potlatch

how not to save a tiger

In my best impression of Alan Partridge, I recently lost my rag with someone in the street by shouting at them, "that's not how tigers die!" An unusual form of insult, I'm sure you'll agree. The person in question was a chugger, probably from the World Wildlife Fund or somewhere, who had been trying to block my path in the now-standard manner of waving a clipboard in my face and doing a silly little dance. But as I walked past, still smiling falsely at them, they had the nerve to say "this isn't about a direct debit! I just want you to send one text and save a tiger!"

How dare they? How dare they insult both me and the tiger community (as they are probably known), by implying some equivalence between a text message and a tiger's life. An absence of text messages, as I informed the young chugger, is "not how tigers die". I am usually a more gracious respondent - chuggee? - than that, but I am becoming increasingly wound up by the marketing strategies of charities and their phoney account of digital media. Exhibit B:

Again, the imputed equivalence in this advert is horrific, and entirely unbecoming of a charity of Amnesty's stature. This is one of a series of ads on the London underground, implying some magical omnipotence to the possessor of a commuter with a mobile phone (or, conversely, some peculiar impotence or triviality on the part of a prison guard or torturer several thousand miles away). 

First and foremost, the advert is a lie, although the word "and" is of course ambiguous. Maybe they're not implying any causal link between the two events, in which case one might place an advert saying "A man in Colchester shops in Tescos and he wins the lottery". Maybe that's what most advertising effectively does anyway, but the bit after the "and" is normally represented with an image, to the effect that "a man uses a deoderant and [image of woman with large breasts]".

But there is something more troubling about this, than just standard marketing mendaciousness. Adam Smith was concerned by the fact that human beings seem to feel less sympathy for others, the further they are away (see this interesting piece in the LRB on how this problem manifests itself in climate change). This is not a problem that can be easily solved or got round. But the strategy of these charities is not to work on increasing the level of sympathy, but of trivialising the nature of the problem. In the advert above, it is assumed by Amnesty that human beings (at least in London) have very little capacity to imagine the situation of others, to sympathise over distance or to adopt an unconditional moral position. Rather than nurture imagination, sympathy or moral sentiment, the advertisement effectively suppresses those things by containing them within the solipsistic realms of the ego-phone. The individual's solitary comfort zone is reinforced by this, rather than rattled in any way.

Aside from this, there is also the problem of economic and technological functionalism, that I've complained about before, in which social life is reduced to a series of inputs and outputs. Institutions are hollowed out by a philosophy that understands them entirely in terms of their measured outputs, rather than their routines and rules. But when digital technology is thrown into the mix, something quite preposterous happens: the relationship between input and unput becomes utterly mystified, as if it's no longer anything to do with us. The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran.

What does Amnesty or anyone else gain from this? Their aim seems to be to build up a database of phone numbers, as the tiger chuggers were apparently doing also. Hopefully this makes them better equipped to prevent torture and illegal imprisonment; they must know what they're doing. But they're also engaged in a political equivalent of "quantitative easing", which runs the risk of political hyper-inflation: in their desparate bid to get political will moving, they're exaggerating the efficacy of their tactics, to the point where they will start to lose value. A greater and greater 'quantity' of political output is being promised, for a smaller and smaller 'quantity' of ethical action on the part of the Western consumer. As credulity declines as well, the long-run effect can only be bad for the charitable sector as a whole.

'political correctness' revisited

We live in the age of 'transparency' or what I once heard Michael Power describe as 'the age of permanent audit'. This is thanks to the presence, sometimes ubiquity, of technologies which make audit the default option, and inaudit (or privacy) a form of specified opt-out. For celebrities, these include legal and quasi-legal forms of media surveillance; for the powerful, it means the constant threat of leaks, the publication of money-grabbing memoirs and Freedom of Information Requests; for the rest of us, it means facebook and digital cameras.

Under these conditions, words, actions and decisions have a nasty habit of catching up on one. Interestingly, we've largely forgotten about the intrusion of the Big Brother state (for the time being), and discovered that the public sphere can be a far more brutal and effective mechanism for surveillance than the all-seeing, expert panopticon. This is partly thanks to the on-going furore around 'hackgate' in the UK, but also because of a strange new form of political correctness that appears to be emerging, as the public etiquette of the twitter age.

As Chris Dillow argues, a number of recent events suggest that the British have become incredibly over-sensitive recently. Despite having been one of the marchers that Jeremy Clarkson said he would like to shoot (in front of my family) in November, I was depressed by the scale of reaction against a man who (as Stuart Lee points out) is paid specifically to recite predictable rightwing slogans in public. The saga over Luis Suarez's finger - which hilariously now gets reported with the offensive gesture concealed - suggests that we're reviving an Edwardian sensibility. This at a time when no Guardian or Observer op-ed is complete, without an anonymous cabinet minister being quoted that someone or other is "completely fucked" (serving only to demonstrate the intimacy of quoter with quoted).

Levels of rudeness, obscenity and pornography are becoming normalised everywhere, while the stakes surrounding a stray finger or badly-judged joke are also rising rapidly. It's hard not to feel sorry for the BBC and Channel 4, who have to muster unprecedented levels of confidence (that are impossible to defend, if challenged persistently enough by enough people) that Franky Boyle or someone is within his rights to use a certain word or sentence.

Clearly, twitter and chatrooms have changed things in two obvious ways. Firstly, registering disgust has become massively easier, a problem which afflicts various service and hospitality industries, via user feedback websites. Secondly, movements of disgust can gather momentum and experience tipping points, until they dominate the headlines. This means that complaints can far outstrip the number of initial viewers, as 'Sachsgate' demonstrated best of all.

All of which turns public offence and defence into a game, involving strategy, scores, winners and losers. Offence can be measured partly in terms of how many people claim to be offended. But there are also PR-type strategies at work in terms of getting things into and out of the public 'conversation'. If they hang around for long enough, then it becomes apparently insensitive for political leaders to avoid confronting them (as both Ed Miliband and David Cameron seemingly felt in relation to Jeremy Clarkson's joke). Because the threat of over-reaction by the public is now so great, authorities often opt to over-react in the first place. For instance, this mildly irreverant Tim Minchin Christmas song was apparently pulled by ITV, before any offence had been taken. OfCom, which ironically was set up according to the most boldly technocratic principles of any regulator, is now in the unfortunate position of having to adjudicate over many such moral issues. Humour experts cannot be far behind.

What gets forgotten in amongst all of this is a fairly simple question: what does offence consist of in the first place? This NYRB article, reviewing two books on digust, might be a good place to start. I am perfectly willing to call Jeremy Clarkson a 'tosser', or even - if I thought I could get a cheap laugh - suggest that he be chopped into slices and fed to the rest of the Top Gear team. But I would find it difficult to watch the clip of him asking for marchers to be 'shot', and report that I am experiencing 'offence' or 'disgust'. To do so would be to descend to another form of moral failing: it would make me a 'liar'.

So what about the recent scandals surrounding racism by Premier League footballers? Maybe all of this over-sensitivity is a price worth paying, if it helps to out John Terry and Luis Suarez as racists and condemn them accordingly. But the problem is that these cases still feel like they're part of a game. The moral repugnance of racism gets almost overlooked, in favour of empirical questions, such as who said what, how do we know, what does the camera or microphone pick up, whose responsibility is it to act, what does the FA (or police) have to do in order for the issue to go away again, how will this affect his football or the England football team. It's almost as if John Terry's greatest mistake was to be so easily lip-read. Quite how or why a multi-millionaire England football captain thinks like that in the first place (or whether he really does) gets left in the shadows, by debates about what can be seen and confirmed as true.

As a result of all this, the age of transparency is also the age of the choreographed grovelling apology. The most disgusting - yes, I think I really mean that - aspect of the Aiden Burley 'nazi-themed stag party' scandal was the report that:

Aides tried to arrange for him to join a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. But the Tory leadership moved against Burley after the newspaper reported on Sunday that he was responsible for hiring the Nazi uniform.

So their ruse didn't quite work. But the point is this: in the game of public offence and defence, Aiden Burley's aides sought to instrumentalise a Nazi concentration camp as a strategy to wrong-foot his opponents (perhaps in time for the lunchtime news). Personally, I hope Aiden Burley and his aides suffer serious disappointments in their careers, leading to prolonged regret and self-doubt. In front of their families. I'm not joking, but I am being offensive.

John Terry's PR team pulled off an equivalent coup, with this surreal headline. Is this where we're all heading to? Mobilising children, monuments and history as a means to distract the twittersphere for a few hours? Some bizarre logic of equivalence is underway, that one regrettable photograph or youtube clip can be cancelled out with one carefully planned (and photographed) gesture towards transcendent political ideals or tragedies. I suspect that Princess Diana may have set the stage for the politics of this new era.

The first wave of political correctness was idealistic, with shades of Orwellian mind control, but too technologically naive to tip into totalitarianism. It sought to police how people spoke, but with no means of achieving this, other than traditional education, debate and disapproval. As the inverse of this, the new wave of political correctness is technologically sophisticated, but with no ideals attached. It is purely concerned with catching people out, making them look foolish, putting them through the ringer for a few hours, days or weeks (depending on how much they are considered to deserve it).

But as a result, it has no concern with the unseen, the undetected or the not-yet-detected. It can work in tandem with professional investigative journalism (as with hackgate, MPs expenses and wikileaks), but it only judges what it can see. It reduces crimes and misdemeanours to their visible evidence, which can be cancelled out by the creation of equivalent visible counter-evidence.

whatever happened to 'Japan'?

Nations, as Benedict Anderson famously proposed, are 'imagined communities'. But 'the global' is also an imaginary horizon. When we think of 'the global', we think of something, and it isn't typically a planet. It typically involves something about trade, cosmopolitanism, information and financial flows, diplomacy. And it varies constantly. In the 1960s, to imagine 'the global' would most likely have included space satellites, that made a visualisation and a technological use of 'the global' possible. But now, we're far more likely to think of telecom cables or internet platforms.

It follows that nations aren't only imagined by their residents, but also, just as importantly, as components within the (equally imagined) global horizon. There is, as I explored here, an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Americans, then an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Europeans. And it recently occurred to me that one way in which 'the global' has been transformed over the past decade is in the gradual disappearance of 'Japan' in its formulation. How could an imagined nation disappear from our cultural, political and economic consciousness quite so rapidly, yet without us even noticing?

Japan's status as our (i.e. the West's) economic and cultural horizon peaked in the 1980s, a time when Clive James created an entire television genre dedicated to marvelling at strange techno-oriental practices, which supposedly avoided the charge of racism because the Japanese economic and social model was eminently so much more successful than our's. Rumours of hotels where you slept in a small capsule, mobile phones which could communicate with microwaves, vending machines selling used underwear (please tell me I didn't imagine that one on my own) animated pub conversations in Britain throughout the 1990s, even as the supporting social and economic model was dwindling under an economic depression. By the time that the UK show Banzai was launched as a kitsch play on such things, the reference points were fading from memory. The stupidly over-rated Lost In Translation was merely a coda (its primary cultural significance is to have nudged The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine out of retirement for a few months).

When I dabbled in consumer technology research circa 2002-03, Japan still carried an exotic hint of our own future. Powerpoint presentations were not complete without some reference to what Japanese teenagers were doing with their mobile phones, no doubt generating a fair amount of apocrypha along the way (there was always one rumour about teenagers ringing each other, then hanging up after one ring, as a cost-free way of saying 'hello').

So much has changed. The depression of the Japanese economy meant that the wonks and economists lost interest in the model some years ago. Japan was a scarcely-noticed absentee from the global financial crisis, having been weighed down by its own collapsed credit system for nearly twenty years.  The plundering of Japanese production techniques (just-in-time production, Total Quality Management) by American management specialists over the 1980s meant that 'Toyotism' is no longer the horizon of productivity, as these tricks have now spread. But remembering that phones-speaking-to-microwaves used to be our global future also throws our new global future into some relief. Here are a few ways in which the global is now imagined differently.

Firstly, we now imagine the global in terms of the rising BRIC economies. The future will now be produced by cheap and abundant labour, not by mysterious oriental tech-wizardry (NB I am trying to describe an imaginary, not a reality!). 'The global' is therefore a harsher, more primitive horizon than it used to be. It no longer represents scientific progress, so much as sheer scale of population. (Meanwhile, the concept of 'the third world' has also fallen away, due to a combination of political correctness and economic trends). One feature of this is that, where 'globalisation' used to be conceived as the partner to acute urban densification (with Tokyo as the iconic example), it is now conceived as the partner to a more primary process of voluminous urbanisation (with Mumbai as an iconic example), not unlike the urbanisation of Europe and the United States during the 19th century.

Second, and in combination with the first point, the internet now dominates imaginations of the global. Around the time of the millenium, companies such as Cisco started to run advertisements with Chinese and Indian children staring into the camera, asking "are you ready?" - ready, in this instance, for the emergence of a single, virtually free, global medium, which was no longer exclusive to wealthy or technologically advanced nations. Again, the global was now about sublime numerical scale. A decade on, it has become clear that the companies with most to gain from the internet are not those with the most far-fetched technological imaginations, but those with the greatest numerical imaginations. Google and facebook are mathematical business propositions, based on insight into what changes once things are measured in billions, not millions.

Thirdly, and relatedly, imaginations of 'the global' now include a somewhat different status for 'America', once 'Japan' is absent. From the mid-1970s onwards, the US became increasingly paranoid that Japan was "eating its lunch", taking American jobs by producing consumer goods and cars that American consumers then bought. The reversal of fortunes during the Clinton years changed all of that. 'Off-shoring' of US jobs went from being viewed as a 'threat' to a means of exploiting the huge new cheap labour pools that were opening up. Post-2008, the US has lost any pretence of being a financial hegemon, but it retains some status as a technological hegemon. 'The global' is now conceived in terms of the relationships between the US and the BRICs, and while dependence on Chinese surpluses means the US is scarcely in charge, nor does this balance of power look especially troubling for a US statesman.

In all these ways, the new imagination of 'the global', lacking Japan, has gone hand in hand with a new imagination of what our collective technological future looks like. The influence and status of Clay Shirky is a good indication in this respect - Shirky's expertise is in people, not in machines. As he says, it is when technology itself ceases to be remarkable that its social effects are most radical. This is quite the opposite of how 'the global future' was imagined during the heyday of Japanese tech exoticism.

If a single company defined the imagined global horizon in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been Sony or Toyota - Japanese firms out-performing, out-thinking tired, Western competitors. Their prowess was best represented in making things that 'we' would scarcely even know how to use. Today it would be Apple - a home-grown US household name, that exploits Chinese labour and the lessons of American business strategy, to enable ordinary people to sit at home or in a cafe, idly toying with a multi-billion user medium. Their prowess is in taking the global, with all of its numerical sublimity, and somehow transforming it into a source of comfort.

the tedious ethic and the spirit of capitalism

The spirit of capitalism is not in good shape, if this advertisement for the iPad is anything to go by. Could our contemporary era be about to suffer a crisis of banality?

The reason for my alarm lies in the messages that are contained in these various tweets. These read:

The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?

Just ate the best sandwich. Ever.

Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!

Ran 10km this morning

I've long found the marketing strategies of telecom companies fascinating, though also deeply irritating, as these posts explore. What intrigues is that telecom networks are a product without any cultural quality or definition of their own, and must be sold purely as the possibility of social interaction. The product is other people. Hardt and Negri suggest that sheer sociability (speech, sympathy, affect etc) is now the source of value within post-industrial capitalism, and what must be inculcated in workplaces and beyond, to be drawn on by capital. What they do not add is the extent to which sheer sociability is also sold as a product, particularly by telecom and IT companies.

It follows from Hardt and Negri's analysis that individuals must be kept in a state of adequate sociability if immaterial labour (on which capitalism now depends) is to produce effectively. But it may also follow that individuals must be kept in a state of some loneliness if immaterial products (the promise of togetherness, love, sexual satisfaction) are to carry on being purchased. Hence, how telecom companies set about dangling that promise in front of people is actually quite significant. 

There is a dilemma attached to this. The sociability in question has to be available to everyone, and yet has  also to be special. It cannot be 'weird' or 'abnormal', but nor can it be dull. T-Mobile briefly experimented with some grizzly attempts to use amateur singers to represent what was special-yet-universal about their network, but these have thankfully disappeared of late. Family has long served to solve the problem, right back to those BT adverts depicting people ringing their parents and grandparents (including this monstrous attack on the queen of sciences). The fact that everyone has a family does not by any means detract from what makes it unique and special. But one problem that the telecom industry has, which other industries do not, is that it is hard pressed to employ the advertising industry's most reliable source of desire, namely sex. Where phoning one's mum is a nice marketing proxi for everything that is warm and special about family, phone sex or pornography are not (yet) acceptable means of channelling libido into retail. In a sense, the Orange 'don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' ads are an honest appraisal of this dilemma.

Which brings us to twitter. What is a normal, yet special, thing to be communicated via twitter? What is twitter for? It is in many ways a credit to the power of twitter that it isn't for anything. No doubt it very occasionally offers a medium for essential information to be transmitted, maybe even averting emergencies, or catalysing them with political uprisings. But to say that twitter isn't for anything is also to say that it offers us far more technical communicative capacity than we could possibly need. We are only able to say that water 'isn't for anything', because we have more than we need; if we didn't, it would be for drinking, cleaning and farming.

Capitalism depends on frustrated yearning to persist, as both Marx and Keynes recognised. Its gravest danger is that people get enough of something, or even too much. Enough leads to a demand short-fall; too much, and you have a crisis of over-production. Many people pine for more intimacy with their loved ones; many people pine for greater sexual gratification. Harnessing these sources of dissatisfaction provides capitalism with a route to its own survival, as Boltanski and Chiapello put it. But digital communication now suffers a problem of over-abundance, leaving capital with no means of explaining what, specifically, it is for, or why, specifically, it is desirable.

Look again at those messages. "The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?"; "Just ate the best sandwich. Ever."; "Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!"; "Ran 10km this morning". To recognise quite how strange these are (in an advert), try to imagine an ISP using such tedious content to sell the internet just ten years ago. But someone has thought long and hard about these; this is what twitter and the iPad are deemed for. These were not thrown together, but probably analysed at some length. If anything they betray remarkable honesty regarding the networked age, that it has turned us into a society of communicative itch-scratchers. Yet if the desirability of an iPad lies in access to this carnival of banality, then Apple could have itself a serious problem in the long-run.

Then again, what else could this advertisement offer, when we quite manifestly have more than enough ways of communicating? Splitting the difference between Orwell and Huxley, maybe it is all ending with one long yawn.

politicians' love of broadband

I interviewed a very affable and smart economist a few years ago, who was a senior advisor to a European government at the time. We got onto the topic of industrial policy, one of the areas in which the vocation towards economics and that towards politics tend to clash. He said:

as one politician who recently became a bigger politician once told me, they are not in politics not to act. They are in politics to do certain things. And industrial policy is one of the things that you do. It’s a government intervention to promote certain activities. That’s why they’re in politics! They’re not in politics to do nothing, they’re in politics because there are levers, and they want to use those levers

Today's news that the Conservatives are promising super-fast broadband for everyone reminded me of this. The announcement has a fin de siecle feel to it - haven't we been here before, about five or six times? Is Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) still our policy manual of choice? It's not that I don't want progress, its simply that it would be nice if our definition of progress occasionally progressed. Next someone will be arguing for more cafe culture in Britain's city centres and loft-style-living in ex-industrial wastelands. NESTA have apparently calculated  rollout of super-fast broadband could 'directly' create 600,000 jobs. And raising everybody's credit card limit by an additional £1,000 will lead to higher levels of nutrition across the population.

No, I would suggest that the economist quoted above is nearer the mark on this. If broadband didn't exist, politicians would need to invent it. If there wasn't a market failure in this area, politicians would need to produce it or insist on it. Rolling out more telecom infrastructure is something that politicians can do, it gives them a chance to act. But how much speed is enough? What comes after super-fast? What would be interesting would be to look at the claims made about ICT over the last twenty years, then test these against what is now empirical evidence regarding productivity, education levels, job creation and macro-economic growth. I've no doubt that compiling this evidence would be extremely difficult, but if NESTA can put a number on what super-fast broadband will contribute to the size of UK GDP - £18bn apparently - then it must be eminently possible to discover whether the promise of the post-industrial age was a remotely realistic one.

the ol' global village

I spy some post-speculative melancholia:

Birmingham is offering to whisk you into a high-tech future known as 1997, when horizontal networks were going to take over stale old top-down organisations, the space of flows was going to make a mockery of traditional place-based communities, and 'London' was going to be re-defined as a network of business parks spread out along the M40.

Birmingham has wandered down this path using the sublime power of numbers. But what do these numbers mean? What would it mean for these particular numbers to be true? By my rough calculation, Birmingham is claiming to host nearly 700 annual conferences every day, which must surely be only a small proportion of the total number of conferences, seminars and trade fairs going on in the city. Is this a lot? It sounds a lot. Or maybe it isn't very much. Who knows?

Then there are the 400 million people that can be accessed via Birmingham's transport links. That's got to be a lot, surely - it's the same as the population of Europe, all accessible, from Birmingham! But then again, it's only quite a small proportion of the entire world. If one were to point out that this leaves nearly 6 billion people who can't be accessed via Birmingham, that suggests something's not quite working. Maybe they should have mentioned that Birmingham's telecom networks offer access to basically everyone in the world. Now that is a lot.

The advert appears to miss one important point about 'facetime', as it puts it: it's never unlimited. People have other obligations beyond networking: sleep, sex and death are the primary ones. Sure, they can just about sustain their bodies with puff-pastry-based canapes and chocolate-chip shortbread biscuits from conference break-out sessions. And there's no doubt bottled water and coffee galore. But, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, networking with 400 million people... well it would just take up too many evenings.

Where did they get these numbers from, and what the hell are they supposed to mean? Interestingly, elsewhere the 'actually existing' network society has rendered such numbers almost commonplace. Wikileaks has just released 250,000 confidential documents recorded from US diplomatic cables, which is comparable to the number of annual conferences hosted in Birmingham each year. Facebook has around 500 million users, which is only 25% more than the people you can travel to from Birmingham. Maybe Birmingham has read Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? and decided to turn itself into a sort of puff-pastry-based networking platform. The next step would be to get rid of Birmingham City Council, all of its democratic and participatory structures, and hand over total control of the city to an asocial 20-something in a t-shirt.

The confusion lurking within this advert is partly due to a total failure to understand economies of presence, a failure that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s. The notion that knowing or meeting more and more people, of being more and more connected, was somehow advantageous has come to appear rather old fashioned. The founder of Ecademy, Thomas Power, used to say that his ambition was to know 100,000 people (or maybe I've missed a zero); he appears to be more than half way there.  This is perfectly fine, but only in the same way that it's perfectly fine for batty old ladies to fill their entire houses with royal wedding memorabilia and Union Jacks. Each to their own and all that.

The prophets of the network society used to argue that the greatest losers in the dawning age would be the excluded - those without social capital, ICT access and mobility. The implication was that the greatest winners would be the most connected, the most mobile, living the most fluid lives. One thing that they missed was that network connections are not always symmetrical, as twitter has now helpfully made plain: I can 'know' (or 'follow') as many people as I like, but if they don't know me then my 'inclusion' in the great network does not equate to power. The fact that Birmingham is boasting about its access to 400 million people is tinged with a melancholia, offering state of the art transport networks for getting the hell out of Birmingham. It's like boasting about how many people one follows on twitter.

But more fundamentally, the concern for the 'disconnected' also entirely missed out much power can be attached to being disconnected. The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).

So, yes, 'facetime' is indeed a valuable commodity. It is, no doubt, one reason to go to Birmingham, maybe even without the promise of a break-out session and a chocolate chip shortbread biscuit. One may even want to stay there, dwell there, build relationships there, without being lured into international travel and the space of flows. But all of these things are anathema to the logic of network maximisation. The only people who definitely gain from more and more connectivity are the sociopathic founders of the networks themselves. Everyone else is caught in various balances between knower and known, follower and followed, (ironic that Julian Assange is now desparately trying not to be followed, wherever he may be.)

Equally,  'Napsterising' institutions may be thrilling (who isn't enjoying the current diplomatic crisis just a tad?) or depressing (newspapers), or a matter of ambivalence between the two. Birmingham can turn itself into just another node in a network of sublime, exponentially increasing scale. Or else it could try to avoid this insidious mathematical logic in the first place.

lights, camera, inaction

In this day and age, many of us are guilty of falling into the trap of INAEB speak (prefacing sentences with "I'm not an economist, but..."). Well if I'm not an economist, I'm definitely not a lawyer, and I've even got the soul to prove it. My doctoral research strayed into some legal territory, partly through my Foucauldian analysis of the Law and Economics movement. Plus I got into reading some legal positivism - HLA Hart and Austin - which is philosophically fascinating. But generally speaking, I'm driving blind when it comes to theorising law.

So maybe I should just throw this out as an observation: isn't it slightly peculiar how meagre the legal impact of ubiquitous visual surveillance is turning out to be? Big Brother is indeed watching us. As has been regularly pointed out, it's slightly bizarre how little the British (the most photographed people in the world) seem to care. But maybe, as has been less regularly pointed out, they're right not to care - it doesn't change all that much.

Contrast the Ian Tomlinson case with the MPs expenses scandal. Again, I'm Not A Lawyer, But I can't quite understand why it's permissible for the police to beat a member of the public, effectively to death, and not suffer legal repercussions. It's obviously a complicated part of the law. But I wonder if different forms of evidence, and different media for carrying them, have wildly divergent ontological statuses in our legal and political culture. The interesting aspect of the Law and Economics story was how calculations of economic efficiency came to acquire such authority amongst the various forms of legal evidence that could otherwise be mobilised in economic (and non-economic) situations. 

One interesting issue today is that photographic images feel strangely lightweight as forms of evidence, perhaps because they're so ubiquitous. It's almost as if we've now reached a stage where so much is being caught on camera, by so many professional, governmental and amateur bodies, that we can't possibly allow it all to truly count. Imagine if it all did count to the extent that it might? Our culture of litigiousness, liability passing and auditting would be ratcheted up to such levels as to bring society to a complete halt.

An image can have a radical impact upon 'public opinion', as demonstrated by the Abu Graib camera phone images. But this isn't a significant departure from the pre-ubiquitous, pre-digital age of photography; photography played an equally important role in de-legitimising the Vietnam war. When images perform this function, they remain within the realm of the aesthetic - they can shock, wow, disgust, excite, but they don't make the leap from being sensational to being factual and technical.

While coppers and soldiers were being widely papped (and papping themselves) performing acts of wanton violence and getting away with it, MPs were being unknowingly auditted fiddling their expenses and not getting away with it at all. This time last year, British public life had become consumed by such urgent political issues as David Cameron's wisteria, a floating duck house and Jacqui Smith's husband's pornography consumption. And while the blood-letting may have been satisfying and necessary up to a point, the amount of public vitriol and vengeance enacted against Parliament was unprecedented, at least for a nation as politically docile as ours. It is clearly not the case that we lack the hunger for the disruptive political power of transparency, we're just picky about which varieties.

Maybe the chance to bully and harrass politicians is simply more attractive than the chance to do so to the police. But again, I wonder if there is something about the ontology of evidence here - all of those numbers, receipts, dated credit card statements, tax details, pounds and pence, all had the air of good hard data. They went with the grain of nearly 200 years of governmental technologies of knowledge. Whether the powers that be liked it or not, they had to count.

Meanwhile, all of those foggy images collected on CCTV and picture phones begin to blur into a papparazzoid mush of images, like flicking through the facebook pages of people you might have once met. Criminologists report that CCTV has negligible impact on crime and conviction rates. It's not even clear that the cameras which regulate our roads and traffic are even legally water-tight. The police seem to accept as their fate that they are now within the panopticon, being photographed and surveilled from all directions, in ways that will undermine their legitimacy and popularity. But given the choice between legal accountability for their actions, and being graphically portrayed in a negative cultural light, they will happily go for the second option. Aesthetically ugly, yet legally clean. 

Like ASBOs, photographic surveillance technologies hover ambiguously between informal and official norms. Jane Jacobs famously argued for "eyes on the street", a reference to the self-policing function of bustling, open public spaces - but this slogan has since been adopted by local councils proudly declaring their investments in CCTV. Where language is concerned, words and symbols are either spoken or written, offering law some ontological clarity in how it organises the relationship between the two. The voice and the pen operate in parallel planes. This distinction seems not to arise where images are concerned, making it ambiguous how a visible event and its photographic record should actually be related to each other, other than via artistic representation.

his'n'hers

Combining two on-going themes of this blog, 'What's Going on Here?' and the behavioural economic analysis of urinary technology, can anyone cast any light on this, encountered in a cafe this morning?

Maybe I've been hanging around with STS people too much, but I did wonder if this was the scene of some experiment.

tweeting

I am experimenting with twitter to see if it's necessary or useful for me, as an enthusiastic gatherer of the world's knowledge.

But I don't get it. If the council were to dump one lorry-load of manure per day on my doorstep, I could see the value in occasionally taking ten minutes to go through it in search of a stray diamond. But if the council decides to re-route London's sewage system straight into my letterbox, what am I meant to do about that, other than find some sort of letter-box-shaped diamond-sieving device? (No offence to the dear friends I'm following, obviously).

All I mean is that, where an RSS reader respects the fact that most adults have to aportion their time for specific activities, and can't just lie back in some Bergsonian hippy trance letting the world wash over them, twitter appears to require me to be there more or less constantly. Obviously I'm being mean about the ratio of poo to diamonds, but either way, it doesn't take away from the fact that if someone posted something truly valuable yesterday, there is a very high chance that I won't see it. I'm tempted to just add twitter feeds to my RSS reader. Am I missing the point? Or just failing to use it properly, for instance the 'list' function?

The problem is that, if I'm right, twitter first introduces an anxiety that I'm missing out on some information, and then exacerbates it. It's like accepting invites to three parties on the same night, and then spending the majority of the evening in a taxi. Twitter takes the principle of social filtration of the web, and then dares you to delimit the filter. Why follow only 100 people? Why check it only once an hour? Eventually the filter is so big that it undermines its initial value, which is to cut the crap, so to speak.

I can see that I may be viewing it too much as a new version of blogging, rather than a new version of email. But in that case I'm merely guilty of being genuinely interested in what people say and discover, to the point where I am happy not to reply. As for the more common complaint that it's narcissistic and conducive to ADHD, well, yes, obviously. But I'm too busy googling the words 'Will Davies' while watching the news to care. I shall soldier on for the time being.

the economic sociology of receipts

When someone comes to write a cultural history of Britain, post-Thatcher, they should dedicate a chapter to data collection. The political arguments for and against surveillance are well rehearsed, with the Home Office on one side and Henry Porter on the other. The economic arguments for and against back office restructuring and knowledge management technologies are equally well rehearsed. But none of these analyses quite manages to explain why the production of data, evidence, a trace occupies such a prominent  place in our contemporary national psyche. This is a cultural issue.

This sign adorns the flapjack tray of Costa coffee in Paddington Station. The normalisation of receipts in the last two years is, frankly, an irritation. It introduces a new way of giving change, where the coins are placed in the customers hand on top of a small piece of paper, which is then unavoidably trapped there beneath the weight of the money. "Here's your money - and in case you're wondering, yes this did just happen".

I've developed an expert way of then withdrawing my hand with the money in it, but ejecting the receipt back onto the counter with my thumb (where it sits along with the dozens of other little data trails that customers have dumped there).

This trend's been growing for years, gradually engulfing newspapers, sandwiches, beer and all the various other sub £5 items that used to be traded less accountably. Costa appear to have now normalised it further. To bemoan this politically would be fairly absurd, but I'm not doing this (although I do wonder how much it is explicable in terms of management surveillance and distrust of staff: it becomes impossible to keep an order out of the till, if the customer is demanding a receipt).

No, it's the cultural aspects that are strange. We know all about the British love of CCTV, that since the Bulger murder of 1993 has grown from being an anti-crime strategy to something that is adopted as a matter of course. We know that CCTV has long since ceased to be a tool for policing, not least because it's so useless in achieving convictions. The latest London buses use CCTV in the weirdest way yet. A prominent screen on the lower deck constantly plays real time images being recorded by the five or six cameras dotted around the bus. If it were only showing the upper deck, then one could argue that it encourages people to feel safer when they go upstairs late at night; but it also plays back to them pictures of the viewers on the lower deck. The "syn-opticon" indeed. But why?

At a seminar on visualisation in InSIS last week I wondered whether one could analyse such things in terms of the multiple justifications on which they rest (a la this theoretical favourite of mine). When is something justified as 'surveillance', when as 'efficient', when as 'aesthetic', and when does it collapse into pure voyeurism? I suggested here that often there is slippage between one justification for digitisation and another, such that democratic and voyeuristic arguments for transparency can morph into one another.

Sometimes justification gives way to sheer existentialism. Maybe the British need their data-gatherers in the same way that Estrago and Vladimir need each other in Waiting for Godot: simply to prove that they still exist. Maybe there are some Costa customers who take comfort in the fact that their coffee at 10.21 06:09:2009 is a matter of record, not because it is an alibi for a crime or because it is tax deductible, but because it is something to cling to. And maybe those TVs on buses are simply there to say "look - here you are." (It could be a situationist prank, aimed at sending people on their way with a nauseous sense of the vacuity of urban life, which eventually spills over into riotting).

Culturally, I think the normalisation of receipts is a shame, insofar as it effects the character of urban commerce. In the language of Michel Callon, economic exchange always 'overflows' its calculative devices, of money and accounting. There is always something not entirely accounted for, which the economist calls an 'externality', and the rest of us call 'the social bit'. Buying a coffee is a messy business, because the pleasure (or pain) of interacting with a stranger in a cafe always exceeds the calculations at the heart of the exchange. One of the joys of New York, and of its bars in particular, is the very shakey attitude to calculation and accounting that goes on - the tills are ancient mechanical things, the tips pile up haphazardly all over the place, the drinks are not measured and the free ones not counted.  The effort to eliminate 'the social' from the calculated exchange is much less severe. 

By contrast, to normalise receipts in cafes or bars is to strive for the perfect, 'disembedded' clean exchange, of the liberal-economic imaginary. It depersonalises the interaction and substitutes data for memory. It declares the exchange over, with nothing more owed by either party. Frankly, this is futile, as exchanges always leak into society. Marcel Mauss's lesson is that the perfect, calculated market exchange is as unrealisable as the perfect, uncalculated gift - actual, lived economic experience sits on a spectrum between these two poles, with the uncalculated and the calcuated parts entangled. But receipts wrestle economistically against this fact, impoverishing both the producer and the consumer of a coffee.