Tomorrow’s World

The brilliant thing about humans is that unlike all other life forms on earth we make things. And when I say make, I don’t mean fabricate, as birds build nests and beavers build dams. We don’t just use tools like the sticks chimps utilise to fish for termites, or birds to root for grubs. No, when I say we make things we create spectacular things that just didn’t exist before. In the minds of certain animal rights activists there is virtually no difference between mankind and monkeys; when you show me a monkey making a smart phone I may concede you have a point.

The current Mr Greenpeace, John Sauven, was on the Sunday Politics yesterday, making something: a right tit of himself. In the face of verifiable evidence that, on all measures, air pollution has been steadily declining for forty years he blatantly denied using invented statistics and fake claims of 40,000 premature deaths for political ends. As always with those of a leftist bent – the highly intelligent, caring, progressive sector of society – measures to solve this non-problem would impact more heavily on those they seek to protect from their own ignorance... and autonomy.

On Planet Greenpeace, the hoi polloi can’t be trusted to wisely steward the world’s resources and it is only by limiting potential, ideally by legislation, that devious capitalistic urges can be curtailed. No third runway, obviously. Then ridding the roads of cars, closing down supposedly polluting industries and soon, energy rationing. What next, compulsory vegetarianism? I have to confess a certain sympathy with one Green aim, population reduction: starting with a swift cull of those who espouse Mother Earth philosophies that would return us to agrarian lifestyles and a level of poverty unknown in generations.

Turning back the clock – a charge often erroneously levelled at those who wish to curtail big government and the global socialist project – is never the answer. The genie is out of the bottle and there is only one way; ahead. You can’t put the atom back together and pretend it never happened and you can’t forget all the advances made by people with vision that have improved our world immeasurably. Around the time I was born the global population was estimated at 3 billion. Fifteen years later it hit 4 billion and a fresh wave of third-world famines sparked the fear that we would never be able to feed so many. Forty years on and it has doubled, yet we keep on somehow feeding them.

And we do it because we are big-brained problem solvers. Our technological progress is just that, progress; forging forwards. We went to the moon, we eradicated diseases that used to claim millions, we fed the world and now, as much as at any time before, we must look to our ingenuity not to limit our possibilities but to push on. Here's just one example of our staggering ingenuity, plucked randomly from dozens, which hints at denying our doomsayers the fulfilment of their wishes; carbon 14, a thing that never existed before we made it. Imagine a world where electrical energy is no longer an issue. Portable, safe, effectively everlasting diamond battery power for everybody. From the problem of nuclear waste comes a solution for the future.

In the future there will be equal rights for vegetables

Will the prophets of doom and disaster embrace the possibilities with open arms? No, they will find something to hang their antagonistic hats on; something to bleat about. When gender battles and planet-saving and diversy-multicultilicious concerns have run their course there will always be new causes to cling onto. For just as the potential of mankind to think its way out of trouble seems infinite so does its capacity to imagine itself hard done by. In tomorrow’s world, as life gets easier and easier, the malcontents will continue to thrive.

An iPhone a day

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, they say, don't they? But right now Apple's blatant built-in-obsolescence marketing model is getting social media all a-froth with indignant mentalists, simultaneously complaining about, yet defending to the death, their whiter than white fetish. Bi-polar syndrome being the lunacy of choice for the discerning Internetter, an Apple announcement a day does much to keep the head-doctors way into 45% tax territory.

One shiny-new iPhone, sir? That's seven-hundred quid and a subscription to The Priory. Or, save yourself the cost of a new bit of kit and simply update your old phone to iOS 6. The price? Free. The cost? Loss of your marbles after an entire weekend spent failing to recover all the stuff you think you can't live without.

In reality it's all bollocks though, isn't it? Apple or Android, almost nobody does more than a tiny fraction of what may be possible. If you use your iThing for music or media you have to recharge it every five minutes and if you try to use it for 'work' you will simply become deranged as your whole intellectual ability tries to tunnel-vision its way onto that tiny screen. Narrow focus; narrow vision; narrow productivity... narrow life possibilities.

Don't even attempt to convince me otherwise. 99% of all smartphone owners use them exclusively for email, messaging, Twitter and the occasional Google search. Apps, you say; it's all about the Apps. Pardon my French, but is it fuck. Apps are what we used to call... now, what was the word?... Oh yes - toys. For every useful app there are a thousand useless, buggy betas, alternatively crashing and freezing their way into the very core of your mental well-being. (I predict a whole new skein of entitlement-based, application-induced insanities to make merry work for the nut-docs.)

Even the pub - once the balance-restoring (or removing; there is that) social haven of happy babble - is now a sterile, strife-inducing continuation of the desperate need to stay in touch with everybody, everywhere, all of the time. The sight of a table of four friends all sitting, eyes-down and thumbs a-blur, is a depressing indictment of the way in which social technology is eroding, not enhancing your all-too-brief experience in this vale of tears we call Earth.

So, wake up and smell the Java, Joe! Get up off your collective backsides and get out into the real world while it and you are still in one piece. Forego the Facebook, get off the Google and avoid the apps! Now, excuse me while I check my Twitter timeline...

It's Digital, Man!

I can't be arsed with all this Greece nonsense. They are going to be enslaved, exiled or invaded and there's nothing any politician really cares about it, so long as they can stay in office by pandering to the uneducated, egocentric wiles of their increasingly dumbfounded electorate and keep telling them what they want to hear. Why change a winning formula?

So, sod the economies and the concerns of Greece, Italy, Spain Ireland and whichever knave in the house of cards is next on the world stage, professing to have the first clue as what is needed. Sod ‘em all and let’s look closer to home. Good old Blighty.

The UK is a pretty affluent country, you know? Of course we got troubles – who don’t, innit? – but Birmingham didn’t seem to think so yesterday. From the teeming masses out on the spend I saw little sign of a country in crisis.

There is nothing – and I mean NOTHING for sale in the Bullring that anybody actually needs. From the bizarre bubble-wrap skin of Selfridges, to the plethora of games and gadget shops, sunglasses huts, coffee emporia, perfumiers, chocolatiers and jewellers, there is sweet F-A that anybody needs to live on. For a country that’s supposedly broke it’s doing a great job of looking like a consumer paradise.

Every other outlet sells mobile phones with enough computing power to get man on the moon, or run an army from exile; the sheer capability of these things is truly awesome. But look who’s really using them and for what purpose.

The digital native, it is said, needs no formal knowledge-based education, for all knowledge is at the fingertips. What use is there in teaching history, geography, the sciences, language and maths when you can carry your brain in your pocket? (Something, incidentally, that men have been doing for millennia.)

Educationalists posit that ‘digital immigrants’ (that’s us crusties, folks) have trouble teaching digital natives because of the proliferation of a new language and new social paradigms. Educationalists, it seems can always come up with another pseudo-scientific reason not to educate. This, however, is a simple case of the tail wagging the dog – who is supposed to be teaching whom?

If the aimless, lardy simpleton waddling along New Street, glazed eyes fixed to a tiny screen, is an example of the digital native (and it certainly is) then you have to ask yourself at which point this genius is going to transform our brave new world.

For every Alpha entrepreneur, using technology in a new and interesting way, you have a million drooling Deltas using the same technology to order pizza. Aldous Huxley’s novel, while not great literature, was nevertheless prescient… and far more stuff needs cleaning than inventing. As long as you keep the drones happy, the world keeps on turning. 

Hmmm, (shudder at the thought) maybe the Eurocrats know what they're doing after all?

The cutting edge of white heat, blue sky durch Technik

Now, when it comes to computers and suchlike I’m no expert, yet I ain’t no slouch either, but have you ever noticed how all this progress is weighing us down? Yesterday, for example, I spent pretty much the whole day transferring files and programmes from one computer to another. Yes, yes, I know, local storage is so ‘noughties’, dude. Like, get with the cloud, man. Put your life on the cloud and you can access it from anywhere via any platform.

Yes and so can anybody else, or – more likely – you’ll have no access when you actually need it. And besides, if a workaday hacker can get at your cloudy inner secrets, so could the government, which is a sobering thought. Whoa there boy, back up a bit. “What are you hiding?” you’re all thinking now. (See? That’s what the government wants you to think!)

Nothing! Nothing, but… it’s a bit like writing down everything about your life in a diary and handing it to a ‘homeless’ for safekeeping. He might try to sell your secrets or your identity. Or he might just browse through it. No problem, you’ve got security on it, right? Or he might just lose it. Or. More likely you’ll never find that tramp again.

Am I likening the government to a tramp? Yes, I believe I am. A dirty, smelly vagrant, whose very existence repulses you, yet you can’t let out of your sight because otherwise he’ll be into your pockets for your keys. Then he and his mates will steal your car and squat in your property before you can say George Osborne. The point is, you can’t just tell the world everything about yourself and not expect consequences. You need a bit of security.

So, passwords. You’re not supposed to use a memorable password – you know, anything you might actually remember? Nor should you write it down, or use it for more than one site… and then you should change it every few weeks. But, it’s not like you need many passwords, is it? After your online banking, there’s not much to worry about is there? Okay, so you might have more than one bank account and maybe a share account, an ISA, or SIPP.

And maybe you have online accounts for gas, electric, water, council tax. Oh yes, there’s also Google, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook… and your multiple email accounts, or instant messaging… and Skype, of course. Still, that’s not too many to remember, is it? Ah but, what about every online merchant you’ve ever bought from? They all want you to register your fake email address so they can bombard you with spam, don’t they?

Right then, multiple log-ins, each with a different password – not written down – that you change every few weeks. Quite a task, but I have a great system. All my dozens of passwords are generated for me by a script I wrote to spew out randomised strong combinations at irregular intervals for each and every account. Now all I have to do is call up that program every time I need to log in and it does it for me!

It’s so secure even I don’t know the log-in details. You could waterboard me for hours and I could never tell. The only thing I’ll ever need is the password to access my programme. Now, if I ever forgot that, boy I’d be in real trouble… which is why I’ve written it down on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.