Surveillance, ignorance and a chilling effect

The Guardian, not exactly disinterested, publishes a leader on regulating Apple and its competitors. I would argue, Apple is the example of the 5th Industrial Revolution monopoly and we need to learn how to regulate it and is competitors and it is a problem for the US also. The authors  completely miss the fact that there are new forms of oppression, that of surveillance, caused by the datenkraken.

We need new forms of protest and defence even though we’ve know about it forever. It’s for this reason that we established the rights of privacy and free speech as part of the universal declaration of rights.

This quote is important, it establishes commonalities with their predecessors,

All [ the datenkraken] use remarkably few workers to generate their enormous profits. All operate an internal class system, which concentrates power in very few hands. None have any unions worth speaking of. All rely on the unglamorous work being done far from California, usually by subcontractors. All shuffle their profits around the world in an endless game of “Find the lady” with national tax authorities – a factor that should not be overlooked when it comes to asking why they are so immensely profitable. If this is the model of the company of the future, it will have consequences we have not yet learned how to manage.

They finish with,

The downside of the oil-based economy is now obvious all around us. The symptoms of apparently uncontrollable climate change have become undeniable. Cities are choked with polluting traffic while the seas are choked with plastics made from oil. Whole countries have been devastated by oil riches. The digital revolution seems, so far, much more benign. But the loss of trust that social media both causes and exploits may one day be seen as another form of unforgivable pollution.

I think this is weak, the threat is surveillance, ignorance and a chilling effect. …

The innovators dilemma in political parties

On my way to writing the article “Servants, not Masters”, I needed to check my material and links about Emanuelle Avril’s unfinished white paper called, “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party”. and was presented to the Political Studies Association 2015 conference, in March so before the 2015 election and consequent Labour leadership election. Eaton’s source identified a failure of the New Labour leadership to renew itself as a cause of it’s failure and Avril’s paper explains why they were always going to be incapable of it.

…. it is true to say that internal consensus and cohesion, as they manifested themselves in New Labour, constituted obstacles to innovation and therefore endangered the survival of the party …

and the ambitions of their successors. (This post continues overleaf/below.) … …

Servants, not Masters

More from my head provoked by Alex Nunn’s book  “The Candidate”, I am reading the chapter on the media. Alex states that George Eaton wrote a negative piece in the Statesman on Corbyn, and ended up supporting Cooper; it reminded me of Jason Cowley’s article, “The fall of Labour’s golden generation”, available behind their identity/pay walls here, or as a .pdf, written a month or so later.

This, though is the quote that makes me remember the article, it’s anonymously second hand,

Parties in the end are machines for capturing power and there is a sort of life cycle, and you’ve got to be absolutely vigilant about renewing it. Blair and Brown thought they could renew the machine with very clever people, but with one or two exceptions they were – what is the word I’m searching for? – they were servants, they weren’t masters, they didn’t really have a vision of where they wanted to go.

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The most left wing person that can win

I am reading Alex Nunn’s “The Candidate” and as exciting as the race for MPs nominations, and the struggle for supporting nominations in the CLPs and Unions are, one turning point is seen as the vote of the Tories Welfare Reform Bill. One thing missing from the narrative so far is how huge the task of winning in 2020 seemed to be; Labour had seemingly gone backwards and the task seemed insurmountable. I was reminded then and again in reading the book of an anonymous quote from a senior labour politician who said in 2010, that the Labour Party ” … will elect the most left wing person they think can win”. It was just in 2015, there wasn’t much confidence that any of them could do so! …

Making Labour’s Policy 2018

And now you can read Labour’s National Policy Forum Report … available from this site, I got it from Seema Chandwani who hosts it on here blog, and publicised it on twitter.

Wonder when it’ll be published by the Labour Party. …

Arrears

As the AGM season for Lewisham’s Labour Parties approaches, I am considering the various deadlines for payments, decisions and record keeping. The first deadline is 60 days before the AGM date for new affiliates. I have had cause to check what the rules say; it would seem that we need to return to our old friend Chapter 7. This says,

IV.1.D all affiliation fees shall be paid by end of the year.

IX.1.B Affiliation fees due to this CLP for the previous year ended 31 December must have been paid to this CLP a clear 35 days before the date of the annual meeting.

IX.1.C. New affiliations accepted at least 60 days prior to the AGM in the current year shall have all rights associated with attendance at the AGM.

The Labour Party’s financial year is the calendar year. If not paid in the year of account, an affiliate falls into arrears on 1st January of the following year. It must pay the arrears by 35 days before the AGM, otherwise it may be treated as a new affiliate and pay 60 days before the AGM. This could  be easier. but it would seem there are two routes for dealing with arrears.

AGMs must now take place in the second half of the year. …

Thoughts on DaaS

I am still struggling to make a remote DaaS for my tablet.  I have built an amazon image based on Server 2012, which is getting a bit long in the tooth and Skype fails to boot on it, maybe I should ensure I have implemented an Amazon “Desktop” experience, but I am not happy with the price. I wondered if Azure might be cheaper, although on first look it would seem not. I need to be more sure and having a remote DaaS would be cool for the tablet, as bit by bit, services will deprecate the version frozen browser. I suppose that bit by bit RDP will also fail, but let’s see. (Microsoft’s desertion of ARM maybe it’s last act of monopoly actions and is a lesson to both consumers and OEMs of the problems in  not owning your own operating system, a subject I used to write a lot about.)

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