Broken bargains

1978 and Rock Against Racism and numerous socialist groups brought hundreds of thousands together in opposition to the right-wing bigotry of the BNP and the banal meanness of Thatcher's vision for Britain. (1)

A generation later and a conservative Prime Minister offers only punishment and retribution in response to a week of rioting across Britain. There is no question in Cameron's mind as to why the riots occurred. Criminality. With all of the subtlety of his eighteenth century political forebears, the response of conservatives has quaked with the fear of the Bastille mob, the weavers of Spitalfields.

It's not surprising that Cameron has nothing to offer other than the tired cliches of his moral certainty. What is far more problematic is how dominant the doctrines of individuality, consumerism and free market righteousness have become. Fukuyama's End of History has become the End of Alternatives. The grotesque irony is that it appears that much of the looting was a response by people disenfranchised economically - not privileged enough, not monied enough, not employed enough to afford all the baubles of consumerism. What began as a protest at police brutality became a caricature of rampant consumerism.

So what does Cameron and the classes he represents expect of the lower classes? Timid acquiescence? Grateful forelock tugging for the crumbs that fall from the table? All the while cutting social, education and health programs that are attempting to ameloriate income inequality. Wealth inequality in Britain and indeed most of the parliamentary democracies we call home has grown, and grown rapidly over the last 20 years. (2) Just about every measure of equity has shown the lessening of access and opportunity to anyone outside of the middle and ruling classes. At the same time, the ideologies of free markets, aspiration, and consumerism labels any deviation from the new 'norm' of shiny success as moral failure, idiocy, criminality or wilful obstinance. Even the twenty-first century version of The Good Life must surely involve a TV series with tie-in book deal and range of branded goods and consumables; hardly the stuff of presenting another paradigm. (3)

And the scolds? The righteous? Yes well that would be all of those members of parliament who strangely seemed to escape punishment despite embezzling thousands from the public coffers for moat cleaning and whatever else members of political elites need extra dosh for. It would also be the press, who it seems make a habit of obtaining information illegally, blindly re-use any old tosh presented to them as a media release, whilst braying the appropriate line of fiscal benefit for their masters. Not to mention the righteous hard-working classes who have bought into the promethian bargain of permanent indebtedness that is the lot of small to medium sized businesses, in the quest for home ownership, investment properties, share portfolios, and the occassional status symbol.

Riots are not tidy. They are not clearly this or clearly that - they are random, morphing from rage to protest to rage to pointless destruction over time and distance. They are irresponsible - the antipathy of careful middle class values. They are the very site of the Other. The embodiment of the unruly mob, the wilful underclasses, the simmering body of sub-humanity craving one's Smeg appliances, gagging to run keys down the duco of the Volvo coupe, to piss in your black enamelled letter box and crush the standard roses. The will of the people.

And these riots are all the more terrifying because of the lack of political focus from the rioters. It doesn't matter whether you voted Conservative or Labour - they just hate you anyway, you middle class tosser. Perhaps worse still, they don't aspire to be you either. By passively allowing notions of civil society to be cut away, the middle classes and their masters have loosened the ties that held the rest of society together - ties made from the promises of social reform during the twentieth century. Aspiration is no longer about bettering society or even bettering oneself - latter-day capitalism has instead revelled in the profit to be made from offering sustenance only through consumerism. The price of that would appear to the burning High Street.


(1) And somewhere I still have my auotgraphed Au Pairs album...
(2) "The HILDA data indicate that, in 2002, the wealthiest decile owned 44.9 per cent of total household wealth (median holdings=$1,394,400) and the wealthiest 5 per cent owned 31.0 per cent (median=$2,511,800). For reasons outlined in Section 2, it is likely that we somewhat underestimated the assets and national share of the richest households. From Social Research Policy Paper No 33, 2008.
(3) See for example Matthew Evans's recent series on SBS, Gourmet Farmer.  For some reason, it invokes that Catherine Tate skit about the egg and spoon race...

Rupert and Uncle Sam

Whatever happens between now and Tuesday in Washington, damage has already been done to the American economy. We are now able to watch as Tea Party Republicans refuse to play by the rules, quite happy to pursue ideological purity at everyone else's expense.

Madness.

Madness given voice through Murdoch's media empire. The Tea Party movement, its leaders, its media players such as Glenn Beck all have their spiritual if not actual home on the Fox networks, or Murdoch-owned papers and syndicated networks.

So how do Murdoch's fellow members of America's economic and political elites feel about his media empire now that even they will be adversely affected by an American economy crippled by the fools on the Hill?

Of course there are many many factors that are impacting upon the US economy; but the current political imbroglio has nothing to do with structural or financial impacts. And the maddest of all? Murdoch-backed Tea Party Republicans.

So just how are Murdoch's fellow mega-rich feeling this evening? At what point when they begin to realise that extremism is in fact bad for their bottom line? At what point will they begin to put pressure on one of its own? Are his fellow diners at Jean Georges hissing when he walks in? So how does it feel Rupert? How does it feel to be the man who gave the Tea Party Republicans the chance to play in the sun?

Giving to the Uncle

We're now in a new world, where advertisers and consumers and Mumsnet can exact a terrible revenge on an organisation. Murdoch seems obsolescent and, like the dictators of North Africa, his troubles come from the abuse of power. News of the World journalists ordered the hacking of as many as 4,000 people including grieving relatives of soldiers and of terror and murder victims because they thought their paper was untouchable. The cover-up was further evidence of this arrogance and included misleading Parliament and the Press Complaints Commission, the claimed bribery of the police, the intimidation of legitimate claimants and, it is now suggested, the destruction of digital files in Wapping. Little wonder that last year I wrote here that Murdoch, his children and clannish associates were beginning to match the profile of your average crime family.

From Henry Porter's piece in The Guardian on the 10th of July, before Rupert and child appeared as travelling pair of organ grinders in front of a parliamentary committee in the UK. Whilst I agree with Porter about the arrogance - it seeped from every pore of Murdoch's body during the entire appearance - I'm not so sure about the power of advertisers and consumers doing a fat lot of use. Problem being, the damage has already been done by the time their conditional approval has been withdrawn. A phone hacked, personal details released, politicians threatened and blackmailed, or cowered into second guessing the wishes of editors and media owners all occurs before an ad campaign is withdrawn or Waterstones refuse to stock a paper.

The potential that media has to shape and influence opinion is the problem. A problem that grows as media ownership is consolidated. And it is opinion that we need to be focused on. No one has ever fought a war or overthrown a government because of a fact - ahh but an opinion. Well it may true that they are exactly like arseholes - everyone has one - but opinions are the bovver bruvver of belief and as we all know, humans have an endless propensity to slaughter each other over a belief.

A fact that Murdoch has always understood. The relentless slide of all News Corp media into the jelly wrestling ring of opinion is not about principled journalistic scrutiny, the role of the Fourth Estate as the watchers or even giving "them" what they want. The contempt that Murdoch and every last one of his henchpersons has for the little people is the very DNA of each of his media operations. From Glenn Beck's senseless rantings, to Bolt's idiocy to the fat fool currently editing The Times - for  Murdoch to ever allow any of them onto the payroll is just as damning as a single pence paid to Mulcaire.

Opinion stifles debate, kills considered judgment, cheapens the development and growth of ideas and policies. Politicians cannot find space within an opinion-saturated media for anything like the sort of conversations or even reportage of the complexities we must face and must make considered nuanced decisions about. And we cannot and will not find the facts, the narratives, or the analyses that we need to live adult responsible lives in the pages of the HeraldSun or Daily Telegraph or late lamented News of the World.

As Paul McMullen so eloquently described, the job of NOTW was to feed the jealous desires of its readers, taunting the famous and glamorous with the Mephistophelian bargain they had struck, a mass spectator sport to replace bear baiting or cock fighting. There is nothing Hogarthian in McMullen's or Brooks's or Murdoch's pursuit of the base instincts on display; just amoral cynicism at the stupidity of the consumers of their content and amoral cynicism at the consequences on how we may govern and organise ourselves.

It remains to be seen as to whether Murdoch's stranglehold on opinion-making in Australia, the US and the UK will be diminished but unless our political elites work very very hard at breaking his cartels, and fostering diversity, an old man and his unlovely offspring will shrug off the public appearances and calls for inquiries. They may not be able to access Downing Street by the front door any longer, but politicians will seek to mould opinion for their own ends - the temptations of power and hubris are easily fed by the promise of media fixes and usually prove too powerful to refuse. And frankly, politicians hate diversity. Too much like hard work. Too difficult to build a consensus. Concentrated media environments can present opinion and ignorance as consensus - a mirage politicians should know better than to accept. If the ALP has suddenly realised how problematic it is having a media owner who does not support them controlling 70% of Australia's print media, perhaps they needed to exercise better judgment on each occasion they have not supported tighter meaningful regulation on media ownership and practices.

Let's hope they grow spines and brains and we see a thorough review of media ownership laws in the next 12 months. And that clatter on the roof must be another pig landing.

But the trials of Rupert wasn't actually what I intended to rabbit on about. What I think is far more interesting is the appearance of web based news providers here in Australia. Crikey has been around since 2004 with New Matilda coming and going, Inside Story, and the usual media players all establishing on-line presences. But in the last 8 weeks up has popped The Wall, Black Inc's ShortlistDaily, and now Huffington Post is advertising for a Sydney based editor-in-chief.

The Wall is owned by a company called Stateless Media registered in May this year which is about the extent of what can be dug up. They have been reported to have been buying US based domains but why? No one quite knows. It's a strange beast, trying to take advantage of one of Twitter's strengths - throwing up the breaking, quirky, popular in a swirling roiling stream of tweets. I'm not at all convinced that it works for a news site, especially as the whole has something of an adolescent male tonality to it.

The ShortlistDaily has only been around for less than a week, so it has to be given time yet to quite see where and what it might become, but I hope they work it out soon. Putting out a daily digest is not a new idea and to work, it has to have some clear idea of why it is doing it and what content matches it's own sense of self. Something Huffington Post does with aplomb, whether the plomb is to your taste or not. And with its intent to start up an Australian version, Morry and Co don't have much time to get things humming. If they want eyeballs on the website on a daily basis, the current efforts won't achieve that.

What is curious is the timing. HuPo's expansion may be about AOL's corporate plans chasing new markets. Given that digital advertising is not as developed in Australia as the US, it makes sense. The Wall seems to be an attempt to harness social media into the provider of content for news service but I would argue that such a form is only possible in a media environment where opinion has equal if not more value and vested importance than quality journalism. Its success will depend on whether enough people share their 'taste' -  their editorial winnowing. Gatekeeping in real time.

It also raises interesting copyright questions about their re-use of Twitter content and the Twitter user's material - Twitter does not assume that a Twitter user has assigned the copyright on their tweets to Twitter as other social media does (Facebook for example) but its response to someone else re-using tweets, particularly if there is advertising revenue being made from the webpages will be something to watch with interest. And quite what you as an individual whose tweets are appearing on The Wall might do will also be interesting - copyright law allows you to ensure that you have adequate recompense for the exploitation of your IP, but it also allows you to have control over where your IP is used. If David Irving suddenly started posting your tweets to his website, the quickest way for you to have them removed is to notify him and the ISP hosting his delightful website that he is infringing your copyright and he best cease and desist or face legal action.

I suspect the folk running The Wall are relying on us all being a little bit Andy Warhol - the momentary pleasure of being popped up on the wall will be adequate payment for the unauthorised use of your IP. Which in truth most blogs rely on as well - a post is vital to the site, but the comments in all their varied glories are just as important in pulling readers to the blog or website. Including Uncle Rupert's high quality bloggers such as Bolt or Akerman. Once filthy lucre enters the equation via ads or sponsored links, will we be so familiar with the re-use of tweets we won't notice? We already provide content to News Corp - let's share the love then.

New media forms are emerging, with we the consumer also the content providers. And at times, maunfactured content as we response to the call to serve ourselves up as those who joined Glenn Beck for their moment of white supremacy so willingly did. Whether these new forms are the harbingers of change will in part depend upon our response to how our input is used. Given what we've managed to date, we've got quite a bit of work to do.

Rupert's little Eichmanns

Some things I will never understand. Such as the remarkable ability some humans have to sprout the most outrageous crap with a straight face, no wait buckets of righteous indignation, fire and brimstoning their way through any reasoned responses. All the time utterly and totally destroying any credibility they may have had - even the credibility their position may have bestowed upon their toady personage.



I shouldn't be surprised. Anyone who works for a Murdoch owned business in a managerial or senior position is insentient or unable to lie straight in bed. A complete lack of any regard for ethics, legal guidelines or societal norms rules. As appalling as the likelyhood that Murdoch's minnows managed to compromise a murder investigation, the cynicism, the puerile certainty that the Press existed only to sneer, distracting the populus from the main game of plunder is a far worse crime. As Paul McMullan keeps mumbling to anyone who'll listen, they were careful to present their tawdry chip wrappings as something noble, something brave, something for the little people. Fearlessly identifying the elites to whom Murdoch and his mighty journo warriors would dish out due desserts.

Murdoch as hero. Murdoch as anti-establishment. Murdoch as the outsider.

And his minnows as his faithful foot soldiers in the quest for truth and justice. A grimey pathology of petty nastiness and paranoia. A typical example is Andrew Bolt's laughable claim that the NOTW scandal is a put-up. Almost as ridiculous as the fat fool in the clip above. And in Bolt's comments, disaffected little people get to agree. Murdoch has built a entire media empire around his ability to out-troll the opposition. And he has no difficulties finding legions of sociopaths to write his copy.

If journalists wonder at the demise of papers, at the demise of their profession, they need look no further than what it has become under the tutelage of Rupert Murdoch. A slide few of them did anything to challenge.

Offending a neo-con

Yesterday a piece by one Jim Lapkin popped up on The Drum, a strange platform of opinion and scuttlebutt in the ABC's digital media world. Once again we are required to put up with a poorly written droning rant from some one or another of a neo-con persuasion which the ABC presents as meeting its self-inflicted definitions of balance and objectivity.

Leaving aside the bizarre notions the ABC holds to when defining balance (which have far more to do with an ill-prepared broadcasting executive or two being beaten up in Senate Estimates than any well thought through notions of journalistic standards) let us turn Bernice's gimlety orbs upon the piece.

Reading the comments of The Drum's readers is only slightly less depressing than those found in the soulless wastes of Andrew Bolt Land, and as per usual it was reasonably evenly divided between insisting that Lapkin is correct or deluded. I belong firmly to the latter, and commented in kind:

As someone who works in the new economy (the digital economy that CIS believes can limp along quite nicely on copper wire and a few 4G towers...) the analytical skills gained via a general humanities degree are increasingly highly valued. It matters not whether they read Hegel or Negri.
If the British really believe that their economic future is best served by eliminating a strong base of humanities-educated next Gen workers (an economy that will see less and less resources' derived income) it does not imply that we ought to be stupid enough to chase them down the Avenue of Poor Judgement.
And as for lack of rightists in the corridors of Casaubons, I suspect most of them are off running a string of Baker's Delight franchises - much more profitable than teaching, researching, and administering as an academic does. If of course their Randian sophistries are true - or have they defaulted to working at a neocon think tank with its veneer of shabby intellectual credibility?

Lacking in substance yes, as other comments had offered up facts and figures that disputed Lapkin's tenets of belief. Starting with universities being full to bursting with marxists bearing flags stained with the blood of the martyrs - as you good reader can attest this was and is not the case at the university you attended or now work at. And even if every faculty common room had a Che Guevara poster on the wall above the sink, the political apathy of 85% of the student body does suggest that all efforts to brainwash the young and vulnerable have failed against the allure of the latest iPhone.

What intrigues me are the obvious interpretations that Lapkin's figures of political allegiance suggests. Allow me to quote:

A 2005 study found that 72 per cent of those teaching at US universities and colleges hold left-of-centre views, while only 15 per cent define themselves as conservatives. At more prestigious institutions the disparity was even more pronounced, with 87 per cent of faculties espousing leftwing views as opposed to only 13 per cent accepting the conservative label.

 Or again:

Lichter's conclusions were confirmed by another review of the American professoriate that found a left-to-right ratio of 30.2 to 1 amongst anthropologists, 13.5 to 1 amongst philosophers and 28 to 1 amongst sociologists.

If you were to follow Lapkin's link in the first quote, it takes you not to the actual study but an article from the Washington Post in 2005. Not terribly scholarly Mr Lapkin; surely it would have been preferable to direct us to the Berkeley Electronic Press website where the article can be found in its original context - a right wing funded journal The Forum.

Where you would have stumbled upon a response to Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte's article by Ames, Barker, Bonneau and Carman which, and I quote from the abstract:

...we show that Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte’s work is plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence. Furthermore, we offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with their findings. Unfortunately, we were unable to subject our alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.

Oh dear. Just like those naughty evil grant-chasing climate scientists. Though I will acknowledge that BEP did publish the response. Just a shame that neither the Washington Post nor Mr Lapkin bothered to either read it or report upon it.

Given that there are significant problems with the original article which cannot be tested, positing anything from the numbers Lapkin quotes is nothing more than bovine rumination however I will raise a couple of points that confuse or amuse me every time this call to arms sounds from the bunkers of true believers.

Firstly, the US tertiary sector has become increasingly sectarian. An entire educational sector stretching from pre-school to supposed post-doc has been developed to train and manufacture good christian soldiers marching onto war, metaphorical or otherwise. The narrowness and prejudices inherent in the syllabus and campus culture would make a Taliban mullah blush with pride. Whatever your wacky End-of-Time fantasy may happen to be, you can surely find a college full of like-minded nut jobs to inculcate your kiddies with your very own home grown bible-waving cross-bearing bigotry.

Who teaches in these places? Presumably the god fearing right wing christians missing from the halls of mainstream academia. Which makes absolute sense - if you hold a set of values that impinge upon your ability to impose rigorous processes of analysis, you may find teaching environments where such shortfalls are not considered professional somewhat hostile. In addition, the christian tertiary sector uses the Republican Party as a significant conduit for staff recruitment and fund raising. It is not unexpected that just as political operatives move into private enterprises after 'public service' they will also migrate into educational areas amenable to their beliefs and patterns of self-advancement.

Secondly, the bias reported by Rothman et al is most obvious in the humanities. What is rather sweet is that the higher up the food chain of American universities you crawl, by the time you get to Ivy League status, they are completely stuffed with those god damned liberals. Why might this be so?

Is it because in the humanities the best work is achieved by nuanced thorough research that evaluates its inputs, its theoretical frameworks and its outputs with a rigor that must refuse prejudice and assumptions? OK, so that's best case scenario and let's all acknowledge here and now that this is not always the case. Whether you vote Green, ALP or Nationals. But the point still stands - the assumed peer review position is that belief and bigotry do not good scholarship make. Mr Lapkin has missed the obvious in his hunt for a good conspiracy theory - the US system is still hearty enough in its standards of academic rigor to weed out the less and least best. Combined with the self-selecting tendency of the first point, it should come as no surprise that the enemies of Christ dare walk the hallways of academia.

And does it actually matter anyway? As pointed out earlier, the dreaded Red Menace hasn't been terribly effective. Curiously I suspect the biggest impact if Mr Lapkin's dream of de-funded humanities faculties came to pass would be upon his beloved shiny free market. What digitisation has given us is vast oceans of data - what is becoming more and more apparent is that we are poorly equipped to manage, describe and distribute it. Frankly, Google's algorithms are bumping up against its own theoretical perimeters - and it is becoming increasingly evident that mathematics is not the sole way to our bright future of digital discovery. The market, ironically perhaps, needs the humanities thought and research processes to best squeeze its returns from the new digital marketplace.

Finally, if all of those leftists were loosened upon an unprepared populace, well yes perhaps some of them may fall by the wayside, starve in the ditches, but most wouldn't. No, they'd probably become teachers or journalists, or community workers, or lawyers or even politicians from local government upward. Maybe even agitators, riding the rails of the new digital lines spreading their propaganda of free thinking and analysis. They would be out there Mr Lapkin, spreading their words and ideas, rubbing up against the great unwashed, just like the last great period of worker education. The last great wave of political reform which threatened your economic paymasters. The last great tide of worker auto-didactism assisted by earnest middle class leftists, by publishers, journalists. Be careful what you wish for Mr Lapkin because it might just come to pass.

Big Press and Cyber Theft

Let's start with the piece up on abc.net.au/news. It relates that 3 members of Anonymous have been arrested by Spanish police on charges over cyber attacks including the Sony Playstation data release from about 8 weeks ago. The piece breathlessly informs us that:

Sony shocked gamers in late April by revealing that hackers had stolen personal information from the accounts of 77 million users of its online videogames network.
A week later, it said hackers had stolen data from another 25 million users of its computer games system. Sony's PlayStation Network was crippled for a month as the company tried to find and fix the problem.

The charges are not just about the Sony data but claim involvement with cyber attacks on Spanish banks BBVA and Bankia and Italian energy group Enel SpA. Anonymous have stated they have nothing to do with the Sony issue. Other persons arrested in the UK and the US on charges relating to the Sony incident are purportedly Anonymous members.

What is not being discussed on the ABC or anywhere else in Big Press is the shoddy slovenly manner in which Sony administered the personal data including credit card records of people using the Playstation Network.

It's no surprise to realise that persons who are keen enough to hand over their credit card details to Sony for instant gaming gratification may also be pretty tech savvy. Certainly tech savvy enough to pick up that Sony were storing and moving the customer data around in.... wait for it, wait.... unencrypted txt files.

Txt files? Apparently yes, txt files.

I wouldn't keep the dog's immunisation details in a txt file.

So people were politely telling Sony that maybe, just maybe this was a bad idea. And at the very least displayed contempt for the luckless masses buying their products. Sony were being repeatedly told this from at least November onward. Warnings and helpful suggestions Sony choose to ignore as they were either so stupid as not to understand what a txt file is, or more likely they were so happy to be making oodles of money, the risk was worth taking. If things went bad, hey they could just buy their way out of trouble.

The "cyber attack" and theft of all of those credit card details appears not to be the work of Russian cyber mafias or Dr No, but a very pointed slap to Sony's posterior to get their house in order. As far as anyone knows, not a single one of those millions upon millions of credit card details have been used; not a single customer detail released. The people who knocked off the unsecured txt files have shown more regard for the data than Sony.

The ABC and all other Big Press responses to this have failed to engage with Sony's culpability. We would be much better served by Big Press investigating the manner in which Corporate World handles our private data than waxing hysterical over those sofa-riding cyber cowboys lurking ready to snatch our plastic fantastics.

Joyce. Charlatan. Fool. And all around Twit

Barnaby. Really. Look there comes a time when you just have to stop and think for 2 seconds before rushing toward that microphone and flapping your lips.

Cate Blanchett being out of touch because she is rich? As Christine Milne pointed out, it's not the rich who suffer the effects of climatic extremes, but rather the marginal and poor. But of course you speak so knowingly and empathically for that sector of Australian society. When you're not accommodating the business needs of Big Tobacco or Big Mining (and how is Gina these days?)

Perhaps its a tactical response to a bit of infighting among the Libs. Send out the clowns so no-one notices we left the cake out in the rain sort of thing (and if anyone can offer a reasonable interpretation of the lyrics of Macarthur Park, I will mow your nature strip for the next 40 years). Or perhaps its a slight misreading of Para 41 of The Right Wing Ascendancy Manifesto: Governance and How We'll Do it Our Way. You know where it talks about rebuffing any statements made by opponents who have high community standing by pointing out they are not qualified to do so. 

Unfortunately, by claiming someone cannot speak on a topic because they are wealthy does kind of rule out lovely Gina and natty Twiggy and that nice Rupert chap. Oops. And how are the plans for moving back to the New England district so you can take on that class traitor Tony Windsor? Sorry? What was that? You'll get back to us on that?

And I apologise in forward for this - what follows is tasteless and tacky in high degree, but truly it is every subbie's dream to have a story such as this come up on one's shift. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I googled the phrase, someone just as tasteless would have gone there already. Which doesn't make it right, just means I'm not alone in my tackiness. From a news story on the ABC News home page -

When Cucumbers Kill...