Focusing on Britain, it seems to me that a competent government would try to attract tech firms by lowering business taxes. Cambridge is an asset with its "Silicon Fen" which hardly anybody seems aware of. It's okay there but the long straight "bus track" is overgrown and graffiti at the bus stops.
That line of transport goes straight to the "science and tech" centre, but is more like cyberpunk dystopia, which I quite like, but no good for being seen as a key tech and biotech area. There's a quantum computing firm there.
Reduce biz taxes and set Silicon Fen up as cool and a happening place. That ought to help Britain and save the country from being a "nobody".
But is there a political party remotely able to do this? To even understand it?
As I recall, the problem with Cambridge is that it is quite simply overcrowded and so becoming sclerotic. The art of sustained productive innovation is to have it spread across a country rather than become centred on a very few ‘hot’ locations. Otherwise I agree that incentives for entrepreneurial innovation and acceptance of failure as a road to success might help a great deal.
My own experience is that, while there may be some self-interested understanding of the digital economy in some parts of Reform, the bulk of the political class (worsening as you move leftwards) know the square root of f*ck-all about the incoming revolutionary storm. There is more understanding than we might think in the City of London but it seems barely connected to the bozos at the heart of the administrative State.
Some might hope that the military-industrial strategy might change this but they are almost certainly desperate fools because the danger is that British innovation simply becomes a service function to US mega-tech. Applications should be to making welfare and social cohesion less wasteful and more efficient and then selling that overseas but I suspect that this ship has left harbour and the profits will go to Palantir and Blackrock.
British politicians strike me as just normies who think they're techies because they can use Facebook. It's a disaster. They need to have understanding of code and information systems. Actually look at what lies beneath and grasp what it means.
Plus know what decentralised systems are, and a reasonable knowledge of cyber security.
The fact is we are digital, and they're still in 1993. They also need to know how their phones work - and they don't. They use WhatsApp but are likely afraid of Signal.
The former MP Steve Baker was previously a software engineer (I think) so that was a start.
There is sprinkling of people with some technical experience in Labour but not at a very high level. Nearly all politicians are now from a distinct political class where it is actually a matter of some pride to have entered politics ‘early’ rather than to have done something else (such as worked up through a trades union or built a small business and entered politics a little later having ‘done something’ more than being a barrister or think tank staffer).
There are, of course, many who have done social work or local government or been teachers or even doctors but these are, by their very nature, at the spending end of the State machine with constant demands for solving intractable problems through ‘more money’ rather than improved organisation. The worst are those whose entire experience has been in the inefficient charitable or NGO sectors and have a single issue or ideological approach to legislation rather than an intent to drive an effective executive. The community activist who ends up in the House may be representative only of the local party machine that put him there and which expects him or her to spout whatever outrages local activists that month.
There are equivalents on the Right - upper middle class professionals who treat politics as a profession, lawyers and people whose business experience has actually been my own historic trade of public relations or public affairs but the point is not that any of these people should not be represented in Parliament (they should) but that they are disproprtionately represented, tend to a lazy careerism or a hobby horse approach to some position or issue and not to have come from either the sharp end of trying to survive in an administratively broken system (although the Left has some like Angela Rayner who have been there and survived) or have actually created or run something big (as Heseltine did) that needed to deliver something useful to at least part of the population.
The Parties then reward blind loyalty and filter out independent thought, encouraging individuals to pursue their hobby horses where they are ideological and do not require any real operational thought. They do not actually need to be technically over-proficient (the failing there is in a post-imperial generalist civil service) but they do need to know what questions to ask and to be circumspect in imposing ideals and values on facts just as the bureaucrats must abandon ideology and be effective at delivering what the people ask for. Party as intermediary is probably the problem here, neither truly representative of the population not technically qualified to oversee effective administration.
In the current case, we have the worst of both worlds - an out-of-control ideologised administrative structure that is not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with the incoming industrial revolution and the rapid changes taking place in the population and global system and a political class that lives in a fantasy land of ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ and performative behaviour within its own closed world and is incapable of demanding a better administrative system to which it cannot apply the difficult questions that it refuses to ask even of itself. It also follows popular opinion instead of educating and persuading, leading to us having the current clown in charge with a 12% approval rating and clearly with no idea what he is doing.
A total disaster, then. I wouldn't expect politicians to do IT courses. Better they aren't qualified. More to get into the real world of tech - why can't they buy a refurbished Lenovo laptop (£300) out of their own pockets and install Linux? Yes, they are busy people, but they could be running alternate tech at home, know how to FTP from phone to laptop, etc. Use AI to figure out the command line and get code.
And muck about with AI, seeing how natural language works.
This might flow down to everyday people who really don't know how to use their devices, nor security, nor easy ways to do 2FA.
Ideology doesn't really have content. It's a miasma of words going nowhere. Be practical.
In the end, most politicians are university, un-educated dimwits. If a bigger war broke out, they'd be more concerned about what wine to choose from Waitrose for that night's dinner party.
Yet war is all around them now - 5GW... so they should also school up on military academia.
Thing is all that would blow their minds apart and their cosy little worlds would evaporate.
Spot on across the board. Left out perhaps is the root cause dominant still driving Anglo-Saxon war against Russia and logically China: Anglo-Saxon Financial Criminal Class.
I am not sure it is right to speak of US finance capital as criminal any more than oligarchs in Russia or China. Criminal is just a way of differentiating those outside the law from those inside the law and should not be a synonym for ‘those I feel are morally repugnant’. Russian oligarchs were often criminals under Soviet law and not under the law of the Russian Federation and yet were the same people doing essentially the same things.
The Anglo-Saxon form of this, if they are part of formal finance capital are (largely) operating within the law with organised crime describing cartels and organisations making use of markets outside the law. A ‘liberal’ simply assumes that anything inside the law is ‘good’ and outside the law is ‘bad and yet we know that morality and law are not always the same thing just as law, morality and ethics are not necessarily the same thing. However, not all finance capital is necessarily either amoral or unethical. Similarly neither are all billionaires (far from it). It is a left wing fallacy that a billionaire is intrinsically bad or evil simply by dint of being a billionaire which is as stupid as saying that a worker is intrinsically good just by virtue of being a worker.
In this situation, we cannot entirely blame finance capital and oligarchs because they are merely rational actors acting as they do either because the law allows them to (which is the responsibility of legislators) or the law is not enforced (which is the responsibility of executives in the administrative state). It is always convenient to be morally outraged by those who behave in ways we do not like within the law or try to work around it but this is misdirection.
Any fault lies with the legislature and executive of sovereign states and, since in democracies we elect the former and elect the people who are said to control the latter, we the people are at fault because we continue to elect people who promote laws protecting predatory or asocial behaviours and people who fail to enforce adequately what laws we do have. We are collectively both lazy and stupid and so, it could be said, get precisely what we deserve.
In fact, I am not convinced at all that Anglo-Saxon finance capital as a whole is driving the neo-conservative agenda. The vast majority of finance capital reacts to events, going with the flow of culture and profit, happy to be feminist, green or war mongering as it thinks it can find profit in the matter but the driver here is not capital but ideology which enables profit and the ideology in particular of the ‘liberal-centrist’ warfare state, the ideologues of liberal fantasy and the specific demands of the military-industrial networks that persuade and suborn the first two classes (often riddled with neurosis) with arguments about exaggerated threats and dubious economic benefits.
The class war is not between capital and labour in this regard but between a malign alliance of ideologue, State and sections of capital against everyone else in a desperate attempt not so much to gain power as to retain power and make a profit from the retention of power. But the real villains are us - we vote these lightweights, sharks and sociopaths in every few years, we buy their shoddy media, we believe their narratives and we think someone else will pay the bill for their malice and ineptitude.
Indeed, we tend to confuse the law (a formal procedure which dictates the conditions of life in society for its members according to whatever authority holds sufficient power to enforce it) with justice in the abstract (about which philosophers since Plato have debated but which is also used to give authority to the law by attempting to link it to morality), morality (the dominant values of society regardless of personal preference) and ethics (which are also a matter for debate amongst philosophers but are equally the personal preferences of individuals who think about their conduct).
In fact, the law can be unjust, amoral and unethical and still be the law and a man may be ethical and yet be outside the law. Law and justice and law and morality are not necessarily consonant although there are sincere attempts to make them so and the various terms fold into one another to the degree that it is politically or administratively useful to do so. There would not be miscarriages of justice if the law was automatically just and abortion law (say) reflects the triumph of one version of morality over another. All is struggle and the philosophers may clarify but their abstractions rarely reflect actual human practice which is centred on yet other matters such as representation and maintenance of power, social cohesion, good order and managing resource limitations.
The British prison and judicial system is lawful but often becomes unjust because of resource constraints and administrative ineptitude as well as the need for 'power' not to admit that it is not in control of the conditions that maintain social cohesion and good order. Everything is positional and linked in some way to who holds power and their intentions and who thinks power at the higher level is insufficient to thwart their desires in a calculation of risk and reward or because their values are considered of greater importance than those that underpin law or morality. Fortunately for social cohesion and good order, most people are happy to accept the law as an approximation of justice and morality and to keep their ethics in a box marked private. Society requires us not to be philosophers.
While the Magician makes masterful use of tactical Hand-Waving, the Fool merrily continues down the Philosopher's Way. Perhaps somewhere in the show the Pot of Gold will be discovered and with it a life of happiness...
Focusing on Britain, it seems to me that a competent government would try to attract tech firms by lowering business taxes. Cambridge is an asset with its "Silicon Fen" which hardly anybody seems aware of. It's okay there but the long straight "bus track" is overgrown and graffiti at the bus stops.
That line of transport goes straight to the "science and tech" centre, but is more like cyberpunk dystopia, which I quite like, but no good for being seen as a key tech and biotech area. There's a quantum computing firm there.
Reduce biz taxes and set Silicon Fen up as cool and a happening place. That ought to help Britain and save the country from being a "nobody".
But is there a political party remotely able to do this? To even understand it?
As I recall, the problem with Cambridge is that it is quite simply overcrowded and so becoming sclerotic. The art of sustained productive innovation is to have it spread across a country rather than become centred on a very few ‘hot’ locations. Otherwise I agree that incentives for entrepreneurial innovation and acceptance of failure as a road to success might help a great deal.
My own experience is that, while there may be some self-interested understanding of the digital economy in some parts of Reform, the bulk of the political class (worsening as you move leftwards) know the square root of f*ck-all about the incoming revolutionary storm. There is more understanding than we might think in the City of London but it seems barely connected to the bozos at the heart of the administrative State.
Some might hope that the military-industrial strategy might change this but they are almost certainly desperate fools because the danger is that British innovation simply becomes a service function to US mega-tech. Applications should be to making welfare and social cohesion less wasteful and more efficient and then selling that overseas but I suspect that this ship has left harbour and the profits will go to Palantir and Blackrock.
British politicians strike me as just normies who think they're techies because they can use Facebook. It's a disaster. They need to have understanding of code and information systems. Actually look at what lies beneath and grasp what it means.
Plus know what decentralised systems are, and a reasonable knowledge of cyber security.
The fact is we are digital, and they're still in 1993. They also need to know how their phones work - and they don't. They use WhatsApp but are likely afraid of Signal.
The former MP Steve Baker was previously a software engineer (I think) so that was a start.
There is sprinkling of people with some technical experience in Labour but not at a very high level. Nearly all politicians are now from a distinct political class where it is actually a matter of some pride to have entered politics ‘early’ rather than to have done something else (such as worked up through a trades union or built a small business and entered politics a little later having ‘done something’ more than being a barrister or think tank staffer).
There are, of course, many who have done social work or local government or been teachers or even doctors but these are, by their very nature, at the spending end of the State machine with constant demands for solving intractable problems through ‘more money’ rather than improved organisation. The worst are those whose entire experience has been in the inefficient charitable or NGO sectors and have a single issue or ideological approach to legislation rather than an intent to drive an effective executive. The community activist who ends up in the House may be representative only of the local party machine that put him there and which expects him or her to spout whatever outrages local activists that month.
There are equivalents on the Right - upper middle class professionals who treat politics as a profession, lawyers and people whose business experience has actually been my own historic trade of public relations or public affairs but the point is not that any of these people should not be represented in Parliament (they should) but that they are disproprtionately represented, tend to a lazy careerism or a hobby horse approach to some position or issue and not to have come from either the sharp end of trying to survive in an administratively broken system (although the Left has some like Angela Rayner who have been there and survived) or have actually created or run something big (as Heseltine did) that needed to deliver something useful to at least part of the population.
The Parties then reward blind loyalty and filter out independent thought, encouraging individuals to pursue their hobby horses where they are ideological and do not require any real operational thought. They do not actually need to be technically over-proficient (the failing there is in a post-imperial generalist civil service) but they do need to know what questions to ask and to be circumspect in imposing ideals and values on facts just as the bureaucrats must abandon ideology and be effective at delivering what the people ask for. Party as intermediary is probably the problem here, neither truly representative of the population not technically qualified to oversee effective administration.
In the current case, we have the worst of both worlds - an out-of-control ideologised administrative structure that is not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with the incoming industrial revolution and the rapid changes taking place in the population and global system and a political class that lives in a fantasy land of ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ and performative behaviour within its own closed world and is incapable of demanding a better administrative system to which it cannot apply the difficult questions that it refuses to ask even of itself. It also follows popular opinion instead of educating and persuading, leading to us having the current clown in charge with a 12% approval rating and clearly with no idea what he is doing.
A total disaster, then. I wouldn't expect politicians to do IT courses. Better they aren't qualified. More to get into the real world of tech - why can't they buy a refurbished Lenovo laptop (£300) out of their own pockets and install Linux? Yes, they are busy people, but they could be running alternate tech at home, know how to FTP from phone to laptop, etc. Use AI to figure out the command line and get code.
And muck about with AI, seeing how natural language works.
This might flow down to everyday people who really don't know how to use their devices, nor security, nor easy ways to do 2FA.
Ideology doesn't really have content. It's a miasma of words going nowhere. Be practical.
In the end, most politicians are university, un-educated dimwits. If a bigger war broke out, they'd be more concerned about what wine to choose from Waitrose for that night's dinner party.
Yet war is all around them now - 5GW... so they should also school up on military academia.
Thing is all that would blow their minds apart and their cosy little worlds would evaporate.
Spot on across the board. Left out perhaps is the root cause dominant still driving Anglo-Saxon war against Russia and logically China: Anglo-Saxon Financial Criminal Class.
I am not sure it is right to speak of US finance capital as criminal any more than oligarchs in Russia or China. Criminal is just a way of differentiating those outside the law from those inside the law and should not be a synonym for ‘those I feel are morally repugnant’. Russian oligarchs were often criminals under Soviet law and not under the law of the Russian Federation and yet were the same people doing essentially the same things.
The Anglo-Saxon form of this, if they are part of formal finance capital are (largely) operating within the law with organised crime describing cartels and organisations making use of markets outside the law. A ‘liberal’ simply assumes that anything inside the law is ‘good’ and outside the law is ‘bad and yet we know that morality and law are not always the same thing just as law, morality and ethics are not necessarily the same thing. However, not all finance capital is necessarily either amoral or unethical. Similarly neither are all billionaires (far from it). It is a left wing fallacy that a billionaire is intrinsically bad or evil simply by dint of being a billionaire which is as stupid as saying that a worker is intrinsically good just by virtue of being a worker.
In this situation, we cannot entirely blame finance capital and oligarchs because they are merely rational actors acting as they do either because the law allows them to (which is the responsibility of legislators) or the law is not enforced (which is the responsibility of executives in the administrative state). It is always convenient to be morally outraged by those who behave in ways we do not like within the law or try to work around it but this is misdirection.
Any fault lies with the legislature and executive of sovereign states and, since in democracies we elect the former and elect the people who are said to control the latter, we the people are at fault because we continue to elect people who promote laws protecting predatory or asocial behaviours and people who fail to enforce adequately what laws we do have. We are collectively both lazy and stupid and so, it could be said, get precisely what we deserve.
In fact, I am not convinced at all that Anglo-Saxon finance capital as a whole is driving the neo-conservative agenda. The vast majority of finance capital reacts to events, going with the flow of culture and profit, happy to be feminist, green or war mongering as it thinks it can find profit in the matter but the driver here is not capital but ideology which enables profit and the ideology in particular of the ‘liberal-centrist’ warfare state, the ideologues of liberal fantasy and the specific demands of the military-industrial networks that persuade and suborn the first two classes (often riddled with neurosis) with arguments about exaggerated threats and dubious economic benefits.
The class war is not between capital and labour in this regard but between a malign alliance of ideologue, State and sections of capital against everyone else in a desperate attempt not so much to gain power as to retain power and make a profit from the retention of power. But the real villains are us - we vote these lightweights, sharks and sociopaths in every few years, we buy their shoddy media, we believe their narratives and we think someone else will pay the bill for their malice and ineptitude.
All comes down to one's understanding of Law.
Indeed, we tend to confuse the law (a formal procedure which dictates the conditions of life in society for its members according to whatever authority holds sufficient power to enforce it) with justice in the abstract (about which philosophers since Plato have debated but which is also used to give authority to the law by attempting to link it to morality), morality (the dominant values of society regardless of personal preference) and ethics (which are also a matter for debate amongst philosophers but are equally the personal preferences of individuals who think about their conduct).
In fact, the law can be unjust, amoral and unethical and still be the law and a man may be ethical and yet be outside the law. Law and justice and law and morality are not necessarily consonant although there are sincere attempts to make them so and the various terms fold into one another to the degree that it is politically or administratively useful to do so. There would not be miscarriages of justice if the law was automatically just and abortion law (say) reflects the triumph of one version of morality over another. All is struggle and the philosophers may clarify but their abstractions rarely reflect actual human practice which is centred on yet other matters such as representation and maintenance of power, social cohesion, good order and managing resource limitations.
The British prison and judicial system is lawful but often becomes unjust because of resource constraints and administrative ineptitude as well as the need for 'power' not to admit that it is not in control of the conditions that maintain social cohesion and good order. Everything is positional and linked in some way to who holds power and their intentions and who thinks power at the higher level is insufficient to thwart their desires in a calculation of risk and reward or because their values are considered of greater importance than those that underpin law or morality. Fortunately for social cohesion and good order, most people are happy to accept the law as an approximation of justice and morality and to keep their ethics in a box marked private. Society requires us not to be philosophers.
While the Magician makes masterful use of tactical Hand-Waving, the Fool merrily continues down the Philosopher's Way. Perhaps somewhere in the show the Pot of Gold will be discovered and with it a life of happiness...