Robert

It is interesting to read your comments in light of yesterday’s report in the Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/dec/09/firsttimebuyers.property

What this example shows is, I fear, that far from the digital revolution ‘leaking power from the elite to the masses’ it will simply perpetuate division and accentuate differences. Cleggs talk of delivering services for each other (if the Facebook example is anything to go by) will not be about the strength and virtue of collective endeavour, it will be about looking after our own.

I think this is rubbish. Two of the four examples he gave are perfect examples of the relative disempowerment of individuals compared to the state and big corporations. Google and Facebook both collect disturbing amounts of information on the individual, which they use to build up a profile of you and sell that product to other companies. In the surveillance society, this huge inequality of information and (digital) power creates more social division rather than less – see the Information Commissioner’s report on the surveillance society (or my write up).

Wikipedia I would defend as being important, although Youtube much less so.

But anyway, this focus on these few well publicised examples misses out the enormous effort being spent on new technologies which are very much paternalistic: expansion of CCTV, development of biometric technologies, face recognition, etc.

First, I personally think that looking for signs of “right” or “left” in this speech/article/analysis is quite wrong and perpetuates an unhealthy obsession with such categories.

But never mind that, I still think that the challenges of the super-connected world are being grossly underestimated, even by Nick Clegg in this case. It has the potential to do away with currency as we know it for example. And to make it very difficult, for example, to trace incomes and wealth without even more intrusion into our private affairs than we allow at present.

I wrote the blog article that this comment links to eighteen months ago as a flavour of the sort of challenges these issues present and how we might get round them. But I do think Nick is correct in the sense that this is something completely new in the social delivery of services and goods. The big thing we need to be careful of is the infrastructure – if we are not careful we may all end up part of Verizon’s “Matrix” or whatever. Have a look at the idea of Market v3.0. Also the recent Royal Television Society lecture by Anthony Lilley highlighted how in “media” similar things are happening – no longer is “broadcast” a one-to-many paradigm, but a many-to-many possibility. James Murdoch, or the BBC, no longer have such control over what we read by way of news or opinion, or how we connect one to another.

This is the new media world in which the individual and the collective can meet up. I think you really need to be looking beyond notions of “right” and “left” in the various new marketplaces that will spring out of these developments. And think in terms of essentially “liberal” not right or left. And I suspect taht’s what Clegg was probably trying to get across.

I personally think that looking for signs of “right” or “left” in this speech/article/analysis is quite wrong and perpetuates an unhealthy obsession with such categories.

You may be right, Jock. I did try to be slightly equivocal in my post, above. But the issues of power and powerlessness should, I think, be at the forefront of our minds as these technologies are created, and used. Perhaps it is not so much that the new technology is inherently ‘Left’, but that those with Left wing values need pay attention, and help shape the technological development.

Absolutely we must help shape…

It’s all there to play for IMHO. It could be the great leveller – imagine trading direct with an individual African farmer say instead of having Nestle broker some mega-deal that rips us both off. Or it could be a ghastly Big Brother scenario – as Dan @ comment 2 seems to want to wish into inevitability!

Personally, I’m an optimist on this. There are enough clever people out here in internet land to subvert virtually anything the “state” or anyone else tries to fence us in with – Tim Berners-Lee would not have had it any other way.

As mentioned in that article I wrote 18 months or so ago, try having a look for work by a guy called Bernard Lietaer – his pet theory is of “Sustainable Abundance” built on the new markets made available to individuals by super-connectivity.

Can I point out that in the article’s abridged version – all that was needed was the term “post-bureaucratic age” and it could just have been a Cameron speech.

And is that sort of uniformity and lack of choice not the reason that people feel disempowered?