Two big social experiments of huge significance

One of the great virtues of the USA is that individual states have a great deal of autonomy over large swathes of policy-making, and can effectively conduct experiments that the rest of us can watch.  Could be viewed as an extension of 'fail fast, fail cheaply' capitalism that confers those systematic advantages that so bewilder socialists and statists all over - because of course when they take an action, it's because they are right - and there'll be no going back or letting empirical failure get in the way of determined execution of the policy. 

If that's the hardened mindset, then the warnings of conservatives like Burke and Johnson against making changes without serious proof of benefit, are doubly appropriate.  What are we to make of the two ultra-significant social experiments about to be kicked off?

Australia's move to ban under-16s from having social meejah accounts is perhaps in the 'US states experimental' category.  A relatively small western country, with representative social concerns, is trying something prima facie of enormous difficulty but with clear social ramifications.  Perhaps it's so implausible they'll succeed as to make it all a bit hypothetical (I don't recall the illegality of underage drinking stopping me buying a pint in a pub at the age of 16**).  What if it has a genuine impact?  FB et al sure as hell don't want to trip up complacently on this one, and have it sweep the rest of the world.  How will they react: ultra-cooperative? dismissive?  faux-cooperative?  Go Australia!, I say: let us know how you get on. 

Here at home we have the looming Assisted Dying Act as the Bill goes into further stages.  What have people made of 'experiments' etc elsewhere?  To hear the Bill's sponsors, they've thought of everything.  But here's an interesting article on the Oregon 'precedent', which shows how what we might call "legal interpretation creep" is an ever-present possibility.  We also know that some proponents of euthanasia have every intention of broadening the scope at the first opportunity.  Why couldn't the Act be for a trial period of, say, 5 years with a sunset clause?

I'm sure there are many wise thoughts out there on both issues (Kev has already contributed on the second), which I hereby solicit BTL.

ND

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** I'll bet many of you have the same experience.  The principle in those days was: "Lads gotta learn how to handle their drink & take their turn at bar billiards quietly in the corner". 

Muddying the Waters in FB ... and Moscow

Today we read that Facebook intends to merge, in systems terms, various functions across various of the platforms it owns - FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc - in order to make it harder for regulators to split the company up, Standard-Oil style.  (Google, incidentally, spotted this wheeze a long time ago - and it cost them an astonishing amount of development $ to achieve.)

Reminds me of a similar but lower-tech story from my days in Moscow.  Gazprom, inevitably, was my main counterparty and I was in their fine new offices a lot.  My Russian staff used to get me to buy fresh bread rolls from the canteen there - the Moscow City bakery only baked twice a week, but Gazprom's operated every day! - and to make this easier, they procured for me (I never quite knew how) a Gazprom pass ...

I was professionally very keen to get an accurate company organisation chart for the sprawling giant.  I was supposed to conduct all my dealings through the Protocol department, but after I got a bit of a presence in the company, people would just invite me in for a chat (out of sheer curiosity, as much as anything: I didn't conduct my affairs in quite the same way as many expats).  I had several memorable (and quite candid) encounters that way, which may be posts for another day.

Anyhow, I asked for the org chart, and was given this bizarre diagram, several times more complicated than the tube map of London, with dotted lines criss-crossing everywhere.  It was of course designed to indicate that there was no such thing as a modular division within Gazprom, oh dear me no: nothing that could be identified as a candidate for breaking off and floating separately - a fate which Gazprom dreaded.  (It was complete bollocks, of course, there were loads of meaty corporate chunks that could easily have been autonomous.)

This wasn't getting me very far towards understanding the hierarchy (which, in Russia, is an extremely important thing to do - КТО КОГО - who does what, and to whom?, the first thing you need to establish in any dealings with a Russian set-up).  But having studied these matters in some detail in my soldiering days, I knew there'd be an answer; and I had my resourceful staff procure me a Gazprom internal telephone directory.  The numbering system set it all out clearly ...  

ND

Facebook on trial...perhaps

Sadly our American cousins are afflicted with sae jumped-up hysterical political generation that we have here in the UK.


A classic example of this will be seen today when two congressional hearings will get to grill Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.


Facebook has apparently a lot to answer for. Sharing cat videos and one-year old's birthday party pics has proven to be a dark road for the world indeed, soon, it started trying to sell you a sofa that you had purchased last year and from then on it was not long before the only thing appearing on Facebook was doing it yourself Sarin kits and guides from Moscow.


Anyway, that is how the congressmen will put it. Asking over the top questions to try and get onto the news and twitter by going gung ho on Zuckerberg. I am a total bystander having never signed up to this over-sharing fantasy world that people enjoy so much. Good luck to them, the idea that you share all your most personal data freely then get annoyed when the company you gave this all to sold the data to make money.


Umm, that is the business model of social media, after all, it is free at the point of use so how are the companies going to make money?


Yet the Congressmen, exactly like our pathetic Select Committees, will grandstand instead of questioning the underlying nature of the business model and how this works. Indeed, Zuckerberg can probably win just by reminding everyone of quite how desperate politicians are to throw money at his company - money raised from their own brand of suckers, and how he will promote some sort of restriction on political advertising. Boy will they not like that.

Jeremy's Judgement Revisited - Facebook, too

... and if we thought he'd screwed it up on Russia ...

But this latest one, well - stand back and light the red touch-paper.  Tough shit, Jezza, but you definitely had it coming.

Still, check the BTL comments on the CiF link; they are pretty much 50:50.  The Jeremy-right-or-wrong horde is still out there.  Does anything dent their ardour, does anything ever stick?  

GE 2017 notwithstanding, I think it does: four years is still a very long time.  Long enough for detailed memories to fade, for sure; but also long enough for residual dirt and doubt to hard-bake, as Kinnock found out.  And Corbyn will be generating dirt and doubt for as long as he is in the public gaze: he is a dubious and politically dirty old man.  One of the CiF-ers describes him as "the acceptable face of McDonnell", but I'm not sure John-boy will find him quite as useful an idiot as heretofore.  Cult leaders are sometimes worshipped, sometimes torn down and trampled.

Anyhow, a couple of other significant points, both of which have almost been lost in the noise (except on the Beeb and in the Graun, ironically, because they'd really rather talk about something else).  Firstly, May's triumph of diplomacy on the Russian front continues to snowball.  The Beeb reported yesterday that the Russians have described other nations expelling diplomats as "puppets of British policy", which must bring a smile to her face.  Of course, we know the euro-wallahs will be busily trying to parlay this into - See, it's best if you don't leave after all - but they are incorrigible and we may diskard them uterly.

But here's one you may not have seen.  It's a fairly thoughtful worry-piece from Labour List (not a typical link-destination of ours) bemoaning the fact that Labour's extremely successful GE 2017 media strategy had Facebook-optimisation squarely as its centre of gravity (I happen to know that one of Momentum's first actions was to set up a highly tech-savvy social media team) - so what on earth are they going to do now?  

What indeed!  Well moan away, chaps, because for once, asymmetric political warfare is going to work against you.   For I can exclusively reveal that the Wicked Tories had no such FB-based strategy ...

The weather may be rubbish this month but just now the political climate, after a long cold lonely winter, is positively balmy.  Here comes the sun?

ND  

Google and its Enemies

Google has a lot of friends, and why not ?  A company providing a mind-blowing array of incredibly useful services for free, within a fabulously successful business model, and with more and better promised: it seems perverse not to be positively inclined.

Enemies, then ?  Well some aren't exactly smitten by Google's many charms.  A lot of jealous rivals, obviously.  Those who don't enjoy the thought of their every keystroke being analysed as part of a Big Data exercise and then, shock horror, made available to advertisers (- just like the supermarkets).  The "don't be evil " injunction invites us to apply high 'ethical' standards which any commercial enterprise - particularly one operating in uncharted territory where there are few rules - is likely to find hard to live up to.  (Google is scarcely the only organisation on the planet that bows to China's wishes as regards censorship: must post on Hong Kong soon.) And we can diskard uterly those of the Max Mosley brigade who don't like the idea of their past public-domain misdemeanours being accessible via a search engine.

But Google does have some real enemies.  Murdoch is feuding hard with his anti-google campaign, suggesting the old pay-wall strategy isn't a roaring success.  Good luck with that, mate.  As the music and book-publishing industries have also discovered, (and shopping, and education, and TV, and translation, and taxis, and medicine, ...) the world has indeed changed.

More interesting is recent observation that Facebook is the enemy of Google - and at a deeper level than just the straightforward, long-running battle for investors' and advertisers' favours.  How so ?  Because Facebook lures people into a closed, self-contained world wherein to spend their hours; whereas Google is seeking to make money from providing services to people doing Real Things in the Real World - travelling, researching, shopping, eating, going to the theatre, reading articles from foreign-language sources ... they'd love you to help them extend the list.  The more time spent with Facebook, the less time googling tourist destinations.

To the extent Facebook is a threat to Google's interests, those mad online 'games' that tie people to their screens for days at a time must be even worse.  Preference for the virtual vs the real world is increasingly a choice people make for the use of their spare time - indeed for some sad types, of almost all of their time - and some would argue there is more at stake than just Google's revenue potential.  

A very strong case against the virtual is made by the fascinating Ian McGilchrist (Fellow of All Souls teaching Eng Lit, and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Research Fellow in Neuroimaging, & Clinical Director of Acute Mental Health Services).  His thesis runs along these lines:  the left brain (specialising in abstraction, maths, linear reasoning, theorizing, virtual world) should be a tool of the right brain (intuition, empirical reasoning, metaphorical thinking, creativity, real world), but starting in the 20th century the left has started to predominate - and not in a good way.  In fact, he reckons, in a very damaging way.

608 pages of this later (The Master and his Emissary), you may or may not agree with him.  It's a value judgement at the end of the day: and I'll take real-world Google against virtual-world Facebook any time.

ND