Rise of the Luddites: Everything’s Easy When You Don’t Understand
The only people in government who understand technology are the ones using it to illegally spy on us.
“And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” —Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska, 2006
In politics, generally speaking, we do not see the best and brightest minds. Sometimes they are present in the background, working away on behalf of the more marketable folks with the right connections. Sometimes–rarely–they appear in front of the camera: the perfect combination of intelligence, experience, and charisma. But normally we’re left to pick between squabbling lifers; the ones characterised by the most visible members of the two major parties in the US. McCain. Romney. Biden. Unlikely to offer a kid sensible advice about chemistry homework, but you’d rely on them to explain the rules of baseball or adequately insulate a log cabin on a freezing night in the Rockies.
“I’m out of time, but what I really wanted to ask you was why the hell I have to keep updating apps on my iPhone all the time, and why you don’t fix that?” — John McCain, Republican Senator from Arizona, and former second choice to command the USA’s 2,150 active nuclear warheads
That’s why I’ve always been very forgiving of those who don’t understand technology: they’re typically not that bright, not that interested, and not that young. The most visible people in politics are those who bide their time for years, or those who make enough waves early on. The jobsworths and the loud mouths. The web, on the other hand, is still being built by comparatively young folks, assembling and orienting themselves around lofty ideas, and building industries out of code and pixels. The nerds are busy turning red bull and pizza into businesses, but to the everyman, Steve Jobs was right: “It works like magic.”
“I seek to understand why [Apple], cannot create technology to render stolen devices inoperable and thereby eliminate the expanding black market on which they are sold,” —Eric Schneiderman, New York attorney general, in a letter to Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, doing all the hard work by coming up with the idea
The trouble is that the internet in particular is so pervasive and relied-upon that nobody would be hired to a role in the private sector without a basic grasp of, say, what a hyperlink is. You just couldn’t do your job in 2013 without understanding how to navigate the internet. But apparently that doesn’t apply to MP Claire Perry, who used Twitter to accuse political blogger Guido Fawkes of “hosting a link that distributed porn via my website.” The porn-distributing link in question was simply a SFW screenshot of her site. No link.
“@guidofawkes has been hosting a link that distributed porn via my website” — MP Claire Perry, responding to an image without a link that did not distribute porn via her website
Think about what that means. Perry is an elected representative of the people. She is 49. When Windows 95 was released, with the arrival of the shit-but-democratising Internet Explorer and blue 12-point underlined Times New Roman, she was 31. Working for Bank of America, McKinsey & Company, and Credit Suise. A graduate of Brasenose College and Harvard University. But somehow she contrived to sleep through the next two decades of innovation, multi-billion dollar growth, and the genesis of an entirely new economy. She has no idea what a hyperlink is. “Bless, the trolls think I don’t know how to block,” she jeered on Twitter this week. You can’t blame them for the assumption.
“You block adult content with parental controls, why can’t you block child abuse material?” — MP Claire Perry solving the problem of online child abuse at a summit designed to consult experts from ISPs, Google, and others on how to crack down on child pornography
If her failure to understand the way the web works is understandable, the role given to her in government certainly isn’t. Would you hire someone who doesn’t know what a hyperlink is? Maybe. Would you allow them to be in charge of a nationwide always-on system for automatically filtering the internet? Probably not, unless you didn’t understand the web either.
“Perry was dominating and not listening […] generally speaking the politicians there fundamentally misunderstood the technical and legal aspects” — A source from the same meeting of ISPs and experts
And hark at John Carr on Newsnight this week. The Government’s senior advisor on online child safety insinuated that Twitter ought to be policing their platform, rather than, uh, the police. “Every time the word ‘rape’ comes up, it should be flagged,” he said. In doing so he casually created a sophisticated filtering system capable of processing millions of simultaneous tweets per hour, in roughly the same time it might take you or me to say, “Every time a Government official talks about technology they don’t understand, a tiny box should replace their voice with that of an inappropriate celebrity”. Someone really untrustworthy like Jeremy Irons. It’ll be a doddle, it’s just a microchip and some software. Everything’s easy when you don’t understand.
“The problem is the volume of threats on the Twitterspace” — John Carr, senior advisor to the UK Government on child safety
The internet is still the most powerful and exciting advancement mankind has come up with. It immeasurably improves the quality of life of millions of people. It has improved almost every industry it has touched, from purchasing music to healthcare, and the rate of innovation continues to amaze.* So why do we make do with entrusting its future to those who do not understand it, or, worse, those who fear it? Why do we continue to believe that the best people to oversee this miracle of mechanics and ambition are those entrenched in the political machinery seeking to censor it? People like Claire Perry who manifestly do not understand the technology they are seeking to curb (and, by the way, who shamelessly author ‘independent parliamentary’ papers which are sponsored by Christian pressure groups) should be the last people running this one.
“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it — too many twits might make a twat.” — David Cameron, man in charge of UK’s 160 active nuclear warheads, struggling with the instantness of a radio interview, July 2009
I opened my first current account eleven years ago this month. It was a shit experience. If you’d told me then that a group of people roughly my age would go on to start a retail bank from scratch to fix the problems I saw, I wouldn’t have believed you. In 2013, I hope it doesn’t take too long for someone to rescue us from the luddites in charge.
“Occasionally, he would sign [text messages] ‘LOL’, lots of love, until I told him it meant laugh out loud and then he didn’t sign them like that any more.” — Rebekah Brooks discussing David Cameron, man in charge of UK’s 160 active nuclear warheads
*In 2009 an entirely digital currency was created. Think about that. The same technology I was using to download dancing baby screensavers has been used to create a currency. (Not only that, but the tawdry spectacle of the English pub quiz is all but dead as a result of the internet in every pocket. Truly a force for good in nearly every regard.)
