Category: Computing

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All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

Universal Welfare vs Individual Freedom

Cybernetic servant

Would global corporations bankroll a universal welfare system without seeking to control our lives?

Imagine a society that not only provided all your existential needs, but also gave you wide-ranging lifestyle freedoms and did not compel you to hold down a mundane job just to afford the necessities of life. This usually means clean water, food and shelter, but nowadays we could probably add a few more goods and services to our list of bare essentials. In Western Europe a minimum viable standard of living would include a cooker, fridge, washing machine, a shower with hot and cold running water, heating and last but not least telecommunications devices to enable everyone to stay in touch and enjoy 24/7 access to the world's media. In the not too distant past many ordinary Western Europeans had to make do without all the latest mod cons just so we could afford the basics, like food. If you couldn't afford a washing machine, you could always take your dirty clothes to a laundrette. If you couldn't afford a television set, you could always listen to an inexpensive radio or read a book borrowed from the library. If you could not afford to buy or rent a place of your own, your employer might provide temporary digs. Indeed the whole concept of a universal right to a minimum standard of living via state welfare is relatively recent. Until the early 20th century the church would have provided emergency accommodation for the respectful needy, but by and large the destitute only had two escape routes. They could find casual work at the going rate or, in the case of attractive young women, seek an affable husband. In either case the underlings had to show deference to the hand that would feed them. The only way to free oneself from the tyranny of bosses or financially dominant spouses was, and I suggest still is, to have the means to feed oneself. A smallholder may own just a few fields, work long hours to raise livestock and tend crops, but at least he's his own boss and, in a country that respects personal freedom, may lead his life as he chooses provided he respect the privacy and freedom of his neighbours and adheres to common etiquette of decency and courtesy when engaging with the wider community. I use the third person male pronoun here because historically women from humble backgrounds would aspire to motherhood rather than self-sufficiency without a husband. Nonetheless, most smallholdings were family concerns. Husbands and wives worked as a team and although men tended to work longer hours outdoors and do more of the heavy lifting, few could doubt the pivotal role that women played in raising the next generation.

For most of human history, unless you inherited considerable wealth, your only route to greater personal freedom was through hard work and dedication. All most people expected of their state was to safeguard their acquired rights and protect them against raiders who may seize the fruits of their labour. Before the industrial revolution the greatest liberation for most peasants was to unshackle themselves from the burdens of slavery or sharecropping and to cease being in debt to a feudal master. However, with the advent of capitalism and the growth of a working class wholly dependent on their employers, the downtrodden embraced the appeal of collectivism. If technological progress demanded extreme specialisation, growing interdependence and massive infrastructure that only large organisations could conceivably provide, then our future freedom logically depends on our ability to control the levers of power for our collective good. Most early workers' struggles focussed on bread and butter issues of survival, primarily working conditions and wages. Workers demanded the right to withdraw their labour and called on their governments to enforce minimum health and safety standards. Nobody denied that everyone had a duty to pull their weight and contribute to wider society by working to the best of their ability. Few anticipated that the underclasses of the future would not be 8 year old boys sent down coal mines or 13 year old girls working as chambermaids, but workless welfare claimants trapped in a cycle of psychological dependence on external authorities who may regulate every aspect their lives. While workers may always withdraw their labour to reassert their rights, welfare dependents are at the mercy of their benefactors.

Extended Childhood

Traditionally two main groups of commoners were exempted from the onus of work: the very young and the very old. While children have to mature physically and mentally and learn some core skills before their induction into the adult world, the elderly have earned their keep through a life of dedication to their family and community. Even in primitive societies young children play and the old relax and share their wisdom. As the industrial age progressed, businesses began to rely more on technical and intellectual skills and a less on sheer muscle power. Capitalist countries expanded mandatory schooling not just to appease demands for greater social justice, but to equip industry with a literate workforce better able to meet the challenges of greater technical complexity, which even in relatively low-skill jobs involved reading and understanding detailed instructions. Not until 1921 did the UK implement the Fisher Act raising the compulsory school age to 14. It took another 52 years for the school leaving age to rise to 16. Today over 90% of British teenagers remain in education or training at least until the age of 18, while those advancing to further education, has risen from around 10% in 1970 to 45% today. While the needs of business have changed, the UK has a massive undersupply of engineers and technicians and an oversupply of graduates in people management, marketing, psychology, law and humanities in general. Yet employers still complain about graduates with poor writing or number-crunching skills. Not surprisingly we've seen a fair amount of grade inflation and degrees from all but the best universities have been greatly devalued. As a result most graduates do not pursue their desired career. Not everyone can be a sports journalist or an equality and diversity training officer. Long gone are the days of secure permanent jobs where one could progress from an apprenticeship and work one's way through the ranks to attain well-remunerated senior role. Now many university graduates find themselves in a similar position to that of schools leavers only 30 years ago. They have to try their hands at a series of uninspiring low-paid jobs before they find an opening in a role vaguely related to their degree. Many may have to retrain in something more practical, such as nursing or plumbing, once they become aware of the limited commercial value of their sociology degree. Only a small minority of graduates, and it's hard to quantify just how few, have acquired the kind of scientific excellence we will need in the coming artificial intelligence revolution. We now employ more people to manage other people or to create ephemeral media campaigns than to develop and produce the technology we will need to survive and overcome environmental constraints on human development in the coming century. Today we have more persuaders than doers or more talkers than walkers.

The future of work

Much of Britain's manufacturing base has migrated abroad since the 1970s. Today's factories are more automated and mainly assemble or just repackage components made elsewhere. Owing to rapid technological innovation, product lines tend to have short lifespans and production facilities are regularly retooled along with their workforce, who are now viewed as expendable free agents. This helps explain the rise of agency workers and employers' preference for itinerant workers without local roots. As soon as advances in robotics can automate operations in a cost-effective manner, management can lay off most human workers. Driverless vehicles are already a reality. We merely need to perfect artificial intelligence to ensure their reliability in challenging and unpredictable traffic conditions. The writing is on the wall for long distance truck drivers and for millions of other skilled workers, whose monotonous occupations follow a programmable set of routines and respond to a predictable range of environmental stimuli. I suspect in the not too distant future smart vacuum cleaners will be versatile enough to climb stairs and automatically adapt to different floor types, reach into nooks and crannies and potentially call another robot to move furniture. In all likelihood most robots will not resemble human beings at all, but will be polymorphic with a multitude of attachments and tools for different tasks. Unlike human beings they will be easily serviceable and reprogrammable. Even the world's oldest freelance profession, often not so euphemistically categorised as sex work, now faces competition from lifelike erotic dolls.

However, the main stumbling block to the adoption of robotics is not the theoretical feasibility of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, but the collapse of our underlying industrial infrastructure due to our gross mismanagement of finite resources and our inability to develop safe renewable energy able to meet our growing demands. We have probably already passed peak oil and over the coming 50 years we're likely to hit a peak human population of 10 billion. If we factor in the threats of climate change, clean water shortages in the areas of fastest population growth and insatiable demand for cars and other consumer goods in the developing world, we clearly face unprecedented environmental challenges that can only be addressed by taming human behaviour or significantly boosting industrial efficiency. Short of colonising other planets, the alternative may well be a world war over control of mission-critical resources.

Work and Society

Many think of work as drudgery we endure to earn a living. We would rather relax or pursue hobbies that inspire us. Few of us would enjoy getting down on our hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor or crawling through narrow underground tunnels to mine coal. Yet during the early industrial revolutions millions of working class women and men had to endure these conditions just to fend for themselves and their children. When millions lost their jobs in the great depression of 1930s, the fledgling welfare state offered little consolation. Without work millions felt completely unfulfilled and would go to extraordinary lengths to relieve themselves of the shame and stigma associated with joblessness. The Jarrow March of 1936, ironically as the economy was picking up again in Britain, exemplified social attitudes of the era. Workers did not expect luxuries or endless charity, they just demanded a chance to earn a living to restore their dignity. The post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s was built largely on a skilled working class whose earnings and leisure time rose as technological advances began to favour intellect and proficiency and over muscle-power and perseverance. It was a short-lived age of full employment, stable families and a narrowing social divide, unfortunately reliant on state subsidies and trade barriers to protect workers from unfair competition and unregulated market forces. Big business soon realised it could no longer boost its profits and expand markets in such a protectionist environment, holding it often at the mercy of militant trade unions. By the early 1970s UK industry had become both outdated and notoriously inefficient compared to their German, Japanese or Korean competitors. As the pendulum swung from protected markets and state-subsidised industries to free market economics, much of British manufacturing moved abroad. While some former manufacturing workers moved to the growing service sector, many were left behind. While material living standards have continued to grow, since the 1980s we've seen a widening gap not just in terms of wealth, but in education and personal attainment. The emergence of the trendy professional classes as the mainstay of our economic and cultural activity may well be but a harbinger of things to come. By 2012 over 60% of workers were tax-negative, i.e. received more benefits and direct services than they paid in tax. If we take into account indirect services consumed, the situation is even more unequal and this disparity is growing. By 2014 the top 25% of earners paid 75% of income tax and the 1% alone paid over a quarter. The only way of closing the income gap is to close the education gap, not in terms of nominal qualifications or years of formal schooling, but in terms of ensuring a much larger proportion of the population acquire the kind of intellectual and social skills we will need in the cybernetic age.

Today the descendants of the old Labour movement not only champion welfare rights, but assume a great many working age adults will never be gainfully employed owing to mental or physical disabilities, concepts which are now much more loosely and widely understood than in the recent past. In the future most work will be either intellectual or social, requiring us to focus our creative and emotional skills and effort on endeavours that serve the wider social good rather just satisfy personal desires. An ideal job is one that you both enjoy and can help others. Your material or financial reward for your effort is a direct measure of its utility to the current socio-economic system. If you possess a rare talent the reward for your creative endeavours may be substantial. Thus an elite of sportspeople and entertainers can earn a fortune simply due to the inertia of market forces. While Premier League footballers may have to train regularly and exert themselves for 90 minutes on the pitch before chanting fans, a hospital cleaner will typically exert much more effort for a fraction of the income. Yet people's lives may depend on clean hospitals, but not on the outcome of a soccer match. Your salary is mainly of a function of your expendability. To what extent is your role mission-critical to your employer? If your employer is a major football club earning tens of millions of pounds in advertising revenue, broadcasting rights and ticket sales, their main concern is your ability to help win games and keep their investors and customers happy. While millions can play football, only a few hundred in the whole wide world possess the kind of rare talent that can make or break a sports entertainment business and a handful can command eye-watering sums, such as the record £89 million Manchester United paid for French international, Paul Pogba. That figure could employ around 4700 hospital cleaners on the national living wage and is a staggering 280 thousand times greater than the mean GDP per capita of Paul Pogba's parental homeland of Guinea. A hospital cleaner can be replaced literally at the drop of a hat, while a world-leading football striker cannot. Gone are the days when hospital cleaners could go on strike for more pay. These services are now predominantly outsourced to agencies. Back in the 1960s and 70s public institutions saw it as their duty not only to provide public services, but also to employ local workers who might get a much worse deal in the private sector. These days a hospital does not employ cleaners, it has a contract with an agency, which in turn procures the best human or technical resources for the job at hand. I recall working in the BBC's plush open plan offices in London's White City. At 7pm every weekday evening when most staff had left, a team of mainly Portuguese speaking cleaners would mop up the mess left by higher-paid BBC staffers. I know this because on one occasion their supervisor had to impart bilingual instructions to accommodate an agency worker from Ghana, who didn't speak Portuguese, but this was in the heart of English speaking world. Yet the same BBC struggles to admit the impact of globalisation on lower-skilled native workers (most of whom deserted the capital decades ago and could not afford to return). Currently machine-assisted human cleaners are still more cost-effective than robots, but as robots become smarter and more versatile human workers will focus more on supervisory and engineering roles. That leaves very little for those of us who do not possess exceptional analytical, creative or people management skills.

Most of us are what social researchers might call semi-skilled, i.e. we've acquired many practical skills through hands-on experience, but lack outstanding talents that set us apart from the crowd. In the recent past some semi-skilled labourers, without formal qualifications in their line of expertise, honed their skills to such an extent as to become invaluable to their employers or clientele, but with outsourcing and automation we've lost much of that traditional skills base for good. Many semi-skilled workers may well have much more experience than a someone who has been formerly trained, but their skills can be easily learned not just by millions of other workers, but by machines. Millions of us enjoy cooking from fresh ingredients, but it's often much more cost-effective just to buy a ready-made meal. Once we rely supermarkets to supply food, it makes little difference if a machine prepares an elaborate recipe from fresh ingredients or we do it ourselves from separately purchased ingredients. In many practical instances ready-made meals are both cheaper and healthier as otherwise you'd have to buy much larger quantities of the source ingredients, which may well go off before you have a chance to eat them. Fast food outlets have already automated most aspects of food preparation. In the near future human chefs will be a luxury available only to the affluent professional classes, but with more leisure time many will still prefer to engage in a little culinary therapy.

More disturbingly the two dominant narratives of public debate on economics and employment could both prove wrong. Global optimists keep reminding us how our growing economies, reliant on extreme labour mobility, can provide new opportunities for all, while identitarian populists from Donald Trump in the USA to Marine Le Pen in France pretend manufacturing jobs can somehow be repatriated. In reality outsourcing menial tasks to low-wage workers is just a stop-gap solution until robotics becomes more competitive. However, if big business no longer needs semi-skilled labour and only requires a select group of engineers, creatives, managers and entertainers, who is going to buy their products?

Universal Welfare

The answer, so the wishful thinking trendy left tell us, is a universal basic income. I fully appreciate its appeal and take on board the argument that by guaranteeing everyone a basic income we remove not just the stigma associated with joblessness and the humiliation of holding down low-paid non-jobs (burger flippers, shelf stackers or call centre operatives), but we also greatly reduce the immense administrative costs of our current welfare system. Essentially the government would just give everyone a basic income that guarantees a minimum standard of living. If you want more you can undertake paid employment or may be inspired to volunteer in the ever-expanding third sector (charities, campaign groups, NGOs etc.), a great CV-booster when you do decide to get a real job. If you just want to take it easy, you can still survive on your basic income with no questions asked. It would also prevent people from claiming disability status due to some perceived relative handicap, which is really just a natural variation in the human condition or the result of acquired behaviour. However, short of a global revolution bringing all multinationals into public ownership and guaranteeing full transparency and accountability of all organisations responsible for our wellbeing, I think we need to take into account human nature. The strongest basic income evangelists insist it would allow people to unleash their creative minds without fear of losing their salary. Such idealists imagine the world as an extended high-tech hippie commune cum university campus. Were we all sandal-wearing bicycling vegans taking time off to write a book on the history of Mesopotamian basket weaving the basic income would be a great idea. Alas deprived of any motivation to focus one's creative efforts on something useful, most adults will succumb to a blend of junk culture and social gaming, no longer competing on skills, but on personality and worthiness. Our aim in life will no longer be to provide for our family through hard work, but merely to ensure we can gain the same emotional privileges. This helps explain the rise of social justice warriors with a bloated sense of entitlement. The great struggles against real injustice of the past (against slavery, imperialism, starvation wages, misogyny, racism etc.) will descend into a farce as most citizens will become mere beneficiaries of corporate welfare enjoying an extended childhood and just like children, their freedom will be at the mercy of their guardians, the technocratic and managerial elites. If the masses remain blissfully unaware of the activities of the regulating classes, they will be lulled into a false sense of security and treated like children, i.e. rewarded for good compliant behaviour and penalised for antisocial behaviour. Until the late 20th century most societies relied on the labour of the underclasses. Without ordinary workers, crops would not be harvested, houses would not be built, machinery would not be maintained, food would not be processed and distributed, infrastructure would crumble and people would starve. If the underclasses cannot produce a surplus of food, housing and tools, the ruling classes cannot accumulate the wealth they need to maintain their power and privilege through a network of administrators and security forces. In theory the working classes could hold their rulers to ransom. If their rulers failed to allocate enough resources, the underclasses could either rise up and overthrow their masters or switch allegiance to a rival faction or neighbouring fiefdom, especially if they possessed superior technology. Parents care for their children not only through strong emotional bonds, but also because of their future role as purveyors of the family's wealth for they would soon become workers and parents themselves. By contrast in the age of robotics, the workless underclasses will be mere consumers whose only duty will be to conform to social norms. We may well retain the illusion of democratic control via online elections for the most affable middle managers, but effectively we will be beholden to a technocratic upper caste responsible for programming and administering our cyberservants. Over recent decades we've seen a steady transfer of responsibilities from viable two-parent families to a maze of service providers. If something goes wrong, we tend to blame external agencies whether they are suppliers, manufacturers, safety regulators, doctors, nurses, social workers or teachers, because we have learned to accept that many aspects of our lives are out of our direct control. We have internalised the notion that one has to have special training to perform any task not deemed safe for laypeople. We have lost touch with mother nature to such an extent we are unable to accept its limitations. As robots evolve to undertake forever more complex tasks, we can expect the range of safe jobs to narrow to all but a few closely monitored human activities performed in controlled environments, such as eating, drinking, exercising, relaxing, playing or making love. For years officialdom has tended to discourage the old do-it-yourself attitude, while encouraging people to seek specialists. This may be preparing us psychologically for a future when robots replace technicians, decorators, builders, cleaners, nurses, police officers and other social surveillance officers. However, if only the gifted intelligentsia have any understanding of the inner workings of our high-tech world, how will the rest of us hold them to account? The people of the future could well split into distinctive castes along the lines the dumbed-down Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Well's Time Machine. Slowly but surely we seem to be sleepwalking towards a Huxleyan future of human beings genetically engineered to assume different roles in a chain of command that only members of alpha caste understand.

Visions of the Future

The current rapid pace of technological and economic progress could lead in two apparently divergent but equally dystopian directions. One the one hand technology fails to meet the insatiable demands of a growing number of consumers either through limits to growth, such as peak oil or climate change, or through cataclysmic technical failures such as nuclear power plant explosions, or indeed a combination of both. Such a scenario may kill hundreds of millions of people, but may also forestall a cybergenetic dystopia of complete submission to technology out of the control of ordinary global denizens. On the one hand technology may evolve so fast to control the excesses of human behaviour and thus render both itself and humanity compatible with our planetary life support system. In other words technology will determine our living standards and, indeed, our procreative potential. Arguably it already does. Only last week the London Telegraph reported that Motherless babies are now possible as scientists create live offspring without a female egg. As always the neoliberal press presents the next step in human genetic engineering as a great advance enabling more couples, such as gay dads, to conceive. The next logical step is an artificial womb, whose development is no longer mere science fiction (See Men redundant? Now we don't need women either ). No doubt artificial uteruses will liberate women from the pain and responsibility of pregnancy, but soon biological genders may become obsolete binary categories that belong to a past age of primitive dependence on messy and inconvenient organic procreation. The affluent cyber-managerial classes will inevitably be able to afford better fertility treatment leading all too predictably to the emergence of a super-race, meaning the underclasses will simply lack the intellect to outsmart their rulers, whether humanoid or not.

The Alternative to Basic Income

If you thought the basic income sounds too good to be true, you're probably right. That's what a majority of shrewd Swiss voters concluded earlier this year. They understood that unless you contribute to the functioning of society, you cannot expect to have any meaningful say in the way it's run. You may well have the illusion of democratic control, but it will more like children choosing which flavour of ice-cream they want or which games they want to play during their birthday party. If they misbehave their true masters will drug them or confine them to their bedrooms. If their life support system fails, all they can do is follow instructions to wait for cybernetic technicians to repair the faults. However, a Huxleyan dystopia is not an inevitability if we wake up to its very real likelihood early enough and ensure all working age adults are directly involved in developing and regulating human-friendly technology. In other words robots should serve us and not vice versa and bioengineering should only ever assist natural human beings as we've evolved over eons. This means preparing the next generation for a high skill future where everyone will have a part to play in the development of our engineered environment. We must be fully aware of the consequences of new technology as the toys of today may become the prison wardens of our near future.

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Computing Power Dynamics

Would a sane Commander in Chief ever deploy Nuclear Weapons?

nuclear bomb

The British Parliament is about to vote on the renewal of the country's US-built and US-controlled nuclear missile shield. In case you didn't know, these nuclear warheads are launched from submarines based in Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, just 20 miles from Glasgow, Scotland.

I've long realised pacifism, while an ideal we should all aspire to, is not a viable option in a dangerous and grotesquely unequal world. Pacifism makes as much sense as open borders without any police surveillance. It might work once we have overcome the dark sides of human nature and established a truly egalitarian and peace loving society in which not only do we all care for each other, but we all trust each other. If you can justify self-defence and accept the need for public institutions to protect us, you have to recognise we need some form of defence, especially in the wake of recent terrorist attacks and attempted coups d'état.

The biggest threats to the security of the British people do not come rival superpowers intent on destroying our infrastructure and killing millions of people, but from unstable militias and unhinged local despots who retaliate against UK involvement in military operations in their neck of the woods. Britain is a prime target of foreign aggressors not because we have failed to destroy their power bases, but because our government's actions in supporting US and NATO interventions has greatly destabilised much of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. A major military power such as Russia, with vast territory of its own, would have little reason to attack the British Isles, unless we became directly involved in a future conflagration with Russia over Ukraine. In such a scenario, were Russia to deploy nuclear warheads against a densely populated country, without the military and economic might for total world domination, the fallout would permanently shatter its international reputation and almost certainly invite disastrous military and/or economic retaliation. In a globally connected world destroying your customers' countries doesn't make much sense unless it&rrsquo;s the only way to gain control of mission-critical resources only available there in abundance.

A quick look at military spending figures for 2015 reveals a changing world. With the notable exception of the United States, which account for over 40% of the global military spending, the countries with the most successful economies have rather modest defence budgets. Even Russia, with around 145 million, only spends 10 billion more than the UK. Most of its military budget is invested in land forces and a large personnel of 771 thousand. Russia is also surrounded by US bases in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Japan. Of greater concern should be Saudi Arabia's massive $88 billion defence budget.

Rank Country $ Billion
1 United States 597.5
2 China 145.8
3 Saudi Arabia 81.8
4 Russia 66.5
5 United Kingdom 56.2
6 India 48.0
7 France 46.8
8 Japan 41.0
9 Germany 36.7
10 South Korea 33.5
11 Brazil 24.3
12 Australia 22.8
13 Italy 21.6
14 Iraq 21.1
15 Israel 18.6

Source: Wikipedia: List of Countries By Military Expenditures

What would happen if some madman launched a nuclear attack against us

While NATO's military planners may be fixated with Russia, the real threat comes from an unstable Middle East, especially in the event of a popular uprising in Saudi Arabia and the ascension to power of an anti-Western regime allied with countries such as Pakistan and possibly Iran. They might, at least until the development of viable alternatives, hold the world to ransom through their control of cheap oil, and fight regional wars of conquest just as Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in bombing campaigns in Yemen. However, any nuclear strikes against European cities would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims too. Nuclear weapons are useless against strategic military targets, unless such targets are conveniently located in remote sparsely populated regions. Indeed to be effective a nuclear attack would have to annihilate enemy territory. A large superpower, like the USA, could wipe out a geographically constrained enemy, albeit with cataclysmic human consequences, but a small militias linked to an ad-hoc state such as Daesh would only succeed in killing people before inviting immediate retaliation against an ill-defined target. A nuclear strike would be the ultimate act of extreme terrorism that no sane commander in chief of a stable country would contemplate even in the event of nuclear attack on their territory, by which time the damage would have been done. The only logical defence would be an advanced anti-nuclear defence shield that could intercept and destroy nuclear warheads before they reach major population centres. Our priority would be to minimise human deaths and neutralise the enemy. Oddly the huge projected £100 and 200 billion budget for the new Trident system over 30 years would be much better spent on more intelligent satellite reconnaissance and surface to air missiles launched from existing submarines but without nuclear warheads. Mail On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchins supported Trident in the cold war days when most of us on the left opposed it, but he rightly says now "To spend all your money of a nuclear weapon for a war that won't happen is like spending all your money on insurance against alien abduction and then neglecting to insure your self against fire and theft."

Deterrence theory relies on convincing your potential enemy that you'd actually deploy your warheads, which would have no tactical advantage. Nuclear weapons are good at two things: mass destruction and complete humiliation. It's what the US did to the Japanese towards the end of Second World War. They could only get away with it because of their massive technological and economic superiority. That's no longer the case. Nuclear war would lead to mutually assured destruction. Keeping nuclear weapons only encourages rogue states from following suit.

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Computing Power Dynamics

Fair Trade Not Free Trade

Fair trade

Free trade has now become an untouchable sacred cow, which alongside economic growth and free movement of labour forms a sort of mercantile holy trinity. Without free trade, we are told, we would have a smaller variety of more expensive products and, worst of all, economic stagnation. However, all this assumes an idealised world of free markets and a level playing field in terms of environmental regulations, workers' rights, welfare provision and taxation. Such a world of laissez-faire entreprise is pure fantasy as the technologies on which our hypercomplex societies rely require a degree of organisation and material resources only available to the largest corporate players. While small players may often innovate, they need a little help from venture capitalists to win the financial resources required to take their ideas to the next level. If our government doesn't regulate our way of life, other organisations fill the void and regulate human behaviour to suit their quest for greater power. Capitalism, if left unregulated, ultimately destroys itself through its natural tendency to let more successful companies dominate the market, either as oligopoly as in the case of cars and many electronic goods, or as a quasi-monopoly, and as may appear in the case in the productivity software industry. No elected government decided that Adobe Photoshop â„¢ should be the standard image editing application or that Microsoft Wordâ„¢ should be the only word processor acceptable in business, education and government administration. Two large software companies first established a market lead in their respective fields and then through an army of sales agents and lobbyists locked key organisations into their ecosystem, largely by enforcing cryptic file formats that other applications had to deconstruct. They can thus charge government and small businesses whatever they can get away with because key decision makers are unaware of alternatives. It's often hard to work out if one is dealing with public or private organisation and they both behave in similar ways. The prison service has clients rather than inmates and the NHS has customers rather than patients. Both outsource many of their activities to private service companies like Serco, Capgemini, G4S, Virgin Health etc.

The British Isles produces around half of its food and imports most manufactured good and strategic raw materials. We're no longer self-sufficient in oil or gas and even import coal as it works out cheaper than exploiting our last remaining deep-vein coal pits. To add insult to injury we import thousands of tonnes of Chinese steel while letting the British steel industry, once a pioneering world leader, shed most of its workforce. However, for some spurious reason in the current debate on EU membership, both sides seem to agree on one thing: Free trade is good or is it? On the one hand the Remain crowd keep reminding us how 3 million jobs depend on trade with the EU, while the Leave side have just produced Brexit the Movie which advocates an even more globally integrated future than possible within Fortress Europe, a myth that spread in the late 1990s just before the WTO negotiations had completed under the New Labour-appointed EU Commissioner for Trade Peter Mandelson. I'm not alone in having viewed the European Union as the lesser of two evils back in the heady 1990s. It seemed for a while that it could protect workers' rights and environmental standards while nurturing a competitive internal market. Southern Europeans, especially entrepreneurial Northern Italians, prospered as their small and versatile businesses adapted to meet demand for niche products in Northern Europe. However, their competitive advantage would not last long as the EU expanded eastwards and forced governments to remove protectionist tariffs and subsidies. Combined with greater automation and the fast pace of technological change and obsolescence, globalisation led to the failure of thousands of small businesses and rapid rise in youth unemployment and that was before the 2008 credit crunch and Euro crisis.

Economic students learn the old mantra that protectionism always fails. One need not look to extreme examples such as Cuba during its special period in the early 1990s or the former Soviet Bloc, most advanced mixed economies, including the United States, had tightly controlled national or supranational markets until the mid 1990s. Governments understood the advantages of competition, but also the need to retain a skills base in strategic industries and more important maintain full employment and social stability. If the local economy depends on hundreds of small textile businesses, it's no good telling voters they have to adapt to new market conditions with dirt cheap imports from the Far East.

Tariffs are effectively a tax on low pay, poor working conditions and minimal environmental standards. If a competitor from another jurisdiction can undercut local producers because they pay their workers peanuts, dump waste in the sea rather than invest in an expensive effluent treatment plant or pay hardly any taxes in their home country, this is unfair competition. You may get cheaper consumer products in the short term, but unless the workers laid off in your high-wage country can retrain or upskill to fill new vacancies in the service sector, you'll end up paying more in welfare handouts. Thus over the last 20 years of unshackled global trade, the welfare bill has skyrocketed in much of the advanced Western world. While some former manufacturing workers have transitioned to the service sectors, tens of millions have been left behind. Not everyone is cut out for sales, marketing, research, graphic design or informatics. Some can find new niches as personal trainers or dog walkers. Others try their luck with online retail businesses, while others tap into the insatiable demand for instant gratification via sexual services or narcotics. As a result fewer and fewer of us have a direct stake in the real economy responsible for putting food on our tables or a roof over our heads. We simply trade favours and compete for a bigger slice of corporate profits, while in other parts of the world resources are depleted, workers are exploited in slave-labour conditions and natural habitats are destroyed in the name of economic growth.

We could only have free and fair trade if we had a level playing field, i.e. a global minimum wage, global corporation tax, global environmental regulations and workers' rights. Why should Malaysians make kettles for the British market? Why should Indians process English council forms? The two main reasons are for temporary economic expediency and to prevent workers from holding their employers to ransom. Today few groups of organised workers can trump the power of global corporations to move their operations from one part of the world to another or in the longer term to invest in greater automation.

Infantile globalist leftwingers dream of a world with Norwegian workers' rights and welfare provision, Tanzanian consumption levels and cutting edge green technology that will enable everyone to enjoy an Australian lifestyle. I recently exchanged tweets with one deluded leftist who believes in free energy, i.e. a conspiracy by oil companies to deny us free and clean water-powered vehicles. With current levels of youth unemployment and ecological destruction, believers in a such utopian vision live in cloud cuckoo land. Each viable community needs to find its own way to reach the ideal equilibrium of technological progress, environmental protection and social justice. More important everyone needs to feel that are stakeholders in the social and economic life of their country, which requires a strong sense of social cohesion, trust and shared values. Free markets empower unaccountable corporations, while fair trade lets each community decide what is in the best interests of its workers.

What is Fair Trade?

Like many other good things Fair Trade has been hijacked by big business as a sort of ethical kitemark (stamp of approval) to mean some external agency has vouched for minimum workers' rights, earnings and environmental standards. We are supposed to place our blind trust in international bodies supported by big business to monitor their compliance with various well-intentioned regulations. This inevitably empowers larger businesses with sophisticated marketing and PR operations who can afford the additional overheads to the detriment of unscrupulous small businesses. Next-generation automation technology will soon displace banana pickers or coffee plantation workers anyway.

What Fair Trade should mean is trading only when it makes good long-term social and environmental sense. It may be temporarily cheaper to import to apples and tomatoes from Spain, Chile or South Africa, but these fruits grow in the British Isles too and people used to adapt to seasonal fruits and vegetables. As people have grown accustomed to a plentiful supply of seemingly fresh fruit shipped from halfway around the world, we waste much more, offsetting improvements in agricultural yields and preventing the development of feasible alternatives such as the greater use of greenhouses. That doesn't mean we should not import at all, but should aim to be as self-sufficient in staple foods and essential goods as reasonably possible. Certainly it makes little sense to outsource manufacturing of goods mainly consumed here. If kettle production can be fully automated, why should that take place in China rather than in the UK? More important, by insourcing more manufacturing we become more aware of the true environmental consequences of our shopping habits. Why should we keep throwing away cheap imported products just because it's more cost-effective than replacing inexpensive spare parts that are mysteriously unavailable locally? Many recent technological advances such as 3D-printing could actually enable greater localisation. Rather than ship goods thousands of miles, we could simply send a design to a local 3D-printer to produce a customised component. To sum up free trade focuses on short-term corporate profits and their need to maximise retail sales and minimise labour costs without having to invest in new technology or training. Fair trade focuses on identifying products and services that regions can exchange to their mutual long-term benefit without displacing workers overnight or creating unsustainable social and environmental imbalances.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

Our Emerging Brave New World

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Mental Health Mantra

If you believe vocal lobbies, we can never devote enough resources to tackle our ongoing mental health crisis. Politicians of all hues like to champion the rights of mental health patients to better care. They try to score points on the perceived lack of funding for mental health services. The subtext is that we should treat mental health just like physical health and it is thus the business of healthcare providers not only to check your blood pressure and heart rate, but to analyse your state of mind.

Unlike physical health, mental health is highly subjective. What kinds of moods and behavioural patterns are so dysfunctional or antisocial that they merit the proactive intervention of third-party supervisors whether in the guise of counsellors, social workers, psychiatric nurses or psychologists. This paternalistic approach raises many questions about personal independence and freedom. Until recently we just assumed that happiness is a mere expression of satisfaction with life. Yet it is hard to detect any correlation between prosperity and happiness, except in a looser relative sense. Above all people need security, a sense of belonging and some love and affection. We often substitute ephemeral pleasures of temporary stupefaction or indulgence for true contentment gradually won through hard work. The abundance of consumer goods and a generous welfare state have jointly undermined the great art of delayed gratification and replaced it with a sense of entitlement that can often create an emotional void and an insatiable demand for more and better.

It seems only fair to care for vulnerable members of our community. If we were talking about paraplegics, everyone would understand why their disability, paralysis of the lower body, merits some help from the rest of us. Indeed with assistive technology most paraplegics can lead fruitful lives. However, few would choose to be cripples and most would welcome medical breakthroughs to help them walk again. If the incidence of paraplegia were to double every twenty years, we would seriously have to address the root causes for society relies on the able-bodied to assist the physically disabled. If we are unable to look after ourselves unassisted, we inevitably depend on the goodwill of others to act in our best interests. Our personal freedom is ultimately limited by our dependence on others for our basic needs. These days few of us could be truly self-sufficient, unless we adapted to a humble existence as subsistence farmers, so a paraplegic is only relatively more at the mercy of external agencies than your average able-bodied citizen. Arguably a talented cripple able to work remotely as a writer, designer or programmer may contribute more to society than an able-bodied drug-addict who cannot hold down a menial job. However, by promoting the concept of mental ill-health we greatly widen the range of people unable to fend for themselves without intrusive help.

Subjective criteria

Who exactly decides who is and who is not mentally fit? What criteria do we apply? If you can only run a hundred metres before running out of breath, are you physically disabled? Of course not, though you may be relatively unfit and should probably get some more exercise. Your doctor would probably advise you not to overdo it and set simple attainable goals and slowly adapt your lifestyle. However, if you fractured your spine in a horrific workplace accident, you may well lose control of your legs and suddenly countless everyday tasks like getting dressed or going to the bathroom become almost impossible to accomplish without some help. You are not simply unfit, but genuinely disabled. A disability, by its customary definition, prevents you from accomplishing essential life-sustaining tasks. It is not a relative handicap. If you're tone-deaf, but able to speak and understand a human language, you are not disabled, but just have a relative weakness in one facet of human creativity. Musical aptitude is certainly a nice to have and arguably gives you an advantage in natural selection, but many tone-deaf people have led fruitful lives without requiring any special help. Tone-deafness is also a rather relative concept as are relative intellectual deficits in mathematics, literacy or dexterity. While we may debate the causes of our relative strengths and weaknesses, modern society relies on functional and intellectual diversity. We cannot all be playwrights, musicians or comedians, but society would be dull without artistic creativity. However, it would cease to function without farmers, builders, engineers, plumbers, toilet cleaners or nurses. We can only relax and have fun once we have provided all infrastructure, food, clean water, shelter and other amenities essential to comfortable human existence. Technological progress and societal pressures have redefined our concept of comfort. Recent technological and economic trends have revealed two paradoxes. First automation and globalisation have displaced millions of manual workers, increasing competitiveness and lowering wages at the bottom end of the labour market. Second as material living standards have risen our emotional well-being has not. Greater labour mobility may have boosted the economy but it has led to greater job insecurity at a time when most women and men are expected to participate in the financial economy. Our personal worth is no longer measured by the roles we play in our family and community, but by our utility as a player in a dynamic consumption-driven market economy. Since the 1970s in much of Western Europe we've seen a gradual shift from practical trades to abstract tertiary sector roles involved in endless lifestyle and product promotion as well as the micromanagement of every aspect of human interaction. The UK now has more social workers than farmers, more accountants than carpenters and more IT recruiters than software developers. Yet we all need food, furniture and mobile communication. As we lose touch with the fruits of our endeavours, we begin to lose our sense of purpose in life other than the mere acquisition of money as a means of ersatz self-validation.

Not only is employment less secure, but human relationships are more volatile and communities more fluid and transient than ever before. By most measures material living standards have never been so high, but people are not only more indebted, but in the absence of paid employment or welfare payments only a few pay cheques away from financial ruin with little means to survive in the wild.

Extreme interdependence

Our current obsession with mental health is the result of extreme interdependence. A quick glance at the commonest professions in the UK reveals a rather disquieting picture. Fewer and fewer workers have any direct relationship to the production and maintenance of essential goods and services, excepts as managers, sales personnel or hauliers. In the UK over six million are employed in mainly administrative roles, some requiring some limited technical expertise or prior hands-on experience, over 3 million are employed in sales, marketing and business presentation, with only 300,000 employed in farming and fishing and around one million in manufacturing, but the biggest growth sectors are personal care and surveillance. The last-named sector encompasses not just policing, but social work and psychiatric services. An ageing population and technological innovation can partly explain this phenomenon, but not entirely, especially as older people are now fitter and many can live independently well into their 80s. A growing proportion of working age adults require assistance as a result of a learning disability, mood or personality disorder.

The Human Spectrum

Until the mid 1980s psychiatric disorders only referred to extreme cases of dysfunctional behaviour. Much of the literature on the relative merits of psychotherapy or pharmacological treatment relates to individuals who posed a direct threat to themselves and/or to wider society. They accounted for under 1% of the general population and as therapeutic care improved most could rejoin the community as normal citizens. Psychiatry had been tarnished by its association with authoritarian regimes, not least in Nazi Germany where schizophrenics were euthanised alongside the mentally handicapped, but also extensively in the Soviet Union where dissidents were routinely treated in psychiatric institutions. Freedom meant above all the freedom to be yourself, to be the master of your feelings and to act an autonomous player in a wider social reality. Of course personal behaviour is regulated by social mores and a fine balance between rights and responsibilities that we learn from our family and community. However, as we gained more free time, we could unleash our individuality and creativity in more expressive ways. Not surprisingly many of the mental ailments now falling under the broad umbrella of mental illness were first observed among the professional classes. The working classes were until recently too busy working to indulge in the kind of fantasies that would preoccupy early psychotherapists. Alcohol remained the main release valve for emotional insecurity and deviant behaviour was either managed within the community or treated as criminality.

To gain greater public acceptance, psychiatry needed a complete rebrand. As the age of self-centred narcissism deepened its roots in North American society, people became more preoccupied with their moods and feelings. New Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors such as fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, proved a huge marketing success. By the late 1990s taking mood-enhancing medication had not just become socially acceptable, they had helped blur the boundaries between a normal range of human emotions and psychopathy. Meanwhile concerned parents and teachers began to refer boisterous children unable to pay attention in class to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder with a seemingly tailor-made drug, methylphenidate better known as Ritalin. In the same period we saw a rapid rise in the diagnosis of hitherto rare neurological disorders on the autistic spectrum. This craze for psychiatric labelling spread to Europe, usually accompanied by awareness-raising campaigns. Psychiatry had now donned the clothes of the progressive left championing the cause of sufferers of these new labels and thus creating new victim groups demanding special treatment. More and more young people began to contextualise their problems in terms of a psychiatric diagnosis.

Marketing Personality Disorders

The more troublesome behavioural disorders that would have merited a psychiatric diagnosis did not lend themselves to marketing, but only to occasional awareness raising initiatives. Nobody could claim pride in psychopathic madness or subnormal idiocy. However, people can be persuaded to claim pride in geekishness, hyperactivity, obsession, sudden mood swings or certain learning challenges if celebrities share some of these traits. Indeed many high-profile media personalities have publicised their diagnosis with OCD, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Aspergers' Syndrome and even learning disabilities. These traits may have their challenges, but also their advantages especially in creative professions. Other past and present luminaries have been posthumously diagnosed. Albert Einstein is claimed to have suffered or benefited from Asperger's Syndrome. It's even been claimed that multibillionaire IT entrepreneur, Bill Gates, has this syndrome too. As the mental health industry widens the diagnostic criteria for personality disorders, we begin to uncover traits common in almost all of us. Excellence in any endeavour is impossible without focussing on the task at hand. It's thus absurd to claim that a special interest in a circumscribed subject is any way pathological. It may be relatively dysfunctional if it prevents us from doing more important things essential to our wellbeing, but we would have made little technological or social progress if some people had not dedicated their professional lives to specialist subjects that few others understand. Our complex high-tech society depends on hyper-specialisation, but as noted elsewhere, most specialists are involved in various aspects of communication, administration and supervision rather than in the hard science that makes our modern lives possible. By promoting the concept of neurological diversity, the authorities can now treat different groups of people in different ways.

Inevitably, some readers will feel a little confused. Most of us have friends or family members who face significant personal challenges. You may have had episodes of emotional distress yourself. Indeed one may argue if you have never experienced sorrow, rejection or isolation, you have led a very sheltered life and will probably struggle to understand the real-life experiences of most members of our society. Should we help an anorexic girl starving herself to death for fear of becoming morbidly obese, a severely depressed teenager confined to his bedroom or a troubled young man plotting to save humanity from a contagious virus by killing his next door neighbour because he works in a pharmaceutical testing laboratory? Of course, but we need to understand the true causes of such seemingly illogical behaviour, e.g. is the rise in eating disorders related to our obsession with perfect bodies, advertising, size-zero models and media obsession with obsesity?

Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons

In Aldous Huxley's prescient vision of a distant technocratic future, humanity had ceased to procreate naturally and was socially and biologically organised in 5 distinctive castes, ranging from high-IQ but potentially moody Alphas to low-IQ but happy Epsilons. However, everyone took pride in their own cast identity rather than fret about their relative social or intellectual status. In Huxley's Brave New World every aspect of life from conception to death was micromanaged and any psycho-social tensions were managed by the wonder potion, Soma (Sanskrit for he body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche) and recreational sex. Today's Soma takes various forms. Besides obvious analogies with anti-depressants and other psychoactive drugs, the mass entertainment business and recreational stimulants play an important role in managing the general population, turning us into compliant consumers and loyal team players rather than awkward free agents. Increasingly political opinions at variance with the neoliberal globalist orthodoxy are associated with maverick personal types, i.e. rather than tackle a philosophical viewpoint head-on, the new establishment will parody it and insinuate that proponents of such views suffer from some form of paranoid delusion. Democracy thus serves no longer to reflect the true will of citizens, but to manage different groups of people in order to manufacture consent with political agendas promoted by powerful lobbies.

Joining the Dots

We should view the neuological categorisation of human beings alongside other trends for cosmetic surgery, assisted fertilisation, gender reassigment and the potential for artificial intelligence to empower the technocratic elite. Now under the pretext of combatting childhood depression and/or bullying, the authorities feel empowered to subject all children to mandatory mental health screening, while simultaneously encouraging non-traditional family structures, facilitating fertility treatment, now available on the NHS irrespective of relationship status and heavily subsidising mothers going to work, even if their earnings are less than equivalent cost of childcare. All these phenomena remove children from traditional biological families and transfer responsibility for their socialisation away from parents to corporate institutions. Natural variations in human behaviour are analysed in detail to identify individuals that fail to respond to mainstream socialisation and psychological conditioning techniques and may thus become, in the authorities' eyes, troublemakers.

Concern about mental health, while often well-intentioned, provides the ultimate pretext to expand the surveillance state. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Categories
Computing

Why are there so many recruiters?

I don't know about you, but 90% or more of my linkedin contact requests come from recruiters. I don't accept them all. Am I the kind of talented high-flyer you would want to headhunt? Probably not, in person I'm rather shy and certainly not management material. I suppose I just know a few esoteric programming tricks and have a good understanding of data and information architecture. What's more, apart from a few modules taken as part of an Open University degree, I'm entirely self-taught. With all these young whizkids graduating in IT-related degrees in a country obsessed with electronic gadgets and multimedia wizardry, you'd think I'd have plenty of competition from young twenty-somethings. Despite high youth unemployment and free access to tutorials on just about any programming framework that takes your fancy, relatively few youngsters get beyond writing a few lines of Javascript. Unfortunately the tech industry does not need mediocre code monkeys who can churn out repetitive procedural scripts, for that task can be fully automated. In the software industry you do not judge someone's productivity by the amount of code they write or even by the number of hours they work, but how well their application performs. To produce lean and mean applications, you need to get your head around various programming algorithms and design patterns. Yes, it really does matter if you pass a variable by reference or by value or if you clumsily copy and paste variants of some old procedural routine rather than encapsulate it in a neat reusable function that can be reliably tested and yields no side effects.

A good developer never stops learning new techniques to write better, more expressive, more maintainable and more efficient code, rather than clever tricks to automate monotonous tasks. That means good hands-on developers are nearly always geeks, as we have to dedicate much of our time to learning new languages and cutting-edge techniques We can learn some things by social osmosis, but only if we understand core concepts that relate to direct experience. Indeed if a subject does not actively interest us, that's what most of us do. We rely on other people's expertise, but know enough about the subject to avoid getting ripped off. In some academic fields a specialist in someone who has researched a subject extensively, but in most hard sciences specialists are people with active hands-on experience. Unless you have written and tested applications with complex and irregular business logic, you wouldn't be able to appreciate what application developers do. They just sit in front of screens writing quirky symbols with a few English-like key words. Concepts such as design patterns mean little if you have just learned how to do a simple loop. Now suppose you need to hire a new developer, for sake of argument, let's just assume you need a good NodeJS specialist. Who could possibly judge if a candidate knows their stuff? They may have an excellent CV, good qualifications and some good references, but in today's fast-changing world, these mean very little. Millions have worked directly or indirectly for major media multinationals. If you say you worked on the BBC news Website, which bit did you do? Did you just design a prototype for a new button or test a new interactive widget on different browsers? Does your recruiter really understand what skills are required?

Recruiter
Hello, Neil. It's Ryan Adams here. Look we've got a Drupal gig on at Arty Farty New Age Media over in Soho. They need a hard-core backend guy like yourself for a couple of weeks. Would £400 a day tempt you?
Me
Well, actually I'm very busy at moment (trying to fix someone else's awful code), but might be available in a couple of weeks (just in case my contract is cut short).
Recruiter
They really need someone to start straight away. This is for a massive media campaign of a leading household brand.
Me
What happened to the last developer?
Recruiter
Oh, he had issues, some of kind of personality clash, I think. How about £450 a day?
Me
If we continue this conversation, my contract here will be terminated. Let me get back to undoing the mess the last developer here created.
Recruiter
Is your boss looking for any new developers?

One way or another for every real hands-on developer out there there's at least one recruiter, one project manager, a business analyst, a marketing wonk and an accountant (because many IT professionals are contractors with their own limited companies). For some jobs in London's frenetic media sector, I've been contacted by five or more recruiters from different agencies for the same job. "Do you have experience with Solr, the Zend framework, Git and IPTV?" enquires a 22 year old IT graduate. These are really just buzzwords, which mean little until more details are revealed. In most cases they just need an experienced developer who happens to have a used the required programming language in the context of a specific framework and has worked in small teams with agile methodology. Requiring a good understanding of business processes is a good way to weed out self-taught novice programmers or inexperienced IT graduates.

For over 20 years the UK education system has produced millions of graduates who can, figuratively speaking, talk the talk, and not so many who can walk the walk. Although our way of life relies on complex technology, few have more than a cursory overview of its inner workings, but millions are employed in managing the complex human interactions between business owners, government agencies and mission-critical human resources. If all recruiters went on strike tomorrow, no essential services would be disrupted. Life would carry on as usual, except slowly lead developers would have to spend a little more time hunting new talent and would probably choose other geeks just like themselves. That is precisely the scenario, that upper management would prefer to avoid. They do not want a new category of indispensable engineers who can hold their business to ransom. They do not want technical experts to see the whole picture or even gain credit for the fruits of their labour. Meeting business requirements often means just accepting you're a cog in a much bigger machine and cannot work out of sync with all the other cogs, chains, pulleys and lubricating fluids.

Categories
Computing

The Copy and Paste Design Pattern

copy paste

All good programmers understand the concept of design patterns, creational patterns, structural patterns and behavioural patterns. We apply these patterns in different aspects of our projects. It's good to recognise common patterns so we can generalise routines into reusable functions or objects. I won't bore you with the details because you can learn more from a wealth of other online resources, but two key principles underly all design patterns:

  1. Think strategically about your application architecture
  2. Do not Repeat Yourself, aka, DRY. Organise your code so common routines can be reapplied.

Great, but in my humble experience we should add probably the most common design pattern of them all, though strictly speaking it's an anti-pattern: Adaptive Copy & Paste. The core idea here is if it works for somebody else you can just copy, paste and post-edit their code. Sometimes you can begin with some really good snippets of well-structured and commented code, but all too often online code samples are just formulaic and adapted from textbook boilerplate code. I've seen blocks of code pasted into Javascript files with references to StackOverflow.com complete with source URLs and deployed on high-traffic live sites. Let me show you a simple example:

var GBPExchangeRates = {
    USD: 1.52,
    EUR: 1.38,
    CDN: 1.57,
    SKR: 12.89,
    AUD: 1.45,
    CHF: 1.76
  };
  function convertGBPToEuro(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
        if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.EUR
    }
    return 0;
  }
  function convertGBPToUSD(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.USD
    }
    return 0;
  }
  
  var coffeePriceGBP = 1.90;
  
  var teaPriceGBP = 1.10;
  
  var orangeJuicePriceGBP = 1.50;
  
  var coffeePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(orangeJuicePriceGBP);
  
  var coffeePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(orangeJuicePriceGBP);

For a beginner, this is honestly not that bad at all. First we set up a simple object of common currencies with their exchange rates. In the real world this may come from some sort of feed. Next we devise a neat function to convert our GBP prices to Euros. Just to make it failsafe, we make sure we can handle strings with a mixture of numerals and currency symbols, which may include commas or other symbols than decimal points. If we only ever had to convert between British pounds and Euros, that would be just fine, though we may convert all prices via some sort of loop rather than make separate calls for each price. Here for just three prices and three currencies, we need to set nine explicit price variants and six explicit function calls.

However, later an intrepid project manager decides we need to support other currencies and may need to convert other units too, such as measurements or clothes sizes, so a busy code monkey promptly copies, pastes and adapts the first method to USD. Not too bad we only have two functions, but they contain much shared logic. Indeed the only difference lies in the conversion rate. We should break down this logic into steps. First we test if the input is a number (Javascript has a generic Number type that covers both floats and integers). Next we strip any non-numeric characters and cast to a float if the result is not empty. Only then do we apply our conversion rate. The above code could be even worse. We could have opted to hard-code the conversion rate. This may work for constants, such inches to centimetres, but it doesn't work for variables like exchange rates. What we need a generic method to convert number-like strings to true floats and another generic method to apply conversion rates from simple key/value objects.
Javascript makes it very easy for us to apply the decorator pattern by extending an object's prototype. This allows us to chain methods in a very self-descriptive way.

String.prototype.numeralsOnly = function() {
    return this.replace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
}
String.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    var self = this.numeralsOnly();
    if (self.length < 1) {
        self = 0;
    }
    return  parseFloat(self);
}
Number.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    return parseFloat(this);
}
Object.prototype.matchFloat = function(key) {
var obj = this, val;
    if (obj instanceof Object) {
        if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
            val = obj[key];
            if (val) {
                return val.toFloat();
            }
        }
    }
    return 0;
}
Number.prototype.convert = function(fromUnit,toUnit,units) {
    if (units instanceof Object) {
        return this * (
        units.matchFloat(toUnit) / units.matchFloat(fromUnit)
        );
    }
}

We then apply a simple conversion table:

  var rates = {
    GBP: 1,
    USD: 1.53,
    EUR: 1.37,
    YEN: 132.2,
    RUB: 12.7
  };

Then if we were to allow users to convert to the currency of their choice, we could simply add prices in the base currency (in this case GBP) via some hidden element and then apply the conversion factor via the Document Object Model (or DOM):

  $('table thead .currencies .option').on('click',function(e){
    var it = $(this),
      tb = it.parent().parent().parent().parent(),
      selEl = it.parent().find('.selected');
    if (selEl.length < 1) {
      selEl = it.parent('em').first();
    }
    var selCurr = selEl.text().trim().toUpperCase(), tgCurr = it.text().trim().toUpperCase();
    tb.find('.price').each(function(i){
      var td = $(this),
      nVl = td.attr('data-gbp').toFloat().convert('GBP',tgCurr,rates);
      td.html(nVl.toFixed(2));
    });
    
  });

This may look like more code, but we now have a solution that works with any currencies and any number of data items to be converted. Moreover, our convert method may be applied to any units. If we wanted to present volumes in either millilitres or fluid ounces we would just include our decorator methods as a library, set up a conversion table and write a short DOM script. 90% of the code would have been tested for other use cases:

var volumeUnits = {
    ml: 1,
    l: 1000,
    floz: 29.5625
}

Good programmers always think out of the box, not just how to solve the current problem as presented by a project manager, but how do I solve other problems like this? More important, we should ask how to make our code more maintainable and easier to test.

Common Mistakes

  1. Placing editorial content in code files that only developers know how to edit: e.g. A senior manager has decided to edit some text on your company's online shop. The only reason she needs to involve you in this editorial change is because your predecessor placed the text in a template or even worse embedded it verbatim on line 1451 of a fat controller file. What should you do? To make your life easy you could just edit the offending line and write a note for future developers that this text is hard-coded in such and such a file. Management will then think that whenever they wish to edit content they need to ask your project manager to ask you to apply some cryptic code change. However, later they will review their IT budget and decide you are too expensive and then outsource the whole project to a low-wage country or replace it with a state-of-the-art content management system that let's them edit any content without any programming knowledge. What you should do is suggest all such content should be editable in a special admin area and all hard-coded text, media or numbers should be replaced with references to editable content.
  2. Quoting one programming language in another: This is surprisingly common. The main reason for doing so is to inject server-side variables into client-side scripts, e.g. using PHP to build a Javascript routine with a few variables generated dynamically by the server. Not only does this make your Javascript very hard to debug, but it inevitably leads to more repetitive and thus slower Javascript. If you want to fetch data from the back-end, you should inject it as hidden attributes that Javascript can read or simply inject some JSON easily converted from native server-side objects or make an asynchronously request with a JSON response. Keep your javascript lean and mean and ideally in separate files, so your browser can cache these resources more efficiently. If you're using backbone.js or jQuery or other framework, these can be loaded from a content delivery network or CDN.
  3. Repeating routines: Whenever you find yourself repeating a routine more than once, you need a new function or at they very least a loop:
    var d = new Date(item.created);
   item.created_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
   
   var d = new Date(item.modified);
   item.modified_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();

This is messy. What we need is a generic date conversion function:

var isoDateToEuroDate = function(strDate) {
    var d = new Date(strDate);
     return d.getDate() . zeropad(2) + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) . zeropad(2) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
}

And if we're doing a lot of date manipulation,we might like to include a date library to make our code simpler. Your bosses may not notice that you are just writing the same code over and over again, but if your code becomes very expensive to maintain, they will either ditch it or outsource your work to some hapless code monkeys on a fraction of your wage.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Surprise: The Big Business Party won

I predicted a hung parliament that would ditch any manifesto promises at the behest of corporate lobbyists. A weak government is arguably more malleable than a strong one, unless the strong government does exactly what its true masters want. I suspect the new Conservative administration will disappoint many traditional small-c conservatives as it pursues a rigorously corporatist agenda while undermining the very United Kingdom it claims to champion.

I seriously expected Labour to do just a bit better and for the SNP wipeout not to be quite as complete (with only three Scottish seats not won by the SNP). How could the English electorate differ so markedly from the Scottish?

Let's take a closer look at what really happened. In percentage terms the polls were not entirely off the mark, Labour gained 2-3% less than expected, while the Conservatives attracted 3% more and SNP 4-5% more. The Liberal Democrats did worse than expected, while UKIP's popular vote was only marginally lower than most opinion polls suggested. We saw three divergent dynamics at play.

  • In Scotland many Labour and Liberal Democrat voters switched to the SNP. In working class provincial England many Labour voters switched to UKIP.
  • In middle class provincial England and much of Wales, Liberal Democrat voters switched to Conservatives, while most affluent Tory voters stayed loyal. In short UKIP took more votes from Labour than from the hated Tories especially in key marginals, where most disaffection went to the one party that had serious proposals to address unbalanced mass migration.
  • In urban areas with large immigrant populations, especially Muslims, Labour did modestly well even gaining a few seats, but mainly from the LibDems, except in posh areas of London with affluent immigrants where the Tories posed as the party of international business.

UKIP gained 3.9 million votes, but just one MP, Douglas Carsewell, whose love of free trade and Gladstonian Liberalism sets him apart from most UKIP voters, who would support not only tougher immigration controls but also import controls to bring back manufacturing to Britain. The offspring of Great British working class are now represented by three parties who look down on them. Labour and the SNP support greater EU integration, free labour movement, greater surveillance and generally more state interference in private lives. UKIP would increase military spending and expand hydraulic fracturing, while promoting free trade and doing little to address fundamental problems of outsourcing and reliance on volatile financial markets. They won support primarily on two issues: immigration and exit from the European Union. Yet millions of workers across the Europe distrust remote transnational entities not because they want an even more deregulated labour market, but because they want to regain the power to regulate their local labour markets to meet the long-term needs of the local population. It clearly makes little sense for millions of young Europeans to move to other countries because free trade deals have caused relatively inefficient local industries to close as production moves to the Pacific Rim or elsewhere. By and large ordinary workers support greater protection, while privileged professional and business classes benefit from a more dynamic globalised economy able to tap into an almost unlimited pool of talent. It's clearly duplicitous to advocate free trade, but not to allow free movement of labour. However, in an unequal world such globalist policies benefit the privileged and well-educated to the detriment of the unskilled poor. To make such a system vaguely fair we would need to extend Western European welfare provision and workers' rights to the whole world and impose a global living wage. This is precisely the kind of fantasy that the Green Party entertains. That would also mean raising everyone to Western European levels of consumption. Alternatively, we'd have to lower consumption in Western Europe to some sort of global average, but this would inevitably prove not only very unpopular but would lead to cutbacks much more severe than current austerity measures, which are by comparative international standards very modest reductions in a welfare system that has grown considerably over the last 40 years.

Labour should stand up for the long-term interests of ordinary working people in its country. Instead it defends the short-term interests of client groups. If you're a low-paid worker, a single mum with a part-time job or a recent immigrant, Labour's policies may seem slightly more appealing than the Conservative alternatives of cutbacks in welfare provision or tougher restrictions on access to welfare for newcomers. But these are only short-term fixes that address the symptoms of unbalanced unsustainable development rather the root causes. More disturbingly, welfarism combined with global free trade promotes dependence on state institutions beholden ultimately to the same multinational corporations that cause so much inequality and misappropriation of resources in the first place. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, neoliberal corporatism means the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of losses and social deprivation.

SNP Wipeout

Why would Rupert Murdoch's News International support the Conservatives in England and the SNP in Scotland? They appear both rhetorically and ideologically at loggerheads. The English Conservatives have a public image as the party of business, economic stability and fiscal responsibility. Conversely the SNP present themselves as staunchly anti-austerity and to the left of Labour on most issues, e.g. they oppose Trident and have opposed most recent military interventions. Yet such deceptively radical stances are common in the global business community, who see nation states as a thing of the past and much prefer a porous mosaic of interdependent regions subservient to remote transnational organisations like the European Union or NAFTA. As British imperialism is very much a dead duck, international big business does not really care about peripheral British disputes such as Northern Ireland or the jurisdiction of the Falkland Islands. They merely want privileged access to any resources in these territories and to wider global markets. Any concerns about cultural diversity or self-determination are pure political posturing designed to appeal to local sensitivities.

The SNP leadership could promise increased public spending because it knew it could blame either Red or Blue Tories down south. It could always blame Westminster for any economic woes. If Labour had won, it would demand unsustainable increases in government expenditure way beyond the meagre 2-3 billion saved by scrapping Trident. SNP strategists advocate the kind of radical debt-driven Keynsianism that Labour pursued for two-short years under Gordon Brown in the wake of the 2008 banking collapse. While such quantitative easing boosted the retail and property markets, it failed dismally in stimulating productive growth. The ConDem coalition merely reduced welfare spending to its 2008 levels, while still pumping more money into the economy and deregulating the labour market through zero-hour contracts. For all the emotive talk of slash and burn austerity cuts, total welfare spending continued to rise until 2013 and has only fallen slightly since due to lower unemployment, a by-product of zero-hour contracts and the growth in temporary work contracts. Far from shrink, the beloved UK economy has continued to grow, as has net migration. Yet millions of British residents find it hard to make ends meet. This is largely because the real cost of living, not the fiction portrayed by official retail inflation statistics, has risen astronomically. Property prices in London and much of Southern England exclude a growing section of the workforce. If you do not qualify for housing benefit and are subject to market rates, you could not hope to buy a modest semi-detached house for less than 10 times the average salary or rent a decent two bedroom flat for less than ½ the average the average salary. Moreover, our post-modern way of life requires us both to travel further for work and pleasure and to allocate more of our meagre earnings to communication gadgets and services. Living without an Internet-enabled smartphone, laptop and/or pay-TV package seems increasingly unthinkable. A typical family of four needs not one, but 4 mobile phone contracts at £25-40 each a month plus a broadband/Pay-TV package.

Ultra-conformist SNP activists

While it's easy to dismiss UKIP as a Dad's Army of climate-change-denying xenophobic little Englanders and latter-day Thatcherites, for some inexplicable reason the Scottish National Party has convinced a large cross section of pundits and electors of its radical leftwing credentials. I guess it all depends what you call leftwing. Does it mean empowering the working classes and favouring policies in the long-term interests of ordinary working people or does it mean pursuing a corporate agenda of far-reaching social change whose implications ordinary voters cannot fully comprehend? The latter variant is often known as progressivism, ongoing change towards to a new better tomorrow. Indeed it's surprising just how many politicians on both sides of Atlantic love to talk vacuously of the need for change, without dwelling too long on its definition or on its impact on our everyday lives.

The SNP has a simple rallying cry, Independence from Westminster, a convenient slogan that masks the deep-seated historic animosity and distrust that many Scots feel towards their English neighbours. On two issues I agree wholeheartedly with the SNP: Scrapping the Trident Nuclear missile system a colossal waste of money and devolving power from the UK. I would stop short of full independence because Scotland shares not only an Island with England and Wales with much of its transport infrastructure, but has very close social and family bonds with other regions of the British Isles. In an ideal world I'd probably have a British Isles Federation including the Republic of Ireland. Such a Federation would mark a clear break with the UK's imperial past and would grant its member nations considerable autonomy. It would merely recognise the fact that these Islands have long lived as an extended community and need to work together on many practical logistical issues, from transport to energy, fishing to telecommunications.

Yet for all its talk of independence, the SNP seems very happy to transfer power to a much larger multinational entity, the European Union, which they portray as a progressive force for social justice and environmental protection. This is certainly the outward image that the European Commission would like to convey to younger Europeans. In reality the EU promotes an essentially corporatist vision, in which large transnational companies collude with multitiered state institutions to set rules and regulations in their hegemonic interests. Big businesses find it much easier to comply with new regulations than smaller local enterprises, but if need be they can always outsource nasty low-paid jobs to third parties. Back in the 1990s many on the left saw the EU as a kind of fortress Europe protecting workers against greedy multinationals. 20 years later, an expanded EU looks much more like a microcosm of a new emerging borderless global corporate empire, in which local democratic institutions merely implement policies decided by corporate consultancies. Indeed even today, the UK government has very limited power over a whole range of key issues that affect our daily lives.

Big business does not really need a UK nuclear deterrent, but merely local institutions that collaborate with its favoured multinational military forces, whose main purpose is to ensure access to strategic resources and to open up markets. Even some UK military chiefs oppose Trident. The rationale for its existence belong to a bygone era of superpower rivalry. Besides even if Russia, India and China overtake the EU as economic and military powers, they would be exceedingly unlikely to invade Western Europe militarily. They could simply expand their large property portfolios and buy up more leading enterprises. The SNP leadership focus on Trident because they know its an easy win in any future negotiations over the status of post-UK Scotland.

However, the SNP preaches a mix of extreme Keynsianism and regional advantage. They claim to oppose the UK government's austerity and campaigned in increased spending throughout the UK. Yet if the new Conservative government granted Scotland Full Fiscal Autonomy, they would have to find an additional £8 billion just to keep public spending at its current levels. The price of crude oil would have to rise way above its 2014 level of USD $100 a barrel to make up the difference. Of course, it can be argued that Scotland with many deprived communities and sparsely populated outlying regions needs more per capita funding, but the same would be true of many other regions in the UK from Cornwall to Northeast of England. The SNP hope the EU may be more generous than Westminster, but with vast areas of Eastern and Southern Europe. If the SNP tried to borrow more than the rest of the UK, it would inevitably lower Scotland's credit rating especially as the country has a very high dependency ratio and a large proportion of young people lack practical skills.

Would Rupert Murdoch let the Scottish Sun support the SNP in Scotland while backing the Tories in England, if he seriously thought the SNP would challenge his business interests? I very much doubt it. If you dig deeper, you find that on most important issues that SNP harbour very little debate, other than ranting and raving about Westminster-imposed cutbacks and Trident. They have no power to change the former, while the later will probably be dropped anyway. Indeed they agree with the much maligned BBC and Guardian establishment on virtually everything else.

In the coming EU referendum, the SNP will join forces not just with Labour, Liberal Democrats and mainstream Tories to support continued EU membership, but will be firmly on the side of big business and against those of Scottish fisherman unable to compete with large fishing fleets from other EU regions. Their love of corporate power is reflected in other policies too. For instance the first majority SNP administration of 2011 opted to allocate extra money to fund free prescription charges. As they did not increase taxes or were unable to borrow, this meant diverting funds from other public spending priorities. It can be reasonably argued that some low-paid people who require medication to stay alive should not pay for being sick. Such people are usually entitled to other benefits anyway and the Scottish government could have simply restricted free prescriptions to genuinely worthy cases. However, Scotland suffers from another more prevalent problem: over-medication, especially for subjective conditions such as depression or other mental health conditions. With one of the highest antidepressant prescription rates in Europe, the SNP administration just made it easier for GPs and patients to choose the biochemical route. Inevitably, this policy affected poorer working class Scots more than others. If you're an affluent professional, a mere £6 a month is not going to influence your decision to keep taking antidepressants. But if you're on the breadline and cannot manage your money very well, the availability of free antidepressants will sway the balance in favour of biochemical intervention instead of addressing a hundred and one other potential issues, such as booze, recreational drugs, lifestyle, exercise, employability, relationships etc. Prescription charges served not so much to pay for healthcare as they were subsidised anyway, but to promote wise use of prescription drugs. Do you really need antibiotics for a viral infection which a healthy immune system should defeat in a couple of days anyway? More often than not, patients will demand quick fixes such as antibiotics for minor ailments such as sore throats against the better judgement of independent medical professionals, but writing a quick prescription is often for GPs to easiest way to placate a patient demanding instant remedies rather than advice on lifestyle choices. Naturally, medical professionals have differing opinions on the suitability of prescription drugs, but most would agree while in many cases they are life-savers or life-enablers, in many others they offer only modest short-term alleviation or may actually counter-productive, i.e. have more adverse side-effects than benefits. Worse still, once you start taking many medicines it's hard to wean yourself off them. Current SNP policy clearly benefits the pharmaceutical industry, who now have a captive state-subsidised market, while the underlying social and environmental causes of so many ailments remain. My attempts at reasoned debates with SNP activists prove futile. One may not challenge the need for antidepressants for fear of offending the 1/7 Scots on SSRIs. If one persists in citing the many whistleblowers within psychiatry such as David Healy or Robert Whitaker, one is quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist siding with outliers who fail to get their writings peer-reviewed. The same paternalistic attitude is applied to the venerable EU. SNP activists will cite official reports by EU-funded institutions uncritically, while dismissing critiques as the mischievous work of rightwing think tanks. If the Scots may not debate healthcare or the hegemony of transnational organisations over every aspect of our lives without submitting oneself to official experts, one wonders what else we may debate in a post-UK Scotland, controlled by the SNP's corporate backers.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

The Nice Party Manifesto

As an environmentally friendly, safety-aware, anti-racist, disability-positive, anti- homophobia, feminist, pro-growth, pro-children, pro-happiness party, we oppose all nasty policies that may harm other human beings.

Global minimum salary:

If elected the UK Nice Party will provide everyone in the world with access to an online bank account and transfer 1 bitcoin ( £150) a day to ensure a min. global living standard. Any work will be optional.

Pollution outsourced to Mars:

All industrial activities will move to the Moon and Mars. All resource extraction, manufacturing and shipping processes will be fully automated.

Imagine there were no countries:

We will abolish all border controls and provide free public transport for anyone wishing to move from one region to another.

Free Fertility Treatment:

We will encourage people to have as many children as they like and provide free fertility services for all those unable to conceive naturally.

A Luxury Villa for everyone:

Our automated builders will provide luxury eco-friendly villas for anyone with long or short-term accommodation needs.

Electric Cars for all:

All global citizens over the age of 18 months will be entitled to their own eco- friendly driverless electric car. These cars will automatically recharge to overcome rage anxiety.

Food for all:

We will build gigantic greenhouse satellites to grow practically unlimited supplies of sumptuously juicy health food to meet all tastes.

Sex for all:

We will provide all sexually repressed human beings with free humanoid sex dolls to suit all possible erotic preferences.

Free Gender Surgery and Body Transplants

Anyone dissatisfied with their current gender or body shape will be entitled to free gender realignment surgery or potentially a full body transplant.

No more accidents

We will repeal Isaac Newton's outdated and frankly misanthropic Law of Gravity and replace it a kinder Law of Floating Attraction. Everyone will thus be able to fly, float or walk as they please. Cliff-jumping, sky-diving and skateboarding will be safe leisure pursuits and pigs will be able to fly.

No more sadness

We will add Soma to the water supply to banish all residual forms of sadness or stray critical thoughts.

Caveat

A combined software and hardware upgrade is required to implement the above policies. We will migrate all physical human beings currently on planet earth to cloud servers interfacing with massively multiplayer virtual reality simulation software.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

What the enlightened elites really think of you

Opinion leaders love to use inclusive first person plural forms, like we, us and our, when addressing unenlightened plebs who fail to share their enthusiasm for all things post-modern and mistakenly reminisce about the positive aspects of our recent past, like greater social cohesion, more respect for age and experience, simpler rules of social etiquette and above all a lot less social anxiety.

Yet despite their matey rhetoric, the opinion leading intelligentsia look down on the masses, treating divergent perspectives, not as important contributions to a vibrant democratic debate, but as symptoms of nostalgia, stubborn conservatism, uninformed conjecture, pathological prejudice or simply a lack of enlightenment, i.e. a refusal to embrace the kind of change they see as an inescapable next step in our evolution to a higher form of humanity. To oppose the winds of change, in the eyes of the neoliberal elite, is to uphold everything that is bad about our past.

Some may look at other good things that seemed better just a generation or two ago, like an extensive railway network that connected most small towns, more countryside, higher home ownership and local shops within easy walking distance that sold everything ordinary people needed and not just booze and snacks. Instead we have motor cars, more roads, smaller houses, more out-of-town retail parks, cheap foreign holidays and a wealth of electronic gadgets unthinkable to most of us just half a century ago. In short we are increasingly disconnected from our immediate surroundings. Few of us truly understand all the complex industrial processes that underly our globally interconnected high-tech lives.

Nobody voted to close down the last television set factory in the UK or outsource the production of electric kettles to South East Asia. It just happened due to circumstances beyond the control of humble citizens. Some may have protested against factory closures or job losses, but politicians were powerless in the face of the global steamroller, a force set in motion 4 centuries ago by the then expanding Dutch, French and British mercantile empires.

Yet our liberal opinion leaders would like us to believe that everything good about our times has been won through a long democratic struggle of progressive forces against reactionary conservatism. Progressivism has come to embody the notion that all change towards a more globally interdependent world is good, and while conservative naysayers may win temporary reprieves, they will in the end be proven wrong, i.e. we may debate the pace of change, but never the need for it.

As all amateur etymologists know, democracy is just an anglicized form of the Greek δημοκÃÂÂÂαÄία or people power. Most of us like to think of it as a good thing, but know deep down our politicians have their hands tied by various external forces such as the global economy, transnational organisations, banks and various other vested interests. However, true power does not come without responsibility and true responsibility is impossible without a clear, accurate and detailed understanding of the way the world works. The elites see democracy not so much as an ideal to which we should aspire, but an effective means of change management, i.e. by consent if we can, by force if we must (to paraphrase Madeleine Albright's summary of US foreign policy). As long as popular desires can be placated through bread and circuses, the spectacle of democratic debate and elections gives people a sense of participation in the decision-making process. Indeed the global elites are sometimes quite happy for people to vote for policies at odds with their long-term plans. If a country or region happens to possess key resources, their local democratic institutions may be allowed to provide better services and defend traditional ways of life or customs at variance with the new global superculture. One may think of oil-rich countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia that in very different ways adapt the concept of global governance to meet very local needs. In Norway this means protecting the fishing and whaling communities while ensuring everyone enjoys a high minimum standard of living, while the same principle of subsidiarity in Saudi Arabia means keeping alive the semblance of a theocracy. The global elite can tolerate such diversity as long as it is manageable and its relative success or divergence can be attrbuted to local factors. However, like all ruling classes, the new global elite cannot tolerate any organised group of people powerful enough to challenge their hegemony. Thus the lucky inhabitants of Norway, Singapore or Sydney are afforded higher material lifestyles in exchange for loyalty with the New World order. However, concentrations of highly skilled and well-educated workers present a particular challenge to ruling elites. Mission-critical professionals need to be culturally separated from the masses through international professional networks and a more refined variant of global consumer culture.

Modern society depends more than ever on technology that requires a complex sequence of industrial processes. No modern urban settlement could function without electricity, a sanitised water supply, transportation links, telecommunications and raw materials extracted from mines, forests or oil wells thousands of miles away. Yet few of us have more than rudimentary grasp of the underlying sciences. We have all come to rely on technocrats, yet complain whenever technical hitch, such as a power cut, burst water pipe or congested transport network, causes widespread disruption. Our modern lives would be unimaginable without electricity, clean water and rapid transportation. In their absence we would be disconnected from the mediasphere (cinema, radio, TV and now the Internet), unable to operate most household appliances, unable to cook or wash and only have limited range of local food available in shops. City states like Singapore would become ghost towns, if the rest of the world imposed an embargo. This hyper-dependence infantilises us by both raising our material expectations and denying us the freedom to fend ourselves. Why should the labour of a Vietnamese production line worker be worth just a fraction of a London advertising executive? The latter merely promotes sales of goods manufactured by the former with technology neither fully comprehend.

The managerial classes like to ridicule the naive opinions of the masses, usually accusing their amateur naysayers of fruitcakery (applicable to all opinions outwith the range of permissible dissent), religious myopia (if someone opposes three-parent babies), racism (if they oppose extreme labour mobility), homophobia (if they oppose gay marriage) or conspiracy theorism (if someone suggests the Iraq War was really about oil) or simply ludditism (if someone opposes nuclear power or hydraulic fracturing). This marginalising technique is most effective if issues can be isolated and analysed in the context of mainstream assumptions about almost everything else. Nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing seem so much more necessary if we plan to continue our high-consumption happy-motoring lifestyle. If you challenge the very foundation of modern economics, continuous material growth, then you risk biting the hands that feed you. If retail sales decline as people stop buying superfluous consumer goods, then not only do many retail workers lose their jobs, but the banking, marketing and advertising industries suffer too.

Consider the concocted debate on unbalanced mass immigration, where the establishment poses on the internationalist left, but sometimes pretends to share the concerns of indigenous workers. Some believe public concern about extreme labour mobility is fuelled by irrational prejudice against foreigners, rather than job security and social cohesion. By dismissing opposition to mass immigration as xenophobic and reactionary, the business elites can dodge real issues caused by a massive oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, i.e. de-skilling of indigenous working classes, disappearance of stable jobs with easy hiring and firing of human resources and dwindling class solidarity. If you have a stable long-term job and are fully integrated in your local community, you may join trade union and care more about the welfare of other workers in your neighbourhood. By contrast, if you only have temporary work contract in another country your main concerns are your pay cheques and staying out of trouble. However, rational debate on the subject is often difficult because mainstream opinion leaders are committed to economic growth at all costs, which relies on a dynamic labour market and bigger profits.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

Twitter Mob: Don’t Blame the Users

How lobbies have turned consumer groups into victims

Twitter does not exactly lend itself to critical analysis. I doubt many people have changed their minds on anything after reading a mere 140 character tweet. Such short messages tend to reinforce existing prejudices and opinions and often build on concerted advertising and awareness-raising campaigns. You can tweet a link to an article, but usually only those sympathetic to your cause will read it. Twitter also encourages conformity as nobody wants to be unpopular or offend their virtual friends. It's fine to support widely publicised causes, but not to voice views that others may easily misinterpret. When issues are simplified, many will readily interpret any divergence from the mainstream view as an act of tribal betrayal, like a crowd of Glasgow Rangers supporters spotting a loner wearing a Celtic scarf.

As I often take nonconformist stances, I've grown used to the devious tactics employed by seasoned opinion leaders, such as dismissing any embarrassing evidence against their case as mere conspiracy theories. However, another very effective tactic is to champion the rights of consumer groups to consume the very product or service that some dissident suggests may harm them.

By this logic, nobody could have ever exposed the harmful effects of cigarette smoking simply because millions of consumers enjoyed, or rather believed they enjoyed, this product. Smoking relieves stress and helps people befriend other smokers. It often serves as a great socialising tool and an act of defiance against an increasingly invasive nanny state. Indeed there is much evidence suggesting nicotine acts as an antidepressant, which might explain why so many smokers find it so hard to quit. This vice may be a little outmoded today, but fifty years ago non-smokers had to tolerate smokers at work, in their extended family, neighbourhood and in many public spaces like pubs, cafés and public transport. Some would complain, but generally had to keep quiet in many everyday social situations. Indeed some would have to claim to suffer from a special medical condition to persuade a friend to refrain from smoking in their presence. Yet as evidence mounted that smoking has all sorts of nasty side effects, smokers began to quit and non-smokers became much more proactive in reclaiming smoke-free areas. More recently smokers have been turned into outcasts, often having to escape outdoors on cold rainy days to indulge in their filthy habit.

Fast forward to the 21st century and antidepressants are not only a multi-billion pound industry, just as tobacco was, but they are actively endorsed by celebrities and state-sponsored healthcare institutions as the primary treatment for the growing number of people who feel stressed or depressed. Yet as smokers, alcoholics and recreational drug users know, mind-altering chemicals may offer you a temporary escape from your melancholy, but they come at a huge price in terms of long-term ill-health and some rather unpleasant neuro-psychological side effects. This change of public opinion, from the largely psycho-social model of emotional distress to the mainly biological model, is largely the result of a four decade long campaign to associate in the public mind a chemical imbalance with people's nonfunctional states of mind. Human feelings have been medicalised, although there remains scant proof of a link between natural serotonin levels and state of mind. Many substances we ingest can affect our natural mood-regulating compounds (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine). It should come as little surprise that many diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD etc.., have a bad diet and have indulged in booze and other recreational drugs. Often bad lifestyle choices arise from a downward spiral of emotional insecurity and a tendency to seek solace in anything that turns your mind away from the immediate cause of distress. As our expectations for higher material goods and personal achievements grow, so does our sense of inadequacy and isolation, when we fail to reach these goals. We are not all blessed with perfect athletic bodies, excellent hand-eye coordination and extraordinary musical talent. We will not all be premier league footballers, Olympic medalists, world-famous pop singers, TV celebrities or fashion models. Most of us are fairly average with relative strengths and weaknesses, but our current obsession with status symbols turns minor personal deficits into medical conditions that require treatment. How personality traits develop has long eluded neurologists. Why are some people so gregarious with an upbeat and ebullient disposition, while others have a more reclusive, independent and sobre character and tend to reflect on events and observations in greater detail? If worrying about things were so bad, then why would such instincts evolve in the first place? In essence worrying is about caring about yourself and loved ones. If we didn't worry about anything, we would lack motivation to try harder. Most creative types need plenty of time for introspection. As we obsess more with image and social networking, detailed analysis can fall by the wayside. While some may be enhancing their social status through better presentation and socialisation, others prefer to build a better life through hard work and contemplation. However, in the age of industrial automation and outsourcing, many lack the motivation to make or even repair things themselves. In today's perverse world, a non-productive lawyer not only earns more than her cleaner, but also more her car mechanic and all the other manual workers who helped make her lifestyle possible. Yet many higher-earning professionals in the burgeoning hot-air sector succumb to work-related stress and even depression.
There may be a good argument for short-term medication to wean people off junk food and booze or simply to get the out of bed in the morning, but little evidence that the any pre-existing chemical imbalance caused them to make bad lifestyle choices. Millions now believe antidepressants are essential medication for anyone whose relative lack of cheerfulness or bad moods cause others so much distress. We have thus wished away the underlying causes of depression in our incessant drive to promote mandatory bubbliness, i.e. where we all feign happiness through fake smiles and frequent giggles ? Casual observations would suggest offices have been transformed from relatively sombre places of work into comedy workshops. 50 years of TV satire and now endless YouTube gags have had their effect on the collective psyche. Yet, we are not all born actors. If you fail to take part in mandatory amateur theatrics, your jovial teammates will soon write you off as a loner. Whereas 50 years ago a lack of practical skills could prove a handicap in all but the most privileged families, today it is a perceived lack of social skills that sets many at a distinct disadvantage. Social anxiety, here in its literal non-psychiatric sense, is a prime cause of social alienation, leading to a lack of self-worth, a sense of inferiority and inevitably melancholy.

Handing out free antidepressants to address social alienation is like distributing morphine tablets to combat tooth decay. They may temporarily alleviate unpleasant symptoms, but they fail to address the root causes of the problem and may have very nasty adverse effects with prolonged use. Suggesting that opposing state-subsidised mass-medication of unhappiness offends the unhappy is like accusing an opponent of hydraulic fracturing of condemning the elderly to freezing homes in winter (the elderly would be the first to suffer from polluted tap water). These quick fixes are simply not the solution.

For more on this theme may I recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker .