Thinking about Michael Howard’s interview fart over the weekend, I done a twitter and they liked it: Remember when politics was all about minutely planned grids, media training, and message discipline, and everyone said it was terrible? — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 2, 2017 And then I remembered the sheer weirdness of standing in Parliament…
Read More Are you thinking what I’m thinking?So Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on t’telly and continued trying to jawbone some sort of privileged access to WhatsApp messages. In the process she also: called on “people who understand the technology” and know “the necessary hashtags” to stop extremist material being uploaded to the internet. Anyway. This was all in aid of Friday’s…
Read More Exactly how those media reports about WhatsApp terrorists happenedOne thing I’ve recently noticed knocking about the industry is what I’m beginning to call the “post-Internet” or maybe the “Afternet”. This is the conjunction of maybe three trends. The first of these is the way 5G is panning out over in mobile. To start with, pretty much everything in consumer and most things in…
Read More Preview: TYR @ OpenTech 2017Reading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureThat populism post has been delivered!
Read More Future populism post, deliveredSo I went to the Royal Academy’s Russia exhibition yesterday, which led to me looking up oligarch/collector Petr Aven on Wikipedia. He’s Mikhail Fridman’s business partner in Alfa Group, which means ironically enough I was looking at paintings belonging to the guy whose employees built a whole fake website to confuse me about their ownership…
Read More WikipediaSo I read the Indivisible Guide, which was drafted by a group of ex-Obama staffers as a HOWTO for people interested in protesting Donald Trump. The core idea is that the ‘baggers were very successful as a protest movement and their strategy can be replicated. Basically, don’t bother with shopping lists of nice stuff, do…
Read More The design values of todayNow if you read this blog, you probably know I was briefly known for proposing that councils borrow against the stream of Local Housing Allowance payments and use this to buy up a lot of rental property. I called it the Simple Plan; it would simultaneously do something for the housing crisis, let the buy-to-let…
Read More A simple, terrible planAn interesting post about populists. I think this point can be extended. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys…if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the…
Read More Note on a future populism postThis Trump speech has been widely circulated by now, but two things come to mind. The first of all is that he seems to have the verbal version of the Heartbleed SSL bug. In Heartbleed, the problem is that you can request a keep-alive message of length you specify, with data you provide, but there…
Read More Interrogation by silence, and Trump’s mental Heartbleed