Monday, February 09, 2004
The reason New Labour are having problems winning hearts and minds over ID Cards (and please, if there's a 'silent majority' in favour then all that matters is the vocal minority against it. If you can't get the millions of people who didn't march against the war to march for the war then their opinion has no place in the debate and should be ignored) is that they are dealing with the problem in such a a boring, old-fashioned twentieth-century way. Much as I hate to admit it, piggybacking it in on the back of passports and drivers licenses is actually a smart thing to do, but it's been forced upon them by public opposition to the scheme, not by themthinking that it was actually a good idea in and of itself.
I was thinking of this when looking at a friend's Livejournal profile, which gives spaces for things like ICQ and Messenger IDs for all those annoying little chat programs that the kids seem to like these days. And Warren Ellis, in a collection of his Bad Signal columns bunched together and spewed out by Avatar, saying about his die puny humans blog was somewhere for him to put all the links to stuff thatinterested him that he could access from any terminal with web access. Now, none of this is new information and we all use our blogs for much the same thing, but walking the cold mean streets of London today it got me thinking of armbands.
It would have to start with armbands. Unfortunate Nazi-esque imagery I know, but sub-dermal chips would probably come later. Forget CARDS, they are passe. Also, you have to present an ID Card, which means you put down whatever you are holding, fiddle around in your back pocket/purse, then struggle to get the bugger out and give it to the security guard. It's a hassle. Promise people something which allows you to do what you want to do with genuinely no effort on their part and they'll be happy with it. So, your armband would have a chip sewn in to it. Now for all the hipster kids this would contain details about your ICQ, email, blog, personal reality transmission codes, etc. There's nothing to stop you carrying your blog around with you for that matter, 'I've just come from the 'Nature of Panic' exhibition over the river. Don't go, it's shit' (you can get digital watches these days that are more intelligent than the dear old 48K Spectrum I had when a sapling, so the days of always-on, always-connected computers that are as powerful as what we use now but not much bigger than a credit-card or a thumb-nail must surely reach us before the eschaton, after all, look at the capacity Apple are reaching for small music players), all of which is controlled by blink-click eye-controlled cursors projecting a screen on to the inside of your sunglasses (if the police think it's difficult to enforce a law to stop people using mobile phones in cars, how are they going to stop people using computers projected onto the inside of their sunglasses?).
Now, you offer something like that to the cool kids (and I'm just projecting what we use today onto the technology, they'll probably have something different and attuned more snugly to what exists by the time we catch up with them) but say, oh by the way, part of this chip will have details on your name, age, address etc, the technology that allows your mates to read your card will allow government officials to identify you just as easily, then I think they'll still go for it. The more you piggyback on current technology the more it's accepted.
This is Labour's problem, it looks and sounds like a tired old party. In 1997 it was either looking for radical solutions to problems or, perhaps, it was able to make itself look like it was looking for radical solutions to problems. But for the next election we already know that Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell will be helping out at Labour HQ to co-ordinate the campaign. They're both very good at it, after all Alistair Campbell has been able to lie and not just get away with it but practically get congratulated for it, but while Tony Blair still has the power and authority to make changes, in all other respects New Labour doesn't look much different from John Major's Conservative Government. And you've got the Conservatives who have turned the dial on the radio and are now broadcasting a completely different channel of 'hopeless'. Michael Howard started strongly but seems to have come unstuck in recent weeks, quite how he managed to make a complete pigs of the absolute gift he was given in the form of the Hutton Whitewash is something that will mystify politics students for decades. More worryingly for Conservative spin-doctors his speeches seem to be drifting into the territory of thinking that the public will be nostalgic for the good old days of the early nineties when the Tories were in power. Seeing as there's often little difference between the politics of the two parties this approach will tend to encourage apathy rather than a Tory vote. They should start coughing "Poll Tax" behind him until he gets the message.
New Labour have to work out how to become New New Labour. The only way to do this while avoiding a spell in opposition (hopefully) would depend on whether Tony Blair genuinely loves his party more than his career as a world statesman. If the former were true then he should give the leadership to Gordon Brown, not Blunkett who I think wouldn't be supported by no-one other than Lynda Lee-Potter in the Mail, and become the Professor X of the Labour movement, act as a headmaster looking at developing ideas and talent behind the scenes to send through to help Gordon 'Cyclops' Brown fighting Conservatism.
I realise that most of the proceeding is completely impossible but there's something liberating in writing it none-the-less. That's what you get when I'm blogging while listening to The Shamen's Boss Drum. But there's more...
I never checked any of it out so I don't know what exactly happened over there but I hope that Howard Dean's complete and total failure to get any kind of vote (which humorously Newsnight over here seems unable to grasp, whenever they cover the Democrat elections and whatnot they always ask about what chance Dean still has, even when he's coming third) doesn't turn politics off using new technology to try and reach out to people. An article I read somewhere over the weekend was all about how Conservative success in the last twenty to thirty years has been due to them taking hold of the debates and twisting them in such a way as to make the left-wing forced to debate it on the right's terms. The gap between the two is closing again but the left is probably marginally ahead in terms of the know-how to use technology to try and prevent Bush actually winning an election for once (Patrick: don't bother).
I was thinking of this when looking at a friend's Livejournal profile, which gives spaces for things like ICQ and Messenger IDs for all those annoying little chat programs that the kids seem to like these days. And Warren Ellis, in a collection of his Bad Signal columns bunched together and spewed out by Avatar, saying about his die puny humans blog was somewhere for him to put all the links to stuff thatinterested him that he could access from any terminal with web access. Now, none of this is new information and we all use our blogs for much the same thing, but walking the cold mean streets of London today it got me thinking of armbands.
It would have to start with armbands. Unfortunate Nazi-esque imagery I know, but sub-dermal chips would probably come later. Forget CARDS, they are passe. Also, you have to present an ID Card, which means you put down whatever you are holding, fiddle around in your back pocket/purse, then struggle to get the bugger out and give it to the security guard. It's a hassle. Promise people something which allows you to do what you want to do with genuinely no effort on their part and they'll be happy with it. So, your armband would have a chip sewn in to it. Now for all the hipster kids this would contain details about your ICQ, email, blog, personal reality transmission codes, etc. There's nothing to stop you carrying your blog around with you for that matter, 'I've just come from the 'Nature of Panic' exhibition over the river. Don't go, it's shit' (you can get digital watches these days that are more intelligent than the dear old 48K Spectrum I had when a sapling, so the days of always-on, always-connected computers that are as powerful as what we use now but not much bigger than a credit-card or a thumb-nail must surely reach us before the eschaton, after all, look at the capacity Apple are reaching for small music players), all of which is controlled by blink-click eye-controlled cursors projecting a screen on to the inside of your sunglasses (if the police think it's difficult to enforce a law to stop people using mobile phones in cars, how are they going to stop people using computers projected onto the inside of their sunglasses?).
Now, you offer something like that to the cool kids (and I'm just projecting what we use today onto the technology, they'll probably have something different and attuned more snugly to what exists by the time we catch up with them) but say, oh by the way, part of this chip will have details on your name, age, address etc, the technology that allows your mates to read your card will allow government officials to identify you just as easily, then I think they'll still go for it. The more you piggyback on current technology the more it's accepted.
This is Labour's problem, it looks and sounds like a tired old party. In 1997 it was either looking for radical solutions to problems or, perhaps, it was able to make itself look like it was looking for radical solutions to problems. But for the next election we already know that Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell will be helping out at Labour HQ to co-ordinate the campaign. They're both very good at it, after all Alistair Campbell has been able to lie and not just get away with it but practically get congratulated for it, but while Tony Blair still has the power and authority to make changes, in all other respects New Labour doesn't look much different from John Major's Conservative Government. And you've got the Conservatives who have turned the dial on the radio and are now broadcasting a completely different channel of 'hopeless'. Michael Howard started strongly but seems to have come unstuck in recent weeks, quite how he managed to make a complete pigs of the absolute gift he was given in the form of the Hutton Whitewash is something that will mystify politics students for decades. More worryingly for Conservative spin-doctors his speeches seem to be drifting into the territory of thinking that the public will be nostalgic for the good old days of the early nineties when the Tories were in power. Seeing as there's often little difference between the politics of the two parties this approach will tend to encourage apathy rather than a Tory vote. They should start coughing "Poll Tax" behind him until he gets the message.
New Labour have to work out how to become New New Labour. The only way to do this while avoiding a spell in opposition (hopefully) would depend on whether Tony Blair genuinely loves his party more than his career as a world statesman. If the former were true then he should give the leadership to Gordon Brown, not Blunkett who I think wouldn't be supported by no-one other than Lynda Lee-Potter in the Mail, and become the Professor X of the Labour movement, act as a headmaster looking at developing ideas and talent behind the scenes to send through to help Gordon 'Cyclops' Brown fighting Conservatism.
I realise that most of the proceeding is completely impossible but there's something liberating in writing it none-the-less. That's what you get when I'm blogging while listening to The Shamen's Boss Drum. But there's more...
I never checked any of it out so I don't know what exactly happened over there but I hope that Howard Dean's complete and total failure to get any kind of vote (which humorously Newsnight over here seems unable to grasp, whenever they cover the Democrat elections and whatnot they always ask about what chance Dean still has, even when he's coming third) doesn't turn politics off using new technology to try and reach out to people. An article I read somewhere over the weekend was all about how Conservative success in the last twenty to thirty years has been due to them taking hold of the debates and twisting them in such a way as to make the left-wing forced to debate it on the right's terms. The gap between the two is closing again but the left is probably marginally ahead in terms of the know-how to use technology to try and prevent Bush actually winning an election for once (Patrick: don't bother).
