"The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will." - Gaping Void
Sunday, August 20, 2017
I'm really enjoying playing with Protoplug for scripting your own VST plugins in Lua.
This sketch uses 3 scripts with the plugin.
My own Waveflavours synth (playing the ever-evolving drone chords). The default "midi chordify" (that chord isn't programmed, it's being generated automatically from single notes) and another self-written variation that chooses random notes from a chord which is driving the u-he's "Triple Cheese" plugin.
All these scripts are hosted in FL Studio, which is also providing the drums.
Protoplug is really exciting to me, because I can finally turn FL Studio into something scriptable, and which I can use more like the way I was using Sonic Pi, to experiment with algorithmic composition.
Update : You can find my scripts for ProtoPlug on GitHub
Jacobin Magazine has a good overview of how much the media / establishment opposed Corbyn during the last two years.
It just makes his performance in the election all the more impressive.
Who, in this fissile age, would wish for a prime minister with no discernible convictions, no perceivable moral core? Who, when we need courage in government more than at any time in the recent past, wants a prime minister who rolls over to everyone from the Daily Mail to King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud? Who, as we face negotiations with the European Union that will determine the future of this nation – negotiations that demand the utmost delicacy and care – wants a government peopled with buffoons, blusterers and bullies?
Threatening a former director of the FBI with secret tapes is like threatening Stephen Hawking with middle school math homework. I have no idea how the FBI would respond, but if they really took Donald Trump at his word, his Tweet as an invitation to spar, the ensuing rout will be more one-sided than a Möbius strip.
Britain’s sense of economic invulnerability is even more puzzling.
Why does a country that is significantly poorer than Germany, with fewer
internationally competitive industries and greater dependence on
foreign capital and managerial expertise, believe it can afford to quit
the single market? Britain’s economic performance is no better than
France’s and on some important measures – especially productivity – far
worse. Yet nobody from France’s political mainstream seriously thinks
that the French economy would thrive outside the EU.
Much of the British elite know little about how Britain’s economy
compares. Few realise that three-quarters of the country is poorer than
the EU-15 average;
that Britain’s growth performance has been mediocre at best; or that
there are relatively few British-owned and managed businesses with a
strong record of growth. There are bright spots in the British economy,
but its commanding heights owe much to foreign capital and expertise.
Foreign-owned businesses generate more than half the country’s exports,
and many of these exports are intermediate goods – links in
international, predominantly European, supply chains. These companies
are especially vulnerable to Britain leaving the single market. If the
British economy were more locally owned and managed, it would be easier
to understand the British complacency over the economic impact of
Brexit. But for a developed country so dependent on foreign capital to
do something so damaging to its ability to attract that capital has few
precedents.
Anyway, for Rick Astley’s song I didn’t want it to sound like Kylie or Bananarama so I looked at the Colonel Abrams track Trapped and recreated that syncopated bassline in a way that suited our song. It gave it the extra dimension that made it successful.
I've actually managed to do quite a lot of music-related stuff in 2016. From organizing MusicHacking events in Brasilia, to more music for dance, to technoshamanic remixes to podcasts and more.
This year I want to explore more raw, self-built, "ataripunk" style electronics.
And more free software. How do I produce more, "finished" music using things like Faust and Sonic Pi and Ardour and qtractor etc.
And electronics?
I want to get more of it out there and people listening to it.
Speaking of which, if anyone ever felt the need to own any (or all six) of the official gbloink!tunes albums while making a small contribution to my future works they are now all up on BandCamp :
One thing that I'm pondering is how to represent my music.
For a while I've depended on SoundCloud as my main music showcase. But actually I want to write more about making music. Particularly with Sonic Pi and Faust and other free-software.
Where should I do that?
Well, how about a blog called "Composing"? Even if it has been mainly for political venting in recent years.
So ... here's the question ... should Composing return to being my main music / music-software etc. blog?
One reason my activity declined here a bit (apart from Google doing an appalling job of keeping Blogger a cool and relevant platform while things like Medium and WordPress rolled over it in terms of ease of use and functionality) is that I don't like to be so dependent on Google or give them primary control of my content.
If I do choose to focus on music here in the next year ... I'll need to have a back-up / mirroring strategy. Maybe RSS-grabber but ideally something that creates content I own first, and mirrors it here.
Pretty much everything I've believed in and championed over the last 15
years in terms of blogging, social media, freedom for anyone to speak
out without gatekeepers etc. has come true.
And the
result is what we've seen in 2016 ... President Trump, Brexit, the
impeachment of Dilma Rousseff etc. All driven by massive disinformation
campaigns across social media. We are in a "post-truth" society or as I
actually predicted many years ago "the end of consensus". Conspiracy theories are the epistemic mode of netocracy.
So what now?
"What
now", in the sense of how can we reinvent a politics which "works"? And
"what now" as in what are the responsibilities and strategies for
people like me who work in software and have championed the spread of
technologies of open communication? What can and should we try to build
next to "fix" the problems we've caused? Finally "what now" as in what
actual policies can be advocated for netocracy where many traditional gatekeeping epistemic strategies are no longer available.
In one sense we are seeing a burst of authoritarianism which is covering the profound weakness
of governments to control what's going on. Everyone in power wants to
control borders to prevent the movement of people. When their real
"problems" are flow of information and capital which remain harder to
control than ever. Scapegoating the poor is the standard tactic of an
elite in trouble, of course. I now think we're moving to "scapegoating
bodies" for the frustrations and failures to constrain information
(including finance which is now revealed as a subset of
information).
2016 was a hell of a year. Though, so far, I'm not too personally affected. (For which I am truly grateful.)
I'm not into reviews of last year (most people probably think "thank God that's over ... OMFG what's coming next?") or too many resolutions / promises that I may or may not keep.
But the turn of the year is a good time for some reflection / questioning which may set my agendas for the next 12 months. (Or not, as the case may be)
Some of it is the usual, self-indulgent angst about what I'm meant to be doing, why aren't I more productive and "successful" (for some value of success) etc. I'll spare you all that.
But I'll post a couple of the, perhaps more substantial, even though quite personal, questions over the next few posts.
What happens when we have automatic tools to summarize news items, journal articles, and perhaps provide early filters (routing-queries) in "what's interesting" from the journals. Perhaps lazy reviewers will just run the filter over a paper to see if its worth reading.
And then if we use the same models to generate papers ???
Just like automatic high-speed trading algorithms go off and autonomously create bubbles and crashes in the market, could we see runaway feedback between automated science paper generators and automated science paper accepters create entirely new subfields of science / pseudoscience?
I suppose, given that this is a physics conference, it's a great response to the Sokol Affair.
OTOH, sadly, it seems like this is a junk conference put together by "open access" publishers. The terrible thing here is that the term "open access" which should be a term of approval, is now getting discredited as vanity publishing.
I don't quite suspect a conspiracy by academic publishers ... but ... it is awfully convenient. :-/
Martin Kettle has an insightful comment on current division within Tory government's approach to Brexit. Not for or against, but which gets priority, controlling immigration (No 10) or free market (treasury).
Since No 10 will ultimately win that battle, the question is how the Treasury will react. In its determination to maintain the City of London’s global position outside the single market, the Treasury will find itself inexorably drawn down the road towards remaking the UK as an offshore, low-tax financial haven. Just at the very moment when the EU locks horns with Apple over sweetheart tax deals, so Britain may roll out the welcome mat to international corporations such as Apple, offering Britain as the new Ireland, or as a European Singapore.
This week I was asked on Twitter if I thought it was OK for someone to
call me a “fucking useless journalist”. My honest answer is yes. I might
not like receiving such a comment, and it’s unlikely to lead to any
sort of constructive dialogue, but I think it counts as a morally
acceptable form of self-expression. Not all anger can be considered
equally justified, but if we insist on civility as a requirement for
having a voice then we inevitably exclude those who are at the end of
their tether – and they’re the ones that should be listened to most
keenly.
GDP per head is up just over 1% since 2008 and real wages are still 7%
below their level at the start of the Great Recession in 2008. The
problem is that many who voted leave thought this was all about
immigration and EU rules, whereas in reality it was mostly about
austerity. The Poles, the Czechs and the Hungarians came to the UK to
work; they have higher employment rates than those born in the UK and
pay far more into the system than they take out. It is clear that the
rising number of immigrants has put pressure on public services but this
was mostly because Osborne under-invested in services in order to
shrink the state. They paid their taxes, but Slasher didn’t invest that
money in new schools, houses and hospitals.
And enlisting a world-class vituperator to help him express his rage. :-)
Meanwhile there's a 30 year retrospective album of Momus songs coming out, selected by the man himself.
Thoughts on the tracklist.
I see why Lucky like St. Sebastian has to be there, though I'd like to see Little Lord Obedience or The Rape of Lucretia rather than Paper Wraps Rock.
From Poison Boyfriend I don't particularly dig Murderers, the Hope of Women. Would rather see Eleven Executioners, Violets or the haunting Islington John. The other two are obviously the right choices. (I'm a big fan of Sex for the Disabled, but understand its historic moment is over.)
Great selection from Tender Pervert and Don't Stop the Night.
Morality is Vanity is an excellent song.
Hipopotamomus? Meh! Bluestocking is throwaway. Marquis of Sadness is much wittier and has all the "perv" credential Momus might want here. Personally I used to like Ventriloquists and Dolls but began enjoying The Painter and his Model more. Hipopotamomus itself and Monkey for Sally are far more musically striking and disturbing. Song in Contravention is more beautifully lush. This is a weak selection from one of Momus's best albums.
Too much Voyager. Voyager and Summer Holiday 1999 are classics. Cibachrome Blue if you want to capture the overall feel. But Spacewalk is excess to requirements. (And I think Afterglow is better if you insist on 4 tracks from this album.)
Platinum fine. Enlightenment is a good song ruined by a couple of horribly clunky lines that spoil what would otherwise be emotionally powerful. Rhetoric, nah! I'd have Breathless instead. And I love Christmas on Earth. Shame not to find a way to fit it in.
Not enough Ultraconformist. Last of the Window Cleaners obviously has to be there. But there are underrated classics like Ultraconformist itself and The Mother-in-Law. The Cheque's in the Post is a bit of a crowdpleaser that doesn't charm me much.
Philosophy of Momus is one of his weaker albums. As close to "filler" as Momus gets. He's right about Sadness of Things and Cabinet. I'm not sure Microworlds adds much. 20 Vodka Jellies, OTOH, is another "bit random" collection, packed with pleasurable upbeat tunes. London 1888 and End of History are obviously big songs. I'd have been inclined to try to find space for a couple more. There are plenty of greats to choose from on this album.
Ping Pong was wildly hyped. But I think he's right to just stick with the much covered I Want You, But I Don't Need You and The Age of Information (an incredibly prescient piece of internet philosophy)
Born to be Adored is great. I don't like Old Friend, New Flame. But I see why it's pretty definitive of Momus and the Analog Baroque moment.
Stars Forever is so varied musically and tied up to its concept (song-portraits of patrons) that it would be hard to get a "representative sample". About 70% of the Stars Forever songs are great and the two he's chosen are from that 70%. But they aren't particular stand-outs. The most interesting thing about Tinnitus is that it's really looking forward to the Folktronic style he goes on to explore in the next album. And mysteriously NOTHING from the Folktronic album makes it into this compilation. Is he just going for a twofer? Trying have one song represent both Stars Forever and Folktronic? Looks like it. He's already on disk 3 and only half-way through his spectacular discography.
Plus there ARE two songs from Folktronic : Pygmalism and Going for a Walk with a Line. And these obviously HAVE to be in the collection as they're two of his best songs from this period (if not two of his best songs. full stop.) But they're from the "extras" part of the disk, not Folktronic proper (at least that's how I read them). Perhaps it was hard to find one. Finnegan the Folk Hero of HTML is a bit twee. Psychopathis Sexualis maybe?
Oskar Tennis Champion is one of Momus's greatest albums. Certainly the extremely inventive beginning of his "modern" (2000s+ ) style. It deserves to be well represented. No arguments about Beowulf and The Laird of Inversnecky, though I'm surprised by Scottish Lips. I'd have thought Is It Because I'm A Pirate? would be the obvious third here.
He's right to skip quickly over Otto Spooky. In my opinion, Momus's least pleasurable album. Even though it has Bantom Boys and Cockle Pickers which are ambitious experiments. Life of the Fields is arguably a kind of last hurrah of of the Folktronic style and maybe appears for that reason. It's so so though.
Ocky Milk, in contrast, is like Vodka Jellies, another compendium of big, enjoyable tunes (that also manages to competently incorporate quite a lot of his weird experimentation). It's under-represented here. Though perhaps hard to do justice to it.
Of course, now he's having to rush. We're half-way through disk 3 and we're only starting on the really new stuff. Home produced albums which tend to have more songs on them than those made with expensive studio time in the 80s. The lush Joemus collaboration Widow Twankie deserves its slot here. Hypnoprism is woefully under-represented. As is Thunderclown. In comparison, two songs from Bibliotek seems generous. Though Erase, Momus's experiment with another folktronicesque genre - Hauntology - is worthwhile. Two each from Bambi, Terpsicore and Glyptothek are fair. Though I'd prefer Catholic App, Unreconstructed or Spore to The Hiker. (System of Usher is fantastic.)
And I wish he'd found room for Old Nick at the end. While Momus's last-of-the-album mawkfests (Ex-erotomane, Gibbous Moon) are often legendary, and The Vaudevillian is the uber-tearjerker of an ending, Old Nick's sly twist on the convention is equally fulfilling, and somehow sums up the Momus project better.
Anyway looks a great compilation for those who don't know or have Momus's ouvre. (I pretty much do have all these tracks, most of them legally.)
I am … flabbergasted … that
the Labour party has decided to commit suicide today. (Sunday 27 June,
2016).
Hilary Benn and friends have basically just declared that they
want Nigel Farage to be Prime Minister.
It takes stupendous incompetence
to make Nigel Farage into the most successful and competent party leader
in England. But right now, that’s what he is. A leader who actually
leads his party. And achieves the things he sets out to do.
Welcome to
the age of stupid.
So … what happened is this. We are out of Europe
because Cameron did a rash thing that backfired. And a lot of
traditional working-class Labour voters were sold a simplistic story by
the far-right, that immigrants were the reason for all the things that
were wrong in their lives and the economy. (Rather than, say, the 2008
crash, and Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity policies over the last
6 years)
So, the anti-Corbyn faction have spun that into the idea that
it’s Labour’s fault that the referendum went Brexit. And, in
particular, those who have beef with Corbyn, have decided to jump on the
bandwagon and claim that it’s particularly Corbyn’s fault for being
lukewarm on European membership; a reluctant Remain. It’s Corbyn wot
lost it.
Well, guess what. While a majority of Labour voted to remain, a sizeable chunk of Labour voted to leave. Labour IS conflicted over
Europe; the working class haven’t seen much of the benefit of
membership. And even remainers are sceptical. In other words, Corbyn’s
lukewarm attitude to Europe far more accurately reflects the opinion of
Labour membership and its traditional voters than any enthusiastic
Europhilia does.
Now most of Corbyn’s enemies are from the right of
Labour. The Blairite or New Labour side. Those who strongly believe that
to win, Labour needs to recapture the political centre and the
middle-class.
Maybe. But meanwhile, Labour is STILL haemorrhaging its
actual, real (as opposed to potential) support among the working class.
The SNP have taken its voters away from it in Scotland. UKIP is now
taking working class voters away from it in the rest of England.But
according to today’s plotters, Labour must orient itself yet further
towards the interest of the urban elites; be louder and more dedicated
in espousing them.
Except, simultaneously, it needs to also listen to the
“real concerns” that labour voters have about immigration. And,
ironically, Corbyn is both accused of bringing up questions like the
TTIP which are allegedly “irrelevant” to people on the doorstep (despite
being one of the most fundamental changes in legislation that Europe
was bringing to the UK) AND of “lack of leadership” (ie. not just
pandering to the crowd and media talking points)
He’s damned when he
does reflect Labour voters (ie. is lukewarm) and damned when he doesn’t
(ie. tries to talk about bigger issues, defends immigration)
(As a
comparison, imagine this was an uprising by pro-Brexit Labour MPs, led
by Kate Huey, claiming that Corbyn had backed the wrong horse and was
out of step with supporters. At least that argument would have the
benefit of coherence.)
The real delusion is this :
The Labour Party is
being torn apart by historical forces that are far bigger than Jeremy
Corbyn and his enemies. It serves multiple constituencies whose
interests (economic, political and ideological) are diverging
alarmingly. It finds it harder and harder to find positions that appeal
to all these constituencies and whenever it speaks up for one, it
alienates the others just a little bit more. (Perhaps Labour in any real
sense, as the coalition of working class economic interest and
middle-class liberal cultural interests is finished. Along with
the second-wave industrial economy that spawned that alliance.)
And
Corbyn’s critics are right. With his fusty old beliefs and principles,
perhaps he can’t reunite these different factions.
But the reason they’re
delusional is that neither can anyone else.
Corbyn’s critics, who blame
him personally him for this, are fantasizing about a unicorn politician,
someone who can magically be on everyone’s side at the same time :
pro-Europe, pro-market, pro globalization, low taxing, liked by the
right-wing media, and also pro-working class, protecting them from the
competition that immigrants and globalization bring, offering more
services etc. etc.In other words, they want a Trump-like, post-truth
politician with the ability to tell everyone what they want to hear
while not getting caught out. Basically, they’re hoping for their very
own Boris Johnson. Blair with added xenophobia.
But even if you
passionately believe in unicorns, and think Corbyn needs to be replaced
by one. You still ought to wait for the unicorn to arrive. Not just make
a unicorn-shaped hole in the hope that one will turn up to fill it.
Let’s
consider a couple of things :
1) The space of being right-wing of the
Labour party while being nicer than the Tories, is already occupied by
the Liberal Democrats. And they have long found very meagre pickings in
that zone. They have to content themselves to just playing the “we’re
the opposite of whoever you don’t like” game at the local level.
The
only time the LibDems did well, was as a way for left-wingers to protest
against Blair’s support for the Iraq War. The moment they went back to
pitching themselves as “saner Tories”, they were wiped out. This is a
common delusion but there is no “there, there” in the centre of British
politics. If there was, the LibDems would have ruled the country for
decades.
2) why did Corbyn win the leadership of the Labour Party in the
first place? The utter lack of plausible alternatives. Everyone else in
the campaign couldn’t articulate any position beyond “tell me who you
want me to be”. And that went down like a lead balloon.
Things are no
better now. If Corbyn goes, we know there are no unicorn populists in
the Labour Party who are waiting to fill that vacuum. There’s no one
with that magical ability to appeal to everyone. We know this because if
there were such a politician in Labour today, then we’d have already
heard from him (or her). They’d have already been prominent within the
Remain campaign. They’d have been out there with Alan Johnson winning
hearts and making headlines. Corbyn wouldn’t (and couldn’t) have stopped
that (despite his enemies trying to talk up a story of “sabotage”). Any
of today’s shadow cabinet resigners could have been out there making a
name for themselves saying brilliant things if they had it in them to do
it.
In practice, Labour was collectively lacklustre. It was
collectively lacklustre because it really is between a rock and a hard
place. The ONLY people who can argue that you can have the economic
liberalism of the EU AND protectionist anti immigration policies are
barefaced liars like Johnson and Farage. And, to their credit, Labour
wasn’t shameless enough to try to promise that. Even if the cost was
saying very little of consequence.
So, Labour had big problems in the referendum. But
Corbyn is a symptom, not a cause, of them.
This week, David Cameron, the
great Tory “success” of recent years, has been humiliated , revealed as
making a spectacular error of judgement and has fallen. Meanwhile Boris
Johnson is getting revealed as spectacularly dishonest. The entire
tissue of lies that is the Brexit campaign is unravelling. The financial
markets are in free-fall.
This is ALL the fault of right-wing
incompetence.If Labour went on holiday for a month, they should be 10
points ahead when they came back.
Instead, a bunch of self-indulgent MPs,
blinded by their own anger, confusion and frustration at Brexit and
panic over a near election, have decided this would be an ideal week to
turn in on themselves and break the Labour Party. Possibly for good.
In
the run up to an early general election (if it comes within the next 12
months) the story coming out of Labour should be ALL about how allegedly
“safe” Conservative hands clumsily dropped and broke the economy while
UKIP were telling outrageous porkies.
Instead the message will be a
confusing internal squabble about whether, in this party that almost
entirely supported remain, the leadership was enthusiastic enough
in its support for Europe. Despite that position being an overall
vote-loser.
Genius!
Instead of recognizing the fundamental challenges that
the 21st century presents to centre-left politics and parties : global
capitalism, high-speed finance, mass automation threatening most
traditional employment, mass movements of people due to continual unrest
and wars, climate change, social media, cryptography, blockchains etc.
etc. MPs in the “shadow cabinet”, the aspiring government in waiting, are
trying to personalize everything as Corbyn’s fault, and fantasize that
by getting rid of the hated leader, their unicorn saviour will magically
appear and heal the contradictions in the party, reunite them and make
everything OK with the electorate.
Now THAT is delusional.
If Labour
spends the next 6 months infighting, as other lacklustre non-entities
demand their turn to wilt in the spotlight of leadership, then the
beneficiary will be UKIP, whose pitch to the working-class will be “we
know what we stand for, we get things done (though we still haven’t
managed to purge ourselves of these immigrants because of Tory
prevarication)”. They’ll take an even bigger slice of working-class
voters from Labour, perhaps finally winning enough seats to force the
Tories into coalition.
Anyone who believes a “nationalist” party can’t
take the working class away from Labour should look to Scotland. And the
rise of far right parties in the rest of Europe.
Farage has already
pwned the Tory party, by spooking Cameron into giving him the referendum
that he can now claim credit for winning. He’s actually had Tory
leavers dancing to the tune of his propaganda campaigns. Now imagine a
coalition government with, say, Theresa May as notional prime-minister
and Farage as deputy. It wouldn’t take long for him to grab the oxygen
and become its public face (and perhaps driving force).
What stands
between us and that future is a united Labour party. Letter after letter
of shadow cabinet resigners stress that and say that Corbyn can’t unite
Labour. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s they who have decided
to refuse to be united under Corbyn.
When they say that he failed
because he failed to stop Brexit, they aren’t speaking for the 52% of
the country that voted FOR Brexit. They aren’t speaking for the
membership of the Labour Party that overwhelmingly voted Corbyn. They
aren’t speaking for the working class that was ambivalent about the
benefits of the EU and tempted to take a punt on something different.
They’re just publicly broadcasting their own cluelessness about the
contradictions within the Labour Party. And their willingness to try to
pin the blame on someone else.
It won’t end well. Corbyn has a mandate from
Labour members and supporters. He’s always put his principle over toeing
the party line, even when it made him unpopular. He has no reason to
think that this upswing against him has any more principle behind it
than naked fear and ambition.
So I think he’ll fight it. And we’ll see
Labour collapse into an angry, bad tempered leadership contest, with no
obviously strong / charismatic alternative to Corbyn coming forward.
Either Corbyn wins it leaving his detractors smouldering with resentment
and denuding the front-bench of even their meagre talents. Or someone
else comes through, who MPs like better but proves equally incapable of
solving the fundamental contradictions that Labour faces, but does drive
away the enthusiastic supporters who came on-board for and with
Corbyn.
Most likely you’ll see a very ugly competition where some
candidates espouse anti-immigration policies direct from UKIP, scaring
away liberal London, while Europhile Blairites tell a tired Polyannaish
story about the benefits of globalization that reinforces their
out-of-touchness with Labour voters in post-industrial regions.
Labour
was falling apart anyway, due to historical trends. But this coup is
like trying to arrest that process by hitting it with a big hammer. All
it will do is accelerate the fragmentation.
I'm not doing Platform Wars any more. But this seems big enough to deserve a comment. (quoting my Quora answer)
Microsoft has a history of buying fairly big, reasonable tech. brands that OUGHT to offer them an interesting direction to evolve strategically ...and then wasting them by leaving them wither into insignificance.
That's what they did with Skype, which they should have been able to evolve into a messaging app. competing with, and as compelling as, Whatsapp / Telegram / FB Messenger / Snapchat etc. Instead it's fading into obscurity.
They did it spectacularly with Nokia. Who now make almost no smart-phones for no noticeable improvement in Windows Phone sales.
They'll probably do this with LinkedIn.
It’s possible that under Satya Nadella things will be different. But the traditional M$ problem is that it tries to use the new acquisition to prop up Microsoft’s existing brands and strategies (ie. Windows, Office, Azure) rather than allowing the acquisition to suggest new strategies and exploring the new opportunities it brings.
Now LinkedIn itself was sliding into a bit of a decline. I think there was very little vision about what a disruptive, world-changing employment platform could be (eg. Phil Jones' answer to Why hasn't anyone disrupted LinkedIn yet? )
To recap, what if LinkedIn wasn’t just Yet Another Social Network left in the wake of Facebook’s dominance? What if LinkedIn’s “big hairy audacious goal” was something like “to double the world’s income”. (ie. to provide whatever will help its users earn more each year … whether by finding better paying jobs, doing more gigs on the side, being better matched with the right job, identifying and getting whatever training makes them more valuable to the market, learning how to negotiate better etc. etc.) To execute on that mission would put LinkedIn in the same league as Google / Facebook / Apple etc. The moment you think like that, multiple new directions, opportunities, potential income streams etc. simply fall out of it.
Now, is that a possibility under Microsoft ownership? Who knows? Nadella isn’t Ballmer. He, says he’s willing to change Microsoft. But it’s hard to know how big his vision is. Or how much he’s still trapped by the traditional forces and attitudes within Microsoft.
So this is another (and almost the last) chance for Microsoft to buy themselves into the social platform big league. They may be ready to do something interesting. But they squandered an amazing opportunity with Skype. And early talk about how they’re thinking of effectively using the community to sell Microsoft products to and analyze data from isn’t that encouraging.
I’d look for some kind of big insightful statement from Nadella before I get very excited about this.
Right now … the evidence is ambiguous : Read Microsoft CEO’s memo to staff about LinkedIn acquisition
Three policies I'd like to see a Pirate Party (or any forward looking political party) adopt with respect to providers of online services, social networks, communication feeds etc.
1) There should be an option to turn the filter-bubble off.
If you use an algorithmic filter to prioritise what is of interest to the user within a feed, you MUST also provide a version of the feed without that filter. And an easy way to switch it on or off.
2 Everyone owns their own "data-exhaust".
If you provide a service that gets its value from observing user behaviour you cannot claim exclusive ownership of that data. The user should have an inalienable right to share or license it with anyone else. (You aren't obliged to make it available to others (which might be genuinely arduous) but you can't complain if the user or another company (with the user's consent) figures out how to do it themselves.
3) Service providers must openly explain what data they are mining / inferring from their users.
Just as packaged foods must explain what ingredients go in to them. Online data-services must explain what they are inferring from your behaviour so that you know what you are revealing to them.
Microsoft, you idiots! Why do you try to force me to create a new Microsoft account to use Skype on my new Windows Machine?
I don't want another Microsoft account and I already HAVE a Skype account. (Which is yours anyway). Why not just silently merge the Skype and Microsoft identity back-ends and let me use the login / password that I already have?
What I'm going to do instead of migrating my account to Microsoft is restrict my Skype use to my Android phone (which still works, Skype on Linux broke a long time ago), and eventually migrate to other chat / VoIP solutions 99% of the time. And that's because you are being demanding and annoying rather than providing me with something useful that helps me do what I want to do.
Rant #2
HMRC (UK tax people) are absurd. Last year I set up a perfectly good online way to access my account. Today they want "confirmation" of the last 4 numerals of an "interest paying" bank account. I don't HAVE an interest paying bank account. I've certainly never registered one with them. But their stupid new "security" measure locks me out of my account with them because I can't present them with the details of one. WTF??????
These days I seem to do most of my writing / thinking / arguing etc. on Quora.
So for the record, here's what I'm saying about ISIS and the UK vote to join in airstrikes. (Question : "House of Commons in UK voted for action against ISIS/ISIL in Syria - Is this going to be another blunder like Iraq?)
It's utterly the wrong thing to do. And strategically somewhere between pointless and very counter-productive.
But it's not quite the same as the Iraq blunder. Iraq was an unforced war of choice against a non-beligerant nation for the purposes of socially re-engineering the middle-east : something we never had the ability to do and should have recognised from the start that we couldn't do.
In this case, the war has come to us. Or at least to France which is a pretty close ally. And IS explicitly say they WANT a war with us. (It's precisely because they want it that we shouldn't give it to them.) Nevertheless, IS is threatening us in a way that Iraq wasn't when we chose to involve ourselves in it. And we need some strategic response.
The basic problem in Syria is that the West wants to get rid of Assad. And two local powers - Russia and Iran - want to keep him. The West can't move fully against IS until that is resolved. We can't put boots on the ground in Syria without either a) Assad's permission, or b) explicitly going against Assad and therefore Russia and Iran.
This is why we're paralyzed. We all know that airstrikes can't actually beat ISIS ... airstrikes by themselves never beat anyone. We know that going in on the ground really would be a blunder, putting us into the quagmire where we try to hold territory and rebuild a state, under attack from all sides : the Assad government, more surreptitiously by Russia and Iran and their proxies, and by the remnant Sunnis who see themselves fighting for survival surrounded by hostile Shiites.
So, avoiding the quagmire, we have the second most amazingly idiotically bad strategy of all time ...
- We're going to bomb people from the air, with no hope of achieving any concrete victory.
- Some people we bomb will be ISIS fighters but many will be innocent civilians.
- Most of whom never wanted ISIS there in the first place; don't support ISIS, and only collaborate with it out of fear.
- We're going to teach those civilian Syrian Sunnis that we nevertheless consider that their lives are expendable in our loooooong war of attrition against ISIS.
- That's mainly about us "being seen" to do something.
- We'll act all shocked and outraged if some of the next generation of young Sunnis growing up in the area start to think of themselves as on ISIS's side and the West as their enemies. How perfidious can they be, considering we were only trying to help them?
- We will wait for a "miracle". That is, for some other local faction, who are nice and good people. That we'd be proud to associate ourselves with. And very friendly with us. And courageous enough to fight against both ISIS on the ground AND to march on and take over from Assad. And when that faction arises, won't our air-support be wonderfully useful to them?
That's it. That's the current strategy. Keep bombing people, and killing mostly civilians, until the miracle group turn up and do the dirty work for us.
Yeah, I think that sounds utterly fucked too.
So here's what we should be doing.
Phone up Assad, Russia and Iran. Tell them that our priorities have changed. That we aren't interested in deposing Assad at this time ... or any time in the near future. Tell him we'd like to co-operate against the common enemy. That we're willing to use our air-power to support his ground-troops against that enemy. In return we want a deal where he promises not to use chemical weapons (he won't need them with the all bombs we can provide him). And that he accepts some NATO troops / UN Peacekeepers on the ground in the retaken areas, as a guarantee that there isn't too much retribution against the Sunni population. Also we'll ask that he cuts a reasonably lenient deal with the other non ISIS, non Al Qaeda rebel factions that rose up against him.
Do the deal. Get the ISIS region back under Syrian government control. Then do a similar deal with the Iraqi government.
Maybe if we're really lucky we can get some kind of semi-autonomous Sunni area protected from Shiites, where we can work with local leaders. We don't want to make the mistake of abandoning Sunnis to vengeful Shiites, which is one of the processes that led to ISIS in the first place.
Does that sound like we've allied ourselves with an evil monster and sold out our other anti-Assad friends in Syria? Are we bad people when we do this?
Yes. And yes.
So here's the question. How serious are we? How badly do we want to kill ISIS? Are we (and our politicians) willing to pay the price?
To which Rupert Baines replied :
And the other thing people seem to ignore: we have been bombing ISIS for 14 months in Iraq
Have we been bombing civilians there?
If so, odd that their government is ok with it
If not, why would we do so in Syria?
No, we have been bombing oil fields, military bases and combat positions
And my further (lengthy) reply
I'm not ignoring that. I'm aware we're bombing a bit of Iraq ... at the invitation of the Iraqi government. And with the hope that Iraqi ground-troops will eventually move back into the IS region and re-establish the government's control there. As far as I know, we are NOT bombing a bit of Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. We are not co-ordinating with Syrian ground-troops. We don't particularly want them to re-establish control over the region. Indeed, we have an ill-disguised hope that Assad is still going to fall to some other rebel faction.
I know people seem to think that international law and boundaries are basically ignorable. Last decade our leaders promoted the idea that our expedience trumps such niceties. So we undermined the entire system.
But THAT is one of the big problematic legacies we're struggling with now ... do we want to re-establish the rule of law? Or it a free-for-all where might-makes-right? We can't have it both ways. We can't ignore international law whenever we like, and then convincingly claim that our wider actions are aimed at, and justified by, establishing such law and stability. Even if the British conveniently blind ourselves to the hypocrisy, the rest of the world notices.
ISIS define themselves against the system that we built and that we are ostensibly defending. If we now casually ignore our own system, then we just make ISIS's argument for them.
Everyone sort of admits that when we fight ISIS, we're "fighting an idea". And the priority when fighting an idea is to have a BETTER idea to offer in its place. But that's exactly what we don't have. Instead we're reiterating the mistake of Iraq : we break stuff, but don't know how to put it back together again. And then we're surprised when what emerges to fill the vacuum isn't to our taste. We hate all their ideas ... Islamic rules for creating a stable society through extreme religious obedience and harsh punishment; but we have no ideas that work better for them in their place.
We allegedly love the idea of autonomous nation-states. But draw and ignore boundaries for our colonial and post-colonial convenience. We allegedly love democracy, but support the Egyptian army overthrowing an elected Muslim Brotherhood. We love free-markets and competition, but Iraq was a feeding trough of well connected corporations sucking up the redevelopment budget.
I'm not saying this to make an argument that Islamic attacks on the West are justified because of our hypocrisy. Don't accuse me of that. I AM saying that the hypocrisy reveals the weakness of the ideas we're offering them. They are superficial facades which even we don't respect or believe in, deep down. But without having something better to offer, how do we "win" against the idea of the Caliphate?
And without a strategy for winning, you have nothing but tactics, designed to maintain some kind of stand-off.
When the attack comes in England, it will almost certainly be executed by British born or resident ISIS sympathizers. It's likely not to be directed from the ISIS region but be planned here too. And largely financed locally or from a very diffuse global network of funders. How exactly do tactical strikes on oil-fields in the ISIS regions prevent, or degrade ISIS's capacities to execute, such an attack?
Airstrikes attacking the military and even economy of the Islamic State are a perfectly valid tactic ... IF you are supporting a ground invasion to seize control of the territory and hand it over to a legitimate authority. That's fine.
But don't try to fool yourself, or anyone else, that airstrikes against ISIS territory are at all useful in preventing the next "terrorist atrocity" in London. There's no possible way that an airstrike in Syria is going to do that. There are no fat causal pipes that can be cut. Just diffuse memes floating across the internet and individuals circulating through the international air-transport system.
It's stupid to imagine that airstrikes in Syria will protect us. And that's what's totally terrifying, the ignorant level of political discourse. People who are meant to be responsible enough to run the country engaging in magical thinking about what military action can and can't do.
Airstrikes in Syria are ONLY useful in support of a ground-invasion. WHERE IS THE GROUND INVASION?
Sign of the times : Faraday Store an online shop specializing in wallets that are also Faraday Cages to prevent your RFID enabled credit-card and other documents being scanned without your knowledge or permission.
Welcome to a world where not only is IP used to stop you using software you DO want, but is also part of a major bargaining tool to oblige you to run software that you don't necessarily want.
The deal will supposedly grant Asus the right to Microsoft's vast collection of patents affecting Android phones.
As part of the deal Asus will bundle Microsoft software, including Office, on future Android phones.
So, to recap: corrupt German companies bribed corrupt Greek politicians to buy German weapons. And then a German chancellor presses for austerity on the Greek people to pay back the loans they took out (with Germans banks) at massive interest, for the weapons they bought off them in the first place. Is this an unfair characterisation? A bit. It wasn’t just Germany.
We are moving ever further from common law towards the tyranny of Roman
law in which everything is banned unless it is specifically permitted.
....
It is often said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that can
only reasonably apply when the law is written in such a way as to leave
no doubt as to what is permitted and what is forbidden. A law which can
put you in prison for seven years for not memorising all the exemptions
to a piece of legislation that amounts to an all-out war on chemistry is
capricious. You’ll get no argument from me if you say that most of
people who get prosecuted under this law will be lying when they claim
that they ‘didn’t know it was illegal’ but for a non-trivial minority it
will be the truth.
Of course, such "whitelist" laws are increasingly popular with new technology too.
Are the police really going to come after people with air freshener or
flowers in their home? Plainly not. But that's precisely the problem.
This is not law as we know it. It is the aspiration of a child-like
intellect cloaked in the respectability of a government bill. Trying to
ascertain the effects is like trying to sit down on an imaginary chair:
it does not exist. It is not there. It is just words. You might as well
legislate against sub-standard sausage sandwiches made by a deli in
2018.
The really depressing thing is that, with expected Tory, Labour and SNP
support, this insane bill is likely to pass with barely any opposition
at all. But it will at least serve as a symbol of how deranged our
debate on drugs has become.
Some depressing reading. I've been saying for a while that Facebook has basically "reinvented television", the stream fed to passive consumers, reflexively channel surfing or hitting a "like" button like pigeons in a Skinner Box.
But I hadn't realized that it's quite as bad as this. Read these excellent articles from The Awl :
It really doesn't help, the week we're all so enthused by the virtues of freedom of speech, that we're basically putting a man in prison for life because of what he said and wrote.
Oh, I know we have some other things on him too : supplying a phone and being part of kidnapping plot. But, be honest with yourself, if that's ALL he'd done, and he'd never written or said anything else, would he really be getting put in a Supermax prison for the rest of his life?
As always, it's a mixed bunch. But some tracks I'm already liking very much.
The GhostBoxish Bathyscaphe :
System of Usher :
The Brutalist :
Catholic App is a classic Momus twisted take, satirising the end of privacy.
I probably disapprove of Unreconstructed (after unwrapping its layers of irony) but it's musically and lyrically clever.
Spore is a salacious zero-g love-song with a luscious tune.
If Thunderclown was anything to go by, I'll probably get into the rest after a couple of listens too. Even at his most antipathic or discordantly "experimental" Momus's songs are always wriggling with little earworms.
Saddam's Chemical Weapons : Existed, sold to him by the US / European companies, covered up by Pentagon at the cost of their own soldier's health due to potential embarrassment.
It is a criminal waste that no institution is able to give him a context to do bigger work. Although perhaps he would end up being too constrained.
Anyway, congratulations Dave. Happy 20th. And thank you. For the inspiration and everything you've contributed. I'm still using my software based on the Concord outliner every day. And I think more and more people are getting ready for the next reboot.
Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth and bans political parties, trade unions and all forms of dissent; deprives women of many of their most basic rights; kills "witches"; has recently declared atheists to be terrorists; and persecutes LGBT people. It should surely be an ostracised regime. And yet this is the biggest market for British arms, with our government approving £1.6bn worth of exports, ranging from equipment for machine guns to "components for military equipment for initiating explosives."
But he puts an economist in charge of the project with an explicit assumption its an economic problem that industry has failed to invent more antibiotics.
So lets see if the committee starts recommending the banning of antibiotics in intensive farming practices or if they just come with recommendations to extend "intellectual property" rights or other incentives for big pharma companies.
I have to admit that I see how this happened, and I would probably have signed off on the ethics of it myself (or been willing to be part of this). But I can see how it looks pretty bad to be caught doing it. And frankly, maybe it is pretty bad.
OTOH : I think what they found out knowledge worth having. But it's largely worth having in order to know the danger that corporations having this power present. You wouldn't want the academic study of this to be banned, and for the research to disappear into internal surreptitious tinkerings where no-one else ever sees the results except in private reports to the marketing department and advertisers.
Microsoft seem to be doing something pretty cool here. Tight integration of a custom UI device (the stylus on their latest Surface tablets) with their note-taking app. OneNote.
Obviously I'm sticking with OWL, but this is pretty nice. And you can imagine them taking it a lot further. Extra buttons on the pen. What about a chording-keyboard on a pen? Other apps. accessible through OneNote etc.
My conversation with Aharon Amir on Search Art and the language of search is now published in the Society of the Query Reader.
Available as a PDF or other online formats linked from the page.
WTF? At this point the surveillance-industrial complex is just laughing at us. The US has done nothing to prevent the NSA demanding that Facebook etc. hand over user's data to it. Has done nothing to make it legal for Facebook to even tell its users if the NSA has demanded their data. And yet Facebook says "trust us, we'll only use an always-open mic channel on your person for good".
At this point it's just comical that they'd ask for this, and comical we'll accept it.
BTW: You can sign a petition if you think it will do any good.
PS : I'm glad I shut my Facebook account and don't use the app.
And, of course, it's his level of genius. And it's awesome. But, hell, aren't we scared yet?
Given everything we now know about the end of privacy, the fact that the NSA have back-doors to all our mainstream social software that Google are legally prevented from telling us about? And that Google are putting always-on cameras onto everyone's face?
Is the thing that we are really missing the ability to have millimetre accurate models of all the geometry (and therefore, via recognition algorithms, inventories of all the objects), in every room we enter? Collected automatically? And potentially streamed to Google's servers? Do I want to have someone walk into my room and immediately start telling Google / the NSA everything I have in it?
Sure, it's going to make amazingly competent robots, though.
But iBeacon is much more than that. It is the infrastructure on which the iWatch will run. For all intents and purposes, iBeacon is the iWatch. The advantage of a wearable device, after all, rests in its ability to interact with the Internet of Things. All that remains for Apple is to build its Internet around the world’s things.
According to the email, sent the day after the News of the World's final issue and six days before Brooks was arrested, Blair also told her he was "available" to her and Rupert and James Murdoch as an "unofficial adviser" on a "between us" basis.
But what has struck me is how seriously many media figures take [the claim that public scrutiny of the secret service "helps terrorists"]. In the vast majority of interviews I’ve done about NSA reporting, interviewers adopt a grave tone in their voice and trumpet the claims from U.S. officials that our reporting is helping the terrorists. They treat these claims as though they’re the by-product of some sort of careful, deliberative, unique assessment rather than what it is: the evidence-free tactics national security state officials reflexively invoke to discredit all national security journalism they dislike.
Fiver is a great place to experiment with online commerce. Both with buying and selling new product ideas. And it's users are both innovative and internationalized. And the prices are so cheap that the fluctuations of BitCoin's pricing might be less of an issue. (What does it matter if your $5 gig fluctuates between $1 and $15? )
In other words, it seems like an excellent test-bed, place to grow.
The key difference, however, is that while those involved in Anonymous
can and have faced their day in court for those tactics [DDoS], the British
government has not. When Anonymous engages in lawbreaking, they are
always taking a huge risk in doing so. But with unlimited resources and
no oversight, organizations like the GCHQ (and theoretically the NSA)
can do as they please. And it’s this power differential that makes all the difference.
Oh yeah, I'm on a roll, at the moment, of actually "releasing" stuff I've been doing over the last few months.
This one's really exciting for me : a version of Gbloink! that's written in CoffeeScript / Javascript and running in the browser. Longer story over on the Gbloink! site.
Try it here ... but be aware it's still pretty experimental. However, it is Gbloink! And it runs in the browser. w00t!
