September 30, 2011 · 2:35 pm

Facebook timelines: mind the gap

Facebook’s new Timeline feature is seemingly intended as an autobiography in the automatic sense: your life distilled to a series of status updates interspersed with red-eye, all filtered and summarised by the invisible hand of logic, the unblinking, unknowing eye of the Zuck-3000.

I’m intrigued by what my own timeline will show. I don’t write the updates Facebook expects. There’s rarely a sense of where I am or what I’m doing. I never say “Sitting in Bill’s, writing a blog post about Facebook timelines.” They’re my tweets, echoed; my rants, hashtag games, rubbish jokes, and other nonsense. My own timeline is likely to consist of other people’s photos of me, some events, and a bunch of non sequiturs. Here’s me at Chris’s 40th; here’s a link to a blog about Facebook; here’s a photo of a typo. Nothing of deep historical or biographical interest, I imagine.

For eager, unjaded pubescents pouring every numbing detail of their lives into Zuckerberg’s database, the timeline will be great – until it isn’t. Until a friendship disintegrates – as it will. Until a relationship ends acrimoniously – as it will. Then the timeline becomes a sniggering, taunting reminder, Gripper Stebson poking Ro-land in his chubby face, forever.

Thus, inevitably, it will become another part of our life online that needs pruning, tending, curating, culling. It will beg for attention, Tamagotchi: The Next Generation. Users will constantly edit their lives. I am going out with Terry from form 3C, I have always been going out with Terry from form 3C.

Facebook wants your timeline to be your autobiography, but it won’t be. For most people it’ll be like a Hello! magazine puff-piece: all of the glamour and the shiny taps, and none of the hoovering.

You won’t see, perhaps, underage drinking at a dodgy party featuring a jazz cigarette, or cruelly excised former friends or partners. I think there’ll be more of the latter omissions than the former: people’s youthful indiscretions appear to be becoming less important. Clinton had to claim he “did not inhale” but Obama didn’t; Cameron successfully sidestepped questions about his own drug use and not even the Daily Mail proclaimed the End Times. I think this is a natural societal evolution, not caused by the Internet but certainly made more visible and – crucially – searchable by it.

However society adapts to decreasing privacy, it’s the gaps that are most interesting. Facebook doesn’t know what happens in the gaps, in the mini dark ages that pepper my history and everyone’s history. It aims to know all but does not, will not, cannot, even with the vast data-buckets that it and the internet in general can supply on-demand for each of us. Like the missing years in a CV or the crackle as an old film skips a few frames, what is absent is often far more interesting and revealing than what is present.

I therefore submit this humble prediction. Facebook’s timeline will ultimately be no tell-all semi-autobiography. It’ll be a sanitised, part-fictionalised history. Stalin’s airbrushing writ large; Big Brother’s ultimate rewrite.

And employers won’t look at your timeline to decide whether to interview you or hire you: they’ll look at your friends’ timelines.

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September 22, 2011 · 5:29 pm

Facebook and the two minutes’ hate

In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother enforces a regular two minutes’ hate to ensure the citizen-slaves are fully au fait with the enemy of the day. It’s a term that originated in WWI’s artillery bombardments and is now mostly evident fully fourteen letters later, on that other battleground, the WWW.

Today’s enemy – as on so many other days – is Facebook. If it’s Wednesday, it must be another home page revamp. This latest change does away with those pesky ‘Top Stories’ and ‘Recent News’ options, which always used to default to ‘Top Stories’ even though I never, ever wanted anything other than Recent News. Now they’ve inflicted some cockamamy algorithmic hodgepodge that combines those two options, and the entire internet has exploded in a fireball of wtf and zomg.

This is not Big Brother’s doing: nobody at Microsoft or Google or Apple pressed a blue button marked with a cuddly sans serif f and sat back cackling with a smartphone full of white, fluffy lolcats. This is entirely a bottom-up reaction. Were I a lazy reporter desperately scrambling for a headline, I might even make some cackhanded pun on Arab Spring. But I can’t think of one right now.

People despise change because we are creatures almost entirely of habit. We might like to think we have will and self-determination and can stay up all night if we want to, you can’t stop me, mum. But we don’t. We laugh at dogs and their pavlovian reactions, and then it’s 4 o’clock and time for tea, oh and I mustn’t miss today’s Pointless I do like that nice Alexander Armstrong, don’t you? and the punched paper tape loops through our brains one more time.

Slow, gradual changes are easily accepted, embraced, like a frog being slow-boiled. I bought a cheapo wifi-capable printer last week, now perched on an ex-server in my spare room together with the military-grade safe in which I keep its priceless ink. The first few times I walked past the room my inner lizard shouted There’s something in there – it was a new, unexpected pattern on the retina and I turned my head involuntarily. Now, meh, I’ve been retrained. The new pattern is absorbed, the newness has gone, the routine is back.

More radical change takes longer to process. In a new house you’re constantly jumping and starting at its various ticks, cracks and wheezes, getting lost in cupboards and locking yourself in fridges. And all the time you’re swearing like a navvy on jankers. Your brain is clunking and clanking away rewriting the paper tape, and your eyes spin like the MacOS X hypnowheel (other operating systems are available) until the updated universe can be paged back in.

Thus it is with Facebook’s latest update. Millions of people are using the site’s various existing features, which they railed against last time they were changed, to protest these latest modifications. In a couple of days the chances are the Facebook juggernaut will thunder on to its next redesign unperturbed by self-immolating gifs and its users will wonder why they were all worked up about it in the first place.

That’s not to say I like the changes. I think they’re daft. And here’s why.

Let’s look at the UI. There are arguably four focal points: the icons at top-left next to the word ‘facebook’, which gain red numbers when something interesting happens; the list of stuff that seems to change in a way I don’t quite understand down the left (favourites, lists, apps) which gain blue-grey numbers when something interesting happens; the main body, which updates in a way utterly unfathomable to mortals, gaining and losing ‘recent stories’, ‘top news’ and other sections when something interesting happens; and the ticker on the right, which updates in a hazily understood way when something interesting happens.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a lot of something interesting and a lot of I don’t know what makes something appear here. Oh, and some of it may appear in multiple places.

I’m not interested if you have figured out how each of these sections works and when it updates. Well done, have a banana. You are special. The point is, most people don’t. To most people, the way all this works is mysterious and magical and they just hope to jebus that they can find the thing they want to when they need to. This is not because they are dumb, it is not because they are lazy. It is because they just don’t care enough to work it all out: their goal is not to understand all this. To a first approximation their goal, to use the sainted jwz’s expression, is to get laid (link is geeky, SFW!).

Facebook’s current incarnation does not make this any easier than its last. It makes it harder, because the vital goal-fulfilling information is scattered amongst the something interesting and I don’t know what makes something appear here sections.

In Joel Spolsky’s words, the fundamental rule of user interfaces is: “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would”.

Facebook does not behave how users think it does, because most people have no idea how it behaves. There are too many places where slightly different, possibly overlapping pieces of information are presented in slightly different ways, and those pieces of information are chosen using slightly different, possibly overlapping, closely guarded, unfathomable algorithms.

Which brings us to the end of today’s two minutes’ hate. I think I overran. Ah well, time for a cup of tea and Pointless.

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September 12, 2011 · 12:27 pm

Cloverfjord

It’s got shaky, hand-held camerawork. It’s got a documentary, found-footage vibe, with portentous opening captions solemnly promising raw, unaltered material. And it has trolls. Proper, Norwegian trolls, galumphing through Norwegian forests and snowy Norwegian tundra. It also has a troll hunter: which is helpful, as the film’s called The Troll Hunter.

The documentary ostensibly being filmed is a student project, an attempt to investigate an apparent bear poacher. The three filmmakers – camera, sound and talent – follow this alleged poacher with his battered caravan as he travels from damp location to damp location, like a discarded segment from Top Gear. Happily for us it doesn’t take too long for the students to discover the truth. We see the first troll moments after the troll hunter, using the world-renowned “running away” method of hunting trolls, encounters the students deep in a forest and roars “TROLL”, eyeballs out, in their innocent Norwegian lugholes. Thereafter they work together, the students recording the troll hunter’s unexpectedly interesting nightlife.

Like Let the Right One In, the film benefits from its sometimes bleak Scandinavian setting and – for the British audience – unfamiliar cast (apparently the troll hunter is a well-known Norwegian comedian). The subtitles help, too.

It’s confidently made and unafraid to incorporate a little dark humour. Only once did I feel a plot development was overly signposted, and its aftermath was curiously under-explored. (Look at me, sucking on a pencil pretending I know what I’m talking about.)

The found-footage approach is occasionally mildly tiresome: we probably don’t need to see quite so many drizzled-upon lakes and steamed-up car windows. I suspect Cloverfield is the root of the current fashion for this technique; although I enjoyed Cloverfield, it rather succumbed to a virulent strain of the delusional illness known as Lucas. Latin name verdus maximus: we can do green screen, we shall do green screen, let’s wreak devastation on a scale hitherto only realised via the medium of plot. The Troll Hunter is thankfully much cheaper more restrained than Cloverfield: it’s CGI in service of story rather than trebles all round at WETA and chums.

In a sense, and I know I’m in danger of contradicting what I’ve just said, what excites me most about the film is the knowledge that believable, sophisticated motion-tracked effects are now available to relatively low-budget films – in this case, reportedly £3.5m. Such is the onward, mighty march of the nerds. It means that films like this one – hardly likely to interest a big Hollywood studio – can still be made, and made well, without papier mache trolls and comedy modelwork. Perhaps this normalisation will filter up to those with bigger budgets, leading to fewer cases of Lucas. I suspect not: my money’s still on an all-green remake of Episode IV by 2017. “Nooooooooo!” to coin a phrase.

Recommended, with one caveat: as with Cloverfield, if wobbly camerawork wonks up your balance, steer clear. It’s not a friendly film for those with balance conditions.

Avaragado’s rating: boiled furballs

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August 22, 2011 · 11:27 am

Disco Kenny, the bin-busker and me

A few days ago a random walk took me along King Street. I noted the latest reinvention of The Bun Shop – now more upmarket, The Lazy Scholar, it seems – and gave it the traditional three months. Then towards The Radegund, where stood – on the other side of the road – Disco Kenny.

Disco Kenny: latest dramatic sighting

Kenny’s a Cambridge institution. He’s our version of the white-haired old man with union flags you used to see at every England football match. He’s the Queen’s corgis, the Shipping Forecast. Everyone knows Kenny. He works his way around the city pubs, a half here, a half there, always talking. You know when he arrives: “Alright! Alright! You’ve gotta laugh, ain’cha mate. Gotta laugh.” You know when he leaves: you can hear yourself think.

Ahead of me on King Street, a family – tourists? – passed The Radegund. Kenny called out: “When does it open? What does it say on the door?”. They looked, and answered.

As I passed the pub, he called out again – the same question. I replied, “You just asked them that.” He looked a little crestfallen, perched on the opposite kerb, his familiar wide-brimmed hat drooping.

I concocted a plausible story: he’d arrived to find the pub closed, banged repeatedly on the door and was told to clear off. He was waiting patiently, far enough away, unable to stop himself jabbering to every passer-by.

Kenny is one of those characters every city has. Cambridge has many. The jester; the man with the thing on his head; wasp-bike man; the elderly man who shuffles round town wishing people Happy New Year whatever the calendar says.

Below that, the constructed characters: the busker in the bin; the Sainsbury’s Big Issue seller with the sarcastic patter. Not eccentric, but familiar.

Below that, the faces you recognise. Cambridge is small enough for this to be a long list. You don’t know their names, but you have named them – consciously or not.

I’m one of those. I’m the scribbler on table 24, always Earl Grey with milk. I’m the guy with the backpack snarfing the wifi. I’m the local watching the tourists punt. Sometimes with friends, usually alone.

I suspect that as the years pass you ascend the levels. First each person has their own name for you but nobody realises; then the dots begin to join – “Oh, I know who you mean”; and finally you have a Wikipedia page or a Facebook group.

Still, you’ve gotta laugh, ain’cha. Gotta laugh.

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August 22, 2011 · 10:59 am

Don’t think of an elephant

In the classic 1960s film version of HG Wells’ The Time Machine – accept no substitutes, even those starring Mike from Neighbours – there’s a famous scene showing the evolving fashions in a shop window as the traveller zips forward in time. Hems rise and fall, fiddly accoutrements come and go, hats balloon, explode with feathers and wither, and the traveller watches transfixed. Then the woodpecker clatter of planks boarding up the shop, and sand bags, sirens and war.

We are all time travellers, rushing into the mysterious future at a second per second. We see the fashions change, the shops appear and disappear, the fads come and go. And in our heads we can make the same journey as Wells’ traveller, skipping between memories with the tickle of a neuron.

The effect is more pronounced if you, like me, live in the same city for a long time. I’ve been in Cambridge for over 20 years, on and off (mostly on), both gown and town, and I can’t walk down a street without unconsciously recalling some event that took place there. Just as saying “Don’t think of an elephant” immediately conjures up an image of our big-eared nosey friends, so passing The Mitre brings to mind the time I walked in somehow without noticing it was a building site in the middle of refurbishment and was given an odd, impromptu tour of the work in progress. When browsing in TK-Maxx I’m plagued by flashbacks to its previous incarnation as Borders, a ghostly second image projected on the now. Was: computer books. Is: pants.

Music and smells are of course great triggers. Some songs at the pub immediately make me think of my friend John, now living in Canada (though still more up-to-date with Cambridge gossip than I am). The scent of aircraft fuel smacks my reptilian brain right in the synapses and whips me back to the first time I flew, and in its wake comes a rush of related memories. It was a Boeing 707, in-flight movie The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (the original). It was my sixth birthday. I visited the cockpit, but as I recall was not asked my opinion on the subject of gladiators. I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley. Shirley Temple, On the Good Ship Lollipop. Lollipop ladies. Walking to school. Walking home from school alone, aged six or seven, to find we had a dog. The day the dog died (twenty-six years ago, and it still upsets me to remember it). And on and on in the great game of memory association football – that one a Ronnie Barker gag I think, “I know my place”, John Cleese was there too, now on to Fawlty Towers, don’t mention the war, don’t tell him Pike…

The chances are that your own brain’s now whirring and right now you’re glassy eyed in your own history, barely conscious of these words. Hello! Pay attention!

Our heads full of experiences, we can’t help rifling through them when an association triggers. (Hmm: “rifle”, “triggers”.) We can surf our own lives in a time sink worse than any Wikipedia session. But we can become locked in our memories very easily: our bodies ticking away the seconds into the future, our minds in Wells’ infernal machine wheeling through the past. The danger is that we spend so much time retelling old stories we stop writing new ones.

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July 4, 2011 · 9:17 am

X-Men: Solid 2.1

The first message was confusing. It arrived sometime in the spring of 1980, in the lunchtime playground of Sheredes Junior School. The usual preteen chaos bounced around the tarmac, hopscotching and hula-hooping and Trevor Brooking in the service of entropy. I was busy repairing an android – an obsolete model, all cogs and flywheels, its maintenance bulb insistently recommending a positronic upgrade. That would have to wait: a rough-and-ready patch-up job was all I had spacetime for. These asteroids wouldn’t mine themselves, after all. I rolled up my genetically modified sleeves and got to work.

I’d barely started unscrewing the chest plate when I felt a silence spreading slowly around me, a cloud of inactivity. Pigtails and snot trails froze in mid-air. I began, imperceptibly, to glow. Uh. Did something happen? What?

The android repaired itself. The message came through loud and clear. The words, though, made no sense.

The playground came back to life.

Perhaps Professor Charles Xavier peered briefly through my eyes, saw no wheelchair ramps, and bailed out muttering. Understandable. In those days children with disabilities tended to be segregated in schools, and mutants hid. Disabled mutants were most certainly not welcome in Tory Broxbourne. (I think she was in Debbie Does Dallas, but I’m no expert.)

 

X-Men: First Class positively goads you into titling a review “X-Men: Second Class” or opining about the price of stamps these days (46p! Cameron’s Britain, ConDemNation, har-de-har, etc, etc). And as you’ll have noticed I’ve given in to temptation. I don’t think it’s a classic film or even a classic genre film, but there’s nothing wrong with a 2.1. That’s what I told myself when I wore my Darth Vader cape to collect my degree from Chancellor Palpatine Baroness Warnock.

The film’s 1962 setting – around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis – gives it an interesting if slightly clichéd edge. As many have said there’s a strong feeling of Dr No about it, plus a nod towards the war room of Dr Strangelove. (All it needed was Dr Kildare and Doctor Who for the full house.) Toss in a few cheeky references to the earlier films (set in this film’s future) including a couple of show-stopping cameos, and some gags about hair loss, and mix with bucketloads of bangs and crashes, and you’re done. It’s not afraid to laugh at itself and is confident enough to play to the audience’s knowledge of the franchise in its varied forms. It takes a few liberties with some characters, naturally, but X-Men and comics continuity in general is notoriously malleable. Another year, another reboot. A slice of retcon, a spoonful of alternate universe. ANTIHULK UNSMASH! Happens all the time.

 

Xavier’s second message didn’t reach me for another couple of years, until a run-of-the-peppermill Tuesday afternoon in Home Economics. A laugh, a joke, an innocent pair of tongs. An unequivocal sign. “Don’t trifle with these powers,” said Xavier, which was odd as we were making a flan.

I put away childish things, and the tongs. I didn’t want to speak to Xavier. He was old, bald, and liked hanging out with younger guys. All a bit creepy if you ask me.

 

In the film Xavier is young, hirsute, and James McAvoy out of Shameless and a Narnian Wardrobe – like David Tennant, a Scot who’s often professionally English. Adding to the accent confusion is Nicholas Hoult, once About a Boy and later of Skins, expanding his acting chops from 1962 All-American totty in A Single Man to 1962 All-American mutant totty here.

Other mini-mutants appear, little x-boys and x-girls, as Xavier trawls the world sniffing out the talent: looking for that elusive X Factor I suppose. Hmm – Simon Cowell: alias Supreeno, special power Hypnosis of TV Executives, costume The Gentleman’s High-waisted Trouser.

The film’s plot ostensibly concerns the nascent X-Men battling a Big Bad called Sebastian Shaw – Kevin Bacon bringing himself home in splendid cackly fashion. His opening scenes are really rather unsettling, almost entirely – and bravely – conducted in several flavours of non-English. In those scenes we discover exactly how the young Magneto – Magnetini? – learns the extent of his powers, and what drives him and the main thrust of the movie.

The film succeeds for me by meshing both the BANG CRASH and subtler stories. The effects-laden set pieces window-dress the underlying human mutant tensions of the leads. The heart of the film is the heart of the X-Men franchise in comic and film form: the story of Professor X and Magneto, of Charles and Erik. Friends and enemies.

 

Xavier tried to get through to me regularly in my teens, never defeating my psychic block. He failed again in my college years, despite a cunning flanking manoeuvre at the Societies’ Fair.

It might have been different had he sent a representative. I knew there were other mutants; I knew where they gathered. Had one approached me I might have embraced my mutation much sooner and answered Xavier’s call (his ringtone was mental).

Or I might not. Mutations can take a time to mature, to ripen. The trigger that finally unleashes the power can occur at any time, in any place. In my case, the trigger was Batman. Well, actually, Robin.

Marvel versus DC – as it was, so shall it always be.

Avaragado’s rating: one blueberry muffin

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June 6, 2011 · 9:13 am

Five Go Mad in Brixton

In the movie ET, you may recall, the titular alien touched down in a forest bordering a suburban California sprawl, and was sheltered by an angsty tween from nasty men with guns torches. But what if he’d landed in Brixton instead? And wasn’t here to sniff out a hundred varieties of moss for the Betelgeuse branch of Notcutts?

That’s the premise of the new movie Attack the Block, written and directed by Joe Cornish – once of nineties Channel 4’s  Adam and Joe show, now of tens BBC Radio 6 Music’s Adam and Joe show, and it seems a proper grown-up film-maker.

The stars of the film are most certainly not grown up, though. They’re almost unintelligibly young, with their strange clothes and their loud music and HAVE YOU UNDERSTOOD A WORD THEY’VE SAID YET? These YOUNG PEOPLE, they don’t SPEAK PROPERLY these days. THAT’S NOT DANCING, THAT’S JUST JUMPING UP AND DOWN. Have I had my dinner, Doreen? I have, haven’t I? I have, yes. I thought I had. A lovely dinner. Ooh, it was a lovely dinner. What was it? Curry? I don’t understand curry. IT’S JUST MUCK. MUCK ON A PLATE. I’m given to believe she stands on a BOX.

Anyway. The urban dialect of the younger cast, all ya get me and allow it and isnit and teeth-sucking, takes a little adjustment for those like me unfamiliar with the patois. You have to hear your way into it, pick up the rhythm, feel the force flowing through you. Before long you’re jiving like a native – wicked, chum, comprendez? Booyakashah of Iran.

Incidentally I have just bought a hoody. From Her Majesty’s The Gap shop. I know. Fashion. Icon.

Anyway. The film! Yes, the film.

Attack the Block is a coming-of-age film. Well, more a coming-of-rage film. The main characters are a gang of rufty-tufty teens, led by a boy called Moses, who spend their evenings terrorising the estate with their bikes and parkas and knives. On bonfire night they encounter a most unusual visitor: not a bewildered American tourist, nor a taxi driver willingly south of the river after 10pm, but something far stranger and not of this world. Their turf – their estate, their block – becomes a battleground, a castle under siege from alien invasion. Their universe expands a little; they do a little growing up. Hijinks ensue.

The film has a refreshing lack of grown-ups wagging fingers. Most adult characters veer either to the stoner or psychopath ends of the spectrum, leaving the gang to tackle the unwanted visitors in their own special way. It’s a bit like a Famous Five movie written by William S. Burroughs.

Joe Cornish coaxed pretty impressive performances from the cast, even the youngest members. The dialogue was, apparently, checked and independently verified as accurate for the disaffected mopers of today’s Broken Britain. Give it ten years and it’ll need subtitles, mind. I can’t imagine it’ll play in the US without them, unless audiences are given crib sheets on the way in or screened for age.

It’s Cornish’s first feature film as a director, but you wouldn’t know it. All those years of bedroom-based film-making with Adam Buxton certainly paid off. It’s fast-paced, nicely plotted, and I expect a strong candidate for Best British Film next year. Ya get me?

Avaragado’s rating: curry

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May 30, 2011 · 12:03 pm

If it weren’t for you meddling kids

Governments love sheep. They adore compliant leggy clouds of wool flocking after them for a sniff of fresh grass. They like to funnel them through the dip for a fungicidal top-up, and wave a pair of clippers at them for a nice shear now and then. And they love to sell them off to Tesco, pocket the cash, and feast on their minty legs.

It’s an old joke: teaching is great, apart from all the students. System administration would be a breeze if not for those damned users. And government would be easy without those pesky citizens demanding rights and freedoms.

Last week’s G8 and eG8 meetings should get us worried. Do not be fooled: the rhetoric about freedom and innovation and unlimited rice pudding is simply designed to give us the warm’n’fuzzies. Yes, we’re supposed to think, they get it. The net is safe! Hooray! Baa! Baa!

The truth is far more sinister. It’s a classic “I love you, but…”. The net is full of lawlessness, of copyright infringement, the governments say, and they want to do something about it.

And again, don’t be fooled. “Copyright” is a trigger word: it polarises, it rehearses the same old arguments from both camps, it focuses the debate on one, narrow aspect. It ensures that big media, the copyright barons, are on the government’s side. It brings out the Cliff Richardses, claiming imminent destitution while dabbing eyes with local Caribbean onions.

Who could deny these artists a living wage? emotes a minister, justifying stricter net regulation on the basis of copyright infringement before nipping off to rip a CD onto an iPod, an act still considered infringement in English law despite now two government-commissioned reports recommending legalisation.

Governments are slow to increase freedoms and quick to reduce them.

But, as I said, don’t be fooled. The copyright thing is a diversion: the government calling “come by” to the media and entertainment sheepdogs and leaving a trail of goodies to distract the noisier lambs.

And it’s not about injunctions, super, hyper or otherwise – though that’s another convenient shiny thing to blind everyone with. Here are two incontrovertible facts:

  • Humans are social animals and love to gossip, even if that’s not what they think they’re doing.
  • Twitter is the most efficient gossip-distribution mechanism yet invented by man.

It thus follows that Twitter radiates gossip around the globe faster than any lawyer can stop it.

But you know what Twitter gossip isn’t? It isn’t doorstepping the people gossiped about. It isn’t rummaging through their bins. It isn’t intercepting their phone messages. It isn’t papping them on the beach and tutting at some tiny variation from this week’s idea of perfection on pages one, two and thirteen. It isn’t publishing lurid details of their private lives on trumped-up notions of public interest.

Privacy invasion and harassment by the redtops – and not just the redtops – is much worse than Twitter gossip for those invaded and harassed: but the government doesn’t legislate about that.

Twitter spreads gossip, some of it true, some of it false, just like email does, and the telephone, and the larynx. And guess what: we already have laws about the false stuff. We already have judges struggling to understand social networking, refusing to recognise tweeted jokes borne of frustration but plainly not menacing.

Twitter is communication, like any other form – but faster and with a global audience. It’s many-to-many, not one-to-one or one-to-many. (And, lest I be accused of undue Twitophilia, so is Facebook.)

This is why G8 governments want to regulate it. This is why they are afraid of it. It is no coincidence that governments have recently woken up to the possibilities of many-to-many. They’ve seen it help to disrupt north Africa and the Middle East all year, and drag them into a civil war none of them want to be a part of but all of them know they must be, thanks to what none of them want to admit: oil. Governments all think: could we be next? What would it take to bring down a western government? It might be on the verge of happening in Greece or Spain.

Governments fear nothing more than their own citizens rising up against them.

This latest shepherding tactic about privacy and copyright is a front, a sleight-of-hand, an attempt to outflank those sheep who sense the approaching knives. I suspect G8 governments believe, like the Romanian communist leaders of the 1980s who ordered the population to hand over their typewriters as they made it easier to disseminate subversive material, that by asserting control over the means of communication they can preserve control over the populace.

Western governments are lumbering beasts but they’re not daft enough to believe they could simply switch off internet and mobile phone services if the people start making too much of a noise, as happened in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. Such an act would only be counterproductive were it even possible, and they’d have to take over the TV stations too. They want subtler control, like mandatory filters. Don’t like this Twitter account? Filter it out. Hashtag chatter a bit near the mark? Filter it out. All “for legal reasons” or for the “protection of children”. It’s all possible: China does it.

But the USA has the first amendment! Free speech! Yes, and that’s a qualified privilege. You can still be prosecuted for crying “fire” in a crowded theatre, or for what someone decides is treasonous speech. Some US legislators and judges believe that linking to a page that contains links to copyright-infringing material should itself be a criminal act. And it seems you can be arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial.

There is nothing to stop a determined government, with a supine or bought legislature, from enacting laws that restrict our freedoms on the internet. There is nothing to stop them: except the people.

I realise it’s easy to see spooks lurking behind every bush, to see malignancy and conspiracy where there is none. Yet history shows that good intentions wither and weather, like rivulets of erosion in the majesty of the Sphinx. RIPA surveillance powers, used to monitor dog fouling. Anti-terrorism laws, used to harass and detain photographers. Laws about “improper use of a public electronic telecommunications network,” used to interpret as “menacing” an obvious joke on Twitter by a frustrated flyer eager to see his girlfriend, and ruining his life in the process.

Governments and their officers, whether deliberately or not, tend to overreach. Powers once taken are hard to let go. Our ancestors fought for our freedoms; they are entrusted to us by our descendants. We hand over those freedoms at our peril.

Or perhaps you believe what the governments say: that regulating the internet is necessary to protect blah, blah, blah. I offer these questions:

  • The internet must be regulated by government, but the press is allowed to regulate itself. Why do you think that is?
  • Do you trust this government? Yes? How about the government after next?

Baa! Baa!

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May 15, 2011 · 12:04 am

Spurs are on their way to Wembley

“Do you want me to call it off?” Mum stood framed in the bathroom doorway, hands on hips, looking down at me sprawling in pain.

“No! I’ll be fine!” My bladder had screamed full all the way home from school and was busy wreaking its revenge. I wasn’t going to let it deter me: it was Thursday 14 May 1981, and I had a ticket for the FA Cup final replay between my team, Tottenham, and Manchester City. I’d been to plenty of football matches – I had a season ticket – but never a match this important. Never Wembley.

And how could I face my school friends the next day if, after bragging that I was going, I then stayed at home – because of a bladder strain. That choice would haunt me forever. Nothing short of a detached limb would stop me going.

I wasn’t going alone, of course. My cousin Mark, altogether more worldly-wise at 18 or so, also had a ticket – and a car. It wouldn’t be our first trip together: we’d gone to London a few years before, just the two of us I think, to see 2001 at the cinema. No, not the original release; it might have been the tenth anniversary, though – 1978. I’d have been nine, he fifteen. Hmm, surely not? Possibly. Times were different then, all flares and hair and grainy film.

We drove to Wembley, or thereabouts. I have no memory of the walk along Wembley Way with the gathering thousands, or of the queue, or of the hunt for the correct stairwell, or of the steep climb to our seats – oh, perhaps I do. It seemed near-vertical back there, vertiginously deep in the top corner of the Royal Box side, not far from the left goal line from the usual TV perspective.

It was a tense match. Spurs took the lead early, never a good sign, with City levelling only a few minutes later in the goal nearest us. Five minutes into the second half they went ahead through a penalty. The supporters around me – all Tottenham fans – became nervous. After 70 minutes Spurs equalised: jumping, screaming, relief. Twenty minutes to find a winner.

Six minutes later, it happened. The finest goal I’ve ever witnessed in person. Ricky Villa, substituted in the drawn match the previous Saturday, took the ball deep into the penalty area past one defender, two, jinking left and right, and fired a shot—

I’ve never seen, heard or felt anything like it. Fifty thousand people simultaneously screaming, exploding in joy, hugging, bouncing. Astonishment, disbelief.

And then the interminable wait. Fourteen minutes, plus injury time. Just keep the ball. Just. Keep. The. Ball.

At the final whistle we could breathe again. The celebrations began. From our vantage point we couldn’t see the team climb the 39 steps to the Royal Box, nor could we see Steve Perryman lift the trophy; we simply cheered when everyone else did. We cheered as, presumably, each player in turn held the cup aloft. We were drunk on cheers.

I’m not sure how we got home without Mark crashing the car. Sober, but still drunk. A high I’ve never forgotten and know I can never recreate.

Football’s a game played by overpaid, often unlikeable twats; owned by oligarchs; run by idiots; watched by thugs and bigots. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s played by sublime craftsmen at the top of their trade, and watched by passionate, loyal fans who experience the greatest highs and deepest lows with friends and strangers on the terraces across the country. But it’s still owned by oligarchs and run by idiots.

Cup Final day is not what it once was, even ignoring the rosifying memory lens. This year it’s not even the final match of the season. It’s lost in the Premier League and Champions League cash-chase, another victim of the sport’s insatiable greed. The loss of the FA Cup’s prestige arguably began when money begat exclusive TV deals. Once, the FA Cup Final was the only live domestic football match on TV, and the build-up began on both main channels at dawn with Cup Final Pro-Celebrity Eggy Soldiers or some such; now the single terrestrial broadcaster has no work to do. No romance to talk up. No semi-literate panel to parade. No Moore v Coleman/Motty contest to hype (Coleman, obv.).

All we have is the game, yet another live game in a season of yet another live games. Eagerly awaited by the teams and the fans, and the obsessives, but few others. Of course I’m only saying all this because the year ends in one and by rights that means Spurs should have been there, dammit.

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May 2, 2011 · 12:45 pm

With malice a Thor fought

Aussie soaps were not originally a well-rubbed waypoint on the cobbled road to celebrity. Nobody from The Sullivans ever wore spandex over dubiously inflated muscles in a Marvel franchise, not even 1977’s The Amazing Spider-Man. All that has changed. Chris Hemsworth can, curiously, trace his casting as Norse totty Thor back to cigar’n’braces soap-enabler Michael Grade or his eighties vicinity, and the unexpectedly world-changing decision to buy Neighbours for BBC Daytime. For Neighbours begat Kylie, Jason, Guy, Alan and a few others, and let loose Home and Away on the UK, which spawned Hemsworth.

From Summer Bay and World of Cliché to Kirk’s dad and now Asgard, in but a few short tumultuous years. It’s like casting Adam ‘Ian Beale’ Woodyatt as one of the X-Men. Iceman, Phoenix, Wolverine, Black Pudding.

Thor has a tricky path to take: part action-adventure, part Norse Mythology 101, it needs to introduce a non-comic-gobbling crowd to a pantheon of “actual” gods it might remember only vaguely from school discussions about days of the week, and also deliver a coherent plot that isn’t something cheesily related like an apocalyptic Battle For Thursday.

The story is by Mark Protosevich and Babylon 5 overlord J. Michael Straczynski, with a three-author screenplay that suggests development Helheim. The film takes place bang in the middle of the Marvel universe (movie franchise edition), with noob-tolerant, fanboy-wetting references to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Tony Stark. But fanboys beware: movie Thor’s not comics Thor. Of course you know that already, you’re a fanboy; you probably already wrote a capped green exclamated thesis on the matter. Less foamy Thor-comic fans will be happy that certain aspects of the comics are preserved (though not all).

Some of the early scenes in Asgard feel draggy at the time: I thought they were trying and failing to be quick expositional backgrounders, but they turned out to be plot. Asgard itself is beautifully realised by director Kenneth Branagh (I know, right?). Kirby loved a wide galactic smear and that’s what we see, with a world full of godly fixtures and fittings and implausible furniture. No pixel is left unbuffed. The Midgard Earth scenes are a great counterpoint, a dreary dustbowl of diners and utterly ungodlike fatsos.

The main human characters are nothing to Bifröst home about. Natalie Portman plays the standard scientist/love interest role; no Oscar noms here. She has a sassy wisecracking girly sidekick and a weathered, Viking-like colleague with whom to enter and exit sundry scrapes. All very comic-like, in fact.

Aside from eight-packing Thor and his massive weapon Mjolnir, gods include but are not limited to dad Odin, portrayed by barely not-Welsh Anthony Hopkins, and brother Loki, played by Michael Sheen Loki-likey Tom Hiddleston. Other deities are available.

Hemsworth scrubs up well. Seekers of flesh will perk up for one brief scene and instantly divide into mary and contrary camps. I’m on the mary side: he’s overly muscled for my tastes. But I still wød.

As you might expect, there’s nothing to stop further films with at least some of the same cast. Indeed I see The Avengers (no, not Steed et al) is in production for 2012 – presumably drawing together the various strands from several Marvel movies. I confess a low-grade squee at this: different movies, different characters, one consistent(ish) universe. It all makes the constantly rebooting Batman and Superman franchises look like dinothors.

Yeah, sorry about that one.

Avaragado’s rating: one tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey

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