We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:
They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.
They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:
Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.
This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.
They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.
I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.
Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.
In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.
The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.
So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
I usually make the point of only ever smoking a cigarette or cigar on No Smoking Day. It is the principle at stake, dear reader. For the remaining 364 days of the year, however, I avoid the weed. But for those who are less bothered about the state of their lungs or just love to smoke, here is a must-have gadget.
I think if Ian Fleming were alive today, he would make sure 007 had such a case for his Q-branch gadgets and Turkish ciggies (via the always-diverting Boing Boing website).
In what amounts to a shocking admission that the “science” supporting anthropogogenic global warming is anything but settled and supported by data, we find that post-modernist thinking has been drafted into the service of stopping climate change.
It turns out that AGW is what is called “post-normal science“, meaning that old-fashioned ideas like data and testable hypotheses have to be left on the wayside as we march in lockstep toward the Greater Truth demanded by The Times We Live In.
In other words, its our old friend Fake but Accurate, hanging out with the usual crowd. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain, and all that.
Enjoying a bit of time off work this afternoon, sitting outside on my back terrace in deepest Pimlico (oh, the wonders of wireless!), I decided to stop bothering about the patronising berk who leads the Tories and came across this story:
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of huge seas — one of them bigger than any of North America’s Great Lakes — on Saturn’s largest moon, scientists said on Tuesday.
Big seas? I wonder if yachting or swiming on the beach is possible?
Scientists studying the images taken by the probe, which blasted off a decade ago, said the seas on Titan were likely filled with liquid methane or ethane and that the discovery reinforced previous theories.
All that liquid methane – do they have cows on that planet?
Seriously, the material being discovered by these probes is astonishing. At a time when our horizons appear to be shrinking in a fear-mongering political climate, it is nice to remember that some organisations, even state ones like NASA, are making discoveries like this. I guess a libertarian purist might object to the NASA funding model, but I am sure privately-funded ventures could pull this sort of thing off, if not in quite the same scale initially.
In having another bite at the Green issue, one thing struck me as I surfed around the Net looking at some of the comments made by people about the idea of the Tories’ trying to stop people from flying to holiday and business destinations. Some people genuinely seem to feel that a crackdown on global warming, and hence a halt to rising sea levels, is good for the poor. So we capitalist zealots should stop trying to argue that Tory leader David Cameron or Labour’s Tony Blair are acting out of snobbish disdain for Essex Man and the latter’s desire to go to Malaga for a cheap holiday. Oh no.
I guess it is true that if sea levels do rise as much as the gloomier scientists suggest, and the Earth gets progressively hotter, that poor people will suffer disproportionately from that. Air conditioning costs money. Buying a home away from a flood plain also costs money. I recall that about 3 years ago, hundreds, in fact thousands of French elderly people died because all the pharmacies were shut for the August holidays and they could not get treatment. That is what poverty does – it cuts your optiions and means of escape from trouble. So maybe David Cameron is acting out of paternalistic concern for the poor — in the future.
And that is the kicker. Even if global warming is man-made and can be reversed, the benefits of such an expensive exercise will not come through for decades, centuries, or even longer. How can the interests of a guy who cannot afford an expensive flight be set against the interests of someone living in 2300? Why should a politician, answerable to an electorate, sacrifice or ask to sacrifice its interests for the interests of people in such a long time to come, and over a theory or set of theories that are, at best, not proven to the standards of a court of law?
We have been beastly to Cameron and his ilk on this site lately, and with ample justification. If Cameron wants to explain quite why the ordinary citizen should be shafted, yet again, by some grand project to make the world a better place in centuries to come, let him make that case.
Meanwhile, my boss, not the most excitable of men, said, in a quite unsolicited moment of rage this morning, that Cameron was a “communist”. He is not even a rightwing Tory voter. I wonder if this view is starting to spread.
Some of the so-called faithful are shamefully unwilling to put up with just a teensy-weensy bit of discomfort for the sake of Gaia:
World-renowned polar explorers and educators, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, today suspended their historic expedition to the North Pole seven days in, citing severe safety concerns due to a combination of damaged gear, frostbite and extreme cold.
The goal of this year’s expedition has been to raise awareness among students and adults worldwide on the impact of global warming on the Arctic region.
Mind you, it could have been worse. If there was such a thing as global cooling they would have died from heatstroke.
As an addendum to Brian’s post on the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, I thought I would inform anyone unaware that the programme can be viewed in full at Google videos. Brilliant – I am downloading it as I type.
(picked up from LGF)
Like everyone in my part of the blogosphere, I am very excited about last night’s Channel 4 Documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. I also recorded it to my TV hard disc.
The two most interesting claims in it, for me, were: that the Global Warming CO2 link is that that Global Warming causes more CO2 rather than the dominant notion now (as expounded by Al Gore) that more CO2 causes Global Warming, and: that Maggie Thatcher set the whole recent Global Warming pseudo- (if pseudo- it be) science funding bandwagon in motion because it was a stick to beat coal miners with. Brilliant. You want to explain what a mad cow Thatcher was? Denounce her take on Global Warming as cynical bollocks.
What was so excellent, for me, about this show is not that it totally convinced me (I have had enough experience with arguing to know that changing your mind is not something you should do lightly and impulsively) but that it sketched out with absolute clarity the anti-Gore (for want of a better phrase) case. It’s the sun what does it. Sun temperature change, earth temperature change, CO2. That’s the direction of the causes, not CO2 earth temperature change. They are correlated, just as Al Gore said. But Gore got the causation the wrong way round.
I also finally understand the point I have kept hearing about sun spots. Hitherto, sun spots have, when being sold to me as the explanation of all this, sounded to me like they are supposed to cause things. Wrong. They are merely a symptom of what does cause things, namely big change in the sun as a whole. The sunspots are a symptom of the sun warming, not the cause of anything on earth in themselves.
Nevertheless, this show certainly made me more of an anthropogenic Global Warming atheist, and less of a mere agnostic on the subject. I will be watching out for whatever arguments for and against that I encounter during the next few weeks and months. I will, for instance, be watching out for what happens to the academics featured in the show who were brave enough to put their heads above the parapet. That we now have a whole heroes gallery of sun-worshippers (so to speak), whose general intellectual demeanour and record we can now scrutinise, is an immense help. Presumably there will be (have already been) lots of character assassinations, attempted and maybe successful.
And who is Martin Durkin, the guy who made the programme? Ah yes, Living Marxism (that was what they called themselves when I first got to know these weirdos. Before that they were RCP. Equals Revolutionary Communist Party).
Living Marxism were one of those creepy outfits that then said you should only refer to them as LM, without saying what LM used to stand for. Sort of like BAT (who were absolutely not British American Tobacco you understand, definitely not, no relation whatsoever at all blah blah blah), only political. Then when that was greeted with the derision and contempt that it deserved, they dumped even the LM crap, and called themselves the Institute of Ideas. I do not trust them further than I can spit them.
But, for their own bonkers cult reasons, they are very ambitious and worldly wise, rather like the Scientologists (Claire Fox, for instance, is one of them. Frank Furedi is another). Generally, what they say is, strangely, well worth listening to. They speak truth to power, because they are insane and want one day to be power, and do Marx knows what to us.
RCP/Living Marxism/etc. is one of the great conveyor belts of libertarianism from the libertarian ghetto here on earth to the real world, also here on earth, via the planet Zarg. Their Zargian take on the whole Class War thing is that the Class War is still raging between the nobs and the yobs, just like Marx said, but Zargians explain it differently to the usual way. Instead of Al Gore et al being described as repentant nobs on the side of the yobs, the RCP/Living Marxism/etc. people describe Al Gore et al as unrepentant nobs, foisting their latest line of bullshit on the toiling masses, the Working Stiffs of the World who Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chains. RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Institute of Ideas/Whatever will lead the Working Stiffs of the World to victory, and then put Marxist lizards in power or whatever the hell they have in mind.
All of this will now be explained with great enthusiasm by Al Gore et al, the central claim being: These People are Bonkers and we can safely ignore what they say!!!
My answer: These People are indeed Bonkers and Not To Be Trusted (i.e. warmed over and (not very) secretly unrepentant Marxists), but meanwhile, what do you say to their arguments? This particular clutch of notions sounds rather persuasive to me.
Not the least of the fun is going to be that a bunch of warmed over Marxists (Al Gore et al) are going to have to explain that another bunch of warmed over Marxists are bonkers, and are going to disagree about whether they should play the Marx card. I personally agree completely that being a Marxist, still, is strong evidence that you should be taken away in a van. But how will other Marxists with a different take on Marxism handle this argumentative opportunity?
But all that is a digression. The truth is the truth. If a mad, not-to-be-trusted person says something true, there is still the matter of its truth to be considered. Pointing out that the person saying the truth is mad and not-to-be-trusted does not make the truth untrue. Point of logic. Besides which, although the RCP/LM crowd are from the planet Zarg, that doesn’t mean that the scientists they have rounded up are likewise Zargians. They are almost certainly, almost entirely, bona fide earth people.
The arguments in this documentary are now going to be the new orthodoxy of the global right wing, anti-regulation, anti-high-taxes, anti-road-pricing, fuck-you-Karl, fuck-you-Tarqin crowd, who will now echo-chamber these arguments with their blogs into a roar that will deafen the world, in other words these arguments will be adopted by a huge number of earth people. Al Gore et al are going to have to explain why these arguments are nonsense, or, despite the fact that they have won every battle so far, they will lose their war.
I await developments with fascination.
UPDATE: try here for some responses from the opposition.
Cross posted from www.brianmicklethwait.com
The green fanatics have been running the debate for decades now so perhaps it is time to hear some scientific basis for their intrusive and reactionary measures.
Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena.
Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth’s crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l’ Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.
The nihilistic nature of the climate research debate – spot on! What frightens me about the environmentalists is that they recommend restricting ourselves back to stone age. Instead of harnessing innovation and searching for alternatives, the doomsday scenarios is what it is all about. Coupled with the urge to dictate what the rest of us should do, we have a long-term restriction on the very things that drives innovation – clear understanding of the problem, redundancy and waste (yes, that too is necessary for change), experimentation and focus on the demand, not just on restricting the supply.
In June, I will be attending the Apeldoorn conference in the Hague. This year the focus is on sustainability – the conference title is Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World. Well, you can guess what my contribution is going to be… I am looking forward to making the point for redundancy and playful experimentation by the markets. Otherwise, sustainability is nothing but another word for rationing progress.
cross posted from Media Influencer.
Last night was a magical one, and not just because I danced to some great music at the wedding of a sailing friend of mine. I also was able to stand outside and, glass of rather fine Armagnac in hand, watch the lunar eclipse in a crystal clear night sky. I have dabbled a bit in astronomy over the years, but this sort of thing might make me part with a few pounds and buy a proper telescope. Think of it: for a short while, the remains of the Apollo landing craft were bathed in orange.
I will be going to live in China shortly, however I intend to backpack around South East Asia for a few months before settling in Beijing. I do not really wish to lug my two hundred and fifty or so CDs around Asia. I am not a masochist. Also, I would hate to lose them. Yet I would also hate to be without my music – so I plan to buy a portable MP3 player and copy all of my CDs on to that. However, I do not know which model to buy, so perhaps a knowledgeable reader could help me out.
Firstly, I should mention that I do not want an iPod. I do not like having to use iTunes to plonk songs and data on the device, and I have heard a lot of stories about reliability problems – units dying just after the warranty has run out, unprovoked formatting of memory and that kind of thing.
I want a player that is compatible with Windows and has a relatively simple procedure for the addition of files – as I may be doing a fair bit of that at internet cafes and places where the software available is limited. Ideally, I would like to be able to rip a CD straight to the player without having to store the music files on a computer in the process. I am not awfully concerned about a video playing ability or an especially fancy display for viewing photos, as I will primarily be using the unit to listen to music. I would like the unit to have at least 30 gigabytes of memory, and I do not want to spend much more than 200 pounds or US$400.
A tech-savvy friend told me to check out the Creative Zen Vision M and the Toshiba X-series. Does anyone have any comment on these units, or any other recommendations?
The damage from an asteroid impact is referred to as an existential threat. The likelihood of this type of event is ranked alongside supervolcanoes, catastrophic climate change and pandemics as a risk that could undermine civilisation’s infrastructure.
The threat from Apophis, aptly named for Stargate SG-1 fans, has crossed our radar screens with the possibility of an impact event in 2036. Astronomers mapping asteroids that pose a threat have singled out Apophis as a unique danger. Their campaign for awareness and funds to establish defences against such threats is beginning to bear fruit. Disagreement on how to institutionalise such space defences acquires momentum when one reads about the role assigned to the United Nations.
Russell Schweickart, of the Association of Space Explorers, has announced, during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that they hope to submit a “draft document” on asteroid impact to the United Nations Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2009. The United Nations would acquire the responsibility for identifying dangerous objects in Near Earth Orbit and requesting national space agencies take appropriate action. This is usually know as the system ‘UN say, US pay’.
The goal is laudable, the method is lousy. It is not clear if the United Nations has the mechanism available to foster co-operation in this field, since many countries may not consider this type of event a risk that requires further expenditure. Moreover, there is a possibility that a rapid reaction is required, whilst the UN’s institutions are not noted for their nimble response to crisis, as the tsunami in South East Asia demonstrated.
The private sector institutions that campaign to counter such existential risks need to develop pragmatic plans involving national co-operation, principally through NASA, with ancillary aid from Russia and Europe, if possible. A private sector solution would be even better. The involvement of the United Nations is an additional layer of bureaucracy. Schweickart’s proposal requires a more pragmatic competitor.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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