining a warrant. Through secret agreements, the NSA can monitor the entire Internet and telephone networks.

This is a huge part of the public-private surveillance partnership.

The result of all this is we're now living in a world where both corporations and governments have us all under pretty much constant surveillance.

Data is a byproduct of the information society. Every interaction we have with a computer creates a transaction record, and we interact with computers hundreds of times a day. Even if we don't use a computer -- buying something in person with cash, say -- the merchant uses a computer, and the data flows into the same system. Everything we do leaves a data shadow, and that shadow is constantly under surveillance.

Data is also a byproduct of information society socialization, whether it be e-mail, instant messages or conversations on Facebook. Conversations that used to be ephemeral are now recorded, and we are all leaving digital footprints wherever we go.

Moore's law has made computing cheaper. All of us have made computing ubiquitous. And because computing produces data, and that data equals surveillance, we have created a world of ubiquitous surveillance.

Now we need to figure out what to do about it. This is more than reining in the NSA or fining a corporation for the occasional data abuse. We need to decide whether our data is a shared societal resource, a part of us that is inherently ours by right, or a private good to be bought and sold.

Writing in the Guardian, Chris Huhn said that "information is power, and the necessary corollary is that privacy is freedom." How this interplay between power and freedom play out in the information age is still to be determined.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

Ed Davey is enthusiastic about renewables. He is enthusiastic about nuclear. He is enthusiastic about everything.

It's like having a young labrador as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Times change, but I was sad that his announcement on Hinkley Point C yesterday marked the abandonment of the Liberal Democrats' opposition to nuclear power.

Because opposing the building of a reprocessing plant at Windscale (as it then was) was part of my political awakening. Forming the opinion that the great majority of the great and good could be wrong about something important was almost intoxicating.

I felt so strongly that I went out and bought a Penguin Special on the subject: Windscale Fallout: A Primer for the Age of Nuclear Controversy by Ian Breach.

The idea of buying a Penguin Special sounds like something out of the 1940s and the book is now so obscure that I could not find an image of its cover to illustrate this post. I did find an obituary for Ian Breach though: he died earlier this year.

So instead I have used this screenshot from Ed Davey's website, though I had to use the Google Cache to find it. The Guardian Diary explains why:

A big day for the government as energy secretary Ed Davey plights his troth to nuclear power. The coalition is excited. He's excited. But he once saw things very differently. There's that quote from him in 2006, launching the Lib Dem energy policy, when he said: "A new generation of nuclear power stations will cost taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of pounds. In addition to posing safety and environmental risks, nuclear power will only be possible with vast taxpayer subsidies or a rigged market ... People don't want nuclear." That seemed clear enough then, and it seemed clear enough today, when Damian Carrington, the Guardian's head of environment, found the page on Davey's website and flagged it up on Twitter. Ain't life full of surprises. Within the hour, the page had disappeared.

It had disappeared from Ed's site, but his words are still all over the internet. So it was not a sensible move.

These days, if you are made to look foolish by the Guardian Diary you really have been a fool.

Philip Brewer sent me this link via email of a commuter trying to take a closer look at the craziness of being a super commuter, and why a self-driving car isn’t the techno-utopian fix, really:

“I spend a decent amount of time trying to optimise my travel through audiobooks, podcasts, and phone calls made while driving. I also gripe about the commute probably far too often to my friends, who are considerate if not entirely sympathetic. (It’s hard to be sympathetic to a guy who has the job he wants, lives in a beautiful place, and simply has a long drive a few times a week.)

Hearing my predicament, one friend prescribed a solution: ‘You need a Google self-driving car!’ The friend in question is a top programmer for a world-leading game company, and her enthusiasm for a technical solution parallels advice I’ve gotten from my technically oriented friends, who offer cutting edge technology that is either highly unlikely to materially affect my circumstances, or would improve some aspect of my commute rather than change its core nature.”

and this:

There’s something very odd about a world in which it’s easier to imagine a futuristic technology that doesn’t exist outside of lab tests than to envision expansion of a technology that’s in wide use around the world. How did we reach a state in America where highly speculative technologies, backed by private companies, are seen as a plausible future while routine, ordinary technologies backed by governments are seen as unrealistic and impossible?

The irony of the Google car for my circumstances is that it would be inferior in every way to a train. A semi-autonomous car might let me read or relax behind the wheel, but it would be little faster than my existing commute and as sensitive to traffic, which is the main factor that makes some trips 2.5 hours and some 4 hours. Even if my Google car is a gas-sipping Prius or a plug-in hybrid, it will be less energy efficient than a train, which achieves giant economies of scale in fuel usage even at higher speeds than individual vehicles. It keeps me sealed in my private compartment, rather than giving me an opportunity to see friends who make the same trip or meet new people.

- See more at: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2013/10/15/google-cars-versus-public-transit-the-uss-problem-with-public-goods/#sthash.vpTNQP6e.dpuf

(Via Google cars versus public transit: the US’s problem with public goods | … My heart’s in Accra.)

I'm a confirmed atheist. If you believe in something supernatural I think you are a wrong. I'm not flinging insults here, I even think I'm wrong.

Somethings I particularly hate about most religious folks are their attempts to suppress art, free expression and enforce their worldview on the rest of us. However I have come to realise that religious beliefs are just a human construct and, thus, getting rid of religious belief doesn't really stop puritanical campaigns against art and free expression. Being boring puritans is obviously something that dwells deep within the human psyche, and thus (it turns out) atheists can be killjoys just like anyone else.

Which takes us to the 9/11 Cross argument. Many people will have seen the pictures, or at least heard about, the 9/11 cross (bizarrely some beams that were in a cross shape stayed in a cross shape, it's a miracle!). It is a silly, silly thing and I have to say it was somewhat insulting to the memories of all those who died in the terrorist attacks in New York to have even a small part of their stories overtaken by news of this cross. But they always say funerals are more for the living than the dead, and I suppose that holds up for clean up operations at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11 just as well. And, I'd accept, it probably gave some comfort to some people (the ones who weren't dead and quickly being forgotten as 9/11 was hijacked for political and social purposes).

Whatever one may feel about it, it was a part of the narrative of the post-9/11 cleanup and thus the fact it gets included in the National September 11 Memorial and Museum's collection should be fairly uncontroversial. Not for David Silverman of American Atheists who, after losing a court fight to have it removed, had this to say:

"We are confident that we will eventually win this case and that cross will be removed, or atheists will be allowed to have our own symbol in there,"

Fascinating. What symbol did we have? Did the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster appear in some shattered glass bringing comfort to atheist rescue workers and clean up crew? There is no doubt atheists died in 9/11 (at the hands of religious nutcases no less!). And they will be remembered by their families and by everyone with a heart. Everything that reminds us of that day should be enough of a memory jog of the horrors that befall so many innocent people (of many different beliefs). The whole rest of the collection in that museum is for secular people. I think we can allow Christians a small token of remembrance of an event that happened after 9/11 that meant something to some people.

"What would Jesus do?" guides many believers (supposedly, though I never feel they quite get it right). I tend to follow the far better guide to moral living "What would a professed believer in Jesus do?". Once you know the answer, do the opposite (which is often actually what Jesus would do, but with less Jewish apocalyptic undertones). Don't be those guys. We shouldn't be launching lawsuits or protests because someone, somewhere has two metal beams stuck together in their museum display.

There is a headteacher (sorry, Principal) in the USA currently suggesting Halloween themed celebrations at school are prohibited due to the separation of church and state. Can you imagine how joyless a life it would be without celebrations and fun? School is horrific enough as it is without the need to take away those small moments of fun we allow kids.

Surely I'm not the only atheist pissed that the Statue of Zeus at Olympia is lost to us? When I went to Thailand I was all over their temples, spirit houses and statues. Accepting religious art, holidays and even their expressions of grief doesn't mean we accept their dodgy beliefs or even accept that one can't have inspiring art, holidays and expressions of grief without religion. It is simply a matter of accepting that beauty, horror and fun are part of the human experience and expressed by EVERYONE. So we atheists need to stop pretending that religious history and culture does not exist and accept that it will always be part of humanity (even if religion itself finally disappears).

Once we accept that, we can enjoy that which is to be enjoyed whilst pointing out to anyone who thinks Zeus is/was a real god that they are very wrong.

Finally, if we are to be seen as a Party of Government, I wonder if Jeremy (and others who use the Party of Government tag) will be as consistent should we find ourselves in coalition again, only with Labour? There is a tendency to regard the folk who populate the ‘Party of Protest’ as those from the SLF wing of the party, where the Liberal Reformers seem more comfortable with the Party of Government. Time may show us if this argument is more to do with political positioning than it is the good governance of Britain

Given Nick's pronouncements in the last 24 hours on Free Schools, a few things strike me...

1. As Stephen Tall has pointed out, this really shouldn't be news, in that Nick has just restated existing party policy.

2. The fact that lots of journalists think it IS news should give folk at Great George Street food for thought. As there are only 2 explanations. Either they haven't briefed journalists up until now too well on the party position - or it is so unusual for the leadership to think the same as the rest of the party in this area, that it's worthy of comment.

3. The latter is of course the more likely explanation - given that only in the last few days, the Lib Dem Minister for Education has been saying the opposite to what Nick said today, at least on teaching qualifications.

'Mr Laws: We want to ensure that teachers in schools have good qualifications and the capacity to teach. The hon. Lady [Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)] will know, however, that there are plenty of teachers who may not have formal qualifications but who still do a superb job. We are ensuring, through the Ofsted inspection process, that every single teacher has the capability to teach. All classes are assessed for quality, and that is the right way to ensure a backstop of high standards'.

4. This is also the second time in the week that Nick has been publicly seen to take the opposite view from what many (I think a tad lazily) call the 'Orange Bookers'; today he contradicts the view of David Laws, last Monday he was sacking Jeremy Browne.

As has been recorded previously, both Laws and Browne  have been approached in the fairly recent past by the Tories with an invitation to defect. It will be interesting to see if they redouble their efforts to do so now.

But more to the point - this is probably the first significant move against the 'Liberal reform' wing of the party. How will this play out internally?

5. Presumably this move to differentiate ourselves from high profile Tory Policy is the latest installment of the differentiation strategy, outlined by Richard Reeves back in May 2010, and apparently still being pursued. You have to admire Nick's determination to hatch a plan and follow it through.

6. The big issue with '5' is of course - will the voters find it credible? Remember Nick has spoken in favour of Free Schools  and voted for them albeit with very clear conditions attached.

The first wave of free schools will open this week. The idea is that parent groups, charities and other organisations can open schools where they are not happy with the existing choice. It is controversial with many, and there are risks – but I am confident we have mitigated those risks to make sure this is now a policy which will promote higher standards, better integration, and fairer chances especially for children from the most deprived backgrounds.

'Let me be clear what I want to see from free schools. I want them to be available to the whole community – open to all children and not just the privileged few. I want them to be part of a school system that releases opportunity, rather than entrenching it. They must not be the preserve of the privileged few - creaming off the best pupils while leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Causing problems for and draining resources from other nearby schools. So let me give you my assurance: I would never tolerate that.
The Coalition has made it clear that our overriding social policy objective is improving social mobility. Reducing social segregation; making sure what counts in our society are ability and drive, not privilege and good connections.
Free Schools will only be acceptable so long as they promote those goals.'

(September 2011)

 I don't think anything Nick has said today contradicts that - but will the press allow it to be played like that? 

7. Finally - there is now doubt that Labour have been banking on keeping those 2010 Lib Dem voters who left the party, as this conversation illustrates rather well..

Independent schools do not have to teach the national curriculum and are free to hire people who are not qualified teachers.

They do not seem to do so badly on it, but Nick Clegg is determined that these freedoms shall not be extended to schools in the state sector. In saying this Nick is, as Stephen Tall points out, championing Liberal Democrat, but that does not mean he is right.

Because there is an odd contradiction here. The national curriculum was brought in by the Conservatives in the 1980s because they did not believe teachers could be trusted. Lazy. Marxist agitators. That sort of thing.

This seemed to me at the time, and still does, a massively centralising measure that Liberal should oppose/

Yes, all children should be taught to read and all sorts of other things, but almost all teachers would agree with that. And if they don't there are all sorts of mechanisms like school governors and Ofsted to force them to toe the line.

But if you really don't trust teachers and want a national curriculum, why would you give those same teachers a monopoly in schools?

And three quick points on the politics of Nick's speech, which he will not me making until Thursday - today's papers must have set some sort of a record for reporting something that has not yet happened:

1. this move is another illustration of the truth that if you set out to be a centre party you will always be against radical change;
2. it is a clear attempt too woo Labour, right down to adopting their silly charge that Gove's reforms are "ideological" - we all have an ideology;
3. in recent days Nick has shafted probably his two strongest supporters among his senior MPs: Jeremy Browne and David Laws. Good luck, Nick.

Hey, if you decided to skip the Conan/Mel interview just before this item, try a little of it. I’ve heard zillions of Mel Brooks interviews and they’re usually the same stories over and over. This one’s different and it’s the old Conan asking the questions. He was a very good interviewer when he wasn’t playing to the audience and trying to top his guests…and it turns out he still is.

Years ago, I did a job for two weeks, punching up the comedy in a screenplay. It was a bunch of us writers all sitting around in an office at 20th Century Fox, trying to add humor to a script that was deemed to be in need of more. Ultimately, the studio threw out our rewrite and had someone else write an entirely new script which they also decided wasn’t good enough to film. The project went into turnaround, wound up getting made at another studio and…well, I just looked it up and Leonard Maltin gave it his coveted "BOMB" rating. I saw it and he was being kind.

Anyway, our office at Fox was down the hall from Mel’s and he was then doing dozens of press interviews to promote High Anxiety. He liked an audience so some woman — his secretary, I guess — would scurry from office to office saying, "Mel’s giving an interview. Come listen." For some reason, our producer — the man who had a lot of his career riding on the screenplay we were trying to improve — would say, "Hey, let’s go listen to Mel." So we went and listened to Mel. Three times, I believe, we went and sat on his couch or floor as he held court before some reporter who couldn’t believe he was interviewing Mel Brooks. Mel liked having me there because when he momentarily stalled on some proper name and couldn’t remember it, I usually could.

Like I said, we did this three times and for the most part, we heard the same interview three times. It was the same questions evoking the same anecdotes. The third time, the interviewer requested the story about Sid Caesar trying to pull the cab driver through the tiny car window port. Mel said, "I don’t want to tell that story. I’m sick of telling that story." Then he turned to me and said, "You tell it."

So it’s real nice to hear this interview conducted by Mr. O’Brien. I hope this is the first in a series.

(Previous post on this topic)

10/23: Update with recent developments added to the end of the post.

11/6: I have been banned from Wikipedia for the contents of this post. More information here.

We’ll start with the good news. After a second move discussion, Wikipedia has decided to move the article on Chelsea Manning back to her actual name instead of misgendering and misnaming her. This brings us to the bad news, which is essentially everything else, and in particular everything surrounding the arbitration committee case.   This case has led to the declaration that calling out transphobia on Wikipedia is unacceptable, that trans activists are disqualified from working on articles involving trans subjects, and that it's more acceptable for people employed by the US military to covertly edit the Chelsea Manning article than it is for trans advocates to do so openly.

To recap, immediately after Chelsea Manning publicly came out and and announced her new name, Wikipedia updated and retitled its article on her. This set off a wave of controversy, resulting in the article being moved back to where it misnamed Manning and being locked there for thirty days. Those thirty days have now passed, and a second discussion over the topic resulted in overwhelming consensus to move the article back to its correct title.

A consequence of this, however, was that a request was filed with the arbitration committee - an elected body allowed to pass broad sanctions to settle disputes on Wikipedia, including banning editors. That process has also now concluded, and has concluded disastrously.

In order to understand the arbitration commitee’s decision, it is important to understand the culture of Wikipedia. In its determination to avoid creating any top-down editorial structure, Wikipedia has instead repeatedly embraced a system of rules designed to eliminate thought from the decision making process as much as possible. Hence the policy that all information must be sourced to reliable secondary sources, with little concern for the biases that this demand introduces (what sources get published is, after all, heavily impacted by degree to which publication can prove profitable, a wholly distinct concept from what is accurate or important) or to the number of fields like the humanities in which secondary sources are not dispassionate attempts to synthesize materials but attempts to advance partisan and novel takes on existing material.

The fantasy has always been that with the right set of rules the encyclopedia would write itself, with optimal versions of articles just coming to exist naturally as a consequence of the self-evident rules about citation and secondary sources. The reality has always been that instead of actually thinking critically about content decisions people just think critically about how to manipulate and play with the rules.

Since this is, most days of the week, a geek blog, I assume the analogy to tabletop role-playing games and the type of player known as a rules lawyer will make sense. If not, allow a brief digression. A rules lawyer is a type of player whose pleasure comes not from any accomplishment within the game, but instead from the manipulation and contortion of the rules. For them the point of the game is pedantic obsession with rules and finding ways to game the system. And for people of this mindset, Wikipedia is a godsend.

Certainly this is the mindset that applied to the original naming discussion. On one side you had the observation that misnaming trans people is tremendously hurtful and that it hurts people well beyond the specific person being misnamed. On the other you had some petty transphobes who quickly learned to back up their argument by citing a minor policy that dictates that articles should use the most common name for their subject. This is literally what the debate looked like. One side pointed out that misnaming Chelsea Manning amounted to the sixth largest website in the world taking action that delegitimized transgender identities, and that this was profoundly harmful. The other side said “yeah, but there’s a rule that says articles should be at the most common name.” And the latter side won, at least initially. (Eventually the fact that every mainstream news organization that doesn’t have an overt partisan agenda, and several of those that do had, in fact, gone over to Chelsea Manning won the day. But not until Wikipedia spent thirty days to the right of The Daily Mail.)

Which brings us to the arbitration committee, who looked at both sides of this debate and made the unequivocal decision that, in a debate between people trying to think seriously about the ethical considerations involved in being one of the largest websites in the world and a bunch of techno-libertarians playing WikiRules, the real problem was all the uppity trans activists. David Gerard, an administrator who locked the page at Chelsea Manning temporarily on the grounds that the alternative was a serious violation of Wikipedia’s policy on articles about living people, was sanctioned on the supposed basis that he did not adequately explain his reasoning, and that he was “overly involved.” This latter claim, based seemingly on no evidence beyond that David knows some trans people and doesn’t hate them, was used to forbid him from using his administrative powers on transgender articles at all.

This idea - that knowing trans people or being in favor of trans rights is an excessive level of personal involvement that ought preclude editing in that area - is all the more appalling given that the arbitration committee did not make any observations regarding Cla68, a user who advocated for punishing Morwen, the user who initially moved the article, for seeking publicity for her actions and for having a conflict of interest. The fact that Morwen and David Gerard know each other socially was, in Cla68’s eyes, evidence of a vast conspiracy to use Wikipedia as a platform for advocacy. The fact that David Gerard is further supportive of Chelsea Manning’s legal battle and has publicly supported the idea that she be pardoned was further cited as evidence of his excessive personal involvement in this case.

This is all extraordinary given that Cla68 is in real live Charles Ainsworth, an employee of the US Military working in Japan. This is a fact he has studiously attempted to hide, all the while accusing others of being unduly involved in the Chelsea Manning case. To be clear, then, the standard of involvement that the arbitration committee used to sanction people is that being openly supportive of trans rights and of Chelsea Manning’s status as a whistleblower constitutes undue involvement, while trying to hide the fact that you're employed by her jailer is perfectly fine.

Beyond that, findings were issued declaring that people arguing that misnaming and misgendering were transphobic were behaving unacceptably. One such editor received an indefinite topic ban from editing or discussing trans-related subjects on Wikipedia. Another (me, actually) came within one vote of a similar ban.

For anyone playing along at home, then, here’s a quick guide to what can and can’t be said on Wikipedia with regards to transgender topics. First off, the things that are allowed. To be clear, these are all things that the arbitration committee specifically looked at and voted by a majority to declare were acceptable and not worthy of sanction. So, it’s OK to say that a trans woman “is a woman only in his own (sick) head.”  It’s fine to compare being trans to declaring that you’re an animal of some sort. It’s perfectly acceptable to refer to a trans woman coming out of the closet as “a one-day circus freak show.” Similarly, it’s perfectly acceptable to say that “Manning can say that he wants to be a girl all he wants, but the fact remains that he’s not.”

This is not to say that the arbitration committee drew no lines. It turns out that talking about a trans person’s genitals, and particularly saying things like “only when his testicles are ripped out of his scrotum will I call Manning a ‘she’” is unacceptable. Likewise, while saying that “This guy is ‘Bradley Manning,” a man and a male, both sex and gender. Period. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t make a heifer become Marilyn Monroe y’know,” was initially deemed acceptable, the user who said it was eventually sanctioned for admitting that he was just trolling to make a point. But these are isolated instances of sanction amidst a much larger sea of sickening transphobia.

Meanwhile, the following statements were cited as evidence of problematic “battleground mentalities,” some of which require indefinite bans from talking about transgender topics on Wikipedia. Lest anyone think I’m cherry picking the acceptable bits of comments and leaving out the bad ones, I’ve included links to the full comments (some of which, again, are my own).

“It's hard to see any other explanation for someone insisting on calling an individual who self-identifies as female by using their former name with which they no longer identifies, than virulent hatred of transgendered people.” (link)

“All arguments for using "Bradley Manning" are transphobic for the simple reason that they are arguments for an inherently transphobic act, which is to publicly misname a trans person on the sixth largest website in the world.” (link)

“We don't move articles because some people hate transgendered people, it's that simple.” (link)

“I hope you never have to experience anything as awful as what you have done in denying Chelsea Manning her basic self-identity on one of the largest websites in the world. I have never before seen Wikipedia used in such an actively hurtful and harmful way as what you have just done.” (link)

“It is libel, gross sexual harrassment, a BLP violation, a violation of MOS:IDENTITY, a violation of human decency, and obvously motivated by transphobic hate, to refer to someone who self-identifies as a woman, by insisting on using their former name with which they no longer identifies.” (link)

“I want to be perfectly clear here. Referring to a transgender person by their birth name is hate speech. This close embraced hate speech. This is not an issue of consensus. This is an issue of Wikipedia actively embracing hate speech. It is shameful and horrifying in exactly the same way that a decision to refer to racial minorities with derogatory slurs would be.” (link)

The message here is clear. Bigotry and transphobia? Possibly annoying, but really nothing to worry about. Calling out bigotry, however? That’s a major disruption that needs to be stopped. The real problem with the discussion wasn’t all the people declaring that transgender people are mentally ill and denying them their basic identity. It was that anyone got at all upset about it.

The underlying policy that justifies this is usually abbreviated as WP:BATTLE, and is a subsection of a page titled “What Wikipedia is not.” The policy states that “Wikipedia is not a place to hold grudges, import personal conflicts, carry on ideological battles, or nurture prejudice, hatred, or fear.” How, exactly, attempts to actively combat prejudice, hatred, and fear are thus in violation of this policy is one of many things one might reasonably want to ask the arbitration committee.

But even uglier than the blinkered reading of this policy is the idea that it is a key policy at all. In the end the policy, particularly as applied in this case, is little more than an attempt to codify the idea that Wikipedia is somehow immune to consequences. It’s the same logic that leads to the suggestion that there’s not any moral issue with misgendering trans people on Wikipedia. It is, in many ways, a techno-libertarian fantasy. It pretends that Wikipedia somehow exists in a truly neutral space where it can simply, as the mantra goes, report what reliable sources say in an unbiased way.

Which is tosh. It’s the sixth largest website in the world. nobody is under any illusions that it’s not a standard reference tool for journalists. Wikipedia has tremendous power in the world. The idea that it can be reactive and outside of any real world conflicts is little more than a fig leaf to cover overt sociopathy.

This is not, obviously, to suggest that Wikipedia must therefore uncritically open the floodgates to advocacy. The idea that the options are either some fantasy in which Wikipedia can completely ignore the political and ethical implications of its own existence or some uncontrollable mess in which people advocating political positions derail all efforts to write an encyclopedia is needlessly reductive. Indeed, this simple black and white worldview is another charade hiding the destructive truth: Wikipedia does not and cannot exist in a magic bubble in which politics and ethics have no basis.

This is the real content of the arbitration committee’s decision, and, indeed, of the argument for misnaming Chelsea Manning: that the game of WikiRules is more important than ethical considerations, and, more to the point, that the game of WikiRules needs to be carefully insulated from any ethical challenge. Certainly this is the argument that inherently lies behind any suggestion that the “common names” rule under which the misnaming of Chelsea Manning was justified ought trump the myriad of real ethical and political concerns involved in publicly embracing the misnaming of trans people. What matters isn’t the consequences - it’s the rules themselves.

The chilling effects of this go far beyond trans issues. The ruling in effect guts the entire Biographies of Living Persons policy, which provided a crucial bulwark against this sort of thinking by demanding that “the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment” - one of the few statements in Wikipedia policy to suggest that ethical considerations do in some cases need to trump rules-lawyering.

Enforcement of this policy has always relied upon erring on the side of caution, and on giving administrators a wide berth to take action first and discuss later. But by sanctioning David Gerard, who locked the article in its correct title so as to prevent the material harm that misnaming trans people causes, while not even bothering to mention the administrators who, contrary to policy, reverted him the arbitration committee has obliterated all sense that administrators who act in good faith to remove harmful content might have any protection. This does massive and permanent damage to the prospect of Wikipedia acting with any sense of responsibility, as opposed to according to the designs of its rules lawyers.

But all of this has a particularly bitter ring to it for the trans community. It is, after all, another instance of the most innocent seeming and yet destructive trick in the transphobic arsenal - the manufactured debate about time and place. The trans community sat through years of this at the hands of the larger GLBT community, as trans issues served mainly as the first thing that would be offered as a concession in any political negotiation. Trans issues were actively treated as the thing to deal with after marriage equality. But there’s a larger trick involved. Trans issues aren’t appropriate for federal non-discrimination laws because they’d imperil passage of laws to protect sexual orientation. They aren’t appropriate for Wikipedia, because they have to win victories elsewhere first. The process of telling trans people that their concerns were inappropriate for a given venue goes back as far as 1969, when Jim Fouratt cut trans people out of the formation of the Gay Liberation Front immediately after the Stonewall riots.

It is only in light of this that Wikipedia’s obvious hatred of activists can be understood. The word “privilege” is instructive here, because it highlights the most important aspect of it, which is that it is an unchallenged, socially accepted form of power. Privilege works because of its invisibility. And as a result, nothing tips the privileged into bilious rage quite like having their privilege questioned or called out.

Often, of course, the harmful effects of this are coupled with talk about how this isn’t some slight against trans people. It’s just the rules, as those arguing for transphobia kept saying during the naming debate. Or you get the behavior of the Wikimedia Foundation itself. People like Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, and Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia are quick to wring their hands over how badly the Chelsea Manning issue was handled. And yet hand-wringing is all they’re seemingly prepared to do.

Wales, who has the power to overturn arbitration committee decisions, could have cut all of this off by making clear to the arbitration committee what he would or would not accept. He did not, nor has he made any move to overturn the ruling. The Foundation in general could declare that the English language Wikipedia has gone against its policies and enforce change. To date, it hasn’t. Perhaps most tellingly, whenever the Wikimedia Foundation attempts a fundraiser, it points to the success and reach of the project, most of which is the English language Wikipedia. And yet for all its supposed sympathy, it refuses to take responsibility for the egregious behavior of that project. At this point, it is difficult to imagine why any trans activist or ally would support the Foundation, nor, indeed, any organization that counts trans-inclusiveness as one of its principles. The sad fact is that supporting the Wikimedia Foundation, as it stands, means supporting an environment in which transphobia is consciously and deliberately allowed, but where support of trans inclusiveness and calling out bigotry is forbidden.

Because this is the situation Wikipedia has given us. Vehemently and hatefully denouncing the validity of trans identities? OK so long as you don’t reference their genitals. Arguing passionately in favor of misnaming Chelsea Manning while covering up the fact that you work for her jailer? Not even worth mentioning. But knowing trans people? Means you’re too involved to take administrative actions regarding trans people. Being willing to call out transphobia and hate speech for what they are? Means you can’t even edit on trans topics.

Because that is how these people work. It’s not that they hate trans people consciously or actively. They just hate the thought that they might have to change some aspect of their lives, however trivial, for them. That’s what systemic transphobia really is. It’s not the hatred or fear of actual trans people. It’s just thinking that avoiding using the sixth largest website in the world as a platform for rejecting their basic identities is less important than the ability to use that website to play a petty little game of rules manipulation. It’s not that trans people are subhuman animals or anything. They’re just less important than getting to treat the world as a glorified Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook.

UPDATE 10/23: So, I woke up to find this in my e-mail box:

Please contact the Arbitration Committee to explain why you have posted personal, non-public information about another contributor on your personal blog. This blog post has direct ramifications on the project, and may put you in gross violation of the project's norms and policies.

For the Arbitration Committee,

Anthony (AGK)

This would presumably be a reference to my revealing above that the user Cla68, who spent the arbitration case complaining that being trans or knowing trans people was excessive involvement, is in fact Charles Ainsworth, who is employed by the US Military. And that the arbitration committee took no action over this, apparently deeming being employed by Chelsea Manning's jailers a less significant conflict of interest than knowing trans people.

The reason why I did this should be straightforward and obvious: it's in the public interest to know that employees of the US Military are attempting to covertly influence the tone and direction of Wikipedia's coverage of Chelsea Manning. I am not attempting to assert some sort of conspiracy - I'm sure that Ainsworth was acting on his own initiative, and that it's merely that his values align with those of his employer. However this does not change the fact that he is employed by the institution currently imprisoning Chelsea Manning and denying her medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria, and that he is hypocritically trying to influence Wikipedia's coverage of this from behind a pseudonym while decrying other people for their conflicts of interest.

I am, of course, thoroughly unsurprised to discover that the esteemed and venerable arbitration committee considers this a "gross violation of the project's norms and policies."

But I would dispute, politely, that this information is non-public. I was tipped off to it by two separate individuals, both of whom included numerous links, and would not have posted it if it was not possible to independently verify the information. It was, largely because Ainsworth has outed himself.

Ainsworth has posted about his employer several times in the past, including mentioning on two separate occasions his work at the Pentagon and at his current place of employment, making the issue of his employer straightforward. He's also made numerous contributions to talk pages while logged out, then changed the signature to his name. These IP addresses further confirm his employer, as they resolve to the US DoD network.

As for his name, he certainly seemed willing enough to reveal it in this edit, in which he was willing to take responsibility for a quote he'd offered the media (used in stories like this one). Here's a Register story in which he gave a different quote, and where the Register linked directly to his userpage. Here's Ainsworth giving quotes to the Register again. (That he's been giving quotes to the media while accusing Morwen of publicity hunting for talking to the media about the Chelsea Manning article is, of course, a further amusing detail.)

It's only recently, presumably because he realizes that he's behaved atrociously and is desperate to not get publicly ensnared in his hypocrisy, that he has become in the least bit concerned with having his real name publicly revealed. Unfortunately, this mostly consists of making furtive glances at a recently closed barn door in the hopes that nobody notices that there are no longer any horses in it.

So to recap, Charles Ainsworth, an employee of the US Military, has been using the username Cla68 to covertly try to influence Wikipedia's coverage of Chelsea Manning while accusing others of a conflict of interest. And, obviously, doing a rather rubbish job of it, since it's trivial to trace his real-life identity.

One final observation: the subject of all of this is Chelsea Manning, who is famous (and in prison) for leaking documents that revealed the sordid details of what the US Military was actually up to. Now the arbitration committee seems to be considering sanction for publicly revealing information about the sordid details of what a member of that same organization has been doing on Wikipedia to further smear Chelsea Manning.

And they say irony is dead.

One of the plagues of historical thought is what might be termed the arrogance of modernity. From our lofty aerie here, at the crest of the 21st century, we mistake our point on a line for the peak of a graph. As did every generation before us, we assume that we are not merely the latest in an endless sequence, but the realization of a goal, a culmination, a point that marks the end of all history rather than the beginning of a history not yet written. So it is, and given the arrogance of man, so shall it forever be. The study of the geek in history is no exception.

Living as we do in something of a golden time for geekery, we imagine that we have invented it. We look upon such modern developments as the Blu-Ray, the Internet and the dodecahedron, and flatter ourselves that surely, the expression of obsessive, time-wasting cultural observation must have sprung forth fully formed from the head of the 21th century, a nerdish Athena born afire from the fervid head of a hundred-year-tall Zeus. While it is true that the combination of consumerism, widespread literacy, and a global computer network that insures that no one ever need have an unvoiced opinion and no cultural expression need ever be forgotten has placed geekery on a mighty pinnacle, we must always remember what a long climb it faced to get there. It is instructive, as ever, to see where we have been so that we may more fully appreciated where we are.

The geek is surely one of the primeval archetypes of human civilization. Wherever there was the king, there was the peasant who kept a list of prior kings and ranked them in order of preference; wherever there was the priest or the merchant, there was the directionless nobody who spread rumors about what the priest and the merchant were going to to next; and wherever there was the poet or the shaman, there was the man who lived in the basement of his parents’ hut and wrote stories about what would happen if the priest and the shaman had a fight. But the earliest historical record of human geekery comes to us from ancient Egypt. When, at long last, the Rosetta Stone was deciphered, students of geekery received confirmation of what they had long suspected: much of the heiroglyphics thereupon were metatextual commentary. Indeed, the bulk of Tablet B was given over to what most scholars interpret as a lengthy critique of Tablet A, including an extended discursus on how the heiroglyphic craftsmen of today cannot compare to those of the First Kingdom. Subsequent discoveries from the same era make reference to other tablets, sadly lost to history, in which the commentaries are themselves commented on, with many of them apparently nothing more than savage criticisms of other peoples’ commentaries of the original material several removes away.

The earliest clay cuneiform tablets of the Sumerian and Akkadian people reveal the existence of a odd game played with primitive number-calculations in which citizens too weak and feeble to fight in wars would devise fantastic character for themselves, often based on the great figures of myth and legend, who would fight imaginary wars. Records of the Songhay people of western Sudan, passed on through oral tradtion, teach us much of what we know about their mastery of drumming, which gave them something of a unique monopoly on information technology; what is not so widely known is that many of the peculiar drum patterns — still played today, and inherited over thousands of years — are apparently rankings of drummers who played similar patterns over a millennium ago, and arguments about whether or not they were better or worse than previous drummers who did the same material. And as far away as Central and South America, it is widely believed that ‘possession’ of the most celebrated players of courtball and quoits was practiced in what amounts to an early version of sports fantasy leagues. In a scene eerily reminiscent of the Ecuadorian ‘Soccer War’ of the early 1970s, it is thought that the sudden demise of the Olmec people may have been triggered by a dispute over draft order in one of the early courtball fantasy leagues.

From the early ‘furries’ who dressed like yaks or goats and walked among the Mongol tribes, to the southeast Asian monks of Angkor Wat who named themselves after popular throat singers of the era, to the surprising preponderance of Heloise and Abelard slash fiction discovered in a recent opening of the Vatican archives, the geek has always been with is. It is the goal of this modest volume to explore these nerds, tools, dorks, melvins and wonks of history’s rich tapestry. We begin, in chapter 1, with the discovery in 1931 of ancient Farsi collectible card games.

Monday:

In a deal that’s literally radioactive, Her Majesty’s government in the form of Master Gideon and Bojo the Clown and, of course, Liberal Democrat point man Mr Ed Davey, have announced that there will be a new atomic power station (or two) at Hinkley Point in Somerset, built and run by the French, paid for by the Chinese and presumably using South African or Canadian uranium.

So, nice energy security there.

The price for their electricity has been set at £92.50 per kilowatt hour, which is about double the current wholesale price.

Not quite “too cheap to meter” either.

Okay, to be fair, if you bear in mind that the new nuke won’t start generating for at least ten years, that’s a (compound) rate of “only” about 7.5% increases every year.

On the one fluffy foot that almost seems moderate compared to the 8.2%, 9.2% and 10.4% price hikes announced this last week; on the other fluffy foot, it means the government are guessing that energy costs will continue to rise at two to three times the rate of inflation for the next decade.

Brrr!

It says a lot about the immediacy of the threat of global warming that a lot of very decent people who would previously have looked askance at the toxic legacy of the nuclear industry (where we’re still not quite sure where to put all the waste) have been convinced that the power of the atom is a clean green alternative to burning lots of carbon when it comes to facing up to keeping the lights on. Not that Gideon or Bojo believe in climate change, so what’s their excuse?

Personally, I still believe that this is a distraction from serious investment in our own renewable resources.

Having worried for ages about the ability of President Vlad the Bad Putin of Russia turning off the gas taps and freezing us (like he did to Ukraine), we seem remarkably blasé about letting Great Britain’s off switch fall into the hands of the Central Committee of the People’s Republic. Better hope that those notoriously unforgiving Mandarins have forgotten all about the opium wars, eh.

I think we should be making more of our own power and not buying in heavy elements to burn up. I should prefer to see at least one, and preferably three, tidal bores being tapped and a whole lot more offshore wind. And to counter those blowhards who protest that “the wind doesn't blow all the time”, time to dust off the plans for that Exmore pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme, and a few more, so we can store power from when the wind when it’s there and release it when the wind drops.

Because, frankly, I’d rather rely on when the wind blows than risk, er, “When The Wind Blows”.



Having talked about energy prices, though, there was for once a very good point in the weekend’s Grauniad (although heavily disguised as a bizarre attack on Morrisey’s autobiography).

The obsession among media and political types – archbishops and Mr Milipede included – with these 9% hikes in the price of energy is the obsession of people who already own houses and is blotting out the much more serious 9% average rise in the cost of rents for people who do not.

British Gas customers – that is eight million households – face an average increase of £123 a year. Bad, but nothing compared with the £835 increase a year for the 8.3 million households in rented accommodation – £835!

In this context, the second phase of Master Gideon’s Help-to-Buy scheme might as well be called Help-to-Buy-to-Let and is likely to drive up house prices and therefore rents even more, trapping millions of people even further below the first rung of the housing ladder.

The prospect of a meltdown at a nuclear power station might be the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the meltdown in the housing market that is truly terrifying.

Showing you this map of aggregated bullfrog occurrences would be illegal.

Dianne Feinstein's bragging about NSA surveillance program may lead to I t being declared unconstitutional.

Anti-racism campaigner and immigration caseworker sent 'go home' text message by Home Office.

13 nutrition lies that made the world sick and fat.

Having lost his ministerial job in last week’s reshuffle, Jeremy Browne was interviewed in Friday’s Times (£) – and it’s not a pretty sight.

What’s that? You won’t pay to enter the Times’s firewall? Quite right, so a copy of the story is provided at the end of this blog post. There are also summaries of the Times’s story in the Guardian, on Liberal Democrat Voice and at Politics.co.uk.

The interview has fuelled speculation that Browne will eventually defect to the Tories, which his half-hearted denials do not entirely dispel.

Meanwhile in the Liberal Democrat blogosphere, Browne’s comments have earned a universal raspberry:

• Naomi Smith (co-chair of the Social Liberal Forum) responds at the Huffington Post, accusing Browne of posing “a false dichotomy when he says the Party must choose whether to be a party of protest or of Government”.
• In a must-read post, James Graham examines Browne’s behaviour in the context of the increasingly authoritarian drift of the Liberal Democrats’ right wing.
• The Fact Collector argues that, if Jeremy Browne were to defect to the Tories, then strangely enough everybody would gain.

What has earned all this hostility? There is much in both the content and tone of the interview that has caused offence, but the essential problem is Browne’s apparent inability to distinguish between government and party.

Controversially, Browne wants the Liberal Democrats to run on a coalition ticket rather than a Liberal Democrat ticket:

Mr Clegg told delegates in Glasgow last month that he “hadn’t said enough” about what “Britain would look like today if the Tories had been alone in Whitehall for the last three years”.

By contrast Mr Browne urges his party to take responsibility, and credit, for the Government’s “central pillars”, including reducing the deficit, curbing immigration and crime and education reforms.

Curbing immigration?!

But the Browne quotation that will doubtless attract the most criticism from within the Liberal Democrats is this:

Comparing his party to a shopping trolley that “left to its own devices defaults to the left and to being the party of protest”, he says that he became exposed after years of trying to exert “corrective pressure”.

“I saw my role, and continue to do so, as doing everything I can to accelerate the Lib Dems’ journey from a party of protest to a party of government.”

This ‘party of protest’ thing is a tired old trope, already worn out by Nick Clegg over the past year. It is simply untrue that the party had no interest in power before the 2010 general election. This falsehood is linked to the suggestion that anyone in the Liberal Democrats who is critical of the coalition government is necessarily against being in power at all. Strangely, both Browne and Clegg never seem able to cite any specific examples of these power-averse party members, which suggests such members are straw men.

Why, then, does Clegg retain support within the party but Browne has virtually none? The reason is not Browne’s views on economics, even though these are about as right wing as they come within the Liberal Democrats. It is because of Browne’s views on civil liberties.

If there is one thing that unites Liberals from left to right, it is support for civil liberties. Yet Browne seems to have a tin ear for this issue, so his move from the Foreign Office to the Home Office last year left him vulnerable.

His weakness on civil liberties was exposed at the end of July, when the Home Office sent advertising vans round several London boroughs advising illegal immigrants to turn themselves in. A few days later, it was revealed that the UK Borders Agency had been hanging out at Kensal Green tube station in London, randomly stopping non-white people supposedly in an effort to catch illegal immigrants.

Browne had not been consulted about these measures so could not be blamed for them. But once he had heard about them, he should have been quick off the mark. As Jonathan Calder and Caron Lindsay pointed out at the time, the silence was deafening. It is a poor state of affairs when Liberal Democrat ministers appear unconcerned that government officials are stopping citizens in the street at random and demanding to see their papers.

Browne’s ineffectiveness on such crucial Liberal issues is basically why he was fired and why no one in the party has come to his defence.

The Times’s interview with Browne will win him no new friends within the Liberal Democrats but simply confirm the perception of his semi-detached status. Disparaging one’s party having just been fired also makes Browne look churlish. But it is the association with authoritarian policies that has, in the end, proved fatal.


The report in The Times (Friday 18 October 2013):

That’s a photo of me with Lou Scheimer, who ran Filmation Studios, producers of hundreds if not thousands of hours of Saturday morning-style TV cartoons. Lou passed away Thursday just a few days shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. He’d been ill for some time with Parkinson’s Disease and he’d been declining public appearances. So this was not unexpected.

Filmation Studios is a controversial topic in some circles of the animation community. Here are some positive things you hear: They produced a lot of shows that a lot of people remember fondly, including the first Superman and Batman cartoons made for television, the Star Trek cartoons, Masters of the Universe, many different programs featuring the Archie characters and the show I thought was the best thing they ever did, Fat Albert. They gave an awful lot of work to an awful lot of artists and writers. In some cases, they gave new people an important break. In others, they gave old-timers a place to earn a paycheck after other studios had closed. Lou was very proud of all those breaks and paychecks.

Virtually alone among producers of animation for TV in their time, they fought to keep work in Los Angeles rather than farm it out to overseas houses. One time when the Animation Union struck over this problem, Lou — as a member — was put in the awkward position of picketing his own studio. No one would have faulted him if he’d not done this but instead, he went out, picked up a sign and marched around his own building, demanding that management (i.e., him) cease this pernicious practice that it was not committing. Lou had a good sense of humor and a friend of mine who worked long and hard at Filmation said, "To the extent it didn’t get in the way of making a profit, it was a fun place."

The negatives? Well, they produced TV cartoons with all the restrictions and problems that TV cartoons had in those days. There were times when their shows were better than others who had to operate under all these handicaps and times when they weren’t. Still, if you cringe at most animation of the seventies and eighties, Filmation offered you much to cringe about. Someone once said of Lou, "He knows how to take the impossible deal and make money off it." Some of his shows were produced on budgets that would have caused any other studio to say, "It can’t be done for that" and pass. Depending on your point-of-view, it might be a negative that he didn’t do that.

This article will tell you more about the history of Lou Scheimer and Filmation, though it repeats the oft-made claim that the studio never sent animation work out this country. They did but only rarely and when desperate. And this obit in the L.A. Times will tell you more. So I think for the rest of this piece, I’ll just tell you about my own path-crossing with Lou Scheimer.

Every time I saw him in the last twenty or so years, he’d throw an arm around me, hug me and tell everyone within earshot that I was one of the many talented writers who’d started with Filmation, done wonderful work for him and then gone on to bigger and better things. "I’m so proud of Mark and guys like him," he’d say. He was so happy and complimentary that I never had the heart to tell him the total amount of work I’d done for his studio. It was one script…and he hated it. I was offered work there on many occasions but, to put it simply, I always had better offers, both in terms of money and in the chance of doing my best work. Once though, I was trapped.

Filmation had a series that they were trying to sell to CBS. CBS was reticent to buy it. Filmation was getting desperate. They were counting on selling that series so they would not have to lay off one entire division. Lou went to CBS and said, in essence, "Tell me what I have to do to get you to buy this show." At the time, I was doing a lot of development work for CBS, which meant I’d write a bible (outline of the format, description of the characters and how they operated, sample plot ideas) and a pilot script for a potential series. I’m not sure who it was at CBS but someone there suggested I might be the guy who could whip it into a shape that the network could purchase.

I was sitting home one day here when my phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line identified itself as Lou Scheimer…and it sounded like Lou Scheimer. I’d once interviewed Lou for a magazine called The Monster Times and I’d heard him speak at animation-related gatherings. Yes, it sounded like Lou Scheimer but it also sounded like my friend Frank Welker’s impression of Lou Scheimer. Frank is arguably the best mimic alive and inarguably the most in-demand cartoon voice guy, and a few weeks earlier, he’d done a medley for me of his impressions of people who’d hired him, Joe Barbera and Lou Scheimer among them. The Lou Scheimer on my phone sounded less like the real Lou Scheimer than he did like Welker’s impression of Lou Scheimer.

Certain it was Frank, I decided to play along. I said, "Hi, Lou! What can I do for you?" Before I realized it wasn’t Frank, I was half-committed to write this pilot for the real Lou Scheimer. Later in the day, a fellow at CBS called and asked me, as a favor to the Children’s Programming Department at his network, to do this development for Filmation even though the money was a bit on the thin side. So, blaming Welker and not myself of course, I committed the rest of the way. Filmation sent over what they’d done so far on the idea and I instantly saw the problem.

The show was overpopulated. As developed so far, it had about 30 regular characters, 25 of which didn’t contribute much, if anything. The concept was lost in the crowd, so to speak. Lou had left the U.S. on a business trip and I’d been told to deal with his second-in-command, a lovely gent named Arthur Nadel. I told Arthur what I wanted to do and he said, "Okay, we trust you." Emboldened by that trust, I rewrote the bible so the show had but five regular characters. When I wrote up suggested plot outlines, I used about five more of those extra players as characters who might appear once…but I basically threw out 20-25 characters as superfluous.

CBS liked the bible. I got the go-ahead to write a pilot script. I did. They liked it and they committed to the series. This was all while Lou was still in Europe. A few days later, I got a call: Lou was back in town and would like me to come in and see him.

I went in, figuring there’d be confetti and party hats for my having sold the show and saved the day. Instead, Lou’s first words when I stepped into his office were, "Ah, here’s the man who killed twenty toy deals for me." I thought he was kidding but he wasn’t. To try and sell the show, he had lowered its price down to a level he felt CBS couldn’t refuse, a level that would force him to produce the show at a loss. To then get the show above water, he’d made a deal with a toy company to put out action figures of all the characters…but the deal called for all those characters to appear a certain number of times in the first season. The math didn’t work if every episode didn’t feature a lot of them.

Remember what I wrote earlier about how Lou could take an impossible deal and figure out how to make it work? Well, this show was an impossible deal but in pruning all those characters, I’d gotten in the way of what he was counting on to make that particular deal work.

I told him I was sorry but my assignment had said nothing about toy deals. My job was to get CBS to commit to the series and they had. Lou admitted I was right and I got a grudging "thank you" — but he also told me that he had to get a lot of those characters back into the show. Which is what he did. Once CBS had signed the paperwork and the show was officially on their schedule, he began convincing them the show needed this guy and that gal and this monster. Eventually, it was so unlike what I’d written that my pilot script was never produced. I had nothing to do with any of this. I was contractually entitled to a screen credit every week — "Developed for Television by Mark Evanier" — but I never got it and never made an issue of not getting it. I watched one episode and it had very little to do with what I’d done.

In spite of this, I liked Lou. He and his partners Norm Prescott and Hal Sutherland fought like crazy to build his studio and keep the doors open over the years. They were the little guys in a field where the biggies had the power to step on them but they succeeded, nonetheless. In a sense the whole studio was an impossible deal but Lou and his cronies found a way to make it work.

As readers of this blog know, I’m a big supporter of the Affordable Care Act, AKA "Obamacare." As readers of the web know, there are a lot of folks out there proclaiming it a disaster, a failure, a flop, etc. So far, however, I haven’t seen this said by anyone I thought was capable of admitting it was a success if that was how things went. It’s all people who predicted — and in many cases, prayed — it would fail. Those who so prayed are pretty awful people in my view. Since no one has offered up a credible, workable Plan B, hoping Obamacare flops is to me like saying, "Oh, I hope all those people who can’t get health insurance because they’re poor and/or have pre-existing conditions don’t get it!"

We have two serious, related problems in this country. One is that there are all these men, women and children who can’t get affordable health care. If that many people had their lives threatened by terrorists, we’d start drone strikes and marching off to war and surrendering more civil liberties. I don’t understand not wanting to do something for those people. Also too, the rising cost of health care for all is crippling our nation’s economy. I don’t understand not wanting to fix that…and again, there is no real "other plan." When you hear someone say the answer is tort reform or setting up exchanges, that’s someone who has about 4% of a plan. (They’ve instituted tort reform in several states and it lowers the cost of a policy an average of 1%.)

You want to get rid of Obamacare? Come up with a real alternative plan…something real-er than "we’ll appoint committees to study the problems and make recommendations."

But the main reason I’m unimpressed by these articles about Obamacare being a failure is that the ones I read all seem to be about the website crashing…about people waiting online for hours and not being able to sign up. If that’s true, as it seems to be, that’s not an argument against Obamacare at all. I don’t recall one single person who predicted it would fail saying, "It can never work because the website will be slow." They were all talking about the actual manipulation of money — what people would pay, how doctors would be compensated, how insurance rates would or would not fall. We haven’t even gotten close to the part of this rollout that tells us how that will go.

Bad website design is not proof that Obamacare can’t work. Websites are fixable. Each year, I get dozens of e-mails from folks who’ve tried to sign up for memberships and/or hotel rooms for Comic-Con in San Diego. It’s getting better but it used to be that the site would crash, people would wait online forever and then get dumped off, people wouldn’t get what they wanted…

That was, at best, an argument that the organizers had underestimated demand and/or had the wrong people design the sign-up portions of their website. It was not an argument that Comic-Con had failed and had to be repealed.

I've been quiet lately because I'm between trips and between books; aside from deliberating over copy edit changes to "The Rhesus Chart" I'm not actually working right now. (The next novel-shaped death march is scheduled for mid-November.) On the other hand, I can't stay idle for long. So it's computer neepery time!

I work with Apple kit. iPhone, iPad, Macs. My work/productivity environment can be defined by the applications I can't live without: email, web browser (Firefox, in my case), Scrivener (for producing novels), LibreOffice (for all the other office shit), and a password manager. There's some recreational stuff — iTunes for music (I have Airport Express wifi repeaters with audio output to drive remote speakers, the Apple universe equivalent of a Sonos set-up), ebooks and movies and a few casual games (on the iPad). But the majority of my work gets done on one of my two production laptops. I maintain two because (a) I've had machines die on me horribly in the past, and (b) one is a whole lot more portable than the other. So there's a desktop monitor and a Macbook Pro for serious bum-in-chair fingers-on-keyboard work, and a Macbook Air for when I need to travel and need something beefier than an iPad and a wireless keyboard.

But. But. I get itchy at the idea of being mewed up in someone else's walled garden. So I'm always keeping one eye on my exit strategy, should Apple do something so Appallingly Evil that I suddenly feel the urge to flee. (It'd have to be something crazy and stupid if not throat-cuttingly suicidal, at least with respect to their pro market; on the order of demanding the copyright on all intellectual property produced on their machines, or locking down Gatekeeper to prevent any app not sold through the Mac App Store from running on Macs. Or to discontinue Mac OS X and force a migration to iOS without simultaneously opening up the iOS application platform.) I don't expect them to try that kind of stunt. They'd have to be utterly stupid to do so, and even more stupid not to do a U-turn within 48 hours. But if they did ... where would I go for my computing needs?

Microsoft is out. Leaving aside the past 20 years of hating on them, I've periodically dipped a toe in their ecosystem, and I have to say, it's not for me. I'm an old UNIX gearhead going back 25 years; DEC-descended operating systems don't make intuitive sense to me, and Windows hurts my head. So, realistically, that leaves Linux — because the one non-negotiable requirement is a platform for running Scrivener, and Scrivener is available in public beta on Linux.

Anyway. Could I work on Linux again? I used to, but I more or less abandoned it as a desktop platform by 2002. The question festered. Then, a few days ago, I remembered: I had a two year old 11" Macbook Air with OSX 10.8.5 aboard, gathering dust in a corner of the office—the travel machine I superannuated this summer and haven't got around to selling yet. And Ubuntu 13.10 is just out. Why not ...?

A quick check of the supported hardware database showed that installing Ubuntu on a late 2011/early 2012 Macbook Air (dual core i7, aka MacBookAir4-2) is in fact possible; the only unsupported hardware is the Thunderbolt bus, and as I don't have any Thunderbolt peripherals that's no obstacle. I also have a SuperDrive DVD rewriter, which makes life easier (burning bootable USB sticks on a Mac is a bit of a black art—one I never had cause to master). So: go to other laptop, download desktop Ubuntu CD image, burn onto DVD-R, and then prep laptop to receive installation.

The first step was to bring OSX on the old Airbook up to spec, installing updates, and to clear up all the cruft that accumulates over time. Then I used Disk Utility to check the OSX partition and then shrink it down to around 50Gb of the 250Gb SSD, and turn the surplus space into a single MSDOS partition. Next step: install rEFIt, the EFI firmware boot manager. (I wanted to keep a bootable OSX partition in case of firmware updates from Apple. This Airbook isn't one of the ones with the faulty SSDs that Apple have just issued a product recall for, but you never know ...) Finally, having installed a boot manager, I booted Ubuntu 13.10 off the DVD, and told it to go forth and install on my Airbook in the spare DOS partition. Installation went cleanly, and about an hour later I had a Macbook Air running Linux for the first time ...

First thoughts. I haven't run a Linux desktop in anger for a decade, and not everything is an improvement. In particular, the Unity desktop is pretty horrible, especially with a single-button mouse. If you're going to install Ubuntu on a Mac you really need to have a spare multibutton mouse kicking around before you start, if only so that you can configure the machine to work properly with an Apple trackpad. I found the trackpad calibration was a bit off-center, and the lack of a right-click area annoying—I'm going to attack this later when I have some spare time, but for now, I have a bluetooth mouse.

Did I say the Unity desktop got up my nose? It gets up my nose. It gets painfully far up my nose when combined with Amazon product placement ads. Luckily these can be removed cleanly by uninstalling the package that provides this functionality (but IIRC in 13.10 the package name is no longer unity-lens-shopping; I found it by skimming the list of unity packages installed on my system, and really should have taken written notes). But Unity is still a mickey mouse level program launcher aimed at non-techies; it's as if the folks at Canonical have tried to copy the toy-like appearance of Mac OS X without actually providing the underlying shortcuts and power tools that make it acceptable to serious folks who like to get stuff done.

Luckily salvation isn't far away: one sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop later and I had XFCE 4 instead of Unity. Again, some tweaking is needed; but at least it's a real desktop.

Installing Scrivener went relatively smoothly as per the instructions; I haven't set up spell checking yet, but it runs okay and can open large projects. It's Scrivener 1.5, as opposed to the 2.5 release current on the Mac, so not all the newer features are available, but it can still open projects from the Mac environment, which is good.

Other stuff: I installed Dropbox, of course, for file synchronisation. And I pointed Thunderbird at my email accounts, and set up Firefox synchronisation too. LibreOffice I'm leaving for now, but will in due course copy my profile over from the Mac to see what works.

All in all, about a day's work got me to a point where I was within sight of a working environment. I haven't selected a password management tool to replace SplashID on the Mac yet, and there are some rough edges—a non-working .desktop launcher file for Scrivener, me trying to get my head around how to best set up XFCE for my needs, importing music files from iTunes.

But the surprising thing is how much stuff just worked out of the box.

During the installation process, Ubuntu asked if I wanted to use the correct proprietary wifi chipset driver (a Broadcomm device), then installed it and connected to my household WPA2-secured wifi network without any fuss. The bluetooth wizard picked up the mouse easily enough and after a minor trial-and-error fumble to work out what default password to use, paired with it just fine. The screen worked perfectly first time. Audio? Just worked, thanks. USB ditto. When I close the lid it suspends, and when I open the lid it wakes up again. This is not the Linux I'm used to, where installing it on a laptop involved lots of swearing over recalcitrant device drivers and late night custom kernel builds. I could actually work on this platform. I'd have to spend a working week (rather than the single day so far) fine-tuning everything, but at the end of the day I'd have a Linux laptop where everything I care about just works. And it's fast. Boot to desktop in about ten seconds. Everything loads in a flash. Linux is a relatively austere operating system by the standards of a recent Mac OS X release, or Windows 8; on a dual core i7 laptop with 4Gb of RAM and a big SSD, it feels like greased lightning.

Postscript: No, I am not going to migrate to Linux this year. As I said, I'm not going there unless Apple force me to walk the plank at gun-point. I will in due course vape the Airbook and shuffle it off to a new home with someone who appreciates OSX. But in the meantime, it's an interesting experiment to try. Newer hardware might be less forgiving (I gather there are issues with running Linux on a Haswell Mac, and even bigger issues on machines with retina displays such as the Macbook Pro I'm typing this blog entry on), but the combination of a lightweight operating system and last-but-one-generation hardware delivers perfectly acceptable performance for my productivity purposes. And I can sleep easier, knowing that I'm not locked in.

The latest possibly-not-that-well-thought-out idea in the debate about protecting children online comes from the little-known QUANGO The Authority for Television On Demand, or ATVOD for short. As the catchy name suggests, ATVOD has a responsibility for regulating on-demand video programming in the UK, a large portion of which will be delivered by internet or internet-like connections. One of their regulations prohibits the hosting of many forms of pornography unless behind a paywall or similar to prevent access by under-18s¹, i.e. no free samples.

But it appears ATVOD have decided to exceed their remit of regulating UK content in the name of WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! They’ve spotted a problem in that non-UK internet sites do not need to follow UK rules (Surprise, surprise) and that many sites offer free samples before paying. Being powerless to intervene directly and enforce UK rules on them, ATVOD decided to follow the money instead and have asked the banks to block payments to these sites. Whoever came up with this idea clearly hasn’t spent enough time on the internet (Or talking to politicians) for several reasons.

First, ATVOD and the banks are arbitrarily deciding what is right and wrong with no democratic oversight. That the banks might acquiesce to this request is in itself worrying, although we only have ATVOD’s word on it that they are thinking of doing so. There were many statements from the Home Office indicating that ISPs were going to introduce a default-block on porn on the internet, which turned out to be fibs…

Secondly, we are not the world’s police and our laws are different from other countries. What is illegal to access until you are 18 in this country might be quite legal at 16 in another, or might be totally unlawful regardless of age. The UK is a small part of the internet as a whole² and it does not seem likely that the majority of foreign providers will want to pay a UK regulator and have to work with UK standards. By extension, they would also need to work with and pay money to the other 205 sovereign states of the world.

Unless you happen to be America, a single government does not carry anywhere near enough influence to alter de-facto internet standards like that. Even if you are America, it usually doesn’t work.

And finally, the attempt to block money appears to be born entirely of spite, or perhaps protectionism for the UK VoD industry. The majority of foreign content providers are not going to care enough about the UK market to do anything. That means the content ATVOD is so worried about – the free samples of pornography that is not behind a paywall – will continue to be accessible.

There are better ways to do this. Reputable adult sites in general do not want kids accessing them, as it is bad publicity and kids generally do not have the money to pay for anything so there is little point. Voluntary systems existed such as ICRA, but that system failed due to lack of takeup. Perhaps if organisations like ATVOD cooperated internationally to promote such voluntary systems rather than trying to force their own rules on everyone else, we might make some progress.

^1. In practice, a paywall that requires a credit card to prove you are 18. Rules on credit cards will differ between countries, so this is another area that would need country-specific handling.

^2. About 2%, based on Wikipedia.

“It seemed bizarre that events so serious would be linked causally with a rarified form of academic talk,” Stanley Fish wrote after receiving a call from a reporter asking if September 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. “But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played serious variations on the same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country’s resolve.” — Joan Didion

Sure, kid, I remember postmodernism. Take a knee, and I’ll tell you what I know.

Fact is, I purt near invented the stuff. Well, be fair, me and the boys down at the Cafe Hebron. The Cafe Ivrogne, we used to call it, haw haw. It was me, Ronnie Barthes, Paul Virilio — Paulie the Rock, we called him, because he had rocks in his head. That’s what you used to say when a guy was stupid, that he had rocks in his head. We didn’t mean it literally. We used to do stuff like that. Anyway, the three of us, plus Georgie Bataille, Jack Dorito and his girlfriend Julia Kristeva, Gil Deleuze, and that weedhead from the Institute, Johnny Leotard. But your old grandpa, he was a real mover and shaker. People like to say that it was Dorito who came up with post-structuralism, but it was really me. I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. How were we to realize? Anyway, I don’t really remember what it was, but I’m positive it was me that thunk it up.

Oh, we’d have a grand old time down at the the Ivrogne. We’d get three sheets to the wind on cheap Shiraz, pick apart a Donald Bartheleme novel — this was back when there was still paper novels, you understand — and then bust the place up. When someone would get on our case about it we’d just say we were shaped by societal imperatives or were reacting against the strictures of an arbitrary behavioral construction or some such. It was all a load of crap, of course, but we kept it up as long as we could get away with it, which turned out to be longer than we thought. We were young and raising hell. Next thing you know we were spouting a bunch of crazy nonsense like all cultures being of equal value, or how words didn’t really mean the same thing all the time, or how what was true for one person wasn’t necessarily true for everybody else. It didn’t seem like treason. You get enough of the grape in you, you’ll say anything.

By the 1990s — sure, kid, I remember the 1990s, do you know how old I am? Anyway, by the 1990s, we were riding high. We were sitting on top of the world, figuratively speaking, of course. From Paris to Sin City, structuralism and deconstructionism ruled the roost. Our values were everybody’s values. Why, back then, if there was a kid your age who couldn’t quote Capitalism and Schizophrenia cover to cover, I never met him. Nothin’ got said or done from coast to coast without we gave the okay. It was a good time to be a postmodernist.

Then, of course, came September 11th.

It seems like a million years ago, even though I see from the calendar it was only 57. I wouldn’t even remember the date if it weren’t for all the banners, and how we all get to march in the parade each year. That’s when Saddam bin-Laden’s men flew them planes into the Empire State Building. We put him right soon enough, it’s true, but in the meantime, you just can’t imagine how devastating it all was. It completely wiped out the irony industry — at the time, Lower Manhattan was the world’s leading producer of irony, so you can guess what it did to the economy. I bet you haven’t even seen any irony around these parts for at least 20 years, have you, kid?

No, that’s ironing. Aaah, forget it, it’s too complicated to explain.

Anyway, besides that, and also all the people who died I guess, it pretty much put an end to the glory days of postmodernism. Our stranglehold on American culture came crashing to a halt. We thought it would last forever, you know? I mean, after all, any American citizen worth his salt could talk for hours about themes of alienation in the works of Batatille, and the young folks were so under our sway that Dorito, that Ralph-Lauren-looking so-and-so, was the most in-demand poster boy this side of Lance Bass. But it all ended just as quick as it started. Almost overnight, the country sobered up and remembered that everything had a simple solution and that we were always in the right. So we all of us shook our heads and blinked, like boys on a bender waking up to the harsh morning hangover, and realized all the incredible damage we’d done.

A few of the hardcore guys like Stan Fish and my ex, Sue Sunday, desperately tried to keep up the façade. I can see them now, drunk as lords, yammering away on the Op/Ed page of the New York Times about alternate historical narratives, the importance of understanding divergent social norms, and the inevitably legacy of a schizophrenic foreign policy. It was pathetic. Couple of old drunks, dancing for pennies, trying to bring back the old days.

Hell, I can’t say as I blame ‘em. I used to be ‘em. Even now, every once in a while, they’ll announce another bombing or another drone strike or another expansion of the security state, and I’ll find myself thinking of a skeptical critique, or remembering that pretty girl Joanie Didion talking about Israel, or poor old Norm Chompsky.

But then the day rolls around, and we all get to march in the parade, and there’s all those magnificent flags. Then I forget.