We're all publishers now

Well, you are one if you have a Facebook or Twitter account. When it comes to social networking online there are two kinds of people: those that get it and those that don’t. Those that get it act like a publisher. Those that don’t, don’t.



Either wittingly, or through instinct alone, those that get it think about their audience for a second or two before updating their Facebook status or posting a tweet. They may not be making money and their audience might be counted on the fingers of one hand, but they have addressed the question that all publishers ask: why would anyone want to read this? Sadly such people are the minority.

Pray tell me, why I should give a rats’ arse that you’re having your hair cut? Okay, if you’ve had long hair for years and getting it all shaved off that might be worthy of note. Better still if you attach ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos. But if you are telling the world that you are having a trim to your bog-standard short-back-and-sides why the hell should I care? Exactly. SO PLEASE DON’T TELL ME.

The best tweets tend to bring a specific factoid to the attention of the reader – often in the form of a comment on a referenced webpage. When there’s something worthy of note going on, fine, do a tweet. But please don’t tell me that you’re visiting gran in York, going to the supermarket or otherwise engaged in the routine drudgery of life. Such activities in and of themselves just aren’t interesting. Or entertaining.

Let’ take a look at that cute Vlogetta on YouTube. She has a million clips. She’s just – like - you know – talking about her life. Now let’s take a look at the comments appearing under her latest post. (Posting a comment is an act of publishing too, after all). Two types of comment dominate.

The first goes like this: “You’re gorgeous!!!! I wanna bang you.” Well, thanks for that Spotty Teenage Boy, wherever you may be. In what way does this comment make sense to the reader? Do I need to be told Vlogetta is gorgeous, or am I allowed to make my own mind up about that? And if I want to bang her, why should I care that you do? Perhaps Teenage Boy isn’t interested in me. Perhaps he only wants to communicate his sensitive feelings to the object of his desire. Okay, so Vlogetta now thinks you’re a rude jerk and possibly dangerous. If you doorstep Vlogetta, revealing yourself as crazyloon69, she will scream and run.

Then there are the sensitive types. “You’re wonderful. I just loved the way you blah blah blah”. These comments are just as bad. At the end of the day Sensitive Teenage Boy just wants to bang her too. But in some sort of hormone-fuelled delusion believes his sensitive, nay debonair, approach might just work. Even the absurd inner workings of a teenage boy mind can’t escape the harsh truth that a raging crush on Hannah Montana is unlikely to be consummated. But Vlogetta is sooo much more down to earth. Just look at the shaky video and the titillating sight of her boudoir. My God, she could almost be the girl next door. Maybe, just maybe, she will be wooed by your admiring comments. NO SHE BLOODY WON’T. She thinks you’re a total sap. Leave off and get a life.

There are plenty of other types of YouTube videos to comment on. So why don’t you just say that the previous commenter was a jerk. “You calling me a jerk! You’re the jerk”….”No, no, you’re jerk”….”Well then, you’re a double-jerk with knobs on”….”In that case you’re a triple jerk with an extra helping of cheese”….and so it goes on.

The nirvana promised by the IT revolution is being buried under a mountainside of pointless drivel. It wouldn’t be so bad if such comments could all be ignored, but the piles of chaff are so huge that it is increasingly difficult to dig out the grains of wheat lurking within.

Nor have Vlogetta and her friends thought about the afterlife of material they publish. It can escape their control, linger for decades and come back to haunt them. But they aren’t thinking like publishers. Nor are the multitudes of adults who get caught out by Facebook gaffes. The wife of MI6’s head-honcho presumably wasn’t when she happily posted her address.

I’m not saying social networking is a bad thing. I am just pleading for people to think of their audience and the consequences before publishing stuff. If I am your friend - or business contact – what would I be interested in? Maybe you’ve just had a baby? Great – show me a picture. Maybe you just finished the best book you’ve read in years. Okay, tell me. Tell me about significant changes and turning points. Just don’t tell me about the trivia. I have more than enough of that in my own life and I really, really don’t need to know about yours.

All this tweeting and Facebooking and blogging and posting thousands of pictures on Flickr. Is it all just a mildly pathetic attempt to give permanence and meaning to our lives? These online traces of ourselves scream: “Yes I do exist. Yes I do matter!” But you don’t. Or at least you don’t matter any more or less than you did before. Don’t judge a Facebook by its cover. The only thing that matters is the sum of your real life achievement. Not how many friends you have on Facebook. And filling the airwaves with clutter does not count as an achievement.

It's no surprise that people aren’t clued up on this score. Why? Because the publishing and broadcasting industries are themselves committing the same errors. In theory, the media should be feeding us content made by people who actually have something to say. But with increasing bandwidth (ie: more TV channels and cheaper book publishing) there is a hell of a lot of space to fill. The temptation has been to pad out the cultural airways with cheap and easy-to-churn-out junk. This junk has served to obscure the genuinely valuable nuggets, which get lost in the clutter.

I just moved to a bigger flat and was shocked how quickly and seemlessly all the extra space got gobbled up with furniture, piles of papers…and whatever else. There is a real danger that infinite bandwidth will mean infinite clutter. Bad news for my flat. Bad news for culture too?

Three electric ideas

British energy policy is in a mess. Tony Blair was willing to stick his neck out over a war in the desert to achieve who-knows-what, but wasn’t willing to stick his neck out politically to secure the basic needs of citizens at home. So no new nuclear power stations for us then.


Instead of a timely decision on replacing ageing coal-fired power stations, we are apparently now faced with a single option: to build a lot more gas ones. According to the Economist (8th August 2009) the government prevaricated so long that the other options…aren’t any more. Neither renewable sources (too weedy) nor nuclear power (too slow to build) can plug the gap in energy capacity looming over the next decade or two.


Once again the system of British politics and government failed to deliver on the basics. While politicians spout endless hot air, our reliance on fossil fuels ticks on. In 2008 coal accounted for almost a third of the electricity supply. (Gas accounts for 46% and nuclear for 13%).


The sad thing is that a sensible energy policy really isn't difficult to concoct. The aspirations below are a rough stab I’ve made. The overall effect would be to slash UK carbon emissions by 90%.


Demand side

* The human population is out of control. Just look at a graph like this, showing how it’s mushroomed. The international community should aim to reduce the world population to 1bn souls in the long term, through peaceful and voluntary means. In such a world the UK might be expected to have a of population around 15m, reducing demand by 75%

* Roll out ‘smart’ electricity meters – to control demand more efficiently, reducing peak loads on the National Grid

* More energy efficient appliances and devices – notably boilers, lightbulbs and standby mode (Much progress is indeed being made here already)

* Improved insulation in buildings (ditto)


Supply side

* Nuclear: 40% of supply
Accept the inevitable and get on with building it

* Gas: 30%
Not great environmentally - but better than oil and coal

* Renewables: 20%
Mainly offshore wind and wave/tide – plus a bit of biomass, anaerobic digestion, hydro etc

* Coal & incineration: 10%
Dirty, but somebody’s got to do it


Three things that should be done but aren’t…

1. R&D funding for low-efficiency solar panels. These could be produced as roof tiles, possibly looking similar to the slate tiles on rooftops today. They need to be cheap and robust. Get it right and even in the UK there’s room to produce (hazarding a wild guess) 10% of our electricity.

2. Making more from raindrops. They may be small but let's face it, there are a lot of them. They already power the vast turbines inside dams, but the potential of rain on rooftops has (to my knowledge) not been explored. What if the kinetic energy of water falling down guttering could be harnessed? I suggest research into such micro-generation of electricity. The power from each downpipe might be tiny, but there are a lot of downpipes in this world. The trick, clearly, is to produce an exceedingly cheap and robust device.

3. One of the problems with renewable electricity is that you can’t turn it up on demand. When power surges on the National Grid at half time during that crucial World Cup qualifier, the wind won’t suddenly pick up in the North Sea. As a result “25GW of wind power…would be worth only around 5GW of fossil fired generation,” according to the Economist. Fair enough. So isn’t it time them that the scientists get their thinking caps on to work out better ways of storing renewable energy? Instead of building a huge excess of windmills, power generated on windy days needs to be held in reserve. One way is to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Modest facilities like this currently exist, but it strikes me that this is an area ripe for investigation and expansion. If British scientists and engineers got really good at it, this could be an interesting niche for UK plc.

If you can think of other possibilities, let me know…

On UK defence procurement

On the Today Programme the other day defence procurement minister Quentin Davies responded to accusations that a report saying that £2.5bn was being wasted annually had been suppressed.

Is it just me or does he sound exactly like you’d expect a Conservative minister to sound? Quite spooky I thought. It was as if I was listening to the government of 1994…or 1984 for that matter. Putting that aside, Mr Davies was attempting to make the case that poorly executed and horrifically wasteful procurement practices are behind us. No more would billions be wasted on the likes of Nimrod, he suggested. Military procurement is much smarter now.

There is cause for hope.

There has been much talk of the super-expensive new British aircraft carriers due to be built next decade. There are legitimate question about whether we need these leviathans at all. However, if we do decide to go ahead and build them an important nettle has finally been grasped.

Too often the Ministry of Defence has been suckered by the same setup: in an ill-conceived bid to save money upfront, they embark on a oddball alternative and ultimately pay more than if they had just been realistic about what things cost in the first place. This is what happened with Nimrod…twice. Rather than buying a new off-the-shelf product, the MoD decided it would rebuild a few old UK airframes that had already been flying for decades. With only a dozen or so planes getting converted it was never going to make financial sense. Nor would Nimrod ever secure export orders, given its quirky nature. Then the inevitable happened – as it does with immensely complex technology - the project ran into trouble as the engineers realised they had bitten off more than expected. Toilet. Billions. Flush.

With the aircraft carriers the setup is slightly different. They were originally intended to have catapult launchers. This is the standard way that heavy aircraft are thrown off ships. The only alternatives to date are helicopters and the vertical take-off (VTOL) Harrier. The shiny new aircraft carriers will be equipped with the Joint Strike Fighter, one version of which is VTOL. So in theory you can get away without the catapults on deck. It’s exactly the kind of knee-jerk option that penny-pinching politicians are likely to take. For a while it looked like the catapults would indeed be removed. Such a course of action would make no military sense.

With catapults, these huge carriers could operate just about any aircraft used on other aircraft carriers around the world, notably by the French and Americans. If you’re going to make a carrier that big, you might as well put a catapult on it. In future operation the British carriers will thus be unable to accommodate combat aircraft off other carriers, even if in an emergency.

Overseas engagements have a habit of being multinational so it doesn't make sense to be incompatible with allied equipment. It is also obvious that the military world is going the way of unmanned aircraft. Some have already been operated off ships and there plans to introduce bigger ones – that can drop bombs – on US carriers. You can of course make helicopters without pilots too, but the combination of range, speed and payload requirements mean that regular wings are required at the end of the day. And that means catapults. (Taking off vertically in a helicopter comes at the price of aerodynamic efficiency, saddling them with less range and lower speed).

For the price of a catapult or four, the British navy would lose compatibility with our allies and slam shut the door on future developments. Admittedly, the cash saving would run into the millions, but it’s still tiny percentage of the total cost of building and equipping two aircraft carriers.

One or both of these issues would inevitably come back to haunt the navy in some future conflict. Politicians would be forced to correct the problem, doubtless at a cost four times as great as if they had just included the damn catapults in the first place.

“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly,” as they say. Either do it or don’t do it. Just don’t half do it.

The good news is that Quentin Davies appears to have accepted now that the carriers should have catapults. Ironically the decisions wasn't made because it was considered a good idea to have them even with a compliment of VTOL fighters on board.

It seems that MoD may do a U-turn on the type of JSF being purchased. The S/VTOL type may be scrapped in favour of a more conventional variant of the same aircraft.

Maybe the old MoD dog really can learn a new procurement trick and get it right for once.


Coming soon...
Why UK defence strategy remains neither fish nor fowl

On Robert S. McNamara

It’s been a month since the death of Robert S. McNamara, that most significant of American Defense Secretaries and I’d like to add a few belated notes to the eulogies and obits. Widely know as one of the main architects of the Vietnam war, here are a couple of lesser known factoids: McNamara’s middle name was Strange and he is credited as the first Secretary to bring modern management efficiency to the vast corridors of the Pentagon.

I never met McNamara but came close in the early 1990s when I was writing a history thesis about US involvement in Vietnam during President Kennedy’s administration. I’d already interviewed a couple of interesting characters. Lou Conein was a CIA operative mixed up in the coup that brought about the demise of President Ngo Dinh Diem and with him any last vestige of chance that South Vietnam could survive. It’s quite weird to sit down with someone who mentions en passant, “Ho Chi Minh was a very personable fellow when you met him…I really had nothing personally against him at all.” Lou, you see, had been in the OSS during the Second World War and briefly worked with the nationalist leader. By 1963 the old friend was an old foe and let’s just say that Lou had a lot of dental appointments in the weeks before the coup in South Vietnam.

Then there was U. Alexis Johnson of the State Department. An old fellow who lived in a luxury apartment in Washington DC with a black maid who – wearing a classic old style uniform – served us coffee at the elegant table in the elegant dining room. It was like living inside Gone with the Wind or something. That aside, the man was a delight. A mantelpiece full of pictures of him shaking hands with about five Presidents. He had been one of around a dozen people holed up with Kennedy in the emergency committee deciding the fate of the world during the Cuban Missile crisis. Now he was sad about the death of his wife. She had fallen in the bathroom and a breath later he talked of how he met her in the 1920s and drove around the countryside. With charm he invoked the phrase “and one thing led to another” on more than one occasion when referring to the sexual turning points of his life. But I digress.

The point is that of course I would never be able to interview the man at the centre of it all - JFK. But McNamara was his right hand man when it came to Vietnam and he was the highest level interviewee left to muster. His office politely turned down my approach though saying he was busy finishing his book. No matter. I had already studied my topic in depth and felt I had a handle on the man.

McNamara was a decent human being. He was smart too. He had his failings of course, believing in the power of numbers just a little too much, but as failings go that isn’t too bad now is it. And he got it horribly wrong with Vietnam. By his own admission he incorrectly viewed the conflict through the pink-tinted spectacles of the cold war: as a struggle between capitalism and communism. This isn’t how the Vietnamese saw it of course. To them this was a war of national liberation against yet another bunch of foreign imperialists. First the Chinese, then the French, now the Americans. Charlie was used to it.

So the slicked-back former Ford exec misunderstood the war but he was not a bad man. Most certainly not an evil man. McNamara was a better and more impressive human being than most of us will ever be. And yet…and yet his decisions led to thousands, maybe millions, of his fellow humans being killed and maimed. Babies burned by napalm. Sons tortured. Daughters raped. McNamara had crafted that policy of war. This is what flowed from his policy.

And you’re telling me the guy wasn’t evil…or warped…or deranged…or degenerate in some way? Yes indeed. This is precisely what I’m saying. McNamara was a good man.

Conspiracy theories are fashionable nowadays, especially when it comes to JFK. Ultimately, they all say the same thing: the evil of this world is down to conspirators who lurk in the shadows and manipulate events for their own malevolent ends. They murder the good and the brave. But let me tell you this Mr Conspiracy Theory Man, in the middle ages peasants rarely blamed the king for their troubles. No. Instead they invariably blamed the ‘king’s evil advisors’. Of course in reality the situation they bemoaned had almost always been signed off by the king, it’s just that the peasants preferred not to believe it. So it is with modern day conspiracy theories. The most tragic events are simply not allowed to be explained by an unfortunate swirl of complexity, randomness and misapprehension. No. A sinister controlling force must be found. It has to be the king’s evil advisor wot done it. The problem couldn’t possibly be on our side of the table, but over there, way yonder, among the shadowy world of wicked conspirators. So convenient to think so and such total bollocks.

The really scary thing about the world is not that awful things happen because nasty, evil people conspire to create them. The really scary thing is that good people – good people with normal flaws who make understandable mistakes – can give rise to the most despicable situations. Now that is Strange.

A new way to do income tax

The system of income tax is in need of an overhaul. The current setup remains unconsciously wedded to 19th century thinking and technology.

I’m suggesting an end to the assumption that, for a given salary, there is a single rate of tax. It’s the equivalent of industry shifting away from straightforward mass production techniques towards an era of mass personalisation.

Before I get on to that though, what’s wrong with the current system? Off the top of my head I’d say:

1. Not enough people are paying it. The book Freakonomics mentions a 20% evasion rate in the USA and this figure is doubtless much higher in some other countries. The reasons…

2. Virtually all connection between the money you pay in tax and what it’s spent on has been lost. You pays your money into a huge dark pit – called the Treasury – a bunch of which comes out the other side to be spent on things you don’t agree with (the Iraq war say) or wasted in a giant cesspool of mismanagement and bureaucracy. When you walk into a shop, you know exactly what your money is buying. Governments seem to think this isn’t necessary: that the mere concept of “government spending” is enough to satisfy us. It isn’t. There urgently needs to be a tighter connection established between our hard-earned money and how it’s spent.

3. This cuts both ways - those drawing benefits also feel no particular sense of loyalty to the donor. The money isn’t from people it’s from a faceless state machine. The system lures recipients into the assumption that the money is always a right and not a privilege. The facelessness also encourages fraud.

4. The tax system is a very blunt tool. In a world where individualism is so highly prized (arguably too highly prized) the UK income tax system puts us into one of three buckets: no tax, standard rate and higher rate.

I propose using technology to break this old tax paradigm that assumes just a single variable: how much money you earn. Other than that, the tax system is largely a one-size-fits-all affair. Governments are missing a trick here.

Citizens should each have access to their very own online ‘account’ with the government. When you pay tax your account gains credits and, conversely, as you draw benefits/services you lose credits.

As such, Mr and Ms. Average would be expected to contribute exactly the same amount as their draw out of the government over the course of their lifetimes. Their account would stand at zero when they die as they put in to the system the same amount as they drew out.

But of course there are those with more money who pay more tax into the system than they will ever receive out of it. These net contributors will see what they’ve paid in over the average odds.

Similarly those in debit will see by how much. This is private data and the purpose is not to stigmatise those who are poor or pensioners or otherwise ‘in the red’ but to state honestly what the financial situation is.

This is the clever bit: a single rate of tax per income rate band would be replaced by two rates. As such, the standard rate income tax might be set at, say, 20/25%, while higher rate is set at, say, 40/50%. Different people start paying different rates of tax. Let me explain…

Those in net credit at any time would pay the lower rate in each pair, while those in net debit would pay a higher rate. What good does this do? It ends the notion that benefit received from the government is ‘free’ money. It injects the notion that government services come with strings attached. It re-introduces a sense of personal responsibility.

The upshot is that someone who had been unemployed and clocked up £10,000 in benefits before finding a job would pay the higher figure in each band until she/he made up the £10,000. So the the money is clawed back by the state through the individual paying 25% rather than 20% standard rate tax (or 50% instead of 40% if they’re lucky enough to get into that bracket).

Example 1: someone with £20,000 of earnings liable to standard rate tax would take a decade paying off their ‘debit’ (5% of £20,000 each year) before returning to the lower standard rate of 20%.

Example 2: someone on a higher income, with (let’s imagine) a full £30,000 earnings liable to standard rate tax and a further £35,000 at higher rate, would ‘pay off’ their £10,000 benefit in two years. At that point their rates go down from 50%/25% to 40%/20%.

The good thing about the system is that it wouldn't squeeze money unduly out of people who can’t pay it. If you’re not earning any money your government debits would mount up in theory, but you would never reasonably be expected get back into credit.

This way, all government service suddenly relate much more closely to the individual. In some cases they could be viewed vaguely like a soft loan (from a caring aunt who would never dream of getting the money back until you were willing and able to pay it). Detractors would say that this is all akin to extending the much-hated mechanism of student loans. I disagree.

Nor is this proposal incompatible with the principle of redistributing wealth from rich to poor. There is nothing proposed here to suggest that this needs to stop or be curtailed (and for what it’s worth I believe that it should continue). Indeed, these tax reforms should help any redistribution become more equitable.

Ascribing government costs to an individual is quite straightforward in some cases: a hip-replacement operation costs £x while any unemployment benefits received can be logged to the nearest pence. It gets more difficult when it comes to something like defence spending. Here one could argue that the rich receive a disproportionate benefit from not being overrun by foreign hordes (as they have more to lose). As such, I would propose that defence spending is not apportioned equally among all citizens but correlated with income.

Such teething issues aside, I see no reason why each citizen should not get to see an online profile of government services apportioned to themselves…and whether they are covering these costs or not. And those that aren’t should expect to make up for it in future if they can. What’s so unreasonable about that?


Coming soon... Tax hypothecation: sexy or what?