DIABOLICAL LIBERTIES

Dick Pountain/22 September 2000 14:22/Idealog 74

I usually love it when the stuff you read about in books comes together with what's happening in real life, but every now and again it can become scary. First I was reading James Gleick on time and speed, and the way that time is becoming a more and more precious commodity in the modern world: 'We are in a rush. We are making haste. A compression of time characterises life today.' (from Faster: The Acceleration Of Just About Everything, Abacus £8.99.) Gleick observes that the vast majority of technological innovations over the last millenium, from the Archimedean Screw to the Cotton Gin to the computer, are really about saving our time, or rather about someone's time by letting us do more work in the available time. Who am I to argue with that since I've spent the last fifteen years writing about caches and pipeline burst modes, RISCs and branch prediction, a nanosecond shaved off here, a cycle saved there. Gleick refuses to get preachy about all this speed - you can feel there's a part of him that dislikes it and would like to slow down, but he is well smart enough to know that we are all hooked on it and that there's another part of him that would, er, rapidly die of boredom.

The other book, which I've been reviewing for another publication is called 'Cyberselfish' (Little, Brown £14.99) and it's by an ex-Wired journalist called Paulina Borsook, who describes how virtually the whole of the hi-tech industry in California has fallen in thrall to an extreme libertarian philosophy/political economy which would like to see the virtual abolition of all government and people being forced to fend for themselves in an unfettered free market. Borsook describes how earlier hippy-like attitudes gradually evolved and hardened: for example the Bionomics Institute began life in 1994 by exploring biological metaphors for the way society works - which is where we get all these references to 'niches' that the marketing people so love. It began in a free-and-easy, countercultural sort of way, but soon one theme came to dominate, namely that these systems are so complex we can never understand them, and therefore should never, ever try to intervene in them (which amounts in the end to saying that God Will Provide). After 5 years or so they merged with the Cato Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank that figures Rupert Murdoch among its directors. Then Borsook shows how the red hot issue of net privacy (and the US government's hamfisted efforts to subvert it) created the Cypherpunk movement which has, in the process of becoming more and more paranoid, aligned itself with this extreme libertarian position. The fact that the US government built the Internet in the first place seems to have been forgotten or ignored - as has the fact that, were all government funding to be withdrawn, the net would either become so unprofitable as to close almost instantly or so expensive that none of us could afford access.

So what exactly links these two books, both fresh in my mind? Of course it was the petrol crisis, a popular revolt which attracted very widespread support, against the very process of government: we all know about global warming, we all know what the government has to do about it, we all know how democracy has to work, but we all panic as soon as our petrol tank gets empty and deny all of these things. And I'm not judging anyone here, because I'm just like the rest (I get actual physical feelings of anxiety and claustrophobia when my motorcycle is not available to take me exactly where I want to go, for whatever reason). What enabled those fuel protesters to almost bring the country to a standstill so quickly was 'just-in-time' ordering, made possible by the computerisation of the stock control and ordering processes of oil companies and garages: no-one is prepared to carry large stocks of anything any more. What all this says to me is that modern government has become such a precisely balanced and unstable thing that it is almost like a fly-by-wire jet fighter - snap one wire and the whole thing could go down in flames. We need government more than ever before in history, and the problem is not that it is too intrusive but that it is barely clinging on by its fingernails (we were 24-hours from  empty food shops remember). Which means that all these libertarian fantasies about little communities of economic free agents doing their own thing in the country are just so much hot air. They'd last precisely as long as a set of AAA batteries...

And while I'm talking about books, I've just written one myself (and if you can't plug it in your own column where the hell can you?) I co-wrote it with an old friend Dave Robins - we worked on the underground press together back in the '60s - and it's called 'Cool Rules: The Anatomy of an Attitude' (Reaktion Books, £12.99). In it we investigate the history, sociology and psychology of the phenomenon of Cool, showing how it has changed from being a rebellious minority attitude to something you see in every Pot Noodle ad. It does have some relevance to computing, what with Redmond kewl, computer games and the way that nerdism has suddenly become cool, but to be honest it's much more about music, film, art and other stuff. Go out, buy it, make me rich and stop me whingeing...