We have met the enemy and he is us

I know that I'm just another liberal lefty academic but all the same I was very impressed with this piece by the historian Chalmers Johnson on the current path of the American Empire.

Occasionally I watch some 1970's American TV show or film and am reminded of how much we (meaning the British public) used to love America. Growing up in the 1980's I saw America as an ideal progressive and modern society, sure - nothing is perfect, but the Americans I saw on television and read about in books and newspapers, seemed concerned with the things that I thought were important - freedom of expression, democratic rule, the scientific endeavour - and these were coupled with a sense of adventure and possibility that I didn't see in Thatcher's Britain.

Cartoon Free America, Brian Narelle

These days I am more used to hearing about how the British public (not to mention the rest of the wider world) objects to America's policies and ideals. Johnson sets out a way forward for the US to reclaim the moral high ground and to save itself, from itself.

This is the new global politics, away from the old left/right tensions of the 20th century, that is about pragmatic moral change on a world scale. It seeks to tackle issues such as world poverty and climate warming, and looks not to protect the rich and the powerful, or to destroy them, but to enrol them in this cause as powerful drivers of change.

It may be a tad Utopian, but it's a view that I've also heard reflected in the the recent Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. In these, Professor Jeffrey Sachs makes a convincing argument that global co-operation is needed to tackle the major problems in the world. Sachs' vision, for all rich nations, echoes Johnson's more specific call for America. Perhaps our current obsessions with Terror (why is that a proper noun exactly?) is just a red herring from the real challenge of this century, which is a call-to-arms to engage with a new level of political debate about global problems that have nothing to do with religious belief.

We have met the enemy, and he is not who we thought he was.

Update (4th June, 2007) - I read an article in this week's New Statesmen magazine by Michela Wrong where she attacks Sachs for being simplistic:

"Sachs believes that Africa's salvation is ours to bestow. It's that simple. We have the know-how; all we need is a huge hike in western aid. History-lite, politics-free, unashamedly populist, his vision of the world is utterly appealing. It just doesn't happen to bear any relation to the world I live in. I guess that's why I find him so tiresome."

Wrong might have a point in that Sach's monologue was all about the message, but I can't help but feel that its an important motivational one. She recommends The Bottom Billion, by Prof. Paul Collier, as a more realistic read. I'll have to check it out.

You will soon be able to download music online!

Yes, folks - hidden away in the depths of the BBC technology pages is the revelation that at last, after years of false starts and obfuscation, you will finally be able to legally download music online.

Of course, many people falsely believe that they can already download music. They are sadly mistaken. The current set of online stores allow you to purchase a limited legal right to listen to music on very restricted terms - this is not ownership in any sense that the word has been traditionally applied (even to copyrighted materials).

I am not condoning downloading communism - I fully appreciate the need to respect an artist's rights to their own work, however I am against DRM whose implications are hidden from those that are purchasing the protected content. There are now millions of people who believe that they have extensive digital music archives, and while they only use their iPods they are none the wiser.

If you buy a CD you are purchasing both an optical disk and the legal right to play and use the music on that disk in a wide variety of ways. If you purchase a music file from a store such as iTunes, you are purchasing only a set of rights, and ones which are not as extensive as those you enjoy with the music on a CD. In particular you lose the right to store the music on other formats, and to store unlimited multiple copies for personal use. This has serious long term consequences for your music collection (and negates one of the main advantages of having a digital copy in the first place).

Now at last a real company (and not some dodgy outfit) is planning to extend its customers the same wide set of rights with music purchased online. This is major news, one of the most important technology stories I have read this year and it's amazing that it's tucked away on the BBC back-pages. The record companies may be beginning to trust their customers again - and this particular customer is very much looking forward to making his first online music purchase, some twelve years after the technology actually made it possible.

Electronic Voting

I live in Wiltshire, in the Borough of Swindon, and so I was one of the people who got the chance to try the new electronic voting system at last Thursday's Council elections. I didn't vote beforehand, but opted to use the computer in the polling station - it was a horrifying experience.

1. There were no instructions on the welcome page. I had to press a button labelled "Check Voter" which didn't mean anything but seemed to be the only option. I'm guessing that this was a validation process - the guy by the door also had a laptop, and I imagine that he confirmed each voter when that button was pressed.
2. So why wasn't I told this? Initially I wondered if there was anything to stop me voting twice!
3. No instructions on the actual voting page. I was presented with a list of candidates with links to their statements, however it looked like a simple list and there were no indication that I should do anything other than click the Next button - I didn't realise that there was a well-camouflaged button next to the candidates names that you could use to select them until I was asked to go back and choose.
4. Confusing confirmation pages - it was not clear when I had finished, and whether my vote was counted. On one page the next button had scrolled off the bottom of the screen.
5. It allowed me to select meaningless options - I was asked if I wanted to vote in parish election even though there was no such election - I was also asked if I wanted to read candidate's statements even though not all candidates had uploaded them. In both cases it wasn't until I selected the option that I was told that it wasn't valid.

I'm very pleased that at last we're getting e-voting. Although ironically some difficulties with the system actually meant that it took longer to count the e-votes than the paper ones. Despite the pig-ugly HCI the system also seemed reasonably robust, and at least I was able to go backwards and forewords and undo the mistakes that I had made.

But it's incredible that with all the expertise available the final product looks so ugly and crude - in all honesty it looked like a bad A'level project from the 1990's, adorned with basic VB-style elements in cumbersome form layouts. Just dreadful.

If a Computer Scientist found it confusing, just imagine what Grandma would say :-(