March 15, 2007...4:07 pm
Serious Time: Venal Stupidity
So far this has been a pretty straightforward blog: I eat some canapés, see a few bands, drink some Leffes and write about it. It’s a comfortable arrangement. It’s working for me, I hope very much it’s working for you, and all will be resumed very soon when I post my review of The Long Blondes at Botanique.
However normal service has been interrupted because of two items I read about in the news which have, frankly made me as angry as a Daily Mail reader who’s just found his golf club’s been converted to crystal therapy healing centre for lesbian asylum seekers. Reading about RFID (radio frequency identification) chips and the Blue Peter phone in scandal has, quite simply, made me despair. Let’s talk about RFID, then phone-in shows, then I’ll tell you why they’re both symptomatic of a larger problem, which I will undiplomatically call ‘venal stupidity’.
Today I got thrown into writing a story about the EU’s new RFID policy, which, like most EU policies, consists of setting up a talking shop and thinking about things for 2 years before they get back to us. However even the EU’s Imperial High Priestess of Telecoms, Viviane Reding admits that when it comes to RFID technology there is “a strong lack of awareness and considerable concern among citizens” which they are going to try and rectify.
I agree with Viviane that I don’t know as much as I should about RFID. But the fact is the vast majority of people have never even heard of it and if you try to inform yourself there’s a wealth of highly biased information, from doey-eyed techie adoration for ‘the future’ and super-paranoia about people stealing your identity because you stood 20m away from them and they scanned your wallet, which needs very sharp critical thinking to understand, let alone decide about.
My understanding of it is that RFID tags are these little teeny tiny chips which emit a low-frequency radio signal, which can be read with a scanner to tell you what the thing they’re attached to is. So far so good. The EU tells me over one billion were sold in 2006 and my friend’s ex-housemate who works for a major cosmetics company (don’t you love sourcing things on blogs?) told me they were very helpful for labelling pallets of shampoo when they’re shipped round Europe.
Even better, a cursory glance at the RFID journal shows me they’re now being used to track portaloos round Europe. As a pragmatist who enjoys many of the conveniences of modern life (sorry) I really can’t object to this. If it means toilets are in the right places at the right time then so much the better. However, if somebody wanted to attach a tag to me, I think, that would be outrageous, an invasion of my privacy, a shocking abuse of such technology. Until a little more reflection makes me realise that my beloved Paris metro Navigo card and rip-off overpriced London Oystercard were JUST THAT and that through owning them, my movements were being tracked.
Given the cons of my information being tracked via the card, versus the pros of being faster, cheaper and harder to lose than classic paper tickets, I would decide to have an RFID travelpass again. Would I have one for my healthcare, bank account, front door? Maybe, maybe not. But the decision depends on two factors: a) that I’m being given a choice (this a whole other post) and b) that I know enough to make it. And I don’t know that I do.
Returning to the EU, “60% of the 2190 respondents to the Commission’s public consultation (on RFID) said they did not know enough to adequately assess the pros and cons of RFID technology”. Quite honestly, I’m not surprised by this. A quick straw poll of people I know reveals that even amongst a highly-educated, well-informed section of the population, reading about Britney Spears’ haircut is viewed as a higher priority than the gradual gathering of information about every aspect of our personal lives. How did we get to be so docile, so placid?
I’m going to give you a short answer, because otherwise this will turn into a thesis, but I believe that much of the Anglophone world is currently suffering from a widespread failure in education (particularly people my age), government, and society to give people any ability to make an informed decision or to take responsibility for their actions. This in turn causes a total lack of self-confidence and a willingness to ‘just follow orders’. In the event an decision HAS to be made, the top criterium is money, which trumps all other interests.
This brings me on to Blue Peter. Now I haven’t followed the TV phone-in scandal closely on the grounds that people who phone in to win stuff on TV shows are like people who buy lottery tickets but like moving pictures and noises as well, i.e. entry-level morons who like to pretend they’re not GAMBLING. (If you want to gamble at least go to a casino or racetrack and do it properly, then you can at least have an illicit thrill of dirty pleasure as well).
But my interest became aroused when I heard Blue Peter mentioned. Blue Peter is one of the few good things about television. It is engaging, lively and fun, offers children an exciting glimpse of cool and amazing stuff and provides some harmless escapism three times a week (three times! they don’t know they’re born). And I can tell you right now for free that in the BP of my youth, if the phone lines had gone down, Mark Curry would have looked straight at camera one, put on his serious voice and told us the phone lines were broken, apologised, and then laughed it off with a comment about the programme being live. We would have understood — Blue Peter’s live-ness was part of it’s inherent, special status as OUR part of TV away from the grown-ups’ dull, pre-recorded world.
But no, in today’s venal, stupid Britain, all the BBC could think of was raking in the MONEY and not admitting failure live on air. They decided it was better to lie to children than to admit to technical failure, thus further exacerbating the cotton-wool wrapped world of children today. This is what I’m saying about taking ‘informed decisions’ — it’s the ability to know when something is worth worrying about and when not. You’re not telling them their rabbit’s died or that mummy’s getting it on with the postman. You’re talking about some broken telephones. I was a pretty sensitive child but even I would have taken telecoms failure on a TV programme with stoical equanimity.
So to conclude, a generation that is raised in a world where creationism is back on the educational agenda, and Britney’s hair is prime time news, is going to be even worse at making intelligent, informed decisions than mine is. Guessing that the average age of the Blue Peter crew is similar to mine, I would say we are absolutely screwed going forward. See you all later, I’m off to get an RFID tag stuck on my forehead so I can headbutt the metro gate when I go through. I’m not worried about my brain cells - who needs them these days?
3 Comments
March 16, 2007 at 9:37 am
I agree with you on the lack of education, although I would respectfully disagree with you about the propensity for following orders. There are large segments of the population who do things their own way and, pehaps out of spite but also perhaps out of principle, question the ‘official line’. They are not always all that visible, but they are there. The best we can do is try not to become too lemming-like and keep a healthy amount of skepticism (but not going overboard, or else we’ll turn into conspiracy nuts who think that the government and everyone else is out to get them! :))
On the subject of RFID, I agree with you that the public is badly mis- and underinformed, but unfortunately this is not just limited to RFID, but extends to whole swathes of science and technology (I could go on and talk about the humanities as well, but this comment is already too long as it is). Take genetic engineering, therapeutic cloning, cancer from cell phones, anthropocentric climate change, or even asteroid impacts, and you’ll find many people have a limited or erroneous view of the issues and the associated risks. If the education system has failed them (something I would agree with only in part, I would venture that a society where acquiring knowledge and studying are frowned upon amongst the younger generation as ‘uncool’ also has a role to play), it becomes their responsibility to educate themselves about the issues which affect them most, so that they can make an informed decision. The internet and television have helped in giving easy access to information, the new challenge now is to filter out the good information from the bad, the biased from the unbiased, as information never equals knowledge.
As Carl Sagan said in a quote I use far too often, “we have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.”
March 16, 2007 at 2:47 pm
[...] Princess Benelux has also noticed this and eloquently worded it as; “Today I got thrown into writing a story [...]
April 12, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Hello princess Benelux,interesting fact you might appreciate. The cost of paper and cartonboard is set to continue on its upward spiral as companies put pressure on carton producers to insert RFID tags in the card they produce so products can be tracked. This means the cost of the end product also goes up . Contrary to popular belief most paper manufacturers want to avoid putting higher costs on consumers and oppose the spread of such tags. Perhaps fighting losing battle but there we are
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