THE WEB WORKS

Dick Pountain/17 June 2009 12:16/Idealog 179

As I write this column Iran is poised on the brink of major upheaval following a contested presidential election - either a democratic counter-revolution against the Islamic state or Tiananmen-scale repression appear equally likely. The authorities have cut off almost all the means of communication, censoring television and newspapers, closing down email and mobile phone networks. But still the dissidents are still capable of putting hundreds of thousands on to the streets thanks to, of all things, Twitter. Barack Obama's administration, reluctant to be seen as meddling in Iran's affairs, nevertheless quietly persuaded Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown at the height of the crisis, and the messaging network remained the  demonstrators' only open channel apart from word-of-mouth.

It's become rather fashionable to sneer at Twitter in recent months, and I'd have to admit that I'm not entirely immune: I don't use it, probably never will use it, and find the notion of following a celebrity's twitterings rather depressing. But let's get this straight, my objection has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the content. The fact that Twitter is mostly used for trivial purposes in the West merely reflects the tragic fact that we're largely sheltered from war and famine and able to take freedom of speech for granted - elsewhere in the world people still have more important news to impart to one another than that they're currently scratching their nuts (such as how to overthrow corrupt and repressive regimes). It would appear that Twitter is a more resilient channel for doing this than either email or the cellphone. The tragedy comes in because we may be poised on the very brink of losing much of our taken-for-granted security, so perhaps we ought to be paying more attention.

I've attacked various aspects of the WWW in past columns, like its structural inability to properly reward producers of intellectual property, its lack of critical faculties and its proliferation of untruths and uncontested opinions. However I've just as often praised aspects of the Web, in particular Web 2 sites like Flickr to which I'm unashamedly addicted, Wikipedia, Abebooks and Amazon. (On which subject, I owe it to Wikipedia to conclude a saga related in issue 166 of how my entry for "Political Quarterly" was ejected by a rogue vigilante editor: it was rescued by a white knight called Cordless Larry, long after we went to press, and can now be read as intended, improved by Larry's edits).

The plain fact is that the Web is one of the few things in our world that works better and better instead of worse and worse. I love to browse bookshops and often drop into the London Review one in Bloomsbury for a riffle and a pot of tea, but I still buy two-thirds of my books on Amazon or Abebooks. Ditto with much photographic and computer equipment. I use Google maps on my Palm Treo instead of carrying an A-to-Z, and still marvel at Google Earth and its streetview. Amazon's interface is plain remarkable: it handles payment in a seamless way that makes others look clunky (and makes me feel secure); its suggestions for books and records I might like are so spookily accurate it feels like mind-reading. Spotify may be the best thing to happen to music since the vinyl disk.

And that brings me to the crux of this column. If web giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter can facilitate world-wide communication in such an effective way, why is it that we still waste horrendous amounts of public funds on failed public sector IT projects, like the disastrous NHS system and the HM Revenue tax systems? At this point all the public-sector programmers (sorry, "developers") among our readers will be twitching toward their keyboards to set me straight about the very different data volumes and security requirements of such institutional applications. Horse Poop say I. The volumes of both data and gross material goods that pass through Amazon's systems every day must be of similar order to these governmental systems, and its need to keep my details private and secure is no less. As for interactivity, Google Earth must have similar abilities to those needed for remote medical visualisation. It seems crystal clear to me that the web giants have cracked the problem of world-wide, distributed database systems in a way that still eludes most public-sector utilities.

To be sure, they achieved it by spending colossal sums on research, a lot of which wasn't generated out of revenues and profits but thanks to equity inflation during previous booms. That doesn't destroy my argument, because I'm not proposing that we outsource the NHS computer system to Google or Amazon. What I do believe is that those firms have accumulated a store of knowledge that could be tapped; that it needs to tapped at an international rather than national level; that provided it doesn't destroy their business models those firms might be proud to assist a properly-designed effort by, say the World Health Organisation; and that the huge sums required are still less than what we've squandered bailing out busted banks. We need a public "Amazon" for our hospitals and other bureaucratic functions, and we need to will the funding and pick the brains to make it happen.