fisharepeopletoo

The problem isn't the excluded. It's the included.

If there are pockets of generation-to-generation "exclusion" and wasted human potential in the UK - and that means low birthweight babies, doing badly at school, tragically narrowed life chances, unemployment, ill health and early death - then it is because for a child born in those places the odds are stacked so heavily against them that only the most exceptional and determined could ever have any hope of overturning them.

And it's a lot to ask of a newborn baby to make up its mind to be so exceptional and determined by the time it is 3 years old.

The reason those odds are so stacked is because through a mixture of history, bad government and malice aforethought we've ended up with a political rule set designed so that the included, for example this retailer of bankers' culture, can shamelessly game the system to their own advantage through old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, slack corporate regulation, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on.

Welfare for the rich, taxes for the poor.

If you haven't noticed that over the last 18 months, you really haven't been paying attention.

And if you give any sort of a shit about human beings having the freedom to waste their lives on their own terms and not on anyone else's then you've really got to be asking about system-wide structural changes to the rule sets.

Because if you think that the inclusion problem is going to be solved by the included being nicer, then you'll very soon find yourself taking the piss .

[square brackets]
a report on the freedom to waste your life on your own terms

Martha Lane Fox is Our Last Best Hope!

No one is excluded from digital opportunities, or any other opportunities!

We don't live in a centralising, homogenising plutocracy in which rule sets are made in the best interests of a few tens of thousands of wealthy and privileged people.

The last 18 months have proved that.

So there is no need to challenge the plutocracy, or challenge exclusion.

Martha Lane Fox isn't at the heart of, and hasn't profited from, a plutocracy and that is why she will never ever need to suggest anything to challenge it.

And just because she has done a bit of charity work on her gap year doesn't prove otherwise.

Which is why she wasn't appointed as “digital exclusion tsar” (or Champion, or whatever).

Because there won't be people up and down the country from Hackney to Inverness with years of hard won experience in trying to reduce digital and every other kind of exclusion (and if there were they'd all have their own charitable foundation anyway!) –  so there is no need to give them some money to experiment with, let them get on with it, measure what works and copy that.

And  we don't need structural changes, so we don't need any negotiation about new rule sets –  Sunderland should continue to be governed by rule sets designed for Canary Wharf!

Sunderland shouldn't define its own rule sets in its own best interests.

Appointing yet another consultant wouldn't be a very tired old New Labour way of trying to change things  –  it's effective and at the same time not at all starry eyed in the presence of rich and powerful people who got their wealth from their existing privilege.

And if there were ever to be such a thing as digital exclusion, the only possible solution would be to appoint someone who is adept at using wealth and privilege for gaming the hidden mechanisms of analogue power, because it wasn't rich, powerful people shamelessly gaming the mechanisms of analogue power (old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on) that got us in this mess in the first place.

Everyone is included in power, no one is excluded!

No, it wouldn't be naff to appoint Martha Lane Fox as digital exclusion tsar!

It wouldn't be like voting for Ester Ranzen to "clean up politics"!

"Digital exclusion? Martha Lane Fox!" It's easy to say out loud and keep a straight face.

Which explains why whoever would have made the decision to appoint her didn't have any fear that it could or would be held up to ridicule, and it doesn't prove how secure powerful people feel in their control of politics and media.

Martha Lane Fox may or may not be an admirable person in her private choices, but I would never question her good faith in public action.

Because in good faith, she would never take the job!

TL;DR? In seven words.

Everything That Is Wrong With Our Shitarse Country Made Flesh In One Frail Human Being

A couple of weeks ago I was banging on as usual about what everyone could already see for themselves - that the reason we are in such a fine mess was because Margaret Thatcher deliberately wiped out any counterbalances to the City of London (financial services industry).

This meant there was no one left with any political authority to say

 "letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, [and] retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients"

isn't the only possible way to run a country.

The pixels weren't dry on the page before the Independent had a double page feature (I can't be bothered to find a link to it - why would I make this up?) on Harry Blain, the owner of the Haunch of Venison art retail outlet.

Harry was brought up in Surrey, went to Eton, and was a stockbroker before he retired to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil, sorry, art gallery in Mayfair.

You see what I mean?

Bruce Sterling Hates Me! #sxsw

The best bit of South By Southwest has been Bruce Sterling's talk in which he spent most of it shouting angrily at us for not living up to our responsibilities as an audience.

Instead of keeping our side of the bargain and paying proper attention, both when we should be present and participating in the room and throughout the long term relationship between us and the artists we claim to like, we are spending all our time first twittering when we should be listening, then pirating books and records, not bothering to work hard enough (in fact not needing to bother at all) to search out and own obscure records on vinyl or second hand paperbacks.

He went further than decrying piracy and pretty much said everything digital was shit and was killing art.

And he proved his contempt by eating crisps and drinking beer all the way through the talk and giving away copies of his book to anyone under twenty five, helping them to understand what he was doing by explaining that books were "lots of words in a row".

In return for us not being good audiences any more, artists are going to back out of their side of the deal.

No more H.P. Lovecraft spending a lifetime dedicated to the service of the horror writing community of America, helping everyone who turned to him, with their personal as well as professional problems, then dying in poverty at 42.

And much worse for the audience in the room, no more open invites to Bruce Sterling's house for a party during SXSW.

We didn't deserve to be asked.

I Just Don't Like Being Taken for a Mug

Saturday's Guardian sport had an "interview" with the Fulham footballer Danny Murphy that was blatantly cut-and-pasted from an email written by a PR person from the club.

How could anyone think that this sounds like real human speech patterns?:

"Like them, Fulham are now an efficient unit, hard to beat. We don't play with great width, attacking wingers and dribblers, but with effective team players who get it down and play."

And that is just two lines taken from a speech of no less than 140 words long, end to end.

Danny Murphy's words are in quotation marks, next to a big photo of the player, under the heading "Saturday interview", so to me that is claiming it's him talking.

I'm sure this happens all the time - this isn't the first time I've thought "that doesn't sound like a person talking" - and that I'm the only one who isn't already in on the joke. I'm not even all that bothered - the tabloids are probably nothing but.

I just don't like being taken for a mug when it's so badly written.

It must be easy to build or adapt software that scours news sites for anything within quotes, analyses the word patterns and marks up those that were written by PRs - it probably already exists somewhere. If you mashed this up (are they still called "mash ups"?) with PR company client lists and the names of in-house PRs and cross referenced it with journalists' names, you could map who was lying on behalf of who (should that be "whom"?).

You could probably even build in some sort of quality scale to identify the PRs who were crap writers and which journalists were laziest.

It's No Good Blaming the Bankers Now

We all ate in the restaurants that their lunches kept busy.

We all went to the art galleries that fed their art market.

We all re-mortgaged our houses in the property boom that their bonuses fueled.

Didn't we?

Snotty Poems

That says:

TRAIN TRAIN
The countryside outside's as black as oil
as next to me my face -
eyes colour of my eyes -
keeps pace.

A while ago Lisa went to see the textiles research centre here in Huddersfield, and for want of anything better as a demonstration, got them to embroider some poems from Text Messages onto hankies.

I've got a cold, and found this one at the bottom of a drawer.

I quite like the old-fashionedness of having an embroidered hankie, even if the embroidery was done by a laser guided machine rather than my sweetheart.

"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

It is what Margaret Thatcher said at the height of the recession of the early 1980s to justify her economic policy.

But that recession wasn't an unforeseeable and unstoppable tsunami any more than this one is.

That recession, if not politically generated, was used, with malice aforethought, by Margaret Thatcher's government to remove any counterbalancing political, economic, social and cultural centres of power that might offer an alternative to the dominance of the City of London [global financial services] in the UK - those counterweights being the industrial and manufacturing city-regions, mostly centre-left politically.

And that is exactly how we've got ourselves into the fine mess we are in now.

Because since then there has been no world view, and no point of view from which to have it, that carried enough weight to say

"Umm. Err. Umm. Err. Maybe letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients, and leave everybody else to face the consequences when the bets not only don't win but turn out never to have had any way of winning except by using them to make more bets and pay more bonuses, might not be the only possible way to run a country."

Christmas Cracker Banker Jokes

This is serious. The more scorn and contempt that is tipped on them, the less easy it is for their lobbying money to corrupt governments.

These are Christmas cracker jokes though, so get ready to groan at the low quality. I can take no praise or blame for them, they all come from the www

What do you say to a merchant banker who knocks on your door?
How much do I owe you for the pizza?

What’s the definition of optimism?
An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday evening.

How many bankers does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but only when he's finished stacking in aisle 5.

This one is my favourite, for its brutality:

How do you get a banker out of a tree?
Cut the rope.

Secret Society of Angels

I've switched my laptop over to linux ubuntu in the hope that it will force me to learn a bit about how computers actually work.

And I'm going to try and learn linux on the train home from work.

So on Friday evening I started on page 1 exercise 1 of Linux for Dummies.

And got stuck straight away.

I typed in what I thought was the right thing, hit return...

"no such directory"

"no such file"

"no such command"

and so on.

I couldn't get past step one.

After about 10 minutes of sighing, putting my head in my hands and staring out the window at the snow covered moors glowing in the moonlight, I was just about to give up, when the young man sitting next to me, who I'd hardly even noticed he was so quiet and calm, said:

"I use linux. How can I help?"

and spent the rest of the journey giving me a beginners tutorial in linux.

When we got to Manchester Piccadilly I offered to buy him a drink in return, but he said no, there was no need for any payment, and that

"as long as you use linux, there will always be one of us here to help you."

So we shook hands on the platform, and it must have been a trick of the station lights, but there was a sort of glowing circle behind his head.

And when I looked back again he was gone.

NB the important parts of this story are true.