A Privatisation Problem

Its been a while since I posted and the truth is it’s because I’ve been looking on in horror at the way our coalition government have set about ripping the spirit out of a country that I have lived in for most of my life. I have been simply unable to find words that dont make me sound like a parody of myself.

Its not enough to stand on the sidelines, pointing and jeering at the idiots in charge anymore. That has become frustrating and pointless. Time to take stock and to act.

The things that make life worth living are many and various, but I’d put people and community pretty close to the top of the list. David Cameron when he came to power talked a lot about something he called the “Big Society”, a vision of compassionate conservatism, a future where society would look after its own, where the benefits of the free market would trickle down to underwrite the costs of keeping things like libraries and schools open and available for all. The vision was that once constraints were removed, the free market would provide for all. Instead, the Big Society has turned out to be a dystopia, a dysfunctional money grabbing power hungry system that discounts society, community, responsibility and personal development in favour of greed, cynicism, non-accountability and blatant dishonesty. Or as the governor of the Bank of England described it: “Fraud”.

There are reasons for this and to my mind, principle amongst those reasons is the concept of “shareholder value”. Good old fashioned capitalism was built upon the belief that you make money by providing something that has a value to society. The free market suggests that value will find it’s own level, subject to market forces. That sounds very convincing, but it hasn’t turned out that way. The fatal flaw in the capitalist ideal is the concept of “shareholder value” its the one thing that drives, remorselessly, a company to make profit, year on year, to grow and grow and grow. Because growth is what drives share prices, which drives profit potential, which is the only known measure of shareholder value. Of course this is nonsense, a child of three could see that this is a pyramid scheme – the logical endpoint is that there can only be one company and that company will have consumed all the others.

The concept of “Growth” is insiduous and perverse. Perverse because it kills innovation, the very thing that provides real value; insiduous because it seems so very attractive. The lifecycle of most companies goes something like this. Somebody invents something, a service or a thing that has a value and can therefore be sold. They start a small company. Before long they realise that in order to meet demand, they have to borrow money to get over what we will call cashflow difficulties. Basically this is what happens when you have to pay your suppliers quicker than your customers are paying you. There is a cost associated with this borrowing and that cost is usually passed on to the customers. If you can keep all the balls in the air at this point then things may go quite well. There will come a point though when you will be advised that by selling shares in your company, you will raise a huge sum of money which will allow you to get to the second stage. The one that kills innovation.

The second stage is all about balancing the books. You are a public company now and your shareholders effectively call the shots. all of your efforts are now directed at cost saving. You might acquire one of your suppliers because that will cut cost out of your bottom line. Standardisation creeps in. Quality is sacrificed for expedience and you decide that this year, perhaps you won’t have a pay rise for your loyal and hard working staff, because that would take value away from the shareholders. If your product and your sanity survive this trip through the looking glass, you may survive this period and move up to level 3. Increase Profit.

The third stage is all about driving more profit. You have a choice. Having squeezed all the margins on your existing product, you can either invent another one or artificially massage the figures by cutting more cost. Since you have been a good and conscientious employer, your workers will have had pay increases and by now they may be beginning to look expendable. After all, you’ve taken most of the complexity out of the manufacturing process, you are more interested in driving profit than innovation, some of these guys are beginning to look expensive. Only the employment laws wont just let you sack them. So you come up with another wheeze. You make the workforce compete against one another and you award the entire bonus pool to the top performers. What could be more logical, the shareholders will love it! Except for the small fact that you’ve done the equivalent of something many of us have dreamed of doing but never dared – driving along a motorway at 70 mph and suddenly slamming the gearbox into reverse. The effect on the company’s internal culture is the same as the effect upon the gearbox of that car. Components that were smoothly meshed together go into competition and finally fracture, spilling oil and shrapnel all over the motorway. This is usually the end of the company in any recognisable form.

This only makes sense in a culture that values profit above all else, and even then it makes very little sense. You have saved very little money and set the workforce against one another. Lasting success is built upon innovation and cooperation in old style capitalism. In the new style we see that success is built upon bean counting – exploitation and greed. We see the results of this in the news most days now. Take G4S the company that have screwed up the security contract for the Olympics – £58m of public money is being paid to this company as a “management” fee. The army and police drafted in to make up the shortfall for this outfits inability to meet their contractual obligations will be paid from the public purse. THe CEO who is widely expected to stand down after the Olymics is set to receive a £20m severance fee. These are big figures. A large part of their problem has been that the people they have employed to work on the project don’t turn up to work. I wonder why? But here’s a clue. To those people who are guaranteed a bonus of £1 for every hour they complete, the prospect of the blundering permatanned oaf at the top taking home £20m must be beyond offensive.

G4S are but one example. We’ve had News International phone tapping, Barclays rigging the LIBOR and HSBC allegedly laundering billions of dollars of drug money in the news just this week. Its making the government’s position on privatisation look like a death wish. I’ve come across a concept called “people per hour” – its about sourcing creatives from the internet. Sounds like a good idea right? Only it indicates just how commoditised our lives have become. And this is part of the whole capitalist vision. We like the idea that we can source say a graphic designer from the web to do the delivery part of our graphic design job. It makes sense in a cost cutting kind of a way. But think of the graphic designer. How does he/she grow the skills they need to progress. How do they make up the shortfall in their income? What differentiates them from a battery chicken? Whatever happened to career progression?

The time has come to act. We need an alternative and we need it fast. I’m too old to be fighting in the streets and its never solved anything anyway, for my part I have made a simple pledge; if I discover unethical dealings on the part of my mortgage provider, my bank or any of my service providers I will move to an ethical provider before they can blink. Its the least I can do. They wont miss me, but they might miss a thousand of me. Its the least you can do.

The Broadcaster Of The Future

With the entry of Netflix, Amazon and Apple into the content provision business, traditional and even satellite broadcasters can be forgiven for looking somwhat uneasily over their shoulders. These intruders are not to be ignored, they are serious players with serious infrastructure and marketing nous behind them.

The business of broadcasting, be it public service or commercial is relatively straightforward. Commission content, broadcast content, listen to audience, start again. This applies whether the broadcaster is in the business of creating original content or buying in existing content. In terms of revenue streams, advertising, syndication, format rights all follow from a successful program. Budgets we hear are shrinking, this is because advertising revenues are shrinking. Furthermore, the diversity of platforms including download and catch up TV militate against the viewer actually watching live TV. Ever wondered why there is so much sport, so many reality shows, so much fake jeopardy in modern broadcast TV? It’s to keep you watching until the next ad break – “who’s been voted off?”, “Will they bake the cake in time?”, “Who’s winning?”

So is traditional broadcasting a total anachronism? Should they just pack up their valves and transmitters and shuffle off into the distance? Well, no. Let’s examine that basic business model for a second and see if it is still relevant. Content still has to be obtained, so we can tick that box. Strike broadcast and substitute the word “Delivery” – more appropriate considering the number of channels and platforms available these days. Listen to the audience? There’s an idea. The traditional broadcaster’s method of retrieving audience feedback is via focus groups and reviews, surely an anachronism in what should now be a global industry. The focus group method takes weeks to deliver any coherent finding. Weeks in which the real audience may be rising or falling. In this day and age we can provide feedback in the form of statistical analysis to the commissioning process even to the program makers much more quickly.

The new content providers are looking at social software as a means of analysing response. Recommendation engines are key to streaming and download providers like Amazon and Netflix. Experiments have even been carried out in the UK with real time twitter feeds being made available to presenters. This I suspect will be a temporary phase – there are much more interesting uses of Twitter than amplifying sentiment into some kind of infernal feedback loop. Social software is also incredibly noisy in that it encourages people to vent. Furthermore, the more enlightened producers are beginning to realise that social software is a good means of promoting content. All of this noise needs to be filtered if meaningful data is to be extracted, but I can’t imagine a broadcaster answering the question “Would you like to know what people are saying about your show?” with a negative. Can you?

Analytics tools nowadays are more than capable of trawling social software sites and converting that unstructured data into something that can be analysed. In fact a company, Trendrr.TV has been set up in the US to provide precisely this function. This stuff is no longer being talked about behind closed doors in the industry – it’s in the public domain now. And its powerful stuff. Imagine the implications of being able to demonstrate that viewing patterns match a profile that says – “This show is going to be a slow burning hit” – and this is where I think analytics will really make a difference. Commissioners need all the help they can get in times like this – the person who is prepared to hang on in there with a series that appears to be bumping along the bottom of the audience ratings is a person with a private income or a death wish! I’d like to see more risks being taken and I think analytics have a part to play in augmenting the creative business of commissioning content. TV was once a medium that entertained, challenged and educated in more or less equal measure. Is that still the case?

The broadcaster of today could be looking at finessing that feedback mechanism between delivery and commission. Get this right, and the switched on broadcaster will be able to accurately predict audience behaviour and therefore advertising potential, will be able to assess the popularity of characters in the shows, study reaction to plotlines and subtly calibrate content accordingly. Internet time, as has been famously observed is a lot quicker than real time. Broadcast time it seems is a lot slower. There’s the gap that traditional broadcasters must fill if they are to fend off the challenge from Silicon Valley.

SOPA – The slippery slope?

The Stop Online Piracy Act SOPA and its senate companion Protect IP Act PIPA are causing all sorts of bother on the internet today with sites such as Wikipaedia closing down in protest.

Superficially, this is about Silicon Valley disrupting the media industry. We’ve seen the effect of downloads on the music industry and the Film and Television industries don’t want any repeat of that scenario thank you very much!

The case of the start up band who have to pay for their rehearsal space, pay to print up CDs and Publicity material, hoping to make at least some money back through sales, only to have their hopes dashed by cynical downloaders purloining their content for free is also well heard. I am a photographer and have found my photographs on Google, adorning sites I’ve never heard of. A magazine recently offered me the princely sum of  £2 for one picture – an improvement on last year when two magazines with high street distribution deals printed photographs of mine for no fee! At first glance, this embattled artist is tempted to agree that SOPA is not a bad thing.

But of course embattled artists are not the only losers, and if any government is passing legislation solely to protect the rights of struggling artists, frankly I’ll eat my hat. There are other players with much more to lose, and this is why there is such a fuss about SOPA.

This debate is about control. Control over the internet. Or to put it crudely, delivery of the internet into the hands of the vested interests providing content through established channels like print, film and CD.

Link sharing sites such as Reddit, Twitter,  StumbleUpon, Digg etc will under the proposed acts be liable for prosecution if they are found to be distributing links to unoriginal material. In effect, this makes them vulnerable to frivolous litigation like never before. Big companies have deep pockets and will have no qualms about bankrupting the pretenders to their throne by forcing lawsuits to be defended.

The sponsorship of government advising think tanks by corporate interests has also been well documented as has the use of lobbyists by various industries to influence government thinking. The extent to which News International influenced successive elections in the UK can only be guessed at, but it is well documented that Rebekah Wade was a regular guest at the homes and offices of successive prime ministers. No coincidence when the Murdoch owned Sun, News of the World and Times all backed the same horse.

The appointment of Murdoch fan Jeremy Hunt to the Ministry of Culture and the subsequent proposal to allow Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB to be waved through could be interpreted as payback for the press support for the Tories before the election.  It was only stopped by furious protests from the public and one newspaper’s, The Guardian, tireless quest to expose the illegal activities taking place in the News of the World under the auspices of …Rebekah Wade. Nobody should remain in any doubt that corporate interests influence and in some cases dictate government policy.

SOPA and its little brother PIPA are merely the instruments by which the corporate interests that control the old media, hope to wrest control of the new media away from Silicon Valley. It should be resisted at all costs, not because we prefer anarchy, but because democracy is founded on freedom of choice and if there is no freedom of information then there is no freedom of choice. I don’t mind sacrificing a few photographs to uphold that principle.

originally published at Electrical Image 18.1.12

Electrical Image 2

I’ve had a great time this week building a web site for my photographic adventures – Electrical Image. This was precipitated by 500px falling out with their fulfilment guys, Fotomoto. I figure that if anyone is going to buy a picture through the site, it will be between now and Christmas. I still love the 500px site and will keep adding to it periodically, but for reasons that I write about on the new blog, I think Electrical Image is the way to go. One thing I learned – web building technology has realy moved on apace since I used to to that for a living.

The new site is a self hosted WordPress site using a theme developed by Photocrati, especially for photographers. The site was up and running in a couple of hours, literally, so full marks to all parties. The population of the site will take a little longer, but I’m pleased with the look of it so far and will spend some time tweaking it and adding content over the next couple of weeks.

Primarily, the intent of the new site is to provide a gallery for my photographs, or at least the ones I think are any good! I’ll also be blogging over there (Electrical Image) about a broad range of things that are of interest to photographers, from Kit to promotion, photowalks, events and techniques (assuming I discover any!).

RiP

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

- Steve Jobs

I don’t know why I feel slightly shaken up by this news, but I do. Perhaps in recognition of the fact I’m only a year younger than Steve Jobs and my achievements are but specks in comparison. Perhaps its the realisation that death cheats us all in the end. It only seems like a couple of weeks ago that Steve Jobs stood down as chief executive of Apple and although it was difficult to see him as a man who would enjoy retirement, if anyone deserved some quality time with his family it was surely him.

Whatever you think about the products, Apple is a company that changed the world, and without the focus, determination and vision of Steve Jobs, both Apple and the world would have been poorer places.

image by Jonathan Mak

Sexy Software & the Wordle of Shame

Now I’m pretty tolerant of business language on the whole. Certain americanisms ending in “ize” (or even “isms”!) are mildly irritating, but they get the job done. This week however I came across a phrase that sets a new low. The use of “Sexed Up” in a business context is surely a step too far. I don’t want to even think of the bizarre practices that such a state would entail. In the context of software it’s just plain ridiculous. And please, don’t get me started on the subject of “funky”. Software is not “funky” or “sexy”. These are qualities associated with the hips. James Brown, I’m pretty sure, never alluded to software in his sessions with the JB’s. “Get up offa that thing” was an exhortation that never included the possibility of that “thing” being a computer.

Often the use of what we might euphemistically describe as business “language” seeks to load a fairly obvious set of actions with a pseudo intellectual gravitas. I was unfortunate the other day to endure an hour long call which was contaminated by one individual articulating a desire to be “the person who facilitates the possibility of a dialogue” I’m sorry, but do people actually get paid for this sort of thing? Was the facilitation funky? or just sexed up?

We are in danger of being swamped by this sort of nonsense, If we in the IT industry continue to adopt this trend of seeking to cloak every message in verbiage, we will soon lose sight of the point of the missives we send and receive daily. Worse than that, we will soon stop paying attention. Most of the people I’ve met in the industry have been intelligent, well educated and thoughtful. I might not agree with all of them about everything, but my point is that more than most communities, IT folk are intelligent enough to realise when they are being patronised. The invasion of our technical language is to be resisted. Surely computers should simply “do what it says on the tin”.

Electrical Image

OK this is shameless self publicity, but what the hell, its my blog! Finally, I’ve got around to putting a portfolio of my photography up on the web. It can be found at Electrical Image, hosted by the very wonderful 500px.

Should anyone become so enthralled as to wish to purchase any of my work, on postcard, print or some such, then the very best images are all for sale in a variety of formats at the online store.

Buy with no inhibitions – it will make me a very happy man!!

Panic in the Streets of Whitehall

I’ve put off writing this post in the aftermath of the rioting, partly because I’m keenly aware that ranting about politics is not what this blog was originally set up to do, partly because I suspected in my cynical and road weary fashion that we’d get a bunch of soundbytes from Prime Minister Cameron asserting qualities such as ‘leadership’, blaming riots on the previous administration, followed by well, no coherent action. I wanted to see, if I was right.

Well frankly, in my wildest and most paranoid dreams I could not have predicted what a complete hash Cameron would make of it.

Firstly we got the soundbytes, exactly as expected. There was a lot of confrontational language on display. Words such as “fightback”, phrases like “zero tolerance” – not the words I would have chosen when dealing with a situation as potentially combustible as this, but exactly the sort of old fashioned Tory tripe I had expected to hear from Cameron.

And it got worse. Cameron enthusiastically blamed the Labour Party, the Police, the absent fathers – everyone and everything except the cuts, the joblessness and the despair his policies have visited upon the poorer sections of society. He proposed that not just the criminals, but their entire families be evicted from social housing. A suggestion immediately acted upon by Westminster council. A suggestion that flies in the face of fairness, human rights and common sense. And possibly the law.

Next, after a consultative process that must have lasted oh, at least five minutes, Cameron proposed to shut down Twitter, Blackberry messaging and damn it, if necessary the entire internet to stop these rioters communicating. I expect the telephone service and the royal mail to swiftly follow. Apart from the implausibility of the coalition actually doing this, isn’t this exactly what he so vociferously condemned the Egyptian government for attempting six months ago?

And then it got hilariously, stupidly, downright incompetently even worse. Without consultation with the police forces, Cameron appointed one Bill Bratton, ex chief of police for LA, a district so ridden with gang violence that it makes Tottenham look like Camberwick Green, to advise the government on how to deal with the societal issues that caused the riots. As offensive as this idea must have seemed to our own police forces, it was about to get even worse.

Bill Bratton is chairman of the private detective agency Kroll. (You can see where this is heading, right?) In June this year, Kroll were accused very publicly and in formal court papers by Dr Martin Coward, a city investment manager, of illegally planting covert surveillance equipment in his house and car. Evidence submitted to the court included the surveillance equipment and hilariously, a video of the goon squad going about their business. But of course as we well know, Cameron is a man who believes in second chances, so obviously he got his people to carry out background checks? Well, with crushing inevitability, it seems no background checks were carried out. So for the sake of a soundbyte, Cameron has done exactly the same thing he did with Andy Coulson. Arrogant? Ignorant? Incompetent? all of these?

There is just one good thing about this government. It is impossible to countenance the electorate ever again falling for a politician who combines poor leadership, empty promises and an empty headed view of people based solely on class, connections and money? Well, isn’t it?

One of Those Days in England

It’s hard after three days of the worst and most pointless rioting the UK has ever suffered, to put words together that don’t sound like cliches. I guess in part its because I used to live in London, only a few hundred yards away from where the violence erupted in Enfield and I know people who still live in London, in Tottenham and Wood Green where the worst of the violence was experienced. I feel guilty that I was powerless to help and ashamed that they had to suffer this awful ordeal. It must have been terrifying. I am only glad that my friends have come through unscathed.

Let’s not fool ourselves, these riots were not, unlike the student riots earlier this year, motivated by politics. They were not race riots, They were not the riots of protest in any sense whatsoever. This was society turning on itself. Looters robbing local stores, putting local people out of business. Wrecking lives, destroying confidence, ushering in a lawlessness and a new age of stupidity, selfishness, greed and cowardice. Let David Cameron talk about the “Big Society”.

The violence we have seen was, and continues to be perpetrated by a section of society that the government has made pay, in terms of jobs, cuts to services, cuts to immigration, for the disaster that was visited upon the west by the institutionalised greed of the financial sector. We have seen corporate greed in the shape of the News of the World obfuscate, avoid and misdirect a government enquiry, knowing that they would not be recalled. It sends a message. James Murdoch, immaculately groomed, fluent in corporatese, giving evidence that so far two of the sacked NoTW employees have denounced as ‘mistaken’ sends an unmistakeable message. And that message, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.

We read about the mysterious workings of the Chipping Norton set that apparently control the government, creeping in by the back door to Downing Street and know that their lifestyles, of shopping in Venice, Hunting, Polo and Governing small European countries, is not for us. The message again, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.

We have suffered in Cameron and Osborne, leaders so utterly lacking in empathy that Cameron considers it more important to massage his ego by having his photograph taken, tipping an Italian waitress this weekend instead of cancelling his holiday and flying back to London to witness first hand the destruction his “Big Society” has visited upon the country he aspires to govern.

We have also seen the incredible amplification that social media can achieve. Sadly, initially by facilitating the carnage, but latterly by providing a channel to organise the clean up Hackney campaign.

I’m through writing about this. Others will do it much better and more eloquently. I’m ashamed to be english today and that I think is a feeling a lot of english people share.

Dog Eat Dog

One of the things that is driving me nuts is the escalating price of wi-fi. It’s £6 an hour in the Marriott or £15 for 24 hours. Why?

I travel a fair amount on business and this is a trend across all of the hotels I stay in – Holiday Inn & Marriott most recently. It doesn’t make sense except from a perspective that says – “the price is set at the most the market will stand”. Now that’s a long way from setting the price at “the value of the offering”. Especially since the connection is usually slower than 3G.

The fact is, I have now enabled my iPhone to act as a personal wi-fi network at a cost of £5 a month. So I, or rather my employer, don’t have to pay these ridiculous charges. Even that does no credit to Orange – it costs them nothing to support the service. It is built into the handset, so on what planet is it reasonable to apply a charge for me to use my phone’s capabilities in the way that I want? They already charge me for data to the phone.

The answer is they do it because they can. And HSBC, declaring half year profits of £7 billion last year simultaneously announce the slashing of 25,000 jobs. Because they can. That’s the world we have created, the world we have voted for.

I can’t help thinking we are being governed by idiots, presiding over the biggest and probably last cash grab most of us will live to see. The writing on the wall says – Recession – it says it in large luminous letters. House prices are decreasing, the market is flatlining. A sensible business might actually look at providing value for money. But not the Marriott, not Holiday Inn. Not BAA in charging for wi-fi in the airport or Dixons for charging ludicrous prices in duty-free. It’s a dog eat dog world these days and the last person standing will please, turn out the lights.