The Return of the Bubble Car

The driverless car meme has started to evolve in some interesting ways. After the simple joys of the robot chauffeur, the predictions of the future are now starting to focus on the real estate potential and the remodelling of the urban landscape. Much of the speculation is nonsense, but the claims made are indirectly revealing. A good example is an article in the New York Times this week entitled Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities.

Amusing claim number one: "Inner-city parking lots could become parks". The theory behind this is that autonomous vehicles, probably shared on-demand ones (i.e. Zipcar with added robot chauffeur), would deliver us to the doors of our city-centre offices and then whizz off to some remote corral, returning promptly at 5 to pick us up. It's a bit like the London Bike Scheme, but without the need to find a docking station that hasn't already been emptied. The implicit extra travel burden is easily dealt with: "Though this would increase miles driven, and thus conceivably increase gas used and congestion, driverless cars will be so efficient there may not be an increase in congestion or gas consumption". I wouldn't bother asking to see the data that backs that claim up.

Bonkers claim number two: "[The] city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary". Where roads were laid out before mass car-ownership, parking often makes the street too narrow. Remove the parking and you would allow cars to move freely in both directions. That's a clear benefit, but one that would be promptly lost by narrowing the street. As cars stop to make deliveries, or allow passengers to alight, the flow of traffic would be halted, much as it is today. There is an argument to be made that high land values in the centre of cities would encourage the conversion of street parking - i.e. offices and shops could expand a bit - but this assumes there are lots of parking bays in situ. The higher the value of the land today, the less likely this is to be true (e.g. New Bond Street or Fifth Avenue). The big development opportunity in city centres would be to demolish and replace multi-storey car parks. In other words, they won't become parks, they'll become office blocks or flats.

Dubious claim number three: "If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities". Suburban malls and retail parks work on the principle that you, the customer, will make the deliveries. With autonomous vehicles, you could schlep over to the mall and back in an on-demand car, but you could just as easily order online and have the car deliver the goods to you. The suggestion that driverless cars might arrest the decline of the high street is just an attempt to dream up pro-social benefits for what is an anti-social development. The really transformative potential of driverless cars is to turn suburban malls into "dark stores".

Worrying claim number four: "Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be". Given the pioneering work in this field by Google, and bearing in mind the recent Prism revelations, it should be obvious that driverless cars are an invasion of privacy on wheels. Not only will the car know where it is "not supposed to be", it will know precisely where you have been and where you are entitled to go. Strangely, none of the cheerleaders for driverless cars have mentioned the impact on crime, e.g. the obsolesence of the getaway driver and the joyrider. Autonomous cars mean a reduction in personal autonomy and an increase in system control. While there are genuine benefits to this, such as efficiency of travel and reduced accidents, the potential for the state to over-step the mark should be obvious.

If that sounds a touch paranoid, consider Tyler Cowen's views (common among right-wing economists) on the need for parking spaces to be charged at a realistic (i.e. expensive) market rate. Though his argument is couched in anti-subsidy and pro-environmental terms, what he's essentially proposing is that city-centre parking be the preserve of the rich. When Westminster Council tried to introduce charges for hitherto free evening and weekend parking, this was widely interpreted as an attempt to raise revenue to offset central government cuts. In fact, the gradual restriction of parking and the increase in charges has been a long-term trend under governments of both left and right, variously sold as pro-public transport and pro-environment. Parking is increasingly framed as a privilege, not as a right (a well-worn false dichotomy of neoliberalism).

Revealing claim number five: "driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home. I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work". This gets to the nub of the matter. The "car" that is envisaged here is clearly closer to a Winnebago, with bathroom and diner, despite the previous claims that pool cars will typically be smaller (as most trips involve only one or two passengers). As an "extension of home", it should be seen as just another property - a mobile pied-a-terre. There is no suggestion that this sort of convenience will be extended to those who don't work in city-centre offices, or who do manual jobs that don't necessitate recourse to an exercise bike.

As I've previously noted, the economics of driverless cars require that they be mandated by law if the major benefits are to be realised. This would be difficult to enforce nationally at a stroke, so I suspect the most likely scenario is that they first become mandatory within a city's limits. This will create a de facto border zone, opening up possibilities for the control of movement into and out of the heart of the metropolis, as well as commercial opportunities for transhipments and tolls. I imagine Boris Johnson will see some upside to this. Congestion charging and the bike scheme have familiarised us with the concept of transport zoning in London at precisely the same time that the centre of the city has morphed into an enclave for the wealthy. The domain of the robot chauffeur is already taking shape between Fulham and Shoreditch.

Many city-dwellers will find they can no longer afford their own car and will instead be obliged to use pool cars. This will be sold as a positive lifestyle choice, with the environmental benefits to the fore. With the potential for car platoons during commutes, it's possible that autonomous vehicles might in time substitute for trams and light-rail trains, and perhaps even the underground (without the need for large gaps between trains, the same passenger numbers could be transported in greater comfort and privacy). Society will be further atomised - the bubble of ear-buds and book replaced by bubble cars.

Contingent Democracy

Despite their proximity, I've yet to see anyone draw parallels between the coup d'etat in Egypt and the shenanigans in the Falkirk Constituency Labour Party, so I will. Once upon a time, the Forth and Clyde Canal, which runs through Falkirk, allowed ships to transfer between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, thus avoiding the need to sail around the North of Scotland. It's not quite on a par with the Suez Canal, but no mean engineering feat either. But that's enough about canals. The more interesting contrast relates to the practice of democracy.

The embarrassed silence of Western governments over the military intervention in Cairo (beyond peace-n-love anodynes) has been widely interpreted as sympathy for "our side", the secular liberal middle class. The implication is that the West cannot help itself in displaying this prejudice - we're only human after all - and that liberals everywhere should simply hope for the best as the alternative (the mad mullahs) remains too objectionable.

Apart from the obvious hypocrisy, this looks strategically foolish as the Muslim Brotherhood clearly enjoy majority support outside of the metropolis, much as the AKP does in Turkey outside of Istanbul. What happens if the electorate fails to deliver the "right" result at the promised (but unscheduled) election? To quote Bertolt Brecht "would it not be be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"

In Cairo, the protestors' charges against Morsi centred on broken promises, economic incompetence and favouritism. These could be levelled at many democratically-elected governments, such as the UK coalition (student fees, stagnation, creeping privatisation etc). As the idea that representative democracies should have the power of recall remains alien in the UK, the dominant narrative in the British media that explains (and justifies) the current rebellion is that Morsi pursued a majoritarian approach that verged on a "constitutional coup". In plain terms, democracy is more than one person, one vote.

This hinterland of democracy is described using flexible terms such as pluralism, tolerance and inclusivity. Of course, the failure of pluralism was as much the fault of the opposition as the Muslim Brotherhood, which has in turn fed the casually racist debate in some parts of the media as to whether Arabs are capable of "doing democracy" (imagine if the Daily Telegraph wrote an editorial suggesting the same crippling deficiency in the Scots). The demands for pluralism now are partly defensive appeals for sectarian tolerance (for the Copts and the small Shia community) but largely a demand that politics be conducted within a narrow spectrum acceptable to liberals. This is consistent with the more subtle coup of neoliberalism in Western democracies, where large areas of political debate have been ruled "beyond dispute" (the free market) or "inconceivable" (workplace democracy).

The army's promise that it will appoint an interim technocratic government pending elections is clearly intended to reassure the West that normal business will shortly be resumed and due proprieties observed. The deployment of the adjective "technocratic" deliberately echoes the Monti interregnum in Italy. The Labour Party's decision to refer l'affaire Falkirk to the Scottish police has much the same purpose: a show of propriety and an appeal to an independent arbiter (this would have been more problematic if the constituency was in London and under the jurisdiction of the Met).

The fuss over Falkirk has predictably produced mutterings about Militant entryism in the 80s and the ridiculous claim that the soft left Unite union is conspiring to dominate the Labour party. In the UK, one-person-one-vote has long been the preferred stick with which to beat the unions. Bloc representation, which is a perfectly respectable democratic practice (after all, MP's represent blocs of voters with widely differing views), is routinely denigrated as anti-democratic. In plain terms, democracy is no more than one person, one vote.

Regardless of the specific abuses in the Falkirk case (which we don't really know about as the "report" remains embargoed), what is noticeable is the ready recourse to the trope of union members as mindless ballot-fodder. You'd expect this lurid depiction from the Tories, but much of it has come from the Blairites who presumably remain "relaxed" about New Labour being primarily dependent on rich business donors. Falkirk is interpreted as a culture clash, with Unite determined to advance working-class, pro-union candidates at the expense of middle-class, neoliberal cuckoos. This is as misleading simplistic as the representation of the Egyptian crisis as a clash between Islamists and secularists, but if it were true, then encouraging more working class MPs would surely be in the interests of pluralism.

What this highlights is a well-worn truth. Pluralism is always advanced from a liberal perspective because it is simply an aspect of liberal practice: the informal division of the spoils. But it rests on the assumption that plural society does not include everyone, only those who ultimately subscribe to liberal values and abide by the rules of the game. This means that there are always some who are beyond the pale, such as Islamists and trade unionists, for whom "democratic rights" are contingent.

Aerotropolis Now

I spent last weekend in Berlin, or, to be more precise, I spent a slow Friday night in Gatwick airport and then spent the next two days in the German capital trying to catch up on lost sleep. A five hour delay, due to a crocked Easyjet plane, meant that we didn't get our heads down till 4am on Saturday. This would have been fine if we'd been clubbing, but our itinerary was geared to early breakfasts and tramping the city streets. The delay meant an opportunity to experience the emerging airport city of Greater Crawley, courtesy of two £6 a head food vouchers from Easyjet. I did toy with the idea of blowing it all on a couple of oysters in the Caviar House & Prunier seafood bar, where I noticed John Moulton ensconced, but opted instead for steak and chips and a bottle of Cahors in Café Rouge. Naturally, the £6 barely covered the chips.

The aerotroplis trope - the city built around an airport - has been around for a while now, though outside of artificially sustained oases like Dubai there is scant evidence of the successful evolution of airports into destinations in their own right; all this despite the attempts to recreate the nineteenth century arcades experience (famously delineated by Berlin-born Walter Benjamin) as a step-up from the pile-em-high duty-free of the early jet age. Airports are necessary evils whose atmosphere blends befuddled anxiety and soul-sapping ennui. The logistics of air travel - i.e. the need for check-in, security clearance and the likelihood of long delays - means that the airport terminal is a form of purgatory far worse than a seaport or railway station, as Edward Snowden could probably attest.

The airport city is less about the physical centrality of the airport and more about the city's dependence on international flows of goods and people. An aerotroplis is not the result of the insertion of an airport into an existing city, otherwise London's gravitational centre might have shifted to Silvertown some years ago, but the creation of a brand-new urbs around a runway or four. As such, the idea is a combination of clean-slate futurism (with echoes of Futurism) and the yearning for a homogeneous, global environment suitable for the executive class, hence the emblematic importance of seafood bars and luxury brand outlets. There is a palpable nostalgia both for the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of La Belle Époque (the Art Nouveau styling of Café Rouge) and the hopeful glamour of the 1920s (the Art Deco styling of Caviar House & Prunier). The use of aeroplane iconography in the commercial areas of airport terminals is rare, though this may be partly to avoid travellers dwelling on the improbability of flight. You're more likely to see representations of the Orient Express or the SS Normandie than an Airbus A380.

These purpose-built hubs are best seen not as isolated initiatives but as a single "global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data". The usually unstated assumption is that some travellers matter more than others: "Floating above it all, meanwhile, are the globe-trotting executives chasing emerging markets". This explains both the comforting evocation of earlier golden ages of travel (i.e. the reassurance of class boundaries and status) and the homogenised corporate advertising that attempts to simultaneously assure us that the world is both hugely various and fundamentally the same everywhere.

One thing I've always found slightly off-putting about airline advertising - specifically advertising by non-budget airlines and national carriers - is the hint of heaven: the stewardesses as angels or houris, the soft focus and sense of antiseptic calm, the (worrying) suggestion that a place in the clouds is your actual destination. It always makes me think of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death.

We ignore the obvious dissonance between this heavenly atmosphere and the noisy, cramped, fart-laden reality of coach class because we appreciate being transferred quickly from A to B (and because after 5 hours stuck in a "lounge" we'd happily stand knee-deep in pig-shit to get on the move); but surely nobody has ever voluntarily switched their bank account to HSBC because of one of their annoyingly self-satisfied posters? I wonder if the same-but-different schizophrenia of corporate advertising is solely intended to soothe the nagging anxiety of the ungrounded executive.

Apart from force of circumstances, I was musing on airports due to the recent reports that a second runway for Gatwick is looking more likely, which would put it on a par with Heathrow, and because Berlin has been heavily defined by its airports, real and imagined, over the last 100 years. We flew in to Schönefeld, which was the main airport of East Germany and is now the focus for budget airlines. It is due to be subsumed into the new two-runway Berlin-Brandenburg airport, currently being constructed alongside it. Once complete, this will lead to the closure of Tegel airport, which was originally built in 1948 for the Berlin Airlift. That had proved necessary because Tempelhof, the main airport during the Weimar and Nazi years, was too short for the larger transport planes required during the airlift and the commercial jets that came after (though it was fine for the rocket ships in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle).

An earlier Berlin airport at Staaken was used in the manufacture of zeppelins, and was re-purposed after WW1 as a film studio where part of Fritz Lang's Metropolis was shot. That film famously envisaged planes flying between skyscrapers in the city of the future, without the aid of traffic lights (and no obvious landing strips).

As a city, Berlin today has few really tall skyscrapers, despite the ongoing post-1989 building boom, with the 1969 Fernsehturm TV tower at Alexanderplatz still dominating the skyline. This shows that Lang's vision of the future was no more accurate than Hitler and Speer's bonkers Germania. Despite the weight of the past, Berlin does not feel like a city of ghosts. As you watch the kids playing hide-and-seek in the Holocaust Memorial, or wander through the typical living room in the DDR Museum (which looks little different to a British living room of the 1970s), you notice how lightly history is worn. Some of this effect is the result of the destruction of the city's fabric in WW2, and some the conscious efforts of both East and West to build a positive image during the Cold War years in what was, in West Berlin at least, an aerotropolis avant la lettre.

What I take away from this trip, apart from a gut-full of pork products, is a renewed respect for London's fragmented airport system. It obviously has its problems, but the solutions are incremental: an extra runway, better rail links, onsite cinemas etc. Folies de grandeur like Boris Island may appeal to the Hitler in us all, but the result is likely to disappoint. For the record, Berlin-Brandenburg airport is expected to be delivered at least 4 years late and vastly over budget.

Defending the Halfway Line

Back in the 1970s, due to the popularity of a certain musical, it was common for football crowds to chant at long-haired players thus: "Charlie George, superstar, walks like a woman and he wears a bra". (These were the days when The Liver Birds was regarded as cutting edge gender politics.) This random memory popped up while reading a new paper by Greg Mankiw, an economic adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, entitled Defending the One Percent. This suggests that rising inequality is simply the product of "just deserts" - that the one percent are getting richer due to the impact of technology and the increasing returns to skill that this gives rise to. The paper is a standard conservative polemic against tax-based redistribution, which has been extensively rubbished by others for it dubious claims and rhetorical method (lots of begging the question). I'm less interested in the philosophical defence of privilege, which is unremarkable, or the dubious speculation on the heritability of talent, which doesn't rise above saloon-bar reasoning, and more in the relationship of technology and skill as an explanation of the one percent's good fortune.

Mankiw starts with the orthodox position that skill-biased technological change increases the rewards for skilled labour relative to the unskilled, leading to increased income inequality. Implicit in this model is the assumption that it raises the value of education, leading to more people becoming skilled and thus inequality declining (as occurred during les trente glorieuses). Recent rises in inequality thus reflect a surge of new technologies driving up the returns to skill, with education lagging behind. According to Mankiw, if this position is right "that the broad changes in inequality have [been] driven by the interaction between technology and education, rather than changes in rent-seeking through the political process, then it would seem an unlikely coincidence that the parallel changes at the top have been driven by something entirely different". In other words, this reward for skill must apply to the top one percent as much as it does to the top 10 or 20 percent, so if they're now richer, it must be because their skills have become even more valuable relative to those of the median worker.

Of course, there is no reason to believe that skill-biased change and rent-seeking are mutually exclusive, though you can see the point of maintaining that belief if your basic premise centres on "just deserts" (you see what I mean about begging the question). To take a real-world example, consider professional football. Though you can fairly argue that modern players are more skilled than those of a generation ago, it's clear that the main reason for the disproportionate growth in their incomes since the 1990s is technology in the form of TV and the Internet. This has generated larger revenues for the game, with the lion's share going to players. A case can be made that this is "just deserts", but that would not explain the huge income that now accrues to FIFA and other administrators who control tournaments (and incidentally provide opportunities for large-scale corruption, as in Brazil today). That is pure rent. An example of these two tendencies co-existing is Lionel Messi, a sublimely skilled talent and alleged tax dodger (tax evasion is rent extracted from the public purse).

Football is a useful study for a wider phenomenon first outlined in The Economics of Superstars by Sherwin Rosen in 1981, namely the impact of technology on scale economies. The point is not just that TV or recording media expand the market, but that they also produce a concentration of output on the best talent, hence overkill like the Confederations Cup and close-season club tours, not to mention Neymar's burgeoning commercial rights income. 45 years before Rosen, Walter Benjamin noted how as the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction loses its "aura", this is compensated for "with an artificial build-up of the 'personality' outside the studio", where that personality is "the phony spell of a commodity". The artist, the superstar, becomes a commodity and object of veneration, like a medieval saint. Old Walt did not live to see the emergence of pop culture and fan merchandise, let alone Elvis impersonators or Glastonbury, but I'm sure he'd have been unsurprised by it.

Rosen presciently asked "What changes in the future will be wrought by cable, video cassettes, and home computers?" What he could not predict was the network effects of Internet-based services - i.e. the more people who use services such as Google, Facebook or Twitter, the more valuable it becomes to each user. A consequence of this is the tendency towards monopoly: one search engine, one social platform, one broadcast medium. But the financial benefits of concentration accrue to the service provider, not to the content providers, i.e. the users. This explains the need for the creators of these services to be simultaneously humanised and sanctified as benefactors of mankind, playing up their lovable nerdiness and rebellious spirit while playing down or excusing their actual strengths as ruthless business people (the trailer for the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic is a good example of these multiple tropes crammed together). Thus the superstar aura of the modern artist is easily transferred to the creators of commodities and commercial services, and reaches a sort of apotheosis in the living brand of Richard Branson (clearly a lifelong aura addict).

Since the 1990s and the emergence of the "new economy", it has become common to apply the adjective "superstar" to jobs outside of entertainment and sport, so much so that it now appears to be casually assigned to the entire top one percent. "Superstar tax accountant" or "superstar lawyer" are terms that can now be used without irony. But to what extent is this a reflection of the impact of technology or skill in harnessing it? Mankiw quotes Brynjolfsson and McAfee (Race Against the Machine, 2011): "Aided by digital technologies, entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainment stars, and financial executives have been able to leverage their talents across global markets and capture reward that would have been unimaginable in earlier times".

What is obscured by use of the word "aided" is that these people have precisely zero skills when it comes to the digital technologies themselves (beyond operating a BlackBerry or iPhone), and even make a fetish of techno-incompetence (the modern equivalent of spotless, white gloves indicating unfamiliarity with manual labour). Skill-biased technological change, if it means anything, should mean that increased rewards accrue to those who acquire the skills to exploit the new technology. But while it is true that many techies have profited handsomely, the skill of an entrepreneur or a CEO rarely has anything to do with mastery of the technology as opposed to mastery of people and process, which fundamentally means deploying skills that are as old as civilisation, such as selling, analysis, motivation and organisation, not to mention coercion, evasion and swindling. Steve Jobs was not much cop as a technologist himself, but he was a top-drawer manipulator of other technologists.

A characteristic of the IT revolution is the scale of the market that it creates both through physical extent and commodity deflation (it is estimated that the number of mobile devices will exceed the global population by the end of this year). Steam locomotives and steam ships shrank the world, but did not penetrate every nook and cranny, hence the emblematic use of the riverboat in Fitzcarraldo. The internal combustion engine spread further but remains constrained by the availability of roads. The physical extent of datacoms has already far outstripped these earlier technologies, so new markets in Amazonia and the Congo can expect Twitter before Tarmac. This amplified network effect has created a much larger and steeper pyramid of wealth, hence the increase in inequality and the power of the one percent who have risen upon it.

Papers like Mankiw's are just attempts to rationalise this tendency as predominantly the product of individual talent and hard work, rather than the result of changes in the material base, dumb luck or incumbent privilege. Pointing at technology as the driver is unintentionally revealing. The one percent are benefiting not because they are better at harnessing new technology but because technological change is shifting wealth from production (capital + labour) to rent. If this were a matter of skill, we would expect technology to drive healthy wage growth at least down to median earners, i.e. the halfway line in the income distribution, but all the evidence is that median wages are stagnating while incomes at the very top continue to race away. Current skill-biased technological change appears lopsided in its impact on incomes. An explanation based on "changes in rent-seeking through the political process" looks more credible.

Lionel Messi may have been out of order in attempting to defraud the Spanish exchequer, but I don't begrudge him earning top wages for his performance on the pitch, even if the scale of his rewards (compared to those of Charlie George) has been hugely amplified by technology. I do however begrudge Sepp Blatter, the "superstar" of football administration, filling his own and his cronies' bank accounts by licensing the game. Greg Mankiw seems unable to appreciate that the one percent contains far more Blatters than Messis.

And Now, a Message from our Sponsors

As I routinely share my blog posts on Google+, I recently turned on the feature to replicate Google+ comments back to Blogger. I've now turned it off. The reason I did this is that the standard Blogger interface, which accepts anonymous comments, disappears and is replaced by a Google+ form that means commenters now need a Google+ profile. Google's not-so-covert purpose, to get everyone to sign up for Google+ by integrating it into all of its other products, becomes clear.

There is still a widespread belief that Google+ was an attempt to challenge Facebook, and that it has now failed and will eventually go the way of Buzz and Wave. I am of the school that believes Google remains wedded to being the king of search and that it has no desire to go head-to-head with either Facebook or Twitter as a social medium. The role of Google+ appears to be to provide a global profile, spanning all of its products, and thus a way of aggregating your preferences in order to refine search results. The fact that most people's Google+ "stream" is devoid of chatter is actually the point. Thoughtful and deliberate preferences are much more valuable to an advertiser than a casual like or a soon-to-be-meaningless hashtag.

This mundane house-keeping (and otherwise dull opening paragraph) has a certain piquancy in light of the NSA/Prism/GCHQ revelations, which I think should be read more in terms of the ambitions of the Internet companies than the ambitions of the US and UK governments. The state's involvement in surveillance is now parasitical and dependent in a far more profound way than in the era of wiretaps. They have outsourced primary responsibility to the Internet companies, and there are real doubts that they have the technical competence to fully exploit the results. Despite the carefully placed role model of Ben Wishaw as a youthful and nerdish Q in Skyfall, the truth is that the best techies want to work for Google and stock options, not work for the NSA or GCHQ and a civil service pension.

Most political scandals quickly arrange themselves into a them and us dynamic. Dreyfusards and anti-dreyfusards. Scandals, as political theatre, tend to conform to stock plots: venality, sexual opportunism, abuse of office, covering up incompetence, the deep state, executive hubris etc. What tends to be common is the revelation that they (the state, the powerful) have been taking advantage. What determines the toxicity of the scandal is the degree of contempt in which they hold the rest of us that it reveals. For that reason, I suspect the current flap (which hasn't even earned a "gate" suffix yet) will soon die down.

Evidence for this includes the rapid fragmentation of the debate. This is a well-established crisis-management strategy - metaphorically opening up multiple sluice-gates - but it also arises naturally if the scandal lacks an obvious focal point (contrast the NoW phone-hacking affair, which was for long fuelled by speculation that old Rupe himself might be implicated). This fragmentation occurs more rapidly in an online world, where there is both an appetite for news and an inexhaustible supply of opinion. Thus we now have distinct strands focusing on the legality of state surveillance, the adequacy of executive oversight, the motivations of Edward Snowden (traitor vs hero), the ethics of leaking / whistleblowing, and even Snowden's girlfriend's career (pole-dancer vs performance artist). There has been less discussion of how the technology actually works and what this means in practice.

The dominant impression is a general lack of surprise. With the exception of full-time civil libertarians and conspiracy theorists, we're actually quite blasé about it. In fact, I don't think it would be going too far to say that most people who thought about it probably assumed this degree of surveillance was already routine. We've had 12 years of propaganda on the "trade-off between security and privacy", and plenty of evidence that online business models depend on exploiting the surplus labour of our freely-provided data. It looks like this undertow of ennui, buttressed by some token inquiries and proposals on tighter oversight, will let both the authorities and the Internet companies ride out the storm.

Much of the debate has employed the traditional dichotomy of the individual and the state. For Snowden's admirers, it's a case of we, the freedom-loving people, against the over-mighty "guvmint". For Snowden's detractors, like David Brooks in the New York Times, it's about selfish irresponsibility: "But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good". This false dichotomy, between Big Brother and the individual leaker, lets business off the hook. The disruptive factor over the last 20 years has been "the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no a very real understanding of how to knit others together". In other words, the iCapitalists for whom "the common good" is meaningless beyond the imposition of their own solipsistic worldview.

Outrage over the attitude of Google, Facebook and the others has now been channelled into the fulminating of various European data regulators, who are just a species of consumer watchdog, and chuntering about the dubious confidentiality of cloud services that may or may not push the discerning consumer towards more specialised providers (i.e. where you pay a fee for "peace of mind"). Consumer rights are not civil liberties (though some would like the reverse to be true). Curiously, only a few have thought to question the monopoly basis of the current service landscape and the consequent rise of rent in the modern economy. It's almost as if we don't want to think evil of those "crazy individualists" out in the Bay Area.

If history teaches us a salutary lesson, it isn't that governments tend to overstep the mark - that's a given - it is rather than monopolies (and cartels) are the true conspiracies against the public. This applies both to commercial monopolies and to monopolies on the exercise of state power. It is the intersection of state and private monopolies that creates the gravest danger as this is bi-directional. I can't be the only person to have wondered if Google's de facto tax exemption is a quid pro quo for services rendered.