This famous neutrality and quality-led focus has made the BBC into an international resource. It is the largest broadcast news gathering organisation on the planet, and one of the most popular sources for current information worldwide.  It’s website is the 46th most popular in existence. Programs such as Dr. Who, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Planet Earth have swept the globe. The BBC World Service is widely considered to be the most important radio programme there is.

The BBC, then, is truly unbiased, informative, high-quality, and hugely popular around the world. So it’s no surprise that corporate broadcasters have always hated it. In the modern climate of politicians shamelessly grovelling at the feed of rich vested interests, the BBC has come under attack like never before.

In particular, Rupert and Kevin Murdoch’s News International, the vast media corporation behind Fox News (amonst many, many others) is particularly furious that the BBC exists. Because people can turn to it for good, unbiased news and programming, it cuts into the profits that father and son Murdoch can rake out of all of us. The BBC cannot interfere in politics, but no such restriction binds News International, and the thought of hostile Murdoch newspapers and TV broadcasts has British politicians panicking.

The price for News International’s smiling endorsement is the crippling — or better yet, destruction — of the BBC.

Planet Earth. Doctor Who. Monty Python. BBC News. All blown away, in favour of Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly. To say that this would be a tragic victory of greed over public interest is a gross understatement.

The battle has already started. Today, cuts were proposed that would slash the BBC’s web presence by 50%, along with removing some of its most independent and important music stations, and cutting into multi-cultural material.

PLEASE. Don’t let this happen. Don’t let the BBC mutilate itself in a doomed attempt to reduce the heat from the sharks circling around it. Wherever you are, please take just a moment to sign the 38 Degrees petition against this crippling blow. Show the BBC’s overseers — and Britain’s politicians — that the BBC is important, and needs to be defended. Don’t turn one of the last bastions of independent, quality, mainstream media into yet another sickly corporate hate-monger. If you can, please spread word of the petition — twitter, blogs, email, whatever.

Please.

The original suggestion, from Peter Mandleson, was that music and film companies could accuse individual net users of being downloaders. After three accusations, that person’s home (and mobile communications) would be permanently blacklisted from being allowed to connect to the ‘net. Note that wasn’t three proved copyright infringements, it was three accusations.

There’s been a lot of protest from netizens of all sorts, and eventually the government decided it wasn’t worth the bad press. They’re still suggesting that in extreme cases, temporary ‘net bans will be imposed, but these look like being the result of proper legal process, rather than a nod and a wink from the RIAA.

I guess election years are good for something, after all.

Peter Mandleson, 'The Prince of Darkness', (c) Bruce Adams.

In a five to four decision, the Supreme Court decided that corporations (and unions) can freely spend their own treasury funds on advertisements for or against individual political candidates. Summarising, Justice Kennedy re-stated the concept of corporations having the same rights as individuals, saying “The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech.”

The ruling itself is even more blunt. Referring to the 20-year ruling in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which prohibited corporations or labor unions from paying for campaign ads, it says “Austin is overruled, and thus provides no basis for allowing the Government to limit corporate independent expenditures.” The decision also removes spending limits for independent expenditure groups, as well as spending limits already established in 24 states. It also removes chunks of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that barred issue ads paid for by corporations or unions in the closing days of a campaign.

Ghastly Hill on a Black Day by Eagpic

It’s not quite a complete carte blanche. Corporations still cannot give give money directly to candidates. But given that the candidates chiefly want donations in order to pay for campaigning, this restriction is now broadly pointless.

The upshot is that candidates who agree to whole-heartedly serve huge corporate interests will be on the recieving end of a sea of funding that will allow them to sweep away any opposition. The political structure was already riddled with corruption of course, but it had to be mediated carefully in light of public opinion. That is no longer the case. Corruption has been boosted up from a sneaking presence behind the scenes to being the director of the entire show. Any politician agreeing to suckle at the corporate teat will recieve funds to guarantee near-certain election, and the idea of serving public interests will vanish entirely.

Horrified reactions have come from all parts of the American political establishment, including both John McCain and Barack Obama. But despite the concern of politicians, the ruling is effective immediately. Anyone wanting to fight this decision will find themselves up against a gigantic wall of money. The chances of any meaningful changes being made in time to stop corporate-backed shills from sweeping to power are very low indeed.

Mussolini famously described fascism as the union of business and state. Whether or not he was right is open to debate — it’s probably more accurate to describe it as corporatism, at least until pro-corruption grass-root movements appear amongst the populace — but either way, it is very definitely not democracy. And whatever you call it, that is what the Supreme Court has now created in the USA.

If you live in America, then whatever side of the political spectrum you lie on, you have been betrayed, and your democratic influence has been reduced to that of a sad whisper on the wind. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the handful of Americans who runs a major corporation, in which case, Hail, Caesar. There are some petitions you can sign, here and here, but frankly, your last shreds of power rest in the right to bear arms.

And that is both tragic and terrifying.

One of the advances that’s been most persistently twenty years away for decades and decades now is artificial intelligence. There have been a few modestly encouraging achievements — neural networks, expert systems, and so on — but in reality, software experts have been totally unable to even begin trying to program an intelligent piece of software. Rumours abound regarding the sentience of Echelon II/Magistrand, the English-speaking world’s massive spy computer — the one that scans every electronic communication — but they’re just not plausible. It would be easier to believe that a sentient Magistrand was a gift from aliens than that we’d programmed a real AI.

The main trouble is that the human brain is just too complex. We don’t really know how it works yet, and there’s even uncertainty regarding the function of different areas. If we can’t even understand consciousness, how can we hope to program it?

Henry Markram: Would you buy a shark-mounted laser doomsday device from this man?

Professor Henry Markram is a South-African Israeli genius, a doctor turned computer engineer, has announced that he expects to have a working electronic simulation of a human brain by 2018. Just eight years. His approach is refreshingly direct. Rather than try to work out how each different brain function works and program flexible simulations, he plans to use dissection and examination. His goal is to map all of the physical elements that make up a human brain, and then reproduce a duplicate structure inside a computer.

The work is intricate and painstaking, but none the less achievable. He has already reproduced — simulated? uploaded? — a mouse’s neocortical column. It’s just computer power stopping him from producing an entire mouse-brain, or starting work on recreating a human brain. Markram is based in Switzerland, and is getting huge amounts of funding for his Blue Brain. As the name suggests, IBM are providing a lot of help and support, too. Given the ever-increasing power of the computing industry, he expects to have sufficient computer power in the next few years.

The result, of course, remains unpredictable. We don’t even really know how memory is encoded, so it’s difficult to guess how the Blue Brain will manifest. But his simulated chunk of rat-brain has occasionally produced totally unexpected bursts of brainwaves over the last year. Some scientists have predicted that the Blue Brain will be an ‘empty bucket’, nothing more than a clever model; others have pointed out that humans start out as fairly blank slates too. Regardless, Markram relishes the issues that his work will raise:

“The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us”

Someone or other from the main webpage at Hello! magazine. (Please don't waste your time telling me who.) If you came here seeking Britney's genitals, then -- Great God! -- I recommend heaven666.org

Fragmented, meaningless information breeds a lobotomised readership who crave only further fragments. It’s self-reinforcing, and best of all, it’s cheap.

So when talking heads babble meaninglessly about bloggery out-competing journalism, they’re really talking about the new journalism — 100 words on today’s stock-market dip, or 250 words on how to have a shinier orgasm, maybe as much as 600 words on a day in the life of a fictitious Rwandan orphan made up by some jaded hack who’s never even been to Paris, let alone Africa.

Sure. I can churn that sort of mindless crap out all day long, and so can anyone else. We’re all journalists now.

New-wave media-friendly journalists care of the Washingtonian. Note: No criticism or praise implied.

But it’s important to remember what real journalism feels like. Done well, journalism is as creative and powerful as any writing of ‘literary merit’. In fact, some might argue that it even takes greater skill, because it has to remain entirely within the scope of what is real. That kind of constraint adds complexity.

I’ve never really tried to produce any real journalism. I simply don’t have the resources — the funding, the contacts, the time to travel and research. I’ve done some magazine and newspaper articles, sure, but they’ve been the kind of froth I mentioned above. I write books, and I blog. That no more makes me a journalist than it makes me a surgeon.

This means I can’t turn to my own files for an example of what I’m taking about. Instead, here are a few links to some pieces of genuine journalism. They’re all fascinating, and I suspect that the first one may well be extremely important to all of us in the years to come. You can’t get through any one of them in five minutes. They’re not safe, bland mulch. These pieces will demand your attention, shake your certainties a little, and possibly challenge some of your assumptions. In places, they even attain a sort of beauty.

Please, read them, and remember what it is we’re losing.

Ennui Becomes Us: Randall Schweller’s masterful analysis of the inevitable growth of disorder in global and cultural affairs.

How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die: Michael Finkel writing on his complicated relationship with the death-row killer who stole his name when going on the run.

They Killed My Lawyer: Financier William Browder’s simple tale of the death of Sergei Magnitsky, an honest man who was brave and foolish enough to stand up to corruption in Russia.

A Rough Trade: Martin Amis’ classic ’01 report from the trenches of the American porn industry.

NOTE: All these links came from Give Me Something To Read, Marco Arment’s selection of top articles bookmarked for later perusal via Instapaper. Both are well worth checking out.

Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts was pepper-sprayed, beaten and then arrested by US border guards earlier this week, for asking why he was being searched. He has now been charged with assaulting a federal officer — the old fave of “damaging my fist with his face”, I assume — and faces two years in prison.

The amazing sound-sculpture installations of Swiss audio-artist Zimoun.

The First Line: Working for God is never easy.

(c) Gabriel Wickbold

Charlie Brooker has a great list of fantastic computer games for people who have never played computer games before.

The Internet List of Top Internet Lists of 2009.

Californian dog shelters are being overrun by Chihuahuas.

Some men should not write advice columns.

A round-up of photographic examples of extreme laziness. Possibly not safe for work, depending on whether they change their side-bar ‘Picture of the Day’.

According to Alternet, Homeland Security are paying a team to develop a scanner that can detect hostility or the intent to deceive’. Wow. I feel so much safer already…

Via Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing (and paraphrasing his text):

Peter Mandelson, British Secretary of State, is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now being prepared for Parliament. These will give him (and his successors) the power to pass legislation without debate to amend Copyright and related law.

In other words,  an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight, provided it was in the name of protecting copyright. He would be able to:

1. Create new penalties for online activities he judges infringements — jail terms for file-sharing, search and seizure for suspicion of ripping a pal’s CD, etc.

2. Confer rights to third parties to investigate and punish infringers — giving record companies the power to monitor all your net activity, then order your ISP to ban you, etc.

3. Impose duties or functions on any person connected to facilitating online infringement — create militias to thug-police the web, force ISPs to monitor web content, etc.

4. Outlaw sites that let you transfer files in private — no more RapidShare if you want to give a copy of your photo album to a relative, &c.

To quote Cory directly:

This is as bad as I’ve ever seen, folks. It’s a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

Even an accusation is likely to be enough to get your entire property kicked off the ‘net under the terms that the Bill is already being drafted to include. Surely everyone except crazed record company execs and paid-for politicians can see that grabbing such a vast chunk of personal rights, privacy and freedom can see that this is a really, really bad thing, right?

Head over to the Open Rights Group for details on calling your MP to register your unhappiness.

A show to avoid like the plague

• The Mandelbulb is an incredible exploration of fractal space.
• Murdering journalists seems to be becoming standard business procedure in Mexico, sickeningly.
• Incredible storm photography from the Photo Argus.
• A selection of insanely-titled books — please note not all of these titles are work-safe!
• Linda Vista: LA’s insanely creepy deserted hospital.
• The view from the top of the Burj Dubai:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWVLzVhnYE0

Seamless integration of graphical displays into day to day reality has been a mainstay of science fiction for years (have a look at Venor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End” and Charlie Stross’s “Accelerando”). It’s the last stepping stone before having virtual reality piped straight into your brain, and in many ways, it’s almost as revolutionary. The article mentions pilots, and simultaneous translation for foreign languages, but there is literally no end to the social and personal changes that this could bring about. It is, quite literally, a paradigm shifter. When this tech hits the streets, everything you think you know about society will be obsolete. And don’t even get me started on the sorts of games and wonders that it enables.

Augemented Reality by xmstellou

It’ll be several years before this is ready — given New Scientist’s usual place ahead of the curve, probably 4 or 5 — assuming that the military don’t decide they want the technology for themselves. That’s happened before with VR tech, when the US military shanghaied a system for projecting images onto the eyeball via laser, back in ’93. There’s also the chance of it just fizzling, too. The profits for the first company to bring this to market are going to be astronomical though, so there’ll be a lot of pressure to make it happen. If it does make it out, it’s going to be an exciting and unpredictable time to live in.

Wow.

Talking about mind-blowing, have you every heard of Exploding Head Syndrome? There you are, minding your own business, when WHAM! You hear a shockingly loud blast, and then everything goes white… and then you discover you’re still alive. Sounds utterly horrible and, offensively, it’s entirely real.

But I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer. If you’re one of the 20% of Americans who opposes universal health-care — and you’re on the US hard-line right-wing — then in the interests of your own blood pressure, you may want to stop reading this post now.

First of all, a definition from historian Robert Paxton:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Paxton is one of the world’s leading authorities on the rise of fascism in otherwise sensible countries, and his definition of fascism now almost universally accepted by political scientists.  There are two key elements here I want to bring your attention to. First of all is the corporatization of the state — where the two elite power bases of corporate power and political power work together for mutual benefit, at the expense of the public. Sometimes, the elite are joined by the religious power base, too. The other is the recruitment of grass-roots militants working on behalf of this hybrid elite to stifle rational debate and fair democratic process.

The emblem of the (extinct) British Fascist Union

I suspect you can see where I’m heading.

There’s been a hell of a lot of hysteria, puff and self-aggrandizing toss over the last twenty years about how we’re all “Fascist, man”. That’s all it has been. Until, in America, this summer.

Paxton identified five clear stages that societies go through on the path of fascism.

Fascism becomes possible when a free democracy loses its way. There’s an implied social contract in society — we work to produce tax and consume goods so the rich can stay wealthy, in return for financial security and support when we need it. Health-care, support in old age, protection from foreign aggressors and domestic criminals, and fair treatment in return for all the hard work we put in. When a government loses focus on this contract, and puts the interests of the corporate world ahead of the social contract, the democracy becomes increasingly weak and shaky, and people get scared and angry. I’m going to tip my hat here to Fox News, banking, agribusiness and insurance for particularly blatant corporatization of government, but they really and truly are just the tip of the iceberg.

Public anger and resentment is the breeding ground.

Paxton’s first stage is when passionate rural interests begin to group together to promote a nationalist fix of the ‘broken’ society. This has the goal of restoring national greatness by restoring traditional (often religious) values, driving out ‘parasitic’ or ‘corruptive’ foreigners, and ignoring those damn fool intellectuals who caused all this mess.

In the second stage, these grass-roots interests spawn active militant bands in order to persecute disliked minorities. Historically, this has usually started by harassing minority agricultural workers on behalf of land-owners. When a weak liberal state arises, badly-battered right-wing political forces decide to deadlock the nation’s political process by refusing to engage with the government.

This is the moment where the third stage tips over. Because the right feels threatened by the rise of the left, it seeks reinforcement. Instead of fighting a long-term game to regain legitimate political capital, they turn to the grass-roots militant bands for support in further pressuring the government, with the aim of using them to regain power. The third stage is clearly marked by the open alliance between nationalist grass-roots militants and disenfranchised right-wing political interests.

I linked earlier to the New York Times piece on the Tea-Bag movement and the open acknowledgement of the power of the Birther conspiracy agenda by congressmen. The militants and the American political right have joined forces, and the militants are being taught how to harass, infiltrate, and disrupt democratic process. They’ve had a very genuine taste of power over the summer months, bonded together in adversity, learnt how to circumvent normal democratic flow, and enjoyed all the lovely, heady goodness of being part of a mob consumed with its own self-righteousness. All without any repercussions from police or state.

That is not an experience you forget about; it is an experience that you seek to repeat, and it is the last stop on the path.

“You must never imagine that just because something is funny, Messire Marquis, it is not also dangerous” — Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

The trouble with imagining that the USA is on the edge of a fascist precipice is that it seems so damn implausible. The Tea-baggers weren’t scary, they were hilarious, with their incoherent signs and their almost 19th-century scare-mongering. It could never happen here… But the stark truth, of course, is that every major civilization on Earth that has ever fallen — and that’s all of them, in case you weren’t counting — has done so with people thinking just that. To quote political futurist Sara Robinson:

This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding. This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins.

From here, the path is bleak, and very, very difficult to avoid. As the third stage develops, the militants get more and more aggressive. Harassment becomes local thuggery — abuse, vandalism, beatings and even killings. The targets are minorities, people who challenge the group’s orthodoxies, and minor political opponents of the sponsoring elite.

“If we can only identify fascism in its mature form — the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies — then it will be far too late to stop it.” — Dave Neiwert,The Eliminationists

Stage three matures as the elite/militant alliance racks up political victories. Each one increases their collective sense of power and rightness — as well as their experience — and makes the next one easier. From there, the rise is swift. Then all it takes is one catalytic event, a domestic disaster or threat of war. Usually, in the past, this has been stage-managed by the alliance, and used as an excuse to temporarily halt democratic and/or due legal process whilst the emergency is dealt with.

Pentagon police, 2007

In stage four, the alliance gains control of the country. The two sides of the alliance then slowly turn on each other. If the militants win, authoritarian police states generally follow. Street thuggery is all they really know. If the elites manage to win, then you may end up with a military junta or a theocracy, or some other version of dictatorship.

Stage five typically depends on a military victory. If the stage four state can enter and win a war (foreign or domestic), it can consolidate its power, and enter a period of violent expansion, savage domestic social engineering, or other activities which arise from being drunk on power. In the absence of a big binding victory like this, the stage four state will generally lose focus and disintegrate into the sort of totally corrupted banana-boat regime we all know and loathe.

In 2007, Naomi Wolf noted the Transportation Security Administration’s proposed “Secure Flight” plan. Under it, all passengers on American flights — both international and domestic — would have to get government clearance to travel. She described this in terms of the slide of Germany into fascism, saying:

“If this proposed regulation goes through, we will move from 1931 to about 1934 — when the borders started to close — with the stroke of a pen.”

As of October 15th — just over two weeks time — airlines will have to provide the TSA with your full name exactly as it appears on a piece of government-sanctioned ID, your date of birth, and your gender for all flights. Flight approval rests on criteria which are not available to you for scrutiny. I advise you to go have a look at the piece that Wolf wrote if you are in even the slightest doubt whether travel scrutiny powers are already being regularly misused.

I don’t know what the answer is. Sara Robinson suggests that if the state re-strengthens by making good on old promises and delivering a fair deal again, and if the media chip in and do their bit to avoid spreading corrosive propaganda, and the police take the side of the people to aggresively punish the militant bands, well, then the slide can be averted.

It would be nice to think that this were possible, but I’m far from convinced. I don’t even know if there is an answer. And like I said at the start, I’m not telling you what to believe. But it seems to me that Paxton’s first three stages can be clearly ticked off the list, and I’m getting very worried, both for America (and the people there I love), and for the rest of the world.

As a kid, I always wondered why the people who knew they’d be in the firing line — the jews and intellectuals and homosexuals and so on — didn’t get the hell out of Germany in the early 30s. I understand now, of course. But our understanding of the process is better now, too. If fascism does arise in America, it will be white and piously Christian and every bit as dumb and emotive as ever. So if you’re in America, and you’re not a dumb white Christian, you really, really might want to start looking for options.

Because when the walls slam shut, and the rallies start, and the boots are marching in the street, and there is no room left for doubt… why, then it will be too late.

I’ll leave the last word to Sara Robinson again:

We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we’re slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

Further reading:
Sara Robinson, “Are we there yet?”
Klint Finley, “Is it to late to spot fascism in the US?”

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