Then there’s the quiz shows. When it comes to reading out infonuggets from pieces of card prepared for him by TV researchers, Fry is the master. And more recently, his pioneering new media work on Twitter has put him at the forefront of an elite group of British comedy talents (including Graham Linehan and Peter Serafinowicz) who have found fame by telling us when they’re stuck in a lift, or about to have lunch. Once upon a time, comedy writers and performers had to be funny, as a minimum requirement. Now, the Twittering comics have now smashed that glass ceiling.

But Fry risks throwing away this incomparable legacy, built up over a lifetime, because of a weakness. And it’s a weakness every bit as reckless as Oscar’s love for Bosie.

This month Fry is the face and voice of the digital radio scrappage scheme. This is not, as you might imagine, the opportunity to trade in some piece of digital junk in exchange for a more modern audio gadget. Many of us have at least one unloved and unused DAB radio somewhere in the household – and perhaps your heart (like mine) soared at the prospect of a trade-in. Perhaps for one of these, which is very nice indeed. Or one of these.

Alas, the scrappage scheme is a retrograde step – the product of backdoor arm-twisting by a handful of desperate men. We’re being asked to trade in an FM radio for a DAB radio – rather like trading in a perfectly useful Mini Cooper runaround for a mule with an attitude problem.

The deficiencies of DAB are well known enough not to need reiterating. Over 90 per cent of the UK listens to radio and declares the current arrangement satisfactory. DAB is yesterday’s technology, devised in the 1980s, it’s been rammed driven through by ‘platform owners’ such as the big commercial radio players. It has terrible power consumption (worse than modern IP chipsets), and the sound quality hasn’t lived up to the promises made.

DAB is also a top-down technology, as opposed to internet radio, which requires only a home PC to crank a station into life, and thanks to open internet standards, has global reach. No proprietary chipsets, or government licenses are required to make yourself heard. Your WinAmp receiver is as good in Mozambique as it is in Manhattan. DAB radios, on the other hand, stop working once you cross the Channel.

And as for the viability, it’s desperate. One operator recently told us he may as well put the broadcasts on a CD and mail them out in an envelope – it would be as cost-effective as a DAB license.

DAB, in short, is one of the great technology car crashes of modern times. Now it’s a car crash with Stephen Fry telling us there’s room for one more car at the back.

Now if this ludicrous campaign was fronted by say, Rula Lenska or Alan Hansen or the Krankies, or some other technology-illiterate, hand-me-the-cheque B- or C-list celeb, we wouldn’t be too surprised. But for Fry, a man who enjoys a reputation for being discerning about technology, to endorse this campaign is wrong and damaging on so many levels.

What on earth is he doing propping this up?

For someone supposedly tech-savvy, let alone a ‘National Treasure’, Fry could be using his influence to cajole and enlighten – campaigning for internet radio, or even more modern digital radio broadcast technology, such as DVB-H or DAB+. At the very least he could warn the British public about the pitfalls of investing in DAB today, rather than leading them down a dead end.

How could this happen?

It’s simple. It’s Stephen Fry’s indiscriminate love of a voiceover cheque. And it’s the ruin of his reputation.

Marketing teams at both newspapers discovered a new super-segment of the declining newspaper market they have informally dubbed ‘the new authoritarian’. According to one circulation manager, this is a reader who “wants to find out what everybody is doing, and stop them doing it”

Read more at The Register

Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed in its larger mission to present the issue properly – something we already understand.

One luxury journalists have left is to call bullshit on self-interested parties – to ask whether they really represented anyone in particular or whether their arguments had consequences. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, TV journalism used to do this all the time. But not this time. The issue was viewed through lobbyists’ eyes. And because equal time was given to a cross-section of lobbyists, the BBC will doubtless insist this was fair and balanced. Yet if the Honourable Old Duffers in the House of Lords can make monkeys out of the lobbyists – and debate legal P2P – why can’t the BBC?

I’ve written many times that the anti-change contingent at record companies and the freetards are sides of the same reactionary coin. They both staked out a position many years ago, probably back when John Perry Barlow was giving his 1995 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace speech, and they like it there: they haven’t had a new thought since. It’s all very static.

On the one side is idea that coercion will cause “behaviour change”, leading to the public embracing the current set of retail choices. This permits them to apply the might and logic of physical distribution control in a digital world, and avoids embracing structural reform. On the other side is the idea that music just had to be free, just because some people demanded it must be – therefore it had no value. Or that the property right couldn’t be defended, because doing so was implicitly oppressive. Every technological revolution has made creators richer, yet in this one, they’re collateral damage. The possibilites that new technology opens all go legal eventually, as black markets go white. To deny this – as both sides do – requires self-interested and incredibly unimaginative arguments. We got no shortage of those.

Panorama simply didn’t dare raise questions on behalf of the viewer and look at the future of music delivery.

Dumb and dumber

The clue that the BBC would not dare ask bold questions came quite early on. Producers chose quite possibly the dumbest family in Britain. One dad of four said his teenage daughter used his work laptop every night and he didn’t know how to stop this. Uh. Password? (Obviously the kids ran this household.)

Mum said she depended on the household computer for two jobs, but didn’t know what was going on.

Towards the end, a residential student and heavy BitTorrent user whose connection was being throttled said she thought music should be free anyway… but now life wasn’t worth living. She looked very unhappy, her eyes glued to the screen, as the Torrents trickled in – now very, very slowly. Did she even have an offline life?

When the BBC chooses people this dumb as representatives of us, we can infer it thinks we’re all this dumb.

prompting a debate on the idea of creating a legitimate business out of P2P file sharing was discussed by the House of Lords last month. Some favour a compulsory tax. Others favour a legitimate market, which doesn’t tax people for a service they don’t use (that’s at least two thirds of UK users) and who prefer a la carte or nothing at all. But even the most naive Peers showed rather more thought than the artists (hello, Billy Bragg, yet again), industry people, or activists.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised because as the fantastic Tweets I’ve captured demonstrate, file sharing is the political issue for people who don’t want to do politics. It’s much more like a cartoon virtual reality game, where you adopt a character (eg ‘Hulk’) as you step into the cartoon arena. Just grunt and roar according to character. (The LibDems’ Lord Clement Jones has belatedly realised this – that whatever politics you try to please the freetards, you’ll always lose.) It’s the ultimate expression of democracy, Web 2.0, a parody of the real thing.

And so copyright has become the perfect issue for the eternal juvenile. It’s like the man who hated the Eiffel Tower so much, he had to go up to the top every day. It was the only place in Paris from which he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower.

There are many harmless and very entertaining pages on the internet devoted to speculative history, some of which are devoted to Moses’ Ark of the Covenant. It was apparently some kind of electrical apparatus. Possibly involving fusion. It performed magic. It transformed the destiny of people who used it wisely.

Now I doubt if you’ve read anything or seen anything in the last few days about Apple’s next computer that is very much more rational. Only most of this output has been written not by UFOlogists, but by grown-ups – professionals in fact, who are paid not to be stupid. It’s the most interesting thing about any new Apple device: the childish and idiotic inflated expectations that precede it. But you’ll have noticed that even by the standards of idiocy set by Big Media, the professionals have excelled themselves this time with iTablet speculation.

The reason is that they don’t just want one to play with, fanbois or gadget fans. This time, they fully expect Apple to save their jobs. That’s quite a big difference. (The New York Times let slip that Apple had a new platform for publishers last year.) So the result has been awful. Like holding up a highly-reflective idiot in front of an idiot mirror – the result has been infinite recursion of stupidity, as far as the eye can see.

I was again reminded of childish and idiotic expectations of technology yesterday, reading a lecture by the G-Whiz-driving editor of The Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger had come to attack Murdoch’s paywall strategy, only he didn’t go quite so far as to say they were stupid. He admitted that from a rational business perspective, charging for some content online was the right thing to do – and The Guardian was doing it. But he had to "balance" this by a pledge that he had to make everything open and a free for all, because that was the nature of the technology.

Technology to the rescue

Examine this passage, and marvel at how the technology itself is both a religion and a progressive movement, all in one:

people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

The Guardian is a beautiful physical product, but the people in charge don’t expect it to be around in a few years. So any editor who defied these online imperatives would be swept away by the tide of history. That isn’t rational: it’s a faith-based view of the world, with technology as the religion.

Apple, like Google, has become a religion for media people. Jeff Jarvis’ book self-consciously asks, after the popular Born Again evangelical bumper sticker, What Would Google Do? It isn’t just newspaper people who are expecting Apple to deliver them from a sticky fate. It’s people in the music and movie businesses too. They’ve looked enviously at closed locked-down platforms like the Xbox 360 and PS3, and wondered if something could allow them to flourish, too.

Maybe it wouldn’t have to be quite so locked down – or at least, not with the same high ground rent that Sony seeks. But if only they could get valuable subscription revenue from a new ‘platform’, all would be well. So something will step in and save them.

The Hollow Men

Yet executive in entertainment and news over the past decade have made this much more difficult; the media’s crisis is one of its own making. Over ten years, they’ve hollowed themselves out. Newspapers are now excellent lifestyle magazines, delivered in instalments on a daily basis. Their capability to provide us with something we didn’t know, or couldn’t find out, or give us new ways of thinking about something, is just not there any more.

Ten years ago you could be sure a broadsheet transport correspondent both knew his field technically and knew the business landscape, while a health correspondent could put the complex into context. I’m not even sure there are any transport correspondents any more, while the other specialists – if they are there – simply reprint press releases from industry, or from the tight-knit hairball of government, academia and pressure groups. A newspaper today is like Google News with the news taken out.

us not to give them our money. They also neglected physical formats and decided to ‘compete with free’ by giving away the crown jewels for nothing, although perhaps not to the same extent. But we now see Spotify lauded for (apparently) "reducing piracy", when its return is negligible.

For these industries to rescue themselves, they don’t need Steve Jobs. They simply need to stop being idiotic. Nobody ever put a gun to a newspaper executive’s head and instructed them to ruin their business. Take away the utopian religion and they can start to be rational again.

Now I appreciate there are subtleties here a broad brush can’t capture. Every newspaper proprietor wants to drive the competition into the ground. Murdoch uses aggressive pricing. Echoing the US city newspaper monopolies, Rusbridger has already mooted a future where public subsidies fund ‘quality journalism’. A translation of that is "we’re a commercial basket case, please give us a tax handout". I find it hard to believe that with the nation utterly broke, politicians will look upon this request with sympathy. What I can say with certainty is that they’re not going to call it correctly.

Looking back at my own tech predictions, as well as other people’s, there’s a consistent theme. My worst call in the past ten years, for example, was expecting smartphones to become much bigger and broader than they have. I should have anticipated physical constraints, crappy UIs, and dodgy and late network infrastucture.

But I downplayed all of these in my estimates, because I wanted them to succeed. I thought it would be a good thing if they did succeed. But things don’t work like that. Oops. Epic Fail. Similarly, sky high expectations of Linux were powered by the deep desire that Microsoft go away. Linux is very good now, and better than ever – but the expectations were pure wishful thinking.

Because media people think Apple’s iTablet will save them, you can safely disregard everything that’s been written, or will be written, by large media companies about the launch tomorrow.

With an end-of-life government meandering to its termination, and Carter’s Digital Britain review soaking up all the attention of bickering departments, he can’t set policy.

Largely as a result of their own greed, financial miscalculations and lack of innovation, large radio companies are suffering. They want to slash costs and merge. Richards, who was addressing the “Radio 3.0″ conference in London, listed his preferred solutions. One was to put more emphasis on news and local radio as a community information service. (You could almost hear teeth grind at that one). This was especially useful “during flooding or heavy snow” or other times of crisis. (The grinding continued).

Another was allowing stations to co-locate and merge to form bigger stations, which perked the audience up a bit, since it’s what the big boys crave. He said savings would help about 60 per cent of commercial stations, with the example that two merging could save £135,000 a year. He hinted at relaxing sponsorship opportunities.

Richards reiterated the line that before we can switch off FM, DAB should be profitable – or as close as it can be. This could be helped by replanning DAB transmission areas, merging some multiplexes and making DAB frequency changes. But the switch-off looks as far away as ever.

It’s not as simple as the TV switchover, Richards told Steve Hewlett. There are far more radio receivers out there. And with TV it was a case of necessity: the regulator couldn’t extend FreeView without first turning off analogue, because of spectrum scarcity. The DAB lobby is praying for an early switch off date – but will settle for any kind of commitment now. DAB is absent from cars and mobile phones – one traditional and one a new medium for radio listeners.

Hewlett asked again – why can’t we force people onto digital radio? As a Grauniad regular, chivvying and beating people up with regulation comes as second nature. Might electric cattle prods be just what’s needed?

(I made the last part up).

Well, it wasn’t that easy, Richards said. “There’s no point in doing something the audience regards as a disaster” he replied.

The panel that followed hinted at the extent of the DABacle. It’s not radio’s only problem, but the poor uptake and high carriage costs contribute to many of the others.

Daniel Nathan of Brighton’s Festival radio pointed out that with such low numbers for DAB-only stations (favoured by only 3.2 per cent of the audience in all) you might as well as stick it out over the internet.

“While IP is not satisfactory it’s more effective to reach those 20,000 listeners than DAB”.

“Planet Rock will need a 90 per cent fall in carriage fees to achieve a profit within five years,” he said. Why not just consider radio as radio and use IP to deliver the addons?

Steve Ackerman of production company Somethin’ Else, thought DAB was helping to lose the young audience. “I see a digital future encompassing a variety of technologies that may or may not include DAB”.

Richard Wheatly, chief exec of the loss-making Jazz FM, described himself as a former DAB critic who had had a “Damascene conversion”. It didn’t sound much of a conversion.

“Brands will move on past DAB. We’ll go to internet and satellite.” Wheatly just wanted to broadcast where he could find an audience.

Tony Moretta of DRDB, which was set up to promote DAB radio, was confident DAB would get in the car – eventually.

He said he was encouraged by the two commercial giants “singing from the same hymn sheet – FM isn’t a long term future – everyone is getting behind DAB.”

Maybe they just have funny ways of showing that love. Last year Globalt torched its DAB stations, and in April sold its stake in the national multiplex that no one wants to broadcast on (DigitalOne) to transmission company Arquiva.

Apparently, for just a quid.

Let’s contrast how each of them addressed the crisis.

Meyer said Google’s policy “first and foremost” was to respect the wishes of content producers, but offered nothing in the way of new business partnerships. Instead, she gave them a short but haughty lecture on how they should present their stories – they should become more like Wikipedia:

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she said in her statement. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

So instead of publishing 50 stories a day, the implication is that publications should only publish 50 a year – tweaking those 50 constantly, in the hope they wriggle up through the Google search results. Yes, that’ll fix things.

She also said they should offer more scope for mash-ups. At both ends of the news chain, then, you have people fiddling – instead of writing (at one end) and reading (at the other). That’s very Web 2.0, and you couldn’t get a clearer statement that Google doesn’t really understand what news is for. (It’s merely the stuff that goes between the BODY tags, silly.)

The creator of The Wire and former reporter David Simon said he found the phrase “citizen journalism” Orwellian. He added:

“A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor – he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to social workers and firefighters.”

Simon also lambasted the newspaper industry’s cry of “it’s not our fault”. Newspapers had gone from privately-owned family firms to publicly-traded stocks, he said, and many of the cuts in the 1990s were against the background of bumper (35 per cent) profits. Families were content with 10 to 15 per cent annual profit.

“How anyone can believe that industry can fund [editors and investigative reporters] by giving away its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me.”

The solution proposed in some US cities, and backed by the editor of the UK Guardian newspaper (which has never turned a profit), is public funding. Simon said he was dead against this.

“High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously.”

His solution?

“An industry-wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base”,

… allied to relaxing anti-trust laws and help with enforcing copyright. Which sounds like a blanket licence, of sorts, to me: one likely to be carved up between the New York Times and the Washington Post. But it was more of a plan than Google’s Meyer had to offer.

The gossip blog Valleywag used to wonder if Marissa Meyer was an android, or merely a remote hologram projection – the gag being that she’s merely a local representation of the Google Hive Mind. Well, judge for yourself by reading her fantastically inappropriate testimony, and Simon’s statement too – here.

Let’s contrast how each of them addressed the crisis.

Meyer said Google’s policy “first and foremost” was to respect the wishes of content producers, but offered nothing in the way of new business partnerships. Instead, she gave them a short but haughty lecture on how they should present their stories – they should become more like Wikipedia:

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she said in her statement. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

So instead of publishing 50 stories a day, the implication is that publications should only publish 50 a year – tweaking those 50 constantly, in the hope they wriggle up through the Google search results. Yes, that’ll fix things.

She also said they should offer more scope for mash-ups. At both ends of the news chain, then, you have people fiddling – instead of writing (at one end) and reading (at the other). That’s very Web 2.0, and you couldn’t get a clearer statement that Google doesn’t really understand what news is for. (It’s merely the stuff that goes between the BODY tags, silly.)

The creator of The Wire and former reporter David Simon said he found the phrase “citizen journalism” Orwellian. He added:

“A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor – he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to social workers and firefighters.”

Simon also lambasted the newspaper industry’s cry of “it’s not our fault”. Newspapers had gone from privately-owned family firms to publicly-traded stocks, he said, and many of the cuts in the 1990s were against the background of bumper (35 per cent) profits. Families were content with 10 to 15 per cent annual profit.

“How anyone can believe that industry can fund [editors and investigative reporters] by giving away its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me.”

The solution proposed in some US cities, and backed by the editor of the UK Guardian newspaper (which has never turned a profit), is public funding. Simon said he was dead against this.

“High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously.”

His solution?

“An industry-wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base”,

… allied to relaxing anti-trust laws and help with enforcing copyright. Which sounds like a blanket licence, of sorts, to me: one likely to be carved up between the New York Times and the Washington Post. But it was more of a plan than Google’s Meyer had to offer.

The gossip blog Valleywag used to wonder if Marissa Meyer was an android, or merely a remote hologram projection – the gag being that she’s merely a local representation of the Google Hive Mind. Well, judge for yourself by reading her fantastically inappropriate testimony, and Simon’s statement too – here.

Actually – I made the last bit up. There was no Thunderbird. But you’ll need something similar – or maybe stronger – to anaesthetise your synapses after trying to read WiReD. After a 12 year absence, the magazine that purports to tell us the future returns to the country that invented the bouncing bomb, the hovercraft, television and the computer.

So, er … is it any good?

I can think of three or four reasons why it should be.

Well I can think of three or four great reasons why it really should be. The media doesn’t do science, and is terrified of technical subjects. The nearest a Hampstead or Islington-based newspaper features editor will get to an engineer is meeting the gas repair man. They consider the vacuous Malcolm Gladwell to be a mysterious, fascinating and wise figure from over the water. Nor do we have, in Britain, a magazine of ideas – just dull collections of position papers written by wonks, for wonks. In Britain we’ve never had the equivalent of a Harper’s or a New Yorker – something with a cracking 15,000 word article that you can read in the bath.

Secondly, this is a time when almost everything is up for grabs. Big ideas in science are furiously contested, and established ideological adversaries are finding strange things in common.

And finally, WiReD has always done optimism quite well – which for all its flippancy and nuttiness, is its redeeming feature. Take Global Warming, for example. Let’s suppose it’s true, said WiReD; there’ll be no Thermageddon, just a set of technical challenges that don’t involve drastic lifestyle or behaviour modification.

In other words – the world is far more interesting than we’re told, and there’s a gap in the market.

What WiReD gives us instead is 177 pages of relentless infonuggets. The techno trivia submerges both the features and the ads. It starts with the specially commissioned cover, which imagines a futuristic London, with WiReD-sponsored blimps hovering over the city. It predicts “buildings are routinely fitted with turbines and solar panels” and “local trips are taken on an elevated transport network”. No, really? The bloke who invented Twitter predicts “I think we’ll be bigger than Blogger” in a 150 word interview. Pages are filled with bite-sized futurology predictions which are just as bland – the prediction that we’ll find ET in less than twenty years comes from a marketing consultant called Faith Popcorn. (I’m not making this up).

Alain de Botton writes about a day spent driving diggers at the Diggerland theme park. He files just 250 words, and I hope I’m not spoiling it for you when I report the philosopher’s key discovery: “It’s fascinating to sit at the controls of a digger such as the JCB 3CX… The strength of the digger’s arm is awesome”.

Who knew?

On to the features, where there’s an good idea done well – quant pioneer David X Li, whose mathematical formula powered the last financial bubble. That should have been twice or three times as long. There’s a good idea done badly – how Anthony Rose rescued the BBC iPlayer. This should be a cracking tale of a techie who tamed a bureaucracy, but it isn’t done justice – you’ll learn a lot more from Rose his own words [PDF, 840kb]. And there’s a completely wacky feature about “Lifecasting”- in which people record every calorie and particle of food eaten, and every minute of activity in their lives, before posting it on the web. Do you know anyone who does this?

Then there’s the four page photo feature of close-ups of a supercomputer’s circuitry – and everything’s alright again. You wonder – was this published because the pictures are interesting art? (They’re not – one page would do).

The choice of experts reflects a media person’s idea of cutting edge science – if they’d been cyrogenically frozen in about 1993. You’ve got neuroscience, represented by Susan Greenfield, and sociobiology, thanks to former Northern Crock chairman Matt Ridley, nephew of former cabinet minister Lord Nicholas and a Dawkins fanatic. Neither is best-placed to explain why neuroscience and sociobiology have been flops.

(Place bets on Stephen Fry “guest editing” in the near future).

Don’t judge a book by the title. Especially if the title is something like Cyburbia. James Harkin, who worked with Adam Curtis on The Trap, has produced the first proper full-length critique of Web 2.0 – tracing the daftness back to the cybernetics pioneers of the 1940s.

It’s odd that something with so much hype as Web 2.0 has received so little intelligent criticism. Half of Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, looked at the social and psychological implications, and he’s following up at length in The Shallows.

But Cyburbia takes a different approach. By looking at the mania for feedback in a historical context, Harkin finds a common thread in subjects as diverse as military strategy, TV shows like Lost, as well as the interwebs.

Q. We’re used to cyber-everything but can you define cybernetics for us?

Harkin: There are a lot of definitions but the simple idea I use is this idea that what distinguishes human beings, or what’ smost important about humans, is that they exist on a continuous information loop defined by a constant stream of messages we’re sending or receiving.

Now you can interpret the world in that way – me picking up a glass, say – but it is just a metaphor. The story of my book is how this metaphor, created by Norbert Wiener, because of its beauty, became the inspiration for a new medium and influencing how we live. It’s given rise to all this incredible technology, but the idea of fitting ourselves into that mould will mean we’re the losers.

The central image of the book is Cyburbia, this strange alternate world where we watch each other and the minutiae of each others’ lives.

You might have stared out of your window in suburbia in the 1950s and seen a few people across the street, but now you can stare at millions of other people. The danger is that when you spend all your time deciphering what other people are up to, you never get around to doing something original on your own, because you’re so swamped by opportunities to go onto other people’s lives on blogs, social networks and Twitter.

Did you start off with cybernetics and then see parallels around us today, or did you start with Web 2.0 and trace it back?

I started off with the image of Cyburbia because I liked it, the image of people retreating from the world and staring at other people’s lives. Now that’s a nice image but it doesn’t really explain a lot .So I began to trace it back to first Stewart Brand and then back to Norbert Wiener, a brilliant polymathic genius. I traced it back to the hippies then realised it goes quite far back beyond them.

Now I’m not arguing people are stupid or lazy if they do that – but there’s an electronic peer pressure online. Academic studies that have been done by people who are very sympathetic to Web 2.0 and networks, people like Clay Shirky and Duncan Watts, show that the whole decision making process tends to become a robotic routine. One person makes a decision, and everyone else falls in line.

One aspect of the suburbia of the 1950s we see online is the conformism. This is incredibly ironic, because this medium was set up, for political reasons, to be incredibly individualistic and creative and non-conformist.

What I like about the book is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of responding to utopianism with a dystopianism: that we’re all doomed. That’s a really common response, but people are intelligent, and discerning about technology. How do you resolve this then?

At the risk of sounding dreadfully like Marshall McLuhan, people haven’t quite understood it as a medium yet. They’ve become so focussed on the idea that we’re “freeing ourselves from the authority of the ‘mainstream media”, that we think that pressing buttons on a computer to talk to your neighbour is an authentic way of communicating. It’s not.

The net is a medium like any other and has its biases, like any other. The biases are different.

The problem people have is that they’re reluctant to describe it as a medium – they see it as a political idea, not a medium. So circumventing the mainstream media is not in itself authentic.

As you know, Andrew, if you criticise Web 2.0, people get offended. It’s peculiar that they should get offended: you’re criticising a medium. What they see is you criticising a groundswell of popular democracy, a movement, which it isn’t at all. It’s a bunch of machines.

There’s an odd aspect to cybernetic ideas a few of us have noticed, which is that some people who adopt them go off the deep end, and lose their minds. They dive in completely. They really lose their sense of self.

If you’re engaging with the internet gurus who are very evangelical about Web 2.0 you’ll hear a very good argument. And that’s for the first time in history, millions of people around the world can have a voice. They can input all their thoughts into this system, and people can read them unmediated by anyone. Now, that’s interesting, and it’s a good and a challenging argument. But if you stop and think about it for a second, it’s also wrong.

It’s wrong in an instructive way. To confuse any kind of democratic movement with typing words into an electronic machine which no one may ever read is really quite insulting. Given the history of modern democracy – everything from the French Revolution to the Civil Rights movement, to the Miners’ Strike – to say that ‘this is the first time people have had a voice’ actually tells you a great deal about the lack of understanding the Web 2.0 people have.

Yeah, I first came across six years ago with the bloggers Googlewashing. They replaced a real political movement with a synthetic one. I thought they’d be a bit embarrased by this, but they couldn’t see why people who had gone on marches against the Iraq invasion were pissed off with them.

It’s scary. It’s not pedantic to say if you can confuse the ability to type things into a blog no one will ever read with a voice, then something is deeply wrong with your political philosophy.

People who are being critical of Web 2.0 and this constant and continuous flow have a difficult time of it. It looks like you’re pissing on someone else’s parade. But I think there are serious and important arguments, here. The intellectual justifications that have been made by internet gurus are simply wrong.

And these are people who are being paid large amounts of money by companies to reorganise how the rest of us work.

Jaron Lanier suggested a reason for people going bonkers. He picked out neo-Darwinism as an example of a cybernetic idea that prompts this. The belief “.. that what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture” as an example of cybernetic totalism. This is a hole Richard Dawkins fell into.

I’m not an expert on Dawkins, but I can argue that part of my story is a sort of tragi-heroic story. It’s a story about people who, over the last 60 years, have been trying so hard to implant themselves into a network. They very much wanted to become a node in the network, because they saw the network as being so much more powerful. In doing so, they lost their sense of human-ness.

But the network isn’t as powerful as the adverts suggest. Human-ness is infinitely more powerful than an algorithm.

It’s similar to the Singularity idea, where we weld ourselves into a cybernetic system, and in about 2040, or whenever it’s supposed to be, we disappear like a puff of smoke.

Technology should be so much better. The web has hardly started, really. But only the new priesthood of web designers are allowed to criticise it, or make improvements. There is a grain of truth in what the evangelists say, it’s the mountain of crap they’ve piled on top of it that’s the problem.

The evangelists are simply wandering about waving empty books, saying “Look, a book! How incredible. Pay me fifteen grand to talk about an empty book.”

It’s a transitional period. Even skeptics like us need to emphasise the positive.

I’ve done that for years by advocating legal, licensed P2P file sharing, which I find almost everyone except a few activists would to have at least like to have the choice to use. Most technology utopians hate it though because it’s an admission of failure. Free music is about the only real ’success’ the nets have delivered.

There’s another view of Web 2.0 evangelists which I call ‘Why not?’ For example, ‘Why not turn up at Grand Central Station wearing underpants in a big Flash Mob?’

But I don’t think ‘Why Not?’ is good enough. Things need to have a purpose. If you have a project or a purpose, you can use the medium to achieve that. With no ideas, no project, you have nothing. The evangelists simply believe can use this metaphysical glow of this medium to woo people.

People forget the world’s first Flash Mob in 2003, organised by Bill Wasik, was a joke. It was a joke on the gullibility of New York hipsters who would react to any kind of electronic information, and do anything you told them.

What’s fascinating is that the ‘Why Not?’ ethos of Web 2.0 people started as a joke against them.

Web 2.0 people don’t do jokes. Cannot compute. Now Linus Torvalds, the guy who started Linux, likes to say that technology doesn’t change people, people change the technology. Again, isn’t there a risk over-estimating some of the effects of technology?

McLuhan’s argument was that media give rise to everything, that media is the root of modern life. Obviously that isn’t true, and I’d never argue that. But it has an effect. Moving from oral storytelling to reading books by candle light did change things socially. It’s important to recognise that.

The oral tradition changed but I can’t buy that the human appetite for hearing a story diminished – we love stories more than ever probably, they just come in so many different forms.

People want zig-zaggy stories now. If we can discuss it without surrendering to it, we can find new ways of telling stories that baffle people, knock them off balance, and get them engaged. That’s good. But Web 2.0 is antithetical to a real understanding of what media can do to culture, because all it says is let’s surrender to the medium, and do whatever it wants to do.

When you look around you though, the best cultural operators are not surrendering their authorship or control, they’re using it to entice audiences with new kinds of stories.

I think the media obsession is an example of over-estimating the impact of technology. I find London media, marketing and advertising agency people are completely obsessed with Web 2.0, but it’s a phrase you’ve ever heard anyone else use. People just pick up the tools, use them, and are really discerning about technology. The BBC goes on about little else.

It’s dangerous because these people are prone to take all the Web 2.0 claims at face value.

I first wrote about Second Life because I was sick of reading utter rubbish. The first line of the repot would always be “I’m sitting here on Copacabana beach with loads of girls and a deep blue sea, and – bingo – I’m not in Brazil, I’m in Second Life.”

This is no way to understand any medium. Instead of trying to understand what the medium can offer, they’re simply surrendering to the whole idea.

It’s partly a demographic issue. You have a very ageing mainstream media and pompous executives who are desperate to reach out to a new audience to who aren’t watching their programmes any more. The danger is because of the demographic distance between executives and audience they take the claims at face value, there’s no critical distance whatsoever.

Why do you think that is, though? Twitter is a great example. An editor or a reporter at a newspaper needs to turn off part of their brain to write about Twitter uncritically. Part of their brain part is going ‘This is really daft’, another part is saying ‘This is cheesy’ and another voice is probably saying ‘Stop. This is a kind of behaviour that has never caught on.’ Yet they silence all those doubts. They’ll throw out evidence to the contrary.

If you’re a journalist in Fleet Street or the BBC it’s difficult to be critical, because these commands come on down from on high. BBC radio people tell me the kind of pressure they’re under to use Twitter.

Large media companies are laying off good, seasoned journalists at the same time as they’re paying these internet gurus huge sums of money to talk rubbish about the medium.

It would be a shame if we abandoned seasoned journalists who are capable of researching and breaking stories, and capable of doing more than just simply going on Google, in favour of people who are simply obsessed with the medium. That’s the danger.

Do you think it’s insecurity as Adam [Curtis] says? Or are they feeling guilty about being in this privileged position of being in the media?

It’s a transitional phase we’re in. But if journalists are messing around, then that’s a problem, they should be doing what journalists should do.

Why should they bother when they have this instant, hyperreal world they’ve constructed for themselves? Web 2.0 gives these new media journalists everything they would otherwise be drawing from the real world if they did their jobs properly. It’s an endless supply of novelty – and it promises to describe the world in a new way. It’s an alternative reality. The credibility of the media goes down all the time with ordinary people the more they write about Twitter, or whatever the Twitter will be next week.

It’s not going to rescue your media operation. If they want to save the idea of newspapers and put them online they need to take a step back from Web 2.0, rather simply chase a young demographic around like pedophiles at a playground.

One aspect of Cyburbia I didn’t find so convincing was the argument that the TV show Lost, for example, or the movie Memento, are cybernetically influenced because they’re non-linear stories. But Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five weren’t either, and you’ve got modernists like Joyce before that. Or Tristram Shandy

I did anticipate that. My argument is that all of these things – non-linearity, stories going off in different directions – are not unique and contemporary at all. They’ve been the stuff of high culture for almost a century. Jean Luc Godard famously said a film should have a beginning , a middle, and an ending – but not necessarily in that order. But they’ve become part of popular culture for a generation, by people playing fast and loose with computer games, texting and the internet. Remember that Kubrick’s movie The Killing [1956] where he used these devices was a big flop – maybe it was too early.

Fair enough. I’ll give you that.

You’re positive about a lot of aspects of technology, then…

It’s easy to be written off as a miserable old bastard.

Hah. Well brace yourself, I think you will be called that anyway by people who have the Web 2.0 religion, from their point of view everyone who disagrees is a miserable old bastard.

The positive aspect is that people are ripe for new ways of working, new forms of story telling – but we have to take a step back from the hype of whatever the latest manifestation of the Web 2.0 is and focus on how people are changing . The changes brought about by computers games, texting and the internet will have moulded us very delicately over the past 30 years into creatures who may be more jumpy, might more sophisticated, or may be keener to design associations and patterns of information.

All this could be harnessed, but we need to take a step back from the idea we just surrender to this self-organising system, and reclaim our human-ness.