Computers are middle class and tweeting is for morons, reckons shout-at-the-bins Northerner Mark E Smith of The Fall, favourite band of the late John Peel.

“I can never understand computers. It’s a very middle-class thing”, Smith tells Mojo magazine in an interview.

Smith also berates people for using online banking and for Web2.0rhea: “You always thought people are daft but you give ‘em the benefit of the doubt, but they are as f**king daft as you thought.”

Has he got a point? Well, statistically he’s correct: some 17 million Britons are internet refuseniks – and whenever a new “initiative” flies in from Martha Lane-Fox to put this “right”, we can’t helping thinking that Smith is onto something: a traditional Fabian distaste of the proles.

Lane-Fox, the lastminute.com co-founder who was voted Britain’s most over-rated entrepreneur, is on a personal mission to brighten the lives of people on “horrible council estates” – people who prefer shouting across the street to tweeting and real communities to online communities.

“I don’t think you can be a proper citizen in our society in the future if you’re not online,” reckons Fox.

This is why people own Staffordshire bull terriers. It’s not a lifestyle choice; it’s a necessity.

Source: Mojo interview.

Energy Minister Christopher Huhne has an opinion piece in the The Daily Telegraph today – and it’s really an 800-word explanation of why we need a new Energy Minister. The subject of Huhne’s essay is new, cheap gas.

The article finds the minister on the defensive about shale gas: it’s why he’s taking his argument into print. Huhne doesn’t like this exciting new development, but he doesn’t have the power to kill it. He welcomes it through gritted teeth before explaining how many handicaps could be put in its place: the ownership of the land, the regulatory framework, the planning hurdles, and so on.

(France has bowed to its powerful nuclear lobby by imposing a moratorium on unconventional gas exploration, but since France’s electricity is already so cheap – the cheapest in Europe, in fact – it doesn’t need shale anything like as much as the rest of Europe does.)

Huhne writes that the Coalition’s energy policy is “technology neutral” – a claim guaranteed to invite widespread public ridicule. The UK’s energy policy is anything but “technology neutral”. It’s full of measures created by lobby groups for their respective energy sectors.
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MPs heard a spirited debate about digital rights this week – including the digital rights you might or might not have as an amateur creator.

Big media companies would like the freedom to use artwork they find on the web without having to worry about lawsuits or negotiating market rates with creators. The web is awash with unattributed “orphan works” – and thanks to cheaper technology, social networks and self-publishing, there’s more being published than at any time in history.

There’s also a strong case for releasing enormous amounts of cultural work that doesn’t have a traceable author, and institutions such as the British Library would like to release this and commercialise it. These are also, confusingly, called “orphan works”.

The problem is, how can you release these cultural works without imperilling the professional market or the rights of amateurs whose work can end up as valuable front page commodity?
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Now we know why what was widely called the “Google Review” into intellectual property came to the conclusions it did. And we have it from the horse’s mouth: not Google, but Professor Ian Hargreaves and his team at the IPO, who “guided” him.

If you recall, a year ago the Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the Google founders that they could never have founded Google in the UK, because of its copyright law. Even Google could never substantiate the quote, or provide a citation. Rather than getting a public inquiry, and shaming, of a foreign corporation for misleading our PM so badly – Google got the government to explore how the law could be altered… to benefit companies like Google.

So the review began with a mistake, and its guiding philosophical idea was a naive, simplified, and fantastical version of the world. This set the tone for what followed.

Hargreaves came across as wry and likeable, as he always does, but his words revealed the bien pensant view of the internet, its potential, and its commercial challenges.

“Politicians are afraid to address [copyright] because of fear of damaging the entirely legitimate and desirable wishes of musicians and other creators to have a fair level of protection, so they can make a return on their own work. I do disagree how this machinery has spread, and become an undesirable regulatory restraint on the internet [our emphasis] and the internet’s effects on the economy“

He continued:

“That is a very, very big risk for an advanced knowledge economy like the UK to run. In my view we can’t afford to run it. It’s urgent; the government has to take the action I have recommended it take”.

The sky was falling, he’d felt a piece of it land on his head. And he hammered home this urgency in his conclusion, in case you missed it:

“The digital revolution is not one-third complete, based on the penetration of the internet around the world. If we don’t ‘Get with the Pace‘, we will pay a significant economic price.”

There are several flaws to this approach.
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Parliament’s Business Select Committee heard some interesting news today, as they mulled the Hargreaves Report’s recommendations. Executive director of the Open Rights Group Jim Killock told MPs that the UK’s copyright laws were deterring investors and new businesses. Alas, he could have picked a better example.

Killock said Netflix had looked at the UK market and spurned it for South America instead.

“Our digital market in film is falling behind Colombia,” he told MPs.

This is mystifying, since 10 days ago Netflix revealed its plans for its UK launch – giving analysts and press the full details. The service will launch early next year.

We wondered if it was a slip of the tongue: perhaps he meant Hulu? But for everyone’s benefit, he repeated the claim later on in the session: Netflix isn’t coming to the UK, and copyright law is to blame.

So is the UK months behind the rest of the world? Not really. Netflix entered the Latin American market just seven weeks ago.

Whatever points ORG may have had to make on government digital policy became easy for MPs to dismiss. One member remarked on the “ferocity” of Killock’s contribution, and bluntly told him that the evidence contradicted his statement.

It’s yet more amateurish campaigning from the group. Surely they can afford last week’s papers?

Can nobody rid of us the barefoot CEO? He may be gone, but Steve Jobs continues to manipulate the press from the beyond – this time through his biographer, Walter Isaacson. The Steve Jobs biography launches the hype for Apple’s next great product, a TV.
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Steve Jobs was a remarkable and fascinating businessman, and by some distance the most interesting and accomplished personality operating in an important corner of the economy. He had a respect for the intelligence of human beings and their ambition, and potential – showing an optimism which is rare in a cynical industry. And Jobs left us far too early.

But we knew what was coming, didn’t we? In the media, a race to the top of Mount Hyperbole, that was easily won by Stephen Fry, with President Obama close behind. And public, showy and stagey displays of public emotion. (Why? Did no one tell you he was ill?).

I actually find all this disrespectful, and as distasteful as any sick joke.

Nobody could be more scathing about mindless technology worship than Steve Jobs. My favourite interview with him was by Gary Wolf, when Jobs was 39, and had realised the utopianism of his generation was shallow, empty and a giant diversion. The web would augment the world, not change it. Far more important, he stressed, was education.
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To Manchester, where I had been invited to liven up a Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy…

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This is a story with huge implications for the future of the web. Even if you don’t use Facebook or Spotify – I don’t – and couldn’t care less, you can nevertheless start to see how business relationships will develop.

Last week’s alliance between Facebook and Spotify turns out to be a much better deal for Facebook than Spotify. While Facebook declined to anoint any one music company as its exclusive provider, and a dozen are signed up, it has extracted exclusivity from the music companies. Or at least one of them. New sign-ups to Spotify must be Facebook members – the non-Facebook world will have to go somewhere else.

Such is the power of distribution platforms. Facebook has got one, and if you want to be on it, you play by Zuckerberg’s rules. It has always been thus. There isn’t an industry in the world where this ancient rule doesn’t apply. And while people may get misty-eyed about the “open web”, or the “neutral net”, this kind of utopianism was always naive in the extreme.

Deals are made. It’s business, folks.
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Three years ago I caught a glimpse of a new social network built around music. You could follow people, chat with them, and enjoy the same music stream in real time.

There were many other clever things about it, such as a very slick integration of music news. But the killer feature, one that made it unique, was that you could also drop songs you liked into a little box, and keep permanently. This was genuine P2P file sharing. There were no strings attached – no DRM, no expiry, no locker (your stash was your hard drive) and no additional fees for this feature.

And it was all legal.
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