All Your Pop are Belong to Us

The chief interest of Dominic Sandbrook's Let Us Entertain You is in determining who he means by those first and second persons plural. It gradually becomes clear that "us" means the aspirational middle class, while "you" is a patriotic, deferential mass that hankers after a cheerful conservativism. This is a rummage through the cultural second-hand shop that marginalises working class autonomy and the pretensions of intellectuals. It is relentlessly middlebrow, mildly xenophobic, and obsessed with big houses and private education. Give him a Union Jack waistcoat and Sandbrook would make an excellent John Bull, or perhaps a Toby jug. In the spirit of the series, the following sneer is based on only the first two episodes and I have carefully selected the most amusing tropes and misrepresentations for best effect.

The thesis of the Daily Mail's resident social historian is "that our modern cultural success is rooted in the experience of the Victorian period". To illustrate this, we start with Tony Iommi quitting a Birmingham metal-bashing factory, after losing a couple of finger-ends, to help invent Heavy Metal with Black Sabbath. The new music's roots apparently lay in the "forges and foundries of our industrial past", rather than the Mississippi Delta. This autochthonous creation myth neatly sidestepped the debate over the Americanisation of British popular culture and is the first (but not the last) occasion on which Sandbrook passes up the obvious cue to introduce George Orwell. In the circumstances, it is no surprise that the influence of Django Reinhardt on Iommi (working class lad impressed by continental Jazz) is not mentioned.

Sandbrook's theme is the continuity of social values beneath the change in material forms, from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Elton John and Grand Theft Auto. Equating the two eras in terms of creativity and entrepreneurialism allows the cultural economy to be presented as inventive, rather than parasitical, and the industrial revolution to be eulogised without reference to its social costs. The serial structure of this conventional narrative - we used to make steam engines, now we make music - also downplays the longstanding commoditisation of class, from the Gothic Revival to Queen Victoria's Jubilee mugs. Sandbrook sees this continuity as self-evidently a good thing rather than the persistence of unequal social relations and the resilience of ideology.

J Arthur Rank is presented as a bridge between the old and the new: an industrialist who treated British cinema as an industry, British history as a commodity, and Britishness as a brand (though Sandbrook fails to note his contribution to the demotic as a euphemism for masturbation). The reaction to the conservatism of Rank's films, namely the social realism of British cinema and theatre in the late 50s and early 60s, is blithely ignored, presumably because of its problematic focus on working-class aspiration and its criticism of conservative values after Suez. Despite the supposed emphasis on Victorian roots, the lasting legacy of music hall in British culture isn't mentioned. There is no Joan Littlewood, no Shelagh Delaney.

In fact, there are no women outside royalty. This is a great man history in which Sandbrook praises white, middle-class "entrepreneurs", such as Brian Epstein, Chris Blackwell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Charles Saatchi. Their commercial nous is elided with creativity, suggesting that culture should be thought of largely in terms of units shifted. Epstein's genius is dressing the Beatles in tailored suits and wangling OBEs for their contribution to exports; the continuity between the exploitation of sugar and reggae in Blackwell's family history is delicately passed over; Saatchi is praised for creating a market for modern art - the creativity of money; while tales of Lloyd-Webber's first night anxiety fail to elicit sympathy when you remember his recent role in voting for tax credit cuts.

In the second episode, Sandbrook uses a 1960s drug-bust at Keith Richards' Sussex manor to ram home his continuity message: rebel buys posh house at earliest opportunity. This vignette of the louche and the conventional, like Chipping Norton avant la lettre, reveals Sandbrook's fascination with property, which he proceeds to indulge in a tour that takes in Castle Howard (the "star" of Brideshead Revisited) and Highclere (the set for Downton Abbey). This is a view of history that reduces the subtlety of class identifiers to mere possessions. For example, Sandbrook's celebration of the" aristocratic" James Bond confuses Ian Fleming's festishisation of commodities with status. He fails to appreciate that Fleming, as the scion of a banking family, was looked down on by landowning aristos who preferred shabby-chic to an obsession with tailoring and cocktails.

The tour of stately homes allows Sandbrook to transport us back to Edwardian times and imply that gracious living reflected right moral values. TH White's The Sword in the Stone is held up as evidence of a persistent popular appetite for these values into the 20th century, including a sympathy with the travails of monarchy (The King's Speech gets an airing). This reading ignores White's pacifism and misrepresents his ecological concerns (Camelot has echoes of the League of Nations, Wart is repeatedly metamorphosed into animals who find man's cruelty baffling). White's romantic conservativism is closer to Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson. Merlin and Arthur's embodiment of the elderly tutor/young student trope is used to establish a link to the present in the form of Dumbledore and Harry Potter. In fact, White's themes of might versus right and family dysfunction find a better echo in Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Star Wars is excluded because it isn't British and because it doesn't feature an impressive rural pile.

The visit to Hogwarts allows Sandbrook to delve back even further in time to the Victorian roots of public schools. Rugby, Eton, Harrow et al are held up as inculcators of right values. Their historic role in moulding the administrators of empire is finessed with the comic interlude of Harry Flashman: a variation on the now-traditional "absent-minded" defence of exploitation. The public school system's role in moulding the social attitudes that undermined British industry during the interwar years isn't mentioned, nor its baleful influence on postwar grammar schools and today's free schools. Again, Sandbrook misses the obvious cue: Orwell's experience as an ex-public schoolboy enforcing the systemic cruelty of empire in Burma, and his experience of the social and economic waste inflicted on the industrial towns of the North in the 1930s.

In the book that accompanies and expands on the TV series, The Great British Dream Factory, Sandbrook finally engages Orwell, but only to criticise the Old Etonian's antipathy to the schooldays stories of Frank Richards. Despite his modern appropriation by neoliberals and neocons, Orwell remains problematic for the right, both because of his unpicking of the ideology of class and his distaste for Americanisation. Where he can't wholly ignore a subject, Sandbrook belittles it: postwar satire is written off as ineffective, other than in undermining respect for politicians (he ignores pre-Victorian levels of contempt); Punk is dismissed as merely "aesthetic" (i.e. by insisting on its lack of significance, which elsewhere is held up as a virtue for pop commodities, he admits its unsettling force); and the Jam's Eton Rifles is misread as showing a secret admiration for Etonians (it's actually about working class cynicism at middle class posturing).

According to Sandbrook, the period from the death of Princess Diana to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee shows royalty's ability to absorb and appropriate popular culture, which glosses over the near-terminal impact of the former event on the institution. The popularity of Elton John's Candle in the Wind is held to prove this resilience, rather than anything as banal as the British public's mawkish rubber-necking. This not only ignores the significance of a eulogy to an American icon being repurposed for a British one, but means Sandbrook fails to note the title comes from TH White's fourth book in The Once and Future King series, where it reflects the fragility of peace. In its way, the song is a perfect emblem of Sandbrook's cultural history: sentimental and superficial, in denial about the adoption of American social mores, and unwilling to accept the diversity and contradictions of British society.

The Responsible Diaspora

It was unfortunate timing that Jonathan Freedland should publish an article on Friday evening that began with the words: "Diasporas can be trouble". It's too soon to know the identities or backgrounds of the terrorists in Paris, but it's probably a safe bet that they were mostly locals rather than foreign jihadis, even if they had spent time in the Middle East recently. The alacrity with which the French government moved to seal the borders suggests a fear of incursions from abroad, and the more paranoid parts of the media have been only too happy to suggest that Syrian refugees are the conduit, but there is no lack of potential volunteers in the banlieus of Paris. The whole purpose of "radicalisation" is to sow dragon's teeth and thereby divide communities along sectarian lines. The new danger is that these attacks will be used by governments as an excuse to suspend the Schengen Agreement in order to placate national xenophobes.

Freedland's piece is a plea for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to be influenced by Western Jewish liberals. Despairing at the growing intolerance and mendacity of Netanyahu's government, and convinced that there is "no credible Palestinian partner" (there never is, funnily enough), he looks in hope to the Jewish diaspora to exert a positive influence. The precedent he cites is Northern Ireland and specifically how the "responsible diaspora" of Irish-Americans lobbied both republicans and Bill Clinton to pursue a negotiated peace. The adjective "responsible" does not imply consequentiality, i.e being responsible for one's actions, but rather privilege and legitimacy. This discrimination in turn implies illegitimacy, which in the case of the Palestinians appears to extend to pretty much everyone. There is no mention of a responsible Palestinian diaspora.

This dichotomy of the responsible and irresponsible requires Freedland to mangle history: "Whether it was the German-Americans who agitated to keep the United States out of the war against Hitler, the Irish-Americans who bankrolled the IRA’s 'armed struggle', or the Cuban-Americans who lobbied to keep the US shackled to a pointless embargo of the island, émigré communities have a chequered record when it comes to the influencing of foreign policy." The chief opponents of war with Hitler were not German-Americans but Americans, from disappointed Wilsonian liberals to the America First Committee (supporters included Sinclair Lewis, Walt Disney and a young Gerald Ford). Though a significant source of funds, the IRA was not "bankrolled" by Irish-Americans. It raised far more money in the Irish Republic. The US embargo of Cuba was prompted by the nationalisation of US-owned assets, not by the lobbying of Cuban exiles. Its maintenance has been due to the intransigence of capitalists holding out for compensation, not street demos in Miami.

This notion of continuing engagement with "the old country" leads Freedland to claim that "In the US, foreign policy is domestic politics". This obviously flies in the face of the USA's long-standing parochialism, not to mention the more ridiculous examples of politicians who don't know what pyramids were for or who wear their ignorance of world affairs as a badge of honour, but Freedland is engaged in building the image of the irresponsible diaspora, all the better to create a stark contrast with the responsible. The irresponsible diaspora is marked by "a tendency to be more hawkish than those in the old country, to adopt a dogmatic stance unaltered by day-to-day experience on the ground". Right on cue, Mohammed Emwazi (aka "Jihadi John") gets a topical namecheck, suggesting that Muslims are particularly prone to this dogmatic tendency.

The responsible diaspora, for which Freedland turns to research among British Jews, exhibits a more mature and sophisticated understanding: "Jews are eminently capable of holding two views at the same time that are often – wrongly – held to be contradictory. They are capable of supporting Israel’s right to exist, taking pride in its achievements on the one hand – and lambasting Israeli policy on the other". Freedland doesn't stop to note that those who maintain that these positions are mutually exclusive include not only antisemites but philosemites. In recent years, Netanyahu has been at the forefront in claiming that criticism of Israeli government policy is by definition an existential attack on Israel, and that Arab-Israelis are a categorical threat to the state. This latter stance extends the trope of the irresponsible diaspora to those whom the state is reluctant to even acknowledge as native citizens.

Freedland's search for a responsible diaspora is not unlike the old imperial search for the responsible native, whose continued non-appearance inevitably sets back the date of decolonialisation. The desperation of this search can be seen in his willingness to rehabilitate Tony Blair, Mr Good Friday himself, who has apparently decided to go freelance with "a new initiative of his own, predicated on the belief that the way to make Israeli-Palestinian progress is through a wider regional understanding between Israel and its Arab neighbours". It doesn't seem to occur to Freedland that the former PM might be more interested in leveraging the many contacts he made as "Middle East Peace Envoy" for commercial advantage than to advance a wide-ranging political settlement.

Freedland defines the responsible diaspora thus: "They favour compromise, rejecting the suggestion that concessions should wait until the wider region calms down. They are unimpressed by the Palestinian leadership, blaming it for incitement against Israel, and accepting the view that there is 'no credible Palestinian partner', even as majorities still believe in the two-state solution, still maintain that Israel should give up land for peace, and do not shrink from the fact that Israel is 'an occupying power'". The belief that there is no credible Palestinian partner is absolutist: the exact opposite of someone prepared to compromise. Freedland should revisit his own historic parallel. Were Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness noticeably more "credible" than the PLO or Hamas?

That the Palestinian leadership is deemed "unimpressive" is an ironic position to take when you consider the deeply unimpressive behaviour of Netanyahu. And as far as "incitement" is concerned, how do you describe the approval by successive Israeli governments of further settlement building in the West Bank? Of course, this tit-for-tat should be irrelevant if there is a sincere desire to negotiate: you want to focus on the future, not dwell on the past. The belief that there is a narrow range of acceptable interlocutors, like the attempts to bound negotiations by appeals to loaded values or the insistence on particular behaviours, reflects the aristocratic roots of diplomacy. These are matters than gentlemen should discuss without the interventions of the mob or their "unimpressive" leaders.

The persistence of these forms is due to their value in constraining the future by reference to the past, which is why they are always more pronounced on the side that is expected to make the greater concessions. They are structurally conservative. The "Foreign Office" style of the UK was a characteristic of the era of imperial decline, not the years of aggressive expansion. Freedland's construction of a responsible diaspora appears progressive and liberal, but in its refusal to engage with both Israelis and Palestinians as they actually are, it is typical of the aristocratic contempt that still mars British attitudes to international affairs, something that even the notoriously oblivious Americans are sensitive to. The truth is that we should always negotiate, where we can, because talk is cheap and lives shouldn't be. We don't need a responsible diaspora working quietly behind the scenes, we don't need preconditions and qualifications, we just need a table and some chairs.

The End of Education

The unsurprising news that future government spending will shift further away from education and economic development towards pensions and healthcare highlights the growing antagonism between different fractions of capital in the UK. Though this has mainly been discussed in recent decades in terms of the "demographic timebomb" and its effect on the affordability of welfare, the smarter capitalists are waking up to the potential risks for capital itself. According to the neoliberals at the Resolution Foundation, "This relative growth of state spending on health and old age – and withdrawal from areas such as post-16 education, housing and economic development – also raises big questions about the state's role in supporting productivity growth".

Public spending is unlikely to fall as much as is being claimed, not just because large cuts are difficult to realise outside of major capital-intensive programmes such as housebuilding and defence, but because government is the prime site for rent-extraction. If the economy continues to stutter along, public services where demand is guaranteed to grow in advance of GDP, such as health and elderly care, will become ever more attractive to the sort of businesses who make political donations. The number of public bodies and public sector workers may well decline, but the amount of public money spent on services via commercial providers is likely to grow. This means that total public expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, will probably remain closer to 40% than the supposed target of 35%.

The challenge to other industrial sectors is that this compositional shift undermines public investment in economic resources such as infrastructure and human capital (i.e. education and training). This raises costs for UK capitalists who have, over the last century, relied on state subsidies for these "public goods" financed through general taxation (i.e. predominantly paid for by labour in the form of income tax, VAT, council tax etc). Though the current government is ideologically opposed to formal subsidies for strategic industries, such as steel-making, its welfare spending priorities mean that it is now turning away from the much larger informal subsidies to broad industry. This applies not only in terms of money spent on public infrastructure and education, but money spent subsidising labour costs through working tax credits.

This is consistent with its encouragement of business sponsorship of schools and colleges, where it is pursuing a strategy of privatisation in the true sense of that term - i.e. leaving it to private actors to pursue their own interests rather than pool efforts for the common good. In effect, business is being told to "grow your own" because public provision will continue to decay. While New Labour's academy programme was the thin end of the wedge, we should remember that it was driven by the delusion that "beacons of excellence" would drive up average standards to the benefit of capital generally. The Tory policy, with its emphasis on elitism and reductionist assessment, is the pursuit of a pluralism in which failure is a necessary component. Capitalists are being asked to become discriminating and to treat education as a buyer's market.

In contrast, economic development exhibits a hybrid, multilateral approach, due to the need for local government involvement (which cannot be dispensed with as easily as in the case of education) and the preference of foreign state-level investors for UK government guarantees. But even here the idea of state investment for national resources is being eroded. Instead, subsidies are directed to foreign investors (e.g. Hinkley Point), privileged domestic groups (e.g. private builders), or both (e.g. HS2). Eschewing state-led investment not only allows the government to resist subsidising ailing industries, it also allows FDI to be used to impose "market discipline" on local authorities, obliging them to compromise in order to "win" foreign approval. The problem for industry is that this can lead to lopsided investment and regional inconsistencies - i.e. a lack of the central planning that traditionally benefited big capital.

The news on the evolving shape of the public sector comes hard on the heels of the latest episode of "The Rise of the Robots", in which the social scientists of Bank of America Merrill Lynch report that "robots and artificial intelligence ... could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years". Some of this is just the usual MBA guff. For example, "We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work". No. A small number of robot owners (capitalists), and either wage repression or un/under-employment for much of labour, does not constitute a paradigm shift but a reversion to historical norms. What caught my eye was the standard neoliberal hope: "It’s not meant to be a doom and gloom report: one of the ways we think people could help themselves here is through education".

But the idea of education as a way of positively meeting technological change already seems out of date. Citing recent research showing an above-average rise in mortality for the white working-class in the US (and specifically the middle-aged with limited education), Andrew McAfee speculates that this may be the result of structural unemployment: "The boredom and vice that come up when work goes away are dire problems. They are, in fact, a serious public health problem". This might appear to be a liberal plea to consider the human cost of economic dislocation, but it echoes a conservative presumption that the working-class are unsuited to leisure because their only purpose is labour. McAfee doesn't seem too bothered by the prospect of boredom and vice among the idle rich, but more significantly he doesn't even attempt to claim that more education could be the solution for labour.

The chief argument against technological unemployment, apart from the risible Luddite myth, is that progress opens up new economic sectors and creates more new jobs than are lost. The classic example used to support this is the steep decline of agricultural employment, with the surplus of labour trooping off to the new factories. In fact, while there was a massive movement from the countryside to urban areas, this masked a movement of jobs as much as people. For example, a lot of those classified as agricultural workers in the eighteenth century, at a time when transport was labour-intensive and most markets local, were actually engaged in food distribution and retail, not working the land. Others were small-holders or "cottars" who supplemented their income through casual (non-agricultural) labour or craft-work. A lot of the "industry" that sprang up in the emerging towns was activity that had previously been dispersed in villages, hidden under the blanket of the rural economy.

In other words, a lot of "new" jobs were actually old jobs retooled or relocated rather than the result of new demands satisfied. A blacksmith replaced by a car mechanic is categorically different to a ploughman who becomes a cinema projectionist. This distinction is important because future job prospects will depend more on the degree of retooling and relocation than society's ability to invent new personal services. The fear is that we have reached an inflexion point where the replacement rate is now less than 1, both because technology has become more substitutionary than complementary (more autonomous robots than power tools), and because technology has enabled relocation on a global scale (so disadvantaging historic concentrations of labour that enjoyed higher wages).

One symptom of this evolution is the way that previously skilled or rationed roles are now being dispersed by technology across a larger casual workforce, e.g. the so-called "sharing economy". The challenge that Uber drivers present to London cabbies is globalisation on a metropolitan scale. The ideological groundwork for this was laid over recent decades by the vogue for portfolio careers and freelancing, but that in turn placed a greater emphasis on the importance of human capital. In this current phase, the mood music is about the declining returns to education and the importance of contacts: who you know rather than what you know. Social media reflects this transition from "brand me" and unmediated self-expression to insider networking and the clubhouse, with trolling providing the justification for discrimination and horizontalist initiatives drowned out by the cacophony of the privileged.

As the ideological frame shifts away from human capital, state education policy is increasingly attracted to social regulation. Education has always been first and foremost a matter of discipline, the roots of which lie in religious and moral conformity, so it is easy to redirect it to a system geared to separating and socialising children based on their parent's socio-economic status or aspirations. The recent tale of the primary school requiring its pupils to walk with their hands behind their backs is resonant precisely because the justification, that it will "make sure children arrive in class in the best possible frame of mind for learning", is so obviously specious. If anything, the evidence is that children are likely to benefit more from running around, which is what they instinctively try to do. Forcing small kids to comport themselves as if they were in holy orders is education only in the sense of teaching them in-group behaviour.

Though public debate will focus on the increased share for health and the elderly, the real story emerging from the government's public spending priorities is not one of demography or even tactical cuts to other services. It is that we have no expectation that "new high-wage industries" will finally arrive in numbers to replace those shut down since the early-80s, and that consequently we have given up on education as a public, as opposed to a private, good. We're writing off our human capital and asking business to make the best of whatever it can find. This is a high-risk strategy given that a "no" vote in the EU referendum would lead many large firms to conclude that they would be better-off relocating to the continent, particularly if tighter immigration controls made importing human capital difficult. For all its triumphalism and the obliging media coverage, there's an unmistakable whiff of the closing-down sale about the current administration.

It's the Little Things that Matter

The tone of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill debate was set for me when I spotted a story in the Telegraph ("Protecting children from paedophiles trumps your privacy", apparently) illustrated by a picture of a finger pressing a backspace key but captioned: "a person pressing the delete button on a laptop". I suspect this was a MacBook, which doesn't have separate keys, as favoured by the creative types who produce stock photos. My keyboard pedantry might appear excessive, but it highlights the casual imprecision about technology common among politicians and the media. While civil libertarians focus on the legal safeguards of the draft bill and obsess about the mechanics of judicial review (whenever you hear that phrase, just remember Lord Denning), there is a danger that its technical ambition will be under-estimated or misunderstood through plain old ignorance.

The BBC apparently used an image from the same stock photo-shoot in their coverage of the Home Secretary's announcement to the Commons, which reinforced the impression that we're witnessing a large-scale PR exercise that spans the political spectrum. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the suspension of UK flights to Sharm-el-Sheikh was a piece of opportunism in this regard, but the insistence by Philip Hammond that the UK government had intelligence not available to the Egyptian and Russian authorities was a clear nod to the utility of data interception and surveillance, not to mention a feather in the cap of the spooks. Of course, we'll never know whether this is just the inflation of boastful chatter by wannabes or something more serious, though we can be pretty sure that actual terrorists do not discuss their plans online even with the benefit of encryption and router masking.

Labour's Andy Burnham has come in for criticism for being so accommodating, welcoming the Home Secretary's proposal and dismissing the suggestion that it constitutes a "snooper's charter", though I think his lack of scepticism is more residual Blairism than evidence that Theresa May has compromising photos: "In a world where the threats we face internationally and domestically are growing, parliament cannot sit on its hands and leave blind spots where the authorities can't see". The notion of the "growing" threat, like "blind spots", is a classic securocrat trope, while the elevation of our concern to "the world" is totalising neoliberalism. The draft bill is not informed by any threat analysis that would justify this claim, or at least not one the government feels able to share even in redacted form. This is about maximising potential capability, not minimising anticipated risks.

In her speech, the Home Secretary insisted that law enforcement agencies access to communications data would be tightly controlled. They "would only be able to make a request for the purpose of determining whether someone had for example accessed a communications website, an illegal website or to resolve an IP address." She did not explain how "illegal" websites would be defined, nor why you'd need to access Web logs to resolve an IP address (presumably she's never heard of WHOIS). What this means in practice is the ability to trawl bulk data by IP address, which in turn implies an obligation on the part of ISPs to provide address assignments by device and account. In other words, every end-point will be "on-grid". There will be no more blind-spots.

The draft bill's own blind-spots are much the same as those that were evident in the Anderson Review that reported on the UK's data investigatory powers earlier this year: little concern with the behaviour of business, in terms of its responsibilities to data-providers (i.e. we, the people); no interest in personal data as property or as having inherited human rights (EU privacy judgements are conspicuous by their absence); and an assumption that "additional protections" should be limited to institutional elites (MPs, journalists, lawyers etc). In other words, companies like TalkTalk can continue to have shockingly poor levels of data security, companies like Facebook can continue to expropriate user data in any way they wish, and your "right to privacy" means transparency to others.

As is now traditional, the government have made great play of the difference between "Internet Connection Records" and content, even wheeling out the "itemised phone bill" analogy one more time. The Guide to Powers and Safeguards issued with the draft bill defines them thus: "A kind of communications data, an ICR is a record of the internet services a specific device has connected to, such as a website or instant messaging application. It is captured by the company providing access to the internet. Where available, this data may be acquired from CSPs [communication service providers] by law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies. An ICR is not a person’s full internet browsing history. It is a record of the services that they have connected to, which can provide vital investigative leads. It would not reveal every web page that they visit or anything that they do on that web page" (section 44-45).

This is disingenuous. The Internet is "stateless", which means that there isn't a persistent connection. Every individual request (i.e. what happens when you click a link or a button) is a separate connection, which means that accessing a single website may produce scores of separate records. In contrast, an analog telephone connection (which is what the deliberately misleading phone-bill metaphor conjures up) is "stateful" in that a fixed connection is maintained for the duration of the call (imagine a manual switchboard and an operator saying "I'll put you through"). The claim that ICRs will only record domain names rather than resources (i.e. specific pages or images to the right of the "/") is dubious, and that's without considering the complication of redirects and aliases. The C/ISP weblogs record the full URL. The idea that commercial operators would go to the trouble of truncating these before providing access to state agencies beggars belief.

The issue of content, like encryption, is a red herring. The security services are interested in network analysis, not reading your emails. Content is overwhelmingly noise and there is simply too much of it. This is why the government can claim there is no "mass surveillance", meaning individual surveillance extended to most people. When they do wish to eavesdrop, which will be on a tiny percentage of the population, full content can be secured through "equipment interference" while encryption can be circumvented by infecting target devices with keyloggers and screen-grabbers (which incidentally means the state has an interest in keeping devices vulnerable to malware). The state has always gathered data in bulk. Without Snowden and the Tempora revelations, the only reason for a bill to regularise this would be to compel business cooperation. As we now know, business is happy to cooperate and willing to support opaque language that keeps the arrangements secret (as was the case with the 1984 Telecommunications Act).

Ostensibly, the draft bill is not about giving the security services more powers, but about providing legal cover for established practice, both to absolve business of responsibility and to protect the state from legal challenge. Where it does seek to extend powers is by future-proofing the security services' surveillance capabilities in respect of the Internet of Things (IoT). Its definition of communication data includes "signals serving either for the impartation of anything between persons, between a person and a thing or between things or for the actuation or control of any apparatus" (section 193.2.b). In other words, if you use a smartphone app to remotely-control your central-heating, that will count as communications data, and so too will a thermostat automatically turning on a boiler. Within your home, a LAN or Wi-Fi constitutes a "private telecommunications system" that would come within the bill's scope (193.14). If it hadn't already been taken by a mobile phone operator, the strapline for this bill could be "Everything, Everywhere".

As more and more of our lives are mediated by networked devices, so more and more of our activities and associations come within the view of both businesses and intelligence agencies. It is this pattern of "entities" and "events", in the language of the draft bill, that constitutes value for both parties in the surveillance economy, not the specifics of our communications. When we talk or write, we are presenting a persona rather than our "true" selves. But what we do, and who we associate with, does not so easily dissemble. The "party animal" who tweets about a mental night out while streaming Netflix to her TV and having ordered a pizza online may be misleading her friends, but she's not misleading the harvesters of bulk data. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the public reaction to the draft bill is the failure to appreciate this imperial ambition: a form of biopolitics that makes George Orwell's 1984 look unimaginative.

Bitcoins, Blockchains and the Grammar of Property

Politically, Bitcoin owes more to the libertarian right than the libertarian left. It has the double attraction of independence from state control and a strictly-enforced limit on the number of coins in circulation, thereby avoiding the possibility of the currency being debauched by a fiscally incontinent sovereign. The advance of bourgeois oligarchy in the Early Modern period is often presented in Whig history as an attempt to restrain monarchical waste and resist the expropriation of private property. In the Modern era, latter-day Whigs have presented democracy as a danger to the public purse - the looting of the treasury - which requires that the better sort step in and manage the process. Regulating the sovereign and regulating the people are two sides of the same coin.

Culturally, Bitcoin owes something of its popularity to its metaphorical near-equivalence to gold, which is most obvious in the role of the "miners" who provide the computing power that simultaneously generates new coins (essentially through trial and error processing and at a fixed rate) and maintains the distributed ledger that obviates the need for a central authority. These miners exhibit all the mistrust and paranoia typical of the stereotype made famous in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though we shouldn't automatically assume they all have beards and poor personal hygiene. Though "mining pools" (in which miners combine efforts to increase their chances) have arisen, these only work because double-crossing is ruled-out by the distributed controls of Bitcoin itself. This is a trustless network by design ("Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!").

The real significance of Bitcoin is not its use as a crypto-currency, i.e. reliable money, but the potential of its architecture - specifically the "blockchain" - to create a distributed environment for the management of all types of property claims (money is just one type), and even for the execution of contracts (Ethereum is the poster-boy for this concept). A "contract" in this sense is merely a transaction that can be verified, which means that the blockchain approach (in which blocks of transactions are chained together to create a fully-auditable ledger) can be used to support decentralised applications (or ÐApps) that can run across multiple nodes in a trustless, peer-to-peer network, so avoiding the need for either a logical or physical central authority (i.e. either a master database or server). The blockchain is the bastard offspring of Napster and DRM (digital rights management).

This may be a bit abstruse if, like Dido Harding of TalkTalk, you don't know your arse from your SQL, but the political point is the removal of the central authority. Bitcoin is celebrated on the libertarian right because it potentially does away with central banks specifically, not just banks generally, but the blockchain concept also has the potential to do away with a variety of other authorities and regulators. Though this is usually discussed in terms of property claims, such as title deeds or copyright licences, it could just as easily be extended to something like voting (i.e. to prevent rigging and personation) or national insurance contributions. In other words, this potentially goes well beyond automating the role of notaries. Both the ballot box and the DWP could conceivably be replaced by blockchains.

The challenge this presents is that the algorithms that maintain the blockchain have to be quite rigid otherwise you could compromise the integrity of the ledger as a record of historic transactions. In other words, you cannot easily change the rules of the game once you've started. This has attractions for constitutionalists (i.e. Burkeans who feel the past should trump the future) and those who suspect central banks of always wanting to create too much money. It also sits easily with property rights, where not changing the fundamental rules is the object of the game. The problem comes in respect of pro-social contracts where changing the rules is considered desirable across the political spectrum (e.g. Ian Duncan Smith's introduction of Universal Credit). Blockchains are not suited to pro-social contracts because they do not easily allow for the evolution of social relations.

One vision of the future economy sees corporations becoming increasingly abstract, as technology allows them to replace labour and disperse traditional overheads. In theory, a business providing digital services (e.g. recorded music) could be wholly accommodated within a blockchain, the individual transactions recording not only sales and royalty payments but securely holding the digital products as well. Though this lowers the cost of business, it would be naive to assume that it will in turn diffuse capital - i.e. that it will make it easier for us all to become capitalists. The winner-takes-all dynamic of the digital economy, like the emergence of Bitcoin mining pools, suggest that capital will continue to concentrate whenever possible. Amazon Web Services is still a more likely template for the future than Bitcoin, if only because few of us wish to become miners.

One interesting strand of speculation around decentralised applications is the intersection with the Internet of things (IoT). Hype-merchants like IBM are already eulogising the "democratisation" of blockchains: "Successful decentralization of the IoT, however, will lie not just in being peer-to-peer, but also in being trustless: an environment in which there is no need for participants to be trusted and no centralized, single point of failure ... In our vision of a decentralized IoT, the blockchain is the framework facilitating transaction processing and coordination among interacting devices. Each manages its own roles and behavior, resulting in an 'Internet of Decentralized, Autonomous Things' – and thus the democratization of the digital world".

It is unlikely that the IoT will deliver a single, common network of trustless, peer-to-peer devices simply because of the challenge of scale - i.e. the size of the ledger and the disparate interests of its components. It's more likely that we'll see the creation of self-selecting "communities" based on specific devices (and thus commodities) and social or geographic affinities, probably geared to shared security and maintenance, like a cross between Neighbourhood Watch and the Apple cult. IBM's vision has a dystopian edge: "Rules could also be defined by 51 percent consensus, as in the case of devices agreeing on the safety of peer downloadable software updates or banning a misbehaving participant". Though the blockchain is being heralded as a secure means of maintaining a common agreement among multiple devices, what it also promises is a grammar that would allow property to talk among itself.

If we think of the blockchain as a substitute authority, it may turn out that one of its chief uses will be to control a household, which may in practice be a virtual establishment spanning multiple physical locations. The Internet then is simply a means of extending that household control globally. If the IoT really does proceed to its logical end-point, every distinct thing you own will be recorded in, and aware of, your personal blockchain. This doesn't preclude much wider-scale blockchains, not least because different types of blockchain may be able to inter-communicate, thereby addressing the current scale limitations of the technology, which in turn reinforces the need for a common grammar. This opens up the prospect of a hierarchy developing within the context of a peer-to-peer network, which would be nothing if not ironic.

The jury is out as to whether blockchains can be made to work successfully in this way. Ethereum remains largely proof-of-concept while Bitcoin is already straining against its inherent limits. What is clear is that there is no diminishing of the desire in the technical community to push this concept as far as it will go. What is also clear is the attraction of the distributed ledger for a variety of other financial purposes, from managing share certificates and dividends to clearing. Given the banking sector's exposure in 2008 to the sheer uncertainty of derivatives and liabilities, it should not come as a surprise that the Bank of England, which has a responsibility for financial stability, has taken a keen interest. The final irony of Bitcoin may be that it provides the sovereign with enhanced control not only over the currency but over property more widely.