COVER -> DAY ONE
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When I was at school the study of history was undergoing a revolution. As European powers literally threw away their colonies, more out of weary selfishness than political liberalism, it no longer seemed appropriate to consider the past in terms of the sayings and doings of a series of great men.
History should be seen as the identifying of great socio-economic forces and the patterns they created as they coalesced or clashed. Here, then, was a spectral triumph for the otherwise vilified Marx.
Since then we have largely stuck to this historiography. In the modern era in particular we have at our disposal batteries of statistics and increasingly sophisticated digital tools for analysing them and, at the same time, we have come to accept, with the possible exception of Nelson Mandela, that our age might have produced some monsters but has not produced great statesmen.
A culture that has conceived chaos theory and the significance of fractals is hardly likely to recognise human agency except as part of the teeming drama of gaia.
It was, indeed, Nelson Mandela who brought these thoughts to mind because he had set his heart on South Africa being nominated by the International Federation of Football Associations to host the soccer World Cup in 2006. He almost achieved this ambition but was thwarted by a single man. Charles Dempsey, a 79-year-old New Zealander and Chairman of the Oceania Football Associations had, it is said, been mandated to cast his vote for South Africa.
Whether or not this is the case, he could not withstand the lobbying pressure of the competing parties and packed his bags and left before the crucial vote. South Africa lost the nomination by 12-11. Had Dempsey voted for it the tie would have been broken by the President voting for South Africa. The result, though hardly the stuff of Thucidydes or Macaulay, is that South Africa has lost billions of Dollars of potential investment and thousands of jobs.
Those we put, or who equally often put themselves, in charge of us still have immense power to affect our life chances. How many of us have had our careers blighted or even destroyed by incompetent or spiteful management? How often have investors been robbed not so much by fraud but by simple incompetence?
It is for these reasons that I understand why most citizens are more interested in competence than ideology, defending their self-interest in public spirited terms by avowing that all politicians are the same, that ideology is dead. Added to this is the economic derivative of chaos theory, that the economy is global and that there is nothing that politicians can do to control economic forces. All they can do, so this theory goes, is to plunge into an inverted auction of falling corporate and individual taxation until governments go out of business altogether.
Of course, the paradox is that declaring that there is no such thing as ideology is in itself an ideology. I have heard it all my life from conservatives who want to "keep party politics out" of this and that which, of course, means that they want conservatives to be unopposed.
This 'death of ideology' is simply the latest installment in the long and shameful history of conservative duplicity.
Liberal and 'left wing' governments and parties of every sort have been naive and incompetent to such an extent that many countries have barely survived their ravages.
From the benighted Republic of Tanzania to the victims of Mao's Red Guards, from the Harmony Mill of Robert Owen to the carnage of Jonestown, the Utopians, the prophets of jam tomorrow, have much to answer for.
Yet, set against it, assess the harm done to mankind by plausible administrators who have elevated personal greed to the status of a public virtue and have developed a series of ideologies to make their sin respectable.
The last chapter was the famous "trickle down" theory, much loved of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl which, maintained with the uniformity and blank indifference of the whited sepulchre, that if the rich were allowed to do as they pleased this, sooner or later, it would be of benefit to the poor.
Had not huge numbers of otherwise benighted waifs been kept alive through the construction of factories, the sinking of mines and the expansion of domestic service?
That argument having been largely discredited, the new one is now with us. The rich shall inherit the earth and there is nothing they can do to stop it. They would, of course, if they could but it is beyond them. To which the obvious rejoinder is not ideological but reverts to our earlier discussion of competence. If political leaders say that they are helpless in the face of global capitalism then it is time to replace them.
This, it seems to me, is a fundamental matter for democratic consideration.
The Republican Party in America and its ideological cousins elsewhere are surely wrong when they say that the greatest threat to individual liberty is the political state. Legislatures and executives, after all, are subject to periodic elections and changes in the ranks of office bearers who might or might not differ in their ideologies.
Global business is, on the other hand, beyond democratic control, say the same people. If we are to take them at their word - a dangerous proceeding - then the conclusion of the argument is surely that the thing out of our control is potentially a greater danger to us all than anything within it.
On this basis the Republican Party is either ideologically unsound and/or incapable of dealing with a present danger which, I would have thought, was a somewhat poor recommendation for its election in any guise.
Progressive parties, on the other hand, are scarcely better.
Mr. Gore hardly strikes one as a warrior against the global hegemony of major corporations but at least he grasps that there is a problem. He knows he must remain quiet if he is to pick up funding for his campaign but at least he views this as a necessary evil.
There is not, in the end, much to choose between one who says nothing can be done and one who says he can do nothing, between the helpless and the hopeless.
But, in politics, to abstain is to condemn oneself to eternal silence and so I cast my vote, reluctantly, for Gore's self-recognised moral cowardice over Bush's total lack of any kind of moral reflex.
There is much crowing in 'right wing' circles over the superior competence of Richard M. Nixon compared with Jimmy Carter but this proves nothing; it is another piece of self-serving persiflage. Besides, if an immoral man is to be elected I should prefer his enterprise to fail and would, therefore, not wish him competent at all.
And so, although neither Bush nor Gore is likely to appear with much credit in the heroic annals of the 21st Century, the choice, in the Dempsey sense, still matters to millions of people.
Have you ever wondered what the real motive is behind supermarket loyalty cards? The answer is that they are a front for tying you up with the things that you buy; till records are no longer lists of anonymous purchases, they are preferences attached to real, reachable people.
The technology isn't good enough yet but one day it will be. You will turn on your Internet terminal, log onto your customary grocery supplier and will be greeted with a personalised message such as: "Special offer on Chateau Neuf du Pape". The system will have noted your love of red wine at around £7 a bottle and will try to nudge your spend per bottle up a notch. When you have negotiated this temptation you will check your regular, default list and make some amendments as Auntie, who is staying for the weekend, likes that revolting tinned salmon and, as the cat has just been run over, you cancel its food. Otherwise, it's the order as usual.
This model, of a supply being tempered by our own behaviour, is already part of some e-mail systems. If you regularly answer e-mail from Jack before anybody else the system can put Jack at the top of your list every morning. But if a deal falls through with Jack and you are less interested in his excuses than you were in his promises, he will slip down the running order as you continue to ignore him.
Soon we will be subject to the same kind of system helping us to regulate our viewing behaviour. In a world of multi-channel, pay per view, unscheduled television the grim truth is that every minute you faff about with your remote controller is a minute of unsold entertainment; the one thing none of us can make is time.
So entertainment sellers will want to help us with our purchases. Again, our behaviour will be logged, what we watch and when; football on Monday, cartoons with the kids on Tuesday; pornography when the wife's out at her needlework class on Wednesday; documentaries when the husband is out at darts on Thursday, and so on. You will be reminded, if you are a regular, of the special two-hour episode of your soap opera to be released at midnight at a special price.
These examples of intelligent agents are the simple part of information delivery based on 'mining' and behavioural analysis. We have much more to look forward to when probability software based on the theories of Thomas Bayes, an 18th Century clergyman and gentleman scholar, will analyse huge quantities of data to produce manageable search reports. If you type in "Lions" without the prefix "British" the system will guess that, as you watch a great deal of rugby and never bother with wildlife programmes, that you probably want the latest news of the tour.
Put together, these developments are going to save us all a lot of bother but the usual reaction is that we don't need all this help. So many of us are speeding into the future with our back to the engine, analysing where we are going in terms of where we have been, that we are not ready for broad band technology and what that will do.
At the moment, if you download a few stills of your latest grandchild onto the average computer you jam the whole system up for half an hour, so it is impossible to imagine down-loading whole movies or even down loading them a bit at a time as temporary files, otherwise known as "streaming".
At the moment the conventional phone line is a bottleneck but we will soon have a choice about how we, literally, widen the tube down which the information travels.
Soon your Internet terminal will be an interactive, digital television, a telephone and a search engine but it will undergo a massive qualitative and quantitative shift once freed from conventional telephones. This is when we will need default grocery lists, narrowcasting and supersmart searching software.
Conventional supermarkets are limited in what they stock by their space, the 80/20 rule and your trolley pushing patience but their on-line services will be virtually unlimited. We will soon forget the constraints of terrestrial television, no longer united by watching the same things at the same time but no average human being will be able to navigate the sum total of all the world's available digital entertainment.
Even with the conventional tools for building boring Web sites, the amount of data on the Web is doubling annually. Soon we will be out of the messy experimentation and the gentle academic Internet of the 1980s and 1990s into serious business and commerce. Instead of the annoyance of the "Illegal operation" we won't be allowed to fail, we will never be left alone, the combination of ruthless retail, intelligent systems and almost unlimited capacity has the potential to overwhelm us. On the other hand, we will be able to buy intelligent systems that work for us against the salesmen. The crunch will come when the .coms can only survive on the sale of advertising. What will happen when our privately purchased software automatically cleans out the stuff we don't want, even while we sleep?
