The following was spoken by Philip Pullman @ a Civil Liberties conference on 1st March 2009. According to this site the piece was put up on the timesonline website - but later removed.  Therefore it seemed a sensible thing to share it, so others can read it and hear an opinion.  After all, it's a free country - isn't it? ©Philip Pullman 2009

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?
The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?
BACKGROUND

* £34bn cost of state-run surveillance databases

* Former spy chief says UK is now a police state

* First ID cards are to be issued within weeks

* COMMENT: that’s a bit rich, Dame Stella

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum.

I recently watched a presentation done by Martin Seligman, ex-president of the American Psychology Association. He's the main man behind something called 'positive psychology.' It's a fairly new branch of the discipline, and one in which there's alot of positive interest.

Ever since the 50's, psychology has dealt with illness. Medical solutions to psychological problems have been the 'norm' of psychology as a science. As such, psychologists got the reputation of being a little scary. Talking to one meant they'd analyse you to find problems. Your repressed memories and assumptions could be read from a single conversation - therefore psychologist were those to be ignored.

Well, according to Mr Seligman, this is no longer the case (at least with him). Since the mid-90s, there has been an increase in interest in psychology as it has diversified into new fields of practise. One such field is this positive psychology.

The talk I watched was done at something called TED (www.ted.com) - it's a conference organised whereby experts in their field are invited to share their ideas. The best thing though, is that they're then asked to move their ideas into a different field. To throw it out there for all the other brains at the event to understand. Sometimes these sparks can light a fire.. that's the idea anyway.

Well, Mr Seligman's talk was on happiness. It's a fairly new area, and one open to massive interpretation: so here's mine.

Seligman talks of three types of happy lives.

Pleasant Lives - Celebrity, Indulgent, ExperinceGood Lives - Appreciation, Focused, Commited, EngagementMeaningful lives - Pensive, Broad, Faith.

They're not mutually exclusive or inclusive. It's interesting, it's possible to have all three.

His studies have led him to find the opposite of what he'd expected to be true. The most 'happy' life to lead is the Meaningful Life, then the Good Life, followed by the Pleasant Life. His reasoning is that although the pleasant life is something we all aspire to; it's also extremely habituating. If you have air conditioning, then a fan is no replacement. The step up is great - but once you're there you've got to enjoy it and appreciate it, else it becomes the habitual norm and anything less is sub-standard. Ironically the pleasant life is the most depressing, as improvements are finite - and more often than not they happen in big steps, rather than incremental changes.

The interesting thing was is that he applied this 'happiness' to technological development (not necessarily electric). Sure, you can put out a "pleasant" application and people will be happy with it. However, it's got to be constantly improving. If you create an application that people can get engaged with, it moves up a step to the "Good"applications; people are happy just using it. The third stage is the 'meaningful' application; one that gets the user interacting meaningfully with it. A great example is facebook.

Now, the interesting thing to me is that this group of 'three' is very similar to another group of 'three' that I read about at University. There's replacement, enabling and ubitiquous technology. The three categories seem to fit nicely as pairs.

Replacement technology - that which replaces a process we already have, but makes it easier.

Enabling technology - that which enables us to do things that were either not possible, or too time consuming to be worthwhile before the technology.

Ubitiquous technology - technology that becomes so widely used and pervasive that it becomes a part of the fabric of society, and is taken for granted.

Reading Zeth's blog post, Zeth cites commentators that say the time is over for the Open Source World, that development is slowly stalling and the exciting ideas of the 90's that came out of Open Source are being commercialised and exploited. I don't think that for one second. Software has (unnecessarily, one may argue) become far more complex. Sure, improvements in programming have been made and there are better skilled people out there than before - but packages are becoming far more complicated.

I'd ask, is this needed. The 'Pleasant Life' of Seligman talks about how having too many pleasures can be depressing. The constant expectation rather than fulfilment is lost on people who fail to appreciate. The same can be said for software consumers.

The ideas that have made people rich are rarely complicated. It's a simple idea, executed well that succeeds. The problem now, is not in "integrating all these fantastic packages and solutions," but in the realisation that perhaps that's not what is needed. Perhaps we need to look again to the simple things in life. A hammer doesn't come with a screwdriver attachment, in the same way a phone doesn't have to come with 'twitter integration.' Sure, it's a nice feature for thos that want it... but for those than don't it becomes a barrier to using the original 'simple' aspect of that technology.

Clay Shirky provides a fascinating insight into how a collaborative approach utilises more skills, and empowers more people than the old institutional model. Rather than coming from an Open Source background, he uses the example of Flickr to convey his point (and then takes a stab at Ballmer). It's an interesting presentation, and shows how you can make the most of the information/data available in a field.

However, there's an angle to his talk which isn't covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That's the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current '$1 million question' - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs's printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg's printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a 'messenger to the people' is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay's talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the 'core' developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it's these people who can really add value to a project.  With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique.  Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There's also a question of expertise.  The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code.  Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work.  It's this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software.  Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - "Woo, when we get this critical mass we'll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years."  To be honest that doesn't bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that's not why I'm here.  I'm here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It's going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes.  It's unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it's also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we're only just at the beginning.

One of the first lectures in my first year entertained the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods in psychology.  We had three lovely, but definately qualitatively biased lecturers.  They spoke of the personal approach to psychology, and identifying individual differences, rather than group 'norms' - for they argues that norms did not exist across society, due to all the difference cultures and individual experiences.

However, our quantitative lecturers disagreed.  They liked to analyse and draw lovely graphs showing difference behavioural patterns.  Attach electrodes to heads to monitor electrical pulses in the brain, and quantify social experiments using hard statistics and probability algorithms.

Well, they're now approaching the end of their careers in this field, as Google and the 'database generation' take over.

There's so much information on the internet now, that we don't need to know whether someone is going to do something or not - we can actually see records of what they do.  Having the browsing habits of thousands, or millions of people is almost priceless data.  It's the stuff that quantititative psychologists can only dream of.  Any psychologist will tell you how valuable that data is to them.

Well, today Alexander Hanff - fighting for our freedom - heads to the House of Lords in order to prevent Phorm from getting their hands on our data; and to question why BT haven't yet been charged on any count for gross invasion of privacy in regards to their trials of the Phorm software last summer.

In order to understand what we're dealing with, I offer the following analogy to those less technically minded.

The internet is an exchange of bags, each containing a little bit of information.  Let's say you pass one bag a second from your machine across the internet to an 'internet server.'  It's very easy for someone to look into any of these bags - but mainly due to volume (but also due to simple logistics) people tend not to bother looking in your bags.  It's not to say they can't though.

Well, phorm contains software that looks through all your bags, and analyses them for 'key-words', from which they can then target adverts at you.  If you're communicating with someone, why do you want them looking through your bags - you don't!

When you deal with your bank, you'd put a padlock on the bags, that only they and you have the key to unlock.. so your online banking details are safe..r.  If you'd rather not have someone looking through all the information you exchange across the internet, charging you for the pleasure, and then holding more information on your browsing habits than you even do yourself.. say Yes to Phorm.  else do the sensible thing and "JUST SAY NO!"

It's quite nice how people can see that all my different email addresses can be linked via a gpg key.  If you deal with me through this blog, you can see the companies I work for, and vice versa.

I like that.