qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

Note: Mostly written while watching the film version of V for Vendetta over Christmas with a hangover, spoilers galore for both it and the book within, so proceed at your own risk.

Of the many things wrong with the Wachowski Brothers’ flawed adaptation of V for Vendetta, the omission of the computer Fate is by far the biggest. Fate is the computer that runs the society in V’s alternate future; it hooks into to the surveillance systems used throughout British society and makes all the decisions. As the novel progresses, the high chancellor Adam Susan, supposedly the fascist dictator in charge of society, turns out to be in thrall to Fate’s machinations, believing it to be a goddess; with it his truly wretched and lonely character is revealed

From Fate and her omniscience and omnipotence, all the best complexities of the characters come – for example, the curious hidden nature of Lewis Prothero, the “Voice of Fate”, a sociopathic concentration camp commandant with a nevertheless seductively charismatic voice (and a natty line in girls’ dolls). In the book he is the human voice of the computer, broadcasting sonorously to the nation, but in the film, robbed of his duality he gets turned into a shitty cross between Richard Littlejohn and Bill O’Reilly, ranting away incoherently on national television every night.

Despite bring set in Britain, the Wachowskis’ adaptation is very Americocentric (as demonstrated by the recharacterisation of Prothero); it details a narrative based on opposition to the neoconservative agenda in America and the resulting foreign policy; the film is peppered with references to the Iraq war, Islamophobia and homophobia, and the bioterror plot within is a little reminiscent of the 9/11 conspiracy theories. The film is very much a product of the early 2000s – and with the crushing defeat of the neoconservatives in the US mid-term and presidential elections, now already seeming a little dated.

With this in mind, the more I think about it, the better allegory for our times doesn’t come from the post-war on terror ostentatious authoritarianism but on the Fate plotline, of a more insidious system of control. Successive governments have become increasingly in thrall to mass surveillance, but it has especially been the case with the present one – whether it be CCTV cameras, the national identity register, DNA databases (even if you’re innocent), mass-snooping of emails and phone calls, or even outright hacking of your computer without a warrant.

And thrall is the right word to use here, as decisions are made not on evidence based on their efficacy but on an ideology that the more is more: the more data the government has, the more able it is to govern. Focusing on the quantity rather than the relevance of data has various unfortunate consequences; we fall risk to garbage in-garbage out: supposedly reliable databases turn out to be heavily flawed. It leads to greater risk of security breaches, whether they be accidental or malicious. And most importantly it leads to a system of governance where everybody is treated as a datapoint – and thus governments manipulate people just like they would like to manipulate datapoints. The end result is a dehumanised and rather bleak polity, with every facet of public service characterised with targets, performances and star ratings, human beings reduced to automata in a fabulous number-crunching system.

There’s another twenty blog posts I could write on this theme, but I won’t for now. But do check Adam Curtis’ The Trap as a primer on it from a philosophical/psychological point of view; The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot for a mathematical examination; there is no equivalent from a sociotechnical or economical aspect exists, as far as I know.

Anyway, back to V for Vendetta, and Alan Moore. The comic was set against the spectre of nuclear war (from which the putative fascist Britain would rise), with a hint of a warning about where the right-wing agenda of the early Thatcher government could take us. And through this system, the monstrous system of Fate is created, and we are beholden to it. The odd thing is that we’re being taken towards the end without going through the intermediate stages – which is a relief in some ways (eating dead rats out of radioactive rusty hubcaps is never a good thing) but also oddly chilling. The pessimistic conclusion is that supreme control and omniscience is the goal of anyone in power and with the technology at hand it’s an inevitability. The optimistic conclusion is that despite the steady encroachment, it’s never too late to turn it back, if only we have the will. What’s it going to be? Hopefully it is not a matter of Fate.

Back in 2003, before I even started blogging, I created the Daily Mail Headline Generator, and within a couple of weeks a friend suggested some extra things to put in it. “Good idea”, I said, “I’ll update the code when I have the time”.

I’m nothing if not prompt, so a mere six years later, I’ve finally got round to doing it. Hey, it still beats Duke Nukem Forever. The code’s updated – it’s now in JavaScript, not Flash, and GPL-licenced (source). I’ve updated the dictionary for more contemporary feel (out goes Tony Blair, in comes Russell Brand) and it can handle the past and present tenses now. Suggestions for extra things to put in are welcome (add them in the comments below).

And while I’m on the subject of the Daily Mail – and I’d normally refrain from even telling you it has a website, let alone linking to it, the hatemongering bogroll that it is, but something in the latest column by homo-obsessed walking shitbag Richard Littlejohn slipped in unnoticed by the Mail’s irony detectors, it seems:

Apparently, my column is a constant reminder of why they did the right thing in emigrating to New Zealand.

In the quietness of the holiday season, the Secretary of State for Culture, Andy Burnham has come forth with plans to age-certify the web like is currently done with films and DVDs. Coming in wake of the IWF’s horribly misguided attempt to block Wikipedia, this is another hamfisted approach to regulating the Internet as if it were old media that solves very little.

So what will it look like? It certainly won’t look like a BBFC for the web: First there’s questions of scale: the total number of sites (not counting subdomains) alone is around 156 million, while the Google index is in the billions of individual pages and there may be up to a trillion unique URLs on the web. Compared to the 639 films and 11,439 videos and DVDs that the BBFC classified in 2008, that’s more than just a few orders of magnitude. No human-oriented solution would be able to get the job done – it’ll face a hard enough job coping with the 120,000 blogs created every day. So any such system will be automated.

Secondly of course, there’s the international dimension. How is a site in Russia or Tuvalu going to be compelled to undergo certification by a UK body? Answer: none at all. So the idea of a website being clearly labelled “PG” or “18″ like a DVD is can go right out of the window – expect it all to be done on the ISP level as it comes into the UK, filtered as you access the site.

Oddly enough, automated filtering like this has existed for years, in corporate firewalls and software specifically targeted at parents such as CyberPatrol and NetNanny. You pay for a licence and it monitors what comes in and out, a bit like a virus scanner, for specific keywords or pictures that might look like nudity. These are hideously imperfect and have their faults by being too over-zealous – how do you prevent filtering out of information about sex education, or other health issues such as breast cancer, for example? But an imperfect solution is better than none for some parents, so why not fork out on the software if you’re worried about your kids, and leave the rest of us be?

Censorship of legal but possibly offensive material in this way is a private, not a public, good – most of us are adults and want our access unfettered. But rather than just tell parents to buy a copy of censorware and install, Burnham wants ISPs to spend millions at the network level to implement it. This is a fairly idiotic waste of money, but then the more you look at what Burnham says, it’s clear he hasn’t got a full grasp of facts on the issue:

Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach.”

This is utter bollocks. If you’re talking about the ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, it was created by the United States Department of Defense. Burnham is probably thinking of John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, with its famous quote:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

But this was written in 1996, long after the Internet had taken hold; Barlow was not a creator of the Internet, far from it, instead while the TCP/IP protocol was being proposed and the early Internet assembled, he was writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Back to Burnham:

I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

Libel online is an emerging issue? The first Internet libel case, Godfrey v. Demon Internet was over eleven years ago (and a dangerous precedent it set too). It has since been clear with cases such as the Alisher Usmanov blog silencing that like all libel cases, the plaintiff has an unfair advantage. Far from being lawless, it’s all too easy for the rich and powerful to silence anything online that is in the UK’s jurisdiction.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

Categorical as he likes to be, Burnham burbles over what exact content should not be available, or to whom – is he still talking about child protection here or is he going further? Far from being clear about it he’s muddying the water, starting off by talking about child protection but now touching on the wider issues of freedom of speech and what content can be seen by anyone.

“It worries me – like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.”

Well then don’t do it. Supervise your own bloody kids. Or cough up for some supervisory software. Or learn about what’s out there and talk to them about it first.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he said. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

Actually most sites children use online (such as Bebo, Habbo or MySpace) have quite clear and helpful parental advice sections which if he took the time to read, could be quite edifying.

“This isn’t about turning the clock back. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”

You could start with yourself, minister. This bit tickles me the most:

He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

Given how web-savvy the Obama administration is, I expect their response to be mostly along the lines of “WTF?”.

So, in conclusion, the minister for fun doesn’t really have much of a clue – all he knows is there is a problem of some sort and he must be seen to be doing something about it. And the truth is there are already plenty of cheap software solutions, which flawed as they may be, offer a quick fix to the problem. But rather than tell people to fork out themselves, it will eventually cost all Internet users both money and convenience.

A better solution is to not let kids go online alone without educating yourself about what sites are good and what child protection policies they have, talking to your kids about it and showing them how to use the web safely. But in this government’s bizarre world, telling parents how to bring up their kids would be seen as nannying and intrusive, while quietly classifying & censoring everything they download is nothing more than a matter of course.

Extra: John has some extra good points over at Sore Eyes while Tom Watson MP is clever enough to open up discussion to everyone on his blog, with a promise he’ll feed them back to Burnham. Now there’s Government 2.0 for you.

And a bit more: Alex has an excellent rant – although I don’t quite agree with him it’s purely a class-based thing, the English-language bit is an excellent point I hadn’t picked up on. Terence meanwhile argues it’s merely the fear of the new and unknown. Finally – Richard Clayton has a rather excellent summary of the problems with age ratings and content filtering.

Here’s a little bit of Christmas fun for you – using Wordle to make tag clouds of major Chrismas speeched. Compare & contrast, the Queen’s Christmas Message to the Channel 4 Alternative Christmas Message by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ahmadinejad’s is not only full of religious rhetoric (Christ, Jesus, prophets, almighty) but also lots of stirring politicalisation (Humanity, nations, justice, demands). The Queen’s on the other hand is lot quieter -words such as service, family, life, as well as a curious verbal tic in overusing the word “many”. It’s also worth comparing both in comparison with Barack Obama’s address, which is overwhelmingly optimistic and positive (although not much use of the word “hope”) – it’s as if there was nothing wrong with the world right now:

Anyway, there’s not much insight one can really draw from the above – my original intention was to instead look at the Queen’s own messages to the nation(s) over the years to see if there were changes in her outlook. As with all such looks – this is just a bit of fun as we’re just picking a few samples – but it’s still interesting to see the clouds from over the years – every ten from the past half-decade:

1958 was very much about family and domesticity – perhaps not surprising as Her Maj herself was mother of two young children at this point in time.

1968 was much more a message of peace and reconciliation, after a turbulent year of social unrest and change.

1978 was a weird speech, as it contained many excerpts from the Queen’s father and grandfather. Excluding those, it looked very much to the future, no doubt influenced by the birth of her first grandchild the previous year.

1988 on the other hand turned about 180 degrees, looking historically and talking about the many anniversaries and commemorations (including the 500th of the Spanish Armada and 300th of the Glorious Revolution).

Finally, 1998, and again the Queen is talking about family and what different generations can learn from each other. Interestingly, this is the one that least mentions Christmas.

And back to 2008 again. Still a lot of family stuff but more touching on religious themes than in previous decades.

So what is there to learn from the above? Firstly, although the Queen is sensitive to world events (as characterise in 1968 and 1988), she seems to be quite influenced by her family and her immediate surrounds more than she may think. And finally, her outlook on the world seems to have shrunk over the years to being much more closer to home.

At the excellent spoof Ideas Brothers agency blog, comes the the secret brief behind the Wispa ad campaign (via Tom). I’ve never liked the Wispa campaign – it seems a little too well-staged to be entirely grassroots to me (or is that going down the New Coke conspiracy theory route?). Then again I don’t like Wispa either – nearly all of Cadbury’s chocolate is basically horrible – it tastes like cocoa-flavoured margarine to me, rather than anything like proper chocolate. Anyway, bolstered by the “success” of the “bring back Wispa” campaign, the creatives have gone one better and asked the public to just give them stuff to make ads with. Ideas Brothers put this and the target demographic firmly back in their place:

What do we aim to do with this campaign?
Ejaculate our brand into the open mouths of the flashmobbing post-adolescent cunts who think there is something fun about their own nostalgia for a chocolate bar.

It goes on…

What’s the selling idea?
You will give us your time and money because you’re a cunt.
We want to tell these credulous fuckwits to donate everything we need to make a major TV commercial, saving us half a million pounds in production costs.

(I wonder if the target demographic will be able to take a joke or not?)

Within the savage humour, there is still a very good point, scratching at the surface of an apparent contradiction: The internet allows us to live in the future, yet so many people use it to live in the past. Whether it’s the proliferation of the Hoff or Mr T on YouTube virals, or the lovingly-restored DVD boxsets of Mysterious Cities of Gold for sale, or authentic Rainbow-branded Zippy sex toys in online stores*, the eighties are big business, and the Internet helps it thrive.

* I may have made this last one up, by the way.

Is it just that technology making us dumb and infantile? That’s far too determinist an argument for my liking, and in any case there’s plenty of evidence that its enmeshing with popular culture is making us smarter in some ways, although they may be different from what we traditionally measure, this is no different from the effects other revolutions in technology & media have produced.

Is it just the inevitable culmination of postmodernity – resorting to everlasting pastiche as we’ve run out of ideas? The stagnating movie industry would suggest so, with its endless remakes and reboots, but online you can still get new ideas and amazingly fresh stuff. On B3ta, the nostalgia and endless creativity even manage to coexist in a sort of weird harmony – this week’s newsletter for example combines the bizarreness of urban knitting graffiti with heartfelt tributes to Oliver Postgate.

Here’s my stab at an explanation, as an eighties kid (born 1981 so I just about make the grade), with a more people-focused look than one of determinism. Thanks to Maggie, the eighties were a time of radical redrawing of British society; old class solidarities and identities thrown out and the UK’s nascent consumer culture replaced it. People growing up in the 1980s no longer had the identities their parents had, so in retrospect the only thing they can cling to is the media they consumed – all those episodes of Knightrider and TMHT serve as a common beacon.

At the same time, suddenly children of the eighties are getting “old”. Most are either in or approaching their thirties, and are being left behind by an ever-younger crowd elsewhere, culturally. Look at the music scene – it’s now filled with much younger acts – and increasingly they’re drawing on influences from the later 80s and early 1990s such as rave, acid house and Britpop. Eighties kids were among the first to go online, but the generation that followed them, the “digital natives” that had MySpace accounts before they first had sex, are now the ones making waves. Clinging onto what common culture they have is just a stand the children of the eighties feel they must make, to keep a space that was originally theirs.

As I say, just a coffee-fuelled stab at not so much a theory and more a hypothesis. I might be wrong. But it’s less misanthropic (if also less funny) than saying it’s just because we’re all a bunch of cunts.

As some of you know, I now work in social media PR advising clients on how to best practice relations with bloggers and other aspects of social media. Most of my clients are fab and get it. Some clients (or potential clients) are less so. Inspired by Jeffrey Zeldman’s 20 signs you don’t want that web design project, here’s 20 signs you don’t want that social media project. Some of these are from personal experience, others from war stories heard from others in the trade, and one or two I’ve just made up for comedic effect (but are utterly plausible):

1. Client calls it an “internet blog”.
2. Client has a “hilarious” viral they want you to “seed”, which turns out to be their latest TV ad on YouTube.
3. Bonus points if the above is a ripoff of a famous existing meme.
4. Client demands that the viral use Mr T, David Hasselhoff, or both.
5. Client wants something edgy “like that suicide bomber viral” – but first subject to clearance by their legal department.
6. “I don’t see why we need to pay you so much when we could just email all these bloggers a press release.”
7. “This Tom Coates guy, can we get him on board? I heard he’s really popular.”
8. Client admits to anonymously posting links to their site on a range of forums.
9. Client insists that you anonymously post links to their site on a range of forums.
10. Client panics over a random blogger’s negative post about them and orders you to get it taken down. Won’t take “sorry, it’s impossible” for an answer.
11. Client says their new site is “really Web 2.0″ but it’s made entirely in Flash with no permalinks.
12. Client enthuses about their new blog presence. Will there be comments? No.
13. Client asks you to invite bloggers to an event, but to keep it quiet as “we don’t want any nutters turning up”.
14. “I want this top of the charts on Digg”. Client makes fashion accessories for teenage girls.
15. Client demands you delete all the negative criticism from the Wikipedia article about them.
16. Every Tweet you post to client’s official Twitter stream has to be OK’ed by the brand manager first.
17. Client says they’re sure the photoblog you’ve built for them is nice, but their corporate firewall has blocked Flickr.com and they can’t see it.
18. Client refuses to budget for site moderation on their new UGC site, then is angrily surprised once B3ta discover it and submit lots of pictures of crudely drawn cocks.
19. Client has spent a six-figure sum on a presence in Second Life.
20. “We want our site to be as popular as, you know, Facebook.”

Any more horror stories (with names removed to protect the guilty, natch) are welcome in the comments…

Update: Thanks for all your suggestions! Of course, agencies are not totally innocent and can be as bad or even worse than clients in some ways. Tom has put together 21 signs I don’t want your online marketing pitch.