Proper Gander: Tell A Vision In Turkmenistan (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The Common Good, Noam Chomsky said that ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum’ (p.43). Applied to television, this principle still holds widely today, perhaps more than when Chomsky was writing in 1998. Not so, though, in countries such as Turkmenistan, which has only adopted the first half of the maxim in their TV broadcasts. Whether this makes their way less ‘smart’ is presumably shown in how effective it is in engineering a limited ‘spectrum of acceptable opinion’.

Turkmenistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, was part of the Soviet Union, and when this collapsed, its government became even more autocratic. The current President, Serdar Berdimuhamedow, succeeded his father in 2022 as the head of the regime. Any opposition to the government is considered to be treason and can be punishable by life imprisonment. Concurrently, the state controls what information its subjects are given, partly to exclude any conflicting viewpoints. Most citizens have no access to the World Wide Web, and instead can only use the Turkmenet, a restricted version of the internet. There is little opportunity for independent journalists: Turkmenistan ranks among the countries with the least ‘freedom of the press’ at 174th out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ 2025 World Press Freedom Index. Similarly, television broadcasts are subject to stringent controls, more than in other authoritarian regimes; the range of channels and content available in Afghanistan and Myanmar is very diverse in comparison. All eight channels broadcast in Turkmenistan are run by the state. The main channel is Altyn Asar, which shows news and reports on agriculture and technology, extolling how the country is supposedly constantly improving under the President’s rule, the ‘Golden Age’ referred to by its name. The only news programme – called Watan – broadcasts simultaneously on multiple channels, including Türkmen Owazy, dedicated to music and Ýaşlyk (‘Youth’ in English), an entertainment channel, with dramas and comedies missing from the schedules. Foreign content and influences are not allowed, although the game show Ondan Bir has taken the format of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the twist that the winner isn’t shown receiving a prize.

Commodities such as rugs, stationery and jewellery are displayed in reports about well-stocked market stalls or even during music performances. This isn’t as ‘product placement’ to advertise them, though; what’s being promoted is the nation as bountiful and industrious. The same motivation is behind the footage of the capital city, which presents Ashgabat as slick and brightly lit, with crisp skyscrapers, fountains, statues and arches in white and gold, streamlined streets for cars to glide along, and no litter or graffiti. Few people are seen outside unless they’re participating in dance routines or military parades, both tightly choreographed and polished. Music is especially prominent across the channels, from power ballads to jingoistic anthems to folk music, although some suspiciously looks dubbed. Particularly striking is an up-tempo song performed by women in camouflage skirts in front of weaponry.

The channels are mouthpieces of the state, intended to promote its preferred vision of the nation to the populace. The meticulously-arranged performances and pristine buildings are supposed to reflect a meticulously-arranged and pristine nation.

While the propaganda is obvious, an indicator of this is that smiles are rarely seen. Most people on the parades or in game shows or recitals, and notably their audiences too, have a flat expression. They don’t smile because they live in fear and have very little to smile about, according to Joshua Perry Parker in his video on YouTube: TV in Turkmenistan is Insane. When the state machine is as oppressive as in Turkmenistan, being an ‘appendage to the machine’ makes people behave in machine-like ways. Those in the marches or music performances look dehumanised, not just in how they run through their routines but also by their starchy uniforms. Even the traditional national dress, which is colourful and decoratively-patterned, manages to look hollow in the context of the programmes. Homogeneity is plainly presented as a virtue. Minority groups are unseen on TV and also face persecution, with gay relationships between men being illegal, for example. Workers living their lives, whether in the city or beyond, are never shown. Rural areas are only represented as backdrops to music videos or as abundant fields of wheat or cotton.

It’s hard to gauge how successful Turkmenistan’s TV output is with shaping mindsets or limiting the ‘spectrum of acceptable opinion’; its viewers don’t have the opportunity to give feedback. The content is supposed to instil a sense of pride and loyalty towards the country, whether through news reports announcing a fleet of tractors or through the frequent songs and music. The emphasis on culture demonstrates that patriotism is the preferred angle used by the state, although nationalism is also pushed through the military displays. The social conservatism exhorted by the state isn’t as directly expressed on TV, as it doesn’t feature many social situations, although the regimented people who are allowed in front of the cameras reflect the repressive norms. While the TV in Turkmenistan shows us little about the lives of those struggling there, it shows us a lot about the approach of the country’s rulers. The class divide is depressingly stark, with the President as the figurehead of a wealthy capitalist class, outnumbered by the poorer vast majority who rely on what their wages can afford. The broadcasts try to disguise this divide by only presenting what the capitalist class wants to be seen. Any indoctrination is probably less successful outside the main city of Ashgabat, where workers can see clearer that their reality doesn’t match that portrayed on screen. Also, those living in rural areas often pick up satellite channels from Russia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, opening them up to other forms of propaganda.

Mike Foster

Sensitive Content Warning . . .

Help me out here. 

Just stumbled across the following 'warning' that concerns the April 2015 Voice From The Back column, which appeared on the blog in March 2019:

The warning from blogger did not pop up at the time. It's obviously something that been flagged in recent months. Is it the passing reference to Russia's predatory 'interest' in Eastern Ukraine? Is it about gender inequality in Saudi Arabia or is it about the lack of basic sanitation for tens of millions of people in Pakistan? Blogger doesn't tell me. It's a real head scratcher.

Looking forward to future 'Sensitive Content Warnings'.

Pathfinders: Sorry, Page Cannot Be Displayed (2006)

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

Sorry, Page Cannot Be Displayed

“Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” Tom Lantos of the US House International Relations subcommittee was pulling no punches when upbraiding representatives of Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Google for their supine acquiescence to the Chinese government’s insistence on strict censorship in their search engines. He further told them that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility” (BBC Online, Feb 15). Google recently agreed to block politically ‘sensitive’ sites and even words, including the word ‘democracy’, while Yahoo has recently been accused by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders of handing over information to the Chinese authorities that resulted in an 8 year prison sentence for the writer Li Zhi in 2003 and a 10 year stretch for another writer, Shi Tao, in April 2005.

But with an internet population of 111 million, the largest outside the US, China is hard to resist, and service providers who resist its charismatic charms, or who debate political ethics, are likely to end up in history as footnotes. This is globalisation, after all, and arguably it’s not all as bad as it sounds. Accusations that these companies are assisting China to suppress rebellion in return for market share is not entirely fair, since the world saw graphically how well China was able to suppress open rebellion entirely by its own efforts. Chinese capitalism is moving towards liberalisation because liberal capitalism is cheaper and easier to run than state repressive capitalism, and the entry of western IT into China is the thin end of the liberal wedge, bound even though it presently is by guards and restrictions. And unlike Yahoo, Google shows on its search results page which sites have been blocked, so that users in China do at least know that they are being censored. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we knew what information was being denied to us in the West?

PVI PDQ?

Hold the front page! Sex is good for you, says study! Acute stress is relieved by sex, according to new research from the University of Paisley, UK (New Scientist, Jan 28). If this sounds like one of those studies scientists frequently conduct simply to prove the galloping obvious, here’s the twist – it has to be penetrative vaginal sex, because other forms including masturbation don’t work as well, and abstinence doesn’t work at all. Of those studied when put in a high stress situation, those who had had exclusively penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) recovered fastest, followed by those who had had non-coital sex or simply masturbated. Abstainers had the highest blood pressure and took longest to recover. The researcher, Stuart Brody, speculated that the result might be caused by a ‘pair-bonding’ hormone called oxytocin, released during penetrative sex.

What the study doesn’t show, of course, is the states of mind of those involved. It seems logical to Pathfinders at least that those having PVI are also most likely to be those enjoying another, more unquantifiable, phenomenon: love. So could it be love that takes the stress away, rather than the sex?

At any event, capitalism has done the same antisocial thing to sex that it has done to food, clothes, shelter, and all those other little needs of ours – it has commodified it, which means in practice that a very large proportion of the population have no access to it. It will be very interesting, once the brutal and human-hating engine of capitalist market culture has been switched off, to rerun these studies. Pathfinders suspects that there will be a lot more sex, and a lot less stress, all round.

Life Sentence

Further to our enquiry (Socialist Standard, Feb 2006) concerning the dubious benefit of living longer in capitalism, apparently we can already look forward to the even more dubious appeal of 75 year mortgages and a retirement age of 85 (BBC Online, Feb 17).

Shripad Tuljapurkar, a biologist from Stanford University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis that anti-ageing advances could raise life expectancy by a year each year over the next two decades. This was, he thought, going to put a strain on social security and medical care, unless the retirement age was raised. Translated, what this means is that the capitalist class is damned if it’s going to pay for workers to have a long holiday from hard labour when they could be nose to the grindstone for another twenty years, or until they drop dead.

The biologist did add that the trend towards longevity would create a “permanent underclass” in poor countries that didn’t have the same resources. Sadly, this underclass already exists, and living to the age of 45 would be an achievement for many members of it.

‘Fiasco’ in Chad.

Imagine giving a mugger your wallet on condition that he only used the money to look after homeless kittens. This is pretty much what the World Bank did when, in collaboration with Exxon Mobil, it invested $4.2 bn to develop oilfields in southern Chad and then build a pipeline to pump all this lovely oil through neighbouring Cameroon to the coast.

Now as everyone knows, Chad is a corrupt dictatorship with no record of respecting human rights or giving two hoots about its own poverty-stricken population, but the government was surprisingly keen to agree to use the profits from all this oil development to invest in social healthcare programmes, a condition the pious World Bank insisted on. Now that the work has been done and the pipeline in place, the Chad government has – shock, horror! – reneged on the deal and used the first profits for what it euphemistically calls ‘internal security’, ie. suppress poverty-inspired revolts and also, probably, start another war with Sudan (New Scientist, Feb 11).

Pathfinders would like to offer its services to the World Bank as consultant (at appropriate fees) the next time it plans to make a deal with a despotic bunch of crooks. Predicting this cock-up would have been easy money. But the suspicion is that the World Bank is not really as naïve as it looks, and that in among the hand-wringing a satisfactory deal has been done. Exxon Mobil, for one, must be crying all the way to the bank.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Capitalism’s Holy Grail (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s an easy question – what’s your view of censorship? If you’re a socialist and a democrat, you’re probably against it. After all, you argue, the only really effective way to combat bad ideas is to bring them out in the open and put them up against good ideas, and you can’t do that if the bad ideas aren’t allowed to circulate in the first place.The battle of ideas must be fought in public or it becomes totalitarianism.

So how fares this public battle today? Not well, actually. Everyone knows that society has changed rapidly in the last two decades. The mass-market passive consumerism of the twentieth century has given way to the individualistic, two-way street of the internet. But instead of this opening up debate it seems to have done the opposite. Very few people would include a public political meeting as part of their normal week’s activity. Street-corner debates are a distant memory for the oldest among us. Now ideas don’t normally challenge each other in large open auditoriums. Instead they exist in largely separate and closed worlds where each person sees what they want to see.

This is not to say that the concern over social media echo chambers should be overstated. Social media groups tend to reflect the organic composition of friendship networks, which don’t typically consist of one exclusive type of belief or idea. Sure, you may not be besties with a Tory, but you probably know one or two, and you may have friends or relatives who think differently from you on a lot of issues. Social networks are like Venn diagrams, overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional nest. Comfort zones they may be, but most people don’t want or expect them to be hermetically sealed. At least, not reasonable people.

But in the pressured depths of the web where reasonable people don’t go there are unmoderated groups where something quite different is going on. Here the most one-dimensional views are expressed, and there are no dissenting voices to challenge them. Here is where a macabre game of Dare is played out. Far-right bedroom trolls take over a forum and use it as a playground to make violent death threats against black people, Hispanics, Moslems, Jews, gays or some other minority. It’s just talk at first, but the feedback loop ramps it up as each participant tries to outdo the last. Finally someone ups the ante to the limit, thereby winning the kudos and respect of all participants. What is this limit? Carrying out the death threat in reality.

This is what is thought to have happened on the 8chan discussion forum prior to the shootings in El Paso in August, when 22 people were killed and 24 injured, and the next day in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were shot dead and 27 injured. 8chan was also used by the shooter in April’s Poway synagogue shooting in California, and in the mosque massacres of Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, where 51 were killed and 49 injured, and where the shooter live-streamed the massacres on Facebook.

Let’s take a moment to revisit that ethical question on your view of censorship. Given the track record of 8chan, if it was in your power to close it down by pressing a big Kill button, would you do it? Or would you defend 8chan in the name of free speech, saying as some US Republicans did at the time, that’s the price you pay for liberty?

Of course there was no shortage of hackers keen to take 8chan down. One easy way to do that would have been to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on it by bombarding it with traffic until its servers ground to a halt. But this wasn’t possible because the site was protected by online security firm Cloudflare. After the Dayton shootings however, the owner of Cloudflare finally pulled the plug, saying: ‘8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate. They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths’ (BBC News, 5 August – bbc.in/2lX1r6T).

8chan duly went offline almost immediately, however its users will certainly migrate to a different forum and continue as before. Even if you agree that ‘free speech’ has limits and such sites need to be stopped, the question is how. The internet is just too big.

Artificial Intelligence is held up as the great unbiased censor, the thing that might save society from its own worst nightmares, however the hype around AI is a good deal more advanced than the technology itself. AI is good in situations with finite options and clear rules, which is why it can beat the world’s top game-players. But ask it to make a value judgment or an ethical call, and it won’t have a clue.

Εven so, it’s good enough to ‘benevolently’ censor you. AI manages what you see on the GAFA big four (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), sifting your data to serve up what it thinks you will like and hiding what you won’t. That’s why two people doing the same Google search will get different results. Meanwhile YouTube’s algorithms attempt to keep users on-site by serving up material on a ‘same-but-even-more-so’ basis. With an estimated 500 hours of material loaded every minute, YouTube can’t possibly keep track of its content. Thus, right-wing extremists end up being offered ever more extreme right-wing material, so that the site may be upping the ante in the same way as 8chan. Some people are demanding that it changes its algorithms in favour of more balance, while others are calling for it to be shut down altogether (New Scientist, 24 August).

There is, though, another reason to be highly resistant to any kind of censorship. What if they turn it on us? In China open dissent is impossible. People have to use secretive Virtual Private Networks to hide their identity when accessing forbidden western resources like Wikipedia. No wonder Hong Kongers are fearful. Who’s to say other states wouldn’t adopt Chinese tactics if it saved them money and created more docile populations?

What’s worrying about certain one-dimensional internet trends and also calls for more censorship is their general intention to disable the human critical faculty. They’re not interested in debate, they are engaged in whiter-than-white brainwashing, and never mind the victims or the collateral damage. In a way that’s the holy grail of capitalism too. It aims to create the perfect customer, even at the cost of the perfect storm.

Paddy Shannon

Brief Reports (2012)

The Brief Reports Column from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Researchers have discovered that temperatures in Antarctica 50 million years ago were warm enough for palm trees to grow. They also point out that temperatures in Greenland are now warm enough for palm trees to grow. A climatologist commented: ‘Travel companies are missing a trick – I predict Eskimo Sun Tours and Seal-Club 18-30 holidays.’ A local Inuit fisherman added: ‘Phew, what a scorcher. I’m down to my string vest. It’s Arctantastic!’

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The dust has finally settled and the crowds have gone home after the greatest competition of games in the modern era, with a raft of new world records set in jumping over obstacles, throwing things, batting things backwards and forwards, lots of rowing, and endless running round in circles. A spokesman for the G8 said last week: ‘If only we gave out medals it would be just like the Olympics. Otherwise it’s a lot of strenuous effort signifying nothing. Capitalism needs the G8 like a pentathlete needs a groin strain. We may as well make a game out of it.’

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Auditors have found that the Department of Work and Pensions has been paying a company to pass dead people as fit to work. French firm Atos was paid more than £112m in the last financial year to carry out about 738,000 face-to-face medical tests on people who later turned out to be deceased. 80 percent of these dead people were pronounced ‘fit and able to work’. A spokesperson for Atos said it worked very closely with the DWP on a “complex and challenging contract” to “fulfil all our contractual obligations”. He added ‘in any large enough sample there will be a statistically significant number of stiffs. Our staff are trained to spot benefit fraudsters, not signs of life.’ Four out of 10 appeals for live claimants are upheld at tribunals.

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Vladimir Putin has intervened to commute the sentences imposed on Pussy Riot activists, on condition their publicity agents come and work for him. A Kremlin aide stated earlier: ‘All that attention over one crap song in a church – who wouldn’t want PR like that?’ Pussy Riot are famous for focussing the media spotlight on a number of derelict cultural icons including Madonna, Sting, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.

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In China this month, the sensational trial of Gu Kailai, wife of former Party boss Bo Xilai and alleged poisoner of British businessman Neil Heywood, has been plastered all over no headlines and no internet websites. The controversial trial, which has thrown the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy into serious internal disarray, has not caused a media frenzy in newspapers and editorials have not blazed with wrath over the ‘moral corruption’ at the heart of government. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, China’s two Twitter equivalents, have been buzzing with no information whatsoever about the trial. Ms Gu, known as a Communist Party ‘princess’ in China, was unavailable for interview. Foreign journalists say they suspect ‘some censorship’ may be involved.

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US woman Diana Nyad is attempting a world record swim from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida, a distance of 103 nautical miles. Nyad, who first attempted the swim in 1978, told reporters before she set off that this time she was very hopeful: ‘It helps a lot that I’m being followed stroke for stroke by 53,000 of my Cuban fans’.

Rear View: The capitalist farm (2018)

The Rear View Column from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist farm

‘China bans George Orwell’s Animal Farm and letter ‘N’ as censors bolster Xi Jinping’s plan to keep power indefinitely. Experts believe increased levels of suppression are sign Xi Jinping hopes to become dictator for life’ (independent.co.uk, 1 March). One famous phrase from this satire concerning the perversion of revolutionary aims is all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. State capitalist China has over 100 billionaires who together have wealth equal to twice Ireland’s GDP and, according to a Peking University report from 2016, its income disparity is getting worse with the top 1 percent owning a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 25 percent of the population just 1 percent. The human oppressors in Orwell’s classic are overthrown by the farm animals, but their desire for the farm to be run for the benefit of all is thwarted by the emergence of a new ruling class composed of dogs and pigs. Under new management the wealth of the farm grows but is accumulated by the rulers rather than shared. The pigs start to argue and reflecting the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, one leading pig uses his trained dogs to drive another member of the ruling class off the farm. Such struggles continue today in the real world. We are also informed ‘it was not immediately obvious why the ostensibly harmless letter ‘N’ had been banned, but some speculated it may either be being used or interpreted as a sign of dissent.’ Indeed, why not: the banished pig was called Snowball and the victor Napoleon.

Pigs in paradise

‘After long playing second fiddle to China, India has leapfrogged its rival to become the world’s fastest-growing major economy’ (theweek.co.uk, 1 March). Yet this growing prosperity for a small parasitical class has not lessened the chronic malnutrition of children; in the 2017 Global Hunger Index of 119 countries India slipped to the 100th place. In fact, this country is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry – a staggering 190.7 million people or 14.5 per cent of the population is undernourished. India also has the world’s largest number of homeless and landless persons. Furthermore, at least 5,650 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2014. Earlier this year, ‘seven workers died of suffocation…while cleaning an underground drainage pit at a poultry farm in southern India…. Such accidents are common in India, where workers clean deep drainage pits without protective gear’ (arabnews.com, 16 February). India’s ruling class prefer to use the stolen wealth elsewhere: ‘New Delhi and Moscow have finalised contractual terms for four new stealth frigates that Russia will supply the Indian Navy for slightly over Rs 200 billion ($3 billion), or about Rs 50 billion ($775 million) per vessel’ (defensetalk.com, 28 February).

Tolstoy’s farm parable

‘I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures and plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are tramping underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence. I saw the owner of the herd come to them, and when he saw their pitiful condition he was filled with compassion for them and thought of all he could do to improve their condition. So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And that they called Charity. Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing up into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should each have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast. Because they were dying off in the cold nights, he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cowsheds for the cattle. Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence, he put corks on the horns of the cattle, so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and the old cows over 70 years of age. In fact, he did everything he could think of to improve the condition of the cattle, and when I asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing, break down the fence, and let the cattle out, he answered: ‘If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them’’ (Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910, pamphlet ‘to the working classes of all nations’).

Pathfinders: Don't Be Evil (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Google have been in trouble again lately, this time for 'allowing'  ads by governments and major companies to appear next to extremist and hate videos on YouTube, making it look as if the videos are being sponsored by the likes of HMG, M&S, the Guardian and others.

The problem, as Google readily admit, is that they don't know how to prevent this happening. So-called smart filtering software does exist, but it's unrealistic to expect it always to tell the difference between appropriate and inappropriate content, given that human opinions are often divided on the subject. Current estimates vary, but in 2014 YouTube stated that 300 hours of new material were being uploaded every minute to their site, so policing that volume of content is next to impossible. Nevertheless critics are wont to demand the moon on a stick and attack Google for not doing enough to keep their house in order.

At the same time, Google has also been criticised for censorship, usually when their automated efforts to police content go wrong. An Egyptian blogger's videos of vote-rigging and police brutality were removed in 2007. A video criticising sharia law in Britain and backed by the National Secular Society was taken down in 2008. There are hundreds of other complaints about Google being either dictatorial or drippily laissez-faire, depending on the individual point of view. And YouTube was  itself blocked in Pakistan for carrying videos criticising Islam, in Turkey for videos insulting national founder Kemal Atatürk, in Thailand for unflattering remarks against the royals, in the UK and Germany for music copyright infringement, in China, Iran and Turkmenistan in virtual perpetuity, and so on.

It's not just the videos that YouTube has been castigated for. Its policy of allowing comments has repeatedly been under fire for unleashing a barrage of inane bigotry. Time Magazine complained in 2006: "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred", and the Guardian in 2015 called it "a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance" (Wikipedia). Google in 2013 decided to force viewers to create a Google+ account before they could post comments on videos, but this in turn attracted a storm of protest, even from one of YouTube's own co-founders.

This is all quite apart from controversies about aggressive tax avoidance, supposed manipulation over search results, source-code secrecy, abuse or appropriation of intellectual property, invasion of privacy and monopolistic practices. Having failed to live up to its founding motto 'Don't Be Evil' (what corporation wouldn't fail, though?), Google adopted a new motto in 2015: 'Do the right thing'. What this means is anybody's guess, but it's likely that Google won't live up to this motto either.

Google is valued at $133bn and its parent company Alphabet is listed by Forbes as the 27th largest company in the world, above IBM, General Motors, Gazprom, Intel, Boeing, Disney and Coca-Cola. Just as Uber, wriggling and writhing through its current worker-exploitation controversies by insisting it is a technology 'platform' not a taxi company, so Google aims to avoid government regulation by maintaining that it is a technology platform and not a media company (Google's crisis of confidence, BBC Online, 20 March). Whether it's allowed to get away with this in the future remains to be seen.

There is a degree of 'shoot the messenger' involved in all this. The internet has opened a hitherto unsuspected Pandora's Box of horrors including trolling, fraud, cyberbullying, revenge porn and general 'net rage' which reveals the crawling underbelly of capitalism in its harshest light. Young people, caught up in this ferocious storm of cruelty, have been driven to suicide. Pious pundits may wonder where all this rage and cruelty comes from, but socialists are not under any illusions. Happy people are not cruel. Anger runs through capitalism like 'Brighton' runs through a stick of rock. What people are angry about is the conditions they live under in capitalism, and the oppressive power relations that grind them down. Of course it's in the nature of power relations that you can't take your oppressor out into the street and punch his face in. So people vent their anonymous spite on each other instead, and then everybody blames Google for 'allowing' it all to happen. Maybe when they said 'Don't be evil' they didn't mean themselves.

What would Google and YouTube look like in socialism? Not that different, in some ways. But passwords and paywalls would be obsolete, to general relief, as would pop-up ads, banners and flashes, not to mention adware and spyware and porn links. Search results would tend to reflect genuinely popular sites, as they mostly now do, but without web developers having a money incentive to 'game' the rankings systems to promote bogus sites. But perhaps the most noticeable difference would be the disappearance of the obsessive cult of online secrecy, including the 'dark web', and the consequent freedom presently enjoyed by some in capitalism - the freedom to abuse, bully, libel, humiliate and torture someone, sometimes to death, while cosily wrapped in layers of anonymity, safe from discovery. That's not a freedom anyone will want in socialism.

Wiki Games

How accurate is Wikipedia? A recent study of Wikipedia produced a very interesting result. It turned out that Wikipedia's own army of 'bots' - autonomous editing and web maintenance programs - have been engaged in a relentless war with each other for at least a decade, changing and rechanging each other's edits, backwards and forwards, without let or quarter (Link.). As a study author put it, 'humans would have given up by now, but bots just go on forever'. Oddly, there is no entry in Wikipedia itself about its own bot wars, which might be an oversight or else a craven example of truth being the first casualty of war. At any rate, nobody's quite sure how this happened, or what to do about it. Says one researcher: "It is crucial to understand what could affect bot-bot interactions in order to design cooperative bots that can manage disagreement, avoid unproductive conflict, and fulfill their tasks in ways that are socially and ethically acceptable."

Quite so, and perhaps when they've managed that, they can start explaining it to humans.

PJS

The Chinese Authorities don't like Socialism

All evidence points to the fact that the Marxist Internet Archive website has recently been experiencing a politically motivated attack on its server from the Chinese Authorities.

Remember that the next time an apologist for the state capitalist dictatorship - Chairman Mao franchise - gushes about the Market Socialist miracle of China or a right-wing political numpty tells you that the exploitative barbarism in Beijing is evidence that socialism can never work.

Cheers,
Darren
Inveresk Street Ingrate Blog