Life

General life. Things that happen.

It’s All Larks Until…

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Shortly before rage-quitting Facebook, an old school friend of mine went on an amusing but wayward rant about a woke moderation conspiracy – because his comment about shooting people got blocked.

British people say “should be shot” a lot. It’s a kind of absurdist humour; a ridiculous exaggeration. It’s not meant literally and no normally functioning British person would ever think it was.

It turns out, however, that there are a lot of people in the world who are not normally functioning British people – who knew, right?

It’s also well documented that if you sufficiently normalise violent concepts within a given channel, eventually someone does take it all too seriously and people do get shot. This happens even if it’s pretty clear to an outsider that the vast majority of content is not intended to be taken seriously. It’s not just violence either, it also happens with extreme ideologies such as white supremacy. Posting large volumes of material that could be plausibly denied as a joke or otherwise not serious has become a key propaganda tactic for extreme ideologies and terrorists – because it works.

That person who “just posts what they find funny” but so happens to bang out a constant stream of messaging might not be conscious that they’re acting as a propagandist for an extreme ideology, but that’s what they doing. Of course, despite and protest they make to the contrary, it’s entirely possible that they’re very aware of it.

Naturally violent and hateful topics do come up in general conversation and are the subject of innocent jokes, hyperbole, rants etc. This is perfectly normal and not usually unhealthy, Social Media companies have no desire to shut that down. This is not the hellscape imagined by The Dead Kennedys in California Uber Alles. The Tofu Eating Wokerati are not coming for you – and I should know.

The problem is that social media companies don’t want to get sued or face criminal charges because of the content people are posting. They’d much rather annoy people by blocking innocent comments than have to deal with the courts and the authorities.

To exacerbate things, it would be hideously expensive to employ real human moderators to scan all of the content. Instead the first line of their defence is a bunch of very paranoid algorithms that block first and ask questions later.

I once got a disparaging comment about the Hemel Hempstead Magic Roundabout blocked. I can only assume that Facebook thought Hemel Hempstead might be a person. The comment was reinstated without quibble when I complained.

It’s only when you do complain that you stand any chance of finding a real human.

Our world has changed, the way we communicate has changed. The UK has long had regulation (some of which is distinctly questionable) on what can be said in public, published and even transmitted via mail and telephone. The difference is that we’re now using micropublishing and telecommunication more than we ever did before – so we’re encountering regulation and the knock-on effects of regulation more.

Let’s Talk About Wednesday

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

I love a hypothesis. Even silly ones. It’s not about the outcome, it’s all about the journey. Just like Strictly Come Dancing. A while back I was trying to explain how my mind works, “basically,” I joked, “I’m Wednesday Addams”.

I am not Wednesday Addams. I’m a middle aged professional from a pleasantly leafy area of rural England. But writers rarely pluck a character out of nowhere. Even Pinky and the Brain were based on real people. Somewhere there might have been a real Wednesday…

Before I go any further I have to add a content warning. This gets really dark, really fast. Right after this kitten picture.

Read more

The Kids Aren’t Alright

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

“You’re brave”, I was told many years ago. Had I battled a terrorist with a narwhal tusk? Had I smuggled a Soviet dissident through Checkpoint Charlie in the boot of a Trabant?

No, I chose not to have kids. For a moment I struggled to contemplate how this could possibly be brave.

Then I remembered I was not normal.

There are two things parents commonly tell me. The first is that “I love my kids, but if I had the chance to go back, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have them.”

Those same people, moments after telling me in a quiet corner that they think they made a mistake, can often be found discussing the joys of parenthood with other parents. We live in a culture where it’s socially unacceptable to regret having children. Of course, this isn’t a simple matter, few parents would want their children to know they regretted having them. Nobody can blame a parent for maintaining the pretence justified by that alone.

The other thing parents often tell me, whether they regret having children or not, is that they’re not entirely sure why they chose to have them. The most common theme is that “it’s just what you do, isn’t it?”.

Is it?

The Herd

The herd is useful, tradition is useful. The chances are that if something is a standard or has been done a particular way for centuries then there’s a good reason for it. Many people have decided they know better, ripped up the rule book only for it to be an unmitigated disaster and before they know it things are back to pretty much how they were before, only with slightly different names to try to cover up the failure.

The herd, of course, has a plan for your life. You start by playing a few games, then do a bit of education, find a job, find a partner, raise some kids, find some hobbies then retire.

Going against that plan is the harder road. There’s safety in the herd, masses of animals all doing the same thing. Any animal that does something different is a cause for concern to the rest of the herd. It might do something that puts others in danger. It might even be a predator in disguise.

Rarely does anyone ever ask the question why someone chose to have kids. Dare not to have them and we get the nagging and the constant leading questions, “When are you two going to get round to having kids?” And the stories about the great aunt that ran out of time and always regretted it.

If you want to add a horse tranquillizing quantity of alcohol, then apparently we would have made great parents and it’s people like us who are responsible for reverse Darwinism, if that’s actually a thing.

Some people, of course, always wanted to have kids: it’s a strong part of who they are. I couldn’t be happier for them, but that’s not everybody. On the flip side, there are those people who are resolute from the start that they don’t want children.

But there are those in the middle and they’re the vulnerable ones…

Blackberry Smoke / One Horse Town

I find that an incredibly sad song, about how a society can railroad you into a career, into marriage, into parenthood before you’ve had a chance to think and whilst you’re still naive enough not to know better.

Then you’re trapped.

To work out how to escape this, I want to reverse back up to that leading question which I was asked in so many different forms over the years, “When are you two going to have kids?”. If your social group, your family, your friends, even your colleagues expect you to have children then the first thing you have to do is separate your personal, true thoughts from those of your community, your family and even those closest to you.

We are all different, it is not a duty or responsibility to have kids, you don’t owe it to your family or anyone else. This is about you and your feelings alone. It is entirely worth taking the time, alone, to work out exactly how you feel.

I can’t emphasise this enough: it is your call.

If you have a partner, of course they’re important, but don’t allow someone else to override your own feelings on this. You can never truly reverse having had children. If having kids is a deal breaker, then the deal is broken. Going your separate ways now might be painful, but it’s better than spending the rest of your life with children you don’t want.

And please don’t let anyone tell you that you’ll change your mind when you first hold the baby. It does work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

The decision not to have children is, mostly, the less permanent one. Sure, if you’re a woman the point where it pretty much becomes permanent is a lot earlier, but you don’t have to close the door forever at age 18. None of us can predict the future that well. If you don’t feel that you want kids now then that’s fine.

The problem is not you. The problem is other people…

People are Weird.

Unless you tell them differently, people tend to assume that you’re broadly the same as them. Not wanting children is such a defining aspect of life choices that it can upset people’s notion of who you are. People can get weird about that.

Sometimes people choose their perception of you over who you actually are. They start trying to mould you to their perception, not the other way around. Or to put it another way, they’ll tell you you’re making a mistake and you’ll change your mind. This, clearly, is their problem, not yours.

Some people’s own visions of their lives, particularly those who want kids, can also involve you having kids. They expect you to run parallel lives, which can mean they feel betrayed. They’re betrayed by their own assumptions, but it doesn’t always come out like that. Again, not your problem.

A common response is an overly-assertive demand to know why. That’s not always easy to answer, because the truth is often simply that you don’t feel any need or desire in that direction. That is justification enough; if anything the people who need to give the better justification are those who chose to have kids. You don’t need to explain further.

There are any number of emotional responses that can come out from people whose world you’ve just upset. The one thing I can say for sure is that you won’t lose any friends. There’s a small chance you might find that some people you thought were friends are really just acquaintances, but the earlier you find that out, the better.

The last thing to mention is that some people are pretty persistent. The in-laws who ask literally every time you see them; they exist. Some friends will also ask as often as they think it acceptable to do so. This, of course, is a type of bullying and you’re totally justified in telling them to back off, or referring them to the reply given in the matter of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

Remember, it’s a huge decision to make and it’s your decision alone. You don’t need to justify it to anyone else; “I just don’t want to” is the only response you need to make. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

You Are Paying, So Take Control

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has to be paid for somewhere, somehow. TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google, none of these are free. If you’re not paying with money, you’re paying some other how.

“Look,” someone inevitably interjects at this point, “if Facebook wants to analyse my ‘likes’ and show me adverts for camera lenses I’m fine with that.”

I think most people would be OK with that. That’s not what they’re doing. This isn’t an exposé of Facebook however, that’s been done. Even if we hadn’t consciously surfaced it we all knew Facebook was evil.

The others are alright though, surely? I mean Twitter just show you a few sponsored tweets, right?

One of the great advantages of social media advertising is that it’s possible to tell exactly how many times an advert is shown to users. The more the advert is shown, the more money Twitter makes. So, by extension, the more time you spend on Twitter, the more adverts you are shown, the more Twitter makes.

Most of these “free” social media platforms started off just showing you the latest updates from your network, in time order. Have you noticed how hard they’re all trying not to do that now?

It’s because they’re profiling you. They’re recording what you interact with, what you open, what you scroll past and combining that with other tracking data so they can doctor your timeline. They want to show you the stuff that’s most likely to keep you engaged, most likely to get you to view adverts.

One of the unfortunate side effects of this can be explained by looking at headlines in the media, because newspapers been doing it for centuries. We love sensation, we love controversy. The result is that the algorithms that manage our timelines are ever searching for more extreme content, more sensation, more controversy.

That’s why Twitter is such a hellscape of political extremism, it’s because the most extreme, the most controversial, the most sensational views are getting shoved in our faces by their algorithms. If you mutter “dimwit” to yourself and scroll past something they’re not making any money. If it makes you angry and you fire off an angry response that makes other people respond angrily, they’re driving engagement and driving up their advertising revenue.

Nobody’s being consciously evil here, it’s just artificial intelligence (AI) working out what presses your buttons and manipulating what you see to do it more, all in the name of keeping you engaged so you view more adverts. It’s just unfortunate that the result is profoundly unhealthy, both for you and for society.

How do you escape? The obvious way is to pay directly for the services and the content you consume.

Up until comparatively recently there have been limited options here. In 2010, when I started this blog, paying to host a blog was pretty much your only option. Now the field is expanding fast.

The Fediverse might turn out to be significant. It’s a project supported by the software development community and (mainly) paid for by voluntary contributions. The whole idea is to create a system for interconnections that’s robust, but also that nobody can own. Sure, people can and do own individual servers, perhaps even systems, but not the whole ball game. If you’re in the Fediverse, you have to play nicely with other servers and other systems or you’ll not be in the Fediverse any more.

Don’t get me wrong, the Fediverse has problems, it has to evolve and to continue to evolve. If it can do it and maintain its purpose and its integrity it might define the next epoch of social media. Maybe. It seems we’ve said that a lot and very few things ever do break through into the maintstream.

Unless you’ve been living in a cupboard, however, you’ll have heard of the Fediverse app Mastodon; primarily because it’s very much like Twitter. It’s not a drop in replacement, there are differences, some of which are by design. Every Mastodon server has to be funded somehow. Some are actually free, run by generous people or businesses. Others (e.g. mastodon.org.uk) rely on contributions from the users, usually through Patreon or some other, similar mechanism.

That’s a neat segue. Patreon is one of a bunch of what are essentially subscription management services, they provide a platform for smaller producers to get paid for what they produce. The advantage, other than actually paying them (comparatively) fairly, is that the producers don’t have to game the content manipulation algorithms for advertising funded services nearly as much. Clearly you have to find them somehow, but it means they only have to compete in the clickbait leagues with a small percentage of their output. They can do deep cuts.

For me, none of this is quite landing where I want it, but I wonder if it ever can. Wherever you sit, there has to be a compromise. Some people will always be happy with advertising funded social media, no matter how unhealthy that might be for them personally or for society as a whole. Free to use social media will also, always have a place in carrying the stories of poorer folk and poorer regions, as well as raising awareness and documenting what goes on in war zones and under oppressive regimes.

I’m not sure there’s any single right answer, but if there’s a wrong answer it’s to have an oligopoly of tech giants abusing people’s personal data and rigging their content – at any cost to them or society – to manipulate people into viewing more adverts.

The key, in whatever form it takes, will come from diversity and cooperation.

Flying Wine

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Remarkable, isn’t it, how good your local supermarket is at keeping your favourite wine on the shelves? You might assume they have a huge stock somewhere, but they don’t. They fly the wine in.

Land in the UK is expensive. Stock rooms in supermarkets are space that’s not selling goods, if they could get away with it, stores wouldn’t have stock rooms at all. And those enormous buildings by the motorways are distribution centres, not warehouses. They don’t really do any warehousing at all.

The old business model was to buy in bulk from abroad and warehouse in the UK, feeding it out to stores as required. It turns out that it’s now cheaper to leave wine with the producers around the world and then fly it in pretty much directly onto the shelves.

The key business drivers are the balance between cost and responsiveness. This is how, when some celebrity is pictured drinking “Herbert’s Herbgarden” supermarkets can ensure they have enough of it on their shelves at competitive prices. That’s important, because if they’re out of stock customers are going to go to competitors and they’ll buy more than just a bottle of wine there.

From a consumer point of view, this is a demonstration of the free market working perfectly. Competition between the major supermarkets has forced them into some of the most economically efficient and streamlined supply chains in the world. They might make big profits overall, but they’re only making a tiny percentage on each item.

The free market is a hugely useful tool, but it’s worth saying this twice; it naturally finds what is economically most effective. It doesn’t care at all about people or the planet. In particularly, the free market is extremely effective at finding ways to use more energy. Right now, because less than 20% of our energy comes from renewable resources[1], that’s a very bad idea.

If we want to make the free market beneficial to society we need to twist it, we need to tip the playing field in our favour, make the free market do things that secure our future rather than wreck it.

Herein I have a problem: I’m an engineer, not an economist. I don’t know how to do that. One thing is very clear, however.

What I’ll do, then, is I’ll put an idea to you and you can tell me if it’s silly, OK?

Let’s start with three pertinent facts:

  • Wine doesn’t perish quickly. I’m told that mass production wine should be drunk within 2 years of bottling.
  • Local wine shortages are not critical or even particularly damaging to society or humanity. If Tunbridge Wells is short of wine for a week, it will cause nothing more than moaning. And there’s a lot of moaning in Tunbridge Wells already.
  • Europe produces a lot of wine that can be shipped overland very efficiently.

So, why can’t we substantially increase tax on shipping wine and other similar luxury non-perishables by air?

Then we could use that extra revenue to fund sustainable shipping methods? Surely someone is going to give me a really good reason why we can’t, why we haven’t?

That would give supermarkets and consumers the choice. If they want to keep their entire range in stock all the time, they could warehouse wine from more distant regions. They could choose to fly the wine anyway, at additional cost. Or they could choose to cover any gaps by shipping alternatives overland from within Europe.

Moreover this is all really just a symptom of something I hinted at further up; our view of energy usage is seriously skewed:

  • We’re very conscious about our direct, personal energy use and largely ignorant about our indirect energy use. We diligently recycle, then impulse-buy a t-shirt from China completely unaware of the enormous amount of energy it takes to make just 1 piece of clothing and ship it across the world.
  • We get our focus drawn into clean energy and forget that – right now – reducing the total energy we consume (mostly indirectly) is more effective.

The Climate Emergency is in the public consciousness, we know that things need to be done. So far we – as Western society – have been very good at telling people what they can do directly, but there is very little awareness of our indirect effect.

We need to tackle consumerism, we need to tackle throw-away culture, artificially short design life, etc. We’re fighting an uphill battle here; the Free Market is ever so good at selling us things to reduce our energy usage, but to get anything done it relies on profitability. The messages we need to convey aren’t profitable except in relatively niche ways.

What we need to do is keep the conversation moving. Point out that supermarkets fly wine and how ridiculous that is, how idiotic fast fashion is. Write blog articles, social media posts about indirect emissions / carbon / energy. The point here isn’t to get people to take personal responsibility – although everyone that does is a bonus – the point is to shove this issue up the political agenda so that politicians actually have to start thinking about how to restructure the economy to reduce our indirect energy consumption and our indirect emissions.

[1] Somewhere North of 30% of the UK’s electricity is renewable, but we do burn a lot of fossil fuel directly, so our overall energy percentage is much lower.

Government and Personal Accounts Don’t Mix

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

The UK Minister for Food recently made a gaffe about using a personal phone. He might not realise how big a gaffe it was, however. His comments were part of a wider debate about the UK’s Home Secretary having admitted to using her personal email account for government business. Whilst government business should be carried out using government (approved) equipment and services, there’s a big difference between making a phone call and sending an email.

The TL;DR, phone calls are pretty secure but email absolutely is not. Read on, I’ll explain, as succinctly as I can.

On the surface of it, using one type of communication device or technology might seem much like another. In reality the technology underneath and the security of them varies drastically.

Telephone Calls are Reasonably Safe

Your common or garden telephone in the UK is considered pretty secure. Your land line is connected to an actual cable that goes to a cabinet in the street. That cabinet is connected via real cables (or optical fibre) to the telephone exchange. You call is then routed from there around a network owned and operated by BT[1], eventually working its way to the destination. It’s pretty difficult for a rogue actor to get access to that pipeline. They either need to tap the wire at one end or they need to get into BT’s secure network.

Mobile phones are a little more vulnerable. It is possible for a snooper who’s physically near either end to listen in to the radio signals between the phone and the mast and hear the call audio. Also, as more organisations get involved in anything so the risk of a compromise within one of them grows. A call routed from Vodafone through BT to EE is more vulnerable simply because there are three organisations involved.

There have been incidents where large telephone networks have been hacked, but it is relatively unlikely that unfriendly foreign organisations are listening in to telephone calls in the UK.

Naturally, government business should be conducted on government (approved) devices. There are many reasons for this, but let me give you just three:

  • People tend not to encrypt or adequately access protect their phones. Both can be enforced by policy with a government phone.
  • Although it’s difficult to intercept an actual telephone call, some smart phones have been hacked to record audio and even video and relay that to rogue actors. Again, organisations can set policies to try to reduce this risk.
  • If a government phone is lost it can be remotely disabled immediately.

Email is Horrendously Insecure, End of Story

The basic protocol the internet uses for email is now more than 40 years old. It was developed when The Internet was a very different animal to what it is today. There have been a number of security updates since then, but there are still some big holes.

One obvious problem is data at rest. Email is a store and forward system, when you send an email from your phone or computer it goes to an email server which then tries to work out what to do with it. That email server stores your email. Because email is not an end-to-end encrypted protocol, the mail server has access to the contents of your email, as does anyone who was sufficient rights (whether legitimate or hacked). I once demonstrated this to an unbelieving manager by changing emails that he sent.

What’s more, when data is written to storage it has a funny habit of hanging around. There are systems to try to make sure that deleted data is really deleted but not everybody uses them, the result being that it’s sometimes possible for a hacker to retrieve emails that passed through the server a long time ago.

Now let me take another angle, if you can receive emails, that means you have an email server somewhere that’s acting on your behalf. That email server is open to The Internet. If you’re foo@bar.com I could connect to the email server at bar.com, say “Hi, I’ve got a message for foo” and under the original protocol your mail server wouldn’t even check who I was. Almost all do now check, but the checks aren’t 100% fool proof and it’s still possible to send emails that appear to be from people they’re not.

As sender and receiver, we also have no control over the path that the email takes. The vast majority are simple, I’ll send my email to the mail server at tomfosdick.com which will look up your server at bar.com and directly transfer the email. As long as both email servers are uncompromised and the link between them uses an up-to-date strong encryption that’s relatively secure.

But there’s no guarantee that will be the route that gets taken. It could end up going through an email server in Russia. It could go between two servers that aren’t using strong encryption or even any encryption at all.

There’s a whole library of different techniques and different ways that email can be compromised, intercepted, altered and faked. If it’s done well, as an end user it can be impossible to tell if it’s been compromised. Even experts can’t absolutely tell if a message has been observed by a rogue actor on its journey, or if it’s been left on an insecure server somewhere for a hacker to pick up at a later date.

A final note here, one of the reasons that it’s important that government officials (including Ministers) to only conduct government business using government (approved) devices using government accounts is because they’re monitored and logged. This is a completely separate reason why a government official using a personal account is a serious issue; it opens the person up to the allegation that they were deliberately avoiding scrutiny. There are times when Ministers need to do secret things, but there are protocols for that. Avoiding scrutiny is a pretty good sign that a government official is working in their best interests, not ours.

WhatsApp et al are Comparatively Secure

A lot of newer messaging apps are comparatively secure compared to email. This is because they’re end-to-end encrypted. Your phone (or web client) encrypts the message and only your intended recipient has the key to decrypt it. It doesn’t matter how many servers or other pieces of network equipment it passes through, they could all be compromised, it wouldn’t matter because they don’t have the decryption key, they can’t view the message contents.

Having said this, there is information in the metadata; an attacker who did manage to compromise the network might be able to see who the message was from, to, when it was sent, when it arrived, how big it was etc. This kind of information can be extremely useful, but unless a hacker can crack the encryption, they can’t view the message itself.

Of course today’s strong encryption can be cracked by tomorrow’s mobile phone, so just consider that if your data does get stored, someone in the future might be able to crack it.

Do be very aware that not every messaging service is end-to-end encrypted. Twitter direct messages, for instance, are not. Their contents are also stored by Twitter indefinitely. Not only could the Twitter organisation exploit the contents of your direct messages, a data leak could easily expose your direct messages to threat. If you’re a government official there’s a reasonable risk your entire twitter DM history could end up on Wikileaks.

Wrapping It Up

For the vast majority of business and government needs, the good old telephone is plenty secure enough, but make sure that you comply with your organisations usage policies and don’t bleed your professional communications across into your personal accounts.

For the majority of business, email is fine. The reality is that millions of emails are flying around all the time and only a handful have anything interesting or valuable to a hacker. Emails are also, generally, pretty secure within the organisation itself. If you’re sending an email from your professional account to the professional account of someone else in the same organisation, that should be relatively safe.

Do be aware that if you’re sending information to people outside your organisation there’s a chance that email might be compromised. There’s a small risk that anything bad will happen, but it is there nonetheless.
A top tip is to remember that the telephone is comparatively secure. If you receive an email message that you are in any way concerned about, or you suspect anything not entirely straightforward, call the person.

Again, do not bleed professional stuff into your personal accounts. That’s a big no-no. Don’t, for instance, send a document to your personal email because you can read it better on your phone that way.

Newer messaging apps can be more secure, but check that they’re end-to-end encrypted and using a encryption technique that’s currently considered secure. You might be surprised how insecure some of the common platforms are.

[1] Yes, there will be people reading this and the words “well, technically, it’s not that simple…” will be on the tips of their tongues. I know; there is always a balance to strike between being technically accurate and boring the vast majority of readers into a stupor. You might consider T-REC-H.248.1 a little light reading before bed, but you’re a very, very niche minority.

Cancel Culture is Not Real

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

John Cleese is a well read, intelligent and usually eloquent man. He’s made some pertinent observations in the past, ones about which nobody can doubt his good intentions. However, I could say exactly the same about Enoch Powell.

Lately Cleese has swallowed the concept of Cancel Culture and is banging on about it like some old white men have become prone to in the past few years. Actually, I get his point, but the problem is – for the most part – his, not ours. Graham Norton hits the nail on the head, Cleese is finding himself accountable for his words for the first time and he’s not dealing with that all too well.

Graham Norton responds to John Cleese’s complaints of ‘Cancel Culture’
Talk show host reportedly described Cleese as ‘a man of a certain age who’s been able to say whatever he likes for years’

Going after someone’s platform because you don’t like what they’re saying is nothing new. The soap box had barely been invented before it was kicked out from beneath a speaker because someone didn’t like what they were saying. It might be underhanded and cowardly, it might be a better world if nobody did it, but it’s commonplace and always has been.

What’s changed, then? Freedom from the consequence of your words is a privilege, but whereas in the past someone in a position such as Cleese would be above the threshold for that, they now find themselves below it. That’s it, pure and simple.

“But”, I hear you ask, “if it’s a matter of privilege, shouldn’t we be trying to extend that out to everyone?”

In an ideal world freedom of speech would be an absolute. But even in that ideal world, all freedom of speech means is freedom from sanction or oppression by the state (or state actors). In theory everything is (or could be) controlled by the government, so it’s paramount to the functioning of a democracy that you must be able to criticise the government without fear of sanction from the government or its agents. That’s the fundamental reason we have a right to freedom of speech.

There are two key points here:

  • You may speak, but nothing about free speech says anyone has to listen or give you a platform.
  • Your only indemnity is against sanction from the government and its agents. The right to free speech doesn’t protect you against any other consequences.

Yes, of course we can argue about the extent of the agents of the government, but if your local pub throws you out for trying to hold Combat 18 meetings there, that isn’t a freedom of speech issue.

Enter The Internet

Let me put a hypothesis to you. The Internet has changed our lives enormously. It’s facilitated (more) direct targeting, but it’s also added a horizontal layer across public channels that wasn’t previously there.

What do I mean? In 1968 you could go to the pub with your similarly minded friends and spout whatever nonsense you liked. You’d be very unlucky if there were any negative consequences – but that’s only because nobody who was interested heard you. Even politicians could get away with making inflammatory speeches to local party groups, because nobody outside the room was listening. Enoch Powell had to actually tell the media that he was going to “send up a rocket” in order to get himself cancelled, otherwise his ill-judged “Rivers of Blood” speech might have slipped by unnoticed.

The Internet (and technology in general) has changed that. You might subscribe to The Telegraph or The Guardian. Think of them as vertical channels, they feed you news based content on a variety of different topics, applying their own particular filters and biases.

In 1968 a lot of people kept newspapers for a few days, so that if something came up they could look back at what was being said. They were staying in vertical channels.

Ed: There was a nice visual link here to a Twitter post in which Rebecca Reid explains some of the above and another pertinent problem with British Journalism, but Space Karen has screwed up Twitter so badly that visual link previews aren’t working any more. You can still follow the old school link, however =>

https://twitter.com/mikegalsworthy/status/1584463739566583809

In 2022 if you want to find out what’s going on, you Google it, and Google doesn’t just give you your favourite news source, it gives you a selection of articles from all the major news sources. You can take a horizontal view, you can easily see what each different channel has to say about a particular topic.

This should be a great advantage, but people don’t do it because, sadly, people don’t like having their opinions challenged. Anyway, they’re not the people we’re talking about…

Expand this vertical versus horizontal concept to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Your normal audience on these platforms might be just your friends – the vertical – but they are public and unless you’ve locked your account, your posts can be found in searches and by algorithms covering any topic.

There are numerous groups and interested parties out there working on the horizontal, searching for, picking up on things and amplifying them. When someone with a significant platform says something they agree with, they amplify that. It gets retweeted, copied around Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, people talk about it on YouTube and TikTok, etc. It can result in the person getting quite a boost, both in exposure but also directly through stuff like Patreon, Paypal, BuyMeACoffee etc.

Exactly the same thing happens when someone says something they disagree with. The signal gets amplified and as a result people start to go after the person’s platform, their employer, start campaigns to boycott the person’s products and businesses etc.

That’s it. That is the primary explanation for the illusion of Cancel Culture. The Internet giveth and The Internet taketh away.

Cleese; an awful lot of white suburbia, rent-a-gobs and bigots do like to stand on the battlements of their castles and yell at the peasants, certain that they are protected. But everyone’s castle is, ultimately, built on sand. Society, culture and technology change. If you don’t adapt to the changing sands, your castle will fall and you’ll end up confused, angry and lashing out at ghosts.

Nobody, it seems, is more resistant to change than old white men.

They Do Have A Point, Though…

At the top I said it was mostly their problem. The fact that something is doesn’t make it right. Of course it’s right that people should be held to account for their actions, even those who haven’t in the past, but what happens is not always proportional or just.

Many years ago someone overheard me explaining The Great Replacement (a racist conspiracy theory) and mistakenly assumed I was advocating it. That person then set about what we might call today a campaign to cancel me. It took a lot of effort for me to counter that negative campaign.

Forward fast that story to today. Imagine how much further, faster that negative campaign might have got. We can see this played out on social media time and again.

Sometimes it’s a few words taken out of context and suddenly that person is the enemy.

Other times someone might give a genuinely ill informed opinion. By that I mean that their opinion was earnest, but it was based on something they’d believed but which was wrong or they didn’t realise they were lacking critical information.

They might get a few responses saying “Hey, I think you should read this…” but the storm starts immediately. The saying “bad news travels fast” is much older than The Internet, but The Internet amplifies it greatly. Conversely, “Highly Knowledgeable Person Expresses Well Reasoned Opinion” never made a headline, so the defence, the full context, the revision of an opinion never has the reach that the initial sensationalism does.

Unjustified damage is done and valid, useful arguments are lost.

It’s Mixed Bag, Then.

I’m hypothesising here, of course. I don’t know that The Internet and effortless global communication are the primary cause of these changes in our society, but at a kind of amateur sleuth level it seems rather plausible.

What we can say is that anyone who’s ever lived in a deprived area understands what accountability for their words means. As Ice-T so neatly observes, “Talk Shit, Get Shot.” Whilst we clearly want accountability to be fair, just and not involve getting “Sprayed with the ‘K”, we want it to apply equally to everyone. If all we’re seeing is accountability being extended to people who previously weren’t, that’s no bad thing.

The Truthiness Horizon

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

Truthiness is a concept most of us heard about associated with Trump’s first presidential campaign.

Stephen Colbert uses “truthiness” on the debut episode of The Colbert Report

The concept is simple, whether you tell the truth doesn’t actually matter that much; what matters is how believable what you say is. People in general don’t check facts, especially when those facts confirm their pre-existing biases.

This forces us to face up to something rather uncomfortable: in a debate, telling the truth only matters if your audience is well informed. If the audience is not well informed, it’s often possible to construct a false narrative that sounds more convincing than the actual truth.

We know this, we’ve seen it in action.

I want to introduce a new concept: the truthiness horizon.

It’s when someone is faced with a level of detail on a subject that’s so far removed from their own knowledge that they can’t even tell if it’s plausible, let alone true – so they reject it.

Sounds crazy, right? It is, but if the person has a pre-existing bias it can happen really easily.

Nobody Knows How a Smartphone Works

One example from personal experience: a friend of a friend asserted that nobody understood how a smartphone worked. I’ve worked in digital electronics, optoelectronics, radio and software so I do know, reasonably well.

“Go on then”, he asked, “how does the display work?” I started explaining how an AMOLED display worked. He asked some very odd questions. After a while he just folded his arms and said “Nah, you’re making it up, nobody knows this stuff”.

At first I thought he was joking, but he got quite angry and abusive, maintaining the theme that I didn’t really know and I was just making stuff up to sound clever. This is an extreme (and irrational) example, but it demonstrates the point very well.

People get emotionally invested in their opinions, when you make a challenge you’re starting on the back foot. People’s first reaction is to preserve ego, to look for ways they can discount your challenge. We all do this, but we hope that professional people override that initial emotional reaction and consider the wider argument objectively. Not everyone is professional, however.

The person here started with the premise that nobody knew how a smartphone worked and was always looking to maintain that state. The questions he asked weren’t intended to get more information, they were intended to find gaps in my knowledge and prove that I didn’t know how a smartphone works.

His problem was that I do.

My problem was that at some point I crossed the truthiness horizon. I sounded too authoritative to be credible and an alternative narrative popped into his head. He reasoned that the chances of meeting a friend of a friend who genuinely had such in-depth knowledge were vanishingly small, therefore he could safely conclude that I was making it all up to try to sound impressive.

There was only one teensie-tiny problem with this line of reasoning: it was bollocks.

At the time I didn’t really understand it, I just laughed it off and told him that one day not listening to people who knew what they were talking about would get him into trouble.

On reflection, however, I don’t think this is really all that rare.

Bullshit Baffles Brains

There’s an old army saying, “bullshit baffles brains”, or to put it another way, if you need to convince someone of something but you don’t have a good argument, just make up a load of complex stuff that you know they won’t understand. There’s a good chance they won’t want to lose face by admitting they don’t know what you’re talking about, they’re not in a position to argue against it, so their only option is to go along with it.

Data overload is another, related technique. You dump a huge load of correct raw facts on someone you know hasn’t the time or the expertise to interpret them. Then you tell them it means something it doesn’t. They’re in full possession of the facts, they presume that you wouldn’t lie to them because they could find out the truth – if they tried.

My proposal of a truthiness horizon is based on the hypothesis that these and similar techniques are now so engrained in our society that people are basically wary of any situation that appears opaquely complex. Such a stance might well help them in daily life, not being sucked in by bogus investment schemes, etc. A side effect, however, is to make them vulnerable to manipulation through truthiness.

There’s a balance to be found here and I don’t believe we’ve found it.

Right now, if you are an expert or significantly knowledgeable in a particular area it’s good to keep this in the back of your mind: people might disengage not because they don’t understand, but because they don’t believe.

One Step Forward…

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Up until very recently I hated Yoga. I did it through gritted teeth. Then I discovered this one weird tip that could change your life forever.

I know, I should give up trying to write clickbait and stick to what I’m good at – but the weird tip thing is true.

The tip is to accept that you’re a beginner.

That was a hard pill for me to swallow, because I’m one of those super-annoying people who seems to pick stuff like Yoga up. I can feel people rolling their eyes as, 5 minutes after trying something new, it seems like I’ve been doing it for years.

Yoga wasn’t like that. It took a hell of a lot of effort and just basically hurt. It was not the relaxing, fulfilling experience that was pictured on the packaging.

I did not find myself magically transported to an empty beach in the tropics. It did not spark joy.

Two weeks ago I bit the bullet and signed up for a beginner programme, 20 minutes a day, a gentle introduction. There’s been a lightbulb moment in pretty much every class so far. If there was something I could do wrong, I pretty much was.

Suddenly now I get it. I understand it. It works for me and I actually look forward to the next class.

This article isn’t about me, though. It’s about pride. It’s about assumptions. It’s about having the fortitude to swallow that pill and accept where you really, truly are and that the road to where you want to get to might be longer than you’d want.

It’s even about having the humility to accept that, at some point, you might have been further forward than you are today.

I know every cheesy self-help book or blog says it, but it is true; even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

We need to have the courage to make that step, to understand what it means, to consolidate that position – even if it is a way back from where we wanted to be – and to be prepared to take the next step and the next step.

We need to learn that it doesn’t really matter where we’re starting from. The only thing that matters is that today we can smile, knowing that we are a step forward from where we were yesterday.

Dry January

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Blame legendary DJ Stuart Maconie. It’s his fault.

I was listening to him talk a few years back; he was explaining that he didn’t think he drank a lot until he and his doctor worked it out. Turns out it was a lot.

A few weeks back I wondered what effect COVID had had on the amount of alcohol I was drinking. I knew the answer, I just didn’t want to hear it.

James Bond would tell me to lay off the sauce.

When you live in a rural area you get used to the fact that pretty much everything requires travel. Not drinking becomes the norm when you go out because the chances are you’re driving.

On the flip side, if you’re home of a dark evening there’s often not that much to do, so you open an improving book and pour yourself a glass of something degenerating.

Then COVID comes along and suddenly the few things that were open are shut. For lockdown #1 it didn’t matter; we got to laugh at people fighting over toilet roll in the supermarket and everyone knew COVID would all be over by the summer.

If the entire world had coordinated and shared responsibility, it might have, but that was never going to happen. So here we are two years later staring down the barrel at Omicron. Life never did get properly back to normal and it certainly isn’t going to for a while yet.

The NHS recommends that you don’t drink more than 14 standard units of alcohol per week.

A small glass of wine, a standard shot of spirit or half a pint (284ml) of average beer is a unit. Your modest Claret with dinner, followed by a diminutive glass of port as you retire to your wing backed chair by the fire will see the NHS smile warmly upon you.

Trouble is, a small glass really is quite small and my pouring arm is awfully twitchy. Very few people ever pour themselves a small anything.

Then there’s the night you’re staying in and having a few drinks with your partner and the other night when your friends pop round for a few quiet beers quite a few beers…

Now, the NHS isn’t daft, the doctors know that few people are going to stick to 14 – it’s really just a bit of psychology to give people a sense of proportion. Nobody really knows what a safe limit is anyway. Opinions and recommendations across the world differ. Everyone is sure of one thing, however: even a small amount can be dangerous. Less is better.

Having assured concerned friends and relatives that the economy of the Douro Valley is not, in fact, dependent on my patronage, I’m doing Dry January this year. For me it’s a bit of a cultural experiment. By going a month without drinking at all I’m hoping I can find some new ways, ones that don’t rely on a side order of sauce.

Hopefully I can then take those forward from February and get back to something more like how it was before COVID-19.