Can you be a Futurist without being over-excited?

64 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW FOR THEN:

How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear

by Ben Hammersley, Hodder & Stoughton,434pp. 

Reviewed: 4 August 2012

In my time I've reviewed many books about the future, and each has made claims that irritate me as a reader. But  I admire books that provoke thought, and maybe there's got to be some drama to keep the pages turning.  

Ben Hammersley addresses this book to "non-geeks", who are presumed to be already anxious about a future that they know they don't understand, but will have to endure.   You may need to be already a little bit geekish to enjoy the provocations he offers by way of 64 Things You Need to Know.... 

Publishers evidently believe that titles promising hidden knowledge are good for book sales. They may be right.  As a contrarian, my instinct is to say "Why 64? Why not 4 or 512?".  In fact, Hammersley gives us 65 chapters, beginning binary-style with 00 and ending with 64. 

My inner geek mutters again: "64 is a nice round binary number, a power of 2. Why not number your chapters in the base-16 hexadecimal notation used by computer programmers? Give us 65 chapters if you will, but number them 00 to 41 hex ?"  Then supply non-geeks with a link to an online hexadecimal converter in case they get lost.

But not much in the world is really binary. Even the genius of computational logic is the way that infinite complexity can be constructed upon machine logic that basically only understands ON and OFF as the prime binary digit. 

Let's face it, most average citizens are worried enough about how to control email inboxes or how long we can avoid committing our lives to smart-phones and social networking.

Ben Hammersley seeks to bring aid to the anxious.  He is a British explainer and prober of the directions and affects of the revolution in computerized communications, Editor-at-Large of the geek journal Wired, and the “UK Prime Minister’s Ambassador to Tech City” (an Internet industry concentration in London).

Any reader may find here more, or many less, than 64 things you need to know.  There's no linear narrative and you can skip randomly about like browsing Wikipedia. There are at least 64 ideas worth thinking about, but readers will differ as to which are worth worrying about.

Privacy, the future of media business models, unprecedented exploitation of databanks of personal information - short chapters will stir you to thought on any of these.

At the wacky end we get serious discussion of The Singularity (Thing 53),  whereby artificial intelligence created by humans is expected to evolve beyond the control of its creators, like Frankenstein’s monster.  We humans are to be subjugated by machines, sometime before 2050.

My personal favourite new Thing is the “spime” -  a “self-documenting object that can interact with the world by tracking its own process of production and gathering information about its usage”.  The object gains in value as it accrues information about itself.  Let's all be spimes.

Read the full review...

Richard Thwaites worked for some years in the Australian Government’s National Office for the Information Economy.

Farm Subsidies make fraud of US Free Trade demands

THE BIG HANDOUT

How U.S. subsidies and corporate welfare corrupt the world we live in and wreak havoc on our food bills 

by Thomas Kostigen, Scribe, 288pp.  

Reviewed: 21 July 2012

In the West we have been led to believe that "Free Trade" is an essential expression of the economic principles of free market economics.  We have also been told that electoral democracy is the political equivalent of the free market -  it aggregates  free choice of individuals into the political decisions of national-scale societies.

When I worked on international trade negotiations for some years, I learned that political democracy can often be the enemy of free trade.  The ability to compete against the cheapest producers in the world is not the only value that governments must consider when they are deciding how to regulate imports and exports.  Free trade forces structural adjustment, and structural adjustment means disruptions to local industry.   You may argue about the long-term national interest, but in a democracy you can be sure than economic pain will cost votes and can change governments.

Nobody spruiks the principles of Free Trade more strenuously than the United States, but Thomas Kostigen's book tells us that the home of free market economics does not practice what it preaches.  Kostigen describes an economy characterized by production subsidies and discriminatory tax breaks that make nonsense of free market principles, and that make US arguments for global Free Trade seem hypocritical.

He asserts that American exports of subsidized wheat, cotton and rice are destroying the domestic economies of developing countries, thus contributing to anti-American sentiment and even terrorism.

With congressional elections every two years, the USA is never out of election mode.  The few politicians who dare to resist the loud, ruthless and well-funded industry lobbyists are outvoted by those who dare not resist them.

Free markets, national or international, do not offer easy solutions to the "creative destruction" that economists see as a necessary outcome of unregulated competition.  

Should the cost pressures of ruthless competition be allowed to force agricultural communities to destroy their own soils and ecologies, as humans have done repeatedly through history?

Can a democratic electorate ever be sufficiently far-sighted to support long-term protection of common resources, and to accept the short-term pain of economic adjustment?  

Kostigen can't address these issues, but he shines an uncomfortably bright light on the failures of the American system to deliver the results its people deserve and the world needs.

Read the full review 

Richard Thwaites has participated in Australia’s international trade liberalization negotiations.

Can the Idea of a University survive political funding?

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University,

by Richard Hil, NewSouth, 238pp. 

The liberal ideal of the free-thinking, knowledge-producing University has always been challenged by those who sought to direct the output of intellectual effort, whether for ideological or economic purposes. Currently in the West, it is utilitarian economics that most threatens that liberal ideal.

There was outrage in Canberra, Australia's capital city, when the Australian National University announced substantial cuts to the teaching budget at its School of Music.  The School had started as an independent conservatorium with wide community and local government support, but was absorbed by the ANU about ten years ago. The incident was a stark reminder that the relations between a university and its host community can not be taken for granted.

Where universities are funded by taxation, the priorities of the university can reflect the politics of the state.

Richard Hil  makes a compelling case that the intrusive administrative demands of today’s universities drive highly-motivated academics to despair, resignation, or mute repression, in a “Whackademia” dominated by glib managerialism.

Is it efficient to make salaried academics devote thirty percent of their time to writing applications (mostly unsuccessful) for research grants, countless more hours filling in university-generated forms and sitting in committees for dubious “performance management” schemes that purport to measure the immeasurable?  Or  trying to meet publication quotas regardless of the state of their research projects? 

Few of Hil’s interviewees had any faith in the accuracy of the bureaucratic measures by which their careers and future opportunities were being determined.  Patronage, favouritism, rivalry and revenge were assumed to be at least as significant for a person’s rating as any documented criteria. 

University leaders have become brand managers focussed on competitive ratings and arcane measures of research performance, because these dubious criteria determine the flow of funds to their institution.

We are left pondering how the global demand for vocational credentials, at competitive market rates, can be met by the same institutions that we might fund to foster thoughtful long-term contributors to our national cultural and scientific capital, with no immediately measurable market value.  This used to be the ideal of the University.

Read the full review

Liu Xiaobo, the angry Nobel Peace laureate

NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED 
Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo,
ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, with foreword by Vaclav Havel 
Belknap Harvard Press, 355pp. 

Nobel Peace Prize laureates can be angry people.  Nobel himself spent a lifetime making explosives and selling armaments, then funded an annual prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Laureates have had warlike histories: Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger among a good few others. Most have had nothing to do with armies or peace congresses, but contributed to “fraternity between nations” by demonstrating moral confrontation against political power. Jose Ramos Horta, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama come to mind.

In 2010 the Peace Prize Committee infuriated the Chinese government by selecting Liu Xiaobo, then as now in a Chinese prison, charged with “incitement to subvert state power”. His “crimes” were purely literary, but enough to enrage the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

This book selects essays and commentaries published by Liu, at personal risk, in magazines and online from around the time of the 1989 Tian An Men incident through to Liu's final statement at his Beijing trial in December 2009.

Liu asserted then that he has “No enemies, no hatred”, but he spares nobody with his trenchant criticism of contemporary China. The Communist Party is his main target, but he also attacks less-radical Chinese intellectuals, dissidents, and those foreign fellow-travellers who make excuses for the Communist Party's refusal to grant fundamental human rights. You can't speak out like this without creating powerful enemies, and you won't persist with it unless you bear substantial reserves of anger. The line between anger and hatred is hard to define.

 The Chinese scholar-hero who dares to speak truth to power is an ancient tradition. But Liu writes off Confucius as a failure at politics who was only endorsed as a sage by later generations of dictators and emperors because he insisted on obedience to authority. Liu blames this for the “slave mentality” of modern Chinese toward their government.

Mostly, he argues for the establishment of individual rights within China. The Charter 08 document, drafted with other liberal intellectuals, attracted more than 12,000 signatories and embarrassed China's leadership in the year of the Beijing Olympics.  This provoked Liu's arrest and imprisonment for sedition.

Liu remind us what rights are currently denied to citizens of China. The separation of powers between constitution, government and judiciary, and the protection of private property including title to land, are things we have come to take for granted.

Charter 08 also calls for China to devolve its centralized system into a  “federation of democratic communities of China”. This would have sent China's right-wing neo-nationalists hopping mad, as well as the Communist Party centralists.

Liu despises the self-glorifying rhetoric that infects popular Chinese culture, the mythologizing of Chinese achievement far beyond reality, and the “bellicose and thuggish” attitudes to China's place in the world as it grows in economic strength. He angrily dismisses those Western commentators who over-praise and over-estimate China's past, its progress and its future, accusing them of naivety, patronizing fantasy, or self-serving attempts to ingratiate themselves with masters of the China growth gravy-train.

There's a lot of anger, for someone who professes to have "no hatred, no enemies".  He provokes reflections on Western society as well as on China's.

Richard Thwaites witnessed China's first modern movement for human rights in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1979, while Liu Xiaobo was a student.

Read my full review

How Short can be Western Thought?

A SHORT HISTORY OF WESTERN THOUGHT
By Stephen Trombley
Atlantic Books, 277pp

I'd like to master the history of Western thought in under 300 pages, but it seems a pretty steep challenge.

Stephen Trombley's publisher offered him the challenge, and he seems to have risen to it pretty well.

By "Thought" he means philosophy, and by "Western" he means the shared lineage from Greek and Judeo-Christian cultures.  By "history" he seems to mean a chronicle, setting aside as many personal prejudices as possible.

He does a pretty good job, considering the scope of the task.  I got a picture of who said what and when along the 2500-year timeline of  "Western Thought". This delivers an overview of what you might be taught in a formal study of Western philosophy, in some Western university.  We begin before Socrates when "philosophy" embraced all disciplines, from speculation on the physical world to religion and ethics.  We end with Philosophy as a relatively dry academic discipline concerned with the language-based processes of the human mind, and even there challenged for authority by the neurosciences and the persistence of faith-based teleologies.

Should we be surprised that the history is Eurocentric? I quarrel with his assertion “Judaism was the first monotheistic belief system”. The Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten is known to have promoted monotheism centuries before the Hebrews wrote a history asserting that they were the chosen people of the only valid God. We Westerners have been amplifying that political convenience ever since we embraced Judeo-Christianity, and wondering why others don't like us.

I would have liked to find reference to the influence of Indian philosophy on the West via Persia, Egypt and the Buddhist missions sent by Asoka (3rd century BC) to Syria, Egypt and Greece. There is good evidence for the influence of Buddhism on Plato and, indeed, on the teachings of Jesus.

Trombley's philosophical canon is limited to those who sought to discover system in the apparent chaos of human consciousness.  The closer we come to the present, the more diverse and complex is the range of philosophical positions to be summarized.  Are “how we behave” and “how we think” closely connected? Many philosophers have thought so, and some still do. How do we know what is real? A glance at any news page reminds us that belief is as remote from reason as ever, and no less powerful for the accumulated knowledge and philosophy of the centuries.

This is not hard to read. If you like the idea of wisdom, you will probably find this quick tour through centuries of hard thinking a pleasure and, at times, a challenge.

Read the full review

Intelligence crippled by ideology

INTEL WARS: The secret history of the fight against terror.

By Matthew M Aid,

Bloomsbury Press, 262pp.  

America spends $75billion per year on intelligence functions. It sounds a lot, but that is only about $250 per citizen.  The question for outsiders, and for questioning Americans, is why such a vast investment in intelligence seems to produce such patchy results.  We hear of the occasional coup such as the discovery of Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, but then we must ask why did it take ten years, given the resources put to it?

It's not as if the value of intelligence is a new idea. People who fight with sticks and stones rely on knowing where the enemy is and what he (or it) is likely to do next.  Arguably, modern technology gives governments greater capacity than they have ever had to keep tabs on people at home and abroad.

This book describes the disconnect between America’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.

It turns out the problems are, as usual, the human factors.  Agencies compete with and sabotage each other.  The flow of information overwhelms the ability to analyze it.

Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the US intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. 

He is most critical of the political messes bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.

This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.

Read the full review here..

Is political hatred the product or the tool?

THE NEW HATE:
A history of fear and loathing on the populist right.  

By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.

It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right.  Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.

Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city.  In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.

Thinking people of all persuasions share a broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists.  It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes.  Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs.  Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.

So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy?  Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity.  Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate.  The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying.  He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about America’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.