Category Archives: Blog

Blog

The Privatisation of America

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Key West conch republic bumper stickerJohn Robb has just re-posted “USA Inc.“, a speculative future-history essay he wrote back in 2007, meant to be read as if “written from the perspective of a think tank that’s operating in support of the status quo economic elites in 2025.” He saw the recession coming, predicted an increasing entrenchment of US forces in unwinnable open-source guerrilla conflicts, and riffed on these themes to predict a future where massive government debt leads to the privatisation of… well, pretty much everything. [image by szlea]

Roads, waterworks, military bases, schools, parks, and much more were quickly sold at appropriate prices. Attempts by government’s to retain ownership and rent them as multi-year leases were initially successful, but as the crisis deepened the market cooled to these schemes. Within a year of the start of what is incorrectly but popularly termed “The Great Theft,” outright sales of assets to global investment funds, corporations and individuals were by far more common. The speed of this transfer in ownership has been unmatched by any example prior or since. By 2015, less than three years after the panic began, upwards of 60% of all public assets from the national to the local levels were formally in private hands.

Note that Robb says this is not a future he desires or advocates, but that it seems nonetheless more plausible as events develop; for extra chewiness, compare and contrast with Tim Maly’s “The Free Freeways” Futurismic essay about the seccession of the US highway system.

I think I can safely predict that a lot of you will say Robb’s USA Inc. could never happen, and those of you who are American citizens would be better qualified to make that judgemnet than I… but I’d be very interested to hear your reasoning. Is Robb’s style of doomsaying just a symptom of the inherently self-critical character of American politics, and hence an indication that the problems he’s flagging up are already being grappled with at a subliminal level?

Or is the feeling that it couldn’t happen merely a form of knee-jerk wishful thinking and denial – “too big to fail” scaled up to a whole nation?

Blog

Facebook profiles are not two-faced

According to recent research, Facebook profiles actually reflect their owner’s personality more accurately than a brief face-to-face encounter might manage to do:

Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Not everyone is entirely convinced, however:

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, Manago notes.

“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,” Manago proposes. In a 2008 study, she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used another online social networking site, MySpace, to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.

Somehow this revelation is both cheering and depressing at the same time… I wonder how those results would differ for older age brackets?

Blog

Sub-orbital launch budget: 50k Euros

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Via Jason Stoddard (and originally found at the Something Awful forums – have that, top-down media channels!), here are some Danish dudes doing something that, on paper, seems somewhere between naively hubristic and charmingly Quixotic: they’re trying to build a sub-orbital rocket vehicle for under €50,000. A vehicle that can carry a human passenger, that is. YA RLY.

This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers. Our mission is to launch a human being into space.

We are working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft.

Two rocket vehicles are under development. A small unmanned sounding rocket, named Hybrid Atmospheric Test Vehicle or HATV and a larger booster rocket named Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or HEAT, designed to carry a micro spacecraft into a suborbital trajectory in space.

These guys aren’t just pipedreaming it up in the undergrad lounge, either; they just yesterday tested their HEAT-1x booster rocket. Got propulsion pr0n?

Maybe the top of the gravity well really is entrepreneurial turf from here onwards.

Blog

Drowning in data

Maybe we’ll have flooded our culture-lungs with angry YouTube comments and pharmaceutical spamblogs before the rising sea-levels get a chance to touch our toes… [via MetaFilter]

According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still.

Actually, I don’t see this deluge of data as a bad thing, but I’m very interested in how we’re going to store, manage and curate it.

Blog

Weaponising Mozart

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Roll up, roll up! Observe, ye gentlefolk of the globe, how the UK continues to skip gleefully down ever-stranger corridors of surrealist authoritarianism and ephebiphobia! In a bizarre inversion of certain mechanisms and escapements eviscerated from a clockwork orange, disobedient school pupils are being forced to listen to classical music during detention sessions [via MetaFilter]:

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable. As one critical commentator said, they will probably “go into adulthood associating great music—the most bewitchingly lovely sounds on Earth—with a punitive slap on the chops.” This is what passes for education in Britain today: teaching kids to think “Danger!” whenever they hear Mozart’s Requiem or some other piece of musical genius.

Personally, I’m less bothered by the choice of music (which indicates little more than the desperate clinging of the chattering classes to pre-Victorian definitions of goodness, virtue and quality) than I am for the increasing parallels between the treatment of children who refuse (or simply fail) to conform to the contorted straight-jacket postures demanded of them by their parent societies, and the treatment of prisoners-of-dubious-legal-status in The War on an Abstract Noun ™. And look at how the subtext of the article, beneath the secretly-admiring hand-wringing over authority-run-amok, worries that classical music might be culturally devalued by this usage. Oh, horrors!

When disaffected kids turn to rioting and civil unrest – in the UK, the US and elsewhere, and soon – these starched authoritarians are the ones who will wonder what could possibly have driven them to such behaviour. What type of ingrates would try to smash the bars of the cage so graciously provided them? After all, it’s all done for their own good*.

[* – By “for their own good” they mean, of course, “for anyone else’s good but theirs”. I was in a really good mood this morning, too. ]