IT is not magic pixie dust

Go Go Gadget Guido

Election Skullduggery, IT is not magic pixie dust, Manufacturing consent, New Labour
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I’m loving this whole Guido/leaked emails/No10 cabal thing, but for those who haven’t been following the saga of Dolly Draper and his fateful entanglement with the blogosphere it may all be a bit confusing. Who is Damien McBride, and more to the point, why is such a jumped-up poisonous little toad of a bitchy party functionary being paid from the public purse?

The meat of the emails – Frances Osborne’s nuts, George O. took drugs, Cameron had the clap and so on, all of it patently untrue – can be found at the Sunday Times too, as can background on the No. 10 relationships and the personalities of those involved. Their conclusion? Gordo’s up to his moral compass in it.

I think that the Observer has picked up best on the meta-implications of this, the first real blog-driven UK political sleaze scandal:

Smears are, of course, a staple of politics not confined to any one party, but the charge against McBride and Draper is not just one of dirty tricks but of hamfisted meddling in a new media world they did not properly understand.

The vendetta between senior Brownites and Guido Fawkes, the Westminster blogger who obtained the emails, dates back to stories Fawkes – whose real name is Paul Staines – posted about the Smith Institute and its relationship to Ed Balls, also a close friend of McBride.

Shortly afterwards journalists began being offered snippets designed to undermine Staines, including news of his drink-driving conviction. Coincidence? Staines, say friends, does not think so. His blog continued targeting senior Labour figures, and its waspish attacks got under Labour’s skin. When Draper launched LabourList, it was not long before they crossed swords – with Staines questioning Draper’s qualifications as a therapist and Draper threatened to sue.

Ah yes, LabourList. I believe ‘pisspoor”s the word. A Daily Kos wannabe without a Kos, without Kos’ commenters, or Kos’ content, run by a gang of bitchy, provincial stalinist hairdressers.

Whatever his qualifications may or not be Draper didn’t fail Hypnotism 101; to have convinced anyone that a shambling, unshaven, disaster of a walking midlife crisis was still young and hip and in tune enough with the Obama generation to start a blog community from scratch – 5 years too late – boggles the mind.

I can imagine Dolly’s spiel to Mandelson: “Yeah, sure, give me a couple of hundred grand and blogosphere will be in your power, trust me I’m a clinical psychologist now wahaha” and Mandy falling for it because he doesn’t read blogs or email and that whole interwebs thingy passed him by, he has a man to do it for him.

Labour’s public engagement with social media’s been a disaster wrapped in an embarassment, with an extra layer of mortification. Whatever they’ve tried they’ve fucked up, either because of general town-hall level stupidity or their desire to use technology purely as a channel for own personal vindictiveness and political rigidity.

There’s a whole building full of strutting, puffy flushed vain little Labour men at No 10, just like McBride, half of whom who think, like Gordon Brown, that social media means social control media. The other half see Facebook as a brilliant way to get back at people they’ve always hated; they don’t see blogging as the political movement in itself that it undoubtedly is but as a means to an end, viz, the personal and political character assassination of your opponents.

But their featherbedding and disengagement with actual life as lived by other people has blinded them to the political power that one person with a pc and intenet access can wield these days.

Despite their efforts to lock down their own residents and prohibit them from ever expressing political dissent, by recording all their emails, phone calls and internet use – and mine, if I ever want to speak to my sons again – bloggers continue to expose Labour for what they are.

It doesn’t matter they can no more physically record everything than they can drain the ocean, it’s public perception that matters – they’re watching you.

It may well one day be only those of us based elsewhere, like Guido Fawkes, who are actually able to blog about political wrongdoing, such is the thicket of New Labour new laws and restrictions being woven around citizen access to bandwidth and the right to free expression.

I disagree vehemently with Guido Fawkes on many many things, both personal and political, but what I do admire him for is for sticking to his guns, cultivating his sources and consistently coming up with the goods. Again and again he’s shown that Labour are little people with little morals, little substance, little brains and little credibility. I don’t care if he’s Pol Pot.

UPDATE I
Haha, Draper just got fired live on tv.

Why MySpace matters to teens

IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism
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Via a comment on a Atrios post on yet anothee example of Zero Tolerance stupidity, comes this interesting 2006 danah boyd article on why (American) teenagers flock en masse to MySpace:

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends’ homes when their parents are present.

Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

Of course, digital publics are fundamentally different than physical ones. First, they introduce a much broader group of peers. While radio and mass media did this decades ago, MySpace allows youth to interact with this broader peer group rather than simply being fed information about them from the media. This is highly beneficial for marginalized youth, but its effect on mainstream youth is unknown.

The bigger challenge is that, online, youth publics mix with adult publics. While youth are influenced by the media’s version of 20somethings, they rarely have an opportunity to engage with them directly. Just as teens are hanging out on MySpace, scenesters, porn divas and creature of the night are using MySpace to gather and socialize in the way that 20somethings do. They see the space as theirs and are not imagining that their acts are consumed by teens; they are certainly not targeted at youth. Of course, there _are_ adults who want to approach teens and MySpace allows them to access youth communities without being visible, much to the chagrin of parents. Likewise, there are teens who seek the attentions of adults, for both positive and problematic reasons.

Don’t ….

Activism, creative direct action, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, New Labour, UK politics, War on Terror
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It could be just a ploy to entrap UK civil liberties activists into committing a crime.

A Facebook Group a fan site, a website and an email being circulated suggest that recipients do just this by overwhelming the Home Office – since they plan to read all our mail and take dominion over everything we see and do online – with an influx of cc’d email on June 15th.

The general gist is ‘see how they like it up ’em in practice’:

“No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls”: Ken McDonald, former head of the CPS.

The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a
“superdatabase” that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet
use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not
to mention a major risk to our private data – but it won’t make us any
safer. The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to
collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn
up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the
morass of spam emails and private chat.

Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/31/privacy-civil-liberties

So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office – “you want
to see our emails? Ok then, here they are then!”.

The date has been set for June 15th. However for legal reasons, please don’t go ahead with the protest of your own accord. Please enter your details below and we will keep you up-to-date from time to time – and you’ll get confirmation closer to the time that the protest is going ahead. Alternatively, you can become a fan at our Facebook page.

I can see a number of problems with this. To begin with something blindingly obvious – why on earth would anyone want to willingly subscribe to any potential ’round up the usual suspects’ list of political dissidents, whatever their politics? Perhaps the author(s) haven’t quite thought their plan through.

Or maybe they have. Maybe this is a uk.gov fishing expedition.”Please enter your details below”, “Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!”, indeed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Which brings up another problem, forwarding incoming email ‘regardless of importance and content:

We do this by simply cc’ing or bcc’ing every email we send (and if you like, forwarding every email you receive), regardless of importance or
content, to public.enquiries at homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how
difficult it will be to get on with their actual work – keeping our
country safe – when they’re trying to monitor every harmless private
thing we say and do.

***Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!***<

I really don’t think so.

It’s outrageous even to suggest forwarding received emails as a form of political protest. In doing so you’d be subscribing the identities of all those people who’ve emailed you to the same potential database of political dissenters as you, but by proxy. Nice.

Also politically yet not quite so technologically aware readers might take this to mean that they should send the entire contents of their in and outboxes, since forever – and virtually labelled ‘seditionist’ too – to Jackboot Jacqui on the 15th June. It does seem a foolhardy course of action to suggest, as does the idea to that we forward all the emails we send and receive only on the 15th of June, which is what I think was actually meant.

Of course what the (possibly somewhat naive) authors may have envisioned is just that protestors might perhaps register a disposable email account, use it at a few of the more interesting sites, sit back, watch the reconstituted pork product that pours into the inbox get cc’d to Jacqui. Voila, enough spam to supply police canteens for a century. What larks.

But whatever the authors actually meant, there’s no getting round the fact that what they’re suggesting their fellow citizens do by way of an act of supposed civil disobedience is to overwhelm the Home Office and other UK.gov network resources with traffic – otherwise known as a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) the organisation of or participation in which carries a hefty 10 year prison sentence under UK law.

Why would any activist, however naive and well-meaning, incite that others (albeit unknowingly) participate in conspiracy to commit a crime?

It all smells of entrapment to me.

Who is this ‘Martin’? Who registered the website? Where did this email originate? So far it’s not taking off that well there’s little I can find mentioned about it except on a libertarian/far-rightwing blog (which refers approvingly to the BNP), which inclines me just to say sod it, let them get themselves banged up and good riddance.

But I would hate for anyone who’s not an incipient nazi, who’s just concerned about civil liberties but who feels powerless to be heard, to take this as a legitimate call to action. I don’t trust it a bit.

Please don’t cc your email to Jacqui Smith on June 15th.