#RhodesMustFall: the politics of misdirection

"A building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world." 

V, from "V For Vendetta" by Alan Moore (New York: Vertigo; 1988)

The #RhodesMustFall campaign was never about knocking over a statue.  The statue, of course, was the perfect focal point - to rouse a rabble and rally them to your cause, follow these three golden rules:

1. Choose an easy target first up, an objective that can be relatively easily attained - this will be your "small win"
2. This target should be identifiable as something tangible, something that can be definitively described and located and, ideally, something emotive - this makes it easier for the Mob to vent their attentions directly onto the target, thus enhancing the likelihood that the Decision-Maker (whoever it is you are trying to influence) will capitulate
3. Use this small win to craft your legend as the Change Agent, the one who can get things done - this will make the Mob more likely to stick behind you (or in front of you when it's time to charge the barricades) as you pursue longer term, more nebulous goals

So, what could the real motivations behind #RhodesMustFall have been?  Could it be that somebody needs a distraction, a brouhaha to divert the public's attention from - oh, I don't know -  the South African government's ongoing failure to deliver meaningful social change, curiously juxtaposed with its unmitigated success in creating überwealthy oligarchs (including, not uncoincidentally, the president)?

Easy to imagine, but...

Professor Jonathan Jansen - whose lucid and rational contribution to South Africa's otherwise rabid national discourse is as rare as it is refreshing - had this to say a couple of days ago.

"We make a big mistake to think this is about a stone statue. This is about the alienation so many people feel on a really great university campus by virtue of being black, or poor or not from that particular culture."

This disenfranchisement, a sense that opportunities aren't available, is nothing new and in no way unique to South Africa.  London, one the world's truly global cities, felt exactly this pain in August 2011.  And Frank Zappa wrote of exactly this in America of the 60s.

Don't you know that this could start
On any street in any town in any state if any clown
Decides that now's the time to fight for some ideal he thinks is right
And if a million more agree there ain't no Great Society
As it applies to you and me our country isn't free
And the law refuses to see if all that you can ever be
Is just a lousy janitor unless your uncle owns a store
You know that five in every four just won't amount to nothin' more
Gonna watch the rats go across the floor and make up songs about being poor

From "Trouble Every Day" (Freak Out!, 1966)

Of course, this economic exclusion in South Africa isn't exclusively borne by blacks, though it's easier for political leaders to avoid the tough questions (and losing their gravy trough) if they paint it as such.

So - notwithstanding the odd hoodwinking by an unethical government - what is the culture that South Africa's youth are demanding?  Rhodes may have been an inveterate racist, but he also believed in education as the vehicle for civilisation.  I really hope that in South Africa's quest for equity and stability, its few remaining seats of academic excellence do not get broken down.  Statues, bricks and mortar will come and go, but hopefully a culture of learning and intellectual rigour can remain.

"We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world."

Evey, from "V For Vendetta"

I, Cyborg: forget-me-cannot

So the European Court of Justice - the EU's highest court of law - has ruled that we all have a "right to be forgotten", and consequently Google must delete from its search results any data that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant".

In making this ruling, the ECJ sought to give relief to a Spanish man who argued that Google should not direct people to a 1998 auction notice of his repossessed home, as published on the website of a mass circulation newspaper.

As Lumbergh might have put it, "Uh, yeah."  I think I see where the ECJ is trying to go with this - we've all posted things we later regret, or others upload our own personal data without permission, and then the hosting corporate retains the data; Facebook, I'm looking in your direction - but I still feel uneasy with this judgment.

Before you read on, believe me when I write that I take my own privacy very seriously.  (I seem to spend most of my Facebook time detagging myself from photos that others have uploaded.)  And I claim no rights for myself that I do not award to others.  Nevertheless...

The first source of my unease is my sense that this is a case of The Wrong Problem.  I don't understand why Google is the target here.  Google - like every other search engine in cyberspace - only points people to other websites.  There is where the data in question resides.  It seems intrinsically misguided to me that, if information is deemed to be offensive, it is not the person displaying the offensive information that the ECJ would call to account - but the person highlighting that the offensive information exists.  In such a situation, is Google not actually doing us all a great service?  After all, once we've decided that there is offensive information out there, it surely helps us to know where that offensive information is, that we may erase it once and for all.  Amen.

(To say nothing of the delightful absurdity that the information in question in this court case was being broadcast through a widescale communications medium - a newspaper - before Google even got involved.)

Which brings me to the second - and biggest - source of my unease.  Who determines which information is offensive, and to what degree?  And, more widely, can information - assuming that it is true; factually correct - ever even be offensive?  This is verging uncomfortably close to a blanket fatwa of servitude and poverty: I deny thee the right to gain knowledge about the world.  This seems to me like a useful tool for anybody who wants to prevent others from bettering themselves; an instrument of subjugation.

I give no person the right to tell me what I can and can't learn.  And I certainly don't give that right to a corporation either.  And yet the ECJ would have private corporates play censor; the gatekeepers to our knowledge; the arbiters of what history we can remember.  Oh well, better than having governments do it.  Right?

Chilling.

Happily, the ECJ has offered some guidelines on when/what/why to censor: the concepts of Inadequacy, Irrelevance, and That Which Is No Longer Relevant.  Hmmm.  Here's my take on those:

1. Inadequacy feels relatively straightforward if we're talking about something that is factually incorrect.  But what if somebody - perhaps acting entirely speciously - argues that the information presented is incomplete?  Now we're stepping onto the slippery slope of a value judgement.

2. Ditto Irrelevance.  The problem with value judgements is that they are subject to different interpretations and thresholds - when considering the same information, two people could easily formulate two different opinions on adequacy and relevance.  If that happens, who's right?

3. Call me a pedant, but I query the distinction between data that is Irrelevant, and data that is No Longer Relevant.  No doubt there's an important - dare I say relevant? - semantic meaning in there for the learned Justices of the ECJ.  But it's tautologous in its look, feel and read, and then the whole rationale of the ECJ's judgment starts to feel a lot less lucid.  I would argue that all factually correct information is relevant at some point, in some way, in some context.

Moreover, if history is the study of why the world is the way it is today, then it feels problematic to discard aged information, simply because it is aged.  Those who ignore the lessons of history are damned to repeat it, or somesuch.

When it comes to determining "relevance" and "adequacy" in an argument, I'd argue that this is an exercise in holistic thinking.  One gathers all the available data and makes a decision, based on a valid argument.  As part of this process one discards whatever data is felt not to be useful or valid, but you need as much data as possible to understand the contextual meaning of Relevance, Utility and Validity.  And you need to see that data yourself, to analyse and synthesise it, before you can decide whether to keep or discard it.  I'd argue that, by seeking to eliminate data from this process, the ECJ's judgment will actually make valid and useful decision-making less likely.

With that in mind, my third big problem: whenever a Google search throws up a result, it's only because somebody requested the data in the first place.  Does one person's right to be forgotten trump another's right to remember?

This is where it all starts to become really insidious for me.  Would the ECJ really force me, or you, to forget stuff?  "You are not allowed to remember that."  It's a heinous concept.  A right can only exist to the extent that it is enforceable against someone else.  So if Señor Costeja González has a right to be forgotten, then everybody else has a duty to forget about him.  Unfortunately, he'll go down in history as the person who petitioned for this absurd ruling, and his motivations will remain part of that record.  Somehow, I don't think he's going to be forgotten during his own lifetime (absent a mass "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" type experiment on the world's population).  Qué ironía, hombre.

You can't legislate for the myriad intricacies of the human mind.  Some of us have phenomenal powers of recall.  If technology is meant to enhance humanity's interaction with the world, then why pass technology laws that can't keep pace with basic human performance?

And so, ultimately, this begins to feel like a rather quixotic - pun intended; this whole thing emanated from the land of the Man of La Mancha, after all - kicking against the tide of scientific advance.  We're all cyborg now: we outsource increasing proportions of our daily existence to technology.  The web is our external memory, and Google is our most efficient (as far as I'm aware) external memory synapse.  I think we should be celebrating our technological advantages, not muddlingly denying them.

This is the genesis of humanity's progress to the stars.  It is widely accepted that communities that share knowledge freely are the most resilient, the most adaptable, the most successful.  Sharing of information can only ever be a good thing.  Let us not inhibit it.

Do svidanya, comrade Arkady

Ah, crap.  Another high school shooting in America, I thought, except this time it's someone I know-slash-care about.  Of course, when I discovered that the victim was 74 it brought into sharp relief how long it's been since I lived vicariously through the all-American antics of Archie and the gang.

I had a mild panic when I thought about all those cute girls that might also have gone down in a hail of nouveau-emo teen-angst semi-automatic gunfire.  Thank ye gods Cheryl Blossom survived.

Then I learned that noble Archie Andrews had died taking a bullet for his gay pal Kevin Keller, a Senator who stands for gun control.  Egad - as Mr Lodge might have exclaimed - I have been out of the loop for a while.  This sounds like a fair departure from the picture perfect postcard vista of wholesome middle America that Riverdale used to paint for us in the 80s.  (And, no doubt, the even wholesomer 70s, 60s, 50s and 40s.  Eh, maybe not the 70s.)

I'd never even heard of Kevin Keller when I was reading these comics.  It got me wondering: is he perchance related to Chris Keller?  Not that Chris would likely have showed up anywhere near Riverdale, even in these pre-apocalyptic 20-teens.

And this, in turn, got me thinking about New Cold War.  While US pop culture is celebrating heroic self-sacrifice in defence of gay rights, Russian politico-culture is - I believe the legally safe word here is "allegedly" - deliberately shooting down a passenger jet filled to the brim with 100 of the planet's best AIDS research minds.

Hang on, breathe.  Forget I brought it up: it's too wild a conspiracy theory.  Could such a proud, artistic nation - that brought us the Bolshoi, Rachmaninoff, Garry Kasparov - really take the anti-homosexual rhetoric of its leadership to such a base conclusion?

There's a bit of background context here.  One of the reasons that HIV, like other viruses, is so successful is its ability to mutate, to adapt.  It finds the most opportune transmission vector for the local environment.  And so it is that, in the US, AIDS is seen to be a gay disease: over there the virus has spread farthest and fastest through the homosexual male population.  In Europe AIDS has been most prevalent, in the main, amongst intravenous drug users, dirty needles being the most efficient vector over there.  While in Africa, the ignorant posturing of political leaders notwithstanding, HIV/AIDS afflicts predominantly heterosexual people (and inside that demographic, unsurprisingly, girls and young women are most at risk - even those who don't identify as heterosexual, but this discussion I'll leave for another time).

So the virus behaves differently in different regions of the world.

Lately, though, things are changing in Europe.  Increasingly risky sexual behaviour amongst gay men - probably an outcome of increasingly-effective anti-retrovirals and an emerging view of HIV as a manageable virus, as opposed to an automatic death sentence - combined with a growing preference for intravenous recreational drugs amongst gay Europeans is seeing HIV make a demographic leap in Europe.  Now it's a gay disease in Europe, too.

Factor in Vladimir Putin's reknowned anti-gay posturing, and perhaps it's not so difficult after all to imagine that flight MH17 - of all the planes crossing Ukrainian airspace - was deliberately picked off by a group of separatists looking to curry favour with Moscow.

There were 55 planes flying over eastern Ukraine on that fateful night, including Emirates, Etihad, Jet Airways, Thai Airways, Austrian Airlines and Pakistan International Airlines.  A Singapore Airlines intercontinental flight was only 15 miles away from MH17 when it was shot down.

There's also the wider question of why Russia would want to destabilise (even annex) eastern Ukraine.  Unsurprisingly, there's an economic incentive.  Firstly,  Russia's population is declining, so absent some sort of external stimulus it faces the economic shrinkage of an aging population.

In parallel, Russia and Ukraine are embroiled in a long-running dispute over gas supplies, prices and debts - this dates back to the days of glasnost and perestroika in the early 1990s.  Most recently:
1. In February 2014 Naftogaz (Ukraine's state-owned oil and gas company) sued Chornomornaftogaz (its Crimean subsidiary) for delayed debt payments of almost €1 billion.
2. In March 2014 the disputed Crimean separatist government (led by Rustam Temirgaliev, almost certainly an agent of Russia's military intellligence, the GRU) announced that Chornomornaftogaz was being "nationalised" and would henceforth be owned by Gazprom (the Russian parastatal; majority staked owned by the Russian government).
3. In April 2014 the US placed sanctions on Chornomornaftogaz, to prevent Gazprom from having any dealings with it.  In May 2014 the EU followed suit.

So: in these energy-scarce times, this is certainly about access to resources.  (But you didn't need me to spell that out for you.)  And perhaps there's an even more insidious agenda to weaken this planet's support base for those whose sexual preferences aren't - let us say - on the straight and narrow-minded.  They play excellent chess in Russia.

Of course, if you think being gay in Russia is tough, it's not much easier being out in the US.  Just ask Simon Cowell.  He's spent years loudly proclaiming his straightness, even going so far as to stipulate what age he "likes them" (27, he once said, in case you're wondering).  Now he's just been outed in a British court.  One wonders why he'd want to keep his preferences such a secret.  Could it be that he's nervous about whether he'd continue to enjoy such unfettered access to his wealth-generating target market (fame-hungry adolescents) if their parents knew he were G-A-Y?

Somehow, I suspect that in these Everybody-Gets-Their-15-Minutes times, these doting parents wouldn't be too fussed.  Hell, even Riverdale can deal with it.

On a completely unrelated note, I just read that a great white shark beached itself in western Australia, writhing and choking on an undigested piece of sea lion.  Damn shame.  It's a magnificent creature, Carcharadon carcharias.  Still: Sharks 297,013,495 - Sea Lions 1.  This is probably why Tony Abbott wants to off them all - he's got a predilection for preserving fat mammals.