Tag Archives: Society

In Praise of Disjointed Communities

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Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is set to make a speech on immi­gra­tion today which, to the very vocal dis­plea­sure of Vince Cable and doubt­less many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Con­ser­v­a­tive party. Accord­ing to the BBC arti­cle:

Com­mu­ni­ties have been affected by incom­ers who are unable to speak Eng­lish and unwill­ing to inte­grate, [Cameron] will argue.

“That has cre­ated a kind of dis­com­fort and dis­joint­ed­ness in some neigh­bour­hoods. This has been the expe­ri­ence for many peo­ple in our coun­try — and I believe it is untruth­ful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.”

Granted, I’m prob­a­bly far from the aver­age mem­ber of the pub­lic in my opin­ions, and cer­tainly I’m far from core Tory mate­r­ial. But I see that dis­joint­ed­ness as more of a good thing than a bad one.

Many years ago, I lived for a while in the vil­lage of Eas­ton, on Port­land. It was blessed with both a Chi­nese restau­rant and a Chi­nese take-away, as far as I am aware the only two on the island. When I was there, the restau­rant was staffed with Chi­nese peo­ple (or at least those of Chi­nese descent) — whether they lived on the island or not, I have no idea. But the take-away? Well, I guess they ran out of Chi­nese peo­ple. It was staffed entirely by Brits. 96.8% of the pop­u­la­tion are of white eth­nic­ity.

I come from, and have since returned to, Bournemouth. Just 30 miles away, it has a pop­u­la­tion more than 10 times that of the whole of Port­land. Dur­ing most of the year it is home to thou­sands of uni­ver­sity stu­dents; in the sum­mer it opens its doors to thou­sands more for­eign lan­guage stu­dents and a never-ending influx of tourists. I live in an area with a high Brazil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Ori­en­tal and Middle-Eastern shops are everywhere.

It’s part of the world in a way that Eas­ton is not.

By and large, immi­grants nat­u­rally pick up enough Eng­lish to get by — instead of impos­ing require­ments on their pro­fi­ciency with the lan­guage, how about we try to learn each oth­ers’ languages?

Instead of impos­ing some require­ment to “inte­grate” with soci­ety (pre­sum­ably that means read­ing the Daily Mail, drink­ing tea and moan­ing about the weather), why not cel­e­brate each oth­ers’ cultures?

More to the point, why not stop pre­tend­ing that there’s a sin­gle homoge­nous British soci­ety for peo­ple to inte­grate with in the first place? My com­ment about the Daily Mail was only partly in humour. How do you define such a neb­u­lous concept?

I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I rarely drink tea. My instinc­tive reac­tion to the phrase “Oh dear, it’s come over all cloudy again, hasn’t it? Typ­i­cal.” is an impo­tent rage as I realise that no mat­ter how much of a trav­esty of con­ver­sa­tion it is, in the eyes of the law, it’s still not cause enough to legit­i­mately punch some­one in the face.

Like most Brits though, I do love French food, Ger­man beer, Ital­ian cof­fee, chow mein, pizza and chicken tikka masala.

If I’m try­ing to make a point here, it’s this:

  • Every­one else’s cul­ture is just as good as ours

  • Every­one else’s lan­guage is just as good as ours

  • And by the way, every­one else’s food is bet­ter than ours.

Let’s stop cling­ing to an idea of British cul­ture that we can’t even define, and pre­tend­ing our way of life is under attack from Poles or Pak­ista­nis.  Let’s not be Easton.

There’s a whole world out there.  Let’s live in it.

The Meh Society

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Today, Ed Miliband gave his accep­tance speech to the Labour party con­fer­ence, and hav­ing watched it, I caught myself acci­den­tally feel­ing cau­tiously opti­mistic. Have no fear, that feel­ing was quickly despatched and I remain my nor­mal cyn­i­cal self.

One par­tic­u­lar term he used which grated hor­ri­bly for me was “the good soci­ety”. The Good Soci­ety, really? Was the Tories’ equiv­a­lent not annoy­ing enough already?

The thing about “the Big Soci­ety” and “the Good Soci­ety” is that they’re sound­bites and they don’t mean any­thing, and that for some rea­son annoys me more than it ought to.

We’re just about com­ing to under­stand that Cameron’s “Big Soci­ety” is about par­ents build­ing schools and get­ting char­i­ties to pick up the bill for things the gov­ern­ment can’t afford to fix. It seems to be a par­tial removal of the state’s abstrac­tion layer: instead of want­ing schools, pay­ing taxes and let­ting some­one qual­i­fied turn one into the other, you’re now encour­aged to take on that over­head your­selves so that they can sack half the pub­lic sec­tor workers.

Wait, this wasn’t sup­posed to be a rant about that Society.

No, the “Good Soci­ety” is even more neb­u­lous, and I hope it doesn’t become a buzz­word like its alter ego. What is it sup­posed to entail? Us being vaguely nice to each other and hop­ing it all works out?

For all the catchy phrases that politi­cians throw around, the major­ity of the pub­lic are com­mit­ted mem­bers of the “Meh Soci­ety”. We want to pay taxes at a rea­son­able level, and get good pub­lic ser­vices as a result. And in the main we’re nice peo­ple, but we’re also pretty cyn­i­cal about pol­i­tics, and being declared part of “the Good Soci­ety” or “the Big Soci­ety” just doesn’t entrhrall us as much as those in par­lia­ment would like to believe.

Engineering and Enterprise

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I stoop low over the table, squint­ing in the flick­er­ing light of an incan­des­cent bulb not long for this world. My fin­gers clutch and twist wires, form­ing tiny twigs of cop­per into shapes that would join and hold fast. I am Mak­ing Eth­er­net Hap­pen. With­out ben­e­fit of crimp­ing tools or sol­der, or even sel­l­otape to sep­a­rate each con­tact from its kin, I have zero tech­nol­ogy, and with it I bring our species’ great­est tech­nol­ogy to this place.

I feel I should renounce my sta­tus as an engi­neer after cre­at­ing this ridicu­lous mess of anti-design. And yet I feel good about it, that feel­ing of tak­ing two things that do not go together and mak­ing them go.

Mah Ethernet

Imma Wirin’ Mah Ethernet!

The com­pound has lev­elled up in recent days, and gained the abil­ity to pro­vide take-away Thai food. It’s served out of someone’s kitchen, and the fact I still only barely parse Saudi Riyals as ‘real money’ brings to mind Maelstrom’s oppor­tunis­tic food stalls, feed­ing a tiny and bizarre com­mu­nity in exchange for bits of metal that are only worth some­thing there.

But it feels like more than that. It may be a tiny enter­pris­ing step by a very bored house­wife, but it’s the first step to a com­mu­nity improv­ing itself. Boot­strap­ping, to coin a favourite word of my profession.

Long ago I had my rant about the impos­si­bil­ity of small, totally self-sufficient com­mu­ni­ties. But I won­der what hap­pens if, for an indef­i­nite period of time, small iso­lated com­mu­ni­ties are left to self-improve. What strange sets of improve­ments would they pro­duce? Could I live in a flat block that’s a net exporter of Ital­ian food and IT support?

The only prob­lem with it all, is that the one thing that spurs on the self-improvement process, is utter, mind-numbing, unend­ing boredom.

Now if you’ll excuse me, poten­tially dubi­ous green curry is calling.

My Contribution to Big Society

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Today, Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron launched his ‘Big Soci­ety’ ini­tia­tive, aimed at empow­er­ing local com­mu­ni­ties to fix their own prob­lems. On the sur­face it sounds to me like a nice idea, get­ting neigh­bours to work together to save their post office or whatever.

But of course, no-one really knows how it’s going to hap­pen yet, or if there’s any money. And money will be needed. No inde­pen­dent community-built schools are going to spring up if the only peo­ple who can vol­un­teer their time are house­wives and a bunch of unem­ployed sales exec­u­tives. Peo­ple need train­ing, and even after a bit of train­ing, they’ll still not do the job as well as pro­fes­sion­als. Appar­ently the gov­ern­ment can’t afford to pay actual builders to build schools, so is this part of the ‘Big Soci­ety’ plan doing any more than invest­ing in cheap, shoddy infra­struc­ture that will fall to the com­mu­nity to main­tain when it starts falling down?

It all seems based on the idea that no-one’s got much money but we’ve all some­how got a lot of spare time. Which, with unem­ploy­ment threat­en­ing to rise even higher, is pretty much true. Unfor­tu­nately, all the peo­ple in this sit­u­a­tion are spend­ing all their spare time try­ing to get money again, by means of find­ing a job that actu­ally pays them. ‘Big Soci­ety’ doesn’t dish out feel-good points that can be traded in at the food bank.

In an attempt to find some money for train­ing and so that there is some finan­cial incen­tive for these vol­un­teers, Cameron also sug­gests “…announc­ing plans to use dor­mant bank accounts to fund projects.” Wait. Are you nation­al­is­ing our bank accounts? How exactly does he pro­pose to do that, and has any­one else done that in recent his­tory besides Com­mu­nist dic­ta­tors? (Or, more likely, am I com­pletely fail­ing to grasp the actual plan here?)

Any­way, I’m feel­ing pretty good about my con­tri­bu­tion to the Big Soci­ety. With all the web­sites ask­ing what we should cut the hard­est, with Con­ser­v­a­tive and Lib Dem man­i­festos falling by the way­side, and with the gov­ern­ment wash­ing their hands of com­mu­nity projects, I think I’ve found myself some­where to volunteer.

In the deprived cen­tral Lon­don bor­ough of West­min­ster, there are plenty of vol­un­teers work­ing in char­ity shops and soup kitchens — but where we’re really lack­ing, where we really need to come together and save our com­mu­nity, is in the area of policy-making. Since the gov­ern­ment clearly isn’t keen on doing it them­selves, I humbly pro­pose myself as a vol­un­teer here. I could spare a few hours after work each night to down a few pints in the Com­mons bar before head­ing to the Cham­ber and being an angry leftie at peo­ple until the gov­ern­ment realises that we pay tax so that they fund these projects, not us.

Revenge of the Mosquito

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The “Mos­quito” anti-loitering sys­tem appar­ently still exists (shows how much I visit shop­ping cen­tres), and some­how is still up for dis­cus­sion in the House of Com­mons. I don’t believe I’ve pub­licly vented my spleen on this sub­ject before, so here goes.

I’ve said before that soci­ety isn’t bro­ken, but if you’re look­ing for an exam­ple of how it some­times gets pretty close, you need look no fur­ther than the Mos­quito. For the unaware, it’s a device designed to be installed in shop­ping cen­tres and malls that emits a high-pitched whine sup­pos­edly only audi­ble to chil­dren. It’s proven quite pop­u­lar in recent years due to a rise in youth crime, or a rise in middle-class fears of kids in hood­ies — one of the two.

Let me just sum­marise that for effect: We have cre­ated tech­nol­ogy specif­i­cally to drive away our own children.

And it’s hardly some device that seeks out kids with ill inten­tions — its irri­tat­ing whine is audi­ble to any­one with good hear­ing. My son is two years old and has caused no pub­lic nui­sance bar occa­sional incon­ti­nence. He can hear your sod­ding Mos­quito. I am 25 years old, with a job and a fam­ily and a mort­gage and an inter­est in pol­i­tics. I am every­thing you want the ‘hood­ies’ to become, and I can hear your sod­ding mosquito.

You’re try­ing to scare off our chil­dren, those same peo­ple that in twenty years time will be run­ning your coun­try and pay­ing for your pen­sion. And you don’t even have enough respect to treat them like human beings capa­ble of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — you drive them out of pub­lic spaces with noise­mak­ers like you drive cats off of your lawn.

Sure, youth crime might be on the rise — I don’t have the fig­ures, so maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. And I don’t claim to have the solu­tion to that. But what­ever that solu­tion is, it does not involve the Mosquito.

Shop­ping cen­tres are not your gar­den, kids are not ani­mals, and hang­ing around in a pub­lic area is not the same as shit­ting on your lawn.

Aaand we’re done.

Society isn’t Broken!

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From Tory plans for com­mu­ni­ties to cre­ate their own schools to Guardian hacks beg­ging for alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies, ex-Soviet strate­gies for social col­lapse to alarmist talk of counter-insurgency on Amer­i­can soil, there has been a lot of talk lately about the advan­tages of small, self-sufficient com­mu­ni­ties over the sin­gle one-size-fits-all approach of the nation state. Half the world seems to think that, due to the eco­nomic down­turn or by delib­er­ate pol­icy deci­sion, the gov­ern­ments of the world won’t be effec­tive at rul­ing their nations anymore.

In the lat­ter three cases, it reeks of scare­mon­ger­ing — “The End is Nigh, pre­pare while you still can!” But this kind of idea is infec­tious. There’s a secret thrill in imag­in­ing the down­fall of soci­ety, and some­how a rose-tinted aura of romance around the idea of self-sufficiency. There’s some­thing that feels good and hon­est about being part of a small com­mu­nity rather than just one cit­i­zen out of 60 million.

But there’s a rea­son why, over the cen­turies, fief­doms and tribal ter­ri­to­ries merged together into the nations we have today. Being a small, self-sufficient com­mu­nity is really hard and you don’t want to do it.

What­ever scale of small com­mu­nity you pick, there are problems.

With a vil­lage, maybe you can be self-sufficient on food pro­vided you have enough arable land and peo­ple to farm it. But you’ll all be get­ting by at the sub­sis­tence level, your qual­ity of life will be poor.

With a group of vil­lages work­ing together, you can grow more things, your diet gets bet­ter and you get more resis­tant to crop short­ages and dis­ease. But that’s the kind of issues we’re still talk­ing about. Eco­nomic doom­say­ers who sug­gest that this is the kind of com­mu­nity we should be work­ing towards are sug­gest­ing we revert our mas­sively suc­cess­ful first-world coun­try to third-world near-poverty.

With towns work­ing together, finally we see infra­struc­ture, health­care, edu­ca­tion. But we still can’t afford to defend our­selves. Effec­tive police forces and mil­i­taries, and with them the public’s con­fi­dence that they can go about their daily busi­ness with lit­tle risk of assault or inva­sion, only really become pos­si­ble at the level of the nations we live in today.

Split­ting up into self-sufficient com­mu­ni­ties becomes even more dif­fi­cult because the infra­struc­ture we’ve built up over thou­sands of years of being a coun­try doesn’t lend itself well to being split up again. Case in point: I live in a conur­ba­tion, a fusion of three towns that’s home to around 400,000 peo­ple. How much farm­land do we have within the bound­aries of this conur­ba­tion? Oh, none. How would we feed that many peo­ple? Well, we’d have to absorb the rest of Dorset (pop­u­la­tion 700,000) into our com­mu­nity. Sud­denly it’s not small and roman­tic any­more. We might as well call it Wes­sex and find some­one called Alfred to be king of it for about 5 years until Athel­stan 2 turns up.

To top it all, we our­selves have, through thou­sands of years of mov­ing away from this lifestyle, become incom­pat­i­ble with subsistence-level com­mu­ni­ties. They’re not going to have a lot of demand for autonomous vehi­cles, or for war­ship com­bat sys­tem design­ers, or even (god for­bid) blog­gers. What if — and I know this is going to come as a shock — the hair­dressers and man­age­ment con­sul­tants and adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives that live on my street turn out to not be very good at farm­ing?

No, it’s not going to work. Nations are what we have, and nations are what we have to stick with for the fore­see­able future. If the econopoca­lypse brings down gov­ern­ments, makes them inef­fi­cient, so be it. What we have to do, and luck­ily what hap­pens nat­u­rally, is try our best to fix them.

As a coun­try and a col­lec­tive body of peo­ple, all we ever do is the bare min­i­mum to ensure that life car­ries on as nor­mal. And for once, that’s not a bad thing. When our soci­ety breaks in lit­tle ways, we need to find lit­tle ways of patch­ing it up. If the Tories’ “free schools” work, then great — it’s a lit­tle patch to a prob­lem which is tiny, if it exists at all.

But politi­cians telling us that “Britain is bro­ken!” and blog­gers telling us to pre­pare for a life of sub­sis­tence farm­ing just aren’t helpful.

The Public Human

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One of the great­est trends in tech­nol­ogy over the last decade seems to have been the ero­sion of pri­vacy, and I don’t see this chang­ing in the decade to come. Our greater depen­dence on the inter­net, social net­work­ing, blog­ging, shar­ing, sta­tus updates — they are all lead­ing us towards a world where noth­ing is pri­vate anymore.

And I think that’s great.

By and large it’s not some insid­i­ous cor­po­ra­tion or gov­ern­ment that’s doing it — the NSA may have their wire­taps and Google may dat­a­mine your search his­tory, but aside from tar­geted ads and some­what dubi­ous “pro­tec­tion from ter­ror­ism” nei­ther has had any real impact on our lives. There’s no scape­goat for most of our loss of pri­vacy, because we’re doing it to our­selves.

Every­thing inter­est­ing we do, we tweet. Every­thing we feel, we post a sta­tus update. Every­thing we think, we blog. Every­where we go, we check in. Every­thing we lis­ten to, we scrob­ble. Every minute of every day, half the world is shout­ing at the inter­net, “this is who I am, this is where I am, this is what I’m doing, this is what I think about it”.

Why do we do it? We don’t really achieve any­thing by it; there’s very lit­tle to gain for the amount of pri­vacy we lose.

We do it because it feels good and because pri­vacy isn’t worth any­thing.

We put our thoughts and our sta­tuses and our loca­tions out there because they’re essen­tially incon­se­quen­tial. It’s spo­ken about in some cir­cles as if it’s some great risk to your per­sonal pri­vacy if the inter­net knows that you’re in McDon­alds and you don’t think much of the fries today. But no-one’s going to exploit your Twit­tered fond­ness for Star­bucks or John Meyer. No-one’s going to wait until you check in on Foursquare before break­ing into your house. 99.99999% of the world isn’t lis­ten­ing and doesn’t give a damn.

But the tiny frac­tion that is lis­ten­ing, and the even smaller frac­tion that has some­thing to say on the sub­ject, gives us all the impe­tus we need to post. There’s that lit­tle endor­phin rush that comes with every com­ment on your blog, every retweet of your amus­ing sta­tus, that spurs us on. Even though it’s triv­ial inter­ac­tion, often with peo­ple we don’t know, it’s com­pelling enough.

And that’s why our loss of pri­vacy will con­tinue unabated — most peo­ple just don’t value it that highly com­pared to the increased level of human inter­ac­tion we gain by sac­ri­fic­ing it.

When it’s put like that, does it seem that bad? Human inter­ac­tion, knowl­edge of our exis­tence within soci­ety, makes us feel more ful­filled and ulti­mately hap­pier. If that’s the net result of this trend — if the constantly-connected, sharing-everything Pub­lic Human is a happy one, why fight it?

(At this point I should prob­a­bly apol­o­gise to the more privacy-conscious of my friends, to whom this post will seem awfully like I’m trolling. That’s cer­tainly not my inten­tion, though you are of course wel­come to reply and lay into it nonethe­less! Rest assured, I get my comment-buzz when I’m being dis­agreed with too. :P)