• Inscrutable password suggestions.
• Daily quotes from John Cage’s Diary.
• Disquieting messages for people in other rooms.
• Orders!
• The frightening bits from out-of-copyright works.
• The funny bits from out-of-copyright works.
• Dog names.
• IKEA product locations, Argos reservation numbers, mall maps.
• Jokes.
• (black and white) pictures of funerals and snakes.
• Sequentially-numbered tickets.
• Encouraging messages (when it looks like I’m a bit stuck).
• Lists.
• Postage stamps (obviously).
• Cocktail recipes.
• The names of all the fictional countries in the Wikipedia entry for ‘fictional countries’, one per day.
• Itineraries.
• Daily diet and exercise sheets.
• Obscene notes.
• Treasure.
• Something to do while your computer’s rebooting.
• Eventbrite tickets.
• Local currency.
• Everything said by one particular friend online during one day.
• Game tokens.
• Optimistic assessments of the situation.
• The catalogue number of the CD on the radio now.
• Hidden meanings, asides, sub-plots, back stories.
• Chess moves.
• Philip Larkin.
• In-game messages.
• Running totals, lap-times, half-time scores, way markers.
• One-time keys.
• The distance from earth of the Voyager 2 space probe.
• Billets doux.
• Wind-ups, complicated hoaxes, in-jokes, gags.

(…I could go on).

But there’s the point, of course. my perception of the Greeks in crisis is faulty – partial, unhelpful. And it’s likely that the Greek perspective on the British response to the crisis and on our rather decorous ‘occupy’ movement (feature in yesterday’s Standard about an occupy protester who commutes from her tent to a job at Harper’s Bazaar) is just as screwed up.

So, whatever you say about the decades of ‘creeping federalism’, one thing it hasn’t achieved is any measure of mutual understanding between the partner nations.

For all our economic interdependence and our unlimited interconnection, we know as little about each other as we did when the ‘European project’ was mostly about not being eaten by a bear while foraging for berries in the great continental forest.

And anyway, these countries we’re obsessed with are probably the wrong unit of human culture to be thinking about. Jane Jacobs, brilliant urbanist and self-taught economist of cities, was convinced that the deepening decline she observed in the developed economies up till her death in 1984 (that’s the decline that we thought was gone for good until about three years ago) was the result of our fixation on the nation state.

Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for the rise and decline of wealth. Indeed the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their biddingsuggests some form of essential irrelevance. It also affronts common sense, if nothing else, to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators. All they really have in common is the political fact of sovereignty.

From Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life.

It looks like tying together a bloc of impossibly different nations – nations which were already arbitrary fusions of regional and city economies – to make a continuous economic entity failed and now the rather desparate fantasy is emerging that going back to the old, equally irrelevant national sovereignties will in some way help.

That was the time I knew my life was going to be different from my dad’s

In a few weeks time I’ll be heading back to BBC radio, where I’ll be taking over the job of Interactive Editor for Radio 3, the Proms and the performing groups. I’m almost speechless with pleasure at this development while also terrifically sad to be leaving my lovely friends in digital comms where we have really just got started on a huge project to reinvent the BBC’s corporate web site.

So it was a nice coincidence that I spent Thursday afternoon with Dualtagh Herr (one of my digital comms colleagues and a bona fide video ninja) in the shabby splendour of Maida Vale’s studio 1 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We were shooting this video about that national musical landmark and massive cultural oddity The Last Night of the Proms.

I’ll admit I’ve never been so close to a great orchestra in action and the gales of glorious, melodic NOISE issuing from every corner of the band (that’s what they call it), even while at rest or tuning up were so affecting as to leave both of us slack-jawed in wonder. We walked back to Warwick Avenue tube after the shoot giggling with the pleasure of it. I’ll be at the Last Night tonight – another first for me and one that I suspect counts as an essential inoculation for the journey I’m going on. Wish me luck, friends!

I took some pics while I was there too:

Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built, a history of the golden age of American popular music. It’s about the generations of American songwriters, starting at the turn of the twentieth century in what Sheed calls ‘the piano era’, who essentially invented what we now know as popular music.

It’s sub-titled ‘with a little help from Irving, Cole and a crew of about fifty’ and it’s told through the abbreviated life stories of the dozens of lyricists and composers who grafted on Broadway, on Tin Pan Alley and in Hollywood to make us all song addicts. It’s warm and entertaining and full of mad insights into the psychology and economics and aesthetics of pop music.

It’s also a catalogue of amazing songs – from Basin Street Blues to Body and Soul to Baby it’s Cold Outside to April in Paris. I’ve created a Spotify playlist for each section. The artists are a bit variable – performers from the other end of the Twentieth Century aren’t as well-represented as they ought to be on Spotify – and there are a few gaps but it’s an amazing mosaic of song. Let me know if you’ve found better versions.

• The piano era.
• Consequences – the great jazz songwriters.
• The Stage – Broadway swings.
• Hollywood – the sugar daddy.
• Survival on Broadway – the curtain that won’t stay down.

Who will do it? A court-appointed executioner? How about a group of ordinary citizens pressing buttons at home, none of them knowing who’s button actually does the deed? Or the victim’s family? I’ll suggest that executioners are drawn by lottery from the list of people who’ve expressed support for the new law. That sounds logical: it surely can’t be OK to vote for the death penalty and expect someone else to despatch the condemned, can it? If there’s a chance that you’ll have to squeeze the syringe, will you still vote for it? And, once appointed, how will the executioner cope with the attention of the media? Will he or she be allowed to sell the story of the condemned’s last moments? Or will the law mandate anonymity? And what will happen the first time the family of an executed criminal brings a civil case against the executioner or the prison or everyone involved in the deed?

How will we do it? A lethal injection? Electrocution? Hanging? None has a great track record. None is humane. How will we decide? It’ll take a decade. High-tech solutions will be proposed (shot into the vacuum of space? Instantaneous robotic dismemberment? Nanoexecutioners?). The debate will rage. Campaigners on both sides will mount judicial challenges. It’ll be chaos and, as soon as the first horrendous screw-up happens, it’ll all start again.

Will we do it publicly and who will observe? I’ll argue that judicial killings should be streamed online from multiple angles (in 3D) and that a panel of ordinary citizens should be obliged to observe from close quarters – selected by the jury service process, perhaps.

And will a doctor be present? Someone will need to ensure good practice and certify death. Does the Hippocratic oath permit that? Will the BMA? And if they don’t, will rogue doctors show up to do the honours or will we have to create a new class of state-appointed ‘execution doctors’?

What will we do with the body? Will we consign the dead to a secure prison graveyard or permit shrines to arise in public cemeteries? How about mandatory cremation and scattering? Will we forbid elaborate funerals and celebrations of the lives of the wicked deceased?

What will we do the first time an innocent person is executed? Will the new law have provision for automatic compensation? Will executions cease while standards of evidence are examined and investigations reviewed? Could the death penalty actually survive a mistake? Or would we be back at square one?

And what about death row? Will there be a single, national facility (designed by a rockstar architect, perhaps, with an atrium) where the condemned work through their decades of appeals? Or will each prison keep a mini-death row of its own? Will the inhabitants be allowed access to the media, web sites, Twitter accounts? Will there be a reality TV show?

There are other questions: will we execute young people or people with learning disabilities? Will we execute mothers of young children? Will we execute foreigners? Will the new law require derogation from international human rights law? Will Britain become a pariah once it rejoins the club that includes all the most hideous regimes on earth (and the United States)? Will the first executions for nearly fifty years bring about civil unrest? Can a civilised state tolerate the introduction of state-sanctioned killing? Will it dehumanise us and our children? Will MPs even contemplate the prospect of another nasty and divisive debate about the grimmest of all subjects? Who will draft the bill, draw up the regulations, implement the policy? Will civil servants and prison officers who object be forced to implement the law? Will employment tribunals consider the dismissals of conscientious objectors? And so on. And so on. Like I said, we don’t have the stomach for it.

A remarkable story about Victorian platform innovation

Radio is in flux. First-wave digital platforms are in danger of being eclipsed – even before they’ve achieved anything like full adoption. Second-wave platforms are evolving fast but usable over-the-air IP – a kind of holy grail – is probably years away so radio stations are investing in web sites and mobile apps. Meanwhile, audiences for radio everywhere are steady but looking fragile and everyone’s waiting for a persuasive package of content and convenience to justify the switch to digital. And billions of cheap-to-own FM radios constitute a huge impediment to switchover.

130 years ago, nearly thirty years before the first public radio broadcast, at an international electrical exhibition in Paris, entrepreneur Clément Ader prototyped a package of content delivered via a new platform, the telephone. He called the prototype a ‘telephonic opera’ service because opera performances were the primary content (just as they had been in Zurich in 1878, when a performance of Don Pasquale was relayed via telephone only months after its invention). The prototype became a commercial product later in the decade under the name Théâtrophone.

Subscribers to the service, including, I kid you not, Marcel Proust (in his cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Hausmann), dialled in from their home telephones (a technology that was only a decade old itself) and asked to be put through to one of the participating theatres. They then listened to the evening’s performance live. In stereo. At the time of the original demonstration, Scientific American said:

The singers placed themselves in the mind of the listener, some to the right and others to the left. It’s easy to follow their movements and to indicate exactly, each time they that change their position, the imaginary distance at which they appear to be.

Two separate telephone lines delivered signals from two stage microphones: one right, one left (this Wikipedia entry suggests eighty microphones and, since they weren’t really microphones, just crude acoustic receivers, that doesn’t sound unreasonable).

A subscriber to an equivalent service in London, Electrophone, described the process:

You lifted your ordinary telephone receiver and said ‘Electrophone please’ and in a moment you were asked which theatre you wanted and in another moment you were in your armchairs around the table listening to musical comedy at the Adelphi…

Theatres, music halls – and, later, places of worship, all over London were wired up to the Electrophone exchange at 34 – 35 Gerard Street in Soho and Electrophone attendants (we’d call them OB engineers) were stationed in each to position mics and connect subscribers.

Electrophone listeners in 1901

If you’d lived in Budapest in the 1890s (and been a wealthy gadget freak) you’d have subscribed to a service called Telefon Hírmondó which, you’ve got to admit, was startlingly like a modern radio network, with content organised into ‘channels’, a daily schedule (including stock quotes, local press, finance, theatrical and sporting news) in addition to the usual operatic performances (what is it with the opera?). There were children’s concerts, acts of worship, folk music, recitals. Advertisements, inevitably, were inserted between juicy news items. The company employed 100 people, with job titles like ‘editor’ and ‘programme controller’ and, at its peak had 6,000 subscribers.

The Théâtrophone receiver

But what’s remarkable for me about these services (there were dozens worldwide) is how closely they resemble the ones we’re building now on The Internet. Clicking ‘play live’ for Radio 3′s nightly live concert is essentially the same as asking the Electrophone ‘attendant in charge’ to put you through to the Wigmore Hall – a personal, two-way circuit connecting you to a live event a long way from home. Nineteenth Century opera nuts were using two-way telepresence to enjoy remote performances that were significantly more immersive than what was to come from terrestrial radio decades later. The spatial separation and specially-designed in-home kit (the ‘Electrophone table’ and Théâtrophone’s special receiver) that came with these services must have made these experiences extraordinarily vivid. Vivid enough for Proust to listen to a performance of Pelléas and Mélisande all the way through in 1911.

They even had pretty sophisticated tiered business models – an extra £5 per season for Covent Garden, for instance (no freemium as far as I can tell, though). These pioneers built a highly immersive Victorian cyberspace on the first of the really big wired networks – and, let’s face it, mostly because they misunderstood what people would actually wind up using their telephones for. The implications for the services we’re designing and promoting now set the mind reeling.

• Google ‘Théâtrophone‘, ‘Electrophone‘ or ‘Telefon Hírmondó‘: you’ll find plenty of web sites about these pre-radio experiments. Here’s a good technical overview of Electrophone, for instance. I owe the inspiration for this post to a terrific Sunday Feature from Radio 3 last year called The Pleasure Telephone, presented by Edward Seckerson. The programme is sadly unavailable. Hunt down a recording if you can find one.
• The picture at the top shows a coin-operated Théâtrophone receiver of the kind that would have been installed in cafes and special listening rooms. All the pics are from the Wikimedia Commons.

A week ago I speculated here about what listeners might do with BBC radio content if allowed to play with it. I came up with something quite linear – a kind of listener-curated Pick of the Week. Here’s something a bit more playful (or dumb, depending). It’s the fifteen clips from Sunday’s Pick of the Week, selected by Graham Seed, all at once.

Click play to hear the cacophony. I think it adds up to quite a pleasing, BBC radio-shaped lump of sound – and another way of expressing the variety and unpredictability that is BBC radio. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could provide tools for listeners to play in this way? Respectful apologies to all the programme-makers involved (and to Graham Seed too, of course).

It’s not entirely unproduced – I stacked the fifteen clips as tracks in Garageband, trimmed them all to 30 seconds each and then staggered them to come in at four-second intervals. This means that the maximum you’ll hear at once is eight. There are no fades, apart from the final clip, which seemed to need one.

You’ll hear: Supermarket Symphony (Radio 4), Composer of the Week, Gian Carlo Menotti (Radio 3), Barbara Windsor’s Funny Girls, Hylda Baker (Radio 2), George Bernard Shaw, Widowers’ Houses (Radio 3), Bird Fancyers Delight (Radio 4), Afternoon Play, Gilda and her Daughters in Looking for Goldie (Radio 4), Twenty Minutes, Romance (Radio 3), Down and Out in the the City of Angels (Radio 4), The Robeson Files (Radio 2), Johnnie Walker meets Neil Diamond: New York City Born and Raised (Radio 2), Tim Key’s Suspended Sentence (Radio 4), A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake (Radio 4), Afternoon Play, Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You (Radio 4), Desert Island Discs, John Graham (Radio 4) and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (Radio 4).