ZDNet opinion leader uses an excellent metaphor for the Conservatives’s attitude to things digital and online.
..when it comes to being digital, standing with the Conservative party is like dancing with a hippo on a bouncy castle. You’re not going to be in the same place for long.
I have heard George Osborne pontificating on open source and its use in public sector. It was a politician’s speech, after all he is one so no surprises there. I was not as impressed by it as others in the audience but agree that it was a Good Thing that a member of the opposition front bench was talking about open source positively. But as usual for political parties, the left hand does not know what the right one is doing…
David Cameron told the British Phonographic Industry:
We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.
Oh dear. It gets worse:
… it is only right that you are given greater protection on your investments by the extension of copyright term.” He went on to suggest that the industry could earn this increase in monopoly rights by providing “positive role models” for children. Regulate and legislate; tame and control.
The ZDNet article sums it up perfectly:
Cameron may be telling the industry what it wants to hear, but it’s as nonsensical as curing alcoholism with whisky. If we have learned anything from the past decade, it is that the music industry — indeed, the old intellectual property-based industries as a whole — has grown lazy and defensive through being given too much control, by being allowed to write the laws to suit itself and then demand deference. Now that such an approach is technically impossible to maintain and the customers are in open revolt, merely demanding more of the same is beyond satire. It’s negligent, lazy and harmful — and in direct conflict with the facts.
Wholesale reform and new approaches are needed, not digging in to defend the ancient regime. The shadow chancellor affirms this. The leader of the opposition denies this. The rest of us have no idea what they think. Time to de-hippo that castle.
Property is a monopoly right.Lump it or leave it.
This is an outrageous calumny against hippos, who are vastly more interesting, sociable and graceful, well, when underwater at least, than gormless Tory politicians!
I totally agree, Perry. I should have added: with apologies to the hippo in residence. 🙂
I agree that the Tories are frequently slow with this stuff. My problem, however, is not their lack of tech. savvy, it is their sheer lack of intellectual curiosity in the first place and their craven submission to the Blairite agenda (albeit with some decent exceptions).
I’d be willing to put up with old buffers who never used a computer if they were willing to argue for shrinking the state, slashing taxes and abolishing red tape. (yeah, right.)
Johnathan Pearce beat me to the punch.
I have yet to hear a politician say anything sensible when it comes to technology than isn’t obviously pandering to the crowd he’s talking to at the time.
Bring on the day when all our politicians (if we must have them at all) are people who have grown up connected to the internet and using the technology that is available there their whole lives. Rather than people who talk about it because they want to seem like they’re ‘in touch’ when anyone with an ounce of sense can see that they most definitely are not.
The public sector has to get to grips with the fact that IT systems are complicated things and that if they are built by the lowest bidder then they will fail. Even if they’re not built by the lowest bidder they are very likely to fail anyway due to the sheer complexity of the job and the fact that the mandarins want to change the spec every five minutes.
I also don’t see why the gov’t has to have custom built systems anyway, there are literally thousands of off the shelf hardware and software solutions out there which it would be much easier and cheaper to adapt to public sector needs.
The gov’t and attendant civil servants are technological imbeciles, and shouldn’t be allowed to play with toys they have no understanding of at our expense.
I’m a little to close to this one. Dont know which theme to take up first. But I’ll try this as an example.
My oldest and dearest friend lives in SanFrancisco. Has done since the early 70s.
He’s an old style hippy musician and a Luddite back to nature type. I have been cajoling him for years to get on the net because it would enhance his live and also be good for his business. But would He! No.
So yesterday I get my first ever email from him!
The penny has finally dropped. He can make his music for next to nothing, broadcast it to the whole world and record companies have nothing to do with it. Any profits accrue to him.
Plus now when he plays a gig in the Bay area, people come to listen cos they know what he sounds like from the web.
Cameron’s remarks only go even further to reinforce my opinion that he is a dingbat of the first water!
That is 19th century drivel!
But property is a natural right.
Consider Locke’s “State of Nature” … you go out hunting, and returning to find your cow gone, find the bastard who stole him, and club him to death. You are within your rights.
Now consider another scenario. You sharpen your digging stick, and find that you get your work done faster. All is well. You go out hunting, and find that another farmer has sharpened his digging stick. Do you have a right to club him to death, since you though of it first? I would say no.
The case for copyright is stronger than the case for patent, but it is still an arguable case.
Rich, those are very good examples of why this is not the open and shut matter Big Media would like folks to believe or that some otherwise very much on the side of the angels Classical Liberals/Libertarians seem to think.
Rich, if somebody does the same as you when you haven’t told him about it, tough.
If somebody does the same thing as you after you have told him, that’s flattering.
If somebody does the same as you after you make an objective record, and place it in the public domain, he owes you something, morally if he has read the record first.
If you go to court to reclaim the fee he owes you, that is civilisation.
If you think property is about ‘clubbing people over the head’, you don’t get it.
Property is not a natural right. It is a recognition of individuality. Collectivizing the products of people’s minds is as antithetical to individualism as the collectivization of their bodies.
There is an easy way available to morally avoid paying people royalties for their work. Don’t use it. Simply imagine those people had never existed and live without the products of their lives.
The justifiable intention behind intellectual property protection is to estimate how long it would be until the idea would be thought of by any reasonable person. This is why patents run short and artistic works run long.
There are problems with intellectual property as there are with any other kind of property be it material, financial, one’s body, or geographic. Errors in the recognition process do not invalidate the underlying principle of individualism.
Declaring somebody else’s intellectual creations to be justifiably your’s for the taking is just another verse of the collectivist ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ anthem.
But surely several hippos on a bouncy castle should be encouraged, just so long as they have 650 MP’s to play with as well?
Cameron recently addressed the BPI (Britain’s RIAA) stating, rather oddly, that music helps encourage truancy, gun crime and misogyny and arguing that the music business had a responsibility to help tackle the issue. He added that it was not enough to simply support community projects – music companies need to reflect their responsibility in the music they release. The added humour after the announcement was from the head of EMI classics who was heard to wonder why listening to Mozart enouraged gun crime …
Which is why it is indeed a natural right. We are individuals, that is a fact of nature. Property rights make no sense for ants, they are natural for humans.
Individual whats? If the qualifier is an ability to reproduce, then skin cells are individuals. If the qualifier is having an ‘independent’ body, then ants are individuals.
Only for humans who aspire to be individuals. Individual property rights are antithetical to humans who aspire to collective identity.
Said differently, it is only natural for an individualist to recognize individual property rights. It is only natural for a collectivist to recognize collective property rights.
Therefore, ‘natural rights’ becomes meaningless without the qualifier of individualism/collectivism.
Property is, in fact, a ‘rational right’ derived from one’s aspirations. I aspire to an individual identity.
Individual self-actualising consciousnesses, that is what. It is an emergent property of our biological nature. An ant, or a cell in our bodies, can only do what it is pre-programmed to do as part of a collective entity. The sum of our biology makes us capable of autonomous action independent of any collectives.
You have an individual identity whether you aspire to it or not, it is an emergent property of the way your brain works, not an elective choice that you can or cannot aspire to. The only thing you get to aspire to is what you do with it… which is quite a big deal actually 🙂
Understanding property-as-a-right is rational but it springs from our very nature as humans, hence it is a natural right… which is also why opposing property rights is irrational.
Regrettably, Perry, I know far too many people who have no identity outside of their collective. Everything from comparatively benign sports fans (rare, but concealed among the others) who live and breath their team and have no other cause or purpose, to religious extremists who dedicate their life and their death to the service of their god and its followers, to genetic supremacists who’s entire ‘self’ is their skin color. Most of these people seem fairly normal on casual contact. Only when persistently probing for their identity might it become apparent.
I know people who’s entire identity is a mirror, reflecting whoever is around them. These people naturally seek out positive feedback. Others don’t even notice this until they see them in the presence of conflicting groups which they have identified with a different times. At these times, their internal stress can become externally obvious. Compartmentalizing can conceal this absence of individual identity very well most of the time.
Many of these at some level have an individual survival will. But many, very very many, do not. They will happily die without issue for the good of their collective.
It springs from your nature. And from my nature. And from many or even most other people’s nature. But we could as likely form society as lions do. Where the new ‘strong man’ kills his enemies and the offspring of his predecessor. There is nothing about having a body and mind that means we must be individuals. There are many other mammals with truly collective societies. In wolf packs, much like bees, only the alpha male and female are allowed to breed. All others serve them and hope to benefit.
Collectivist societies are common (and successful) as are individualist ones among mammals. It is strictly a rational decision as to which society we attempt to create around us. We are perhaps the first to have the intelligence to see, understand and choose between them. I think it likely that two separate lines of humanity will form. Life has been changing and adapting for a long time, I don’t think it will stop now.
I think you misunderstand, Mid. Choosing to be a follower of Mao or a fascist or joining Al Qaeda does not mean you are pre-programmed to do those things in the way a worker ant is pre-programmed to do what worker ants do. You (and I) may not like the choices people make, but they are choices.
Collectivist societies are indeed common, but that is utterly irrelevant to my point because a person can choose to reject a collective society. It is that ability, used or unused, that makes us what we are. An ant has no capacity to choose to leave the ant nest, which is why property rights for ants makes no sense as everything really is collective for an ant: they are a collective by nature,. Humans are a member of a collective only if we choose to or are forced to… a worker ant does not need an ant-commissar to make him act like a worker ant.
The fact some people choose badly does not change the underlying facts of our nature and the logical rights that derive from that nature, however irrational it may be that some choose to try to run a society as if humans were actually more like ants.
You and I are perhaps basing our beliefs on our different observations. The people I am referring to, and I can bring to mind many examples, cannot function without the support of a collective identity. If you forcibly remove them from one collectively identity, they will find another. And another and another. Even in collectives intrinsically in opposition to each other. Unlike you, I am not at all certain that they are able to choose this characteristic. They certainly do not need anyone to compel this behavior from them.
I do not know or have a strong opinion on whether this is DNA or something that happened in their childhood or some as yet undiscovered reason. But if something is to be found consistent in genocidal collectives (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Hutu/Tutsi, etc etc etc) it is that they seek to eliminate all un-assimilated DNA within reach. What determines ‘un-assimilated’ may vary, but this collective behavior is in many of its characteristics a biological immune response.
I also know individualists, and I am probably one of them, who are unable to treat this as a choice. I do not believe I could survive as a unit of a collective. I believe it may be beyond my survivability to give up my identity. Perhaps, like black and yellow Labrador retrievers, we carry two alternative traits in our gene pool and whichever is best adapted to a given environment survives. I don’t know, I’m speculating. But I do know we humans are at the leading edge of a process of adaptation. And I don’t think that process will stop. This is one reason why I don’t believe the eradication of collectivism is desirable or even possible without unconscionable violence. Those in our individualist society who would establish enforced collectivism need to be prevented from doing so and, barring a criminal conviction, offered exit. And those in collective societies who desire admittance to individualist societies should be offered those terms. (There is a reason why, if the societies are substantially different on the Ind/Col scale, walls are only needed in one direction regardless of which society builds them.)
Also, I am not sure that collectivism is irrational. It certainly achieves nothing that I value (I assume you think the same). But as a mechanism for passing on DNA and conquering more territory, it may be very effective. (Look at the Islamic world.) I think the essential characteristics of it are horrifying. Much of what distresses ‘good’ people of the world are actually the essential features of collectivism.
As an individualist, I will extend my recognition to any individual who requests it. And to the products of their minds and bodies and property acquired in exchange for those products.
Not really, as I do not really think you quite understanding what I am saying. If you do, are claiming some people do not have any intrinsic ability to have private property by virtue of them not being biologically capable of free will outside a collective?
I am not sure whether some people are able to recognize private property as anything more than a set of rules for the collective to manipulate. Whether this is biological or some form of imprinting from childhood or whatever, I don’t know. I welcome everyone as an individual until they attempt to force me. If they are at all open to reason, I reason with them. But I am certain that a great many people are and will continue to be utterly incorrigible on this. They truly cannot think of rights as anything other than for the benefit of the greater good. And when they believe that rights are not serving the greater good, they will be morally compelled to terminate them.
Their brains are impenetrable on this and I have no problem with them other than the equally intractable will to be left alone. My independence is utterly unfathomable to them. These are not crooks out to rip me off. They are truly unable to understand property as not belonging to the greater good. They respect other’s rights not as an act of recognition, but as a concession to avoid conflict. They do it for the greater good.
On a deeper level, these people by their most basic instinct do believe in truth by consensus. They have delegated the thinking and accept what it decrees. Their votes and beliefs are acquired from their collective. I have been raised and lived most of my life on the border between these two mindsets. I truly do not know the origin, and perhaps am out of line speculating on it. It would seem likely that it is imprinted along with first language, but that is also pure speculation.
We can only reach and build the meta-context for people who think and act on what they think. Fortunately, the vast majority of people, at least to some degree, think. But whatever the reason, there are people who will not think and only accept received wisdom from their chosen collective. Those people are out of our reach.
Julian,
Cameron did that? Oh Lordy, he’s even worse than I thought. One of the more intelligent gansta-rappers (can’t remember who) once said in an interview when asked about his “violent” lyrics that he grew-up listening to his mother’s large Johnnie Cash collection – “I shot a man in Reno – just to watch him die” how can I top that?
If a person does not have the right to defend their property then they are not being treated as if it was rightfully theirs.
Some people dislike the word “rights” and prefer the term “natural law” instead. And some people dislike both the term “natural rights” and the term “natural law”. Fair enough – as long as people can defend their bodies and possessions (inculding land) against aggressors I do not much mind what exact terms are used.
And, of course, fighting off people who are trying to take your stuff may include lethal force – so it DOES involve (sometimes) “clubbing them to death”.
But why was it that when people above talked about “clubbing to death” David Cameron’s face kept appearing in my mind?
Wasn’t ‘Natural Law’ exposed as being nothing more than an attempt at Yogic Flying?
Without even using a Tupolev Bear?
Perhaps we should field 600 candidates for a party called ‘Marxist State’, which believes in assisted suicides for all people not currently addicted to heroin?
The straight-faced PPB’s would be excellent!
While I’m here, the discussion of ‘property as natural right’ should include the fact that we have no choice as to our nature(metaphysically, physically or whatever), but only choose our choices.
This leads us to the whole realm of ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and evil’ and the ability to go against our nature.
Nature is neutral; successful life in accordance with nature is good.
Deliberate violation of our nature is evil; possibly mistaken, but then only due to other evils inflicted on us socially.
i LOVE THiS PAGE iTs JUST SO AMAZiNG TO SEE iT