What do you do when a global corporation pays out millions to the watchdogs that we expect to protect us against it? It’s a fair question to ask in light of the Chocolate Factory’s legal settlement this week, over Google Buzz. The privacy class action suit has landed a windfall of millions of dollars to “privacy” groups – but not a cent to ordinary citizens, users of Google Gmail’s service whose privacy was compromised.

The Washington Legal Foundation’s chairman Dan Popeo, a pro-business organisation, is one critic who has raised an eyebrow.

Google offered $8.5m to settle several class action suits last September. The Court made a preliminary settlement late last year and decided on the dispersal of money in February. The lawyers took a cut of just over $2m, leaving $6m to be spread around some 77 organisations. Only 12 made the cut.

Amongst the groups that failed to squeeze its snouts into the trough was EPIC, which complained that the selection process favored “organizations that are currently paid by [Defendant] to lobby for or to consult for the company”.

To say the least, that’s an interesting description of the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which both hit the jackpot, receiving $1m each.

Judge James Ware approved the payouts,and then he included EPIC and one other recipient too.

“Why were these lucky 14 settlement fund recipients chosen and not others?,” asks Popeo. “What criteria were used to choose them? How will the $6.1 million provide an ‘indirect benefit’ (as the judge put it) to the faceless, nameless plaintiffs in the suit?”

Popeo also notices another curiosity. In addition to EPIC’s ticket on the gravy train, Judge Ware managed to find $500,000 for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Why that particular faculty? It’s anyone’s guess, but quite coincidentally, the Honorable Judge Ware is a lecturer at Santa Clara University.

It’s a strange arrangement that sees purportedly independent “citizens groups” come to become recipients of cash from the companies they claim to fight, on citizens’ behalf. A cynic would suggest that they might forget to bite the hand that feeds them.

And $1m is not a trivial amount to the EFF: in 2008/09 the organisation saw gross income of $3.42m, and was left with a shortfall of over $400,000. Google’s cash from this one settlement alone exceeds both individual membership fees, and individual contributions – both under $1m. You could almost describe relying on Google is a kind of business model.

(Former EFF board chairman Brad Templeton is an old pal of fellow Burner Larry Page, as he explained in an unusually generous critique of GMail.]

It’s all quite cosy. Perhaps the groups could nominate Google for one of their many awards: we suggest “Most Munificent Litigant”.

Bootnote

Europeans shouldn’t be so smug. The superstate hands out millions of Euros to environmental groups to lobby the EU. Greenpeace, to its credit, refuses to accept the cash.

Read more at The Register

Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.

I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade…

Read more at The Register

Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web – how “data” would replace files, with machine speaking unto machine in a cybernetic paradise.

It’s really a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy.

Computer Science is no longer about creating graduates who can solve engineering challenges, but about generating work for the academics themselves. The core expertise of a CompSci department today is writing funding applications. And the Holy Grail for these paper chasers is a blank cheque for work which can be conducted without scrutiny for years to come. With its endless committees defining standards (eg, “ontologies”, “folksonomies”) that no one will ever use, the “Semantic Web” fits the bill perfectly.

Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material ‘curated’ by the unemployed or poor graduates – another form of spam, really. The enterprise is doomed. But nobody’s told the political class.

For real bureaucrats the dangers of self-service government are obvious – most of the civil servants are not needed any more. Therefore the challenge is to make the technology as expensive and bureaucratic as possible. Both IT consultants and civil servants have got rather good at this over the past 15 years: IT consultants fees have exceeded £100m since 1997.

In his latest speech, Broon says:

“[The] next generation web is a simple concept, but I believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary – just as disruptive to existing business and organisational models – as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information – and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information.”

And I’m sure he believes every word.

The beauty of the “semantic web” – unworkable in anything other than a small, tightly controlled context – is that it will be years before anyone notices. By which time “Web Science” departments will have flourished all over the land, and billions more will have been spent trying to make Big Government small.

So you have two parties with a mutual interest in prolonging the agony. What’s uniquely grim about the appointment of The GLB to oversee all this, is that Tim Berners Lee is probably the last person you’d want advising on your web strategy. He refuses to recognise the many problems with networks, as we discovered three years ago, back when he boasted that Phishing wasn’t a problem – because he’d never been Phished. That didn’t last long.

The term long since ceased to mean anything – it now means anything you want it to mean. But as a rule of thumb, advocating Neutrality means giving your support to general Goodness on the internets, and opposing general Badness. Therefore, supporting Neutrality means you yourself are a Good Person, by reflection, and people who oppose Neutrality are Bad People.

This is a wonderful thing, and the beauty is, it’s all so simple. It’s like the Good Guys Wearing White – the Bad Guys oppose Neutrality. And because Neutrality is anything you want it to be, you have an all-purpose morality firehose at your disposal. Just point it and shoot at Baddies.

But best of all is that you get to define the Baddies, raise a lynch mob, catch them and hang them – before somebody has had a chance to ask "Where’s the harm, exactly?".

This time the accusation of Neutrality Violations is being turned on copyright holders, minority groups – and anyone who wants a network to run the way they want it to.

Rights for some, but not all

Now you may be thinking that it’s strange that in an age when we keep being told that thanks to technology "we’re all creators", creators’ rights must go out of the window. Surely these digital rights should be being strengthened – as new sources of money are available to the talented, and as old middlemen melt away? Has a technology ever been invented that when allied to copyright, makes creators less independent, or poorer? Not until now.

But not everybody sees it this way. Copyright messes up the smooth running of the networks, it’s a spanner in the machine-driven cybernetic utopia. It also costs network operators money – paying the pesky talent who create the stuff that generates the demand. And it’s impossible for a machine to do: an algorithm is unable to spot and nurture creative talent, in the way a studio boss or a publisher or a label could find and nurture acting writing or performing talent. The machine can’t compute that. And of course, the machine can’t create art: when algorithms are set to write a composition (or when, say, Cory Doctorow attempts to create readable prose) you can tell instantly something is missing.

So Google’s front groups such as Public Knowledge and FreePress – they fly under the flag of "citizens groups" or "consumer rights" groups, but are really two of Google’s most potent arrows in its lobbying quiver – are now deploying the morality firehose on copyright. Anyone policing the internets for copyright infringement will be violating neutrality, say the groups. Therefore it shouldn’t be permitted. Presumably the same logic can be applied to policing the internets for anything: a paedophile "neutrality" maybe being violated somewhere – which would be awful. It’s economically and technically illiterate of course, just as you’d expect. Nobody at Public Knowledge or FreePress has ever done a day’s honest toil at a business in their lives – their prejudices are evident. But the groups have also rolled out ethnic minorities, alarming them that without Neutrality, they’ll be erased. The National Hispanic Media Coalition, for example, is standing right behind the Neutrality firehose. But imagine these two examples.

How ideology busts the citizens’ networks

In the first, a community of citizens in a small town – let’s call it HappyVille – decides to mutually own and operate their town’s network. In order to defray the cost of buying bandwidth, they grant the HappyVille Co-Op Network a video-on-demand service. Punters pay HCN their $3.50 a movie knowing that the profit generated maintains the pipes. In order to keep the HappyVille citizens who prefer to get their copyright content illegally, however, they create a fast lane that goes only to TVs, for delivering the movies. This keeps the Torrenters happy, too. The HCN serves one happy town.

But that could be illegal under Neutrality rules. It would only take one bitter or ignorant ideologue in HappyVille to complain to the FCC and remind regulators that the Neutrality rules were being broken. Asking "Where’s the harm?" would not be a valid question. The Co-Op has committed a crime against Neutrality: Go string them up.

In the second example, let’s imagine that a diaspora of Latin Americans decide to start their own ISP. They club together to buy cheap international traffic back to Central and South America. Subscribers to the ISP enjoy cut rate VoIP calls to family and loved ones. It offers a community alternative to the scalping rates of large telcos. But voice traffic on an IP network is highly susceptible to latency and jitter – and one relentless Torrent seeder can cause problems. And as above, that one Torrenter can complain to the FCC that Neutrality Crimes are being Commmitted. So let’s close the joint down. No more cheap calls for you. That’s how the advocates seem to like it. One guy with his trousers around his ankles can invoke a virtual national lynch mob.

Ask Whitey; he knows best

There’s something uniquely distasteful about the sock puppet "citizens" groups evoking citizens rights to deprive citizens of choices. Some Progressives have always viewed ethnic minorities as little more than an opportunity for a photo shoot, and then forget about them for the next four years. This is all that, but it’s worse, too: it’s patronising and misleading them. It insults their intelligence. Whitey still decides what kind of networks they are permitted to run. The internet was so much easier before the technology utopians (abetted by Google) decided to write the world’s first technical rulebook for the internet.

When there was no rulebook, you could do what you want technically – and your network either succeeded or failed, according to the laws of physics, or the laws of business. Now you have to pass some arbitrary political correctness test, adminsiered by Comic Book Star Guy. Ain’t life grand?

You have to admire "Neutrality" itself though, and more and more each day. This metaphysical, metaphorical firehose can be anything an authoritarian wants it to be. It allows people who want to be in politics but who can’t do politics (in terms of vision, persuasion, coalition building, honesty) to wield tremendous power. It may not last, since it’s almost certainly unconstitutional, and the consequences leave everyone (except you-know-who) worse off. But it’s a great example of net nerds flexing their muscle.

Tuesday found me in New York, on my first stateside visit in a couple of years. The details of the Bailout plan had just been revealed and the slow burn of outrage was apparent everywhere.

Admittedly, this was New York.

(Long-time readers will know I was the San Francisco correspondent for El Reg for six years and was frequently asked by Europeans: “What do Americans think of … x?” To which the only honest answer is, “I can’t tell you what Americans think, but here in San Francisco …”)

The outrage isn’t the spooky part. The really odd thing is that if you had to rely on the mainstream US newspapers and TV channels – and nothing else – you’d wouldn’t know something remarkable was happening. Which is that the Treasury Secretary’s Bailout Plan had united parts of America who spend most of their energy hitting each other over the head, in common opposition to the proposal.

It was the moment that politicians dread the most. This was not merely an outbreak of popular discontent, but a phenomenon which breaks down those convenient labels the political marketing people like to use, to shield their masters from people’s true desires and intentions. Not just coarse labels like “Left” and “Right” – but the really dumb, patronizing demographic ones like “Soccer Mom” and the nadir of modern politics, those found in Mark Penn’s “Microtrends.” Niche marketers will have to start from scratch.

Conservatives, libertarians, and lefties all raised objections to the Bailout for very sound reasons of their own. The idea that the state should bail out feckless private enterprises offended both conservatives and libertarians, who take moral responsibility seriously. The left wanted their traditional adversaries put in jail, not given a gift of new lease of life with the public’s money.

People discovered that to “Change Congress,” you simply need a ballot box – or the threat of one.

All this was reflected on political sites, forums and blogs – but not a hint of this sentiment was expressed by the professional media. So when Congress rejected the Bill on Monday, America’s punditocracy expressed its shock. It also reported that the markets were “astonished” – the markets being presumed to have a better grasp of what American citizens want than American citizens themselves.

All week, the media had refrained from comment that might embarrass the political class. In fact, the first professional column I read which was reflected the true feelings of many US citizens around me was written from 3,500 miles away and published in London’s Sunday Times.

“To be told that this bill would be beyond scrutiny was more than democratic flesh and blood could bear,” Simon Jenkins.

Ouch! Your democracy is hurting my consensus

But even after Monday’s vote, the cream of America’s pundits couldn’t quite face up to what had happened. For example, Thomas Friedman retreated further into his fantasy world, from which he could only radiate disbelief:

We’re all connected. As others have pointed out, you can’t save Main Street and punish Wall Street anymore than you can be in a rowboat with someone you hate and think that the leak in the bottom of the boat at his end is not going to sink you, too. The world really is flat. We’re all connected. “Decoupling” is pure fantasy.

There’s a man who’s a prisoner of his metaphors. Leaping from “we’re all connected” (vaguely… somehow) to “you can’t let banks fail” is a jump that can only be made if you think your metaphors have astounding metaphysical properties. Maybe Friedman really believes this. Who knows?

Or take David Brooks, who usually poses as the champion of the proles, except when the proles do something he doesn’t approve of. He called the Congressional vote “The Revolt of the Nihilists.” The dissenting Congressmen, Brooks wrote,

… showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.

You could see what Brooks really objected to was the natural order of things was being upset – how dare people question “expertise”? Or leaders? People don’t know what’s good for them. (But of course, David does…)

And to confirm that what really peeved him was voters getting uppity, he concluded:

What we need in this situation is authority.

Actually, what we need is an open, rational, and democratic debate about a range of choices – and that’s something the political and media elites united to oppose last week.

The media had done all it could to keep awkward questions off the air.

Where did the surreal $700bn figure come from? On Friday, we found out – someone at the Treasury had just made it up. The Treasury also let slip that the plan had been in a drawer for months. “Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials,” Rollcall reported. Oh, really?

Much else was kept off the air, particularly the key issue of whether US banks should be permitted to fail. The unspoken assumption was they couldn’t – but they have before, and the financial system has continued.

The anti-democratic sentiment wasn’t just confined to superstar American columnists. At the ironically-named OpenDemocracy, a British site funded by the Ford Foundation, the editor-in-chief patronized the bailout objectors by calling them “principled but mad.” See how you’re not permitted to both rational and disagree? (The site has argued before that people are too stupid to be trusted with democracy).

Dumb and dumber

Was this a conspiracy to keep Americans from seeing the truth? I don’t think so, but it is a watershed moment that exposes the media and political elites. These are people who went to college together, and who share the same sense of importance and entitlement. In the memorable words of the BBC’s Adam Curtis, neither class knows what it’s doing any more, “and they know that they don’t know“.

Both also have a close relationship to marketing, which claims it has a unique and almost alchemical ability to help politicians “reach” the public. In actual fact, it does something far much more useful for the politicians, by making people a distant, safe, and manageable entity. Politicians hate democracy and the nasty surprises it brings, and marketing promises to disarm the threat. With “microtrends,” people’s true intentions can be managed into something that can be addressed with a soundbite, to be mollified with an earmark.

It’s a truism that when someone claims an expertise on niche marketing – they really don’t have a clue about the world. Finding refuge in atomicity, they’ve simply given up trying to describe the bigger picture. It’s a cowardly choice.

The media’s role is simply one of providing comfort and propaganda. Tremors in the micro niches are reported in great detail. But when a political earthquake takes place, the media can’t even recognise it. It’s literally beyond description – the words aren’t in their vocabulary.

The result has left us disenfranchised. The same comforting propaganda that reduces people to a convenient aggregation of demographic labels, is quite useless at divining their intentions, when they are so forcefully expressed.

But clearly, now, the era where politicians, journalist and political marketing experts propped each other up is over, and the internet has helped enormously to destroy their power. The micro-marketing is now junk; the court journalism is superfluous, and deep alliances that the elites tell us are unthinkable and impossible( such as between libertarians and parts of the left) will surely emerge.

As I write, however, the Bailout that Americans don’t want is returning, this time weighed down with pork barrel sweeteners for everyone from NASCAR track owners to environmentalists. A few minutes ago, it passed: so 21st Century America’s brush with democracy may have been a brief experiment.

But wasn’t it fun while it lasted?

© Situation Publishing 2008.

Getting an NMA is the equivalent of getting an orange at half time from the coach of your village football team, just for turning up in the rain. But this year, even by its own standards, New Statesman appears to have outsourced the nominations to a team of satirical writers.

What else can explain one nominee, East Devon District Council, which is lauded for “using AJAX web technology” to “provide efficiencies in waste collections”.

Rubbish enabling rubbish, if you like.

But Garbage 2.0 faces a tough challenge from another nominee, Jimmy Leach, “head of digital communications” at 10 Downing Street.

“Since he started in his post at Downing Street,” we learn, “Jimmy Leach has transformed the government’s approach to new media”.

That’s remarkably similar to the boilerplate text Number 10 sends out to accompany Jimmy Leach’s forays into the real world:

“Since he started in his post at Downing Street, Jimmy Leach has transformed the government’s approach to new media,” apparently.

How? Well, “he executed the e-petitions strategy which has resulted in many millions of people engaging with the website. He has also instituted a series of podcasts featuring the PM and personalities such as Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Chris Evans, Bill Bryson and more”.

Your taxes at work, there.

In true New Labour fashion, members of the public are queueing up to offer spontaneous gestures of appreciation.

“It may seem a small thing but as a citizen to have a direct voice into Downing Street has got to be a huge step forward and more listening to the people, not just hearing them, must become an increasingly valuable asset to any premier, now and in the future,” gushes one appreciative commenter. “Thank you Jimmy, long may this development continue.”

Yes, it’s about listening not just hearing. Where would be without the web? Hearing but not listening, probably.

But even that display of party hackery is outdone by Joanne Chew, of the website Local Directgov. Joanne has modestly nominated herself.

“Key to the implementation and deployment of LDG was effective stakeholder communication and management. Multiple channels of communication were employed including e-mail alerts, feedback forms from events, articles in magazines, journals, newsletters, ambient media [ what's that? - ed.], workshops, conference, ‘How to guides’ posted in website, face-to-face engagement.”

Alas, not everyone is appreciative, as you can see from the comments:

“It would be worth investigating not just how much money has been directly spent on this shambles – and for what miniscule benefit – but also how much more has been spent in wasted time across 388 local authorities,” writes one commenter. Indeed – much of the work of the LocalGov was famously replicated in a few minutes using Google: check out Directionless Gov.

“Perhaps a reputable magazine with an interest in civic society might care to carry out some enquiries?” asks another.

Alas, that reputable magazine probably won’t be the New Statesman, which takes time out from puffing blogs and wikis for some occasional hard-headed policy analysis:

“The world is catching on to smart cards as a way of easing the growing tension between security issues and civil liberties,” wrote one Nagemeh Nasiritousi in the supplement to honour the magazine’s 2003 New Media Awards. The supplement was sponsored by Schlumberger…the same Schlumberger that’s lobbying furiously for the government’s highly popular ID card scheme.

And it’s no surprise at all to hear that a virtual Presidential candidate is throwing his electrons behind a virtual cause, to repeal a virtual law that never existed.

What else would a cypher do?

Asked whether he’d “re-instate Net Neutrality” as “the Law of the Land”, trailing Presidential Candidate Barack Obama told an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa pledged that yes, he would.

He also said he’d protect Ewok villages everywhere, and hoped that Tony Soprano had survived the non-existent bloodbath at the conclusion of The Sopranos.

(So we made the last two up – but they wouldn’t have been any more silly than what the Presidential Candidate really said.)

There are several problems with Obama’s pledge.

Firstly, the network of networks we call the internet has never been neutral in any technical sense – it wouldn’t work if it was. Network managers have always performed “shaping”.

Nor has this “neutrality” ever been “the Law of the Land”. Campaigners like to point to the ominous portents (http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA631098.html) of a Federal court decision known as Brand X, from 2005. But guess what? This turns out to be a fiction, too: the court simply maintained the status quo, upholding FCC cable regulations that permitted cable to share their pipes with ISPs. So no change there.

Campaigners say comments by AT&T boss Ed Whitacre indicated he wanted to charge different prices for different websites. This is something Obama picked up on.

“What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites, so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites,” he said.

But … well, you can guess, by now.

In the now famous interview, Whitacre never mentioned websites: he indicated that Google and Yahoo! for example, shouldn’t be allowed to launch TV services on his expensive new high speed IPTV network for free: a defensive, not an offensive remark.
Virtually yours

Obama’s finger-on-the-button pledge may have been a waste of virtual time, though – for “neutrality” has fallen off the agenda for a number of reasons – Despite the dogged efforts of Ars Technica’s Nate “Neut” Anderson to try and breath some life into it.

Perhaps the idea of one slow lane for everyone doesn’t really hold much appeal. Or perhaps the it’s because each new “scare” turns out to be hokum, and the public is growing tired of the Chicken Little scares.

For example, a fortnight ago Comcast put a cap on Bittorrent uploads, so Bittorrent downloads could continue. And that’s a clue to why “Neutralists” now meet with such indifference – perhaps there’s a realisation that in a shared resources network, rationing actually means there’s more to go round.

There’s one aspect to this virtual campaign that’s been overlooked however – the sheer improbability of the nightmare.

To believe the campaigners, you need to believe that a net with differential treatment (eg, “No YouTube for You”) is sellable at any price: in other words, you need to believe ordinary people are stupid.

Unfortunately, this comes naturally to the Neutralists, and their paranoid narratives .

They’re capable of imagining all kind of satanic machinations from up on high. But they’re incapable of believing that their fellow citizens are able to make the simplest and most rational decision, and just say No.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t. What he did say (or what his advisors scripted for him) didn’t reflect the reality of Web 2.0, only the highlights of the marketing fantasy. Politics should study this fantasy vision, he said, and then try to imitate it.

Miliband was speaking at a Google-sponsored networking event, designed to showcase the internet – and by implication, its own benevolent role in it, to the political elites.

“There is not only dispersal of power and flattening of hierarchies; there are also new forms of collective action. ‘I can’ means ‘I can collaborate’,” he said.

“The tools of production are in striking ways being put in the hands of citizens.”

And in the choicest observation of them all, he predicted that this can-do spirit will “transcend the limits of consumerism, and become a mass movement for cooperation”.

This is what the world looks like to Miliband, who we’re told is so clever he writes his own speeches. Not for the first time, having examined one of these, we’re wondering where this reputation for intellectual clarity comes from.

It’s curious when politicans advocate a course or programme and ignore its consequences. Free opiates and free beer would bring instant happiness and well-being to the population: opiates cause weight loss – so no more fat people – and beer is cheap to produce, and easily and joyfully consumed. So why not give them both away? Presumably, because the consequences outweigh the advantages. The picture of Web 2.0 which exists in Miliband’s head would be the first technology in history not to have any side-effects – or the first whose side-effects are only positive.

Even IT professionals, and those of you who have to keep IT systems running, have little appetite for it, warning us that its consequences are costly. We won’t dwell on his misconceptions, because it’s familiar territory to most of you – save to pick out two, one micro and one macro.

Miliband lauds OhMyNews, the Korean “citizens journalism” site. But OhMyNews, as Koreans know only too well, is a nasty, partisan political operation – a kind of Fox News – that only flourishes because it doesn’t pay its volunteer contributors. It profits from what’s called “digital sharecropping”. If this is a new spirit of volunteerism, then so is the Church of Scientology.

As for new modes of production, or a new spirit of sharing, Miliband makes a very common mistake. What we’re experiencing is an explosion of low-cost recording technologies. Much of what they record – and what Google indiscriminately caches, like a listening bug in the corner of the room – was never intended to be recorded. Much of the rest was never intended to be “published” – merely spread among one or two family members or friends. The internet has given us “a telephone network with pictures”, if you like, which we can all put to use. But to describe this as a new form of production is like claiming that the listening device is creating the conversations it records. Once one has made that mistake, it’s very difficult to see things clearly again.

No wonder the Rt Honorable Member for Google (South Shields) is confused, for when some people fall into digital utopianism, they fall in all the way – and when they bob back to the surface, it’s with what looks like a shiny, new, off-the-shelf belief system. From then on, it’s hard to persuade the sufferer that they’re fantasising about the world. Miliband has a fantasy version of technology, breaking off only to plug his “carbon trading calculator”.

In keeping with the Web 2.0 rhetoric, Miliband’s is religious. Take this purple passage:

Instead of citizens acting in isolation, unsure of whether their actions are reciprocated by others, feeling powerless in the face of large organisations and global change, citizens can feel part of a bigger project. They can create a shared willingness to act, their preferences can be aggregated, and can give rise to collective action as well as collective discussion.

hallelujahs.

But for a moment, let’s take the Minister at face value. What politicians like Miliband and the Conservative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne – another web fantasist apparently cloned, as you can see, from the same incubator (Millibourne Industries?) – are describing is how they see society ordered. It’s technocratic, and the role of the politician in this machine vision is merely to provide lubricant for the great, benevolent actors.

Unfortunately, the near-identical policies of our parties are designed to make life easy for them. Planning controls are dropped and democratic checks and balances are discarded to ease the path for who really runs the country – Tesco, Google (a newcomer), and the nuclear industry.

With so many teenagers pouring out their most intimates on the web, into MySpace and Facebook, some press pundits are wondering if these careless candid thoughts will one day come back to haunt them when they’re running for political office. These pundits have got it wrong. It’s not their adolescent indiscretions, but the things they said last week that we should take notice off. Especially when they start acting like teenagers. As our “future Prime Minister” just has.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t.

What he did say (or what his advisors scripted for him) didn’t reflect the reality of Web 2.0, only the highlights of the marketing fantasy. Politics should study this fantasy vision, he said, and then try to imitate it.

Miliband was speaking at a Google-sponsored networking event, designed to showcase the internet – and by implication, its own benevolent role in it, to the political elites.

“There is not only dispersal of power and flattening of hierarchies; there are also new forms of collective action. ‘I can’ means ‘I can collaborate’,” he said.

“The tools of production are in striking ways being put in the hands of citizens.”

And in the choicest observation of them all, he predicted that this can-do spirit will “transcend the limits of consumerism, and become a mass movement for cooperation”.

This is what the world looks like to Miliband, who we’re told is so clever he writes his own speeches. Not for the first time, having examined one of these, we’re wondering where this reputation for intellectual clarity comes from.

It’s curious when politicans advocate a course or programme and ignore its consequences. Free opiates and free beer would bring instant happiness and well-being to the population: opiates cause weight loss – so no more fat people – and beer is cheap to produce, and easily and joyfully consumed. So why not give them both away? Presumably, because the consequences outweigh the advantages. The picture of Web 2.0 which exists in Miliband’s head would be the first technology in history not to have any side-effects – or the first whose side-effects are only positive.

Even IT professionals, and those of you who have to keep IT systems running, have little appetite for it, warning us that its consequences are costly. We won’t dwell on his misconceptions, because it’s familiar territory to most of you – save to pick out two, one micro and one macro.