Here's a story about how a private monopoly can outlast governments and consumers with ease, whilst this story tells how a competitor aims to engineer Internet access in Africa.
Each story is significant in its own way. The first company, Microsoft, was born out of a business model where the real customer was the shareholder and the external customer an afterthought. The second company, Google, was born out of a business model where satisfying stakeholders - that is to say, all parties involved in the success of the business; from ideas creation to end-user, from producer to consumer - was key to satisfying the shareholder. Google's goal is to undo a private monopoly - and, in the process, perhaps create another. Microsoft's goal has never been any other than successfully preserve that monopoly at all costs.
Oh. No doubt about it. The shareholder's still there, overbearing and overarching. But these two stories define, without a doubt, a generational difference of significance.
How significant, and how different, only time will tell.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Why anti-politics may be pro-community (II)
Bialik - I tried replying directly to your comment this evening, but my comment exceeded the maximum allowed by Blogger, so here it is as a follow-up post:
I think I'm still feeling my way on this subject. There are clearly conceptual imprecisions in the post and I'm afraid I haven't been as clear-headed as I could've been. But you yourself equate politics with party politics, or, at least, you seem to want to run them together - and I think where the thought processes behind what I've said might be leading us is to a point where party politics does not need to be the only form of politics that guarantees freedom from totalitarian states and tyrannies.
A lot of what has been going wrong for quite a while now is entirely due to logistical reasons where representation needs to be fairly observed and generally isn't. How we communicate our wishes, how frequently we can make them known, what those wishes really are, how we define and unreasonably choose to massage them ... all these things are logistically rooted (though they do of course have political consequences) - and all are a result of, as well as result in, the public being too many steps away from the decisions.
That is to say, even if we did want to act more democratically, more representatively, more accurately, our systems of communicating such opinion would not be up to the job.
I'm not talking about electronic polling systems or referendums galore here. I suppose I feel we should really consider the idea of "consultation" a dirty word. I am wary of using such concepts as they seem to me to be completely inappropriate to a real democratic socialism, if what we are looking for is to allow both a true and valid expression as well as an accurate representation of a voting public's opinion. Firstly, it's evident that the hierarchy implicit in the widespread usage by modern politicians of ideas relating to "voter/member/client consultation" clearly indicates who operates the levers and who is operated on. Secondly, we shouldn't even be talking about a voting public but rather a participatory public.
Our objective should be to create a state where each individual is able to easily represent themselves, and where communities can reach the necessary decisions they need to take periodically on the basis of such representations. That is to say, we should aim to weld the concepts of representation and expression so that they become one.
This is where Web 2.0 comes in. What Web 2.0 is now is but a scratching of the surface. Where Web 2.0 will be in five years' time, no one can know for sure. But what we do know is that communication is key to making life, and by extension politics, work - and never was communication as cheap, emancipating and widely available as today. I've blogged recently on the virtues of mobile Internet, of holding a computer in the palm of one's hand, and as capitalism serves to drive down the cost of communication until - for the first time in history - it becomes a right and a good as basic as that of water, food and housing, so capitalism will either have to re-engineer its virtues substantially to maintain its hold on us or Web 2.0 will destroy it from within.
And, perhaps, quite surprisingly, in the end in a mostly peaceable manner.
When we need only utility companies to engage in all those activities traditional politics has learned to feed off and sustain itself with - water, energy, food and now communication; in the future, education, continuous learning, the exchange of all kinds of discourses as goods and services - is when we will no longer need the kind of politicians we have had up to now - or, at least, not quite as much as we did.
A penultimate point. To come back to the title of the post, I do think it's fair to argue that to be pro-community in a Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing world is - quite inevitably and fundamentally - to be anti-politics and anti-politicians.
At least, to be anti-politics and anti-politicians as you seem to understand the concepts.
If I understand rightly, you feel that only party politics can guarantee any degree of freedom from tyranny and totalitarianism. Yet, Web 2.0 and everything that swirls around it, the freedom to create, to be a consumer-producer, to publish, be published and republish one's thoughts and feelings, to distribute to the four corners of the world (distribution is so important to lever true power), to print and film and share and remix, to engage in direct discourse with a planet which is full of people who inhabit an exactly similar hierarchy ... all of this leads us undeniably to one uncomfortable place for modern politics, modern politicians and both big and small governance of any kind - where the people can exchange goods and services without the intervention of money, the political structures that currently reign over us lose all purpose. Not only that - they lose all the resource which previously justified and allowed for their existence, all that income which allowed them to mean something; to declaim and exert their power over us and define what we meant and wanted.
In a way, capitalism and the invisible hand of the marketplace does seem to want - and be able - to win out over a planned economy. But perhaps what is really happening here is a plague on all our houses. Perhaps what is really happening here is that capitalism and its opponents, all of which have depended for so many centuries on making communication and knowledge goods with hefty price tags on them, will become spent forces in the face of this astonishingly seamless - and absolutely acquirable - set of tools we have suddenly been presented with; tools which allow us to engage in a discourse, that is to say, engage in both politics and labour of a most primary nature, with almost anyone and everyone we care to.
Finally, if we are truly pro-community, we simply cannot be in favour of the politics we currently look to and favour, just because we see it as the least worst alternative to totalitarianism and tyranny. There has to be a finer reason than that. Especially as many tyrannies currently coexist with our least worst scenarios.
Undoing, from within, the tyranny of capital over labour - and what's more, in a peaceable manner - is surely reason enough to continue, however inexactly and confusedly, with our pursuit of this line of thought.
I think I'm still feeling my way on this subject. There are clearly conceptual imprecisions in the post and I'm afraid I haven't been as clear-headed as I could've been. But you yourself equate politics with party politics, or, at least, you seem to want to run them together - and I think where the thought processes behind what I've said might be leading us is to a point where party politics does not need to be the only form of politics that guarantees freedom from totalitarian states and tyrannies.
A lot of what has been going wrong for quite a while now is entirely due to logistical reasons where representation needs to be fairly observed and generally isn't. How we communicate our wishes, how frequently we can make them known, what those wishes really are, how we define and unreasonably choose to massage them ... all these things are logistically rooted (though they do of course have political consequences) - and all are a result of, as well as result in, the public being too many steps away from the decisions.
That is to say, even if we did want to act more democratically, more representatively, more accurately, our systems of communicating such opinion would not be up to the job.
I'm not talking about electronic polling systems or referendums galore here. I suppose I feel we should really consider the idea of "consultation" a dirty word. I am wary of using such concepts as they seem to me to be completely inappropriate to a real democratic socialism, if what we are looking for is to allow both a true and valid expression as well as an accurate representation of a voting public's opinion. Firstly, it's evident that the hierarchy implicit in the widespread usage by modern politicians of ideas relating to "voter/member/client consultation" clearly indicates who operates the levers and who is operated on. Secondly, we shouldn't even be talking about a voting public but rather a participatory public.
Our objective should be to create a state where each individual is able to easily represent themselves, and where communities can reach the necessary decisions they need to take periodically on the basis of such representations. That is to say, we should aim to weld the concepts of representation and expression so that they become one.
This is where Web 2.0 comes in. What Web 2.0 is now is but a scratching of the surface. Where Web 2.0 will be in five years' time, no one can know for sure. But what we do know is that communication is key to making life, and by extension politics, work - and never was communication as cheap, emancipating and widely available as today. I've blogged recently on the virtues of mobile Internet, of holding a computer in the palm of one's hand, and as capitalism serves to drive down the cost of communication until - for the first time in history - it becomes a right and a good as basic as that of water, food and housing, so capitalism will either have to re-engineer its virtues substantially to maintain its hold on us or Web 2.0 will destroy it from within.
And, perhaps, quite surprisingly, in the end in a mostly peaceable manner.
When we need only utility companies to engage in all those activities traditional politics has learned to feed off and sustain itself with - water, energy, food and now communication; in the future, education, continuous learning, the exchange of all kinds of discourses as goods and services - is when we will no longer need the kind of politicians we have had up to now - or, at least, not quite as much as we did.
A penultimate point. To come back to the title of the post, I do think it's fair to argue that to be pro-community in a Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing world is - quite inevitably and fundamentally - to be anti-politics and anti-politicians.
At least, to be anti-politics and anti-politicians as you seem to understand the concepts.
If I understand rightly, you feel that only party politics can guarantee any degree of freedom from tyranny and totalitarianism. Yet, Web 2.0 and everything that swirls around it, the freedom to create, to be a consumer-producer, to publish, be published and republish one's thoughts and feelings, to distribute to the four corners of the world (distribution is so important to lever true power), to print and film and share and remix, to engage in direct discourse with a planet which is full of people who inhabit an exactly similar hierarchy ... all of this leads us undeniably to one uncomfortable place for modern politics, modern politicians and both big and small governance of any kind - where the people can exchange goods and services without the intervention of money, the political structures that currently reign over us lose all purpose. Not only that - they lose all the resource which previously justified and allowed for their existence, all that income which allowed them to mean something; to declaim and exert their power over us and define what we meant and wanted.
In a way, capitalism and the invisible hand of the marketplace does seem to want - and be able - to win out over a planned economy. But perhaps what is really happening here is a plague on all our houses. Perhaps what is really happening here is that capitalism and its opponents, all of which have depended for so many centuries on making communication and knowledge goods with hefty price tags on them, will become spent forces in the face of this astonishingly seamless - and absolutely acquirable - set of tools we have suddenly been presented with; tools which allow us to engage in a discourse, that is to say, engage in both politics and labour of a most primary nature, with almost anyone and everyone we care to.
Finally, if we are truly pro-community, we simply cannot be in favour of the politics we currently look to and favour, just because we see it as the least worst alternative to totalitarianism and tyranny. There has to be a finer reason than that. Especially as many tyrannies currently coexist with our least worst scenarios.
Undoing, from within, the tyranny of capital over labour - and what's more, in a peaceable manner - is surely reason enough to continue, however inexactly and confusedly, with our pursuit of this line of thought.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Why anti-politics may be pro-community
On Facebook yesterday, Tom idly (or perhaps not so idly) drew our attention to the following idea: to be anti-politics is not a neutral or natural state of mind.
I think the underlying thesis runs as follows. To suddenly not want to participate in party political discourse plays into the hands of those who are always going to run the world anyway - but, even so, we must stand up and do what we can. Why so? A progressive's lot is always going to be a bitter battle against injustice. Thus it is we must get used to the idea and prepare ourselves to spend the rest of our lives spouting acrimonious jets of political spume.
But there may be another way. To be anti-politics - as it is currently structured - is the obverse of that coin we might call pro-community. As pro-lifers were reborn out of anti-abortionists, so anti-politicians can re-engineer themselves as pro-communitarians. Communities are all that individuals need for their socialisation to be complete. Democratic socialists do not need a globalised world to effect their socialism. They need a responsive sense of real individuals, removed once only from their environments. One step away is all we need. Parliament is already too far. The further we move away from our homes and villages, the greater the dilution of purpose and connection. In fact, in an ideal world we may be able to represent ourselves. Technology - fairly and justly applied - could serve such a purpose.
I wonder if Web 2.0 - and all that struggles to surface around it - can eventually provide us with the tools to create the socialism we clearly hanker after.
I think I've suggested before that open source behaviours mean that modern ways of harvesting data about the productivity of our economies severely underestimate their true output. We are effectively entering an astonishingly new phase in how we exchange goods and services, how we manage to serve each other, without the traditional structures or mechanisms that money imposes. Those of us who edit Wikipedia continue to exchange our skills and wisdoms on trust when we spend an evening writing an article on a word-processor we've downloaded for free, and which, in itself, is the sum of another's good works.
This is a truly democratic socialism. A jaw-dropping sociality of common interest, where altruism kicks off the processes in question and combines with overarching - and very real - needs to weld an unstoppable juggernaut of intellectual progress.
Yes. I admit it. I am slowly - but surely - becoming an anti-politician.
But this is only because - all along - I've been pro-community.
I think the underlying thesis runs as follows. To suddenly not want to participate in party political discourse plays into the hands of those who are always going to run the world anyway - but, even so, we must stand up and do what we can. Why so? A progressive's lot is always going to be a bitter battle against injustice. Thus it is we must get used to the idea and prepare ourselves to spend the rest of our lives spouting acrimonious jets of political spume.
But there may be another way. To be anti-politics - as it is currently structured - is the obverse of that coin we might call pro-community. As pro-lifers were reborn out of anti-abortionists, so anti-politicians can re-engineer themselves as pro-communitarians. Communities are all that individuals need for their socialisation to be complete. Democratic socialists do not need a globalised world to effect their socialism. They need a responsive sense of real individuals, removed once only from their environments. One step away is all we need. Parliament is already too far. The further we move away from our homes and villages, the greater the dilution of purpose and connection. In fact, in an ideal world we may be able to represent ourselves. Technology - fairly and justly applied - could serve such a purpose.
I wonder if Web 2.0 - and all that struggles to surface around it - can eventually provide us with the tools to create the socialism we clearly hanker after.
I think I've suggested before that open source behaviours mean that modern ways of harvesting data about the productivity of our economies severely underestimate their true output. We are effectively entering an astonishingly new phase in how we exchange goods and services, how we manage to serve each other, without the traditional structures or mechanisms that money imposes. Those of us who edit Wikipedia continue to exchange our skills and wisdoms on trust when we spend an evening writing an article on a word-processor we've downloaded for free, and which, in itself, is the sum of another's good works.
This is a truly democratic socialism. A jaw-dropping sociality of common interest, where altruism kicks off the processes in question and combines with overarching - and very real - needs to weld an unstoppable juggernaut of intellectual progress.
Yes. I admit it. I am slowly - but surely - becoming an anti-politician.
But this is only because - all along - I've been pro-community.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The Two-Headed Beast That Destroys Economies
It continues to beggar belief. These are the lives of ordinary people that those would see themselves as all-powerful have proceeded to destroy without compunction.
Robert Maxwell is supposed to have said there were two kinds of wealth: that which you possessed and that which you had access to. In his world, in the world of so many modern money men and women, the truly fun stuff is the latter. That's the stuff that really energises and excites them.
That was the stuff which, last year, brought us to our economic knees.
Our downfall has come about because those that possessed some wealth wished to use it to lever access to the vastly greater sum - a sum they clearly coveted - of what was essentially other people's wealth; ordinary people's wealth, the little men and women, the grafters in society - a wealth held, in fact, by the institutions the rest of us thought could be trusted to take care of their charges.
The desire to make money out of simple access rather than only ever act prudently on possession is the key to everything that has happened over the past year.
And now it looks as if Ireland is going to have to pay a terrible price for that economic incontinence.
Robert Maxwell is supposed to have said there were two kinds of wealth: that which you possessed and that which you had access to. In his world, in the world of so many modern money men and women, the truly fun stuff is the latter. That's the stuff that really energises and excites them.
That was the stuff which, last year, brought us to our economic knees.
Our downfall has come about because those that possessed some wealth wished to use it to lever access to the vastly greater sum - a sum they clearly coveted - of what was essentially other people's wealth; ordinary people's wealth, the little men and women, the grafters in society - a wealth held, in fact, by the institutions the rest of us thought could be trusted to take care of their charges.
The desire to make money out of simple access rather than only ever act prudently on possession is the key to everything that has happened over the past year.
And now it looks as if Ireland is going to have to pay a terrible price for that economic incontinence.
Skyfire now works on iPlayer and I'm (kind of) done with politics
Well, I suppose it had to happen. I'm now watching, pausing and changing the volume on iPlayer, using the Skyfire browser on my Nokia E63 - a Symbian S60 smartphone. Whilst the BBC hasn't managed to get round to officially sanctioning - or perhaps that's engineering - iPlayer to allow the E63 to use it, other technologies, which allow us to use phones to fool webpages into thinking the device in question is actually a PC, actually make the whole debate quite irrelevant.
And this is what I want to do with politics. Pull the rug from beneath those who would use it to suffocate freedoms. Take it out of the hands of the professionals and make space for such activities in the daily lives of ordinary men and women.
Companies love to talk about the wisdoms of the work/life balance. It's now time to factor a third element into the blessed duality - politics. We do, in fact, need a blessed trinity. We need to be given time to get involved. In times of economic crisis, where over-production is in any case an issue, I suggest we should all have our working-week reduced by say five hours - with the proviso that we use these five hours to get involved politically in our local communities. Whether this be as a school or health trust governor, a housing trust partner or, indeed, a local councillor. Or whether this be simply a question of attending the meetings of political parties.
In the past, education was a privilege not a right. Those who had to work missed out on the opportunity.
Today we would look aghast at anyone who chose to propose such a relationship between the precious processes of learning and the wider populace.
It is time for us to be equally aghast that politics should be the preserve of the moneyed and the professionals with the time to dedicate to its practice. It is time for us to be awarded the time we need to practise the profession all of us despise and none of us can do without. It is time for politics to be placed on the same footing as health, safety and continuous learning.
It is time for politics to be an inalienable right - and for society to make space for its exercise.
What say you?
And this is what I want to do with politics. Pull the rug from beneath those who would use it to suffocate freedoms. Take it out of the hands of the professionals and make space for such activities in the daily lives of ordinary men and women.
Companies love to talk about the wisdoms of the work/life balance. It's now time to factor a third element into the blessed duality - politics. We do, in fact, need a blessed trinity. We need to be given time to get involved. In times of economic crisis, where over-production is in any case an issue, I suggest we should all have our working-week reduced by say five hours - with the proviso that we use these five hours to get involved politically in our local communities. Whether this be as a school or health trust governor, a housing trust partner or, indeed, a local councillor. Or whether this be simply a question of attending the meetings of political parties.
In the past, education was a privilege not a right. Those who had to work missed out on the opportunity.
Today we would look aghast at anyone who chose to propose such a relationship between the precious processes of learning and the wider populace.
It is time for us to be equally aghast that politics should be the preserve of the moneyed and the professionals with the time to dedicate to its practice. It is time for us to be awarded the time we need to practise the profession all of us despise and none of us can do without. It is time for politics to be placed on the same footing as health, safety and continuous learning.
It is time for politics to be an inalienable right - and for society to make space for its exercise.
What say you?
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Shades of grey and the Mozart of the MTV generation
Michael Jackson's death sinks in slowly.
I remember where I was when John Lennon died. The remembering of people who strive to excel - who infuse excellence into the world around them by their example and their endeavour - is easy. Appreciating them justly is rather more complex. It takes time.
It seems to me that the time we need as blogging aficionados to justly appreciate what happens around us is being lost in the helter skelter desire to be the first with the comment, the first with the news. I am aware of how easily the blogosphere can be manipulated - or if not manipulated, then herded in one direction or another - and it does not remind me of excellence. It does not remind me of people who strive to make something lasting and memorable.
Both John Lennon and Michael Jackson do.
Michael Jackson seems, in a way, like the Mozart of the MTV generation.
And so it is that I revert to my technological bunker.
But technology and its implementation is political. Software is code. Code is law. Laws are being made by software engineers. Lawmakers are becoming more and more irrelevant.
If the personal was political in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the technological is political in the early part of the 21st century.
Or perhaps I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not degenerating into irrelevancies.
I've spent the last week fiddling around with Skype Lite and fring on my Nokia E63. I've also installed a DivX player for mobile phones which works like a dream. Even iPlayer runs - though currently unpredictably and more often than not only after a fashion - if you access it via the Skyfire browser.
Today, I managed to install Last.fm - or, at least, the web version of Last.fm - by adding my logon to fring.
There's a lot more you can do with a phone than the operators would have you believe.
This is what makes the subject of communication so very political.
Communication is the key to us understanding and conceptualising the future properly and fairly. It is becoming a utility. This is as it should have been all along. Education used to be the preserve of the wealthy - mainly because education makes us better and more effective communicators; now it - and the ability to make our voices heard, to impact on the degrees of power we enjoy - is a right of the majority.
That is the achievement of our generation.
When all I need to make my telephone calls, listen to my music, post my blogs and watch TV is a mobile Internet connection, so the Internet becomes as basic a right as water, food, gas, electricity and housing. If we are to create a better world, a world which goes beyond the oppressions of menial work, the oppressions that demand of our societies a terrible professionalisation of politics because the rest of us simply do not have the energy to participate, then we must focus on the infrastructure of communication as we have never done so before. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must battle to keep it free. We must understand its potential to release us.
And we must use it - above all - to deprofessionalise political activity.
They are right. Well before Obama and Oprah, Michael Jackson showed how the world is not black and white but shades of grey.
We should learn how to keep it that way. We should fight to do so. The key is how we talk to each other. In the future, the key will be whether we choose to reproduce the essential stupidities of 24-hour rolling news or whether we decide to use the tools we have to hand to create a reflective environment of healthy engagement.
Only time will tell.
As always.
I remember where I was when John Lennon died. The remembering of people who strive to excel - who infuse excellence into the world around them by their example and their endeavour - is easy. Appreciating them justly is rather more complex. It takes time.
It seems to me that the time we need as blogging aficionados to justly appreciate what happens around us is being lost in the helter skelter desire to be the first with the comment, the first with the news. I am aware of how easily the blogosphere can be manipulated - or if not manipulated, then herded in one direction or another - and it does not remind me of excellence. It does not remind me of people who strive to make something lasting and memorable.
Both John Lennon and Michael Jackson do.
Michael Jackson seems, in a way, like the Mozart of the MTV generation.
And so it is that I revert to my technological bunker.
But technology and its implementation is political. Software is code. Code is law. Laws are being made by software engineers. Lawmakers are becoming more and more irrelevant.
If the personal was political in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the technological is political in the early part of the 21st century.
Or perhaps I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not degenerating into irrelevancies.
I've spent the last week fiddling around with Skype Lite and fring on my Nokia E63. I've also installed a DivX player for mobile phones which works like a dream. Even iPlayer runs - though currently unpredictably and more often than not only after a fashion - if you access it via the Skyfire browser.
Today, I managed to install Last.fm - or, at least, the web version of Last.fm - by adding my logon to fring.
There's a lot more you can do with a phone than the operators would have you believe.
This is what makes the subject of communication so very political.
Communication is the key to us understanding and conceptualising the future properly and fairly. It is becoming a utility. This is as it should have been all along. Education used to be the preserve of the wealthy - mainly because education makes us better and more effective communicators; now it - and the ability to make our voices heard, to impact on the degrees of power we enjoy - is a right of the majority.
That is the achievement of our generation.
When all I need to make my telephone calls, listen to my music, post my blogs and watch TV is a mobile Internet connection, so the Internet becomes as basic a right as water, food, gas, electricity and housing. If we are to create a better world, a world which goes beyond the oppressions of menial work, the oppressions that demand of our societies a terrible professionalisation of politics because the rest of us simply do not have the energy to participate, then we must focus on the infrastructure of communication as we have never done so before. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must battle to keep it free. We must understand its potential to release us.
And we must use it - above all - to deprofessionalise political activity.
They are right. Well before Obama and Oprah, Michael Jackson showed how the world is not black and white but shades of grey.
We should learn how to keep it that way. We should fight to do so. The key is how we talk to each other. In the future, the key will be whether we choose to reproduce the essential stupidities of 24-hour rolling news or whether we decide to use the tools we have to hand to create a reflective environment of healthy engagement.
Only time will tell.
As always.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Digging deeper into my technological bunker (II)
This Skyfire thing is a bloody revolution. It even works with ITV's equivalent of iPlayer - I've just been watching "Coronation Street" on my phone and I haven't had to install Microsoft's wretched software plug-in equivalent of Flash to do so (or maybe it's already installed - who knows?).
Has no one else heard of this browser and what it can do?
Has no one else heard of this browser and what it can do?
Digging deeper into my technological bunker
Skyfire is really good. Really, really good. It's now my default mobile browser. I can see and listen to video on the BBC and the Guardian. The mobile Internet suddenly becomes something rather more than WAP-based links that only ever reminded one of the advent of teletext at the end of the last century. I now have TV on my mobile - what's more, I want to watch it.
No media players. No problems with the BBC identifying my compression IP as extra-British and thus not deserving of streaming video. These people must have set up their server parks on British soil. Either that, or the BBC are being fooled in an almighty way.
This is really good stuff, really lovely software engineering.
Try it out. You really must. That is, if you have a Symbian phone (Nokia and possibly some of its cousins) or a Windows mobile phone.
As I said yesterday, even iPlayer sort of works.
I've fallen in love with my technological toys, even as politics and its shenanigans simply block my writerly desires.
Even as stories like this make me gulp in shame.
No media players. No problems with the BBC identifying my compression IP as extra-British and thus not deserving of streaming video. These people must have set up their server parks on British soil. Either that, or the BBC are being fooled in an almighty way.
This is really good stuff, really lovely software engineering.
Try it out. You really must. That is, if you have a Symbian phone (Nokia and possibly some of its cousins) or a Windows mobile phone.
As I said yesterday, even iPlayer sort of works.
I've fallen in love with my technological toys, even as politics and its shenanigans simply block my writerly desires.
Even as stories like this make me gulp in shame.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Skyfire on the Nokia E63 and the unravelling of the good
I came across a curious little Opera Mini kind of clone today, called Skyfire. It allows you to see videos embedded in web pages whilst browsing the Internet using your mobile. According to the literature, it seems to work with most Symbian phones; I've tried it out on the Nokia E63. You can find out more about it here and here. A little rough round the edges at the moment - iPlayer half-worked then hung, although the Guardian video player went like a dream - but some potentially mighty features, all the same. I liked the double click zoom feature in particular. Well worth a try.
Meanwhile, we had a power dip in our area of Chester this evening. Lights went dim, our digital radio spat out noises like a mini machine-gun, and the toaster and microwave stopped working completely. A quick phonecall to what we used to call Manweb confirmed that up to a hundred houses would probably be affected.
Seems to have been sorted by now though.
I had visions of an early computerless night.
No chance.
For even as I hide in technological bunkers of my own making, I am still trying to work out why I should continue to participate in the political process. Yes. I know. People are suffering. And so they are. But what, in all reality, can my participation do to ameliorate that suffering? I am but a grain of sand on a crude-ridden beach that runs for miles and miles; a beach that occupied a treasured place in Paradise but is currently awaiting a final apocalyptic napalming by people who operate in utter bad faith.
People who will choose to unravel all the good the last decade has brought us and simply build on all the bad.
Jos is right. Politics is not about gratitude but aspirations. We - as a political movement - have forgotten what that means.
Meanwhile, we had a power dip in our area of Chester this evening. Lights went dim, our digital radio spat out noises like a mini machine-gun, and the toaster and microwave stopped working completely. A quick phonecall to what we used to call Manweb confirmed that up to a hundred houses would probably be affected.
Seems to have been sorted by now though.
I had visions of an early computerless night.
No chance.
For even as I hide in technological bunkers of my own making, I am still trying to work out why I should continue to participate in the political process. Yes. I know. People are suffering. And so they are. But what, in all reality, can my participation do to ameliorate that suffering? I am but a grain of sand on a crude-ridden beach that runs for miles and miles; a beach that occupied a treasured place in Paradise but is currently awaiting a final apocalyptic napalming by people who operate in utter bad faith.
People who will choose to unravel all the good the last decade has brought us and simply build on all the bad.
Jos is right. Politics is not about gratitude but aspirations. We - as a political movement - have forgotten what that means.
No social life - but even so, a happy bunny
You can read about my IT-related exploits over at Zebra Red today. They kept me up till 3 am - but I am a happy bunny, nevertheless. There's always a way, even in the direst of circumstances. A lesson there for politicians of all shades of opinion.
More here.
More here.
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