The 2005 Reith lectures are being given by Lord Broers, on the progress of technology and its bearing on society - the first lecture was broadcast today. Criticising the views within is perhaps biting off the hand that fed me here, Lord Broers was formerly Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, the university that first educated me and then employed me for two years. But anyway…

First, the title is wrong, or rather it’s incomplete: “Technology is determining the future of the human race”, which is true, but equally true is the converse: “The human race is determining the future of technology”. Technology is not some wild beast which (in his words) should be “harnessed”; there is no “race” to keep up with it. To assume technological progress is naturally uncontrollable is to fall into the same misunderstanding that Lord Broers the public possesses.

Lord Broers demonstrates this public ‘ignorance’ by mentioning that a public poll picked the bicycle as Britain’s greatest technology. This seems to me a frightful piece of snobbery - the public have a point, and he is perhaps a little ignorant himself of the bicycle’s impact. The bicycle is 200 years old and yet (as a Cambridge man, he should surely notice) still a popular mode of transport; it was the first mode of transport the masses could own and use of their own accord, rather than relying on those well-off enough to own large capital investments like carriages and horses (and later trains). This helped the bicycle become popular; in turn the bicycle spurred advances in metallurgy, mechanical gears, road construction, rubber, pneumatics, and mass production. Although the bicycle was a common, to the point of ubiquitous, technology here, that time was 100 years ago, before the advent of the car, and time lends a distance that means we might not appreciate how revolutionary it was. To dismiss the bicycle is to go against the very title of the lecture - it’s one of the few technologies that actually can be afforded and used by the majority of the human race, not just the developed world. Today all over the world hundreds of millions of people use bicycles in their day-to-day business, and their lives are improved by them; the same cannot be said of his other examples like the jet engine. Even electricity isn’t as accessible to all; only the smallpox vaccination has touched virtually every human in a similar way.

Lord Broers implore scientists and engineers (the boundaries between science, engineering and technology are blurred throughout the lecture, but I’ll let that pass) to greater inform the public on their work and demystify the process. This is an honourable goal and can be done in many cases. But many of the cases where there has been public mistrust of sci/eng/tech is when the cutting edge of research, and all the messiness and uncertainty that goes with it, is brought to the public’s attention. These are usually health-based - the early AIDS debates, BSE/vCJD and MMR all come to mind, but the Challenger disaster and the Millennium bug are the best non-medicine examples I can think of. There was public misunderstanding of all these topics, but there was also plenty of expert misunderstanding - and this is perfectly acceptable; at the cutting edge of research you’re bound to get disagreements, conflicting data and arguments over what’s going on; knowledge takes time to gel and fit in with the rest of what we know. As I’ve said here before - if the experts can’t decide what’s right, what chance do the public have?

I found the lecture confused in its attitude to the evolution of technology. On the one hand, Lord Broers dismisses the idea of singular linear progress of technology to some final point, yet whenever looks back at its evolution, it is in reference to an endpoint of today’s technologies - aviation, the Internet, clean water, industrialised agriculture. It is ‘this is how we got here’, rather than ‘why did we end up here from over there?’. Along those lines, any solution to the problems of technology are, in his mind, technological as well; knowledge or expertise from other sectors is not considered. The only exception to this technocentric view is his recounting of the development of the radio, the only example that really grounds a technology in the richer contexts of where it came from (tellingly, he refers to it by its original name, wireless), with the consideration of old-fashioned government paternalism and how it gave birth to public service broadcasting; perhaps this is because he has had personal experience of its evolution from an early age. If only he’d considered other technologies in similar ways.

Still, I agree with some of his points. Many technologies are quite elegant and beautiful (although this is very much a matter of personal aesthetic - I consider them more beauitful for how they fit together and work than what they have done), and this is often dismissed out of hand without reflection. And he is right in saying that Britain is not very good at innovation (product development, getting it to work in the real world) while being very good at invention (coming up with the idea in the first place); the difference between the two is not often properly enunciated in public, and it’s a subject that needs to be more openly discussed.

The lecture is available in text, and podcast in mp3 format - I recommend the audio, it’s about half an hour long, and there’s an interesting (if short) post-lecture discussion from various distinguished guests; the BBC should have stretched out the programme to a whole hour and let them fight it out, the discussion was just getting interesting when they cut it off.

Right, back to the essays…

I’ll tell you what I’m thinking; that Michael Howard is a vile, shrieking worm of a politician. I caught most of today’s PMQs while queuing in the bank at lunch, on BBC News 24. Even though the volume was off and I could only read the Ceefax subtitles, I could still hear his snivelling, creepy voice pour out half-truth after half-truth. The most galling, hypocritical crap came out, again and again. “Crime UP, immigration UP, Waiting Times UP”, he shrieked, the son of a Hungarian Romanian immigrant neatly lumping immigrants of any kind together with criminals. In a desperate attempt to attack Blair and Brown over the economy, he bemoaned the country’s sluggish manufacturing growth - this coming from a man whose party, when in government, sought to tear the head off the manufacturing sector and shit down its neck.

When you can’t hear Howard mouthing his hideous trap off in the Commons, you can sense him via the creepy Are you thinking what we’re thinking? campaign all over the streets, insinuating suspicion and fear into everything. The questions are all phrased in a sinister yet slightly moronic fashion: I mean, how hard it is to keep a hospital clean? - you can almost hear him saying it, can’t you? Well it’s much harder than privatising the hospital cleaning services in the 1980s, like your lot did, Michael. Why don’t you get hold of a mop and try working for a week in a hospital on minimum wage and no training for a company striving to cut as many corners as possible, then get back to us? Here’s another ad - How would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter? I don’t know Michael, but at least I’m not the person who secured a pardon for a drug-dealing gangster 11 months into an 18-year sentence, who coincidentally happens to be an associate of your cousin’s (but that had absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever, libel fans).

If Howard is trying to make this election about the politics of hate, then he’s certainly succeeding, because now I absolutely fucking hate him. Howard has succeeded in making me consider doing something I thought I’d never I’d do again: voting for Blair. Not just voting for Labour, but actually voting for Blair, the man himself, and backing him as Prime Minister. Blair may be a shifty Thatcherite with a more than slight aversion to the truth, but anything is better than that lying, hatemongering demagogue. If there’s one thing Michael Howard has done for the Tory party, it’s reminded what a hateful bunch of arseholes the Tory Party is, and how much better off this country is without it in power.

Whew. Now I’ve got that out of my system, a slightly more sober reflection on the election. The election brings with it the usual dilemma from anyone on the left who disagrees the direction of the Labour government under Blair. Labour’s record is patchy, on the upside we’ve had a stable economy, more investment in hospitals & schools, the minimum wage etc., on the downside we’ve had Iraq, the abolition of various civil liberties and the creeping Thatcherisation of the welfare state with foundation hospitals, and the farce of the postal vote. Do I vote for Labour and Blair again, or do I try looking round for an alternative? Not that we have much, but the Lib Dems are the least worst of the other viable parties.

I would spend the next month agonising over whether to pick Labour again or not, except that for me the dilemma doesn’t really apply, since I will be voting in a seat occupied by one of Britain’s least consequential MPs. While I currently live in Edinbugh Central, seat of none other than Alistair Darling, come May 5th I will be shifted into the new constituency of Edinburgh East, which is pretty similar to the old Edinburgh East & Musselburgh constituency, and is rock-solid Labour. The incumbent, Gavin Strang, is quite harmless by the looks of things, having only managed a year as Transport Minister before being relegated to backbench limbo. He’s neither a member of the awkward squad nor a loyal Blairite. It’s not likely he’ll be voted out and it wouldn’t be much of a bloody nose to Blair if he was.

So even if I did vote tactically for the Lib Dems (and get over the inevitable self-loathing afterward), it wouldn’t do much good. I can happily spoil or vote Green and not have to worry about the consequences. While this is bad for democracy, it’s quite good for you, as I can devote what little spare time I have to blogging cynically about the election, whilst doing other things like updating the election map applet, instead of continually agonising over who to vote for.

I’m a bit hungover and grumpy, but even excluding those factors, I still got irked at David Aaronovitch article in today’s Observer, about Labour’s detractors - it’s described as “polemic dynamite” but is actually a pretty poor rant. Once you get past his insulting anyone who has criticised Labour, and his dismissal of the bruschetta-munching upper-middle class intelligentsia (like, er, most of the Cabinet and the author himself), he advocates Labour’s policies on tuition fees, Iraq, the curtailment of civil liberties as being the only way it was possible to encourage education for the working classes, freeing the world from tyranny and protecting us from terrorism. No other alternative, any better alternative is entertained - New Labour’s way is the only way. Any debate on whether how things should be done is waved away - as long as it looks like something’s being done, that’s all that matters. Aaronovitch boasts that money is being flung at schools and hospitals - no matter whether or not it’s being hoovered up by wasteful PFI projects. And when over-simplifying can’t help him out, a selective use of the facts comes in instead. The gap between rich and poor may have indeed closed in the past two years, but it is far outweighed by the widening that has occurred since 1997.

It’s a disappointing article, it’s not a polemic at all. There is nothing provocative there, as he has boxed himself into purely a New Labour way of thinking; nothing more a simplistic and false attitude that if you don’t agree with New Labour’s approach, you’re part of this false cabal that has abandoned the left and the common man in favour of dinner-party sniping. And people wonder why people are so cynical about politics. The worst part of the article is the ominous reference to past spectres like the Major administration and the poll tax, as if it is the only alternative out there. New Labour’s mediocrity and muddling through may be better than the Tory administrations of the past, but it’s nowhere the best we could ever get - the liberal left have every justification to express discontent at the government.

The cyberlaw talk was really good and interesting. A bit short (only an hour, so not much time for questions), for so much, as well as Lawrence Lessig and Bill Thompson duking it out (well, not really, they mostly agreed) and Andres Guadamuz and Jonathan Mitchell announcing the launch of CC Scotland (the project, not the official licence), but it was still interesting, especially to see Larry Lessig in the flesh. He is a good speaker, although his presentation featured words appearing on the screen in very very quick succession - Edward Tufte would not be pleased - the content of his talk was still really good. What follows is a ‘remix’ of Lessig’s presentation, cribbed from my own notes:

Remixing has always existed in the progress of human culture; ideas created by people have continually been re-expressed and re-worked by others after them, who have always been free to do so. However, with the advent of internet technologies we are now facing an Inversion. Is it because a change of technologies has led to a change of freedoms?

Computer technologies now mean anyone with a $1500 computer can become a musician, filmmaker or political activist with an audience of millions; we have gone from few-to-many to peer-to-peer. We are no longer restricted to text; in an age where “literacy” no longer implies just “reading”, will we still be free to “write” [create things in any format]?

The answer is no. The architecture of technology is now fundamentally different from the architecture of copyright: every use of a work digitally implies making an extra copy for oneself, while copyright still affirms that every copy. With paper and analogue material, regulation was the exception: most use fell outside even what is described as “fair use” - when you buy a book you have the right to read it, lend it to a friend or sell it on - there is no law on this at all. Only reproduction is covered by regulation, whether legal (fair use) or illegal (full unauthorised reproduction). But with digital materials, the default is now regulation; downloading and reading something comes attached with a set of rules and regulations about what you can do with it. With scientific texts and other knowledge being locked up this way, we are going against the principle of the Enlightenment, that human knowledge should be free (i.e. libre, as in freedom). This is the Inversion.

Copyright is an outdate legal mechanism from the 18th and 19th centuries, which have only been partly adapated for the 20th. The American response, like in many other fields, has been to wage war on remixing and re-expressing. A war mentality leads to insanity; we must sue for peace - condemning outright theft of material more, while setting up a reform of copyright and intellectual property. There’s no hope from Congress etc. for a change in copyright law, given the corporate interests, therefore we must do this ourselves. And this is what the Creative Commons project is about - reserving some, not all rights, and allowing others to adapt and remix our work. This is not total anarchy, but a balanced approach to intellectual property.

I would write my own thoughts & reactions to Lessig’s talk but I have lots and I haven’t the time right now - it is a Saturday night, you know :-) Bill Thompson spoke next, saying he had “one and a half objections” to the project, even though he broadly supports the venture. He was worried about the “collage culture” that this attitude would create (more or less bypassing Lessig’s assertion that we already are such a culture), and that as little skill or creativity is needed to remix (true, but skill is needed to remix and make something good), we could suffer from creative de-skilling. I more strongly agreed with his differentiation between Europe and the US, and the idea of the moral rights associated with copyright (claiming work as yours, not having it misquoted or misrepresented), which in the US-dominated legal culture, don’t figure much, but they do figure in Europe. In the UK, authors have to actively assert the moral right that they are the creator of the work. CC thus needs to be sensitive to these moral rights as well (the CC England & Wales project have only a brief mention of it; the Scottish version seems to have taken this on board more so).

Right - I have to dash off now. More later on what was a really interesting talk. I’ll probably update this post over the weekend somewhat with further thoughts of my own.