Thoughts about Wikileaks and government…

[Image by the World Economic Forum, via Wikipedia, Under CC. See here.]

I’ve just finished a draft of the new book and my daughter has at least begun to gasp the concept of day and night, so I find myself with time to read a newspaper or two. Aside from Brian Blessed reportedly throttling someone for saying he didn’t like Flash Gordon (I’m even more inclined to admire him after this episode) the media is rightly devoting a great deal of time to the Wikileaks cables. Official sources, generally, want to discuss the grave security implications of the leaks, rather than the content of the documents. This is an understandable but fatuous attempt to change the topic to more comfortable ground.

What the recent leaks demonstrate, in my opinion – and what our leaders are apparently at pains to distract us from – is that we are, globally, governed and administered by absolute bastards who as far as I can see hold law, ethics, morality, and humanity in contempt. It is drably predictable that in the face of the revelations contained in the war logs and now in the cables, all our political class can talk about is how rotten it is of nasty Mr Assange and his geek-anarchist treasonites to tell anyone how the world is being run. This miserable refusal to discuss the real issues is the root of the much-bruited disengagement of the public with our democracy. The public wants to talk substance. The apparat does not – because it has no answers which are not shameful when exposed to the light of day.

For example: a few years ago, Britain, along with a number of other countries, took a stand on cluster munitions. We signed up to a treaty which outlawed them because they are essentially impossible to clear and have a tendency to blow up children years and years after the conflict they were deployed for is over. So what happened? It would seem that senior officials and politicians, including David Miliband, connived with the US – which for its own reasons refused to sign up to  the treaty – so that cluster munitions could be based on British soil in defiance of the prohibition. The pros and cons of the US position are uninteresting to me. What is utterly typical and totally unacceptable is that people supposedly loyal to Britain and hence to our parliamentary democracy worked with a foreign power to circumvent the binding decision of elected MPs and undermine our country’s commitment to a better world. I suspect that Mr Miliband believes he hews closely to ethics, morality, and the law, and that he feels a great love of his fellow man. The truth is not necessarily otherwise; he may have been squeezed into this position, and the one he occupied regarding Diego Garcia and rendition, by those around him. In other words, the list absolute bastards in this equation may not include him. All the same, the next time David finds himself rubbing shoulders with Angelina Jolie, I hope she slaps him in the chops.

A brief update…

The Hellbrat is duly punished, and let all within reach of my voice pay heed, for thus does House Harkaway – most puissant, most awesome – deal with the low, the cussèd, the unwise, the irksome burrs that trouble our mighty stride. (Thank you, Sheri S. Tepper for writing True Game when I was a kid.)

I rang the parent this morning and explained as delicately as I could the trajectory of the situation. The parent used words parents should not use. By this time I had heard from most of the offended parties and was disposed to some measure of mercy. (Consider, ye rash folk, what my mercy entails. See below.)

We spoke as men do. This is a secret thing, and subtle. It involves long periods of avoiding the issue entirely and establishing in good mammalian form that no actual combat will be necessary. It then moves to cautious searches form common ground.

The upshot:

I am to be spoken of as a saint by all of his line and their chattels.

He will not be spoken of at all, and the matter will lapse gently into the public forgetting. I will shortly move the original post to the archive, where almost no one ever goes. (Except @benjohncock for some reason no one really understands.) It may have been apparent to you in your initial reading, but I took pains to obscure the identities of those involved even when I was in a fury. This airbrushing will continue.

No, I wasn’t meeting David Cameron.

In exchange for my forbearance, the parent will require of the Hellbrat that he should spend his free time engaged in a serious effort to raise money for Haiti. He will recruit no fewer than three of his putrid, thuggish, street urchin friends and they will between them raise a sum the parent assures me will be almost impossible for the Hellbrat to achieve without some act of public self-immolation such as shaving his head or running ten miles in his sister’s ballet clothes.

He will do this without parental assistance and at no time will he reveal to anyone that this is not his own idea.

And he will do all this… analogue style. No computer use will be permitted.

Bwah. Ahahah. Ahah. HA.

Yes, it’s one thirty in the morning and yes, I am awake.

There is absolutely no prospect of my going to sleep until I’ve told this story, so I’m going to tell it and then I’m going to cause some other things to happen, things so dreadful that I cannot actually mention them on the interwebs.

Yes, that bad.

Yes, too bad for the interwebs.

Yes. Hush now and pay attention and all will be reveealed. It happened this way…

I was having a meeting.

It was a boring meeting and thankfully it was never going to be a long one. It was about infrastructure, cables, and digging holes in the street. The guy I was meeting came to the house and we talked about all these exciting things. For added value, he brought his youngish son with him. I was given to understand that the child was not in school owing to some sort of medical issue regarding an injured leg.

It is now clear to me that the leg was almost certainly injured in the preparation and commission of some criminal act.

Be that as it may…

I had a fair quantity of electronic swag on the desk, because I’ve been trying to do some clever stuff recently like recording podcasts and learning to use a stylus/tablet combo in my endless quest to avoid RSI. I also had my two e-readers out for a sort of furtive re-comparison; having been snotty about the Kindle for ages, I was actually given one at Christmas and forced to acknowledge that it’s a decent bit of kit, albeit still a “third device”. In the spirit of honesty, I had my Sony Reader out too (which I actually paid for), in case my initial assessment of the Sony was also a bit unkind. All this, of course, delighted the infant, who at the ripe old age of fourteen was apparently something of a gearhead.

“Are you gonna get a new laptop soon?”

No. This one works fine.

“But it’s really old!”

It’s only about three years old, actually.

“That’s REALLY old.”

In fairness, some people do feel that’s old for a laptop. I, however, still have a first gen Apple monochrome upstairs, just in case I ever need a doorstop with a floppy drive and just enough space on the hard disk for a couple of iPhone apps.

So while the father wandered around the kitchen tutting and saying things like “we’ll never get the gaskets” and explaining why my newest attempt to drag Harkaway Towers into the nineteenth century is doomed to failure, I talked to the infant about life, the universe, and everything. Specifically, about ebooks, and the Apple Tablet, and Google Books.

And that is where I made my mistake, because the little monster is a copyright extremist-activist.

Look out, Lord Mandelson. This kid is a filesharing 800lb guerilla (yes, I do mean that). One mention of copyright and the issues surrounding the GBS was enough to send him into a kind of focused volcanic eruption. Apparently, anything which stands in the way of Google must be burned to the ground and sowed with salt. Anything which restricts the freedom of the fourteen year old masses to copy, re-copy, re-mix and distribute anything online for fun and profit is an act of barbarism which must be resisted with martial arts and big, big guns.

At which point, his father came into the room to ask me about quarter inch versus half inch piping, and I, bloody idiot that I am, wandered out into the hall. For six minutes. Leaving. The Hellbrat. With. My. Laptop.

I am an idiot.

In the course of those six minutes, he managed to do the following:

Move my new (unedited) novel to a folder marked ‘squirrel porn’ and hide it in the Utilities folder.

Email my old college with the information that I was dead.

Send a Facebook message to a female friend asking her to come round later and give him/me a “Swedish massage”. And certain other services we shall not go into.

And – and this is the kicker – tweet Jasper Fforde and Waterstones with a request that they bring out a Kindle edition of Jasper’s new book, Shades of Grey. Which at least shows he was listening when we were talking about the differences between e-readers, I suppose.

He also sent a couple of other messages which thankfully don’t matter or didn’t do what he wanted them to.

(I found out all this when my wise and tolerant Facebook friends texted me to let me know my account had been hacked. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

The upshot of which…

… is that for ten seconds I really thought I was going to commit murder (until I found the book – yes, it’s backed up, but I nearly expired with horror all the same) and then suicide (when I discovered I had to all appearances simultaneously propositioned one old friend and possibly insulted another in public at his own publicity event, and been unpleasant to Waterstone’s into the bargain.)

Sorry, to all concerned.

Most especially to Jasper, and to Glenville, Kate, Andy & Greg at @waterstones. And to a lady whose Facebook headshot is apparently particularly attractive to evil teenaged males.

There will be drinks bought and suchlike. Just say the word.