Samizdata

A piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Sept 8 2002 – page 1.24) deals with the creepy subject of children having computer chips implanted into them, so that their parents can keep track of them and stop them being abducted and murdered by mad sex-fiend serial killers. The technologist at the centre of this is Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, and maybe we ought to plant a chip in him to keep track of him, because he’s a rather strange person himself by all accounts.

On the face of it, planting chips in people is a clear violation of liberty, fraught with the danger of many further violations of liberty, especially when governments start planting chips in criminals, and then in people suspected of being criminals, and then in people, and then finally (checkmate) in all people.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t think children nowadays have nearly as much freedom of movement as they might have. They are now mostly expected to show up at the same place, day after day for months at a time, whether that makes sense or not.

Time was when schools really were educational institutions first and surveillance operations only incidentally, but that balance is shifting all the time. Put it this way: if there were a massive year-long strike by the teaching profession, which of their contributions to society would be most missed? Their teaching of children or their mere keeping of tabs on children. Parents and other responsible adults want children to be “educated”, but what they really really want is to know where their children are and that they aren’t getting into evil company, if not second by second then at least hour by hour.

This is surely why portable phones are now so popular as gifts from parents to children. But they’re hardly foolproof for this job. Portable phones can be stolen by other children. They can just be lost. And there can’t be a great missing child panic every time that happens. (A wrist watch portable phone might work better, and no doubt the techies are working on that.)

To put it another way, the choice for children is not so much between children being kept track of by some kind of electronic communications device, or not; it is between children being kept track of, or being made to stay put in one or a few known-in-advance locations. And being made stay in fixed places is not exactly what we libertarians call “freedom”. Paradoxically, childr-tracking technology is what may make freedom of movement for children much more common in the near future.

Of course this kit can be used by parents and teachers to drive children crazy. But children are already at the mercy of adults. For those adults who want children to have freer and happier lives than they do now, this sort of kit, used with humanity and with common sense, will surely be part of the answer.

Maybe Professor Warwick isn’t such a creep after all.

I’m going on the radio this (early) evening for a few minutes to talk about this stuff, and happily they’re not expecting me to come crashing down on only one side of the argument. The radio station is Ondacero International, which is basically Spanish but which also does English language broadcasts for Anglo expatriates living in Spain, of whom there are at least a million. I couldn’t find any hint of English at the Ondacero website, but maybe you can. If you do contrive to tune in by some magical means or another, the show goes out at 7 pm Spanish time, which is 6 pm London time, and whatever that might be your time. Who knows? – maybe some Samizdata readers are themselves Anglo-Spaniards within regular radio range of this. I’m fixed to be on for a few minutes at around twenty past the hour. My thanks for making the contact to my good (and good libertarian) friend David Botsford, who’s been on this show several times himself.

I can’t remember exactly when it was, but one evening something like a fortnight ago, David Carr, Adriana (I think she was there), Perry and I were gathered at Perry’s in the small hours of a morning and we were discussing that newly erupting Transnationalism article. The various properties and qualities and signs of Tranzis and Tranzi thoughts (we were already using David’s word, I seem to recall) were itemised. I offered the thought that Tranzis probably prefer Linux to Microsoft, but was squashed by the assembled majority. Linux is libertarian and the Tranzis don’t like that do they? Course not. I said no more.

But now have a read of this article by Steve Lohr, and then tell me I was wrong. Anti-American governmentalists everywhere (especially from the Tranzi heartland: the EU) queueing up to support the Penguin and to trash the Evil Gates, whom they regard as the personification of US corporate imperialism.

I think personal computer software is a natural global monopoly, if you’ll pardon the expression. What I mean is that at any moment there is a global winner which it makes sense for nearly everybody to use – Tranzis, anti-Tranzis, Americans, anti-Americans, everybody – simply because everybody else does. And any year now, it would seem, the world may do a switch. But I confess to being biased about this, because I placed a sort of bet four years ago in a Libertarian Alliance piece about Linux!, and if Linux ever does topple Big Bill I will look very prescient.

This one has got to be the long shot of the year.

It has happened before. A rather hefty woman was hit by a larger rock that came through her roof some decades ago; a car boot got well dented by another in the last decade; and I think a dog got killed or injured by one.

From the smiling face I assume she had good sensible shoes on and is not now walking with a limp.

Over at TBHN, there are two further comments from readers about modern housing, one being of particular interest because it is from an architect.

Alistair Twiname confirms an inexpert impression I have long had, which is that while the finish of modern buildings is indeed fairly tacky, because of this being a craftsmanship thing and craftsmanship now being either worse or more expensive than a century ago, anything in a building where modern industrialisation techniques can work their magic is now improving steadily.

(The above direct link seems dodgy. The blogspot archive thing again? To get there by hand, it’s www.tbhn.blogspot.com – August 22nd 2002.)

I remember, when I worked as a junior functionary for a house builder many years ago, being very impressed with how clever the hidden bits of the buildings often were, and how rapidly such things were progressing, underneath the twee and conservative exteriors, which just looked like cheap copies of past glories with added garages. That being because they were.

Any man-made, mass produceable object small enough to be moved easily is improving fast, in quality, price, cunning, everything. Why can’t houses be as good as cars and aeroplanes? Because you can make cars and aeroplanes in convenient indoor factories, and then move them easily to where they’re wanted. A house is a hell of a lot harder to move, and to make it movable, you have to build a self-supporting structure into it which will only be used once (unlike the equivalent car and aeroplane structures, which get used throughout the machine’s life). But with a house, for the rest of its life, the ground will support the house. Doesn’t work. So, the thing has to be assembled on site, in the rain, by those now reasonably well paid building workers. Thousands have tried, but nobody has cracked industrialised housing yet.

The other thing Twiname’s comments confirm for me is the enormous value of specialist blogs, and specialist debates and discussions on blogs. These draw specialist people, who might have no interest in or agreement with general pro-free-market bombast, into debates and discussions of genuine interest to them in which our questions and concerns still set the agenda. And, such people educate us.

This story will gladden the hearts of lovers of the fruitful vine anywhere. Maybe I can use this technology when I jet off to California’s wine-growing region for my holiday at the end of September.

I always enjoyed the Village Voice. It’s one of those publications that may gladden or infuriate, sometimes in the same issue, but will always tell the truth as they see it. They are invariably interesting to read, far more so than the bland uptown (well midtown: NY Times overlooks Times Square) papers. It was also my neighborhood paper for a good part of two years, so I got in the habit of reading it over a morning coffee at the Sidewalk Cafe.

Today I ran across this fascinating article. I have long wondered, and by long I mean twenty years or more, whether the city as we know it can survive the amplification of capabilities of “one man working alone”. My own suspicion is the combination of information technology and nanotechnology will allow humanity to disperse at the same time low density becomes a matter of safety.

But even under the more dire of possible future histories, I cannot see us doing without places like New York. We need the energy and creativty and well, life of it. Many cities may die, but the cultural centres will live on, even if they have to be rebuilt and repopulated once a generation.