Police demonstrate outside anarchist film show

End:Civ

I went to see End:Civ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--FsPMKkt9c) with director Franklin López in Whitechapel last night. It was like entering into a science fiction world, Children of Men, perhaps. End:Civ preaches deep green environmentalism and is as hostile to light green groups like Greenpeace as it is to the oil companies. Frank is a self avowed anarchist and I took it that the premises the video was shown in was run by an anarchist group. In the street, the forces of law and order, police officers who I took by their uniforms to be from outside the London area, massed in some numbers. I don't think they were too bothered about us, it seemed to be just another pre-Olympics show of strength. These police demonstrations are becoming quite common in north east London right now as the forces of law and order seek to exert control over the streets, signalling that no repeat of last summer's rioting will be tolerated in 2012. Frank explained how his video was made for about $20,000. Some bits were simply stolen, most of the very impressive interviews were shot at an environmental conference, and other sections were shot while Frank was attending events. One model of 21st century video making, perhaps. If the distributors are not going to distribute and the tv companies are not going to broadcast, what difference does it make if you rip off a few giant corporations by stealing their video? It's a point of view. The basic message of End:Civ is that the system is so rotten that it has to be overturned in order to save the planet. If the corrupt governments and the over mighty corporations threaten the world then you have to do whatever is necessary to topple them. Reform is simply not possible. A bleak message. Malthusianism with a 21st century twist.

Zen Management

This is both a handbook to help you succeed in the modern world of work and a survival guide for those unfortunates who have no desire to climb the greasy pole but would prefer not to get on the wrong side of the powers that be in the organisation in which they work.

It introduces the idea of Zen Management. This sounds like a highly exotic technique but is actually the commonest form of corporate organisation in the workplace today.

Zen management is by its nature chaotic and destructive. It is one of the most profound reasons why the corporation is likely to be replaced by a loose network of individual contracts, with people working together on a freelance basis on individual projects, connected only by the internet.

In a world where roads are permanently jammed by crawling traffic, it makes no sense for people to spend perhaps ten hours a week getting to an office that has worse equipment (computers, phones, faxes, broadband etc.) than they could afford to buy for their own home.

Ten hours a week is about the same as 1.2 working days. The average person goes to an office about 45 weeks a year. That means the total travelling time is about 54 working days or nearly 11 weeks. That is the equivalent of working from January until the last fortnight of March! Apart from the damage done to the planet, this wastes an awful lot of resources. It is not uncommon for people to spend £2,000, £3,000 perhaps even £5,000 a year commuting. There are parts of the world where an income of £5,000 a year would be regarded as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. In the age of the internet people who live in these areas may be able to compete against some of the commuters for their jobs. Call centres have already started to do this. Quite clearly the current level of commuting is not sustainable.

Right now the corporation seems stronger than it has ever been. It is the dominant form of social organisation and thrives while other social systems (churches, voluntary organisations, cinemas, clubs and societies, even pubs and drinking clubs) languish. It is likely to remain that way for at least the next decade. It wouldn't be worth writing the book if it was any other way.

But all forms of organisation wax and wane. They have a natural life span. And when an organisation seems to be most powerful it is a likely sign it is about to decline. Has the corporation reached its apogy! Probably not just yet. But it will at some time. Probably some time in the 21st century.

Zen Management conjures up the image of Tibetan priests in spartan temples ringing bellls annd using prayer wheels. But these are not the signs of Zen Management. The most obvious sign is that when you deal with an organisation the first thing junior staff tell you about the middle management is that they do nothing.

If you then talk to the managers themselves they will usually tell you they are fiendishly busy and have to work incredibly long hours.

Both groups are often guilty of a degree of self delusion (managers may still be in the office three hours after the end of working time, but they may also slope off at other times when they believe no one is looking--- workers come to believe that everything they do is entirely their own idea and forget that the job has been set up for them). But to some extent both groups are right in what they say. Middle managers do work hard and they do appear to do nothing. This is the nature of Zen.

The Zen Master causes things to happen without appearing to do anything. And the Zen Master has to spend a lot of time in contemplation in order to reach enlightenment. From the outside this meditation looks an awful lot like doing nothing.

Many who have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will be reluctant to believe this. ZAMM, as its fans call it, made Zen appear to be a bullshit free zone. Engineers doing things because they were the right things to do rather than to impress anyone.

Zen is like that but there are many forms of Zen. You could have a Zen of military force, perhaps even a Zen of thieving or contract killing.

Zen management is unpleasant and inefficient but it is nowhere near as immoral as the Zen of contract killing, if such a thing exists.

Droughts

There's a long standing tradition in Britain that just before a lengthy rainy spell, the authorities announce that we are in the middle of a terrible drought and there will need to be a hose ban pipe in the summer.


This, of course, is excessively optimistic, because we don't always get summers in Britain. But what is even more extraordinary is that the powers that be have an uncanny knack for announcing droughts shortly before the heavens open and we are all drenched in a downpour.


No Native American witch doctor ever performed a more effective rain dance than do the weather experts when shuffling uneasily (even on radio you can tell they are shuffling) as they threaten us with the dreaded hose pipe ban.


I don't own a hose pipe and if I did I wouldn't know what to do with it since I live in a flat and have no garden. Hose pipes are effectively banned from the Brind household, come rain or shine.


Even so I took notice when I heard the drought warnings because it was clear what was to come. As expected it has rained more or less continually. It's amazing! How do they know it's about to rain? If they do have a sixth sense for these matters, why when they see the signs of coming rain, does it suddenly make them fixate on the poor hose pipe?


After the drought warnings, after the flood, the next step is usually the imposition of a hose pipe ban anyway. A lot of rain doesn't mean we don't have a drought. Oh no, we just have a very wet drought.


The usual excuse is that the rain happened at the wrong time, or it was the wrong kind of rain. Despite the whole country being a sodden mess, it's still officially a drought.


We haven't reached that stage yet but watch out for it. I'm confident it will happen. I can't predict the weather, but I can predict the weathermen!

Ken Dodd

Years ago I was the editor of a coal industry magazine called Solid Fuel. Late one night I was sitting in the office when I received a call from a very angry Ken Dodd. My assistant at the time, David Cusworth (who subsequently went to Perth in Australia and long monopolised the state press awards for his headline writing), had been causing Ken grief.

David had been pursuing Ken's brother Arthur, a coal merchant who (from memory and as unlikely as it may seem this is how I remember it), was based in Knotty Ash, Merseyside. For those who don't know Ken Dodd's act, Knotty Ash is an almost mythical place he refers to, the home of the Diddymen. The Diddymen, who definitely are mythical, are Pinky and Perky type characters.

Anyway, David had been ringing Arthur Dodd's business phone line, asking him to get in touch with the magazine. We thought a bit of publicity might do him some good and it would certainly make interesting reading for our coal merchant audience.

So back to the call. There I was working on something (in those pre-email days the phones seemed to ring all day so sometimes the evening was the only time you could actually get anything done) when the phone rang.

I could tell immediately Ken Dodd was angry. This was not the loveable character he mostly portrays in his stage act. The conversation went something like.

"I'm Ken Dodd,"KD
"Oh, hello Ken," me.
"Why are you ringing my brother?"KD
"Oh that's not me, that's my assistant David," me.
"Why is he ringing my brother?" KD
"We wanted to do a feature about him," me. "We thought it would be interesting."
"Well don't." KD.
"He's a coal merchant and we write about coal merchants in Solid Fuel,"me
"He doesn't want to talk to you,"KD.
"But why, Ken?" me. "It would be good for his business and a positive, interesting story."
"If you have to do something write about me," KD.
"But I can't Ken you're not a coal merchant," me. "We write about coal merchants."
"Well leave my brother alone!," KD.
"Ok Ken, I'll tell David to drop the story," me.

The next morning I told David that Arthur wasn't going to talk to him so he should drop the story.
A shame really. The story I'd heard was that the Dodd coal business used to be owned by Ken and Arthur's father. When one of the sons had to take over it turned out that Arthur was a first rate comedian but also a great coal merchant. Ken was not a bad comedian but he was certainly a worse coal merchant. So Arthur got the business and Ken took to the stage.

Rubbish, of course, you don't get to be as good a comedian as Ken Dodd through natural talent. It's practice, practice, practice, practice. It takes years of heart break and failure to make a great comedian.

But all the same it's a good story and it would have been great to have some photographs of the Knotty Ash coal business.

Sarkie

Nicolas Sarkozy's last ditch attempt to win re-election to the French presidency by promising a 0.1% share transaction tax could be a sign that the tide is turning. Those who like me believe in kondratiev waves and have long been waiting for the economic nadir to be reached, may find this encouraging. This may be the sign.
After the Second World War people in Europe and across the world rejected the rapacious capitalism of the 1930s that had caused so much human misery and destruction to the fabric of society. In Britain a Labour Government introduced the modern welfare state, nationalised the basic industries that were seen as the backbone of society at the time and Conservative and Labour governments competed with each other to see how many council houses they could build!
This social confidence petered out in the 1960s with the so called individualism of flower power and drug culture. We had rooms full of students, each expressing their individuality but from a distance looking exactly the same as each other.
In the 1970s and 1980s with Thatcherism and Reganism there was the emergence of the lunatic assertion that there is no such thing as society and the creation of a world fit for small shopkeepers and B movie leading men. Labour and Conservative parties competed with each other to see how many industries could be de-nationalised.
The nineties and the noughties were decades of excess and unprecedented collapse: boom and bust on a previously unimaginable scale.
Inequalities multiplied with the richest taking an ever greater share of the pie, while the majority in America and Europe, got poorer. This was very much the story of the 1920s and 1930s.
A financial transaction tax will not damage investment, since long term investors like Warren Buffet will scarcely be affected. If you don't make transactions you don't have to pay the tax!
What it will do is tax churn, by that I mean the relentless speculation and financial manipulation carried out by banks and other cowboy outfits. Banking should be boring.
Tax the transactions enough and all the credit default swaps and financial derivatives become transparently a mugs game. Even the people who believed they could make a killing out of trillion dollar zero sum games, come to realise the process is fundamentally flawed.
And when you think about it every other transaction is taxed. When you buy a packet of baby food, or a house or pretty much anything else there is a sales tax. The only major exemptions are some forms of gambling and the stock market.
Tax all the transactions and you strike at the heart of the giant machine that has been grinding wealth and prosperity away from the mass of the people to an unelected elite. A tax on share transactions is a first step.
Britain, of course, has much to fear from a financial transaction tax. Much of the British economy is devoted to the City and finance. A British transaction tax could cost the economy dear if the city upped stumps and moved elsewhere. But the City is hardly going to move to Paris and if Sarkozy starts a trend it may be that there are fewer and fewer bolt holes for speculators who don't want to live in the Cayman Isles or Lichenstein.
And Britain also has much to gain. While a 0.1% transaction tax won't raise much in France (a billion euros perhaps), it would raise quite a lot in Britain and might make the current Government's doomed attempt to balance the financial books, a little more plausible.

a new type of search engine

Imagine everything you have ever been told about the internet in general and search engines in particular. Then reverse it.

This is a counter intuitive idea, yet when I explain it, people always say it must exist already. Perhaps it does, but I haven't come across it.

Information they say wants to be free and perhaps it does but advertisers want different values placed on different types of information: so free means different things at different places.

Let's put it this way, but it is only one of millions of potential examples, suppose you are looking for orange Egyptian cotton sheets in Ebay, you can find them but it is a very tedious process. These are standard high street products but you will have to wade through enormous quantities of stuff you are not interested in at all (pillow cases, polycotton sheets, which is probably not cotton at all and a lot of other stuff as well, almost none of it coming from Egypt).

Ebay probably tries its best to serve people who want to buy the goods offered via its service, but I believe internet traders attempt as hard as they can to compete on anything but price. In other words they hope that you may forget what you are looking for and instead click to buy their offerings on impulse. There seems to be no other conceivable reason for the fact that many of the entries are virtually identical, as if the search engine had been stuffed in order to crowd out low priced competition.

It's the same story with Google and other search engines. Googlewhacking is the name given to the process of entering search terms into google - often two words - with the aim of finding a search with just one result on Google. There is a word for this phenomenon because it is so rare. Many searches will give you millions of results. It is said that you can even get billions of results if you enter a term like if!

So far as most of these searches are concerned the results are of little value to anyone except the advertisers, reminding one of the old adage, he who pays the piper calls the tune!

So is the internet doomed to sink into a commercially driven miasma? Unfortunately, it probably is and, of course, this has driven the creation of selective search engines and web sites that catalogue related information. It's also possible to refine the way you search but fundamentally so long as the advertisers are paying it's never going to be a level playing field. If it was they wouldn't pay!

From a consumer's point of view this is all pretty depressing. Just as the internet really takes off as a commercial forum and high street stores start to feel the competition, consumers begin to find it almost impossible to discover what they really want.

So there is a huge unmet demand for an intelligent search engine and at the same time there is a vast amount of extremely cheap untapped intelligence: About three billion people (half the world's population), live on less than $2.5 a day. Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

It's hard to avoid watching techy or third world development tv programmes without seeing stories of African towns, or sometimes whole African countries, aiming to be internet hot spots. But what exactly are they supposed to do with the internet (apart from attempting to obtain the bank account details of people who believe they are about to get $100million from some phoney source)?

Obviously, there are legitimate things people can do, like compete for jobs on services like peopleperhour, but they don't seem to do it a great deal. Perhaps it is too complex to get access to an internet enabled computer and perform quite sophisticated duties (like designing a Powerpoint presentation)?

But doing a search is quite a simple operation, if tedious. Pay internet enabled people living in these desperately poor areas $5 a day and I imagine it would seem like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Even if they had to spend 20 minutes wading through an Ebay search sometimes, they'd probably be able to do a dozen searches a day. Charge the consumers $2 a search word ($8 for Orange Egyptian Cotton Sheets) and it could be quite profitable.

Save the core information obtained on an intranet and it might be possible for second line searchers to do a hundred searches a day, so you could make a good profit even if you were charging 25c a word.

Of course, there would be considerable consumer resistance to a search engine like this. People expect to get information for free and even premium services usually offer limited use for free.

Then there's the problem of micro transactions. It might be difficult to charge 25c via Paypal (or similar) so there would be a need to register and pay a subscription. Many consumers might give up at this point and say they can't be arsed to pay for something they know little about, particularly if they have to go through the process of registration.

On the other hand, I don't think it would be worth doing unless some (preferably a handful) of charities like Computer Aid and Oxfam, bought into the process. These charities have enormous databases and a vast ability to publicise a scheme like this. Their involvement would also make consumers feel better about parting with their cash.

Then there's the problem that search results would be delayed. They would not be instant. Could this be presented as an advantage?

For one thing this search engine is really intelligent and does not simply appear to be intelligent. It passes the Turing test so you can engage in a genuine conversation with it. If you don't like the response you can ask for the engine to take another look (possibly for a small additional fee).

Then there's the cooling off period angle. I can imagine the advert: ever bought a blow up purple rhino on the internet and wondered why when it was delivered a few days later? Using this search engine if you want to buy something you get to look at what you want to see yet the transaction takes a while. It isn't instant.

This idea would change the world. It could make internet shopping work better. It could improve the lives of the poverty stricken. It could force companies to be more transparent when they list their wares on the internet.

Lots of people have talked about providing internet enabled $100 computers in some of the poorest parts of the world. This search engine could afford to pay for and distribute such machines in meaningful numbers and at the same time create a lot of value for the people who construct it.

Biutiful (2010)

Biutiful written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu is probably the most depressing film I've ever seen. I would cheerfully break off watching it to see Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Ingmar Bergman is a comic film maker (and I'm not talking about Now About These Women) in comparison to Iñárritu.
Yet Biutiful is gorgeously made and has some of the best performances ever recorded on celluloid, particularly Hanaa Bouchaib, a teenager, though it was actually Javier Bardem who got nominated for the Oscar. In truth his performance is phenomenal but in this Spaniish film that is not unusual.
It is set in a Catlonian badland, so bleakly depressing that it seems as if it would be impossible for things to be worse: and yet almost immediately they get much worse and continue to spiral downwards at an ever increasing rate.
If you imagine something ghastly might happen, it almost immediately will. Yet this is not done for comic effect and it is hard to believe that Iñárritu thinks it will actually change anything. It probably won't.
The only redeeming factor is that you may emerge a better person having gone through an emotional wringer (a roller coaster with only downs and no ups). I sincerely hope so.
If you have to see the very best film making (which this is) go see it. But if you value your happiness, stay well away.