Google – Angel or Devil?

Google claim to be “the Good Guys”. Maybe they are – at the moment. When that amount of power is focussed in one place, you can bet your bottom dollar the bad guys will want a piece, if not all of the action.

At the moment, Google makes so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. So what it does, is create new little bits to further colonise the web and other communication technologies, so that in a couple of years, when a some nerds from Stanford come up with a “Google Killer” idea, the web will be owned by Google and they won’t get a look in. Google has learned not to let itself fall into the same trap Microsoft did.

If Google were making real things or selling food or any other utility, they would have been broken up into pieces by now, but somehow, we are perfectly happy to blindly let a real Big Brother outfit take over our lives, because they keep telling us they are the “Good Guys”.

If they really are the good guys, then they should stop fiddling about with operating systems and phones and apply their considerable power and inventiveness to the problem of content.

Google is a parasite. It makes its money by exploiting people like me – the creatives, who spend our lives having ideas, using our brains to move the human condition on. Google sucks up what we do, mashes it up and sells advertising on the back of it. It pays us nothing for our work and claims all the profit. That is either theft or slavery. The very word content demeans the work of creative people. The Mona Lisa is content to a web technologist. Picasso and Shakespeare mere content providers. Content is just a nebulous medium that can be focussed by aggregating technologies to sell advertising to finely chosen markets.

I’m beginning to feel a bit jaded about the wonder of the web. No one makes money as a creative person on the web. Certainly not enough to live on. It makes communication faster and easier, but is that a good thing? When I was young, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would be delivered by tea. Isn’t that really enough? we used to pick up the phone and actually talk to people at the other end – wasn’t that better?

I find myself glued to my communication devices these days. The day goes by and I’ve done nothing but blog, sort through spam and obsessively check my youtube and website stats, this because my publishers tell me it’s not enough to have ideas, to write and illustrate and visit schools and libraries and perform at festivals anymore, I have to blog to create and maintain my market. Woah! Isn’t that the publisher’s job? I blog away like mad, but I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference to my market, because I don’t address my blog to my market. If I did, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the books, as I’d be giving all my creative work away to the kids who aren’t the ones who buy the books anyway.

Meanwhile, as you read this blog, you and I are putting a journalist out of business, because you really should be reading carefully considered, well-written work from a paid-for journal and I should not be dashing this off for free, but submitting it to a journal who would pay me for my time and effort.

If Google really are the good guys, they should put all their energy into one project – online micropayments.

I’ve removed creative projects from the web because I did not get paid for them while they were online. As they were free, they took away from sales of real books from which I earn real money. Now I can’t be bothered to work on all the great ideas I have because I can’t afford to do them, because I know I won’t get paid.

If I got a micropayment every time someone looked at one of my projects, then it would become worthwhile to start putting projects together, or it would be worthwhile for publishers to gravitate towards online delivery. The way things are going, in about five years time, there is going to be a blood bath in publishing unless an equitable way is found to pay people for the work they do online. As far as I’m concerned, my good will and the fun of experimentation has worn out. Like everyone else, I need to eat and in this system, that means I need cash, not the promise of a new paradigm in a generation’s time, when I’ll be 90 and having to stack shelves at the supermarket.

I tried setting up a secure area of my site to provide quality content. But I could not guarantee the security of it and I found myself turning into a systems administrator – I shouldn’t have to do that. The business guys will tell me that I should be entrepreneurial and set up my own content delivery business, but then I’d never be creative again – I’d spend all my time employing others to do the creative work, while I did the paperwork and programming. I have a publisher to do that. It’s a weird twisted re-cycling argument that technologists and web business people don’t seem to get.

Since the web began to take hold, my workload has at least doubled. If only my income had done the same. I may have stayed in the same place – I think I’m probably going backwards in real terms.

The internet is turning into a place that is purely commercial, a system for screwing money and free labour out of the plebs, (that’s us) by legal or illegal means. Will we continue to walk blindly down this path, or will we revolt or will the good guys come to our aid and create a future that we might want to be part of?

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, at the moment.

Lanier is one of the original geeky gurus of the net. He’s taking stock and having a think about where we are going in this book, which he calls a manifesto. I haven’t got to the manifesto part yet, but his musings are most thought provoking.

I got in on the net quite early, building my first website in early 1997. Most people thought I was silly, self-indulgent or plain wasting my time. everybody told mw I was crazy when I told them they would all be emailing and video conferencing, shopping and banking online. “You won’t catch me doing that!” they all told me.

They were exciting times. If you weren’t there, you’ll never understand. The net was growing in dog years, the speed of change was incredible, keeping up with it was like being on drugs. Every day was a bright, new dawn as new possibilities opened up. I think my family worried about me for a while! I never did make a million – not many did – but the intellectual pursuit was worth it in itself.

But now it’s been corporatised. Just like the record companies collared the music industry, Facebook, Google et al have collared the net for their own ends. Does it matter? Maybe not now. These are pretty good guys – at the moment. But for how long?

Everyday Google and Facebook colonise our lives, not just affecting our society, they are becoming our society. We think we are the customers of these giant corporations, but we are not. We are the product. The advertisers are the customers! It takes a moment to get your head around that one. We do a deal with Facebook and Google – Give us these amazing tools and we will give you gigabits of high-level information about us and our lives, so that you can sell to us stuff we never knew we needed.

Lanier argues that we are becoming conditioned by the providers. We are being turned into homogenised purchasing units – infinitely targetable by the advertisers. A good number of people now think Facebook is email – that is how they communicate.

Facebook is a boring, corporate, homogenised environment. It always looks the same and you are not in control. Remember last week how your front page changed? Did you have any say in that? Slowly, in tiny baby steps, they are grinding down their users so that they don’t notice innovations anymore and accept things into their lives that, if introduced in on fell swoop, would get them out on the streets protesting.

Facebook is there to make money for itself and for advertisers and for no other reason. The same with Google. They call themselves the good guys, but so did the Nazis. Google, in the hands of a dictator, could be the end of civilisation.

Lanier wants to celebrate humanity, and that is what we do not do in this brave new Web2.0. We homogenise and we anonymise. Yes, you can be who you like on the net, but what does that do to the real you? What does that do to real interaction between human beings. When you make a comment on the net and sign yourself, anonymous12547, what does that say about you? You are worthless and your comment is worthless, it may as well have been posted by a robot making up a stream of words that seem to make sense if read in the right order.

What happened to all those whacky personal websites? They all became corporatised. We are told what a website should look like and so they now all look the same.

I’m with Lanier, let’s bring a bit of humanity back to the web. It is a tool, not our god.

Too Much Customer Service – Direct Line Insurance Fail Miserably

I’ve received a birthday card from Direct Line Insurance and it almost made me feel ill! Do I know these people? Do they know me? I am a faceless e-customer and occasional telephone caller – not a mate. I’m friendly with their staff when I call, but I’ve never had the same person and have never built up any kind of personal relationship. We do have a lot of policies with them, but they can’t be that grateful.

And then there is the design. Bland, bland, bland and deliberately inoffensive. The font is bleak. It may follow their corporate style, but this is not supposed to be a sales leaflet – or is it? That crass addition of my name on the front – different colour – no one puts the name of the birthday person on the front.

The the inside is even more bleak. So as not to identify the manufacturer of the party popper, they have taken the wrapper off, making it look cheap and tacky – it took me a while to work out what it was meant to be.

Enjoy your special day Shoo, of course, should have a comma before my name, but let’s forgive them that. The words are suspended in a sea of white space with no attention to optical alignment. The words hang in that space so that the little bits of snot can dangle from the E and the y.

There are codes printed at the bottom, repeated on the back and there seems to be a related raffle number at the top on the back – do I win a prize if I have the right number?
These numbers make me feel like they are data gathering – not the right spirit.

Oh yes – it arrived much too early, which adds the the thoughtlessness of it. You either put do not open until the specified date on the envelope, or you send it to arrive on the date with a pre birthday postmark or you are late and apologise.

Am I being ungracious?

Uh- uh! Direct Line – you failed – miserably.

Bling My Coach

Please vote for the Pink Car Rally coach to win the bling my coach competition by voting for them here
The Pink Car Rally is in aid of a fledgling children’s charity, called the Little Princess Trust, which provides children who have lost their hair (primarily through cancer treatments) with ‘real hair’ wigs. If we win this competition, we can take 49 pink passengers on the coach and if each one raised an average of £50 Sponsorship, we could raise in the region of £2500 for the charity!! How fantastic would that be? It means that the charity could provide wigs for 8 more children!! We NEED to win!! Please help us…..

Please look at the short film, which is introduced by Gail Porter, on the Little Princess Trust’s website (www.littleprincesses.org.uk) It tells the story of how the charity helped Melissa….

Think Pink! Pink! Pink!

My friend, Sali Gray, has let me know that they are auctioning a Pink Car for the Little Princess Trust on eBay. Here’s the link

The Little Princess Trust helps children suffering hair loss due to cancer treatment. A great cause, so if you’re in the market for a new old car, it’s a

1996 MAZDA 121 GXI  with NO RESERVE

They are hoping to get over £1000 – the paint job is worth £2000!

Independant Safeguarding

Oh dear, I’ve been hoping that this would all go away and we would come to our senses, but it seems that I’m going to have to get myself a certificate to prove I’m not a paedophile so that I can still visit schools.

Looking at the the ISA website I found the glaring loophole within thirty seconds.

Apparently, children in schools need protecting from children’s authors, who are accompanied at all times and work with groups of up to 300 at a time.

Those who actually want to harm children do not need to register – indeed it is in their interest not to. If they have a dodgy past they will become a barred person and then will break the law by entering Specific Places and carrying out Specific Activities. However, if they are not checked, they are free to enter private and domestic places and employment with impunity.

Where does 99% of all the damage to children occur? In the home of course, in domestic environments. So the overpaid, quango nonsense is powerless in the one place that real harm to children occurs. The scheme is nothing but a cash-raising enterprise – certainly in the case of visiting authors and those who would pass on their experience and expertise. It’s a tax on those who work with children. Sit back and watch as volunteers disappear. It is totally demeaning to go cap in hand to a faceless organisation and ask to be proved a nice person. Where will the youth workers, Arkelas and Brown Owls come from now?

And what message are we teaching our children? Everyone is a paedophile until proven innocent. This has turned the whole basis of our legal system upside down.

Watch the world of children and adults move further apart. Parents will soon be excluded from entering school premises. They pretty well are already, dropping their children off at the barbed wire security gates under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera. Parents only ever need to talk to schools through the gate intercom. No wonder they never turn up for parent’s evenings.

When do adults and children ever meet? How are children supposed to know what they are meant to grow up to be, if all the good people stay away from them in fear of being smeared. Children now are to be feared.

Who now would help a lost child? The irony is that most of us now would stand back and let a kidnapper take a child because we think we would be accused of something if we stepped in to help.

I was asked for a certificate a couple of years ago by a museum. I said I didn’t have one and didn’t see the point as I’d be on public show all day and all the children would be chaperoned by their parents. They hummed and hah-ed but in the end said okay. When I arrived, the two Gents toilets had been reassigned as one for Men and one for Boys! Nothing was said, but what message does that give? The organisers, of course, will come out with the usual guff about insurance and covering themselves, but what they were really saying is that all men and me in particular are a danger to boys, in particular. Notice that it was okay for women to take boys and girls into the toilets with them…

…Oh dear, didn’t we just have a case of arrests of a nursery nurse up to no good? Wasn’t she a woman? She would have been checked too. Fat lot of good that did! Anyone wanting to harm children will do so. Checks and laws won’t stop them. The laws will only create division in society. Except that children don’t count as society. They are just a nuisance that have to be put up with and hidden away until they are old enough to enter adult society.

I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and pay – I’m fixed up to do loads of visits next year.

I’m not being a good blogger! All this came about from an article in Guardian. It’s great that Philip Pullman stand sup for us like this. Most children’s authors earn below the minimum wage from their writing, so school visiting is often the major part of their income. They will meekly sign up and be done with it.

I’m so used to being treated with suspicion in schools now that it comes as a surprise to be trusted. Last year I went to a school where I was met and showed around the school, visiting all the classes one by one, by two children. The school were so friendly and relaxed, that I mentioned it to them as being unusual. “But, you’re our honoured guest!” they said in surprise. “We invited you!”

The sinister left hand

I disturbed a hornet’s nest yesterday. I gave a talk over the weekend about creative organisation and was explaining how the left and right sides of the brain work differently. The left side deals in order and language. The right side is a bit airy-fairy and deals with the world in a wider, looser way. The right side takes everything in, decides what is important and then passes it over for the left side to organise and make sense. That is a very crude description.

One of my audience had had a couple of small strokes and wondered how that might affect their creativity. They told me there were some words that they just could not remember. This led into a discussion about left and right-handedness. Counter-intuitively, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. We then wondered if right-brained thinkers might be more left-handed than the norm.

Yesterday I asked my FaceBook friends how many were left-handed, as most of my FaceBook friends are writers or illustrators. There was no statistical anomally in the results – If I’d thought about it more I would have known that.

However, I was not ready for the tirade of abuse that came back about left-handed people! My friends are intelligent writers and thinkers, so I assume that they were being mostly ironical, but a base hatred of all things left-handed was very evident.

My sister is left-handed, so I grew up with it as an everyday occurrence and learned all about her difficulties with scissors and clothes’ irons and other tools that are made for right-handers. I read on one forum yesterday, how someone said they hated sitting next to left-handers because their writing arms bumped into each other. The obvious answer is to change places! I remember fondly sitting next to a left-hander, who was the object of my affections when I was about six. We both had long pencils with walking stick ends – they looked like candy canes – the hooks entwined as we wrote. I was most upset when the teacher made us swap places. I suppose I was always a romantic.

Yesterday I was reminded that the word sinister comes directly from the latin word for left and that left-handers were often considered to be witches. One of my friends, assuming I was left-handed for asking the question, wondered why it hadn’t been beaten out of me at an early age! I guess this must happen. I found a few forums with concerned mothers asking how to make their left-handed children right-handed. In the past, left-handers had their arms tied up behind their backs to force them to use their right arms. My Grandmother had a little board tied around her neck to let everyone know that she was a Welsh speaker in the times when they tried to beat the language out of children and make them speak English. It’s the same thing.

You would think by now that we understand everything about human nature and have become more accepting, but it seems we are hard-wired to go along with the norm. Anything that deviates is deviant – obvious. I won’t mention that I grew up with bright red hair – lucky for me it turned very dark as I got older.

Alright, I will mention it as I’m frequently shocked at the way “Gingers” are abused on the TV and in the press. It doesn’t seem to happen in other countries. Americans are amazed at the way we treat ginger hair. I think it’s a race memory hatred of the Vikings. Red-heads are the only people you can legally be nasty to nowadays. When the UK had it’s enormous influx of immigrants in the 60s and 70s red-heads were forgotten and had a quiet time as we told jokes about, and were generally hostile to, the Pakistanis, West Indians and the Irish. But now it’s against the law to tell those jokes or show any animosity to other races, so tough luck on Gingers – they are fair game again – and, so it would seem, are the sinister ones amongst us.