Another Westminster blog

Richard Allan is the second UK MP to have a weblog (that I’m aware of).

I just bumped into Tom Watson MP in the corridors of the House of Commons and we greeted each other for the first time in the real world! Funny business this that we have exchanged comments through our blogs but never spoken to each other before.

[/technology] posted at 21:20 #

On what would have been Orwell’s 100th birthday - William Gibson writes about the coming transparent society:

As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

The constant elusiveness of truth:

A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.

How Orwell’s medicine was preventative:

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I’ve seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don’t have to.

It might be a good idea to get another prescription soon.

[/society] posted at 20:41 #

The Next World Order?

Bruce Sterling:

The New World Order, proclaimed in Gulf War I, died in Gulf War II. The Next World Order has means, motive, and opportunity now. Instead of the customary 20th-century hot air and phony baloney, it might turn out to be rather hands-on, tough-minded, and practical. There are good reasons to think this will happen, with or without American cooperation. The Next World Order may well look like nothing we previously were led to expect.

George Monbiot:

The UN Security Council should be scrapped, and its powers vested in a reformulated UN General Assembly. This would be democratised by means of weighted voting: nations’ votes would increase according to both the size of their populations and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, the people of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose purpose would be to hold the other international bodies to account.

I have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might be implemented. Poor nations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in effect, the world’s financial systems. The threat of a sudden collective default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the minds of even the most obdurate global powers.

That kind of threat is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. International financial suicide bombers.

[/society] posted at 16:18 #