The Generator News has gone visual for the launch of the book Your Life Your Planet.
This sound file was first recorded in 2005 and has been updated a number of times. It has now been set to music. It cannot be included in podcasts and vidcasts, because we do not own the copyright to the Bowie song.
The demise of regional newspapers in Australia is the latest reminder that the business model of media has been broken by the Internet. Funneling tax-payer dollars from the ABC into regional print may not be the most intelligent response, however.
There is a widely held and often expressed assumption that independent journalism has flourished under and been supported by “the rivers of gold” that represented classified advertising in particular but advertising in general. It follows that the transition of those funding dollars away from traditional media to facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon et al has created a vacuum once occupied by the fourth estate, that governments now attempt to address.
This narrative has led to a number of government interventions, including the attempted regulation of online communication systems, the calling of executives before committees of elected officials, and threats to frame legislation that curtails special privileges enjoyed by tech companies or reinforces the advantages given to traditional media companies.
That narrative is overlaid by privacy concerns, the veracity of news and the use of mass media by foreign actors to manipulate the democratic process. All these factors combine to create a wicked problem of the first order, that will only be resolved over coming decades as we shape a new communications system and political process that can operate within it.
There are a number of important elements missing from this narrative, and their absence makes it all the more difficult to understand what is happening. Adding in these elements, adds to the complexity of the picture but, at the same time, makes it easier to understand.
Implicit in this narrative is the assumption that a separation of powers in traditional media allowed journalism to flourish independently from the influence of powerful advertisers.
Of course, that separation of powers did exist in the great media properties of our time and launched brilliant examples of holding truth to power and fine traditions such as the protection of sources and other forms of immunity that allowed journalists into war zones under similar conditions we have come to expect for medical services.
It was never universal, however, and it only existed at all through the impassioned efforts of its greatest defenders.
In general, media owners have wielded great power through their ownership of communication networks and have used that power in the same way that bankers have, to control and manipulate the polity for their own ends. Rupert Murdoch quoted mentor Lord Beaverbrook as “selling to the masses to eat with the kings” and since backing Fraser in 1975 has consistently taken his role as king-maker very seriously. He recently re-organised News Limited specifically to separate the cash-cows from the influence-wielding consumers of capital. He is not pretending any more that his media ownership is a business concern.
The first newssheets carried only advertisements and gradually the printers realised that they could use the “eyeballs” they had garnered to influence people and thus the editor was born. The relationship between advertising and journalism is entirely arbitrary and opportunistic with journalism the dependent parasite feeding on the rivers of gold. The television headlines, the day’s talking points and the front page of the newspaper have always been out of the hands of the editorial department and in the hands of the media proprietor regardless of the popular perception to the contrary.
The significance of this is to recognise that it is up to the journalism community to follow the money and find the way to use the evolving platform to promote truth, rather than to preserve some blessed alliance that is under threat.
The manipulation of popular sentiment through public ritual is as old as religion and has experienced various historical climaxes in Olympic and Roman Games, public executions, football and mass rallies famously choreographed by twentieth century dictators.
The far more subtle collection and collation of personal data by secret police or other informer networks has an equally ancient and unvenerable history. The techniques were refined by the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In a parallel but similar universe, the combination of the printing press, postal system and global capitalism allowed the Readers Digest to create a user-pays, infotainment network in which the customer, come content consumer, pays to build an increasingly accurate profile of their preferences so they can be drip-fed content-on-demand for a fee. The combination of base subscriptions supplemented with one-off fees for special products was well established by the sixties and fed into a burgeoning mail-order network that sold a significant portion of the retail trade operating in that decade.
As a young Packer editor in the 1990s, I was flown to New York and Boston to study the techniques of database mining which was then responsible for a third of US magazine revenue, the other two thirds being cover price and advertising. The value of that information network was confirmed by the business model of the trade magazines which I edited, which had no coverprice and, in the US, made equal amounts from advertising and database sales. The investment Packer made in my trip was to be returned by doubling the revenue of the trade stable using the knowledge newly acquired on that trip.
Computers were instrumental in managing this volume of information, but there was only a nascent computer network, that information was collected exclusively via the postal and telephone networks and collated on computers in media company head offices.
The surveillance state and the commercial publishing industry moved in parallel to extend those capacities as more of us began to participate electronically, but the model existed well before the World Wide Web or mobile phone.
The importance of understanding this is to realise that the manipulation of people through collecting and collating information about their participation in public entertainment, spectacle and conversation is not new, and has always been the justification for funding and developing many of the public institutions that we consider to be important pillars of civilisation.
It has always been the case that institutional power, regardless of its philosophical justification, demands the sacrifice of the individual. Every solider is prepared to die for their General, Commander, King or cause. We bow down in worship because we understand, ie stand under, the Omnipresent power of our God, gods, their divine representatives or our local bully boy.
It is the nature of the organisation to protect itself and an essential ingredient of that operating principle that no individual is above the law, the lord, Lord or the lore. The dark side of that principle is intimate state control of your person through surveillance and coercion.
Venice, the Innovation Hub that harnessed the printing press and double entry accounting to dominate European commerce and intellectual life for two centuries used a sophisticated surveillance state to underpin it’s rule of law. Shylock’s pound of flesh was the sacrifice made buy every Venetian to keep the riches flowing.
The notion that the common good is served by individual rights is a relatively modern proposition known as liberal humanism. It assumes that we can align personal desires with the needs of the state and so govern in the broader interests of the people. It conflates all of us, with each of us.
Cooperative sensibilities are generally promoted by conservative governments in good times and progressive or radical governments in tough times. We sacrifice our individual freedoms for the common good when we are convinced we will be better off doing so. Sometimes that conviction stems from fear, at other times by opportunity, but the system always comes unstuck when the contract does not hold.
Brexit, Trump, Erdogan, Duterte, and Bolsonaro are all made possible by the end of the continuous growth enjoyed over the last fifty years. Thanks to cheap oil, the ‘democratisation’ of debt and an increase in the global population by an order of magnitude we enjoyed three drivers of economic plenty that ensured we were each better off than our parents. Now those drivers have dried up, we fight over the scraps, yelling at each other “What about me?”
The supreme selfishness evolving from a lifetime of unfettered affluence (literally) has now run headlong into the harsh reality that there is rarely enough to satisfy everyone and some of us get our share at the expense of others. The advocates of abundance-thinking do not work in African mines or live in trash mountains on the fringes of the world’s megacities. Europeans across the planet consider their freedom of choice as a benefit of the Enlightenment. The awful truth is that Free Thought has been built on an affluence that has been won by conquest.
The relevance of this to the debate about how to best ‘recover’ the independence of the world’s media is to check our privilege. We have experienced the luxury of the welfare state, a free press and relatively even distribution of wealth, that does not make it our natural right.
The battle for power using new communications technologies is only now taking shape. An attempt to preserve twentieth century business models because we understand them is the modern equivalent of defending horse-drawn transport on the basis of the revolutionary nature of the automobile. It is true, but it is irrelevant. It is a distraction from the real problem of maximising the benefits of the revolution and avoiding its greatest dangers.
I am not advocating that we should roll over to the narco-villians, arms traders or energy ogliarchs, pop the blue pill and harness ourselves to the matrix. I am, though, suggesting that it is not enough to invoke the righteous wrath of John Stuart Mills or the poetry of Pablo Nerada in the hope that we might shame the one-per-crore into putting down the reins of power and raising Vaclav Pavel from the dead so that he can run Google.
Had governments a century ago thought through the impact of the car on the village, the inner city and the market town, transport policy may have been more broadly discussed and less nineteenth century infrastructure dismantled. On the other hand, maintaining horse troughs and street sweepers would not have proved terribly productive.
The role of governments in the media is extremely chequered. The Australian Broadcasting Cooperation like the British version on which it is modeled has a long and proud tradition of independence and calling truth to power. On the other hand government media and communications policy has been shaped to benefit its powerful owners.
We now need to start imagining and demanding the services made possible by the network and imagining the way we communicate in 50, 100 and 500 years. Along the way we will need to crack the heads of the constantly evolving rogues who mis-use it to gain personal advantage at the expense of the rest of us but that regulation is very different role from planning and building it properly.
The printing press combined with numeracy and modern accounting to bring down the Church, empower the Guilds and fund the enlightenment. That involved bloody revolutions, religious fundamentalism and global imperialism at the same time as it nurtured the human rights of Europeans. It banished the epic poem and the oral tradition at the same time as it vastly democratised language, created the scientific journal and the newspaper.
The Internet will have a similar revolutionary effect and will be just as messy. It is time we stopped bleating about what we are losing and started focusing on what we might build.
Got a ruler, a pencil and a piece of paper? You have everything you need to delve into the fascinating world of tessellation with pentagons.
Cairo Tiling is a fascinating pattern named after some street pavers in the Egyptian city and part of a fascinating set of space-filling Pentagons that has been the subject of research by mathematicians and amateurs over the last century.
That master of patterns, Escher has taken the pattern to another level.
Writing on Medium, Catherine Halloway @femion, has provided some relatively simple programming code to generate Cairo Tiling. Her published pattern is shown above, the code for creating it is linked here and is reproducible by anyone who knows how to program.
This article shows a very simple way to generate the pattern with no mathematics at all.
You can do it at home with a ruler and some graph paper, or you can use computer drawing software to generate it. The great thing about this method is that you can fiddle a little bit to create many other related patterns.
The first step is to rule a bunch of squares. At a minimum you will need four, I found it easier to start with nine.
Now put a dot in one square, preferably half way between the corner of the square and the middle.
… and repeat for every square.
Now join that dot to the three closest corners
… and repeat. There are your first set of hexagons.
Now copy that and flip it over.
If you are using pen and paper you can skip the next step.
If you are using graphics software. Draw the dots and the lines on a separate layer from the squares, cut and paste to a third layer, then flip the third layer.
Now move the flipped layer so its corners are in the middle of the first layer.
You can see that I have moved my example half a square to the right and half a square down.
If you are using paper and pencil, photo copy your hexagons, and put the two copies on a window with one of them face down (upside down or back to front), shift the top one around until it looks like the drawing below and trace the pattern onto the top piece of paper.
Now trim it and remove the squares. Bingo!
I have breaks at the corners of my tiles where I removed the square lines.
Depending what you are planning to do with it, you can avoid that, or use that as a guide to generate square tiles, prints or fabric that repeat to produce the Cairo tiling pattern when they are joined together.
Note that the pentagons are not symmetrical. That is because I have told you to put the dot in the middle of one corner of the square. With a bit of fiddling you can use variations on this approach to produce many of the patterns described in the Wikipedia article on Cairo Tiling. The point of this article is to give you a quick way to produce a fascinating pattern.
White Australians struggling with approaches to justice for First Nations people might consider a Radical Republic, writes Geoff Ebbs.
The coincidence of the Queens Birthday long weekend and the Black Lives Matter rallies encouraged me to dust off an old idea during today’s episode of EcoRadio.
Many Australians have had enough of the Sax-Coburg-Gotha regime. Prince Andrew’s privileged attempts to avoid his association with Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking of children only further sickens the public. The Palace letters between the Queen and her Governor General regarding his dismissal of an elected Australian Government 45 years ago emphasise the fraught nature of our relationship. We care little for an ancient and totally irrelevant European royal family and understand fully why Harry might want to leave the firm. Australian republicans certainly do.
Let’s juxtapose those reflections on the perverted nature of the British Crown with the impassioned demands for justice for the First Nations people over this weekend. This is an ancient and sustainable civilisation who had their land stolen by British colonists. Some of the white guilt accumulated over the last two hundred years has been assuaged by Land Rights legislation, the Mabo case and numerous Royal (there’s that word again) Commissions finding systemic injustice toward our First Nation people. The general feeling after this weekend is that we have talked enough. Now it is time for action and the first order of business is to stop killing black people.
As a stale pale male, literally a patriarch, I cannot and do not pretend to speak for First Nation people. I am speaking on behalf of myself, though, when I propose a simple solution to a purely white construct.
The British Navy came and stuck a British flag on this soil and claimed it for the British Crown using the legal fiction of Terra Nullius to justify the claim. As a result we emboss the Queen’s head on all our coins, we celebrate the Queen’s Birthday with the Queen’s Honours List and our head of state is a vice regal apparatchik reporting directly to the Queen. Any land which has not been bought, sold or assigned to a particular government department is legally known as Crown Land, our armies serve the Queen through our vice-regal head of state. The Governor General of Australia and the Governor of each state report directly to the Queen. All minerals under the surface of the earth are the property of the Crown and the mining companies that dig them up pay royalties to the Crown, collected and managed by the Australian Government on the Crown’s behalf. Public Servants may no longer have a picture of the Queen on every office wall, but they labour On Her Majesty’s Service (OHMS) and swear an oath of allegiance to her as the crowned Head of State. So do any applicants for citizenship to this country.
The simple solution is just to give that all back.
Everything that we currently cede to the British Crown should just go back to the sovereign First Nation. This simple move directly reverses the fiction of Terra Nullius. Such a simple, legal declaration does not jeopardise the property rights of any Australians, in fact, the only rights affected are those of the so-called British Royals. The Australian Parliament, public servants, Scout Groups, the local copper and the Defense Forces will all serve the First Nation people in the same way that they have served the Queen.
It is up to the First Nation people how they want to organise their side of this arrangement. They get to decide what goes on the back of the Australian coinage, in the corner of the Australian flag, and on the front of official government correspondence. They determine who the Governor General is and whether any particular Act of Parliament receives assent. The top legal inquiries in the land will no longer be Royal Commissions but XXX Commissions, the lawyers who make representations to the highest courts in the land become XXX Counsels. Australian sailors will no longer serve on Her Majesty’s Australian Ship (HMAS) and so on, down the line.
It is simple, it is just, it is clean and it is logical.
All of the objections I have ever had to the idea are conceptual, rather than practical. Many of them express the view that it would be weird to be ruled by ‘a people’. My response is that it is no more weird to be ruled by a foreign family. The other response is that there is no formal structure to replace the Crown. Interestingly, the British Constitution is not documented. It is simply the accumulation of centuries of precedent. Under British and Australian law, anything that is not nailed down by some other written contract belongs, by default, to the Sax-Coburg-Gothas. I don’t like that.
I, for one, would gladly join a re-invigorated Republican movement dedicated to replacing the rule of the Sax-Coburg-Gothas with the primacy of our First Nations people.
The privacy versus safety debate examines the wrong dilemma,
according to Geoff Ebbs.
Numerous podcasts and current affairs programs have raised privacy concerns this week around track and trace software proposed by the Australian government. They generally framed the debate with safety as one horn of the dilemma and privacy as the other. The question is most regularly posed in the form, “How much privacy we are prepared to sacrifice to obtain the safety offered by the track and trace application proposed by the Australian government?”
This article does not seek to devalue privacy concerns.
There is no doubt that governments have aggressively adopted surveillance and centralisation of data to strengthen their power over the population. Although essentially a democrat rather than an anarchist, I have a great deal of sympathy for Proudhorn’s view that “To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”
Despite the High Court ruling last week that the Australian Federal Police used an illegal warrant to enter the home of journalist Annika Smethurst, they made no ruling to prevent the police from keeping the data they had illegally gained. Despite the High Court ruling last week that the Australian Federal Police used an illegal warrant to enter the home of journalist Annika Smethurst, they allowed the federal police to keep the data they had illegally gained. It is beyond irony that the AFP used illegal means to shut down a journalistic investigation into spying on Australian Citizens by the Australian Signals Directorate. The story involves layers of abuse by government agencies carrying out surveillance on citizens.
So, concerns about privacy are completely legitimate. The problem emerges in the assumption that there is an inverse relationship between privacy and safety. That there is a direct trade-off and we must choose how far we want to push the slider along a spectrum between full privacy at one end and full safety at the other.
Without going into the deeper technical details of the various approaches being proposed to track and trace we can carry out a simple thought experiment between two possible and radically different approaches to reaching the end goal of tracking and tracing.
One approach, commonly called the Bluetooth approach, is to provide unique IDs to each citizen and then to record what other citizens you have spent more than 15 minutes with in your phone. The other approach is commonly referred to as the GPS approach and it maps your location over time, providing the possibility of identifying who you were near at any given time over a certain period.
The Bluetooth approach is considered superior for a number of reasons, and a version of it has been selected by the Australian government. The most widely discussed reason is the better accuracy of the system. The GPS data is easily confused when people are in the same building, but not near to each other, for example. The Bluetooth method ensures you are close enough to share a signal, which roughly equates to breathing the same air.
There is a fundamental difference to the nature of the data and the world model involved. This is really important, if a little abstract.
The Bluetooth model, at its simplest, simply stores a list of ids that you have shared space with for more than 15 minutes. It requires a date to be stored along with the ID so that you can eliminate people who you shared space with outside the incubation period of the virus. Other than that, nothing else is required. So, when you are found to have CoViD19, ie test positive for a response to the virus named SARS-CoV2, you supply the list of IDs you have had contact with to the government and they are duly notified. That’s it.
The model of the world maintained by this method is a record of interactions. If that was fully shared, we could build a day by day account of who was with whom, which may be useful for lots of reasons, especially if shared with other data, but in itself it need not constitute surveillance of a particularly invasive kind. It also requires a relatively small amount of data. 1 billion people, each recording a couple of hundred interactions a day, involving two numbers for each transaction – the ID and the date. That is two hundred billion numbers a day, roughly a trillion numbers a week.
The GPS model, on the other hand, records the location of every individual on a map of the world at some time interval, say every minute. This necessarily has to be centrally stored, because the amount of data required to record your location like this would swamp many people’s phones. The result is that your every move is available to the data holder, and everyone who has access to it, for as long as it is stored. The amount of data required is phenomenal. Every person requires at least two numbers to identify which of the 149 million, million square metres of the earth’s land surface that they occupy and another number (or, more usually, pair of numbers) to identify which minute of which day that space is occupied.
Tracking the same billion people requires (1,000,000,000 * 4 * 86,000)= 346 thousand trillion numbers per day or roughly one and half million, trillion numbers a week. That requires one million times the storage of the alternative.
There is little wonder that the Morrison government has opted for the Bluetooth model.
The purpose of this analysis is not to confirm the wisdom of the Morrison government’s decision, indeed they may not implement the simple and benign solution outlined above, but to identify the different dimensions involved in building such solutions and the relationships between the social, political and technical aspects of those solutions.
The simplest Bluetooth approach offers a solution that reduces the quantity of data by a factor of one million, that is six orders of magnitude. The elegance of that approach seems inherently valuable just because of these data savings. It also provides a much less intrusive data model by focusing on the data required to achieve the specific outcome.
In this case, the desire to identify who might infect whom requires us only to record the encounter, not its location, or time. The recording of the encounter obviates the need for mapping any individual’s journey. The improved requirements analysis reduces the problem significantly.
The general preference for simple solutions is generally captured by technologists under the heading of elegance. The value of elegance in programming has similarities to the core principle of Occam’s Razor, “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity” or in modern business English, “Keep It Simple Stupid.”
Similar logic applies to the concerns expressed over the nature of targeted advertising in late 2019. Scott Morrison insisted that Google and Facebook provide data on who had been shown what advertisements. They resisted on the basis that it would be impossible. You only have to think for a moment about the amount of data storage that such an endeavour would require to realise that it is inordinately easy to imagine systems that generate more data than it is capable to process. I have crashed more than a few computer systems in my time with such infinitely expansionary code.
One thing that results from the simple, elegant solution of capturing only the ID of those in close contact is that it separates the requirement or tracking and tracing from any external surveillance concerns. The important thing in this case is that it removes any purported relationship between privacy and safety.
Some artificial Intelligence systems apply similar simplification to resolving navigation problems. I studied an introduction to Robotics with Professor Agris Nikitenko at Riga Technical University in Latvia. His team has produced world champion sumo robots using AI sensors that predict the movements of their opponents.
He told me that the research they are carrying out mimic the sonar systems of bats and other biological navigation techniques. He said that one of the key findings was to lose the notion that they had to build a map of the world and then identify their place in it. “That is a very modern rationalist approach to the world,” he said, “We can build far more effective solutions just by recognising what is a door or, more generally, what is a possible entrance or exit, rather than trying to build an entire map.”
The general approach of modern AI to simply identify successful results in masses of data, rather than trying to construct a system of meaning (or map) of how that data might hang together is at the basis of many systems we use every day. Recommendations of music, entertainment and consumer goods that we might like, route mapping across cities, risk assessments by insurance companies and banks; all these use AI that develops solutions from the bottom up examination of detail rather than the top down application of meaning.
Our understanding of virology and the development of vaccines has moved in a similar direction, leaving behind the development and testing of hypothesis to the generation and testing of models based on large data sets.
This mimics the random nature of evolution. It is always tempting to anthropomorphise evolution by attributing intention to specific genes. The truth is that quite complex behaviours can be generated and explained by relatively simple variations in the base coding. The evolution of an ant colony, for example, can be explained with eleven rules or less, including simple things like “put waste far away from food.” That includes quite complex social behaviours such as “older, established ant nests are more mellow than younger ones which need to be more aggressive to establish their basic infrastructure.”
Technical co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, once explained the notion of the company’s slogan “the network is the computer” to me by describing “the ballet of the network” as data flowed between people. He said we have moved beyond the Information Age to the Participation Age. His view was that the network is the wiring for the organism that is civilisation.
In the Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of a meme as conveying “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” in a similar way that a gene provides a physiological unit of transmission.
In 1992 I wrote in PC Week that the concept of Gaia, that the planet is an organism, meets Dawkins’ concept of the meme and Joy’s concept of the network in the concept that computer codes is the DNA of civilisation. In the same way that ancient bacteria exist as individual entities in their original habitat and also as enzymes in our digestive tract. Just as we humans are meta-organisms containing the evolutionary history of the cells from which we are built, so are we nodes in the network which is the organism of the future.
Architect, philosopher and accidental grandfather of modular programming, Christoper Alexandar addressed the 1996 convention of Object Oriented Programmers (OOPSLA) in San Jose with a challenge. His recognition as a founder of Object Oriented Programming was based on its use of his modular combination of patterns in architecture to create “good buildings.” He noted that his life’s work had been to identify what was morally good in architecture and what was amoral or worse. His challenge to the 1996 conference was that while they had adopted his approaches to generate efficient, fast and elegant code, there had been no attempts to build a moral framework into the code itself.
“What I am proposing here is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing.”
In the discussion of how we best design and manage the computer systems that increasingly dominate our lives, we need to keep a very clear head about exactly what it is we are doing.
The future is already here, it just not evenly distributed
My social media feed is full of people desperately wondering why governments have responded to the spread of CoViD19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a reasonably urgent and coordinated manner over days and weeks but have actively opposed action on Climate Change over decades.
Of course, the content of one’s feed tells us more about the person than the world in general, but the question is an important one and has probably occurred to you.
The general consensus is that the immediate and personal danger triggers much greater fear than an abstract and distant one. Logically, we should also blame the well-funded campaign by the coal lobby and the world’s largest investment banks, and the general resistance to management by government from the neo-liberal right.
It is important to note that the neo-liberal resistance to government interference has emerged in response to SARS-CoV-2 in the form of statements promoted by Donald Trump “the cure should not be worse than the disease” and the lieutenant-governor of Texas Dan Patrick “I would rather die than see public-health measures damage the economy”. It is also important to note, though, that while this has derailed the attempts to provide a nationwide response in the US, many states have ignored the President and have acted on their own. The neo-liberal control of public-affairs is not complete.
Long term considerations about how we manage global heating and the ensuing climate chaos need to take account of these responses. That learning will guide our efforts to lobby government and loosen the hold of their corporate masters at the same time as we act independently to build resilient and robust communities.
This article examines our actual responses to the existing threat to support that learning rather than attempting to discern the reasons why responses to climate chaos have been less than robust. The basis for that is that we have a rare and unusual social experiment where one single factor has caused major social change. The different responses around the world allow us to examine other variables and so separate the observations about effectiveness of different responses from the arguments about the nature of the threat. The climate debate has become toxic largely because of the deliberate fouling of the waters by a well-funded denialist lobby. That distraction has been removed in the response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, providing us with a clear view of many things that have previously seemed confusing.
It is also worth noting that this article assumes that the term “intelligence” is a combination of its meaning in “military intelligence” (notwithstanding its common use as an example of an oxymoron) and its use in the term IQ (intelligence quotient), by which we mean someone’s ability to perceive solutions to problems.
We collect intelligence as a series of data points, which requires context to build knowledge and experience to produce wisdom, so data by itself is not intelligence. But our view of the world is, like Plato’s shadows on the wall of a cave, a crystal ball that captures all that data and holds it for our examination. In that sense, the clarity of that ball, the lack of cracks and fissures such as might be caused by brain damage or trauma, or the cloudiness and lack of clarity that might be caused by drug use, tiredness or dementia mean that intelligence of the IQ type depends on a combination of the completeness of the intelligence of the military category and the clarity of the crystal ball.
This is important because the CoViD 19 pandemic provides us with an enormous, global data set, unclouded by the vagueness of the future and the deliberate obfuscation of facts by a denialist lobby.
The underpinning Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ ethic implicit in the response of Donald Trump and Dan Patrick is so well embedded in our psyche that when the UK chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance said on Sky News that “probably 60% of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity” it was widely reported that the UK government had adopted a ‘business as usual’, ‘let it rip’ strategy to save the economy at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
Radio National’s Dr Norman Swan told Fran Kellly on RNBreakfast early in March that there is a simple trade off between lives and the economy. He said that the US response at that time had been to preserve the economy while, “thankfully”, the Australian government’s response had been to save lives. The echoes of the Climate response boom loudly in my ears as I write … unless that is an impending stroke.
The message has been confused, though.
Keeping schools open is an attempt to preserve the economy. We must keep the economy ticking over to build a bridge to “the other side”. We have not been able to walk away from the mantra that economic growth is the engine that underpins prosperity and we cannot afford to invest in a social safety net, a universal basic income or decent widespread internet because it would harm the economy. The first response was to underwrite banks, give money to airlines (who promptly stood down 80% of their workforce) in a classic neo-liberal injection of money at the big-end of town so that it might ‘trickle down’.
As the sheer weight of scientific evidence, and the deaths of thousands of Europeans, started to sink in we realised that this virus did present a real, immediate and personal threat and that we had to act to manage society in a strong and direct manner and implement strategies that would not only hurt the economy but also be unpopular.
The confusion comes about because of the number of factors at work.
Firstly, if it is a matter of lives versus the economy, then the traditional left right divide drives the political urge to act in particular ways but, apart from loonies like Trump and Patrick, few politicians have the stomach to paraphrase Mao and sacrifice millions of citizens in the name of glory (or the economy).
More subtly, the entire basis of the neo-liberal project and its more recent outcrops like the Koch brothers’ Market Based Management are built on the fiction that the economy is a thing, an entity, that needs protection. Of course, the joint stock company has acted as an entity, spending billions bribing politicians to legislate that fiction to the point where we have all come to believe it, but a fiction it remains. The reason it is so passionately and expensively defended is that it is the mechanism by which the one in ten million people (the one per crore) govern us via their control of the economic system.
The economy, as it is theoretically and ideally presented, is a tool for measuring commercial activity. It is built on the notion of profit and loss and uses the double entry accounting system developed in pre-Mughal India and perfected by the Venetians to manage risk and maximise profit. An ancient chippie once said “the worship of money is the root of all evil” and, though executed for insolence and sedition and misrepresented by the institutions formed in his name, his words ring true today. The neoliberal project conflates money and power as the moral framework for society. When something like the disease CoViD 19 comes along, it presents an unfortunate and inconvenient reminder that nature works in mysterious ways that the ‘economy’ has no means of accounting for.
Again, the echoes of the Climate Wars boom loudly in my ears but this time I don’t think it is an impending stroke I think it is smouldering anger. I could spend pages dissecting the implications of that observation but there is much more to learn from our response to CoViD 19 and so I will move on.
The observation that schools were not closed in Singapore, that South Korea had suppressed and contained the virus and that China is going back to work inspired both a groundswell from an observant and intelligent public ‘why can’t we just isolate for a couple of weeks and then get back to normal?’ and letters signed by hundreds of scientists demanding that governments do more.
On 20th March, Tomas Pueyo published in Medium.com an article entitled the Hammer and the Dance analysing in detail the actions taken by various governments and the corresponding infection and mortality rates.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
He argues that there is a significant difference between Mitigation and Suppression.
He pointed out that South Korea, Singapore and China had totally locked down infected areas, tested everybody who possibly had come in contact with the disease and so isolated and controlled the outbreak. After hitting it with the ‘hammer’ those societies then went into a dance of returning to work but maintaining rigorous and widespread testing and enforced isolation of ill people and possible carriers.
By March 24, newspapers were reporting on the difference between flattening the curve (Mitigation) and bending the curve (Suppression). Scientists around the word had already penned letters to governments questioning the failure to enact strict isolation regimes but had not found an effective rhetoric to win the debate. ‘Flatten the curve’ was such a powerful rhetorical tool that it was not until ‘Bending the curve’ emerged that it was a publicly digestible argument. Dr Pankah Jain introduced those terms to the Australian public in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24, “China achieved it through an unprecedented lockdown, South Korea through widespread testing and contact tracing.”
On March 26th, Dr Norman Swan’s podcast CoronaCast asserted that “we could defeat this virus in six to eight weeks but it would take widespread testing and massive behavioural change.” Australia does not currently have the volume of test kits to test everybody that might have the virus, or the willing cooperation of its population or the security apparatus that would allow the rigorous isolation of all possibly affected people.
There are a number of lessons here for the formation of good climate policy.
And so we come to the really difficult part of the problem: the villain in the mirror.
Many of us know someone who is out there on the front line, swabbing potential victim’s saliva, packing and delivering food parcels to self-isolated candidates, showering and spongeing the frail, disabled and elderly, but most of us are hiding at home whingeing about the comforts we have had to give up.
I have personally spent a large part of the week chasing and securing payments to me and minimising the payments I will have to make as the lock-down proceeds. Of course, we must secure our own oxygen masks first, it is just that many of us forget to help the person next to us once that good clean air starts to flow.
The tourists still travelling around remote Australia, the hoarders emptying the supermarket shelves, the people who could not bear to cancel that dinner party … they are not the ‘other’, we are all guilty. We all put our interests ahead of the common interests. It is not only instinctual, it is sensible. If you do not apply your own oxygen mask first, you cannot help others.
We all know someone who is more selfish than we are, we see the neighbour’s partying, the family down the road hoarding and setting up for the black market that we pray will never come … ‘I don’t want to buy my toilet paper from “them”.’ Most of us know someone more selfless than we are, more caring, more prepared to risk their own well-being to help the community. Doctors and nurses do that everyday and, so, are our current heroes. Two months ago it was firefighters.
There is a spectrum. It is our task to acknowledge where we are on that spectrum, to look at ourselves squarely and say, ‘I have done everything I can to protect myself, now what can I do to help others?’ If that urge does not well up within you, that’s your business, it is your life, live it as you see fit but, for your own sake, do not start complaining about the privileges you have lost. Maintain your privilege quietly, lest the tide of envy turn to anger and wash up against your door.
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this self-examination is that it brings us right back to the opening question about our governments’ responses to global heating and the consequent climate chaos. In a democracy, we get the government we choose. Those choices are limited, stage managed and may only change the puppets but, regardless of the form of governance under which we live, the choices we make ultimately influence the society in which we live.
If we are not prepared to help others, who do we think is going to help us? If we are not prepared to resist tyranny when we see it applied to others we cannot complain when the tyrant tips us onto the street. If we are governed by the survival of the fittest, are you really prepared to get out there and defend your life with tooth and claw?
The answer will be very different depending on the nation you live in, your cultural and moral background. I cannot speak for you or tell you how you should respond.
I can remind you though, that the people you turn to for help when you are in trouble are the people who you should acknowledge as the keepers of your destiny. We call the police when a party turns into a riot, we call the ambulance when a neighbour falls down ill. It is the apparatus of the State that creates the fabric of society and, like it or not, it is the State that holds our destiny. To put our faith in the economy, or our bank account, is short sighted. As Cat Empire put it “there are no credit card advantages on a dead planet.”
The Greeks invented democracy on the basis that the Gods do not rule in our interests. If they exist, they are capricious. To the extent that we can control our own destinies we are the only ones who control our destinies. We make our decisions in the light of the intelligence we have and we are completely responsible for the consequences of those decisions. The blind selection of the Archon by lot using coloured stones was not a popularity contest, it was a lottery. The coloured stones were also used in the same way that we use secret ballots for making choices between two options, but the acceptance of a lottery to choose the first among equals is a fundamental recognition that we are all responsible for our own destinies. If our leader might be any one of us we might pay more attention to good manners and active listening.
This is not a lecture on democracy, it is a reminder that we must put our faith in the institutions we believe in, and so we must individually act to strengthen and preserve those institutions to be the best they can. We invoke this principle in modern safety protocols, Do not walk past a hazard, for example. If we do not take responsibility for the dangers among us, we surrender our well being to those we appoint to look after us. This is at the heart of the divide between the libertarian right and the communal left. The challenge is to provide for both individual freedom and responsibility when we are dependent on a government to protect us from the brutally selfish among us.
When the Black Plague swept through Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century, ordinary people beseeched the gods to spare them and died bemoaning the fact that God had forsaken (or sacrificed) them. By contrast, during the cholera pandemic of the 1850s, people turned to the government to manage the outbreak, provide compensation for the disruption to commerce and to fix the water and sanitation that was discovered by scientists to be the cause of the disease.
We have called for governments to step in and compensate us for lost wages and income, but the government response is muddled because it is torn between protecting the ‘economy’ and the ‘people’. It knows it should but cannot bring itself to exercise the power to banish us all to our homes and test everyone with a sniffle. Our response is muddled because we are torn between protecting our privilege and acting communally.
Both these dilemmas are central to the policies on greenhouse gas emissions.
The dilemma is largely caused by the relationship between affluence and the social contract. The social cooperation required for civilisation to flourish is procured by a contract that we behave properly (communally) and in return get the benefits of cultural, social and economic improvement. As soon as this contract breaks down, we default to the selfish position of looking after ourselves first.
The rapid economic growth of the twentieth century has provided affluence unrivalled in the history of humanity. We each have the luxuries beyond the dreams of ancient kings, we ride in smooth, fast chariots and communicate using polished rocks that send our thoughts to each other through the ether. You could not explain that to a medieval gold smith without invoking magic and alchemy.
That growth has come to an end. It was built on cheap energy, exponential population growth and the ‘democratisation’ of debt. Cheap energy is running out, population growth is killing the environment that sustains us and we cannot personally carry any more debt. We must now take responsibility for our future.
The CoViD 19 pandemic is a window into the future and the way that we individually and communally respond now is the template that we will carry forward to deal with the next challenge and the next challenge and the one after that, as the global systems that support our unsustainable lifestyle fail in the face of increasingly complex challenges.
The future is already here, and this time it is widely distributed.
Future is already here it is not just evenly distributed – usually attributed to William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, who is described in 1992 as having said it. I first heard it in 1990 from Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, who was describing the rise of the graphical user interface (the Mac was the only point and click computer at the time) and the potential of the touch screen (then still a laboratory pipe dream). Metcalfe had worked in Xerox PARC where the first point and click interface was built and driven by the first electronic mouse.
The central notion of the quote, though, is older. Marshal McLuhan wrote in 1967, “the future has already happened”. Futurist Alvin Toffler wrote in 1982, “the future has already begun, which is to say that the present has long since begun to grind to a halt”.
The other part of the adage, that the future is not evenly distributed was used by Gibson to explain his prescience and by Metcalfe to point out that the future has to be invented somewhere, by someone, using existing bits and pieces.
Professor Ian Lowe provided the foreword and cover phrase for my 2008 book, Sydney’s Guide to Saving the Planet: “The future is not somewhere we are going, it is something we are creating.” Our engagement with the future is not passive.
If we can imagine a sustainable world, we can prototype it. We can test that prototype on our friends and neighbours. And that is the way in which the future is created.