Red Snapper: Sound bites and unsound nibbles (2005)

The Red Snapper column from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

” I don’t look like a millionaire, I don’t act like a millionaire, I am not a millionaire.”

George Galloway, RESPECT MP, ahead of addressing the Washington senators who have accused him of receiving vouchers for millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein’s regime. Daily Mail, May 17th.

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” They chose me. Can’t you find it even within yourself even to congratulate me?”

George Galloway again on his election victory to Jeremy Paxman, from The Guardian, May 7th.

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” We expect the Revolution will create entirely new genres to expand the definition of video games,” he said to loud cheers in the hall.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, on a new console, BBC Technology, May 17

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“People remembered why they had lost trust in Tony Blair, but they couldn’t see any real difference between the Tories and Labour, so we lost out on that.”

Lynton Crosby, Tory Party campaign director, Independent, May 20

” A student who misbehaves gets two verbal warnings, then detention for one hour and finally a day in the isolation unit. It is very rare that a student gets sent there for three days.”

Sir Dexter Hutt, executive headmaster of three schools in Birmingham, where he has introduced isolation rooms, Sunday Times, May 15

Pathfinders: Game On (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Game On

A man from Sydney, Australia, buys an island populated by wild animals for $26,500, and charges tax for hunting rights, as well as renting beach front property. This is perfectly normal behaviour in capitalism. The money he earns from it is real enough. The island, however, does not exist. It is a virtual island, with virtual animals. (New Scientist, May 20)

Elsewhere, in Shanghai, a man lends his prized sword to a friend, who then secretly sells it for 7200 yuan (£500), back-pocketing the proceeds. Furious, the man complains to the police, who do nothing. Enraged, he breaks into his friend’s house, and stabs him to death. The knife he uses is real enough, and the man gets life imprisonment for murder. No action is ever taken over the original theft, because the sword does not exist according to any known law. Real blood spilled by a virtual sword.

From Carolina, one man has made a fortune selling rare virtual furniture and other items, which, he discovered through a bug in the program, he could duplicate, and sell over and over again. Nobody knows if he has broken a law. The game company closed the bug hurriedly, but not before the man had cleared $100,000.

Online gaming is moving beyond the purview of geeky kids. Virtual items and goods, though theoretically worthless, acquire value in the real world as players seek to shortcut the time-consuming process of acquiring them in the game, and serious money is being made in the ‘grey market’ of virtual trading. Now game currencies have been indexed to real currencies, and one game developer, MindArk, has launched an ATM cashcard that players can use to withdraw real cash, calculated according to MindArk’s exchange rate of their ‘game’ wealth. The global trade in virtual goods is currently estimated at $880 million and rising, with 30 million, mostly western and mostly affluent gamers, playing games for up to 18 hours a day. In one popular online game, Second Life, a third of the players spend more time in the game than in the real world.

It’s not hard for socialists to see why people would want to escape the rigid fetters of real-time capitalism. People have been escaping the real conditions of life ever since the Greeks invented the outdoor theatre. What is slightly depressing but perhaps not very surprising is that people work so hard at their escapist fantasies only to create societies of lawlessness, savagery and insane self-destructive cruelty that make capitalism look like a pussycat by comparison. In one game, players are dedicated to the task of setting off virtual semtex bombs and blowing themselves and their online world up. In others, there are virtual assassinations, or random slayings, where players find their character has been murdered for no particular reason, apart from somebody’s idle amusement. A player can take a long time, sometimes years, to build a character up, provide it with its special faculties and powers, as well as its virtual property. To be robbed and murdered after all this work is no small thing and can be deeply upsetting to the player. But this is the virtual wild west, and there is a nihilistic appeal. Law doesn’t appear to work in people’s interest in the real world (true, in many ways), so the idea is to get rid of all law and have an orgy of violence and blood in the games.

The problem is, as with the Shanghai murder, the violence is starting to spill over into the real world, prompting some observers to suggest that law and punishment should be introduced into the games. The game developers are opposed. What is the point of playing a game that lets you do nothing? That’s just like real life, the very thing people want to run away from.

The other problem, from a socialist view, is the constant reinforcement these bloodthirsty games give to the perceived need for law and policing. For these are, in a way, highly moral games, in that they strongly emphasize what dread chaos results from ‘amoral’ or lawless behaviour. Socialism proposes to abolish all coercive law which serves class interests (which is to say, all property law, at the very least). What laws or rules socialism would retain is a moot but interesting question. What is evident however is that no rational debate on the socialist need for laws, or rules, or their nature or means of enforcement, is possible among workers while they are bamboozled into believing that a society without repressive legal structures is always going to look like a scene from Conan the Barbarian. Play one of these online games for a week and you will either become a nightmare axe-murderer from the Dark Ages or you will be screaming for the return of capital punishment and school floggings.

Why normal bank clerks and home heating engineers should want to lead double-lives as marauding rapists and genocidal maniacs is a topic too large to enter into here. But it would be interesting to speculate what a socialist society would make of it. Would they look back at capitalism and trace a pattern from the Boy’s Own stories of Empire days with their strongly moral content, through the poignant emptiness of punk culture and on into the cybernight of shoot-em-ups and global conquest games and say: there, that was a society in decline? By giving reality to the horrors of the repressed mind is capitalism liberating or enslaving us even more deeply? Will there come a point, perhaps with the total abolition of hard cash, when capitalism will itself become a virtual game, with a human population of players who try to amass arbitrary ‘units’ of currency in order to buy arbitrary artifacts? The difference between real life and a game is that you always have to return to real life eventually, but it is just possible that this difference may one day disappear, and our grip on reality may disappear with it.

Game Off

On a more positive note, a friend who is a computer repairman reports a recent case where a young man came in to have his computer repaired. The graphics card, an expensive one, had blown, and the cost would be over £300. The man appeared, and was given the bad news. He went away to think about it. A week later he returned.

“£300 is a lot of money when you don’t have a job. I can’t get a job because I’m too busy playing online for 16 hours every day. I haven’t been to a pub in two years, all my friends have disowned me, and I never see anybody. On top of that, I’m bored with the games because I am Grandmaster in all of them and can’t be beaten. In the past week I’ve gone to the pub, gone to a party, found all my friends and even met some new ones. In fact, I’ve had the time of my life. Tell you what. You can keep the bloody thing.”

And with that, he walked out into the real world.

Paddy Shannon

Go Tell the Spartans (2005)

TV Review from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time Commanders, BBC2, Sunday 7.45pm

There's no doubt that the rapid development of computer graphic imaging has done wonders for livening up history documentaries that used to rely on bearded men lyricising over lumps of masonry in a field. By filling in all the visual blanks it has opened up a fascinating subject to a generation of new enthusiasts who find archaeology a bore and Tony Robinson terminally aggravating. But even with CGI there's a limit to how gripping you can make an Iron Age settlement or an Egyptian temple complex. Now, perhaps inevitably, comes the adrenalin-fuelled rush of a real time video game crossover where teams of men (well, it's a man thing) take on the roles of ancient generals and refight famous battles on a huge computer screen.

In the first series Eddie Mair, normally lugubrious even on the radio, looked positively tragic as he watched suburban Essex car salesmen pretending to be world-conquering military leaders and throwing away their virtual armies in clueless abandon. In the second series Richard Hammond bounds around like a boy scout cheering on all the corking good fun and offering pointlessly inane advice like "don't let them get you in the flank!", while two dour bona-fide experts sit upstairs and witter grumpily about everything the 'generals' are doing wrong. Occasionally the teams even win, but even so it rarely seems that they have much idea what they are doing.

To anyone who imagines that historical battles were gigantic chessgames played out by masterminds this game reflects the truer historical picture, which is that battles were usually ugly and confusing messes presided over by frequently incompetent generals who were there by virtue of birth rather than merit.

The popularity of this show can scarcely have anything to do with any widespread knowledge of or interest in the history behind these battles or of the times in which they occurred. The vicarious thrill of being a general in charge of mass slaughter is perhaps bound to appeal to individuals who have no real power in society and whose only realistic experience of battle would ever be as cannon-food. It’s only a bit of fun, yet the concept is surprisingly repulsive.

All through history soldiers like these were 'spent' like so much disposable currency on the whim of human beings behaving like gods in the interests of wealth and power. For all their clockwork clone appearance these virtual soldiers are good enough to represent those historical but nameless human beings whose cruel lives and terrible deaths are being played out for our amusement. And as the graphics improve and the mutilation and gore acquire better and more prurient detail, the savagery of power and powerlessness becomes ever more poignant, and the pity of war ever more pitiable.

What really sticks in the craw and what this show inadvertently emphasizes is the thought that everything that holds meaning and value in our lives is actually meaningless and valueless to our rulers. Indeed the computer graphic algorithms reinforce this in a way since they simply create one virtual soldier and then make multiple identical copies to form the virtual armies. One can't escape the feeling that the owning class of the world must see us in largely the same way, as essentially wealth-producing bacteria without names, faces, rights or identity, cultured on their slides in order to grow them new wealth, and to be disposed of whenever we become unproductive. What is even more chilling is the idea that we ourselves might even adopt in some sense their view of us, certainly enough to fight all the savage battles of the future on their behalf. No wonder socialists oppose all wars.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Avatar, avachange (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Avatar, avachange

Anti-socialists who peddle the old saw about human nature being unchangeable ought to hang out more with the kids and play online computer games, because if they did they would soon realize just how malleable human behaviour actually is. A recent study by researchers in Palo Alto, California, took two groups of virtual reality gamers and assigned them online cartoon representations, or avatars, which were deliberately given distinct physical characteristics, shorter or taller in the first group, and uglier or prettier in the second. Then they studied the behaviour of the gamers. (New Scientist, Feb 25, p.30). Those whose avatars were taller displayed consistently more assertive and aggressive behaviour while the shorter players were more acquiescent, and in the second group, the uglier players stood farther apart than the prettier ones. A quick and informal interrogation by Pathfinders of known local players reveals that this sort of behavioural change is common knowledge among gamers and in fact accounts for much of the appeal of virtual reality gaming. If our behaviour is so easily influenced by our perception of ourselves and our virtual surroundings, it is not hard to imagine a sea-change in human behaviour occurring almost overnight if our actual material surroundings were changed, say by the abolition of private ownership. The researchers plan to run the experiment next using age as the defining characteristic. We look forward to gamers, confronted by themselves with wrinkled skin and grey hair, suddenly becoming gurus of wisdom and maturity.

RFID, RDFI, DRIF, FRIED…

News that researchers have managed to infect state of the art RFID tags with a virus (BBC Online, March 15) raises a number of disturbing issues for the security of this new technology, as well as a highly interesting question for socialist revolutionaries in the wired world of the 21st century. These electronic Radio Frequency ID tags, which give every inanimate object the ability to identify itself electronically, can now be printed on cans of beans, and even sprayed on advertising posters, so that in the supermarkets of the near future the checkout till, barcode reader and human operator will disappear and your goods will be automatically identified in the trolley, and your bank account debited, as you push your wonky-wheeled chariot through the doors and into the carpark. Such ‘smart-tagging’ of products, posters, pets and even people carries huge benefits from a capitalist point of view, and not a few benefits from a future socialist society’s point of view too (see Socialist Standard, Jan 2005), but none of this takes into account what happens when a virus introduces Factor X – the RF Identity Crisis. When all forms of hard cash have disappeared, and the circulation of money in the economy is replaced by the circulation of binary digits round a computer network, the money economy will have reached its zenith of efficiency, and its nadir of vulnerability. One smart hacker could in theory do by stealth what all the revolutionaries of history have failed to do by force – abolish price tags, wipe out bank accounts, mortgages, debts, profits, rents and fees, thus effectively ‘rebooting’ society and resetting all values at zero. The question, for socialists, is whether they could ever condone, or advocate, such a draconian step, given the chaos which would quite likely ensue. Given the organized chaos of a society which at present lets most of its members suffer appalling deprivation within a sea of riches, the answer is surely not straightforward.

More on viruses

AOL, the American internet giant, have recently been hit by a double whammy. First, according to informed sources close to Pathfinders, their endorsed anti-virus partner Macafee turned out a March upgrade to their anti-virus software which, oh dear, oops, deletes certain vital Windows DLL overlay files, which is the equivalent of removing the spark plugs from your car engine. Then, within days, the Norton group produced their anti-virus upgrade which accidentally removes, yes, you guessed it, your AOL internet software. If anti-virus companies are going to carry on doing more damage to your computer than the viruses they are supposed to catch, surely the obvious question is: why don’t they test these upgrades on virtual animals first? Remember, you saw this idea here first.

Lastly, on viruses

In case you missed this: the animals in the jungle are discussing who is the scariest of them all. ‘Me’, says the lion, and gives out a big roar. The animals shake their heads, unimpressed. ‘Me’, says the gorilla, and thumps his chest. The animals tap their paws, underwhelmed. Then the parrot lets out a sneeze, and everybody runs for miles…. You know it’s serious when the jokes start appearing.

Drugs trial + Pro-Test

The controversy over animal testing has always generated more heat than light, and the temperature has now been turned up several notches on the regulo dial by two unrelated but curious events. One is the unprecedented ‘coming out’ of pro-test students in Oxford under the name ‘Pro-Test’, instigated by a young student disgusted with anti-testers’ increasingly terrorist tactics against individuals as well as the alleged poor quality of the debate. The other is the catastrophic clinical trial of the drug TGN1412, developed by the German TeGenero biotechnology company, that left six UK volunteers in intensive care, with two of them in critical condition as this goes to press (FT.com, March 16). Early reports are suggesting that the paperwork for the trial was entirely in order and that the drug had already been extensively tested on rabbits and monkeys with no discernible adverse effects, so that it was deemed entirely safe to proceed with clinical trials in humans. What is especially interesting about this calamity is that both sides of the animal testing debate will immediately seize on it as proof of their position: the anti-testers will parade this disaster as evidence that animal testing is unable to prevent harmful drugs like Thalidomide and Seroxat, now TGN1412, from reaching humans, while pro-testers will be entirely justified in asking how many more potentially lethal drugs would have been tried on humans if animal testing had been banned outright. As with many things in science, both sides have a point, and there are no simple answers. Even in socialism, where there would be little likelihood of animal testing for non-medical purposes, eg. cosmetics (such research today account for around three quarters of testing), this debate would most probably run and run.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: SocialSim City (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How can you ever prove socialism will work?

As socialism has never yet existed a very big obstacle for socialists is the lack of a working model. In the absence of this we are obliged to rely on theoretical arguments in order to persuade people. But not many people enjoy theory. Help however may arrive from a quite unexpected source, the computer games industry. As the internet becomes all pervasive and as computer games become ever more sophisticated, a new type of game may be able to create this model by simulation. The Sims launched in 2000 it became the all-time best selling computer game, and parents reported how their children’s perception of life and relationships changed after playing the games. So popular is the idea of simulation that now political parties are using it to promote their policies. In Uruguay the opposition left wing  coalition Frente Amplio devised a game called Cambienos (Let’s Change) for the October elections, while in the US elections there were five or six ‘party games’ on offer (BBC OnlineTechnology, Sat Oct 23). More significantly, sophisticated computer simulations offer a way of conducting complex what-if analyses of live systems from ecology to economics.

Maxis, the company behind SimCity, was approached by the military, governments and oil companies to design sim games that could help planners see the consequences of making different strategic decisions. Maxis designed models for the oil industry, healthcare sector and the environment protection agency, but discontinued development because of the extreme legal complications involved. see the consequences of making different strategic decisions. 

So could a socialist sim game be developed? The short answer is yes. But would it be any good? That depends on the number of variables in play, and the processing power available. Using distributed  processing across home PCs, as the NASA SETI project and the British Astronomical Association do, would provide a computational power unequalled by the world’s largest supercomputer, and with continual update and modification by online participants there is no theoretical reason why a working prototype could not provide valuable insights into some of the complexities of socialism in practice. If a simulation could give us an idea in advance of what sort of production and distribution problems are likely to occur, we can begin to find concrete answers ahead of schedule. And if we can show a stable model of socialism in practice, audited by independent third parties, it will go a long way to destroying the claims of economic calculationists and others who insist that socialism could never work in practice.

How do you know what to produce, where it goes and what happens to it?

Capitalist theorists are comfortable with the argument that the only variable they need to track is price.

Consumption and distribution don’t matter in themselves and can’t really be gauged anyway, whereas  in socialism, with no prices, the unmeasurable needs to be measured. But even capitalists have uses for better information and better tracking, and a revolution is taking place in stock control which has  enormous potential for socialism – the humble RFID tag. A radio frequency identification chip is inserted into all products which then emit a unique identifier bleep, a kind of audio bar code, enabling a receiver to identify all goods present, and track the passage of all goods through time and space, anywhere in the world. The applications however go well beyond supply chain tracking, with the US State Department issuing a million RFID tagged passports next year (New Scientist, 23 Oct) and supermarkets hoping to use CCTV to monitor which tagged items customers tend to pickup (NS, 28 August). What this means in capitalism is that the technology become mired in a new row about  state and corporate surveillance. What it means for socialists is that for a fraction of a cent per item capitalism has produced an easy way  to measure the ‘unmeasurable’, which in turn could greatly facilitate the operation of a socialist non-market economy.

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 1 of 2 (2012)

From the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

As in the industrial revolution, progress in the computer revolution comes at a price.

Despite all the technological innovation, computing is all too often a frustrating and limiting experience. Is this because Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft are evil and lock down hardware, platforms, software and content? NO! Is this because we should all avoid proprietary software, even freeware in favour of mutual co-operative open-source projects such as Linux? Well this is barely half the story as can be seen when free open-source software is not immune to industry trends such as cloud computing, bloat, eye-candy, new version fetishisation and app stores. The elephant in the room is the broad historical trends in the industry which affect free software somewhat less than proprietary software and mirror the industrial revolution and tend to disempower, limit and alienate (in the Marxist sense) the end user. Software and personal computing suffers from class divisions.

2011 was another year of hype for cloud computing. In June 2011 Google launched the Chromebook and Apple announced iCloud. The Google Chromebook is no ordinary laptop, it relies on storing software and your data on Google servers. This is called cloud computing and has been considered the next big thing in IT by market experts for some years. The term ‘cloud’ is appropriate since its benefits are nebulous and it may also represent dark clouds on the horizon for personal computing.

The history of personal computing is almost as old as the first manned moon landing in 1969, and in technological terms, the personal computers of today are certainly more advanced. Why on earth is personal computing then, a frustrating and limiting experience? By 1965, Gordon E. Moore had predicted the rate of advancement in computer hardware (doubling every 18 months), which has proved largely accurate. By 1973, the first mouse-driven graphical user interface had been produced.  Niklaus Wirth observed that ‘software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster’. This parallels Stanley Jevon’s observation over a century earlier that ‘advances in efficiency tend to increase resource consumption’. To find out why this is the case we have to look at the history of personal computing and its potential downfall.

‘A computer in every home’
The first million selling computer book was the Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth in 1968. Although it was an incredibly technical book, Knuth liked to stress the art aspect of the title, and it was certainly in stark contrast to the industry that it is today. In other respects, sentiments among computing enthusiasts would be familiar (especially to socialists) throughout history. In particular, The Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers) which included such noble statements as ‘all information should be free’ and ‘access to computers should be unlimited and total’. This was not unusual for the time. Popular computing literature including magazines and books such as 101 Basic Computer Games (David H. Ahl, 1973) printed lines of code and encouraged users (especially children) to input the code to produce games. Most personal computers offered a command-line interface (even those with an additional graphical user interface) and were bundled with some form of the BASIC programming language, so named because of its ease of use and suitability for learning. The learning curve for using home computers was steep when compared with today but popular computing literature at the time helped make the curve somewhat more graduated. Despite its significance, very few writers have lamented the disappearance of BASIC, perhaps the most well-known article is titled ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code’ (David Brin, 2006).

As Neal Stephenson put it, in the beginning there was the command-line and Microsoft had the odd idea of selling operating systems. It was Apple Macintosh however, who introduced the first commercially successful graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) interface in 1984. Just a year later, the Commodore Amiga 1000 made colour, animation, sound and multi-tasking affordable to home users. Although the desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was used by rivals, the Amiga offered an indicator of the ethos of the time. It used the metaphor of a deeply-customisable workbench for its operating system. The desktop metaphor prevailed partly because home computers in the West evolved out of the office at a time when industrial capital was on the decline.  But also, the desktop prevailed over the workbench metaphor, because empowering users to control the means of production was gradually becoming an alien notion.

No single business seemed to be able to establish a hardware monopoly, let alone a software monopoly, that was unchallenged by rivals. In January 1986 PC Magazine reviewed fifty-seven different programs for word-processing. Even the most popular application software such as WordStar, AmiPro and WordPerfect was largely produced by small teams and in some cases individuals. The spirit of the age was described as the era of the bedroom programmer, although this is possibly a little exaggerated. Sharing software was widespread, computing magazines distributed cover disks with public domain and shareware software and users exchanged software in classifieds advertisements. Software developers might not have liked it, but magazines were an important channel for distribution. Acceptable software costs to users were generally regarded as the cost of the disk and this was the attitude in businesses as well as at home. The limitations of the hardware of the time meant also that developers were expected to optimize code to be as fast as possible.

Windows 95
The personal computer industry grew rapidly over subsequent years. By 1992, Amigas had fallen by the wayside. Ataris were cheaper and in 1993 could boast multi-tasking but by then it was too late. A monopoly position had already been established by IBM-PC compatible hardware and Microsoft consolidated their monopoly in software with a $300m launch of Windows 95. Although users may have been reluctant to embrace planned obsolescence, this was a time when the vision of ‘a computer in every home’ still involved selling hardware to first-time buyers.

The truth behind the hype was a little different, RoughlyDrafted.com (5 February 2007) comments:

 ‘From the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Microsoft amassed fortunes as an application developer for the Mac. Even in 1996, Microsoft reported making more money from Office–$4.56bn–than it did from all of its Windows sales combined–$4.11bn. Tying sales of Windows 95 to Office helped to boost sales of both. Microsoft pushed the new version of Office as a reason to buy Windows 95, and Windows 95 helped kill sales of rival applications, including the then standard WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, neither of which were available or optimized for Windows 95 at its launch. By the release of Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft had swallowed up 98 percent of the OS market’

Innovation, but not for the masses

Although Windows 95 firmly established the desktop metaphor over rivals, this was the limit of its innovation and other enhancements were criticised as merely cosmetic. The successful introduction of encyclopedia software called Encarta on CD-Rom was regarded as cutting edge use of technology for encyclopedic content. That encyclopedias might not be traditionally editorially controlled and might instead be participatory by the next major Windows release was not anticipated by Bill Gates in his published book The Road Ahead in 1995 or its heavily revised 1996 reprint.

Many innovations after the achievement of software monopoly never reached the masses or if they did, many years later than when they first appeared. IBM OS/2 never replaced Windows 95, though some considered it more advanced. By 1997, an operating system called BeOS had been introduced with instant-on boot, 64-bit, journaling, indexing and metadata tags, but this too never reached the masses. The first 32-bit internet web browser, with FTP client, usenet group reader and internet relay chat (IRC) client was not from Microsoft but from Cyberjack in 1995. But by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows just as the internet was taking off, Microsoft was able to delay tabbed web browsing as standard (until 2006) which already existed in the relatively popular Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer became so popular for about 5 years after 2001 that it felt no need to introduce a new version. By then it could no longer ignore the threat of Mozilla Firefox (loosely descended from Netscape) which was rapidly gaining market share.

At least, the marketing for new versions of Windows did claim to offer usability improvements and fix the many problems identified in previous versions rather than just eye-candy. What became clear beyond any doubt was that software was getting inflated at a rate roughly in proportion to each passing year (faster than Moore’s Law). Benchmarking tests are one way to test this, and are sometimes used in the independent computing press.

Bill Gates commented: ‘I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs […] We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis’ (Focus Magazine 23 October 1995).

The vision of ‘a computer in every home’ began to look dated. Instead, focus shifted to encouraging existing computer users to upgrade software. It suited hardware manufacturers that software updates should make older computers slower. Whereas the earlier trend was for first-time hardware sales to come packaged with software, now software sales (with artificial barriers)  would drive the need to buy new hardware.

Games also played a big part in driving early hardware sales of the first personal computers in the home. Games revenue eventually overtook the movie and music industry and games were even described as the leading artform of the era. The latest ‘Call of Duty’ game was the biggest entertainment launch ever in revenue terms. Games helped drive the industry upgrades but many users’ reluctance to upgrade persisted, and Windows sales through retail channels continued to decline. Planned obsolescence needed introducing more forcefully, and subscriber-computing and the internet was about to offer the opportunity to do it.

The emergence of viruses and malware on the burgeoning internet helped the software update industry. The idea of software spying on the user or otherwise compromising privacy, was something malware and viruses did, not legitimate software. Users owned their software and anything else was an alien concept. As one user on MSFN.org put it:

  ‘I will never understand why users tolerate or accept this. If an individual or company demanded that you prove that you did not steal your home or car, you’d eventually file some kind of complaint or harassment charges against them. If the same standards that are used for applications were applied to operating systems, XP and newer systems would be classified as spyware. Windows has been going in the opposite direction for some time, with each new version giving the user less control over what it does and less access to the data it stores.’

This comfortable position of around 90 percent market share could not be threatened by any rivals. Journalists of the computing press might have been tempted to describe the hardware and software monopolies as the end of home personal computing history. But to do so, would have been as foolish as Francis Fukuyama’s claim to have reached ‘The End of History’ a decade earlier.

DJW

Link to Part 2

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 2 of 2 – The 21st Century (2012)

From the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The Internet versus the iPod

The first year of the 21st Century was a remarkable one for mass personal computing in many respects including the launches of Windows XP, the iPod and Wikipedia. In 2001, XP was introduced for both home and office users – for over a decade, these had been separate. For home users it was the first version of Windows that required activation (Microsoft Office soon followed suit). Installation CDs were not included with new XP computers which discouraged experimenting with alternative systems. Various legal and illegal projects took the XP operating system and stripped it down for performance gains, proving it could still be functional with less bloatware. Windows Media Player was ‘bundled’ (included in the installation) but was still unpopular, being bloated with eye-candy, and many users replaced it. XP also removed the command-line interface option, a key route out for power users.

The Scratchware Manifesto (at the Home of the Underdogs website) sums up the state of games development but the comment equally applies to software generally.

  “An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labour, that no single creative vision can survive. … You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon – last year’s number 1 best-selling game – almost entirely on his own. What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior. You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game cost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developed for nothing, by a development team working as a labour of love, in their spare time.”

It wasn’t that Microsoft was incapable of innovation, nor was it a company uniquely bad for users’ needs. Windows XP actually introduced decent multi-user accounts albeit some 10 years after Linux. But Microsoft has held back many features that might have made life easier for users. In Windows Neptune, Microsoft experimented with task-orientated interfaces (allowing users to focus specifically on relevant tasks without unnecessary screen clutter) pre-empting by about a decade those of the Chromebook and Ubuntu Linux Unity. Unlike XP however, Windows Neptune was never released. Driven by short-term commercial and compatibility considerations, the standard desktop metaphor of files and folders remained for the mass of users while no-one got to hear about alternatives. Microsoft even tried to incorporate the desktop metaphor into the Windows phone, which finally proved its uselessness beyond all doubt. Windows 8, predicted for release at the end of this year, finally drops the desktop metaphor to some extent. Eventually perhaps Microsoft will provide features long in existence such as live CD/USBs from which you can run an operating system, bespoke installations rather than bloated generic ones, unattended installations you don’t have to babysit, and installation direct from USB.

The internet had effects on the industry in ways which both benefitted and hindered users. At the turn of the millennium, the hacker ethic of sharing was dramatically revived, Napster popularised peer-to-peer sharing of information, principally music. It was tremendously popular and free access but it was also illegal. After Napster’s demise at the hands of the industry, Apple launched iTunes Store in 2003 which was only accessed through iTunes software and could only update iPods. Such artificial software ‘lock-ins’ were a way to stimulate hardware sales in the post “computer in every home” heyday.

The sharing ethic was also channelled into legal collaborative efforts. Many innovations came from the Free and Open Source Software movements. Linux had become a workable operating system for ordinary home users and Knoppix introduced the first popular live-CD environment. Puppy Linux stripped down bloated operating systems without harming functionality and proved modern software can run on old systems. Debian Linux was software with an ethical sharing philosophy. Wikipedia dwarfed all of these innovations, becoming one of the biggest encyclopedias in human history. Several CD-Rom based encyclopedias that had been considered so innovative only a few years before promptly went bust.

Analysing the trend

Criticism of the industry is varied and to some extent constrained by the industry press reliance on advertising revenue from the targets of their criticism. Some criticism is little more than vendor tribalism, but some goes deeper, exploring the mode of production itself. In one popular article, commentator Joel Spolsky in December 2003 claimed somewhat idealistically that making software is not a production process, as if design is not part of production.  Some, like Eric S. Raymond, came up with a novel critique. He makes much of the open source aspect, but little of the free access part. In a 2008 essay he says “More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; I’ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, it’s neither my business nor anyone else’s but his customer’s what the terms of sale are.” This is similar to those who complain that software encloses content in “walled gardens” and want to tear down the walls, but are still content to let the produce of these gardens be exploited by private interests.

The most radical voices tend to come from the free software movement who add free access (an aspect of freeware) to their open source critique of walled gardens. Even among these advocates it is becoming clear that the free access and open source software is not enough. Founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds complained of the “users are idiots mentality” on 12 December 2005.

  “This “users are idiots, and are confused by functionality” mentality … is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.”

The present

This leads us to the present where the industry has resorted to practices blatantly not in the interest of users such as the Microsoft policy to “extend, embrace, extinguish open standards”. Software aims for complete simplicity for the mass of home users while at the same time being increasingly difficult for power users to work with. App stores are characterised by software or content as a commodity with ultimate control by the store owner, which is a far cry from the hacker ethic. Even free software supporters talk approvingly of creating app stores. Maybe they would even support remotely bricking (disabling) iPhones if they are jailbroken (hacked) in order to update their applications.

Some primitivists seek solace in retro-computing and oldversion.com has the slogan “because newer is not always better”. Meanwhile Microsoft markets new versions of Windows with gimmicks including a 3D desktop, better voice recognition, touchscreen and Office with a ribbon interface. These gimmicks extend to using bogus version numbers. Windows 7 was actually revealed to be marketing hype and known internally as Windows 6.1, meaning that it was a lot less different than it pretended. Microsoft is working on artificially locking new hardware to only work with Microsoft operating systems, no doubt calling this better ‘security’. Windows 8 invites users to hand over the ability to wipe clean their computer data to remote Microsoft servers, supposedly for greater ease of use. Then there is ‘shovelware’. Sales of new hardware are driven by low prices subsidised by advertisers who ‘shovel’ in pre-installed low-value software as advertising filler.

Conclusion

The personal computer revolution bears comparison to the Industrial Revolution, only the personal computer revolution has happened more quickly. The sum of all human knowledge will soon be available at our fingertips. The tools to create any recordable media such as film, music and books will be too. ‘Infosocialists’ such as Anonymous and HackBloc (whose motto is ‘Exploit code not people’), the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman all support the free software movement and co-operative enterprises such as GNU/Linux. There are also Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation who approvingly argue that ‘free culture helps free markets’, clearly only seeing part of the solution from a socialist perspective. History and industry trends show that all code should be the common treasury of all and developers should be encouraged to develop passive consumers into empowered knowledgeable end users. Although Marx wrote some notebooks on the history of technology they are now lost, so perhaps the last word should go to Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain’s predictions of the end of personal computing.

  “The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.” (Jonathan Zittrain, 2011)

DJW 

Further reading

Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (1983) by Nathan Rosenberg (particularly Chapter 2).

Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society (1994, 2004) by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Treason pamphlet

Cyber-Marx (1999) by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

The Anarchist in the Library (2004) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Free Culture (2004) Lawrence Lessig.

Free culture, P2P networks, alternative economic models, and why some people do not want freedom (2005) by Jorge Cortell

Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto (2006) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Why I Hate Proprietary Software (2008) by Eric S. Raymond.

Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009) by Amy E. Wendling.

Free Software, Free Society (2010) by Richard Stallman.

Sting in the Tail: Tory duplicity (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory duplicity

John Maples is the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Part of his duties consists in keeping the Prime Minister informed about the party’s reputation with the electorate. Towards this end he sent a memorandum to John Major with all sorts of suggestions on how to manipulate the media and con the electorate. Nothing unusual in that, but unfortunately the media got a hold of the document.

In a refreshingly honest report Mr Maples, a former Treasury minister, blew the gaff on all that Tory electioneering nonsense.

  "Although in the eighties the Conservatives seemed to promise a classless society of opportunity, the reality is now that the rich are getting richer on the backs of the rest, who are getting poorer. " (Guardian, 22 November)

This will hardly come as a startling revelation to Mr Major or, for that matter, readers of the Socialist Standard.


Size does matter

The news that the Halifax and Leeds building societies plan to merge and become a bank has probably, as one newspaper put it,“sounded the death knell of the building society movement”.

Mutual societies have been losing market share of mortgage lending to the banks — down last year from 63 percent to 58 percent, and they blame this on the Building Societies Act which restricts their access to the wholesale money market and to providing other financial services.

If the merger goes through then the new bank will be able to compete with “the Big Four” banks and expand into selling unit trusts, pensions, etc. Roger Boyes of the Leeds regretted that the Leeds would no longer be a mutual society but added:

  “The mutual movement has been getting smaller and smaller, and businesses which don't grow are left to wither on the vine" (Guardian, 26 November).

What do the dreamers of the “small is beautiful” variety have to say to that?


Kids and capitalism

The charity organisation Save The Children, which has been in existence for 75 years, has published a report showing how children have fared throughout the world in the last ten years. It makes sorry reading.

  “Other chilling factors in this report are — 4 million children have been disabled, maimed, blinded or brain damaged in war — 12 million have lost their homes — 1 million have been separated from their families (The Herald, 17 November).

And what does this charity propose be done about these horrors?

  “The report was launched by Terry Waite, the former Beirut hostage, who called for the banning of devastating landmines, a halt to international arms trade and more diplomacy to head off conflict."

After 75 years they still cannot see that capitalism leads to war. How many more kids must suffer before we call a halt to capitalism's carnage?


Civilisation?

We have been sent an interesting article about computer games in the Guardian's “Online” supplement (6 October) in which Jack Schofield claims that “for the past three years, Civilisation has been widely regarded as the world’s greatest computer game”.

Apparently, this game “. . . covers the great sweep of history; you start with a single settler in 6000 BC and end up taking a spaceship to the stars”.

Sounds fun? Alas, Schofield says it “has problems” because:

  “People have tried to play it in a friendly fashion, co-operating with rival civilisations for the general good. This doesn't work. The way to win is to wipe out rivals as quickly as possible, saving only one enemy city to avoid ending the game. The more aggressively you play, the better the results."

The games people play and watch in capitalism will inevitably reflect the society in which they live, so the games are almost always competitive and adversarial with the emphasis on defeating opponents. This applies to football, rugby, boxing, etc., and computer games are no exception.


Clueless in Gaza

Last April we dealt on this page with an ITV news item which showed the new police force in the soon-to-be-independent Palestine being trained in the use of clubs. We said:

  “Seems the Palestinian freedom fighters, like those in many other countries, are going to learn what they have been fighting for. No doubt they will be filled with patriotic pride at the thought of being attacked by a club-wielding Palestinian cop rather than an Israeli thug. ”

The truth of this was shown by the recent killing of 14 demonstrators in Gaza by the Palestinian police. Instead of facing the might of the Israeli state those “freedom fighters” now face that of Yasser Arafat's PLO state. National independence makes such a difference, doesn’t it?


Some horse sense

In the days before the tractor, horses used to pull ploughs. Young horses were fed oats and had the best of veterinary care. When they became old they stopped work and young horses were put in the shafts. The old horses were sold to the glue factory.

The young horses didn't know about this.

Inside modern capitalism young workers are taught in schools, colleges and universities to work. They are given medical care and every Friday are given a lump of sugar.

When they grow old they are replaced by young workers. They are given a gold watch and allowed to die slowly from neglect and poverty.

Young workers should know about this.

Voice From the Back: Kill Capitalism (2015)

The Voice From the Back column from the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kill capitalism

You want to know more about socialism, who are you gonna call? Jeremy Corbyn? Antonio Costa? Bernie Sanders? No, they can’t see beyond capitalism. You will learn more from the console/computer game Assassin’s Creed, where Marx’s call for workers of the world to unite is repeated along with the following biography: ‘Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 – 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, journalist and sociologist considered the founder of the ideology of Marxism … Throughout his life, Marx published several books, the most famous of which are arguably The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, as well as subsequent economic thought. Although many revolutionaries, such as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro would later cite Marx as an influence, their fidelity to Marx’s ideas is highly contested’ (assassinscreed.wikia.com, accessed 7 November).

Same shit, different century

‘Communist [sic] dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s iron-fisted rule of Romania was marked by several decades of brutal repression, fear and intimidation. But the most shocking details to emerge after his death were the conditions in the country’s orphanages — where thousands of emaciated and diseased babies were found slowly dying in filth infested cradles. Images of their plight shocked the world when broadcast in 1989. Now, 25 years on, these orphans have been found still living rough in underground sewers throughout the country — where diseases such as HIV run rampant and drug addiction is rife’ (dailymail.co.uk, 6 November). State capitalism then, crony capitalism today.

Cruising to Chernobyl

Capitalism can seem like a crazy system where war, waste and want exist alongside wanton excess. Yet these are endemic features of a form of society which has outlived its usefulness rather than crazy per se. However, the following news item suggests that exceptions are to be found. ‘Plans to link a chain of rivers and canals in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine may release radioactivity from the remains emitted by the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster of 1986, environmental experts say. The project, which would complete a huge trans-Europe waterway, is designed to increase trade between the three north European states, and to foster tourism and encourage more environmentally-friendly freight transport … Andrei Rehesh, secretary of the Commission on the Development of the E40 Waterway, the European Commissions name for the trans-Europe link, told journalists visiting the canal near Brest of the regular trips made through the zone by the river craft. These take them within an estimated 500 meters of the Chernobyl plant itself’ (truthdig.com, 1 November).

Blood money

We would like to think that bear baiting is extinct, but it continues in Pakistan and the USA. Similarly barbaric, cock fighting takes place in many countries. One clue as to why is given here: ‘ at the Bangkok Cockpit in Samut Prakan, a province on the outskirts of the capital, a 1,000-strong throng cheers on a pair of avian fighters whose necks are locked in combat as bets furiously exchange hands … A few weeks later the same stadium raked in 22.2 million baht ($618,000) for a record-breaking bet, venue manager Banjerd Janyai told AFP. In this lucrative industry “good fighting birds” can sell for more than $85,000, he added, with Thailand exporting cocks to neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia and buyers arriving from as far afield as France and Bahrain’ (news.yahoo.com, 1 November).

Unsafe sex in a dangerous world

‘Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar will leave for Moscow and St. Petersburg Friday, October 30 to finalize two defense deals …(over $1.8 billion USD) to acquire new equipment that (were) just approved by the Defense Acquisitions Council’ (valuewalk, 1 November). Meanwhile, in the world of the 99 percent, we read ‘India provides free condoms under its community-based AIDS prevention programme that targets high-risk groups like sex workers … The shortages come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi slashed federal AIDS funding in February by a fifth’ (asaiaone.com, 6 November).

No pies!

Capitalism exists worldwide. Nearly one in four Americans have more credit card debt than emergency savings and two out of three exist paycheck to paycheck. Yet members of the 1% have money to burn. Take Kanye West for example. He ‘… spends a whopping £120,000 a YEAR on getting his hair done …’ (heatworld,com, 3 November). Clearly it is time for capitalism to meet its Sweeney Todd in the form of an enlightened working class.

Holiday postscript (1981)

From the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Long before Christianity a festive break during the dark, cold winter months helped people to get through the most trying time of the year. To replace celebration of the winter solstice, early Christians decided to celebrate the birth of Christ on 25 December; historically incorrect, but necessary to combat the appeal of the heathen jollifications.

Whatever the excuse, the holiday is over. We have had our parties—probably eaten and drunk a bit too much, certainly spent more money than we meant or could afford and, thankfully, waved goodbye to relatives and friends whom we genuinely welcomed at the start of the holidays. Listening to the radio on New Year's Day, one particular thought came uppermost. Money—"vast profits" to quote the narrator in Woman's Hour—are made, particularly during the season of "Peace and Goodwill"—from belligerence. 

The Daily Telegraph, in a number of pre-Christmas items, mentioned that in spite of—or perhaps because of—unemployment and the "difficult times" people seemed determined to enjoy the holiday; toy shops were doing a good trade, and by far the most successfully selling lines were guns, soldiers and war games.

Supermarketing of 21 November reviewed the snacks market, which has grown from 85 million in 1970 to an estimated 450 million in 1980. 70 per cent of all snacks are eaten by children, although the purchasing is split 50/50 between parents and children. With such vast sums at stake, it is vital for manufacturers to "get their sums right" when launching new products, and it seems Smith's have done it again with their "Battle Bags". Their research team went out with over two dozen concepts like space, sport and war, but Frank Richardson, their marketing manager, said:

We have always believed that there is no long term mileage to be gained by associating our products with current crazes . . . We were therefore seeking a subject which . . . would have long-term appeal. War won hands down and so we decided to introduce Battle Tanks and Fighter Planes under the overall umbrella of the Battle Bags name.

The programme which started off this train of thought dealt with the huge success of computer games. Addicts and psychologists who were interviewed stated that the main appeal was that, to play successfully, one really had to stretch one's mind/ Concentration and involvement is such that they often found themselves shaking with nervous tension after a game. Apparently the most successful game is Space Wars, and it is ironic that the inventors of this, as well as the other games, are Japanese, who still commemorate in most dramatic fashion the horrific happenings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, let us end on a optimistic note. These computer games were originally invented to train space pilots in manipulation and navigation of their craft. The representative of one of the manufacturers foresaw games being produced which could be used to plan agriculture and the best use of resources, especially in under-developed countries. Used in this way, they would not only stimulate the mind, but help a socialist society to organise best use of the world's resources for the good of the world's community.

Eva Goodman