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)