BigShinyThing

With her trademark bangs and super high heels, Bettie Page sadly waited late into her life to cash in on her status as an icon. A lot of the obits have focused on her decline but we’d rather remember her in her heyday. Bettie made light S&M look joyous and fun. Her shoots never featured men — only women as master and servant — and most of the time she is pictured with a broad smile on her face, even when trussed up to the nines. In the sexually-stifling context of 1950s America she showed men and women that sex (and pretty subversive sex at that) was positive and even a bit of a lark. Was she exploited? Yes, but by those who replicated and marketed her image without paying her — not those who called the shots. It was not to be until the 1990s that Bettie started to recoup some of the money that had been made out of her image. And by then, an icon was born.

Indeed that’s the case, under new plans from London Police. Event organisers in 21 London boroughs are requested to ‘co-operate fully’ with police, by completing the new Form 696 before the event, in the interests of ‘risk assessment’.

Requested are not only details of promoters and onsite security, but also the contact numbers and real names of all performers, description of the ‘expected audience’ and the genre(s) of music expected to be performed, the examples given on the form being bashment, R’n'B, garage. No surprise then that many feel the Met is actually planning to use this data to focus police attention on clubs where such ‘dangerous’ forms of music are to be played, as well as for the profiling of the scene(s) and communities who organise and attend.

According to early reports, the form also included questions about the ethnicity of expected audiences. The current version on the Met’s site doesn’t include such information, so we can’t comment on that.

Concerns have been raised by many, including once-Undertone Feargal Sharkey, who now heads up the music campaign organisation UK Music. There’s a petition running on the 10 Downing Street website, a FaceBook group has been set up, and the mainstream press are paying attention.

Simply misguided urban policing, or the precursor of some modern day version of the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill’s rave-busting criminalisaiton of ‘repetitive beats’? Watch and wait. More importantly, act against this.

[Thanks for Helen Noir for tipping us off to this]

So. Google (arguably) has access to the most complete and up-to-date dataset of fact, opinion, intent and interconnection on the planet. What’s it doing with it, apart from shifting ads and servicing up web search?

Let’s start with a provocation. Why didn’t Google management either:

1. Profit from,
2. Alert us to, or
Intervene to stop

…the ongoing collapse of contemporary capitalism? Was that an active decision on their part, or do they simply not have the predictive capability? That’s an either-or question. We’re guessing the answer is that they don’t, but that they’re working on it. Wouldn’t you be?

Google’s long-standing interest in zeitgeist and trending suggests a deep interest in the descriptive uses of their wealth of data. Once you have description nailed, then prediction is a logical next target — and prediction at the scale Google might attempt would lead to a historical discontinuity of the kind only tackled head-on by Golden Age science-fiction hacks. Check out, for example, Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story Franchise set in a [fictional] Election Year 2008 in which

… the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac [...] then uses the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as “Voter of the Year” in 2008. At first he is not sure he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after voting he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise” — a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn’t actually get to vote.

Indeed.

There has been much speculation that Google is working to develop some general high level artificial intelligence. AI is tricky and doesn’t, we think, fit Google’s proven modus operandi. Google people like to solve pragmatic tasks in clever ways, not mess with fiddly intractables.

Consider Google’s recently announced flu prediction system — which analyses clustering in search query data to infer epidemiology two weeks earlier than traditional methods. We’re guessing the development of this tool offers clues to what Google is really expending the bulk of its computing resource and intellectual activity towards — not on AI research, but on data-driven predictive models for all sorts of real-world happenings — not only those related to public health, but the financial markets, weather systems, sports results.

We’re betting Google doesn’t know which real-world phenomena it will be able to model predictively. It doesn’t matter. As long as it can model some of the systems which drive our lives, Google is placed to dominate the global economy through the next economic cycle. Revisiting our original question — does Google’s non-intervention in the Crash of ’09 mean that they haven’t got the modelling down yet, or that they simply don’t want to Get Involved? Either way, it’s a Google future, people. Enjoy your franchise.

Last week, US unemployment jumped to an official level of around 6.8%. But, according to MarketWatch, when you include

…discouraged workers and those whose hours have been cut back to part-time — [the numbers] rose to 12.5% from 11.8%. The number of workers forced to work part-time rose by 621,000 to 7.3 million.

The difference between those percentages offers a glimpse of the scale of the Precariat — those workers with the most tenuous connection to the Experience Formerly Known as Employment. The term Precarity has been kicking around for a while now in leftie Academia and the anti-globalisation movement, to describe

…a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence.

Precarity is most commonly associated with outsiders who compete for low-paying retail and service jobs. Perversely, a similar state of uncertainty falls to the skilled, individualistic young, working their time with zero job security as digital freelancers in the post-industrial economies. A familiar scene at your local coffee-shop franchise is probably the closest the depoliticised members of both groups come to meeting — the one group toiling behind the tills, the other slaving against client deadlines on their MacBooks, making each drink last half a day.

Precariat, meet Digital Precariat. Help yourself to sugar over there, by the door. On the way out.

Everyone loves a bit of self-regulation. But what happens when world-views collide?

Today it has emerged that a ruling by Internet Watch Foundation — a charity-status QUANGO established to help self-regulate internet content in the UK — has led a number of UK ISPs to block access to a (community-regulated) Wikipedia page for heavy metal band Scorpions.

Why? Because the entry includes an image of an album cover which features a naked child. Internet providers began to block access to the page after the IWF warned them the picture may be illegal under UK law. An IWF spokeswoman said a reader had brought the image to the foundation’s attention last week and it had contacted the police before adding the page to their content blacklist.

The album cover itself is a pretty nasty piece of 70s schlock art but it is widely viewable elsewhere on the Internet.

Censorship is a big issue for the Wikipedia community, and policy is hotly debated. In July 2008, Wikipedia community editors then made a joint decision not to remove the Scorpions cover art from the site. According to the discussion page from that time, “Prior discussion has determined by broad consensus that the Virgin Killer cover will not be removed.” Indeed, the current Wikipedia page for Scorpions explains that in the United States (where the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation are hosted), the image is not considered obscene under the criteria of the Miller test, which requires that an obscene work lack “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value” (as album art is used to “brand” the album, it is considered to be artistic).

On the other side of the fence, the IWF is a UK-based charity, funded by ISPs and others, and endorsed by the UK Government. It was established in the mid-90s to self-regulate around the issue of USENET porn. Since then the IWF’s remit has expanded to include identification of racist and criminally obscene content, although its focus still seems to be on images of the abuse of children. Unlike Wikipedia, their process and website offers for no community discussion. There is apparantly no way to object to or appeal against their classification.

To us, the message of this story is plain. The kinds of ground-up regulation and consensual decision-making we value on-line only exist — if they exist at all — at the discretion of the State and its possibly-well-meaning but generally opaque proxies. If you want a voice, get out and shout. Yes, you.

First up: fear forward. As in ‘fashion forward’, but more (f)era-appropriate. For instance, those who are enjoying their ‘I told you so’ moment with regards to the current global recession, can be rightly described as ‘fear forward’.

With apologies and props to Word Spy.