IT is not magic pixie dust

So it turns out UK government revolves around Excel sheets

IT is not magic pixie dust, UK politics
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Damian McBride explains how the Budget process works:

Each viable idea – called a ‘Starter’ – is given a snappy 4-5 word description – a useful discipline to check whether it can be explained in one sentence – and a lead official and lead minister is assigned to it.

It’s also given a number, so if Chapter 6 of the Budget is on the environment, each relevant idea is numbered Starter 601, 602, etc. With fuel duties, etc., where there are lots of different options, they are listed out as 601a, 601b, etc.

All the starters – about 150-200 in total – are placed in an Excel file called the Budget Scorecard. Each line contains the name and number of the starter, and the amount in revenue that it will raise or cost in each of the next 5 years, before and after inflation.

Sheet 1 of the Scorecard contains the Starters which are almost certain to proceed, Sheet 2 very likelies, Sheet 3 probables, Sheet 4 not likelies, and so on. Starters are gradually promoted to Sheet 1 over a 3-4 month process, and at the bottom of Sheet 1 – constantly evolving – is the Budget arithmetic, which says how much the entire package costs or raises.

No Starter ever disappears from the Scorecard. Even if it is firmly rejected early in the process, it still lurks on a distant Sheet waiting to be recalled in case the distributional analysis of Sheet 1 calls for a measure targeted at a particular income group or segment of society.

On Budget Day, Sheet 1 is literally copied and pasted as a table into the chapter of the Red Book entitled ‘The Budget Decisions’, which is what politicians and journalists generally turn to first to see what the Chancellor’s actually announced after he’s announced it.

Singularity may rid us of death, but it won’t abolish backscratching

IT is not magic pixie dust, technology
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Evgeny Morozov puts the boot in the well deserving TED talks industry:

The “technological” turn in Khanna’s “thought” is hardly surprising. As he and others have discovered by now, one can continue fooling the public with slick ahistorical jeremiads on geopolitics by serving them with the coarse but tasty sauce that is the Cyber-Whig theory of history. The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.

For the Win

Activism, Fans are slans!, IT is not magic pixie dust
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Over on the Feminist SF blog, labour organisor Ariel Wetzel reviews Cory Doctorow’s For the Win:

Doctorow imagines how workers in a global economy might resist contemporary manifestations of divide and conquer. Many of the characters in For the Win, who have worked in sweatshops and stood up against unjust working conditions both as individuals or collectively, have seen how bosses and owners utilize this tactic in contemporary transnational business models: a worker resist as an individual, and she is fired and replaced by someone desperate for a job. Workers resist collectively, and their factory is shut down and moved to a country with even worse labor laws. The Webblies, our clever heroes, adapt the Wobbly philosophy for “an injury to one is an injury to all” and organize across borders through the virtual worlds in which they work.

In short, Doctorow captures some of the key philosophies of the Wobblies through his fictional Webblies revival: solidarity across race, and gender. This tactic is an especially smart response to the challenges organizers face in the 2010s–and I’m going to recommend this book to activist friends who know little of virtual worlds because their is fertile ground here for organizing. I also hope that this novel will inspire young people, gamers and virtual workers, to form their own Webbly locals in real life; since the nineteenth century utopian novel Looking Backward science fiction has a tradition of informing real world practices, and For the Win is an awesome candidate to continue this tradition.

It’s been interesting to see Cory Doctorow’s slow radicalisation over the past decade or so. His earliest novels sounded like bog standard late nineties techno optimism, libertarianism lite to me, but with a bit more social awareness than usual. But look away for a decade and he was writing young adult novels like Little Brother and now this, a proper socialist young adult science fiction novel. Doctorow is not the first to fictionally revive the Wobblies however; Ken MacLeod had done so as well in one of his Fall Revolution novels if I remember correctly, as the International Internet Workers of the World.

Lenny’s look at what somebody I unfortunately can’t remember called the grownup version of For the Win, Adam Roberts New Model Army might also be of interest.

What the Twitter Joke Trial means for all of us

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust
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Jack of Kent on why the Twitter Joke Trial matters:

The Paul Chambers case – known as the “Twitter Joke Trial” – has three points of significance:

– how relentless administrative and judicial stupidity can end in a conviction;

– how the CPS are wrongly using criminal law in respect of electronic communications; and

– how a criminal record can change a person’s life for the worse.

Let us hope Doncaster Crown Court can reverse this injustice on Friday and allow Paul to rebuild his life.

He explains succinctly why and how these points matter for Paul Chambers, the poor guy whose life was ruined through this case, but it has of course broader considerations too, especially the first point. Chambers was originally convicted through a long chain of people and institutions unable or unwilling to apply common sense about what was essentially the kind of stupid joke you’d make to your mates or cow-orkers, but on twitter. You could’ve had the same sort of case thirty-forty years ago as well, if some passing police officer had taken offense to a similar joke by some local wit. But whereas then you had to have had spectacularly bad luck to say something stupid in front of a copper himself dumb enough to take an obvious joke seriously, if you do the same on the internet, your bad joke can land you in hot water long after you’ve made and forgotten it.

Twitter is meant for ephemeral conversation, but they don’t disappear when you stop talking. Once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, barring acts of god or Google. Which means that many more people can read and misinterpret your comments than just your mates and it only takes one blockhead to ruin your day. What’s more, because it’s so easy to gather data online, you have whole classes of professional blockheads, in government as well as working for private companies looking for “threats” and it’s not in their interest or power to treat anything like a joke. As with airport police, these people have no sense of humour and are obliged to treat any bomb joke like a real threat, no matter how stupid.

This is not to blame Paul Chambers for his misfortune, rather the fault lies with institutions like the police, like the Crown Prosecution Service and like the Robin Hood Airport security department for not using common sense or rather having institutionalised processes in which the right thing to do is to not think for yourself but follow procedures. That’s always been a bad thing, but it’s made worse when such a dumb organisation is fed the huge amounts of data gathered on us routinely every day and starts to datamine. No government and damn few private companies truly understand information technology and the simple fact that it’s not how much but what kind and which quality of data you gather and how you use it that’s important. So you get things like airport security officers googling for their airport to detect threats and then using inflexible, dumb procedures to process these “threats” because the only thing their organisations understands is “more data good”, “common sense bad”.

That’s the spectre we’re all living with, of huge unaccountable organisations fucking over our lives not out of malice, but out of wilful stupidity because of something we said online.

Your Happening World (17)

Crisis? What Crisis?, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, UK politics
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What’s going on today.