In my virtual absence…

Hi everyone. Like yesterday, I'm not properly back online: too much to do. But I thought some of you might like to see some photos of Jack Zipes' public lecture here at the Dark Place on Monday. 

On the big day itself I was away giving a lecture to first year students at the University of Gloucestershire, on the Mabinogi, myth and post-realist readers. Before my bit, I joined them for a lecture on nationalism by an incredibly charismatic historian who started off with Braveheart in French (a 'slightly more historically accurate' story of feuding Normans led by Robert le Bruce and Henri Plantagenet, as he put it) and explored the origins and ideologies of nationalism with some panache. As much as I loved it, I did wonder how on earth I could follow such a performance. 

Thankfully, his lecture segued into mine beautifully, as I was talking about the translation, revival and retelling of ancient Welsh myths in new cultural conditions, particularly Alan Garner's wonderful and disturbing The Owl Service and Gwyneth Lewis's The Meat Tree, both retellings of the Blodeuwedd story (man cursed never to have a human wife makes a wife out of flowers; she winkles out of him the extraordinary conditions needed for him to die; attempts to kill him with her lover; he escapes by turning into an eagle; she's turned into an owl, which is why they sneak around at night and are objects of hatred in Welsh tradition). The students hadn't read The Meat Tree but had seen a translation of the Mabinogi version, and talked really intelligently and interestingly. We talked about imperialism, the Enlightenment, Freud, Jung, postmodernism, science fiction and devolution. I made some Star Trek references and raised some pitying laughs, which was kind of them. 

It was fascinating being at a different university. The students were a very different demographic, so it was a bit like being on holiday. Not better or worse, but different. And of course I didn't have to mark anything!

As soon as that was over, it was on to the train and back to the Dark Place for Zipes. Posters to replace, welcomes to arrange and I had to work out how to use a professional video camera. Not quite well enough, it turns out: I now have 30Gb of Jack Zipes as a silent movie. I still can't work out why the sound didn't work, but nor can my Broadcasting and Journalism colleague, so I'm only feeling disappointed rather than moronic. For a change. 

Crowds gather for Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes

Candi Miller, Jack Zipes

The lecture itself went really well. I think there were about 230 people in the 250 capacity hall, many of them from outside the university. The Vice-Chancellor welcomed Jack, the interpreters did their thing and Jack was fascinating. He spoke mostly about the Disneyfication of Red Riding Hood, showing multiple versions of the story by Disney and others, including some compelling independent productions. Largely based on classical Marxist analysis, the lecture ended with an attack on the way the rape at the heart of the story has been elided or silenced. This, Zipes concludes, mirrors the way sexual assault has been marginalised or denied in society itself. 

Here's one rather outré version, starring Betty Boop:



and this rather racy (not to say misogynist) version by Tex Avery:



After the lecture, we went off for a curry with Jack which was joyful too: he's a master raconteur with a lot of tales to tell. Eventually we parted and he wished us well for the next morning's strike. 

5 hours later I was dragging myself out of bed and on to the picket line. Considering the employers have unilaterally imposed their settlement, the turnout was pretty good. We spoke to students and handed out lots of leaflets, and soaked up the usual parade of abuse and lies from so-called colleagues. One Principal Lecturer claimed it was 'illegal' for PLs to strike, which was news to the PLs on the picket line with us. Another claimed that she couldn't strike because she had a cold, the logic of which defeated me. Yet another claimed that striking was impossible because there were children to feed - which rather misses the point that missing one day's pay for striking is nothing compared with a fifth real-terms pay cut in a row. Honestly, I prefer the honest opponents who crossed the line. At least one guy had the selfish honesty to say 'my pay isn't going down, I've had a promotion'. Solidarity, baby! But at least he didn't bullshit us, unlike the Vice-Chancellor who keeps sending emails claiming that 'the majority' wanted to work, and that we're 'moving forward positively', which might cut the mustard at a meeting of PR Bullshitters and Management Consultants Anonymous but means precisely nothing other than 'tough shit: more pay cuts ahoy!'. 

By this point, i.e. Tueaday lunchtime I was exhausted and cold. As an antidote, I headed off to a colleague's house to plan some new research which will take in Dr Who, Star Trek, Beards of Evil, Poe and Lacan, just for starters. It'll knock your socks off, I promise. Unless this is just stoner logic of course. 

Wednesday was another killer - two long sessions without a break. I was already feeling exhausted and slightly ill, but the students were so good that I felt thoroughly revived. In the Shakespeare class I gave them several sonnets with the lines jumbled up. All they had to do was use their knowledge of poetic form and of sonnet conceits and narrative to get them in the right order. Nobody was completely right, but they were pretty good. The last one I gave them was a bit of a favourite, Wendy Cope's 'Strugnell's Sonnets VI':

Let me not to the marriage of true swine
Admit impediments. With his big car
He's won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
I have no spare; henceforth I'll bear the scar.
Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
And soar above Tulse Hill on poet's wings --
A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
Outlives their din. One day I'll make my mark,
Although I'm not from Ulster or from Mars,
And when I'm published in some classy mag
You'll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.

The students liked it too, which cheered me up a lot. 

After that, it was straight into my Ethics and the Media class, focussing on social media. We looked at footballers' tweets, openness and privacy, Bentham and Foucault, sock-puppetry, online reputation management, honesty on dating sites (research shows people are comfortable about stretching the truth a fair way because they assume everyone else is doing the same) and Glenn Mulcaire. We toyed with the ethics of editing the university's Wikipedia page, and discussed why nobody would tell the class when they last had a poo. There was a reason for this:

‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’. - Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

‘You already have zero privacy. Get over it’. - Scott G. McNealy CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc

All this was illustrated along the way by excerpts from The Circle, Dave Eggers' new novel. It is, like all of Eggers' works, written without any literary style whatsoever (the symbolism is astoundingly clunky) but it's packed with good ideas fairly carefully worked out. It's only a small step from the quotations above to the fictional CEOs of social media company The Circle saying things like this:

when thousands, or even millions, are watching, you perform your best self. You are cheerier, more positive, more polite, more generous, more inquisitive…Every day she’d done without things she didn’t want to want. Things she didn’t need…Anything immoderate would provoke a flurry of zings of concern, so she stayed within the bounds of moderation. And she found it freeing.

Mae is the central protagonist. At first resistant to the company's insistence on 100% surveillance, she is eventually converted and becomes an evangelist for the effect it has on the individual and society despite the increasingly oppressive demands on her to share every experience and constantly interact with others to build social capital.

It's an interesting novel not only for its exploration of the techno-utopians' ideology, but also for its fears about the nature of identity in a fully-integrated surveillance society. It is, quite literally, Foucauldian. Mae and others not only welcome surveillance, they internalise it. As Foucault points out in Panopticism, you don't need omniscient surveillance at this point, because the inmates act as if they're being watched at all times. This is where the conversation turned to the philosophy of ethics: we'd talked about the ethical responsibilities of social media companies and users, but the central question is this: is Mae acting ethically when she allows observation to dictate her behaviour, or is ethical choice impossible in this context? Her boss explains the new rules to her like this:

‘…my spouse said to me…I should behave as if there were a camera on me. As if she were watching…If I found myself alone in a room with a woman colleague, I would wonder, what would Karen think of this is she were watching…This would gently guide my behaviour, and it would prevent me from even approaching behaviour she wouldn’t like. It kept me honest.’

But did it? If the fear of getting caught is what keeps him honest, is he in fact honest? The utilitarian would say so, especially Bentham, but a Kantian would not: the motivation destroys the ethical nature of the act. The students definitely got the hang of this, and we had a really enjoyable discussion. The irony is of course that in-between reading this novel about the dissolution of the interior self under surveillance conditions (which is really a return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-psychology theories of the self, only with added consumer capitalism), I've been tweeting like mad on all sorts of matters. Now I feel guilty every time I tweet or share something, which is pretty inconvenient given that I do so about 347 times per day.

We finished with this clip of Glenn Mulcaire, News International's chief phone hacker. Going one step further than  Schmidt and McNealy, he has this to say about privacy: start at 1.13 in.

If you read this, you'll be on a list.

Afternoon, readers.

I'm afraid that despite the momentous events of the week, I'm slightly devoid of pungent opinions. Too much going on at work. Mostly boring to the outside world, and some very sad, such as my friend's stroke. No news on that front today. Instead, I've been in meetings about pensions (generally bad news) and the regular union negotiating committee session. An interesting mixed bag as always, but in general a depressing view of how the senior management operates. However, I've now been elected to the university's Board of Governors, so I'm looking forward to seeing how oversight operates from that perspective.

Most of the week's outside news doesn't surprise me in the slightest because I read the newspapers and I'm a socialist. Police spying on dead mens' families? UK security agencies hoovering up every single communication? Law-abiding campaign groups riddled with police informers to the extent that cops wrote their material, in some cases kept the organisations going, and fathered children with activists before disappearing? Cops conducting spying missions against their perceived political opponents? Awful, awful behaviour. But not in the least surprising.

Now and then British newspapers publish stories about Over There. Terrible countries – Iran, North Korea, Russia, East Germany etc. – in which governments vet educational materials, spy on their citizens, operate secret courts and possess fearsome secret police forces which serve the political establishment rather than the people.

The plain fact is that Over There is really Over Here. Our schools are being handed over to corporate interests without a murmur of complaint. The UK has secret courts, boringly disguised as Closed Material Procedures. The Education Secretary and the Prime Minister personally write the curriculum, particularly for History because those with no memories have no means of cultural resistance. Anyone with any knowledge of leftwing politics, Northern Ireland (or indeed Scottish and Welsh nationalism) is well aware that beyond helping old ladies cross the road, the police services in this country are the reactionary lackeys of the ruling classes. In previous decades, they were merely corrupt, especially the Metropolitan Police, but they became politicised by the Miners' Strike (150 arrests at Orgreave: no convictions as it turned out that the cops faked their statements), Hillsborough, by Northern Ireland and by the Thatcher Government, by the shrieking neofascism of the Sun and the Daily Mail. Any light shone on Special Branch and its sub-groups, and the Security Services, reveals bodies with absolutely no political neutrality. They aren't interested in right wing, capitalist and racist subversives: their enemies are environmentalists, anti-racists, ethnic minorities and the poor. The permanent state is authoritarian and capitalist and its foot-soldiers operate to ensure that the arms dealers, bankers and uniformed services are never scrutinised, let alone overseen by the likes of us.

All this is one of the reasons I read science fiction: so much of it extrapolates from the assumption that state and corporate forces will always do whatever's technically possible, regardless of the law. Given the means to record every tweet, email and phone call, they will. States – of any complexion – fear their citizens, and rightly so. They aren't scared of each other in any real sense, they're scared of us. Luckily for them, most of us don't care in the slightest. Politics is boring and we're busy. We accept reassurances like Hague's that only guilty people are monitored: something that's not technically possible and it assumes that the natural state in which to exist is the Panopticon: that all instincts for privacy are automatically suspect.

Thomas Jefferson said that a situation in which the people fear the government is tyranny, whereas liberty exists when the government fear the people. He's now wrong. We don't fear the government: hegemony has manufactured consent, largely by persuading people that the subversives are Them: the Muslim bomber, the environmental activist, the Edward Snowdens of this world. In the modern tyranny, we've taken the free gifts: Twitter, Gmail, The Voice, CCTV, credit cards and mobile phones, without question. In the modern tyranny, the government fears us, and it acts on those fears to the fullest extent of its capabilities. The state doesn't have specific fears (the Irish, the ALF, Islamic terrorists). It has one general fear: that there are things it doesn't know. And yet when it comes to things it should know, it fails every time. MI6 was as shocked as everyone else when the USSR collapsed. Nobody knew the banks were lying, cheating and stealing. And yet the Met knew whether or not the Lawrence's friends had ever been on demonstrations or joined political parties.

I've always assumed that any campaign group is riddled with police officers, however anodyne the cause. They aren't detecting crime or disorder: they're conducting political surveillance. There's no other earthly reason to spy on Stephen Lawrence's grieving parents other than to destroy the credibility of their criticisms of the police. Perhaps I'm overly paranoid, but it does seem like the state and corporate bodies (this week revealed to have bugged and hacked their way across the country without any legal action at all: instead, the cops covered it up). Stand up for badgers and you'll be infiltrated before you can staple a placard, but Corporate Security Providers have carte blanche to do whatever they want: and yet last time I looked, business had bankrupted the country.

I said earlier that I'm a socialist. This means that I'm saddened by this state of affairs. In a socialist society, governments are a good thing. They're set up by the people as an efficient and fair means of distributing wealth and protecting themselves. Socialists don't trust corporations to do it, and believe that collective action is better than individualism. But because governments have power, expertise and stability, they attract the wrong kind of people and develop a tendency towards omniscience and omnipotence. Smarter socialists are aware of this, and believe in distributed power: grass-roots decision-making and the like. Some tend towards municipal socialism, others towards anarchism. But I still think we need governments. I've just read Cory Doctorow's interesting novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (he's posted it for free here, though I bought the book), which posits a society that's replaced money with accrued respect, and 'ad hoc' coalitions running everything from Disney Land to transport networks. It's a lovely semi-anarchist vision, but it's based entirely on the assumption that there are unlimited resources and – for the most part – general good will: the novel cheerfully just states that energy and resources are infinite and carries on from there. Back in the real world, we need democratic governments to referee the competing demands of its citizens (or you just need to put me in charge). But this is a Utopian vision: what we actually get is governments behaving oppressively as a means of self-preservation, or because it openly declines to serve the interests of its people, preferring instead to (in the case of the UK government) serve the US and the markets.

Radio 4 is currently running a series of programmes about British Dystopian entertainments called Dangerous Visions. Seems to me we don't need to imagine them. We're in it.

Hail Shining Morn!

Listing my desires for remakes yesterday, I entirely forgot to mention this one: Sunset Boulevard, starring Jordan and Russell Kane (if I'm thinking of the right one - blond, giggles on Mock the Weak a lot). Think of it: blowsy publicity hound desperate for the attention in a post-Leveson world hooks up with pushy naïf. Starts and ends with him face down in the pool while Jordan prepares for the role of her life… as the defendant on Judge Judy or Jeremy Kyle. It writes itself, and I reckon she's got the swimming pool (if not, she can borrow Barrymore's), the creepy ex-husband butler (Alex Reid) and the cash. Adds new meaning to the line 'I am big. It's the movies that got small').



Anyway, what a day. The sun's shining and the Tories are in trouble again. To divert attention from the various scandals befalling them (including their Trade Minister Lord Green being unmasked as the linchpin of the international drugs trade), they sent out David Gauke MP to attack people who pay tradesmen in cash. It's immoral, he said, because it's tax evasion.

Fair enough. But I bet it doesn't avoid as much tax as David Cameron's family business, which existed only to collect tax breaks, Jeremy Hunt's £100,000 tax evasion, Tory adviser Philip Green's £1.3 bn tax-free trick and all their other friends like Vodafone, which was let off an £8bn bill and then didn't pay a single penny of corporation tax last year.

And there's more: it turns out that Gauke's wife is a leading tax-avoidance lawyer. And that naughty David 'flipped' his main and secondary homes during the Parliamentary expenses scandal to… avoid paying stamp duty and tax. Presumably there's some clause that defines that as 'moral'. And - David himself worked for a leading firm of 'tax advisor' lawyers.

Poachers and gamekeepers?

And if that's not all - the CPS decided to charge a pile of scumbag News International (alleged) phone hackers: Coulson, Brooks, Mulcaire and several others for - among other charges - hacking the phone of dead teen Milly Dowler.

Obviously they're innocent until/if/when convicted. So the following Doonesbury cartoon from the Nixon era has no connection with their case at all. (Click to enlarge). The same cartoon certainly has no relevance to events in Ireland yesterday either: the Quinns found guilty of plotting to hide €500m from the state they owe €3bn to, with one in prison and another on the run, and Sean FitzPatrick and a couple of his cronies arrested too for running a massively indebted bank for the benefit of his social circle. Where will the joy end?

He Knew He Was Right

I told you so. More importantly, so did all the trades unions when Murdoch started gobbling the world's media. Now the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture agrees.

This is the mug from which I drink my tea at work. Most of those unions are gone, but their cause is even more justified now.

Separated at birth? Leveson edition

Here's Dick Fedorcio, suspended head of press relations for the Metropolitan Police. He employed a vast number of News of the World journalists in his office. He wined and dined several serving ones. He let a NotW hack write an article on his office computer. He got his son a work experience job on the Sun. The son then moved from The Sun to the Metropolitan Police. Other officers hint that he leaked and briefed. He of course says that he's never even heard a breath of scandal ever.

But never mind that. Play this clip of the intrepid Fedorcio.



Then play this one, of Baron Greenback from Danger Mouse:



Separated at birth.

Paul Uppal MP, meet Paul Farrelly MP

As you know, I'm compelled here at Vole Towers to occasionally take issue with Mr Paul Uppal, supposedly my MP, for his self-centred and uninformed approach to political affairs. More in sadness than in anger, as I'm sure you recognise from my occasional discussions of his intellectual and moral failures.

But I'm happy to report that not all MPs are dishonest, lazy and dumb. I've been in correspondence with Paul Farrelly, Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It's a nice place, occupied by Mrs. Bouquets who all claim they're not from Stoke. Well you are.

But I digress. Mr Farrelly - not a firebrand socialist by anyone's standards, but a decent and principled man - is a member of the Culture/Media Select Committee. That's right, the one that roasted Rupert Murdoch and Pals recently. This is his approach, and I think it's the right one:

For all the easy press comment, though, from my time as a journalist, most press conferences are hardly disciplined or forensic. 

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times other hacks allowed those who knew their stuff to ask all the questions needed, and to back each other up, to get a better story for everyone. 

With Select Committees (unlike press conferences), the great ally is time, so you get your turn eventually to pursue the trails that need following. We had the Murdochs there for three hours, not just an hour. 

What I wanted to do was to follow the evidence their lot had given previously - and to get them to blame people for misleading us, and for the cover-up since. Murdoch Senior duly did that - and their lawyers and former Head of Legal, who were dumped in it, are now starting to sing in their own defence. 

I also wanted them to admit, for the first time, to still paying the legal fees of the private eye at the heart of this Glenn Mulcaire (which they were doing, despite the apology to Milly Dowler's family). The intention there was to get them to stop - which they now have = so he ends up cutting a deal and singing as well. 

This now looks to have worked. The edifice is cracking and they are fighting like rats in a sack.

More power to him.

Hear no evil…

I promise I'll get back to mundane nonsense soon, but the Murdoch story just keeps on giving.

The big story yesterday was confirmation from the two senior policemen giving evidence that Ed Llewellyn,  the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, explicitly told them not to inform David Cameron what was going on - despite employing the News of the World editor who had to resign because of the phone hacking scandal.

This is a disgrace. This is the Prime Minister of a country deliberately isolating himself from the certain knowledge of criminality as a subterfuge. The Chief of Staff has to resign, and I'm sure that when he does, he'll say he was acting alone to protect the PM. It won't wash. An apparatchik doesn't behave like that unless he's damn sure that it's what the boss wants.

It reminds me of a mafia boss covering his ears while taking the payments from his underlings. It's deniability, but it isn't plausible deniability. It's personal survival taking precedence over political and moral responsibility.

Should David Cameron resign?

I mentioned this aspect of the hacking story briefly yesterday, but Polly Toynbee takes it up very effectively.

But is there more to come? The Mail on Sunday reported that Cameron intended to hire the BBC's Guto Harri as his press secretary. So close, apparently, was the appointment that the Harri family visited the Camerons one weekend in 2007 at Chipping Norton to discuss it, but the job went to Andy Coulson after Rebekah Brooks "is said to have told Mr Cameron that the post should go to Mr Coulson to strengthen links between the Tories and News International". Is this true? Reviewing the papers on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday, I pointed out this story and said Harri was well-known in the BBC as a straight-as-a-die, honest man. I was pleased to get a text from Harri just after the show saying "Thanks". Does that mean it is true? I called Harri, who now works for Boris Johnson, to check. Yes, he said he'd heard tell that his name was not acceptable to News International. "I heard it as gossip on the grapevine – but I have no idea whether or not it's true. Yes, I did talk to David Cameron about taking the job – but whilst I lingered they'd clearly approached Andy Coulson." He had a good idea who the source from the Sun was for the story. How Cameron must wish he had given Harri the job. The idea that News International planted their man in the heart of Downing Street is truly shocking.

If this is true, then the Prime Minister has to resign. You can't have the man running the country choosing taxpayer-paid officials according to how acceptable he is to a particular media company.

Audiovole

Yes, dear readers, my media empire expands as certain others decline. You can hear me live on WCR on July 20th, 1-2 p.m. BST. And repeated on Thursday at 5-6. 101.8FM if you're local, or listen live on your computer. I'll be joining in a discussion about the hacking affair, the media sphere and the new politics.

Plashing Vole. Coming in your ears. (OK, I stole that from Chorley FM).

Time to Gove

Who else in government is in hock to News International? How about everybody's favourite ex-Newsnight Education Moron Minister Michael Gove?

Will Michael Gove also be drawn into the sleaze? In 2009, the Conservatives published a list of shadow cabinet ministers' outside interests. News International were very generous to him, paying £5,000 a month for his services as journalist for one hour a week. That’s £1,250 a week. Contrast this with the £250 he received from Scotland on Sunday.

Meanwhile, one of the most evil papers on the planet (the Daily Mail, in case you didn't realise), claims that Rebekah Brooks vetoed Cameron's plan to have an ex-BBC press spokesman, and suggested Coulson instead - to 'strengthen links' between News International and the Tory administration.

If that's true - and as it's in the Mail, that's an 'if' the size of Greenland - then the Prime Minister will have to resign. If it isn't true, he'll have to sue, given the monstrosity of such a claim.

News of the World: Why It's Your Fault

You may have noticed that there's a massive campaign afoot to make corporations drop their advertising in the News of the World.

OK, so far so bad. The newspaper has illegally accessed the telephones of politicians, entertainers, a murdered teenager, murdered kids' parents, terrorism victims' friends and families and dead soldiers' families.

But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that these advertisers (and the Royal British Legion, which has just dropped its 'relationship' with the paper) are in any way better than the News of the World. These allegations have been public knowledge, to some extent, for several years. More widely, the News of the World, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express and other papers have been using illegal methods to gather information for decades. You can spot the guilty papers by their lack of coverage of this story over recent years.



Basically: the advertisers know what newspapers do. They've forked over millions of pounds to tabloids which explicitly specialise in vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip for decades. To suddenly decide that they can't (temporarily) stand it any longer isn't a sign that these companies exist on a higher moral plane than the papers. For all their handwringing ('I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here'), they don't have moral values. They have accountants, and they have PR departments, who are both telling them that the outrage dollar (as Bill Hicks would have it) is more lucrative than the News of the World dollar, for now.

Which brings me to my final point. Why do major corporations advertise in the News of the World? Because it's the best-selling Sunday newspaper in the UK. Why is it the best-selling newspaper in the UK? Because millions of otherwise un-evil citizens make a deliberate choice of a Sunday to read vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip. Sure, individuals aren't responsible for the cultural soup in which they swim, but you have a choice. You could decide that the sex lives of TV weather presenters, Bolton's second-string fullback, and Big Brother losers simply isn't news, or relevant to you. You could decide that if you really must leer over the breasts of a teenage girl, to have some guts and buy an actual porn mag, or head to the internet, where I'm told flesh is easily found. You could stop dialling the sex-lines which fill the back pages. You could make a resolution to avoid the shrieking racism which pervades these repulsive papers.

And if you're reading this smugly congratulating yourself for not being a News of the World reader, you can wipe that smile off your face, particularly if you have a Sky subscription. 'Oh', you might be whinging, 'I've no choice. I love Boardwalk Empire, and big movies, and live sport, Vole, how can I live without live sport?'. Tough. They're all just commodities, sticky open jam pots designed to suck you in and sell you to advertisers - despite the fact that you've paid a subscription too. If you like films, go to the cinema or even better, the theatre, and make an occasion of it. Read a book. Sports fans: go to a live match, or play in one. Every penny you give to News International or one of its competitors - because blaming NI alone is to deny that there's a structural political, economic and cultural problem - you don't just fund what you're watching. You reward the News of the World and its friends. Ironically, paying to watch your favourite footballer perform involves paying for the 'celebrity news' which has replaced actual news, and funds the hacking, telephoto lens, kiss-and-tells and all the other paraphernalia which will be turned on that very footballer if a media outlet senses sales in the offing.

This isn't new: here's an extract from George Orwell's 1946 The Decline of the English Murder:

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. 

So when anyone wonders out loud whose fault it is, you can tell them: it's your fault. You buy the papers. You accept that celebrity gossip is news. You somehow have a definite opinion on who killed Maddie McCann. You let the tabloids define the terms for debates on anything from immigration to public sector pensions. The word you're looking for is 'complicit'.

Who hacked those phones? You did.

(And as an aside: given this week's events, I hope all you snobs will now revise your opinions about media studies).

DDOS, LOIC and other nerdy things in perspective

I'm absolutely loving the Anonymous collective's attacks on Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, PayPal and various other corporations who've decided that censorship is a matter of commercial wisdom.

The old definition of a state is a body which reserves to itself the right to use force against its citizens or other states/their citizens. To some extent, this still applies online: every major country, from the UK to China employs an army of hackers: China recently downloaded all global e-mails, Israel infected Iran's science computers, Russia attacked Lithuania and the Chinese have access to basically all of the US's critical infrastructure.

However, the danger of training masses of computer programmers is that hackers tend to be contrary libertarian weirdos. Some will do whatever they're paid to, but quite a lot of these bedroom warriors will develop skills and apply them if they think there's a challenge in it - like Gary McKinnon, autistic sysadmin. Put a hacker in front of a big bad corporation or government and they'll have a go.

So - and as you may know, I read a lot of 'hard' SF, where the notion of flowing around states and corporations rather than allowing them to dictate the shape and direction of the online world - each hacker is now in possession of the tools formerly reserved to the state. A Distributed Denial of Service (automated mass hits on a website to block access to legitimate users) using a tool like LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon - the name tells you all you need to know about these kids: they play a lot of computer games) is essentially a weapon available to a global, untraceable collective. Sure, my institution blocks DDOS software like LOIC, but most users are at home, limited only by bandwidth. Download LOIC here to get involved in Operation Payback.

A part of me worries that these guys are selfish libertarians with no regard for democracy, but an alternative reading is that they're anarchist-syndicalists of the kind portrayed in Ken MacLeod's Scottish Trotskyist-libertarian science fiction. Their principles are those of Jefferson which I quoted yesterday: freedom of information leads to free societies, and organisations which block, reserve or squat on information are the lumbering dinosaurs which need to be brought down.

There's a good deal of idealism and fantasy in the anarchist-egalitarian world of hacking and futurism, partly because these people are only now developing an ideological base, but I'm all for it. It has the potential to bring to life a non-capitalist, non-statist democracy of the kind envisioned by Lenin and Trotsky before the Russians became wedded to the state-communism model.

Where things are getting interesting is the overflow of DDOS-style activism into the offline world. What is the fluid, random, 'flash-mob' style closedowns of Vodafone, TopShop and other outlets organised by UK Uncut to protest against tax evasion if it isn't a distributed denial of Service? Loose, leaderless groups coalesce with minimal organisation for a specific event before melting away again. No structure for the cops to infiltrate, no long-term planning, no hierarchy: just a shared set of ideals and limited set of objectives.

It's not new of course: UK Uncut are drawing on the traditions of Captain Swing, the Luddites, the Rebecca Rioters and the Chartists - but faster.

Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose except your social lives!

I'm getting into swinging

NO, you perverts.

I refer to this wonderful hack (which you can download): it turns ordinary songs into swing numbers by stretching the first half of each beat and contracting the second.

I really, really love this swing version of 'Enter Sandman' - other examples are available on the site:

Enter Sandman- the Swing Version by plamere

Don't Stop Believin'  (Swing Version) by plamere