We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Published from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia where internet access is… challenging.
Last week I went to Whole Foods Market, the US “natural foods grocer” that opened in London on 6th June. It took over a splendid Art Deco building in Hight Street Kensington, where Barkers department store used to be. The store is spacious and even full of people it is still easy to walk around. The design is effective both in presentation and logistics. The prices are comparable but more importantly the selection consists of products sourced locally as well as internationally.
It was a slice of US retail at its best imported to this country but without crowding out the best of local stuff. I found my favourite British products in varieties I did not even know existed. There are whole sections labelled “Best of British”. Fortunately, Wholefoods also passes on the lesson learnt from decades of gross junk foods in the US and there is a great selection of tortilla and no transfats chips, i.e. junk food with damage limitation. I have not seen the awful Walkers crisps but then I was not looking for them. 🙂
There is no question that the contrast between the experience of shopping in Wholefoods and then going to Waitrose or M&S a few yards down the same street will have a profound impact on the supermarkets in the UK. If I were M&S, Waitrose, Holland & Barrett or any other retailer marking up organic, green and sustainably virtuous products, I’d be quaking in my boots. There was a man walking around the entrance to Wholefoods with a board for M&S inviting people to come & taste their food. A bit transparent methinks. He could have just as well have ‘losers’ tattooed on his forehead.
There is also no question that some green people in the UK will splutter venom at the sight of Whole Foods. Why? Because this is the opposite of what they are trying to achieve. They want us to stop consuming and here is a Texan bigga betta supermarket barging in, taking over one of the London’s splendid and capitalist buildings (the façade has carvings of ships and even a de Havilland jet plane) telling us that spending on their produce will satisfy our consumerist cravings, make them plenty of money and will be better for our bodies and the planet. Aaarrgh! I predict a barrage of attempts to find ‘fraudulently’ green, natural or organic products at Whole Foods as the hair-shirted, sandal wearing hoards comb through the aisles. I also predict that they will end up green with envy. I shall refrain from going into more organic details.
I will be travelling (with another esteemed Samizdata editor) to Addis Ababa this weekend and stay in Ethiopia for about a week. I have read many fascinating things about the country but I have no idea what to expect. So tips and suggestions are welcome.
I plan to travel outside the capital – it was a toss up between Axum and Lalibela. In the end the latter won as the rock-hewn churches are amazing. Also it is a shorter flight, which given time constraints is preferable.
Thanks to Graham of Noodlepie I have learnt about the vibrant Ethiopian political blogosphere. Any Ethiopian bloggers worthy of note?
A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.
Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:
Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a website’s privacy policies.
So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. 🙂
The networking giant announced late Monday that it plans to buy privately held BroadWare Technologies in an effort to bulk up its video surveillance business.
Just what we have been waiting for… with the kind of record Cisco has in China (and probably elsewhere) it is not a comfortable thought to have them helping their customers to be able to monitor, manage, record and store audio and video that can be accessed anywhere by authorized users through a Web-based interface. Especially, if some of those customers are the most oppressive regimes in the world. And even without that I would not find much enthusiasm for this particular technological advancement until individuals have some kind of recourse and defence against the jungle of surveillance cameras already in existence.
Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco’s Emerging Market Technologies Group, said in a statement:
Cisco views the video surveillance infrastructure market as an immediate high-growth opportunity that requires the ability to support both IP and analog device installations. Through the acquisition of BroadWare, Cisco will be able to address both existing and greenfield video surveillance opportunities.
How innocuous the corporate-speak phrase video surveillance opportunities sounds!
There is a reason why we keep saying here that we are not pro-business but pro-market…
This seems like a good time to second the call for some recognition of Harper’s Law: “The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.” Remember that the next time the government wants to set up some large database and insists your data will be kept private.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
Western countries are concerned about the expected appointment of Zimbabwe to head a key UN body, the Commission on Sustainable Development.
“We don’t think that Zimbabwe would be a particularly effective leader of this body”. (A US state department spokesman, Tom Casey)
Concerned?! Particularly effective?!!
So this is what they mean by diplomatic language… I think I shall start interpreting people’s remarks about my need to be more ‘diplomatic’ in an entirely different manner. Or is the term ‘reality-challenged’?
FYI: Zimbabwe is enduring the world’s highest inflation, at more than 2000%, mass unemployment, and there are widespread accusations of civil rights abuses.
German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.
Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.
Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps
Until I read the final paragraph.
Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany’s tax authorities.
But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to…
No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.
Reading Financial Times this morning, I came across an interview with Sarkozy during his election campaign, the FT’s sister paper, Les Echos. This extract says it all.
Sarkozy: … I want to raise clearly in this campaign the issue of morality in financial globalisation. We didn’t create the euro for it to result in capitalism without ethics or scruples. I am extremely troubled by speculative movements. Who can accept that a hedge fund buys a company with borrowings, makes a quarter of the staff redundant to repay the loans, and sells the business piecemeal? Not me. In that economy, there is no wealth creation. The capitalist ethic, is that he who creates wealth earns money, and he who creates lots of wealth earns lots of money. That’s normal. On the other hand, speculation isn’t normal. Capitalism won’t survive without respecting a minimum of ethical rules. The eurozone should be at the forefront of this thinking.
Les Echos: Do we need coercive measures?
Sarkozy: If I am elected president of the Republic, I will ask the finance minister to propose, at the European level, a measure to reinforce the morality and security of financial capitalism. In this respect, taxation of speculative movements seems to me an interesting idea if it were introduced at a European level. I want to make France a country which rewards wealth creation, but which also knows how to strike predators.
A tip – here is the same video but with better translated subtitles. Alas, the embedding has been disabled, which is rather stupid. Fits the spirit of the thing.
They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.
They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:
Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.
This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.
They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.
I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.
Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.
In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.
The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.
So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.
The internet is only doing to politics what it has done to other industries: it disaggregates elements and then enables these free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules; it fragments the old and unifies the new. So in the end, the internet gives us the opportunity to make more nuanced expressions of our political worldview, which makes obsolete old orthodoxies and old definitions of left and right.
The green fanatics have been running the debate for decades now so perhaps it is time to hear some scientific basis for their intrusive and reactionary measures.
Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena.
Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth’s crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l’ Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.
The nihilistic nature of the climate research debate – spot on! What frightens me about the environmentalists is that they recommend restricting ourselves back to stone age. Instead of harnessing innovation and searching for alternatives, the doomsday scenarios is what it is all about. Coupled with the urge to dictate what the rest of us should do, we have a long-term restriction on the very things that drives innovation – clear understanding of the problem, redundancy and waste (yes, that too is necessary for change), experimentation and focus on the demand, not just on restricting the supply.
In June, I will be attending the Apeldoorn conference in the Hague. This year the focus is on sustainability – the conference title is Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World. Well, you can guess what my contribution is going to be… I am looking forward to making the point for redundancy and playful experimentation by the markets. Otherwise, sustainability is nothing but another word for rationing progress.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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