Mark Steel is a UK comedian and a committed socialist. In “What’s Going On?” he describes his world falling apart. His marriage is collapsing, and at the same time he’s coming to believe that the Socialist Worker’s Party will never be an effective political organization. (Yeah, I know.) All that, and mid-life crises too:

I’ve had similar experiences. With the Iraq War now finally over (again, for the time being), it was interesting to read Mark Steel’s recollection of the anti-war protests in the UK. The whole nightmare still seems vaguely surreal to me. There were anti-war protests so huge that you couldn’t see the edges of the crowd, and yet the next day you’d read in the media that everyone supported the war. Now if you look back at poll numbers, even in the US support for invading Iraq without UN approval barely rose above 50% at its peak. And that was after the majority had been confused into believing that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Within a few months of the war starting, the majority said it had been started under false assumptions and was a mistake. And yet here we are, a trillion dollars down, having caused somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 civilian deaths—we’ll probably never have an accurate figure.

Meanwhile, the super-rich trashed the world economy, and are now trying to squeeze the poor to bail themselves out. People are so angry they’re sleeping in protest camps in cities around the world. But Mark Steel takes a step back to ask the even bigger question: How did we get to the point where it seems universally accepted that profit is the only reason you can possibly having for doing anything? Could we not have proper TV news, not in order to make money (it won’t) but just because we need to have an informed population? Rather than encouraging people to take out student loans to get a college degree so that they can get a better job to pay back the student loans with, couldn’t we go back to encouraging people to go to college because education and knowledge are generally good things, even enjoyable?

We decided to make a trifle for Christmas Day. Trifle isn’t a fast thing to make, and the recipe called for stale cake, so we started this evening. The idea was to make a couple of layers of sponge cake which would be left for a day until the assembly stage of the project.

Total cake fail. I know nothing about baking, and it mystifies me. I think it must be one of the dark arts. We were supposed to do various unnatural things to some eggs that would allegedly make them behave in un-egg-like ways. They completely failed to sit up in mounds the way the recipe said they would. It might as well have demanded that we get the eggs to fetch a stick then roll over and ask for a tummy rub. Supposedly all these recipes have been tested in real kitchens, but the magazine doesn’t say what manner of warlock they were tested by.

Fortunately, I live in America, land of 24 hour shopping. I got in the car and headed to the local H-E-B supermarket to get some cake mix designed for idiots.

We live in a “transitional” neighborhood, which means our local supermarket is often a collision of social classes. The shelves have stickers to say which items you can get if you’re on food stamps, and the clientele runs from students to Mexican families to businessmen grabbing some supplies on the way home. It’s the only supermarket I’ve ever shopped at where they regularly play The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. I arrived at 9pm, so there were more black-clad shoppers than normal. A passing couple were involved in an animated conversation, and I overheard “So, how do you tell your child that everyone’s a shit?”

I grabbed a box of cake mix and some soy milk and headed to the exit. The cashier had a badge saying her name was Edna. I wondered if it really was. It seemed like an improbable name for an attractive young woman with dyed red hair and a nose ring. I wondered if maybe the real Edna was out back leaning on her walking frame and taking an unauthorized chain-smoke break. I should explain that my friend Jenny worked at an ice cream shop one summer. To save money, they gave her the badge of the previous girl who worked there, who against the odds hadn’t been called Jennifer. So now I always wonder whether name badges are a lie.

The cake mix is described as yellow. I suppose it’s just generically cakey aside from the color. Meanwhile, the failed cake from earlier in the evening looks and tastes like some kind of sweet breakfast omelette. I’m going to eat some of it for breakfast; it has sugar and plenty of protein, so why not? The rest will probably be a feast for one or more squirrels.

A lot of people are concerned about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. There are plenty of pages that say that it will destroy the Internet, but very few that explain clearly exactly why. It has also become clear that the politicians writing the law have no idea how the Internet actually works. So here is my attempt to explain it all.

Let me start by explaining DNS, using a situation that doesn’t involve computers, that hopefully anyone can understand.

Imagine a server on the Internet as being like an office building in 1973. No computers. No mobile phones. Just an office building with an expensive business phone line, internal phones connected by wires, and a receptionist with switchboard and a single phone line connected to the outside world.

The server has an IP address. That’s like the office building’s telephone number.

The web sites on that server are like the people who work in the office building. So talking to John Smith is like reading John Smith’s web site.

Now, when your web browser connects to John Smith’s web site, it looks up the IP address of the site, connects to the web host, and requests John Smith’s web site via HTTP. The request is then routed to the appropriate page.

That sounded complicated, so let’s translate it into our telephone analogy:

When you want to talk to John Smith, you look up the phone number of the building he works in, call that number, and ask to talk to John Smith, and you’re put through to him.

Note that unrelated people can work in the same office with the same phone number used to contact them. This is just like the Internet, where there can be multiple unrelated web sites on the same server at the same IP address. What about the different pages of a web site? Well, those are like talking to the owner of the web site about different topics.

OK. Next problem: DNS is distributed. How do we explain that?

Well, at work in 1973, when I want to know somebody’s telephone number, I look in my address book. If it’s not there, I look the number up in the company telephone directory, and make a copy in my address book so I’ll find it quicker next time. If the number isn’t in the company directory, I get the big telephone directory from the phone company, and look in that. If it isn’t there, I call directory assistance, and they look in the really big master telephone directory that has every number in the country. And so on.

DNS is like that. If your computer knows the IP address of a web site because it has used it recently, it just goes ahead and connects, makes the call. Otherwise, it asks your ISP if they have the IP address. If they don’t, your request for the IP address gets forwarded up to a higher level server, until we get to the so-called root servers, which are like the phone companies’ multi-volume master directories.

There are a few technical details not addressed by this analogy, but it’s close enough to explain basically how the system works.

So, now we can talk about the proposed SOPA legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The basic idea of SOPA is that if someone is accused of copyright violation, all the ISPs in America are required to block access to that person’s web site.

Put like that, it might sound quite reasonable. That’s probably how music and film industry lobbyists explain it to politicians. The problems become clear when you rephrase it for 1973 technology.

People are taping LPs, and giving tapes to friends who call them up on the phone and ask for a copy. So, if someone is accused of taping LPs, we will cut off the phones of the business he works at and remove his name from the phone directory.

Hopefully if you think about that for a moment, some obvious problems spring to mind. I’m going to talk about a few of them.

The first problem is that word “accused”. SOPA does not require any independent investigation. It does not require a lawsuit, or a trial, let alone a conviction. All that’s needed is for Polymer Records to accuse John Smith of taping their albums.

You might think that record companies can be trusted. Well, you might think that if you aren’t a musician, anyway. If you do, I’d suggest reading about some of the abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA. Just this last week, Universal Music Group have been issuing takedowns on YouTube for video recordings they don’t own the rights to. You might think it would never happen to you, but if you’ve ever uploaded a video of your kids singing Happy Birthday, well, that’s actionable copyright violation. The owners of The Birthday Song, Warner Brothers, collect about $2 million per year from demanding payment from people who sing it.

The second problem is this: Even if the record company is right, what about all the other people who work in the same office building? How are they going to do their work and earn a living?

A single IP address can host literally thousands of web sites, owned by people who are total strangers to each other. Blocking an IP address takes all those sites offline.

That’s not the only weapon against the Internet authorized by SOPA, though. It also allows for DNS-level blocking. That is, rather than taking out every single web site hosted at a particular IP address, it just takes out every page hosted at the same domain. Going back to our telephone analogy, when John Smith is accused of copying LPs, his name is struck from the telephone directory.

Our analogy fails somewhat here. On the Internet, a single name like Flickr or YouTube can represent tens of thousands of people. So the problem of ‘collateral damage’ isn’t eliminated, only reduced.

But the analogy does make clear a more constitutional issue: In what way is it any of the government’s business what the phone company prints in the telephone directory? If I want to run a telephone directory business with ads for dodgy massage parlors, it’s none of the government’s business. Or in Internet terms, if I choose to publish the information that happyendings.com is at IP address 2001:db8:0:1 then the First Amendment requires that I be free to do so.

There are technical issues too. At the moment, a lot of effort is going into making the Internet more secure by preventing DNS spoofing. Like crooks who put card skimmers on ATMs, DNS spoofers put fake entries in the Internet’s ‘telephone directory’, so that when you think you’re contacting the bank, you’re actually contacting a web server they own. They then collect your username and password, and use those to drain your account.

The solution is called DNSSEC, secure DNS. It uses digital signatures to ensure that only DNS entries signed by your bank will be accepted by your browser. If the signed and verified entry is missing from the directory, your computer goes out and probes servers around the world until it finds one that can provide signed and verified information.

The problem, of course, is that this is utterly incompatible with SOPA. If the government orders that happyendings.com be removed from the Internet, a computer with secure DNS will detect that the “No such web site” reply is not signed by the company that owns the domain. It will try other DNS servers, including those outside the USA and beyond US government control, until it gets a true answer.

So for SOPA’s DNS filtering to work, DNSSEC has to be abandoned or blocked. Which means that online fraudsters will carry on having a free pass to put digital ‘card skimmers’ on your bank’s web site.

Hopefully you’ve followed all that. Please feel free to quote any or all of it in letters to your elected representatives. And now, a little irony to chuckle over.

Earlier this month, a Russian web site compiled a database of around 20% of the IP addresses using BitTorrent file sharing, along with the details of the files they were downloading. Investigation soon revealed something interesting. Someone at Sony Pictures movie studio had downloaded illegal copies of “Conan The Barbarian”, a movie owned by indie studio Lions Gate Entertainment. They had also downloaded Beavis and Butthead, owned by Viacom. Meanwhile, NBC Universal’s IP addresses had downloaded pirate copies of HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, and Fox Entertainment had pirated Paramount’s “Super 8â€.

If SOPA were already in effect, Sony, Fox and NBC could have found their corporate web sites forced offline, with no trial, no notice, and no comeback. Do they realize this, or are they counting on the law not being enforced against them?

I’ve tried to keep a diary a couple of times, but the habit never stuck. A few months ago I realized that what I really wanted was something like a cross between a time log and a journal. It had to be digital and searchable, because the main reason for wanting it was to be able to answer questions like:

In my head, I envisioned something like Twitter. A cloud-based web page with a minimal data entry form—just a text field. It would log each entry with time and date, and store them in some searchable format. The process had to be as easy as Twitter, or else I wouldn’t bother to log everything. Obviously actually posting the minutiae of my entire life on Twitter would have worked on a technical level, but didn’t meet my requirements for privacy and not boring the crap out of my friends.

I assumed someone else would have had the same idea, and looked around to see what I could find. Unfortunately, all the private Twitter clones still seem to be focused around broadcast, or at least narrowcast. The idea of Twitter as personal journal seems to be largely unexplored.

I briefly toyed with the idea of using syslog, formatted as per RFC 5424. The server software already existed, so all I’d need would be a trivial client program. I’d been implementing syslog-based logging at work and documenting the syslog API for Ruby, so I suppose everything was starting to look like a nail. I eventually decided the predefined list of syslog facilities was too limiting, and the priority system too useless, and pondered using a plain text file of ISO timestamp followed by line of text.

Eventually I gave in and started implementing something. I decided it would initially be web based so I could use it from my laptop and my phone. I then decided to use Ruby, for ease of implementation. I installed Rails 3, gagged in horror at the size of the dependency list full of stuff I would never use by choice, uninstalled it, and installed Sinatra. After thinking a bit about the joys of parsing and rewriting text files reliably, I installed DataMapper and SQLite instead. An afternoon of learning curve later, I had a working web application. A few teething troubles later, it was on my web host, protected by a username and password.

Then for fun, I added a REST API for clients, speaking JSON or plain text over HTTP. And a trivial command line client, for times when firing up a new browser window is just too much like hard work. If you’re interested, take a look at the source for it all. I’ll probably get around to adding the search function the first time I need to find something—how’s that for YAGNI? In the mean time, I’m by no means committed to this solution, if there’s something better that I’ve missed.

You may be familiar with SnowSaver and RedPill, two popular Mac screensavers I wrote.

I recently signed up as a Mac developer, with the intention of making my screensavers available on the App Store.

After some technical hurdles, I submitted my first screensaver, and it was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t provide enough functionality to be worthy of the App Store, because it was just a screensaver.

I appealed the rejection, pointing out that there are already screensavers on the App Store. I got to speak to someone at Apple, who told me that the appeal board’s final decision is that the rejection stands. So going forward, no screensavers will be allowed on the App Store.

I post this information in the hope that it will save other people from wasting their time and/or money. Since the policy had invalidated my only reason for signing up, in my case Apple made an exception, canceled my developer account at my request, and refunded the membership fee.

Obviously it’s up to Apple what criteria they want to set for entry in the Mac App Store, as (for the moment at least) there are plenty of other places to distribute Mac software. I can’t help but be disappointed, though. I plan to focus my spare time programming back towards open source projects and Android.

I’ve written before about my perception that the UK took a drastic turn in the wrong direction during the 1970s, and that it has been deteriorating ever since. My perception is that the UK now has political and economic problems worse even than the USA. This is not a popular opinion, particularly among those who still live in the UK. Some accused me of callousness, but I have friends and family in the UK. I still return from time to time—most recently about a year ago—so I am far from uncaring about what happens to the nation.

Having explained that, I’d like to draw attention to an article titled “Broken Britain†which recently appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Written by Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, it takes the UK riots of August 2011 as a starting point.

The riots were almost universally portrayed in the UK media as meaningless violence perpetrated by a bunch of criminals who wanted something for nothing. And yet, as Vulliamy points out, they were predicted:

Clegg’s Liberal Democrats went on to make broken promises a major issue in their election campaign. Clegg promised to oppose a rise in tuition fees for students, and asked people to vote Liberal Democrat to make Britain fair.

And then came the election in May 2010, and a hung Parliament. Nick Clegg led the Liberal Democrats to join up with the Conservatives, allowing the Tories to grab power with only 36% of the vote. He then broke his promise on tuition fees by backing Conservative plans which tripled them. He cut pensions, cut child tax credits, cut the NHS, and supported a budget which cut police and courts in a way that even the far-right Daily Mail described as ‘savage’.

Clegg was attacked with blue paint by disgusted former Liberal Democrats, and burnt in effigy by angry students. His party’s support dropped like a stone to its lowest level in 14 years. People were so angry that when there was a referendum on electoral reform in May 2011, former Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain begged voters to put aside their hatred of Nick Clegg and vote for reform anyway. Clegg himself also asked for people to look past their desire to poke him in the eye.

It didn’t work. The referendum failed, and with it went all hope of seeing the UK’s bent electoral system improved within my lifetime. The UK would remain with a voting system as hopelessly broken as the one that keeps the Democrats and Republicans in power in the US.

After I reached voting age, I voted Liberal Democrat in every UK election, until I left the country and ceased to be able to vote anywhere. To me, fixing the electoral system was the first priority, because nothing would ever change as long as two parties could collude to exclude any other options.

I believe Nick Clegg singlehandedly destroyed electoral reform in the UK, and destroyed the Liberal Democrats too. If I were still there, I’d have been burning the lying piece of shit in effigy myself for Bonfire Night. Even now, nearly 8000km away, I find myself taking breaks from writing about Nick Clegg in order to pace around and swear. But I digress…

In August 2011 came those riots Nick Clegg had warned about—brought on by his very own actions as coalition leader. Yet suddenly Clegg seemed to suffer some kind of amnesia. He blamed “smash and grab, get what you can†values, and insisted that in spite of rioting across the country, those savage cuts in police funding would still be going ahead. By the time the remaining Liberal Democrats held their party conference in September, newspapers were comparing Clegg to Tony Blair: a polished performer, but someone who had betrayed his supporters and now mostly brings to mind the word “liarâ€.

Yes, just as America has two corrupt major parties equally in the pay of the financial industries who destroyed the economy, so the UK is bipartisan when it comes to corruption. The expenses scandal which unravelled in September turned out to be an all-party affair. Labour MP Hazel Blears was revealed to have claimed expenses for three different homes, having sold two more and used a loophole to avoid paying tax on the profits. Conservative Douglas Hogg had the taxpayers pay for having his manor’s moat cleaned and his piano tuned. Labour’s Sir Gerald Kaufman billed the taxpayers £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen LCD TV. Conservative Sir Peter Viggers had £40,000 in fraudulent expenses, including £1,645 for a floating ornamental duck house. Liberal Democrat David Laws broke a few by claiming £40,000 in rent and then paying it to his partner. (His excuse? He said he did it because he didn’t want people to realize he was gay. I wonder if he’s a Pet Shop Boys fan?)  And of course, nobody was surprised to find Nick Clegg’s name on the list; he had to pay back part of a £3,900 claim he submitted for having his gardening done.

As Vulliamy puts it:

I think he’s wrong about the xenophobia, but probably right about the hubris. As I used to say in the years before I left, the UK is complacent and lazy. People are content to let the status quo continue, to overlook corruption and dishonesty, to carry on doing things the same way simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done, and to put up with terrible service and then moan about it afterwards rather than actually taking their business elsewhere.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. “Fawlty Towers†and Monty Python made the same points repeatedly back in the 1970s; all that has changed now is that everything has been given a sprinkling of vacuous slogans and corporate marketingspeak:

Or as one book I saw put it, rather more bluntly: Is it just me, or is everything shit?

But let’s go back to ask how we got to this point, as I did in my earlier article. Vulliamy again:

But while infrastructure privatization was a mixed bag, the shifting of the UK economy to financial and service industries was the more disastrous change in the long term. It was probably a good thing that Margaret Thatcher broke up the cosy old boys club that used to control the London Stock Exchange with her 1986 “Big Bangâ€. Unfortunately, her policies made the country’s economic health far too dependent on the City. The USA may have an unhealthy relationship with the financial services sector, but at least the USA still has a manufacturing industry to speak of, unlike the UK.

With the City of London deregulated, the Tories set about “selling off the family silverâ€, as Labour politicians of the time put it:

Even America often recognizes the need for utilities to remain in public ownership. Here in Austin, Texas, the city owns and operates the electrical and water utilities, on a not-for-profit basis. Many other US towns and cities do the same, particularly in rural areas.

But when the Conservatives finally got kicked out of power after 18 miserable years, it was into the warm embrace of Tony Blair’s “New Labourâ€.

(Vulliamy points out that the Jubilee line seems to be the most troubled, even though it’s so new that I remember it opening in 1979; whereas the Bakerloo line continues to work quite well, even though it opened in 1906. Again, it seems that modern Britain does a lot of stuff, but none of it is done very well.)

So why did the selloffs continue? The simple answer is that it was the only way the governments of the 90s and 2000s—whether Conservative or Labour—could get the books to balance. Between 1999 and 2002, Labour got so desperate that it sold half of Britain’s gold reserves in an attempt to avoid having to implement cuts. Like Saudi Arabia’s government propping itself up with oil profits, successive UK governments propped themselves up with fire sales of infrastructure and state-owned resources.

Now that there’s nothing left to sell, the obvious question is how much long term benefit came from those sales. Obviously selling off the gold reserves looks like a pretty bad move at this point, but given that the proceeds wouldn’t even cover a tenth of the cost of the bank bailouts it’s all a bit academic. More worrying is the state of UK society:

In other words, if you look at graphs of trends in social inequality and social mobility, you find that the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever before. Worse, if you’re born into poverty, the chances of improving your situation are lower than ever before. The UK even gives the USA a run for its money in inequality, which is a staggering accomplishment.

As I mentioned earlier, the Cameron/Clegg government is now performing the kind of ruthless slashing of expenditure that US Republicans favor. This suggests that things will get worse; in the US, research shows that states which slashed expenditure in response to recession did worse than the ones that didn’t. Conventional economic wisdom is that you get out of recession by spending money to create jobs. To be fair, the Tories are also trying to do some of that, bizarrely even while claiming that government can’t create jobs.

So, two corrupt major parties. Both authoritarian, both selling off anything they can grab in a desperate attempt to prop up a collapsing economy, both paying billions in bailouts to their friends in the big banks, both facing social unrest, both cutting taxes and spending in the middle of a recession.

In that respect, the UK and USA are perhaps closer now than they have ever been before.

Something I learned this month:

Phillip Morse is the co-owner of Liverpool Football Club. He also runs a company called Richmor Aviation, which supplies chartered jets. Between 2002 and 2005, a company called Sportsflight contracted for use of a Richmor jet. They chartered a number of flights for “government personnel and their invitees”, as the president of Richmor put it in court testimony.

The flights went to various places. One location which frequently appeared on the flight plan was Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In case you aren’t filling in the blanks here: SportsFlight was working for the CIA, who hired them through a government contracting company called DynCorp. The plane belonging to the owner of Liverpool FC was used to fly innocent kidnapped people to foreign locations where they could be tortured, as part of the CIA’s illegal ‘rendition’ program.

Apparently the Morse family are now afraid to fly in their own aircraft, because of the negative publicity. They sued SportsFlight, and won $875,000.

We should thank the Morse family. Attempts by the ACLU to obtain information about ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights had been blocked by the courts on the grounds that the details were state secrets. But someone in government wasn’t paying attention this time, and the transcript of the Richmor lawsuit was made public. As a result, we know a lot more about the CIA flights than we would have done.

A recent article by Michael L. Ross talks about how oil money may yet destroy the democratic gains of the Arab Spring:

Then the Arab-Israeli war happened, and:

The reason being:

For example, Saudi Arabia offers universal healthcare. It manages to do so without the kind of taxation required in European countries. This was pointed out to me by a libertarian expat in Saudi Arabia. I noted that the economy of Saudi Arabia probably wouldn’t be sustainable once the oil ran out in a few decades. (Nevermind the irony of a libertarian apparently proposing a socialized oil industry.)

But it’s worse than that:

The full article is behind paywalls at Harper’s and Foreign Affairs, but you may be able to find a copy out there on the Internet via Google.

Part 3: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

Or: The Episode You Shouldn’t Bother Watching

I know that quite a few people were disappointed by the first two episodes in Adam Curtis’s series. I rather liked them, but to me the third episode really went off the rails.

The Rwanda Watusi vs Bahutu genocide, caused by an imposed myth, is undoubtedly bad. It brought to mind a much longer lasting—yet in many ways similar—deadly myth: that of the Jewish exile to Egypt, their return to the Holy Land, and their racial separateness from the Palestinians. The idea that Jews and Palestinians are separate races has been a topic of much research, obviously frequently highly controversial. I don’t think it’s helpful to start playing genocide Top Trumps; both myths have obviously had horrific consequences.

The fact that terrorism, murder and genocide make sense from a rational genetic perspective is, to me, another example of the reason why extreme rationality doesn’t work as a source of moral guidance. But Curtis’s interjected comments about the danger of rejecting religion as a source of morality ignore that religion is another system of moral rules (or at least, it is in the West). His entire thesis is that simple systems of rules don’t provide stability. Exchanging The Selfish Gene and Atlas Shrugged for the Old and New Testaments isn’t really solving anything.

In fact, Curtis’s third program struck me overall as being a confused mess. I kept waiting for the threads to weave together, but they didn’t.

Linking it all to the PS2 is weak. The PS2 was a tiny, tiny part of the computer industry’s demand for mineral resources. Blaming aid camps for providing a target for genocide is weak too. The music really goes off the rails as well—party music for African refugee camps? WTF?

I don’t think the view of humans as machines is as widely held as Curtis suggests, either. The John Searle view that there must be an ineffable something-or-other seems to me to be much more widespread.

I also suspect that Curtis misrepresents Richard Dawkins’ position. I don’t think Dawkins really believes that the selfish gene is any more than a model, a way of seeing the world and hence gaining insight. (Dawkins’ followers seem to agree.) And while Curtis presents the idea of the gene as sort of analog of the immortal soul, that really doesn’t work as an idea. Souls, at least in Christian traditions, are eternal, separate from their environment and from other souls. Genes are anything but inviolate, separate or eternal. Your genes don’t survive intact after your death; they don’t even remain intact through your lifespan.

Curtis also takes a hatchet to the reputation of Dian Fossey, charging her with racist and imperialist attitudes towards the African people. It may be true, but it’s the kind of incendiary claim that really needs more evidence. Meanwhile, a thread about the belief that experiments on polio vaccines caused AIDS seems to meander in and out of the show, before Curtis admits at the end that the theory was without foundation, and he apparetly included it just to provide another example of a westerner going to Africa with a western agenda in mind—like that’s a revelation.

All told, it’s a confused mess that fails to present anything like enough background to support its personal attacks, and fails to deliver a coherent message. Watch the first two, but skip this one.

Part 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

In which I continue to post my thoughts about a documentary everyone else watched six months ago.

I thought during this episode that I could see a central point being made in Adam Curtis’s series. He seemed to be attacking the myth that networks are inherently self regulating and stable. I think he’s off-base painting it as a myth promoted by computer scientists or engineers, however. People who build computers know that they only stay stable because they are so simple, with the fundamental simplification being treating everything as digital binary information. There were analog computers, such as the Norden bombsight, but they were ultimately a dead end precisely because it was so difficult to make them reliable.

Today, enormous amounts of engineering go into making computers stable, trying to make them immune to chaotic behavior triggered by noise and unexpected input in their feedback loops. CPUs have to be designed so that their circuits can filter out thermal noise, quantum effects, and other unwanted sources of randomness and unpredictability. Serious business computers use special ECC RAM designed to catch and fix errors and small divergences that would otherwise cause crashes and instability. We’re actually hitting the point where hard drive storage becomes problematic because the error rates are too high to keep big disks from chaotically losing information. Instead, companies like Google have to build their petabytes of storage using multiple distributed storage units. There are new file systems (ZFS and btrfs) which are adding data duplication and error correction techniques to try and make multi-terabyte disks and distributed disk clusters work as if they were reliable single drives.

Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, of course, the problems were different. Then it was ferrite cores cracking, paper tape wearing out, floppy disks going bad, and so on. But the fact that computer-like systems easily end up behaving chaotically is not, I think, something that any engineer would have been unfamiliar with.

Aside #1: When it comes to music, chaotic feedback systems are very much preferred. From the electric guitar to the Moog synthesizer, feedback loops are one of the first things you implement with any new piece of music technology in order to make it sound more interesting.

Aside #2: While it seems quaint now, during the 50s it was seriously considered that the entire universe might be a feedback system that naturally tended towards a steady state.

The thing is… Economies based on perpetual growth really aren’t sustainable indefinitely. We’ve been in an anomalous period of history, effectively cheating by using up finite natural resources. However, human managed stability isn’t workable either, because we don’t have the control we think we have, or the knowledge to work out how to adjust a complex natural system to keep it stable. Wildfires are perhaps the best example. It seems obvious how to prevent forest fires; so obvious that cartoon bears tell children they can do it. But catastrophic wildfires have been getting worse and worse, precisely because the US has attempted to prevent fires.

The truth nobody likes to admit is that we need to live our lives on the assumption that change will happen, including disastrous change. We need systems which keep disaster localized. In economics and political terms, that means smaller markets, smaller countries, smaller companies, less control. Obviously, nobody in power wants to admit that that’s the case.

Not mentioned in Curtis’s documentary is that this view of the world as a place where steady states are possible, even desirable, is a very Western idea. If you look at Chinese philosophy, Taoism teaches that change is inevitable, and to be welcomed; that even catastrophe can be viewed as an opportunity for positive change. (The idea that the Chinese character for crisis is composed of the characters for change and opportunity, though—that’s a myth.) Buddhism, too, teaches that impermanence is inevitable, and that our clinging to a desire for perpetual stability is the root of what makes us unhappy—not just because we are inevitably disappointed, but because our actions in seeking permanence cause suffering.

Personally, it’s not even clear to me why a stable steady-state world would be a good thing. Looking at reality, the only things which are steady state are dead things; life is characterized by constant change and adaptation. So basically, as presented by Adam Curtis, both sides of the debate are wrong: The world can’t be treated as a dumping ground without ill effect, and it isn’t self-regulating—but equally, we can’t turn it into a regulated stable system and prevent ecological disasters.

The scary thing is that the environmental debate today is still dominated by the two same incorrect ideas: the one side insisting that we can carry on without any climate crisis, the other that we can fix the problem and avoid crisis. There’s a Woody Allen quote that’s closer to the truth:

A final note: It’s interesting that both hippies and Randian Libertarians ultimately have the same mistaken belief, that a simple system with no imposed power structures will end up egalitarian and stable.