Openness and Enclosure

The longtime privacy-sceptic Jeff Jarvis has an upbeat take on the NSA/GCHQ revelations: "It has been said that privacy is dead. Not so. It's secrecy that is dying. Openness will kill it." Jarvis draws a distinction between privacy and secrecy: "Think of it this way: privacy is what we keep to ourselves; secrecy is what is kept from us. Privacy is a right claimed by citizens. Secrecy is a privilege claimed by government". He then seeks to downplay the chief threat to the former: "It's often said that the internet is a threat to privacy, but on the whole, I argue it is not much more of a threat than a gossipy friend or a nosy neighbor, a slip of the tongue or of the email 'send' button". The imagery harks back to the parochial, but Jarvis appears to be oblivious to the irony of this, despite the ample recent evidence that the Internet facilitates on a global scale the "tyranny of common opinion" that once marked village life (trolls are just narrow-minded oafs with broadband).

For good measure, he claims that the Internet itself is a force for good: "The agglomeration of data that makes us fear for our privacy is also what makes it possible for one doubting soul – one Manning or Snowden – to learn secrets. The speed of data that makes us fret over the devaluation of facts is also what makes it possible for journalists' facts to spread before government can stop them. The essence of the Snowden story, then, isn't government's threat to privacy, so much as it is government's loss of secrecy". The suggestion that the state struggles to keep secrets any more is not merely wrong, it exemplifies Jarvis's working method, which is to omit all mention of the essential actor in this drama, namely the Internet companies. As such, this is a fairly obvious pitch that we should trust the likes of Google and Yahoo and back them in their noble struggle with government: "the agents of openness will continue to wage their war on secrecy".

The separation of privacy and secrecy is a false dichotomy, central to liberal philosophy and neoliberal practice. This views privacy as the property of individual citizens, and secrecy as the restricted property of legitimate government. In reality, there is no clear boundary as both are species of privatisation, the enclosure of the commons, in the sense that rights of access are limited to privileged minorities. The true dichotomy is between private and public. Jarvis avoids the latter word in his Guardian piece with one exception, when he quotes Gabriel Garcí­a Marquez to the effect that "All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret". The purpose of this quote is to focus attention on the last two. In place of the public realm, Jarvis offers openness.

In doing so, he attempts to link it with opensource (while simultaneously name-dropping and flattering his hosts) "When I worried on Twitter that we could not trust encryption now, technologist Lauren Weinstein responded with assurances that it would be difficult to hide 'backdoors' in commonly used PGP encryption – because it is open-source. Openness is the more powerful weapon. Openness is the principle that guides, for example, Guardian journalism. Openness is all that can restore trust in government and technology companies. And openness – in standards, governance, and ethics – must be the basis of technologists' efforts to take back the net."

As Tom Slee notes, the NSA and other government agencies are extensive users of opensource and have been involved in (and have thus potentially compromised) many opensource developments and industry standards: "to trumpet free and open source software as an alternative to the surveillance systems it has helped to build is nothing but wishful thinking". This is not to say that all opensource software is compromised, and you can certainly find reliable encryption tools if you want, but even the most basic communication device has scores of different programs and utilities running, any one of which may have been "backdoored", not to mention whatever might be running on the systems of an interlocutor. In practice, privacy is partial and contingent, which obviously doesn't fit well with the ideological premise of a citizen's inalienable "property right".

The concept of opennness in ICT, from the early days of OSI, has always been highly contested. What it means and the way you implement it, which is not the binary open/closed choice the name implies, is a political decision. The blithe acceptance of openness as a universal good defined by technology companies (the nebulous "cloud" has inherited much of this style of utopian thinking) has marginalised these political and economic considerations. Media-friendly Internet commentators like Jarvis are a large part of the problem. As Henry Farrell notes: "There are few real left-wingers among technology intellectuals. There are even fewer conservatives. The result is both blandness and blindness. Most technology intellectuals agree on most things. They rarely debate, for example, how private spaces governed by large corporations such as Google and Facebook can generate real inequalities of power".

It's likely that once the German federal election is over later this month, the NSA/GCHQ scandal will run out of steam. There will still be official investigations and some calling-to-account, and regulatory safeguards will no doubt be enhanced (if only to minimise commercial damage), but the general principle, that the state can unilaterally access our digital data, will have been established. This will represent not the triumph of the post-9/11 neoconservative worldview - the "war on terror" is history and "liberal intervention" out of fashion - but the triumph of the neoliberal economic order, specifically the symbiotic relationship between the state and monopoly businesses. We have traded our rights to privacy for the utility of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Contra Jeff Jarvis, openness (as defined by him and his ilk) is killing privacy, not secrecy.

Watch Your Phone

The launch of the iPhone 5S and 5C has been greeted with a general "meh", once it became clear the C stood for colour rather than cheap, and the 5S's only new feature was a fingerprint reader. This rather misses the strategic significance of the latter, which is less about addressing the password management hell of online services and the poor security of smartphones and tablets, and more about the way that technology is becoming integrated with biology. Another aspect of this is the emerging field of smartwatches, which is thought to be Apple's next big product target.

Strictly speaking, smartwatches have been around for decades. Digital watches that could be used as calculators date from the 70s, while modern sports watches with accelerometers and GPS are common. But we're obviously on the cusp of something new now that companies such as Sony, Samsung and Apple are piling into the market opened up by the crowd-funded Pebble. (Just as an aside, I wonder if anyone told Samsung that "gear" is slang for heroin. Presumably they chose the word more for its "Top Gear" connotations, implying the target audience are mainly male and a bit dim. I suppose they could have gone for Gadget).

The choice of a watch has not traditionally been about utility for all but a few specialists (or those who fantasised they were jet pilots or divers). Being able to tell the time in 3 different places simultaneously isn't the reason why those who can afford it buy a Rolex. If you check your watch 10 times a day, that's probably no more than 30 seconds all told, which is a pretty low level of utility, irrespective of price. It's like buying a car and only driving it on the 29th of February. Watches have traditionally been positional goods, both those that are essentially jewellery and cheaper models that are a statement of personality (the ironic Mickey Mouse, the retro LCD Timex).

The smartwatch promises to augment this limited timekeeping utility and positional value with two new uses: acting as a display for alerts relayed by a smartphone, and housing a variety of bio-readers. As the former is somewhat underwhelming (if you really need to scan tweets in real time, you'll pull out the phone), and the latter is already well established with sports watches and bracelets, like the Nike FuelBand, there has been some scepticism that smartwatches can really be disruptive. They're not creating a new market after all, unless you count the tech-heads who dispensed with their watches back in the 90s because they could then check the time on their mobile phones. Given the long life of most watches, there won't be many people eyeing a smartwatch as a necessary replacement, and if the new device's lifetime is as short as a smartphone, many (of those with the necessary moolah) will consider a £500 analogue watch (with resale value) a far better investment that a £300 smartwatch that depreciates to junk inside 5 years.

Watches are part of the personal brand, so the core market for the smartwatch may be the intersection of those that take personal branding seriously and are into geek-chic and the "quantified self". The first person to wear both Google Glass and a smartwatch can expect to be stoned in public. Like the Borg eyewear, a key feature of the smartwatch is that it will be on display (don't expect wearers to discreetly shove it under the cuff). As a slave device, the smartwatch is a way of showing that you own an iPhone or top-end Galaxy without having to constantly and ostentatiously use the damn thing. Because you can now keep your phone trousered or bagged, the less-easy-to-snatch smartwatch will help reduce theft, which will please hipsters currently torn between showing off and staying safe.

The use of fingerprint authentication with the iPhone 5S, plus the parallel development of heartbeat signature sensors (a potentially more efficient biometric identity mechanism), means that in the not too distant future you may be obliged to buy a smartphone and watch combo in order to enjoy the full benefits of each, which provides growth for the nearly-saturated smartphone market as much as addressing the "how do you create a market for smartwatches?" problem. Some analysts even anticipate the smartwatch replacing key-fobs and secure access tokens for corporate workers, which means that businesses now giving staff smartphones may soon be shelling out for smartwatches too. If that market segment reaches critical mass, then you can expect the general population to be attracted, much as happened with BlackBerry.

Another potential new market segment is health and social care. A smartwatch stuffed with bioreaders could communicate with a smartphone and from there relay far richer diagnostic data to a central monitoring team than is possible with the current pager-like devices being trialled by the NHS. Of course, OAPs and the disabled (and possibly tagged offenders) are the sort of demographic that might pollute the brand, so you can expect the "public sector" version to look ugly and be cheaper, even if it is constructed in the same Chinese factories as the aspirational Apple and Samsung models.

The key point is that the "quantified self" is coming, and it may be approaching from multiple directions. Just as the NSA/GCHQ revelations have been a great leveller, proving that the self-proclaimed tech-savvy (as opposed to the real cognoscenti) are under exactly the same degree of observation and control as silver surfers and techno-buffoons (I'm thinking Claire Perry), so the smartwatch may mark the first step towards the ubiquity of biometrics. There is a clear progression here: from the compromising of devices that we periodically use (PCs), to devices that we carry with us (smartphones), to devices that we wear (smartwatches). The logical next step would be bioreader/transponder implants, which we'll probably trial in the health, social care and penal sectors. Neural lace and The Matrix are probably some way off, but you can see the direction of travel. Personally, I'm going to stick with my steampunk Seiko.

Why Don't We Use Chemical Weapons?

With the possibility that they may be neutralised in Syria, now is perhaps a good time to ask why chemical weapons have not been used more extensively in warfare. The question is often asked in the context of WW2, given the precedent of mustard gas in WW1 and the fear that led to the general distribution of gas-masks at the start of the later conflict. Popular answers include a willingness on all sides to observe the 1925 Geneva protocol banning such weapons (which may be confusing cause and effect) and Hitler's own experience of being gassed in the trenches (which didn't lead him to outlaw Zyklon-B). In fact, if you consider the second world war to have started with the earliest aggression by Axis powers, then chemical weapons were used by Italy in Abyssinia and Japan in China in the late 1930s. The eurocentric view is rather blinkered.

The real reason for their limited use is that chemical weapons, particularly airborne gases, are of little military value due to their lack of discrimination and can even be counter-productive, as the tales of a change in wind causing blowback in WW1 attest. The stalemate of the trenches also explains why they were used there. The hope was that they could provide a more effective means of clearing the line ahead of another big push, shelling having proved ineffective due to digging-in, but the key enabling factor was proximity, in much the same way that distinguished pre-industrial chemical weapons, such as catapulting a disease-ridden animal corpse into a besieged town or poisoning an accessible water supply. Without the trenches of the Western Front, it's unlikely that gas would have been used.

There was limited tactical use of chemical weapons during WW2, notably the defoliant Napalm in the Pacific, but they were never decisive on the battlefield. Even as "terror weapons", chemical agents would not have been as deadly as the incendiaries that created firestorms at Coventry and Dresden, or as psychologically stressful as the random V1 and V2 rockets that hit London. Though the debate around the strategic value of mass-bombing continues, and in particular the balance between hitting military targets and hitting civilians, it is clear that no one thought that terrorising the population alone would win the war, or at least not until Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ultimately, the unwillingness of the belligerents to deploy chemical weapons during WW2 (both sides had large stockpiles of mustard gas) was probably down to a combination of their poor military utility and the fear of reprisals. Since then, they have been used occasionally, mainly in the context of civil wars: Yemen in the 60s, Vietnam and Angola in the 70s, and possibly Afghanistan in the 70s as well. Iraq used chemical weapons, mainly mustard gas and sarin, against Iran in their 1980s war, but it's most infamous use was against Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

It is claimed that chemical weapons are "too horrible, even in war", but the suggestion that there is an ethical red line is nonsense. There are plenty of conventional weapons just as horrible, and they kill people just as effectively, while the ultimate deterrence of nuclear weapons is premised on a willingness to kill more people in a hour than have died in all the wars throughout history. Some part of the visceral distaste for chemical weapons stems from the use of gas in the Nazi death camps, and there is much truth in the observation that the nuclear powers don't want lesser states to access "terror weapons on the cheap", but another reason is the realisation that while they are often ineffective on the battlefield, they are well suited for use against an adjacent civilian population. In other words, if you want to kill indiscriminately, and aren't particularly concerned about the risk of collateral civilian losses on your own side, then chemical weapons may fit the bill. This is the practical lesson of Halabja.

In this sense, Assad's recent claim, that US intervention in Syria could cause the whole region to "explode", is not mere bluster. The use of chemical weapons, assuming Assad's forces were responsible, looks like a demonstration, a threat of wider chaos if the West directly threatens the regime. The red line then is not about the use of chemicals weapons per se, but about the escalation of the Syrian conflict and its potential spread to neighbouring states (the metaphor of an indiscriminate gas cloud at the mercy of the winds is obvious). The dilemma for the US is that intervention might just as effectively provoke this very result, which is why a face-saving exit strategy has been engineered this week (the idea that John Kerry's suggestion was a gaffe is absurd - diplomats do not make unplanned remarks in press conferences).

I've mentioned previously that the US's policy in Iraq can best be explained by assuming that the current state, a fractious and emasculated power, was the desired outcome. In this sense, it's worth noting that the developments of the last 3 years have similarly undermined Syria as a regional power, and at a time when Egypt has been forced to the sidelines by domestic upheavals and Turkey has begun to raise its profile as a regional player. I doubt the US has a policy of deliberately "balkanising" the Middle East, but it does seem comfortable with the emerging patchwork of sectarian enclaves, just as it remains comfortable with the patchwork of Gulf monarchies and emirates.

It's worth remembering that the bogey for the West (and Israel) in the region has long been pan-Arabism, the idea that the post-Ottoman era should have led to a unified Arab state stretching from Egypt to Iraq (there was a short-lived union between Egypt and Syria between 1958-61). The chief impediment to that has been the tendency of various regimes to manipulate and exacerbate religious, ethnic and tribal divisions, paying only lip-service to the idea of an Arab nation. The willingness to use chemical weapons against your own people is as much a symbol of that as the scapegoating of Copts in Egypt or the pitting of Sunni against Shia in Iraq. The fear is that whatever the outcome of the current decommissioning initiative in Syria, chemical weapons remain more likely to be used in the Middle East than elsewhere.

Dance to Your Daddy

The tale of the man asked to dance as part of his interview for a job at Currys is a multi-faceted gem of modern manners. Initial reports have veered between shock at the callousness of the interviewers and glee at the comedy of David Brent-style corporate bollocks. Some are already (correctly) pointing out that the humiliation of the interviewee is an inevitable transaction cost in an economy with high unemployment, but this will be drowned out by the stock commentaries shortly bemoaning the crass irresponsibility of managers on the one hand, and the inflexibility and sense of entitlement of candidates on the other - i.e. people are to blame.

We can also expect the candidate, Alan Bacon, to experience both fleeting fame (apparently the Sun have tactfully offered to pay him to recreate his dance moves for posterity) and a backlash for his temerity in complaining. In fairness, what he has obviously displayed is the unworldliness of a 21-year old graduate, as indicated by this: "They told us there would be five minutes to talk about our hobbies, and I like astronomy so I had spent some money printing off some pictures I had taken through my telescope". Having lost count of the number of CVs I've read over the years, I remain bemused that some candidates still put down this totally irrelevant data. No one gives a shit what you do in your spare time, any more than they care that you've got a swimming proficiency badge.

What the vignette should emphasise is that most interviews are a farce, whether they involve role-play, Powerpoint or psychometric tests. Despite the best endeavours of snake-oil salemen to convince us that the recruitment process can be made objective and empirical, it remains more art than science. Experienced interviewers always seek to challenge the interviewees, because you learn more about them when they are discomfited than when they are reading a script. That said, the ability to think on your feet (or just bullshit) isn't in itself sufficient qualification for any job. In truth, putting the candidate on the spot is in large part a way of staving off the bordeom of listening to another career resumé ("and then I decided I needed a fresh challenge ...")

It's clear that the Currys interviewers had prioritised being a "good team-player" and a "fun guy" in their selection criteria, and that Mr Bacon was not a good fit for a frontline sales job where a thick skin and an ability to "have a laugh" (i.e. suffer daily humiliation) would be assets. To that extent, the interview process was actually successful, and probably more effective than the traditional routine of unenlightening CV walkthroughs and presentations ("what I can bring to your business") in separating the sheep from the goats. In light of Currys decision to re-interview everyone, I wonder what the successful candidate(s) must now be thinking ("I'm an easy-come, easy-go kind of a guy, but with a passion for consumer electronics").

The wider significance of this spectacle is not just the revelation that business has the whip-hand over labour, which has been obvious for some time, but that the fetishisation of labour surplus ("going the extra mile") has extended from the workplace (presenteeism, wage restraint etc) to the application stage. Day-long "interviews" are now common, and "trial starts/working intrerviews" (i.e. working for free for up to a week) are not unusual. If the claims of the right were true, that there are plenty of jobs out there and candidates are simply reluctant to take them due to over generous welfare, then we would not be seeing these developments. A 10-minute phone interview followed by "can you start tomorrow?" indicates a market where the demand for labour is high. A day spent jumping through hoops for the amusement of others does not.

Recruitment has always tended towards ritualised humiliation, particularly where labour is casual and can be treated more obviously as a commodity, such as the daily hiring processes of the building trade (the "lump") or pre-container docks. This has gradually crept into the world of white-collar jobs, slowly relegating the traditional modes of application that were signifiers of class: writing, wearing smart attire, speaking "proper". Some of the anxiety at the David Brent nonsense stems from a belief that middle class workers should not be treated in this way (notice the emotive word "forced" in the reports). Of course, Mr Bacon's humiliation is trivial compared to that still experienced by casual manual labour, where intrusions of privacy and presumptions of guilt are the norm during one-sided interviews.

The boundary between blue and white-collar has long been blurred, as call-centres and other low-pay service industries have turned a desk job into the modern equivalent of operating a machine loom. The real boundary in the world of work is now much higher up the pay-grade, at the point where these symbolic humiliations disappear. Interviews are a "chat", "soundings" are taken rather than references, and the institutionalised humiliations of performance reviews are "inappropriate for someone at your level". Being asked to dance to Daft Punk is just business's way of saying you're not a member of the executive club, as much as you won't "fit in" at a shop in Cardiff.

Tomorrow Belongs to Me(sut)

I've deliberately avoided commenting on Arsenal since the end of last season, and am even now wondering if it is still too early to make any sort of reasoned judgement (6 league games in was my mental target before the season began), but the closure of the transfer window seems an appropriate time to make a few observations (the fans who chanted "spend some fucking money" during the Villa debacle were a tad premature). The first observation is that the window is helping, along with UEFA qualifiers and staggered games, to blur the sense of a definite start to the season. I'm not a traditionalist, but I would prefer all the opening fixtures to kick-off at 3pm on the first Saturday, and for the transfer window to have closed, so we have a real sense of a beginning, rather than the current ragged procession.

Paul Lambert looks like he may be able to fashion a mid-table team out of last season's relegation-flirters, but Villa's victory at the Emirates owed as much to Arsenal's slow start as their own hard work. The goals arose from mistakes by two of our better players, Wilshere and Cazorla, neither of whom looked fully match-fit. Generally the team were a fraction too slow and appeared to be still in pre-season mode. Fears that this might be 2011 all over again were allayed by hard-working victories over Fulham and Spurs, interspersed with a highly professional two-legged performance against Fenerbahce in the Champions League qualifier.

The victory over the Lilywhites left everyone feeling much more bullish, in no small measure because it highlighted the value of team familiarity, in the face of the neighbours' transfer splurge, and the rewards for patience, notably in the case of Aaron Ramsey. As I suggested back in May, our prospects for this season would be as much about who didn't leave in the summer as who arrived. In the event, Wenger deserves credit for moving on a lot of stale players (8 former first-team squad members), though this is being drowned-out by chuntering over the paucity of replacements: no new experienced striker or central defender. The signing of Mesut Ozil has lifted spirits, but some fans question whether we need another attacking midfielder.

I think this indicates that too many are still stuck with the old paradigm in which the front and back lines have equal weight with the middle. What the world record fees for Ronaldo and Bale should indicate is that attacking midfielders are the key to successful teams. In fact, the world record hasn't been held by a striker since Hernan Crespo in 2000. Arsenal were unwilling to meet Real Madrid's valuation of £30m for Higuain, and I suspect that £40m for Suarez wasn't far off their maximum bid (another tenner, perhaps). However, £42.5m for Ozil looks like an intelligent investment.

Wenger is often accused of being tactically out-thought (though anyone with eyes to see on Sunday knows he got the better of Villas Boas), largely because he tends to focus on maximising individual performance within a team framework rather than mastering drills and set-pieces (Spurs looked like a better Stoke, and I'm not being uncharitable in saying that). A characteristic of this approach is that he develops players' ability to operate in multiple roles and to dynamically switch during the game, which places a premium on intelligent midfielders. The debate last season over whether Walcott should play centrally ignored the fact that Wenger has long asked his players to be flexible: on the wing and down the middle are not mutually exclusive over the course of 90 minutes. Mathieu Flamini, who famously thrived as a full-back before settling as a midfield terrier, is an emblematic re-acquisition in this regard, while Ramsey's stint on the wing during his recuperation should be seen as part of his education rather than "easing him back in".

Having said all that, we are (as ever) only a couple of injuries away from a problem, so another striker and a central defender would have been nice. I suspect Wenger does not think the latter an issue, as he obviously considers both Sagna and Arteta capable of playing there (and was happy to let Miquel and Djourou go on loan), while it's worth remembering that Arsenal classify both Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain as strikers. A David Villa or Luis Suarez would have kept the fans happy, but the bigger issue in the event of an injury to Giroud would be the loss of his aerial ability, notably as an outlet for a pressed defence (he worked his socks off in this role against Spurs). Ba for Bendtner would have been good business. With the Great Dane still exit-bound, I suspect we might pick up the thread when the transfer window reopens in January.

It's a long way to the business end of the season, so we can expect further setbacks and surprises, but the signing of Ozil, and the revelation that we really do have a war-chest after all, will probably keep the fans in a glass-half-full frame of mind for now. It's all hype of course, both the extremes of "Wenger's reached his sell-by-date" and "Ozil is the new Bergkamp" (no pressure there, then). The one thing you can predict is that Arsenal's midfield is going to be the most interesting to watch this season, which will probably leave messrs Mourinho, Pellegrini and Moyes feeling a bit sour today.

My final observation is that while Arsene is famous for buying French and Francophone African players, and much press coverage has focused on his developing a young British core in recent years, he has always had an eye for Germans, from Stefan Malz and Moritz Volz through Jens Lehmann. As well as the current crop of first-teamers, there are promising signs with youngsters Serge Gnabry and Gideon Zelalem, both of whom made the bench against Tottenham. There would be a certain symmetry if Wenger, who hails from the border lands of Alsace, should book-end his Arsenal career with great teams based on first a Franco-British mix and then a Germano-British one.