Essays and fragments


Click here to vote!	Democracy, as Churchill famously observed, is the worst system of government except for all the others. But as we move into a new - supposedly democratic - century, Churchill's least worst option is not universally in great shape. For all the gratifying footage of South African, Zimbabwean or Indian citizens queuing interminably to cast their hard-won votes, there is the reality of abysmal turnouts and voter apathy throughout the more "mature" democracies of the west. Fewer than half of the US electorate voted in the last presidential election, for example. And the turnout for local and by-elections in Britain is often derisory... [more]
Gift culture in Cyberspace	A spectre is haunting the software industry -- or at least the part of it controlled by Bill Gates and his fellow moguls. It's called the Open Source movement; its basic proposition is that proprietary software (the kind created and sold by companies like Microsoft) is a flawed idea. For some Open Source activists this is about technology; they are convinced that proprietary programmes are less reliable, less stable and more bug-ridden than programmes which are communally owned and created through the cooperative efforts of hundreds, even thousands, of dedicated hackers. Other Open Source adherents believe that their software is not only technically better than anything produced by Gates & Co., but also that it is ethically superior. For them, the notion that programmes should be "owned" by individuals or corporations is as odious as the idea that humans could be owned and traded as slaves... [more]
Singing the (deep) blues?	I spent a good deal of Wednesday evening following a board game. It was taking place in New York, and I was sitting in my study at home in East Anglia but I was able to see every move, live, as it happened - on the Net. Millions of other people, all over the world, were doing the same thing. We were watching a contest between brute force and intelligence. At the brutish end is a ferociously powerful computing engine called Deep Blue - an IBM RS/6000 computer with special go-faster modules attached. At the intelligent end sits Gary Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess-player in history. This incongruous duo, the Brute and the Genius, are playing chess. The winner will walk (or roll) away with $500,000... [more]
The physics of dirt	Fifty years ago this week, the modern world was born. It happened on December 23 1947 in a room in the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Research and Development arm of the giant AT&T corporation in Murray Hill, New Jersey, 20 miles from New York city. Two unknown physicists - John Bardeen and Walter Brattain - spent the morning of that day fussing about with a wacky apparatus lashed up from a tiny slab of germanium, a thin plastic wedge and a strip of gold foil, all held together with a paper-clip. Two copper wires soldered to edges of the foil snaked off to batteries, transformers, an oscilloscope and other equipment needed to power the apparatus and assess its performance. It looked like something by Rube Goldberg out of Heath Robinson... [more]
Thomas Kuhn's Revolution	Twenty years ago Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was published. Few books create such a deep impression, especially in their authors' lifetimes. It is difficult now to think of an academic discipline, whether in the humanities or in the natural and social sciences, that has not been touched by it. Some of its concepts and insights - the notion of a 'paradigm' for example, or the contrast between 'normal' and "revolutionary" science - have passed into the language of academic discourse, and now colour and shape the way in which scholars think and talk about their specialisms. [more]
The lampost and the dog	The playwright John Osborne once likened the relationship between critic and author to that between dog and lamp-post. As someone whose Day Job is that of a television critic, I know just what he means. At parties, previews and alcoholic luncheons I have often listened to anguished complaints from TV presenters about how frustrating it is to spend weeks or months - sometimes in physically dangerous or psychologically fraught circumstances - preparing a film only to have it cruelly dismissed by a TV critic in a few flip sentences... [more]
A house divided	Estate agent arrives to inspect property and confirms all prejudices. On one hand is loathsome, pin-striped, fawning hypocrite spouting jargon ('well-appointed bathroom with charming antique gas-fired water-heater'). On other hand, is personable, efficient, knowledgeable and properly attired. To his inquiry as to what clients think house is worth, they reply as one woman 'Ł30,000,' whereupon he exclaims that this was exactly the figure he had in mind himself. Naive clients beam with satisfaction. Harmony restored. [more]
Dear Diary...	'One should always keep a diary', said Oscar Wilde, 'in order to have something scandalous to read in the train'. Cartoonist Nick Garland kept a diary throughout 1986 and as a result has given a great many people something scandalous to read on the 8.15 to Charing Cross. Not Many Dead: Journal of a year in Fleet Street is the title, and it relates all that happened to its author during the annus mirabilis which saw the founding of the Independent. Like most diaries, Mr Garland's book reveals more about the diarist than about anything else... [more]
Where editors hang (and fall) out	"Editors of quality newspapers", thundered Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph just before it was eaten by its daily stablemate, "used to be hommes serieux - ie frequenters of Oxbridge High Tables, learned seminars, European chancelleries, establishment dinners". He was complaining about Donald Trelford and Andrew Neil and their involvement with the resourceful Ms Pamella Bordes... [more]
Jack Kennedy	I saw Jack Kennedy once, in the flesh, at close range. It was during his visit to Ireland in 1963 and my father -- who had been responsible for some of the arrangements -- had wangled a good viewing position for me. For a brief period, long enough for every detail of the scene to be etched onto the memory of an impressionable schoolboy, the President stood about 15 feet away from me... [more]
The Architecture of Freedom	Cyberspace -- the most gloriously open, uncensored and unregulated public space in human history – could easily become the most controlled environment imaginable. That is the fear that pervades Lessig’s magnificent, sombre book – that ‘the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of what it was at cyberspace’s birth. The invisible hand, through commerce, is constructing an architecture that perfects control’. George Orwell feared that we would be destroyed by the things we fear. Aldous Huxley thought we would be destroyed by the things we love. The logic of Lessig’s argument is that both were right. It is up to us to prove them wrong.... [more]