Break up BT?

Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos’ latest report ‘The Politics of Broadband’. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of sponsor) but we should expect that of a Think Tank whose average age seems to be about 19 (I make this observation because I am old and bitter). They’ve absorbed all the latest thinking from the US – Lessig, Open Spectrum, the ‘Innovation Commons’ and they want Government to get on and break up BT to dissolve the innovation log jam and get broadband roll-out moving. From the platform, Stephen Timms was nicer about this idea than I’d expected of the ecommerce minister (but it’s still a ‘no’) and Graham Wallace, who runs Cable & Wireless (the incautiously chosen sponsor), made a good case for the break-up (but then he would, wouldn’t he).

From the floor, Clare Spottiswoode, who, in an earlier life, split up Gas supply for the last Tory Government, couldn’t understand why it would be any more complicated to split up BT than British Gas and pointed to the wave of innovation and price cuts that followed that break-up. Wallace went further and argued that it would be ‘easy’ to split up the giant incumbent because of the elaborate system of interconnect agreements already in place at the telephone exchanges.

There was no consensus. Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media & The Internet at the LSE, was against – too complicated and disruptive by far. The most cogent argument against came from Claire Enders: the capital markets will have the casting vote, since they’ll have to fund the break-up, and they’re still on strike so we might as well forget it. I think it’s unwise to bet on apocalyptic infrastructural change to help us get Broadband Britain rolling while the tech and comms economy is still deep frozen. We’re going to need to be more tactical and less scornful of ‘incremental change’.

Information about energy

Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for the NS archives or, if you subscribe to the magazine there’s no charge) Eric Schneider and James Kay think the biologists (and the rest of us, for that matter) have got it wrong about life. We’re not here to reproduce, we’re here to tear up energy, to accelerate the rate of increase of disorder. All of life is just a big entropy machine. This sounds like one of those ideas that’ll be orthodoxy in twenty years. Meanwhile, also from New Scientist, chemical physicists in Australia have shown that, at micron scales and over periods of time as long as a couple of seconds, the second law works in reverse. Blimey.

Fireworks therapy

So after two or three hours running up and down the garden in the fine drizzle, lighting fireworks of every variety (including some fucking enormous roman candle bundles about the size of a fire bucket), I can confirm that my favourite is the Angry Wasps Mine from Standard Fireworks. It produces a gorgeous fountain of multi-coloured sparks for about 30 seconds and then stops… for just long enough to convince you that it’s all over. The bang that follows is awesome – the percussion, even from the the other end of the garden, where you are cowering, is startling – a big shove in the chest that leaves everyone laughing and grinning like fools. Speaking as your doctor, I suggest you get a big box of these things and keep them handy for those difficult days…

edemocracy spiked!

Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally steam-rollered by a law suit in 2000 but these guys were always more switched on than the rest of the factional hard left so it’s no surprise to see them back with a stylish, readable web site and now a series of debates on the entirely relevant theme of IT after the crash.

Spiked’s mission is the debunking of trendy ideas – in politics, science, business, anywhere really. But this is really just classical entryism – a subtle and accessible way of doing the important work of blowing away our ‘false consciousness’ and reasserting the eternal oppositions of the class struggle – labour vs capital, state vs individual etc. (I can’t find a trace of the political party itself. Was it wound up? Surely it can’t be this lot?).

I guess the logic of the project is that debunking is infectious: for every orthodoxy persuasively overturned there is a potential convert to the larger cause. There really is nothing so satisfying as a cogently argued rubbishing of the status quo – whether it be climate change (it’s not happening), edemocracy (it’s just more state coercion) or testicular cancer (it’s no big deal).

As a strategy it’s obviously working. If tonight’s meeting was anything to go by, they’re frequented by plenty of non RCP people, many of whom may have no idea what Spiked stands for and little or no sympathy with their goals (like me). More subtle still, with no actual political party to push, Spiked can rightly claim to be entirely independent and new recruits are recruits to a way of thinking rather than to a political creed. Very postmodern.

In this debate, Charlie Leadbeater, advisor to number 10 and prominent optimist, argued that informal, self-organising digital networks (like this blogging thing) might present a way of holding governments and trans-national institutions to account. Influential forecaster James Woodhuysen, for Spiked, disagreed – entertaingly, as always. edemocracy is phoney – worse, it’s a barely disguised attempt to reinforce state control, provide new channels for coercion and permit governments to steamroller dissent. All of this communication is just a smokescreen, a clever distraction from the real business (in ‘the real world’) of production – substituting participation for real power. This programmatic emphasis of production over communication (content over form, real over imaginary) is sooo last century and, obviously, neglects the actual, objective reality of networked communications, though. Communication in the 21st Century is production.

The downtown music scene after 9/11

I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma, worldview, prejudices and ego intact – “yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I’m mostly working with tabla and tape loops…”

What passes for entertainment round my way

If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn’t been washed into the river by the already torrential rainstorm here in the burbs, you might catch our garden fireworks live on the Shedcam from 1730 – 1900-ish this evening. I’ve upped the timing on the cam and pointed it out the shed window. I guess actually catching a burst on the cam would be a one-in-a-million chance but I don’t suppose you’ve got anything better to do this evening have you?

Detritus of fireworks night in a suburban garden
Afterwards

An Open Source BBC?

Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC’s role in the post-crash Internet.

I’m a busy man – I’m nearly forty and I’ve never lit a firework in my life (can that be true?) and this evening I have to light lots of them. So, here are some disconnected thoughts:

1. Has the market failed? There are lot of fancy words – mostly borrowed from economics – in this debate and two of them – ‘market failure’ – make me uncomfortable. It’s much too early to tell that we’re seeing any kind of systematic failure here. A market crash is not the same as a market failure. We mustn’t allow our frustrated and (admit it) utopian geek-longing for better tools, fatter pipes or social transformation to convince us that we’re at the end of anything. Seriously: we probably need at least another decade before we can be sure that the current, messy mix of provision cannot deliver our nirvana of interconnection, participation and empowerment (that’s not an excuse to wait ten years, btw).

2. Politics. The BBC might be the right vehicle for this laudable goal – or it might not. There’s a critical difference between picking the right agency or mix of agencies and levers to deliver a social policy goal and pragmatically making use of a big, powerful, politically bullet-proof institution like the current BBC to do it. Although the latter might make sense now – especially while this kind of thinking is gaining ground within the Beeb – it might just be storing up problems – both practical and political – for future generations of citizens and market players. I happen to think that we should probably seize the opportunity of a pumped-up, inflation-protected BBC to at least make a start on the infrastructure for participation but I think we must be practical and limit our ambitions – the better to realise them fully in the future. Piggy-backing the BBC makes sense right now but not because the market has failed, rather because the market is in the doldrums and we need to make some progress while the Venture Capitalists are still on strike.

3. Government neglect. Since we may have to wait a long time to see how this all pans out, we need to get started now on embedding the goals of the ‘connectivists’ (or whatever we will call people of this general mindset) in the right places: public policy, media, corporate and BBC strategy. For this reason, I’ll link to my alarm from a couple of months ago at the total exclusion of the net from the scope of the new UK Communications Bill and from the super-regulator OfCom. The Government at least has to be paying attention in this crucial phase. Benign neglect has had its day.

4. Long-range thinking needed. Since I’m on record as arguing for seven or eight years now that the BBC is the best-placed agency to pursue some of the goals of the connectivists, it’s interesting to reverse the telescope for a minute and look at this from the BBC’s perspective. I’m ill-qualified to do so but there must a nagging worry in the minds of the more forward-thinking Beebistas that this period of plenty cannot last and that, when it comes to an end, the outlook for a huge, content-focused state broadcaster may not look at all rosy. The BBC needs some good long-range thinking. This is a good start.

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Categorized as Media

Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide

One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I’ll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though.

If I’ve got this right, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth’s extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).

This is fun…

iTunes playlists are becoming an obsession. Here’s my “sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers” list – every track that features one of those words in its ID3 tags. For some reason, these lists make for a much more provocative listen that just randomising the whole library.

A Mother's Love, The Meters
All Your Sisters, Mazzy Star
Big Bayou, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Broken Little Sister, Death In Vegas
Brother Can You Spare A Dime, George Michael
Brother John, Cannonball Adderley
Christine's Tune, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Come To Daddy,  Mummy Mix
Divine Mother, Jah Wobble
Endless Grey Ribbon, The Corn Sisters
Every Day Is Christmas, The Webb Brothers
Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand, Williamson Brothers And Curry
Good Mornin',  Brother
Graveside Song, Stevens Sisters
He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother, Keith Barrow
He Meets His Mother, Richard Robbins
He's The Greatest Dancer, Sister Sledge
I Believe In Father Christmas, Six By Seven
I Need Someone, Wallace Brothers
Jackie Brown Soundtrack.mp3, Brothers Johnson
Jungle Brothers - Because I Got It Like That (Ultimate Mix), Jungle Brothers
Just a Little Talk With Jesus, Statler Brothers
King Of The Road, Statler Brothers
Lacassine Special, Balfa Brothers
Last Song for Mother, Nanci Griffith
Legacy (Show Me Love) (Mash Up Matt Mix), Space Brothers
Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley
Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley
Look At That Old Grizzly Bear, Mark Mothersbaugh
Make It Easy On Yourself, Scott Walker & The Walker Brothers
Mother (very rare), Blind Melon
Mother And Child Reunion, Paul Simon
Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles
My Baby's Gone, Wallace Brothers
My Dad's Gone Crazy, Eminem
My Sister, Tindersticks
Nebraska, The Cash Brothers
New Genious (Brother), Gorillaz
Oh Lori, Alessi brothers
Oh,  Sister
One For Daddy-O, Cannonball Adderley
One Too Many Mornings, Chemical Brothers
Our Mother The Mountain, Townes Van Zandt
Piece of my Heart, Big Brother & the Holding Company
Ras Dub, Sister Carol
Sal Got A Meatskin, Carlisle Brothers
Sister Ray, Joy Division
Sisters & Brothers, The Fire This Time
Slapshot, Brothers In Raw
Star Catching  Girl [Soulside Mix], Brother Brown Feat. Frank'ee
Transition Theme For Minor Blues (Or Little Malcolm Loves His Dad), Sonny Rollins
Tunji's Song - Tunji Oyelana, Brotherhood of Breath
Will the Circle Be Unbroken, The Neville Brothers
Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Statler Brothers
Will the Circle be Unbroken, Mother Maybelle Carter
Will the Circle be Unbroken (live), The Allman Brothers Band
You Can't Hold On To A Love That's Gone, The Holmes Brothers
Your Heart And Mine, Nicholas Brothers
Your Winter, Sister Hazel