Facebook

I’ve retreated from Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson’s article in The Guardian was the tipping point, but that just crystallised a number of thoughts I’d already been having. The fact that when I talked to friends who weren’t on Facebook they reminded me of me a couple of years ago before I finally relented and got a mobile phone – which made me think maybe I should have held out. Each one of these technologies had a mystique of inevitability, of a new world of communication. Keith reminded me also of Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred, and the questions he suggests we ask of new technologies.

I’d already investigated the intricacies of extracting oneself from Facebook’s embrace – the fact that you could “deactivate” but not “delete” your account; that like so many of the corporate relationships we engage in so willingly these days, our eyes closed in the first flush of love, ending the affair is not easy – getting “our stuff” back is not easy - working out who owns what when our personal details and interactions have gained impersonal value as marketing information, intellectual content… is not easy.

The corporate compromise is everywhere of course, this is written on Microsoft software and published through a Google service and I’ll probably alert some friends to its existence using my Yahoo mail account, and I stick photos up on Flickr, another Yahoo service. So who am I to moan about Facebook, come back when you’re all open source – and even then my words will depend on some Cisco server somewhere – is there no escape? Am I choosing to focus on some perceived downslide of all this, a killjoy who can’t just dissolve into the jouissance of global capitalism? Shouldn’t I just shut the fuck up, take my macbook down to Starbucks activate the wireless and put mea culpa up on Facebook and MySpace and Bebo and Friendster, so all my “friends” can see I was wrong on their RSS feeds. Can you DIGG it?

I haven’t yet “deactivated” “my” Facebook account though, I’ve not followed any of the suggested routes to full deletion. I have tried to remove every bit of personal data that was up on there and basically replaced it with Tom Hodkinson’s article. Which I guess is a provocation.

My friend Brenda, my most distanced friend – being on another continent, living in another time zone in Ohio, USA wasn’t happy about my decision or what I’d done. I guess I provoked her. This is what she had to say:

In response to the posting of Tom Hodgkinson’s article:

Uh...you can't talk to people who live 4,000 miles away in the pub? Phone is better, but long distance costs money.

In response to the posting of the Alternet article “Facebook: The New Look of Surveillance”:

If you thought posting things online was private, then you're thick. Don't post things you don't want people to see. Done.

I’m assuming that she wont mind me repeating her comments here as they are evidently not “private”.

Of course to learn this Brenda’s opinion I had to open 2 emails from Facebook telling me I had messages from Brenda on Facebook, which I then had to log into to go read. Brenda could have emailed me direct, she still can email me whenever she wants – we don’t need Facebook to stay in touch. Or we could write properly, pen on paper into envelopes marked with “air mail” stickers or “par avion” and stamps that will look funny when they arrive across the globe. And that will be “slow” communication, but it also might be “deep” communication – and it might be worth keeping. How many people make screen grabs of their friends and lovers Facebook postings so they can keep them for ever more – perhaps the digital seems eternal (which it assuredly is not) or perhaps (more likely) it just doesn’t seem so important. Am I the only person I wonder who frets, as their mobile phone meets its capacity to hold messages requiring me to delete some/all of them – the requirement for receiving new communication suddenly becoming that I go back through my inbox, reading, remembering previous communication deciding to blast an other persons words into oblivion. I want to download their messages, I want to print them out, I want to keep their exact words… yes perhaps I’m in the wrong era. But what the fuck does that mean? That the things I feel are important aren’t important anymore?

Sites for sore Is

There’s been a slight site redesign, more forced on me than chosen by the “modernising” ethic of the new blogger… anyway that’s boring geekspeak, I’m falling asleep already myself. In the course of putting the site back together again I had to re-upload the banner links in the sidebar, and this seems a useful point to reflect on those:

The Oil Depletion Protocol

“A Plan for a Sensible Energy Future...
As we move into an era of oil depletion and energy constraint, everything from transportation to medicine to food to climate change response strategies will be affected. Almost everything we do is dependent on oil.
The transition to a future of reduced oil supply will require the development of clean, reliable, and renewable energy sources and reduced oil production and consumption. The Oil Depletion Protocol will allow us to accomplish both - simply, conservatively, and cooperatively. It is a plan for a sensible energy future.”

The oil depletion protocol is a plan to move the planet through the end of the fossil fuel era by getting the countries of the world to sign up to a simple plan: oil importing countries reduce their annual imports by the global depletion rate; and oil exporting countries reduce their annual exports by their national depletion rate.

My good friend Keith has recently added a new e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website calling on the UK to sign up to the Oil Depletion Protocol; you can add your voice to the call here.

Richard Heinberg author of the book The Oil Depletion Protocol has been interviewed recently speaking on the subject here.

Irrepressible

This Amnesty International campaign seeks to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. Bloggers around the world are encouraged to carry the Irrepressible badge which will display material which has suffered from attempts at political censorship. Individual are also encouraged to sign up to a pledge on Internet Freedom. Learn more here.

In Barbarity There Are No Comparisons

“I will say nothing about Nuremberg. In barbarity there are no comparisons. Whether it is here or there, it is all “here”.”

Gandhi, Letter To Prema Kantak, October 16, 1946

In a ghoulish manner, but with an intellectual excuse to paste over my amorality I went on to YouTube last week found the full version of the Saddam execution and downloaded it (using firefox/greasemonkey) [I wont post a link to that, I’m sure you can find it yourself if you “need” to].

In the presentations I do on ITN and Reuters news material as part of my job I often like to find archival material that reflects or interacts with contemporary news events. The film of Saddam's execution and the resulting controversy seemed an excellent topic to pursue as it includes moving image technology and "news value" as an inherent part of the story.

An obvious historical event to use as a point of comparison seemed to me to be the Nuremberg trials and subsequent executions of leading Nazi's - so I went back and took a look at the newsreel record of that.

Gaumont British News devoted a whole issue to the verdict and sentencing of the Nazi's - however it states that they were not allowed to film the sentencing. Using images of the court doors being closed in front of them they overlay audio of Goering being sentenced to death by hanging. Gaumont did not cover the executions themselves at all (in the first issue after the executions took place Gaumont leads with racing from Newmarket).

British Pathe News issued a story over the dilemma of whether or not to show the executions, preceding the hangings they ran a screen and press publicity campaign asking their audience their opinion. They received 980 replies. 950 of which stated they did not think the hangings should be shown. The Pathe story also mentions questions being asked in the House of Commons regarding the showing of the executions.

The American edition of Universal News, illustrated the execution part of their coverage with footage of American soldiers hanging a weighted dummy from the gallows, thus getting their money shot without showing the real deal.

British Movietone News featured the American reporter Kingsbury Smith, the only journalist to witness the executions, speaking about what he saw of the Nazis being hanged, including the detail that following the hangings the dead body of Goering (who committed suicide a few hours before the executions) was brought in to demonstrate to the witnesses that he too was dead. Kingsbury Smith didn’t reveal in this piece, as he would in print, that a miscalculation of the weight of Julius Streicher meant that he did not die instantly:

“He went down kicking. When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body of and pulled down on it. We were all of the opinion that Streicher had strangled.”

Kingsbury Smith, The Execution of Nazi War Criminals, 16 October 1946 for the International News Service

Saddam Hussein's execution, in addition to everything else it is, seems emblematic of a new era of the audio-visual medium – one that circumvents the mainstream media, News or otherwise. This event was filmed on a mobile phone, spread around the world using P2P technology and then further distributed, manipulated and repurposed on web 2.0 sites like YouTube.

It shows what the mainstream news media will not show (and perhaps for very good reasons). [The Guardian faced harsh criticism, including from a large percentage of its own journalists for showing a still from the film on its front page]. It fits into a genre that includes the militia beheadings from Iraq - and has a relationship with the "last messages" of suicide bombers, Jihadi propaganda from around the world (check Internet Archive for the Chechen and Ossetian end of this), but also the footage taken in Falluja by US Marines helmet mounted cameras (available on YouTube in both "raw" formats and in versions edited to heavy metal soundtracks - glorifying the destruction taking place). Since Vietnam, battlefield coverage has largely been absent from the news, these new technologies are re-revealing what it's actually like in a war – fucking horrible.

Of course there is also that argument that it is pornography that leads new developments in audio-visual technology - and perhaps all this stuff is pornography too? Hearing about some piece of film featuring this internationally known figure in a compromising position that the media wont show, knowing that you can probably find it on the internet, searching for it, downloading it, sharing it with others - are we talking about the execution of Saddam Hussein or 'One Night in Paris'? What are our motivations?

Low Energy Computing?

A couple of stories I saw today reminded me of the computer stuff I was going on about a while back. Sparked off by a Ran Prieur piece (Ran's site seems to be down in 2007 anyone know what's going on?).

Andrew Brown has an anti-Vista broadside on the Guardian online site, indicating the continuing inefficiency, pointlessness and greed associated with software upgrades. The raft of subsequent comments ran the point home.

This is put in further relief by the latest news regarding the $100 “One Laptop Per Child” project for schools in the developing world which should be launched this year. The BBC Online site notes:

“The computer runs on a cut-down version of the open source Linux operating system and has been designed to work differently to a Microsoft Windows or Apple machine from a usability perspective. Instead of information being stored along the organising principle of folders and a desktop, users of the XO machine are encouraged to work on an electronic journal, a log of everything the user has done on the laptop.”

Apparently the machines will be powered by a 366-megahertz processor from Advanced Micro Devices and have built-in wireless networking. They will have no hard disk drives and instead use 512 MB of flash memory, and have two USB ports to which more storage could be attached.

This could be exactly the kind of stripped down computing we should be aiming for on a grander scale. Hopefully these small machines will be lower energy users, there has been talk of wind up models – solar power would be another obvious winner if the technological and sustainability hurdles can be leapt over. The One Laptop Per Child Wiki suggests that a retail version may become available for sale to help cross subsidise the units sent to the developing world. These apparently may have some enhanced capabilities such as built-in Ethernet and extra flash RAM.

Engines of Indifference?

For the first time in print, I’ve seen someone express how I feel about progress in computing – its from good old Ran Prieur in his November 9 entry, where he calls for an end to the wasteful use of processing power that’s become endemic:

“The people who most want to save high tech are doing the most to crash it, by reaching for more and more candy instead of working to build the stability that any enduring system needs. If we're going to have computers in 200 years, a computer maker has to say something like this:

We're holding the line at 1Ghz and 512MB RAM. We're going to keep making them that powerful forever. Instead of "improving" in speed and size, we will work on reducing energy consumption, reducing weight, making components that have less ecological footprint, last longer, and are easier to repair. And software designers for our machine will have to stay within the same technical limits, and make improvements in elegance and creativity. In 1000 years, our 1GHz machines will be hand-made from quartz crystals for five cents each, use captured sunlight instead of electricity, and beam pictures directly into your brain. That's progress, baby.”

A lot of my thoughts on this have their origin in me pondering on two things:

1) Computers in the USSR. Due to cold war trade embargoes, and restrictions on knowledge transfer, the USSR could not benefit from many of the forward strides in computing power being made in the West. However faced with poorer spec’d computers, their programmers had to become amazingly efficient and imaginative in order to get the machines to do what they wanted – with the end result that Soviet computer programmers were real geniuses. Now – is it better to have lower-tech, less intensity machines having their utility maximised by intelligent operators OR is it better to have high-tech, high intensity machines, that are bloated in order to require less intelligent operation? Every decrease in memory/processing power cost brings PCs with more memory/processing power which is immediately used up by hungrier programmes – most of which are performing the same tasks a previous software generation did at a lower use of memory/processing power. There is no incentive for programmers to hack down the software to use as few resources as possible to do the task at hand, they have just depended on Moore’s Law to save them the bother and spew out these lardy new products that gobble up all the gains.

2) Influenced by the idea of Steampunk science-fiction, I often ponder how effective “old”, “outdated” technologies would be if now revisited with modern knowledge and materials. e.g. How efficient a timber driven steam engine could you make now? What new characteristics and abilities could ceramics and aluminium foam or Kevlar and other modern synthetics bring to these “outdated” way of doing things? Could they actually be more efficient than modern methods, or have other beneficial characteristics – e.g. in terms of health and safety, environmental impact, cost etc.??

As we move into an energy descent future, these are certainly areas we are going to have to look into – and how exciting that could be – isn’t this the real challenge of science and technology that inspired the great thinkers?

IMAGE: The London Science Museum's replica difference engine, built from Charles Babbage's design.