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Anomaly UK blog posts

On Being Offensive

Being offensive is an absolute right. No legal action and no violence should be brought against anyone, anywhere, for being offensive.

But let’s not get carried away. Being offensive, is not, in itself, a good thing. Other things being equal, it is better not to be offensive than to be offensive. There are, however, many things more important than not being offensive, and so it is sometimes necessary or desirable to be offensive.

If we take The Satanic Verses, or Jerry Springer, the Opera, they both offended a lot of people. They are both, in their different ways, artworks and pieces of entertainment, and their producers felt that their value outweighed any offense they gave. Right or wrong, that was their decision to make.

In the case of the Danish cartoons, I get the impression that the whole point was to be offensive. If so, I’m not able to say it was a good thing to do. What is praiseworthy about insulting people for no reason? Offensiveness is a right, but it’s not a duty. People must put up with being offended, but they are not required to like it.

So now we have the fallout. Many people were offended, and responded, some in legitimate ways, some in illegitimate ways. Violence is unjustified. Complaints are justified. Threats of violence are unjustified. Boycotts are justified. Demands for changes to the law are allowable, but should be refused. Demands backed by threats of violence are wrong.

In the face of this reaction – some of it illegitimate – it has been suggested that it is good to reproduce the cartoons, either to punish those who overreacted, or to “draw fire” from the original publisher. But this also adds to the original offensiveness, and dilutes the effect of legitimate criticism as well as illegitimate threats.

In reality, one side is trying to radicalise their section of society by exaggerating the original offense, and using it as a provocation. This was even more blatant over the Satanic Verses affair, where almost nobody who would be offended would ever have even heard about the offense without strenuous efforts by their “leaders” to bring it to their attention.

Against that, the other side is trying to demonstrate its attachment to, and unwillingness to compromise, its freedom of expression, and, less admirably, to demonstrate its power to be as offenive as possible.

I think it would be better to stand firm, but not to antagonise. Remember that there are many people who are offended, and who are entitled to be offended, and who have not threatened violence or otherwise stepped beyond the bounds of civilised behaviour. In dealing with retaliation, concentrate on the retaliation itself, and do not dwell on the insufficient reason for it. Basically, pretend that the reaction that occurs – withdrawl of ambassadors, or whatever – is completely unprovoked and act accordingly. That is better than the “escalating” response of repeating and amplifying the original, insignificant, offense.

As I discussed last year, I think we can best deal with the intolerant by calmly insisting that the right to free expression is inviolable, while at the same time discussing the content in question rationally, and treating any calls for acutal censorship as “ceremonial” – part of the normal process of objecting to something one doesn’t like, but not serious proposals. Unfortunately, this approach is undermined by any censorship we do have, such as the “inciting hatred” laws which weere used unsuccessfully against the BNP, and which are currently being expanded (fortunately less than the government wished).

Of course, if the point of the cartoons really was solely to be offensive, then there is not really anything of substance to argue, which is a shame.

Technical Integration

Cory Doctorow asks:

I’ve often wondered why the camera in my pocket — which has a fast processor, a big beautiful screen, and a four-way rocker-switch — doesn’t come with a couple thousand video-games, given its capacious memory.

I can think of several reasons:

The camera state-of-the-art is fast-moving. The extra time it takes to design in the game features for a given model will delay it – putting it up in the market against newer designs.

Software reliablility. Cameras don’t crash. Games do. I slight tendency to crash would be a huge problem for a camera.

Phones. If you want a single do-anything gadget, it’s more likely to be a phone with a camera in it than a camera with extra features. Buyers of specialist cameras – which aren’t phones or pdas – are likely to concentrate solely on phone features.

General “integrated device problems” – if one feature goes obsolete, the other is left with an obsolete device hanging off it. If one feature breaks, the other is left with a broken device hanging off it.

These things take time. I remember a long period during which laser printers, photocopiers, faxes and scanners were all made of different combinations of the same functional elements, but multi-functional devices that could fulfil the different roles were not available. They became available once the features of each device reached a plateau – where integrating different functions became a more useful innovation than improving any one function.

There is a pernicious belief that what matters in innovation is ideas. The idea of integrating a dvd-player into a television, the idea of a compressed-air powered toy aeroplane, the idea of selling petfood on the internet. What matters isn’t having the idea, it’s making it work.

All these things will happen when someone invests in making them work. I’m planning to hang on to my antediluvian Nokia 3310 until I can replace it with a model integrating an MP3 player with >20Gb of storage. I estimate 2009, including a year for the early-adopter tax to go away.

Three cheers for democracy

Yesterday the House of Commons unexpectedly upheld freedom of speech by voting to accept the amendments made by the House of Lords to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Very good news. We will continue to be able legally to be rude about religions, as long as we are not threatening (in which case there is plenty existing law, anyway). And three boos for my MP Margaret Moron, who has a 100% record of voting for oppression.

Of course, while it is good to see our elected representatives voting for freedom, it must be remembered that the Commons previously approved the bill in all its horrible glory, and only after the rejection by the unelected house of Lords did it agree to gut it. What conclusions can we draw from that?

Well, one is that the Commons’ view when there is time for both a public and an internal debate is not the same as its view in normal circumstances. This is because legislative productivity is too high: laws are being passed without getting adequate consideration.

Why did the Lords get it right when the Commons initially got it wrong? Possibly, the Lords, while unrepresentative of the population just happens to be more representative of me. That doesn’t lead anywhere useful. Alternatively, I have often thought that the Lords show a greater sense of responsibility, brought on by the knowledge that their powers are illegitimate. An MP says to himself “I have gone through a long struggle of politicking and elections to obtain the power to vote on these matters – I shall now vote according to whatever suits my purpose at this moment”. A Lord says “I have undeservedly been given power to change the law of my country – I must take care not to use that power in a harmful way”. This explanation seems weaker now that most voting Lords are appointed ex-MPs – it seems unlikely that they would suddenly aquire an unfamiliar humility along with their silly robes.

I cannot justify the existence of the House of Lords, and I have in the past argued for unicameralism, but there is a pressing need to reduce legislative productivity, and the brake that is the Lords, eccentric as it is, cannot be discarded at this stage.

A claim by Charles Clarke was that the defeat was “a purely political act”. A bizarre statement for a politician to make, but I suppose he meant that those opposing the bill were not really opposed to it, they just wanted to see the government defeated on something. (Of course it is unheard of for a Labour MP to vote for a bill he does not really support, just because he wants the government to win a vote). That may be true of some Tories, but I am sure that those who voted against their own party were sincere in their opposition.

A prominent feature of the debate was its dishonesty. The original text of the bill said things like “an offense is committed if someone says things that stir up racial or religious hatred”. In response to criticism, the government proposed amendments along the lines: “you may express criticism of religion (provided you don’t stir up hatred)”. Such amendments obviously have no effect whatever on the meaning of the bill: see here

I am impressed by the Hansard web site. Full text of yesterday’s debate and votes is available this morning for examination. Obviously, this is how it should be, but it is slightly surprising nonetheless.

Why Not?

A spokesman for Devon and Cronwall Police said: ‘We would never recommend confronting a thief but in this instance the victim may have had God on her side’ (Quoted from today’s Metro)

The story was that Reverend Bill Stuart-White broke off his sermon to pursue and apprehend thieves who had run out of the church with a parishioner’s handbag.

But this is what I was complaining about when I said:

In spite of the law of self-defence, and of the traditional principle that it is not only a right, but also a duty of the citizen to prevent crime if possible when it occurs, and indeed to apprehend criminals, the idea has been propogated that the most responsible and respectable thing to do is to leave it all to the police

I really wish the police would explain that they can’t possibly track down every petty criminal on their own, and would go on to recommend that citizens act to prevent crime and apprehend criminals whenever there is no obvious danger.

And as for the “divine intervention” jokes made by police and media alike, would it not have been more insightful to emphasise what could be done by a man in good physical condition who had the respect of the people around him?

Finally, what about the scandal that today’s teenage bag-snatchers cannot outrun a 47-year-old rector (admittedly a rugby-playing one)? I blame the selling-off of school playing fields.

Of course, where there is no obvious danger there might still be non-obvious danger. A petty thief can produce a knife and maim or kill someone. Even if someone is a police officer. No-one – including a police officer – should bite off more than they can chew, but if we are all too terrified to chase a fleeing teenage petty criminal in a small town in Cornwall, then our civilization is already lost.

Expensive metaphors

AT&T is now jumping on the misinformation bandwagon, in attempting to claim that providers of services over the internet are getting something for free:

I think the comment from AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre in the FT really shows why I said earlier that we shouldn’t consider the internet to be a place:

“I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece for the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in internet access fees, but for accessing the so-called internet cloud.”

This is taking the piss. Whitacre admits that his company is charging and being paid for the actual physical services it is providing, but says that it should be paid extra for the metaphor – the “so-called cloud”. He’s saying the internet isn’t just the pipes (which he gets paid for), it’s also a place, and Google owes him rent.

He has no relationship with Google. He has relationships with his customers who pay him to connect them to “the internet”. He has peering agreements with other ISPs with whom he exchanges data (as a necessary part of providing his customers with the service they’ve paid for). If he feels he should be paid more for passing on the data – the “movie streaming” or whatever – he can either charge his customers more for sending the traffic to them, or he can charge his peering ISPs for accepting the traffic from them. Why he should be able to directly charge the other ISP’s customers (e.g. Google, or Apple) for the traffic which they have accepted from Google or Apple and are now passing to AT&T makes no sense at all – that transfer of data is what the peering agreement covers.

Cost of DRM

Tim Lee at Technology Liberation Front revists history to explain why copyright can actually survive without DRM:

It turns out that consumers value the convenience, legitimacy, and positive experience of purchasing legal content, even if they have the physical capacity to engage in piracy. Recording movies off the TV and editing out the commercials turned out to be too big of a headache for most Americans to bother with.

In fact, the best explanation of why legal downloading can work was given by Steve Jobs in an interview in 2003:

Well, let me give you an observation that’s really interesting. If you go to Kazaa and you try to find a song, you don’t find a single song. You find 50 versions of that song, and you have to pick which one to try to download, and usually it’s not a very good connection. You have to try another one, and by the time you finally get a clean version of the song you want, it takes about 15 minutes. If you do the math, that means that you’re spending an hour to download four songs that you could buy for under $4 from Apple, which means you’re working for under minimum wage.

The trouble is, by the time you factor in all the time spend on registering decryption keys and otherwise fighting with DRM systems to use the music you’ve paid for the way you want to, you would have saved time as well as money by finding illegal downloads. Unlike the guy selling DVDs at a car boot sale, the music pirates are offering a superior product.

On Being Evil

Yikes! Instalanche!

I’ve dealt with a couple of the anti- google.cn arguments: that they are complicit in the Chinese Government’s oppression, and that there is a clear difference between obeying a bad law and denying basic human rights.

I haven’t addressed the point that, while the behaviour I defend might be OK for your average money-grubbing nasty capitalist goliath, Google has presented itself has having a higher morality.

That’s partly because I never took that idea too seriously in the first place. I instinctively shy away from any product marketed as “fair”, “organic”, “0.01% is donated to…” or whatever. Google’s attempt to distinguish themselves from the likes of Microsoft or SCO was mild enough to be not actually off-putting, but not something that I valued particularly. In fact I believe the offenses of Microsoft etc. are not due to the “evil” of their management, but are the more-or-less inevitable result of bad legal structures.

If I thought what Google was doing was evil, then I would denounce them, whether or not they had publicly expressed an opposition to evil. But I don’t. The grey area for me starts where they start helping the government track down dissidents. Even that is grey, because, even in our own, open, societies, the distinction between criminal, terrorist and dissident is occasionally controversial (I think the Religious Hatred bill here in Britain is as clear a denial of the “human right” of free speech as one could ask for), but like the military action I considered in my previous post, if you’re unsure whether your actions are causing net harm or benefit, the best course is to leave well alone. So, once they find they are stepping into the grey area, I think they should stop. Google have so far been explicit that they believe they are bringing benefit, and, until they start being asked for access logs, I agree with them.

I would like to see an open, democratic China. I would like to see it tomorrow. If some Chinese reckon they can have a go at organising and overthrowing the current government, I would hate to feel I was on the other side. But the Chinese people are in a better position than they’ve been since the Cultural Revolution, and it’s improving, and there is good reason to hope that the end result will be a free society obtained non-violently. To actively help the government against the people would be to work against this end, but to help the country, people and oppressive government together, by trading and providing services, is bringing it closer.

PJ on Google and China

Pamela Jones at Groklaw echoes my sentiments over google.cn Indeed, she goes further, and smells Microsoft PR at the bottom of it.

Not impossible, but there’s a substantial Google-sceptic movement which is not pro-Microsoft – people like Andrew Orlowski at The Register. Google’s size and rapid growth are sufficient to attract considerable scrutiny.

There is a line of argument that accepts Google’s claim that they are providing net benefit to the Chinese, but holds that by compromising with the Chinese government’s authoritarian demands, Google is nevertheless “dirtying” itself – making itself complicit in oppression.

This claim should not be ignored. I have made similar-sounding arguments myself when I have argued that it is usually better to allow atrocities to take place abroad than to commit them, especially if it is in some area you would not otherwise be in contact with. I base that claim on the effect of ignorance: If you drop bombs on people you can be pretty sure they are going to die, but if you stay out it is harder to predict what will happen to them. The better you understand the politics of the problem, the more confidence you can have that humanitarian violence will actually achieve its ends.

The parallel argument in this case would be that if Google participates in China, the Chinese are definitely going to get censored, but if they stay out, the human rights problems might get resolved more satisfactorily. The relative implausibility of that argument, is, I think, down to the difference between denying people certain search results and dropping high explosive on them.

In this case, I think the effect on China of becoming “complicit” in the world economy and the world media is greater than any effect on Google of involving itself with China.

There is a line which can be crossed, however. Providing intelligence on users to the Chinese Government (as it is attempting to avoid doing with the US government) would be worrying. But even there it is not clear-cut. Business everywhere is expected to co-operate with authorities in detecting crimes, even crimes that would be legal in the company’s country of origin. For example, a British company in America might face demands to provide details of users of gambling services.

There is a pretence that there are distinct “human rights” that are self-evident and should be respected around the world, but in fact that is just not the case. The fact is that there are some values that are shared by by many of the world’s most powerful societies, and which we believe would bring universal benefit if they were shared more widely still.

Not boycotting Google

I don’t see the problem with Google producing a “censored” version of its search results for the China. After all, Yahoo have a censored version for France.

If you want to do business, you have to meet the legal requirements of the countries in which you do business. Very often those requirements are stupid and evil. Nearly always they mean you can bring less benefit to your customers than otherwise. All you can do is ask whether your business is in total bringing benefit or harm.

Another example – in the USA, Wal-Mart brings a very wide range of goods at low prices to its customers. Here in Britain, it took over Asda and is doing some of the same things. However, it is restricted. It cannot use the same contracts with its workers as it does in the USA. It must obey Britain’s stupid and evil planning laws. It cannot sell firearms. All these restrictions reduce the benefits Wal-Mart can bring to me as a British customer. Should it, therefore, for the sake of morality, refuse to do business in Britain at all? Should outraged Americans boycott Wal-Mart for not stocking shotgun shells in Dunstable? If any are considering doing so, let me say, I appreciate your concern, but I would prefer you to desist.

Of course, there is an enormous difference of degree. Scum that they are, the government of Britain is vastly superior to that of China. And, farce that it always is, the democratic institutions of Britain provide a mechanism of improving the government that is not open to the Chinese. But I do not think these large differences of degree change the equation – Asda brings benefits to me, and Google brings benefits to the Chinese.

That last claim could be disputed – you could claim that in the absence of a censored Google, the Chinese would be forced to search other, uncensored sources for information, and would thereby be better off. But I doubt it.

Update: more 1 2