plasticbag.org

Phil Zimmerman struggles with the possibility that terrorists could have been using PGP. We should all remember that tools like encryption, like the internet, like the telephone, like the petrol engine – all of these things empower everyone – good or bad alike, and that the tools shouldn’t be blamed for the actions of the people who use them.

The whole world is talking about A Tribute to Heroes this morning. Apparently it was shown simultaneously on forty American TV stations – well it was also live on BBC1 and ITV1 in the UK, starting at 2am and finishing at 4am. I decided to watch it, and I can’t say that I wasn’t moved by it. But in the back of mind the whole time I was thinking that the people who supported the attacks on America could have watched the show and – almost to a song – found strength in them for their cause. And I was thinking that the same people could have heard the speeches of some of the celebrities, changed the name of the institution that they were fighting for, and they’d have believed it just as forcefully as America does. I watched Tom Petty, one of my favourite musicians in my youth, singing “Won’t Back Down” with steely eyes and tightly drawn lips. And I imagined some shadowy figure facing him singing exactly the same thing. I think that scared me more than anything else.

I used to be so much better at this stuff than I am now. In the past, people would post on Metafilter if my site went down. And they wrote really nice things about how good I was at HTML and design and stuff. No longer. I am a relic of a more childlike time on the web, when people could be impressed by pretty colours and occasional non-imbecilic utterances.

Today on Barbelith: Around the USA – “”Yesterday was September 11, and it was one of my best friend’s birthdays. We’d been trying to talk her into ditching her classes for the day but she’d have none of it. So I rode the el with her to work – it was my first day temping at at Chicago’s NBC tower. We were both pretty tired and didn’t say too much on the ride, but as I got off, I wished her a great day.” and Life during wartime: “Here in America, we’re awash in red white and blue and flags flying from currency exchanges, taxicabs, suburban homes and government offices. As if they were Christmas carols, The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America can be heard on every radio and at every corner. And our president talks of ‘War’, of a ‘Crusade’. ‘This will not stand,’ he cries.”

Noam Chomsky – always a startlingly intelligent man – has said some of the most insightful and terrifying things about the current situation around the world. A recent transcript has been posted on Barbelith. A couple of excerpts from his interview follow:

“It is also widely recognized that Bin Laden and others like him are praying for ‘a great assault on Muslim states,’ which will cause ‘fanatics to flock to his cause’ (Jenkins, and many others.). That too is familiar. The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides, a fact evident enough from the recent history of the Balkans, to cite only one of many cases.”

“The decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein – who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities.”

“The U.S. and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. To quote the lead analysis in the New York Times (Sept. 16), the perpetrators acted out of “hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.” U.S. actions are irrelevant, and therefore need not even be mentioned (Serge Schmemann). This is a convenient picture, and the general stance is not unfamiliar in intellectual history; in fact, it is close to the norm. It happens to be completely at variance with everything we know, but has all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power.”

The sheer blind fury of writing a long piece (ironically about anti-war protests and Tariq Ali) and then losing it due to a system crash or failed internet connection is familiar to all those who maintain a weblog of any description, unless possibly they are using Unix in a bomb-shelter with its own generator. That’s forty-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

I don’t quite get The Blog Twinning Project, but I’m certain it’s bloody genius idea.

A reconstruction of how cool it could look:

So I’m watching this TV program rather than do any work, and it’s about properties that are for sale around the UK – the slightly weirder, more beautiful, stranger places to buy, live and work in. Suddenly this incredible place comes up on screen. Am underground fort – victorian in origin – later used as a kind of way-station for troops in World War Two. Full of underground rooms, and over three miles of tunnels and rooms which were previously gun placements. My mouth hit the floor. I was in love with Fort Borstal.

It didn’t take long for my mind to start working overtime, imagining corridors lined with cabling, huge underground server rooms, places to live, places to work, places to play. A huge, underground hi-tech geek utopia of weird thinkers, dreamers and weirdos. I talked to Matt about it immediately and he got just as excited as I had. But how much would it cost? How much would a disused, run-down underground metropolis cost? Three million? Five million?

No. One hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds – an amount of money that you couldn’t buy a two bedroom flat in decent parts of London with. It would cost hundreds of thousands, millions even, to get the whole thing up and running, but for an initial outlay, it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was sold, in the end, to a woman from South London who wanted to buy goats.

God, I write crap. Every so often I look back at what I produce – what I write – what I put out into the public arena – and I’m ashamed of myself. I can’t tell whether it’s because my thoughts are stagnating, or because I’m too stressed to think things through properly, or whether I have got used to using plasticbag.org as a braindump rather than as a notepad. But I look back at the kind of writing I’m producing and it’s just awful. Why do any of you people read this stuff? What possible benefit could you get from it?