Still reading (and still irked by the inanities of) Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. I’m reminded of that delightful scene from the classic TV comedy Till Death Us Do Part in which (as I recall it, so many years on) Alf is insisting to Elsie that the world is actually round, a globe. “But at least the bit that we’re on is flat”, she replies.

Just how flat the world is depends, I rather think, on where you happen to be standing. And if you happen to be standing on US soil it perhaps looks flat enough for you to be able to see Freidman’s “Globalization 1.0″ and not the exploitation by European empires of their eventual colonies for raw materials and cheap agricultural produce, to see “Globalization 2.0″ and not see the trade in slaves and–at the ‘end’ of the colonial era–the North’s export of its manufacturing base to cheap-labour sweatshops and non-unionised factories of the South, to see “Globalization 3.0″ and not see that the export of “grunt work” (to use Friedman’s term) to low-wage call centres and data processing plants in India and elsewhere is not to empower workers of the South but to lock them into an info-slavery that enriches none so much as the big corporations of the North. “90% of the shares … are owned by US investors”, he proudly announces, in reference to one such installation in Bangalore. Flat?

All enabled, of course, by the global fibre-optic network laid down in the 1990s, for which India should apparently be so grateful:

India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. (p.128)

Uhm … yes, in some sense, I suppose. Actually, American shareholders had at that time rather been under the impression that they were investing in the domestic Internet gold rush that eventually led to the dot-com boom and bust during the years 1996 to 2000 (p.69ff). But such “overinvestment”, Friedman continues, “can be good”, and I imagine those same shareholders are reaping the benefits now.

The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. “But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so too were the benefits”, said Singh. In the cae of the digital railroads, “it was the foreigners who benefited.” India got to ride for free. (ibid.)

For free? India’s IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), first established in 1951,

became islands of excellence … You couldn’t bribe your way to get into an IIT … Candidates are accepted only if they pass a grueling entrance exam. … Arguably, it is harder to get into an IIT than into Harvard or the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology … For most of their first fifty years, these IITs were one of the greatest bargains America ever had. It was as if someone installed a brain drain that filled up in New Delhi and emptied in Palo Alto. Roughly one of four IIT grads ended up in the United States. (p.127)

It seems to me, quite frankly, that the IITs’ investment of intellectual capital in US technological development during the past 50 years has not only cost India its most brilliant graduates but has also paid for its fibre-optic connection many times over.

One of the most irritating things about the book, however, is its blatant omission of the human cost of Friedman’s glorious “Globalization 3.0″. On the day I write this I am also reading an article in ZDNet, ‘Amnesty condemns tech firms over human rights’:

The human rights group has slammed major technology companies such as Cisco for providing the infrastructure to support repressive governments.

Amnesty International UK and an Internet surveillance monitoring organisation have claimed that several large technology companies are guilty of collaborating with “repressive” governmental regimes.

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all assisted governments in countries such as China and Iran, Amnesty alleged. Cisco is accused of helping China construct the Internet-filtering system which prevents citizens from accessing certain sites.

Just how ‘flat’ is Friedman’s brave new world when human toil flows North to South but human rights do not?

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In MI5, we used to joke that the Tory party was the political wing of MI6 and The Sunday Telegraph was the in-house newspaper.

Yes, indeed, I’m reading Annie Machon’s Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 and the Shayler Affair. The above quote, from page 128, prefaces some ten pages of fascinating stories of how the Telegraph obviously took to heart that inspiring 1971 quote from IT guru Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Or perhaps more acurately in this instance: “The best way to predict the news is to invent it”. For example, that Iran was provably behind the Lockerbie bombing, that Saif Al Islam was involved in money laundering and forgery, that an Austrian company was raising hard currency for Iran to fund its weapons programme by selling oil on the black market. And, in each case, the source would appear to have been an officer within MI6.

I wonder what and who were the source of the forged document—miraculously intact in an otherwise burned out building—’found’ quite by chance by Telegraph journalist David Blair, which purportedly showed that MP George Galloway had secretly been receiving around £375,000 a year from Saddam Hussein’s regime prior to the start of the Iraq war. I seem to recall (but correct me if I am wrong) that it was only after Mr Galloway won £150,000 in libel damages from the Daily Telegraph that Philip Sherwell of the Sunday Telegraph publicly conceded there were no recoverable documents when he had visited the same building in which Blair later claimed to have discovered them.

The fact of the matter (oh, how ironic that I should use the word ‘fact’ in this context!) is that for those of us (and that’s just about all of us) who are not first-hand witnesses to events, our only source of information is the reports of others, pre-eminently the major news media. A statement of the “bleedin’ obvious” (as someone used to tell me) and yet, amazingly, how gullible we seem to remain.

Or, at least, how easily taken in we once were by the stories published by the major media. And, no doubt in part because we’ve learned that the media lie and in part because we can all now be publishers, how easily we now, in the postmodernist third millennium, are taken in by any old conspiracy theory that comes our way.

When in 1989 Francis Fukuyama announced ‘The End of History’, he undoubtedly had no idea how true—in an utterly different sense—his pronouncement would be: there is no history any more, arguably there are only stories competing in the global marketplace, the triumphant deregulation of truth.

Does it bother me? well, of course, it might be nice to know the truth every now and then. But on the other hand I’m truly fascinated by the (largely post 9/11) cacophonous proliferation of voices contending for attention in a free-market economy of rival narratives.

As Bob Dylan sang, “There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”

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I am intrigued by what I see to be a trend towards decimal versioning of things for which, it seems to me, decimalisation is not only inappropriate and unnecessary in principle but also unused in what would otherwise be normal practice. I’m currently reading Thomas Freidman’s The World is Flat in which he identifies three eras of globalisation, dubbed Globalization 1.0, Globalization 2.0 and (yes, you’ve guessed it) Globalization 3.0. The ‘point-zero’ suffix suggests that there may also be significant intermediate gradations, on the model of version numbers for software (such as, for example, WordPress 2.0.2 in which I am now typing) or draft documents (for example, StrategicGoals&Objectives_v.1.2.5.doc); yet a browse of Freidman’s book shows there to be (unsurprisingly) no textual occurrence of such. So why use it?

In similar vein, in a recent issue of eLearn Magazine, Stephen Downes displays the same enthusiasm for decimal versioning in announcing that:

e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it’s changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0

And, of course, the ubiquitous use of ‘Web 2.0′ (I don’t recall there ever having been a ‘Web 1.0′) as though, counterfactually, the term identified a congeries of tools and techniques sufficiently coherent and homogeneous for us to seriously anticipate, for example, a Web 2.3.1 in alpha or a beta version Web 2.4.4

It’s fashionable, pure and simple. A fad, a trend, pompous technobabble to flag to others that we can walk the walk and talk the talk and know our mashups from our long tails. Retroactively we may, I fear, next find historians publishing their learned tomes on the history of World War 2.0 while, in schools, our children will with fascination study the life of Henry 8.6 (assuming his wives might be considered benchmarks for the versioning.) Movies will be remade as The 39.0 Steps, 1001.0 Dalmatians, 12.0 Monkeys, … except, of course, Peter Greenaway’s 8½ Women which will simply be decimalised as 8.5 Women. We will find ourselves listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812.0 Overture and Eddie Cochran’s 3.0 Steps to Heaven. And never mind “Stardate 2761.9″ … we may find ourselves by the end of this month living in 2006.05

This coming Sunday (sorry, I mean 2006.05.28), by the way, I reach the grand old age of 54.0

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So there I was, looking around in an idle moment for WordPress plugins I might find useful, when at the bottom of the page I came upon the copyright notice:

© 2005 – dr Dave – http://unknowngenius.com/blog/

Always curious to find out more about any ‘unknown genius’ (and, on this occasion, in particular an unknown genius who maintains a database of WordPress plugins), I naturally clicked through to his blog. An interesting character, it struck me (not least on the basis of his sui generis About > Dr Dave bio page), and so I nosed around for a few minutes. Found a posting from last summer, What does Africa owe You?, written in the aftermath of the Live8 concerts (hosted by Jonathan Ross who was reported to have been paid £45,000 for doing so), in which the valiant Dr Dave addresses the issue of tackling debt in Africa, pointing out that:

bobbing your head to a pop concert, marketing your flailing pop-star career to MTV or sipping champagne while smacking lips with other botoxed city socialites at a charity dinner: this is NOT humanitarian work. It’s just the same old selfish fun, with a cheap attempt at buying a conscience.

Such had been exactly my own sentiments at the time. Buying a badge and t-shirt, bopping around to U2 and Duran Duran, wearing that cute white armband, and talking with that characteristically patronising white middle-class sentimentality about MakePovertyHistory in your PSHCE classes in school as though this were a politically-correct “okay-yah” version of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”, falls something short, it seems to me, of doing something effective to alleviate poverty in Africa (and elsewhere).

For a start, it seems to me that timetabling the issue for just one day of the year leaves the other 364 pretty much unaccounted for. (Yeh, you get that feel-good factor when you go home, you’ve done your bit, your conscience is assuaged … and now you can put it on the back-burner till the next big media event). I have the same bad feeling about ‘Black History Month’ incidentally (but my rant about that will be left to another post), as though Black history is worth just that one-tweflth of (what doesn’t actually need to be explicitly labelled as ‘White’) history, as though Ghanaians and Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans and Khoisan and Sri Lankans can be indiscriminately all lumped together as indistinguishably ‘Black’, as though ‘Black History’ were something quite aside from ‘world history’ (i.e. Euro-American history), as though ‘Black History’ can be written and properly understood without reference to (white) ‘mainstream’ history. Friends, this may come as a surprise, but History is History: time passes and shit happens, irrespective of the colour of your skin or the depth of blue of the sky overhead.

In the second place, events like Live8, however well-intentioned they may be (and far be it from me to doubt that), may paradoxically serve to obstruct further thought and action rather than encourage it. If the problems of debt and poverty in the countries of the South can be simplified, summarised, and neatly packaged in such a way that can apparently be blithely solved by the prancing around of a few ageing pop stars and a few fine words from Bono, Geldof, Mandela, and co, then too few people will feel compelled to ask a lot more awkward questions. I applaud Geldof and co. for heightening awareness; but I deplore their failure to insist that, in order to understand issues and to act effectively on the basis of that understanding, one first has to ensure that one is well-informed about exactly what the issues are. “Turn off the TV! go read back issues of New Internationalist! read a decent newspaper every day! buy a few decent books! go online and read all you can about the World Social Forum!” Bob, why can’t you say that? why do you have to use the misleading discourse of the politicians that says it’s about “cancelling debt” as though Africa were in debt to us and not we to the peoples of Africa? Bob, did I ever hear you tell out loud how it was that Bristol and Liverpool became such wealthy cities? how the Atlantic slave trade made America rich? When I asked Renée from South Africa, some months back, why she had chosen to come to England, she told me it was “to collect my grandfather’s back pay”. Why is it, Bob, that Renée is so much cleverer than you?

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“Parents know that if you try to run a school where the moral structure is based on humanist, agnostic principles, then there are no morals at that school”.
John Mackay, creationsist, quoted in The Independent, education section, today (18th May 2006)

Excuse me? humanists have no morals? agnostics have no morals? I have no morals? those who taught me in school nearly 40 years ago have no morals? my parents have no morals? Well, I confess I’ve performed no human sacrifices (Judges 11:29-40), nor burned any unbelievers (Deuteronomy 13:13-19), nor raped any captive women (Numbers 31:7-18; Deuteronomy 21:10-14; Judges 5:30), nor sold my daughter as a sex slave (Exodus 21:7-11), nor murdered any gays (Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:24-32) or Sunday traders (Exodus 31:12-15), nor raped and murdered babies (Isaiah 13:15-18), but I’m sure nonetheless that I must still have some redeeming moral qualities. Does it say anything in the Bible about swearing at wheel-clampers?

As a humanist and agnostic I have, alas, been imbued with the obviously immoral convictions that mass murder is a bit naughty (and clearly I should have taken better note of Judges 18:6, 27-29; Jeremiah 50:21-22; 1 Kings 18:36-40; Numbers 25:1-9), that killing your neighbours (Exodus 32:26-29) is not the decent sort of thing to do in a respectable neighbourhood, and that slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46 notwithstanding) is in these modern times now somewhat passé.

But I digress. The main issue of debate in the article in The Independent is the teaching, in British schools and colleges, of Creationism (or, as it is euphemistically called by those too obviously modest to declare themselves dye-in-the-wool Bible-literalists, ‘Intelligent Design’ … and, tell me, what is so darned intelligent about the duckbill platypus? and were it and its missus really on Noah’s Ark?) “Science works on observation”, notes Dr Keith Davidson, creationist director of education for John Loughborough Seventh Day Adventist school in Tottenham, north London; “you can’t observe evolution, so it’s not strictly science.” Uh-huh? so what exactly have those men in white coats being doing with fruit flies all these years? I think we should be told. Something, I’d venture to suggest, a tad more empirically observable than God in the business of creating “great whales, and every living creature that moveth”.

“Having just one opinion [sic] about the origin of life is indoctrination. Christian schools present both sides of the debate”, continues Davidson. (I’m here reminded of, and too tempted to remind you of, that glorious line from the wonderful Blues Brothers movie: “Why, we have all kind of music – We have both Country and Western!”.) But the problem and fact of the matter is, of course, that they don’t, and can’t, present both sides of the debate in quite the same way. In the one they believe, in the other they don’t; and ‘believe’ (incidentally—the linguist in me—’believe’ is not a factive verb) is precisely, in the absence of all scientific evidence, exactly and uniquely what they do. (I now, incidentally, recall a lively conversation I had, at Sussex University in the mid-80s, with the late Christopher Longuet-Higgins on Islamic science … I shan’t bore you with the details, but Professor Longuet-Higgins clearly missed the point. Ask me for the gory details, if you wish.) How do you decide just how much of the literal text you believe? cherry-picking is not an option here: it’s all or nothing (or facing some deeply embarrassing questions on why you believe verse A and not verse B) For how much of that text are you able to adduce supporting empirical evidence? Weighing up the empirical evidence for, on the one hand, evolutionary theory, and, on the other, ‘Intelligent Design’ (or whatever you euphemistically choose to call it), it seems to me that the balance tips in just one direction: as an academic of nigh on thirty years standing I feel professionally obliged to remind you that God published only one book, that it had no references or bibliography, that He did not publish it in refereed journals, that there is some doubt He even wrote it Himself, that there’s been no new publications in the last humpteenth thousand years, that He is not renowned for His cooperative work or collaboration with peers, that when one experiment went awry He tried to cover it up by drowning all the subjects, that when sample subjects did not behave as predicted He deleted the whole sample, that He rarely comes to class—and just tells His students to read the Book, but that He expelled His first two students for learning, that it is rumored that He sometimes lets His Son teach the class, and in any case that His office hours were always infrequent and usually held inconveniently on a mountain top. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that …)

I suppose finally I must leave you to decide for yourself. Explain the golf ball; then explain to me WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot this site is all about, and WTF this stuff is being taught in British schools.

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