The title of this piece is a quote from the late, great American brainy bugger Gore Vidal.  I’m not sure how seriously I actually believe it, but a little pang of…something…went through me yesterday when a friend contacted me to tell me that a novel he’d written (and that I was lucky enough to read in manuscript form) was now fully completed and ‘out there’.  So, before we go further – check out ‘The Ironlane Detective’ by Paul Witham.  Congratulations Paul – you deserve it and I wish you many sales and the beers will be on you!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m lucky to know a lot of very creative people – film makers, craftspeople, writers, musicians, software developers, radio presenters, gardeners, woodworkers, painters, actors, comedians – and I love hearing from them as to how they’re getting on.  It’s just that….well….I don’t seem to have the knack myself.  I have the odd creative splurge every now and again, but it never seems to blossom in to the creative outpourings that many people I know achieve.  Which is odd because in my 20s I turned out books by the box full and articles for the technical press by the dozen – of course, that was in those glorious, pre-Internet days when there were definitely fewer distractions for those of us with butterfly minds!

I think that that is my problem – focus!  I know that when I do set my mind to something I can get it done.  I’m often reminded of Dr Johnson’s comment “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” with regard to my way of managing myself.  I need to be prodded!

As I mentioned in a previous post about Facebook’s purchase of the Instagram mobile photo-mangling application, there is a long and proud tradition in software and Internet industries of companies buying technology and customers.  This is done for the following reasons:

1. The purchasing company can’t be arsed to write or isn’t capable of writing the software being purchased.
2. The purchasing company hasn’t time to wait to write the software or acquire the customers – it may have a pressing deadline…oh, like an IPO?
3. The purchasing company just wants to knock a possible competitor out of the game – exemplified by ‘Bill Gates’ in an episode of The Simpsons where Bill tells his henchmen to ‘buy Homer out’ by kicking his desk over…

In this particular case, Facebook score all three scales – they have an upcoming IPO which will go better if they’re seen to have a big handle on the mobile social media market, they’ll get 35 million new customers and they knock out a potential competitor, all for a billion dollars, which probably looks like a cheap price to the Facebook management right now.

While I was writing that last post, it struck me that the approach taken by Facebook is rather like the Borg in Star Trek; “We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”  Whilst Facebook and similar companies aren’t currently replacing bits of our bodies with technology and absorbing our individuality in to some sort of mindless collective, their effect on the high tech industrial sector is awfully similar.

Where’s Species 8472 when you need them?

I’d been expecting – or should that be suspecting – it for some time but we finally do appear to be in the grip of an Internet Boom to match the real world bust.  When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars – it was back to the good old days of 12 or 15 years ago when money flowed like water and barely a day passed without some new high point in purchases, sales and IPO prices.

So, here we go again.  On a professional level, this purchase doesn’t make much of a difference to the IT world that I inhabit these days.  Much of my work is IT ‘gruntsmanship’ where I’m more worried about referential integrity in a database than I am about making my picture of my cat look ‘interesting’.  Of course, Facebook’s real intention in buying Instagram is probably two-fold – get a chunk of technology that can help them leverage their way in to a more viable mobile presence, and get a potential (albeit relatively small at the moment) competitor out of the picture.  There’s nothing new with this approach – Microosft and Google have both adopted similar approaches at different times in their history.  It’s very much part of the tech playbook.  The sheer size of the deal seems a little crazy and what makes me think ‘bubble’ – a billion dollars in one form or another for a glorified set of Photoshop filters?  Come on….

I’m afraid that I just don’t ‘get’ Instagram – it reminds me too much of the very early days or Desktop Publishing, when everyone went crazy with fonts and created documents that didn’t educate, entertain or inform but simply screamed ‘The bod who wrote me has a new Desktop Publishing Package.’  Lots of photos, all looking the same…so much for creativity.

So, we’ll see what happens next.  The Facebook IPO will be the ‘market maker’ for this new boom, and will also probably flag the high water mark.  On a personal note, I’d like to make soem money out of this boom having missed out on the previous two – I’m a cheap date, have good ideas and am known to work for peanuts – anyone wanting to give me money, I also have some old rope in the garage…

The little grey cells are still going through the mill here at Pritchard Towers as I try and work out who it is I’m going to be voting for on Thursday morning.  Actually, I’ll be voting twice – local election and General Election – and it’s probably safe to say that I’ll vote for different parties in each election.

In a previous post here on Joe’s Jottings I commented that negative voting is not the way forward, and I’m still maintaining that viewpoint.  My current approach is to look at the policies that each party is offering, and the record of the parties in terms of ‘What they say against what they do’.  The policies that matter to me are going to be very different than those that matter to my friends and colleagues, and the general confusion that all of us seem to be having this time around is reflected in the closeness and volatility of the opinion polls, and the intense and occasionally bad-tempered debate and discussion that I’ve witnessed between party activists and leaders in the media and amongst people who I know who are usually pretty much apolitical.

Passion is politics is good – provided it’s positive and focused and not just a knee jerk – ‘Against x because of who they are’, as I said here.   When there is passion and nowhere to focus it, that’s often when the extremists manage to score points by creating policies designed to harvest the strong feelings from people who feel ignored and disenfranchised by the major parties.  I have no doubt that any significant gains by extremist parties within the UK in the General and Local elections will be based on the harvesting of negativity rather than on affirmative votes for the policies they offer.

The question remains for a lot of people – who to vote for, when none of the major parties seem to offer what we want in it’s entirety.  Whichever party gets in, I’m not convinced that there will be significant differences in the what happens in the UK in the next few years.  One party’s cuts may be deeper and more rapidly applied; another party may spread the pain.  Whatever happens, that pain is going to have be endured unless the Government of the day is happy to allow the IMF to influence the policy of the government as it is now doing in Greece (and is likely to soon find itself doing in other Eurozone countries).

So, what to do.  First of all, I’m going to vote for whoever will do the least long term damage, with particular relevance to the policy areas that matter most to me – civil liberties and personal freedom, sustainable and environmentally sound economic development and a reduction is state interference with people’s day to day lives.

Then, I’m going to continue to stay involved with my community ‘on the ground’ by working with community groups to make lasting, sustainable improvements to my community.  I’m not bothered about the politics of those I work with – I would just like to think that we’ll all be working for the long term benefits of our communities, rather than political parties.

Who knows – analysts have already said that whoever gets to make the decisions for the next year or so may well be out of Government for several years to come.  Perhaps we’ll see massive cowardice from whoever is elected, in that they’ll put party before country.  I hope not. 

What’s best for the UK?  A hung parliament, perhaps with some electoral reform, might be what we need to make a further long-term improvement in the political processes of the UK – the rise of ‘Independents’ in Parliament, who are loyal to know party but will vote for what’s best for their communities.

I guess that I’m primed for this sort of story at the moment, having spent the last few day’s re-reading Ben Goldacre’s excellent ‘Bad Science’, but when I do read a story like this it makes, figuratively speaking, reach for my revolver.

A study by Leeds university academics of Internet users found that 1.2% of the people in the survey were Internet addicts, and that quite a few of these were depressed.  The study goes on to say that there’s no evidence to suggest that there was a causal link, and that most Internet users have no mental health problems.  So….hold on here….but….what that says to me is that a bunch of academics have spent money in determining that:

1. Some Internet users are addicted.
2. Some of those Internet users are depressed.

At the moment I could have told them that from personal experience, because this sort of bollocks really does depress me, an Internet user, thus making me an Internet user who’s also depressed….

 Why am I so peeved?  Let me count the ways, and hopefully encourage you to take this sort of research finding with as many pinches of salt as necessary.  I must say that I’m not getting at the academics involved; I know that they’re hard working folks who have to publish to survive.  Anyway…. the abstract for the paper is here.

Apparently the online questionnaire was filled in by people who’d found it via links on Social networking sites.  Now, having an online questionnaire when you’re looking for Internet users is a good idea.  Having it linked from Social Networking sites which tend to be the preserve of the Internet’s heavy users would appear to me to skew the sampling towards that type of Internet user – not Mrs Miggins from number 46 who uses the Internet to send flowers to her sister.

The group that was determined to be addicted tended to be younger rather than older, and also exhibited statistically significant more depressive attitudes and behaviours than the non-addicted group.  The abstract reports that the Internet Addicted group (IAs) were likely to use more sites that replaced real-life socialising – such as social networks, pornography and gambling.

Let’s just take a step back here.  I think that we could just as easily say, based on this, that there are people within society who’re so cut off from normal social interaction for some reason that they’re depressed and that to relieve this social exclusion they turn to the online world.  And all of a sudden this study becomes much more interesting for me because it starts suggesting that our society has become so broken that people are being excluded from normal social interactions and are relying on the Internet to self-medicate.

The BBC’s headline doesn’t help ‘Internet addiction linked to depression’ – as far as I can see, I can’t see any causal link being suggested in the abstract, or even, in reading the BBC article, on teh BBC website itself.  Sloppy reporting on top of a report that does tend to state the bleedin’ obvious.

I don’t often have much to say in favour of Phillip Pullman, but this is a fantastic article, IMO.  He encapsulates so much of how I feel about the gradual erosion of our rights in the UK.  Now…and disturbingly…this piece was ‘vanished’ from the Times’ website for a while – no explanation, no reason. It eventually re-appeared. Concerning, no?

I believe this to be one of the most important articles I’ve seen online for some time, and feel stronlgy that it should be widely read.  So, just in case it disappears again, I’ve taken the liberty of posting the full item as a Blog post here.  As an intresting aside, as I’m typing this I’m watching an episode of ‘The X Files’ in which Mulder says “…too many others know what’s happening out there. And no one, no government agency has jurisdiction over the truth. ”

PHILIP PULLMAN:

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness – the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation – after all we have an Established Church – or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

What sort of fools do you think we are?
The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sleep, you scum.

Philip Pullman will deliver a keynote speech at the Convention on Modern Liberty at the Institute of Education in London tomorrow

http://www.modernliberty.net