It’s rather like cursing in church, or copulating on the Queen’s lawn. No good opinions, I know, will come of it. But how do you start your digital week? With junk, with spam, with a standard crop of 58 e-mails offering to “energize my baby-maker,” prevent “death by swine flu,” and dispense “scintillating orgasms” to all and sundry. Welcome to the 21st century, and a great deal of what we hate about it. Impotence, disease, frustration.
And such starts, on examination, do not get better. Just sit down and consider the most dire dishes of the day. Shall we obsessively discuss the death of newspapers, the end of five centuries of print? Or maybe we could go one worse and ponder the demise of books themselves, a bonfire of our literary heritage turned to ashes by Kindle? There’s porn and pedophilia, of course: giant helpings of fear and disgust on demand. There’s terrorism and the latest sinister warnings from Osama and Co. There’s the end of civilized life as we know it.
Whatever happened to community? Walk any high street and you’ll see the shutters coming down. Remember the ghosts of Woolworths past and sniffle nostalgia. Traditional, human Britain is closing for business — just like a globe where bank failures spread like viruses and viruses spread like bank failures. Will leaders arise to rescue and inspire us afresh? Not British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, alas, the man with the toxic grin. Not those who serve and defend him most zealously. Not our parliament and its elected representatives, buying bath plugs and toilet seats on Joe Public.
This is surely the way the world really ends: not with a bang, but with surges of nausea amid mounting heat, rising seas and carbon despair. Can mankind somehow be saved? Well, we could always switch the damned computer off.
For the Web we work on, the digital connections our government now seeks to spread as a universal right, the keyboards in our studies and living rooms, are blights as well as boons, misery-makers as well as enablers. We won’t automatically be better with no books to finger and caress, or shops to sell them, Amazoned out of existence. We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or US President Barack Obama twittering away when he could be thinking instead. Before there were computer disks to steal from the fees office, there was privacy, secrecy and supposed decency undisturbed.
Before there were computer disks to nick, nobody cared how many houses British Member of Parliament Hazel Blears could score in a year. Before e-mail, there was no former Brown adviser Damian McBride hawking his poison from screen to screen. And it becomes increasingly necessary to weigh the revolution that has changed all our lives on an updated set of moral scales.
The figures aren’t definitive, to be sure. We can’t be certain how much energy will go into 10 minutes of Google searching. We can’t blankly endorse the Gartner company analysis that put the IT industry worldwide in the same energy-using bracket as airlines. We can probably argue a bit about Stanford University estimates that show US Internet usage either overtaking the energy levels of all color TVs in the US or devouring the equivalent of two months’ worth of UK electricity. We can question posited rates of Web expansion in the crunch and hope that technology will get us off the hook when the bills for digital power get back to growing at 10 percent a year.
But let’s not pretend that there isn’t a problem. Let’s acknowledge, in the words of one highly experienced processor designer, that there is indeed “a possibility that computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet.” Let’s get a real challenge out in the open.
Walk or bike to work instead of getting out the car? Of course. Learn the complex routines for recycling bins? Hopefully. Think before leaving on the next jet plane? Naturally. But what’s the use of worrying and wondering about a wilting world when Susan Boyle videos by the zillion are clogging up YouTube, when life is a deluge of puerile twitters and bilious blogs?
I know the Web is a wonder beyond compare. I work on it for hours every day. I can’t be without it (via laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone). But I’m also glumly aware that it brings despond in its train, that much of what irks us most is digital cause and effect. Discuss? No, we don’t want to know. Just like the blogger who won’t think about electricity demand because “Oh yawn! ... it’s government’s job to supply that demand” — just like spammers with scintillating orgasms for sale.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under