Random Variable

In the early hours of this morning, former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad. Little needs to be said about his life, as has been documented everywhere else on the net.

The timing of his death seems a bit odd however. Is it meant as an Eid present to Shi’ite, or an Eid humiliation of the global Sunni population? I wonder under whose orders this day was chosen.

Was it the Iraqi government attempting to please the “Big Other” – the United States – or perhaps offer an Eid present to the Shi’ite. If so, then the government appears to be rather thuggish in the way it meets out justice. United States planning seems more likely, only because only they would be tactless enough to think that executing him on this day would be a good thing. Of course, maybe it is supposed to be an act of humiliation towards the global Muslim population, the West’s new objet petit a. “Don’t fuck with us; otherwise this’ll be what you get.” If this is actually the case, as Josh Marshall, Kieran Healy, and I suspect, then isn’t this the perfect example of an entity which has already lost its power – a display of the emperor’s new clothes in a time when no one believes the emperor is wearing any. But do we, as Žižek claims, all agree to the deception? Few in the Islamic world seem to, and despite all the pictures of Shi’ite towns celebrating, the Iraqi blogosphere is showing mixed reactions.

In any case, Derek Wall, Male Principle Speaker of the Green Party has condemned the execution, saying it “continues the brutality rather than ending it”. It’s an important point, but not one I’m sure I agree with and will revisit in due course.

As it has been reported in the news that we may spend more than £2.5 billion on Christmas presents today, I thought it’d be prescient to address something that’s been nagging on my mind.

When (Red) first tried to add me to MySpace, I immediately clicked “Deny” and left it at that. It’s only in the last week I actually understood what the purpose of (Red) was – a multi-vendor brand that participating companies donate a proportion of profits to, in order to provide antiretroviral drugs to Africa.

So this is another example of the new-age philanthropy of the 21^st Century. For a while I’ve been thinking that sustainability/ethicality is the natural evolutionary/revolutionary step for capitalism. Heck, “why the hell not?” I thought.

However, there seems to be a sinister obverse to this apparently sustainable capitalism.

Before I go further, let’s look at some numbers (UNAIDS 2006):

 

140 000 is a rather small figure compared to the grandiose advertising that (Red) has created. Their manifesto (the marketers are not even beneath stealing political language) almost suggests that their work alone will save everyone from AIDS in Africa. The problem with this is the message that such a campaign sends out – that politics is useless, and economics can save the day. Yes, governments have been dragging their feet in providing donations, but that is no reason to say that we can ignore politics altogether.

What’s scarier is the assertion of commodity fetishism, or as Žižek puts it “liberal communism.” Yes, you may continue to consume and exploit as much as you wish, but as long as you moderate it – donate some money to charity, offset your carbon emissions, buy (Red). Not only that, but as the advert above shows, isn’t this the friendly face of neo-colonialism. Look at how Gisele represents the West; modern, artificial, and Kesme represents Africa; primitive, natural. The message being that Africans are incapable of helping themselves, that we must preserve their way of life, and we can do this through our consumerism. This ignores the fact that a large problem is the intellectual property war conducted by Western pharmaceuticals against those who would produce cheap generics, and also that our consumerist excesses are going to damage Africa in the form of ecological crises. Africans can golly well help themselves, if we didn’t try to fuck them at every opportunity. Mark from K-Punk has written a more detailed write-up of the semiotics of that particular advert over at AnyBody.

The logic of “liberal communism” appeared once again at my school, last week during charity week. I don’t wish to criticize the fact that we were supporting a good cause, but it struck me as odd that the fundraising (estimated to be several thousands of pounds) was accompanied by an orgy of consumerism. You could not walk down the corridor without a student trying to sell you something in the name of charity. In addition, each house, ala Harry Potter, put on a lunchtime event which basically consisted of teachers being humiliated in school versions of the crassest television programmes currently on air (and frequently involved male teachers in drag, singing). Of course, this is all met with the rebuttal “It’s all for a good cause, etc…” It’d be almost acceptable if it weren’t for events like the fashion show, which seemed little more than an excuse to accentuate consumerist teenage sexuality.

By the end of it all, whilst observing all the waste surrounding the place, I was muttering to myself Žižek’s opening remarks in his May master class (Žižek 2006): “No charity, we need some bloodshed.” Of course, I wouldn’t want a sponsored charity Battle Royale, but perhaps we need to beat ourselves up a little bit more.

Further reading

Donnelly, John. (RED)-hot this season - The Boston Globe. December 8, 2006. http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/diseases/articles/2006/12/08/red_hot_this_season/ (accessed December 23, 2006).

UNAIDS. 2006 Report on the global AIDS epidemic: Executive Summary / UNAIDS. Geneva: UNAIDS, 2006.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Master Class on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction.” no. . London: Birkbeck University, May 25, 2006.

Richard Feachem (Donnelly 2006), executive director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, estimates that (RED) will raise $1 400 000 by the end of Christmas. If the cost of treating a patient in Africa for a year is $1 000, this will mean an extra 140 000 people treated with antiretroviral drugs – 2% of the 6 300 000 urgently needing antiretroviral drugs.

Someone recently stated that the government ought to renationalise telecommunications in order to widen access for the poor.

It should be clear that a privatised communication infrastructure has more readily commoditised access than would have been case on a telecommunications system that continued to be state run.

The history of the Internet tells us that it was Post Office engineers who had started to develop packet switching data networks before the Americans, but higher management failed to invest R&D money to make the system go live.

Unfortunately, telecommunications is the perfect example of how markets have encouraged innovation and prices to fall and fall. I remember when telephone calls was well over 10p a minute for local, and web storage was charged at 50p per byte (this message would have cost £7,000 so far). Early nationalisation as Britain and most of Europe carried out was a good idea as the highly fragmented and monopolised markets of the US show testament to that. But now, the current method of full privatisation with strong oversight by OfCom is the best way forward.

Access to the Internet is not a problem for the poor. Access to a computer, full stop, is. A recent paper (Banerjee and Duflo 2006) tells us that in Ivory Coast, for example, 45% of people earning less than $2 a day have television sets. I’m pretty sure we could generate similar stats on the UK regarding Sky TV. The problem is not that of price, but of public perception. I’m sure the net is seen by most as the place to do online shopping and watch crap on YouTube – not as a place to aid an active deliberative citizenry. I believe the MacArthur Foundation’s recent white paper on digital literacy (Jenkins, et al. 2006) is a good first step on how the curriculum could be modified to maximise the opportunities that the Internet can provide.

In addition, we can use voucher schemes to incentivize internet access for the poor. Either that or the state provides their own ISP that competes on the market with private companies whilst subsidising access. This could have lower download limits (which are only required for illegal P2P activity anyway), so that if people wanted better access, they can go to a more expensive ISP. This is pretty much the same as the free ISPs Sky Broadband Base, Talk Talk, and Orange Broadband already provide. The former option seems the best to me.

Back to nationalisation vs. Privatisation; let’s look at our top countries. Scandinavia is already delivering high speed fibre optics to the home, whilst the US must be credited for the development of the Internet Protocol. Both countries benefitted from enormous R&D expenditure – Scandinavia from the social democrat model, and the US from Cold War military expenditure in academic research without pursuing Intellectual Property rights (Castells 2001). Nationalisation is not the issue here.

Further information

Banerjee, Abhijit V, and Esther Duflo. “The Economic Lives of the Poor.” MIT Economics. October, 2006. http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=1426 (accessed 12 21, 2006).

Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2001.

Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J Robinson, and Margaret Weigel. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” Digital Learning @ MacArthur Foundation. 2006. http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0
-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF (accessed December 21, 2006).

Right, This blog is now officially designated a “green blog” from now on.
In any case, you should definitely be reading “Life is complicated yet beautifully simple” - the work of one very intelligent student medic member of the Green Party I met during the fun LondonFed social last week who wishes to remain anonymous for now. Also Natalie Bennett’s Philobiblon who does a hell of a lot of work for the party.

They’re also the joint number 2 green party bloggers. So there.