Brexit - time for a coalition of the sane

The markets are collapsing, our allies are discussing their future without us in the EU, and the UK political scene is totally discredited.

There is no end in sight to this. Party politics has spectacularly failed. Not only do the Leave campaigners now admit that they lied and have no plan, but say that this was all OK - and, as we can see every hour, they continue to have nothing further to add than to deny reality.

The democratic mandate of the referendum is questionable, constitutionally and practically. It was obtained by deceit.

It is inconceivable that Boris Johnson, Michael Gove et al have any moral authority, left, and will be unable to advance the UK's interests at this time of mayhem. Labout has no cohesion whatsoever.

Power vacuums during times of crisis are profoundly dangerous.

Two political groups have some authority left - the Lib Dems, who have little influence, and the SNP, with no MPs south of the border. But their Scottish MPs are full UK MPs, and it is the full UK which faces the crisis.

The House of Commons must assert its sovereignty.

The SNP must build a coalition of MPs from all parties who are prepared to save the nation. This coalition must say that there will be no assertion of Article 50 until a meaningful post-Brexit economic and political plan, in conjunction with the EU,  has been set out - and that there is a time limit on this, after which, should such a plan not be forthcoming, the referendum result will be set aside. There will have to be a general election either way at this point, giving the political hierarchies time to rebuild themselves in a less febrile environment and decide what their policies will be before presenting the nation with, one hopes, options showing us the respect as citizens we must demand. from them.

During this period, the SNP must commit to acting for the UK as a whole and not push for an early independence referendum. (I am in favour of Scottish independence but, unless it is absolutely unavoidable, it should happen in calmer times than these.)

This will be a very hard path to follow, but has the benefit of being a plan with definite outcomes and definite timescales. If there is any substantial alternative other than to wait and see how far the ship will sink before we have to swim for it - I am unaware what that might be.

A coalition of the sane is the only way forward.

Fixing The Algorithm

In the wake of \the Tweetstorm caused by Twitter's quasi-introduction of its algorithmic timeline, - with entirely foreseeable consequences -  I took a quick spin around the various services at Goodwins Central which already enhance my life through automated decisions made on my data. There are lots of them: Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and more Google AIs than you can shake a broomstick at.

They are all terrible. Terrible in different ways, to be sure: the shopping stuff assumes because I've searched for or bought something, I must want more like it' Google Now assumes I work a 9-5 and commute between home and office, and am fixated by stock prices and the news headlines. Facebook... ah, who knows what Facebook thinks. But I miss most of the things my pals say unless I tell it to show me most recent, a setting I can't make stick. I want to know the news that isn't making the news yet. And when I've searched for something, I either don't buy it or I do - either way, I've moved on with my life.

But the algorithms have nothing else to go on, so they go on going on, like toddlers who think because something was good to say or do just now, it'll be better and better the more they repeat it.

The law wisely if tiresomely forbids infanticide. Algorithms lack this protection and so, merely tiresomely, live in clouds beyond our reach. Because they know and I know and you know what we'd do to them if we could reach in there.


You know how it is. You have to use the same stuff I do. None of us likes it. These services have taken on the responsibility of running our lives, and they have become essential. They are proud to do this and be this; their marketing crows about it to excess.  They have become our representatives in cyberspace, providing - and crucially regulating - access and actions.

And they are all run on an an authoritarian dictatorship model. You cannot tell them what to do; they might choose to do something you like or they may not, but you cannot do that which they deny, and you must do that which they compel.

It's all extremely corporate, and this is how companies work of course, internally and externally. You don't get a vote on corporate strategy; whether you work for a place or if you use its services. The boss knows best. If they don't, then there are various forms of codified coups available, but you'll never see a CEO leave because customers or employees have voted them out.

The only people who exert control on companies from outside are the shareholders, the VCs. And they want to see numbers, they want ROI, they want blood and growth, quarter by quarter. It doesn't matter how. Twitter is no good unless it is becoming Facebook - the idea that it could be perfectly fine just being Twitter, with numbers naturally smaller than Facebook and a service set circumscribed to doing one thing well, is inadmissible. Facebook is huge. It has algorithms. Therefore...

It doesn't matter that Twitter and Facebook are actually doing very different jobs; in the eyes of Wall Street they are both 'social media' and only one can win at it. (The real media is just as bad: half the time I go on telly or the radio, it's to talk about Apple v Google in one form or another. But Google's an advertising company and Apple is a manufacturer, I say: nope, they're both 'tech'. The fact that in a sane world they'd be as symbiotic as Ford and Ogilvy is not on the radar.)

You see how it works. It is no bloody good for anyone, of course, but authoritarian dictatorships rarely survive because they're good for people, they survive through instinctive and relentless control.

And right now, that control is being expressed by brain-dead algorithms that get in the way of the very things the companies ostensibly want to provide for us; on the grounds they'll drive 'engagement' and 'exposure' and advertising. And they're doing it in the most personal, ways, tampering with how we communicate, how we interact, how we learn from and educate our friends. I don't really care that Amazon assumes because I've bought some audio patch leads and read about Tarantino breaking a priceless antique guitar I must want to buy a new guitar myself; it's a waste of its time and my bandwidth, but it doesn't stop me searching for socks. If Twitter doesn't show me the things I want to see, which are surprising things or the things my friends have been surprised by, then it does matter. Algorithms don't like surprises.

We have no say in this. You can't argue with an algorithm. You can, however, tell it what to do.

What we need is control, something that scales, something a billion of us can do, whether we[re technical or not, whether we use phones or PCs or whatever. We need a good old fashioned control panel where we can say - do not mix this data with that.  Do not prioritise this sort of data event over that. Do let me know if something from here happens.

All this has to be is a file that sits on the Internet somewhere safe and which is accessible to anything, with permission. It has to be in a standard format, and the only thing in the world that can change it has to be you, and it has to tell you who looks at it and when, but anything that proposes to use or filter your personal data can only do so if it reads that file first and agrees to act on it. It's a bit like robots.txt, but for people - it's terms and conditions, but for them when they want to use us.

Sounds only fair to me.

This presupposes we have a language that can describe personal data, and what algorithms do with it, in ways that people can understand and use. That doesn't really exist yet, but by Toutatis it should. Deciding how we want to control our personal data and the algorithms that use it is a very necessary step to take, for without it we lack the basic tools to express our anger and frustration - and desires and joy - to the companies that think they know these things better than we do.

It will also provide a vocabulary for regulators and lawmakers, should they ever decide to use them.

That done, the tools to effect our retaking of control will be trivially cheap and easy to implement, and their use by companies made effectively compulsory.

It'll be introducing a small level of democracy into the dictatorships. \They'll find it shocking, annoying and a terrible intrusion into their affairs, and I can live with that, but who knows - actually doing what customers want may yet turn out OK after all.

(It becomes even more fun if you apply such ideas to actual politics and real governments, turning the whole electoral concept on its head, but that's for another time...)

A question of protocol and crime

The online world is constantly throwing up new challenges. Here's my latest.

Somewhere in France, a young man - I assume- has just signed up to a Francophone Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site. Yes, such places continue to exist. He has chosen 'Rupert Giles' as his identity, and - again, I assume - also created a Gmail account for his alter ego. My final assumption is that this email address is very similar to my own, as this best explains the sudden flood of notification emails from the site that have appeared, and continue to appear, in my inbox.

(For those who don't know, 'Buffy' was a popular TV entertainment at the end of the last century concerning the adventures of a young woman in an American school who finds herself caught up in a paranormal battle between good and evil. Rupert Giles was a teacher at that school who was her mentor and guide in matters magical; his character was of an upper-middle class Englishman of some sagacity - or at least, the American vision of same. Having ;no interest in the affairs of schoolgirls and/or vampires, I paid little attention to the show at the time, although certain of my peers were entranced.)

Hence my problem. I do not want my inbox filled with writing about the fascinations of people I don't know, let alone in a language I have to work to read, about a show I found jejune twenty years ago. I want these to stopl I believe this is a reasonable desire.

But. I do not know my electronic namesake's real name, let alone his real email, to ask him to stop.

Here are my options.

1. Ignore it all, and wait for it to die out.
2. Set up a filter and get Google to do the ignoring for me
3. Get my own account on the forum and attempt to make contact that way

1 and 2 are the obvious, sensible options. But these things go on for a long time, and I presume m'sieur Giles would rather not have his activities logged with a random stranger. Often, intense personal relationships spring up in public forums like this one, and he has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

(Last month, another Rupert G_______ , of Florida, gave my email address instead of his to Domino's Pizza, and for a couple of weeks I got all his delivery notifications. I learned where he lived, his girlfriend's name, something of his working life patterns, his favourite toppings and more besides: enough, in fact, to contact him at his office and get him to rectify matters. In the past, I have been electronically mistaken for Rupert Grint by Malaysian Harry Potter fangirls, and received the most astounding communications which I had to delete immediately for fear of falling foul of Operation Yewtree. These are deep and dangerous waters.)

3 is also sensible, but my French is execrable and Google Translate is not that good for interactive sites. Could I present a credible, or even comprehensible, case for my concerns?

There is a fourth option, or rather a range of options. The forum's security is poor - I have already received in plain text the user ID and password for the account. I could go in and change the notification email setting.

Or I could pose as some demonic possessor from the dark worlds depicted in the show, and mess with my counterpart's head.

I'm not much taken with that last one, to be honest. It's fun to contemplate, and from my doppelgänger's profile he's a rather self-important and supercilious young man (with terrible taste in music, given the evidence in his password) of the sort it is truly delightful to tease, but it would be - as they say - a dick move. The Internet has enough cruel trolling, and I have no wish to add to that sad calculus.

So, I'm most tempted by the email reset. He's not getting his notifications anyway, and assuming he notices this at some point he'll be able to fix the problem easily enough.

It;'s a shame that move would be illegal. You can't use other people's credentials to access their accounts, even if you acquired them blamelessly.I may even be breaking the law by reading the messages his chosen form sends me.

I don't want to break the law; I do want my heavy-metal-lite Buffy anglophile fanboy to enjoy his online choices without reference to me. This is a problem that's happened before and will happen again, I'm sure to many other people.

What to do?