Continue reading »]]> I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels.  This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia.

The “security” of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles of some of the sessions indicate the main security issues with which the conference was preoccupied: deception, privacy, fraud and terror. How might, the conference inquired, deception and invasion of the privacy of Internet users be used by “bad guys” (a term frequently deployed) to commit malicious acts – ranging from the spreading of viruses, misuse of medical records, and phishing to vote rigging, Facebook bullying, money laundering and acts of terrorism?

The final session was entitled “How do we fix the world?” It was I fear inconclusive. How might we good guys (obviously) frustrate or catch and punish the bad guys? Identification of the good guys was not as straightforward as one might have hoped. Law-abiding individuals with home computers do not pose a categorisation problem. But companies and institutions that collect personal data for legitimate purposes, but who are insufficiently aware of its sensitivity and insufficiently careful about protecting it fell into a gray area. And the Orwellian Big Brother state intent on imposing ID cards on its citizens and tracking all their phone calls, emails and Internet activity was, in the eyes of most (all?) at the conference not good at all.

Complaints about Big Brother were of two sorts. He was incompetent; he would lose sensitive data and/or fail to make effective use of it. Alternatively, were he to make it work, his surveillance agency would be indistinguishable from the Stasi. The problem is an ancient one: Juvenal asked “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – who will guard the guards themselves.

The session to which I have been invited to contribute in the Green Week Conference in Brussels is entitled “2050 Vision: Transport and spatial planning in a decarbonised world”. I have been invited to discuss “the social issues involved”. In my 20 minutes I will invite people to imagine a future in which science and technology have solved all problems of climate change and energy supply, freeing the world to indulge its appetite for ever-increasing mobility. Feeding this appetite is the objective of most current EU transport policies, as indicated by plans to increase airport capacity and subsidise the car industry to help it through the credit crunch.

What kind of world would such policies produce? I conclude that one of its most salient features will be paranoia. In the hypermobile world that current policies are creating people will spend most of their time in “communities of interest”. As levels of mobility – physical and electronic – increase, people have less time for social interaction with neighbours in old-fashioned geographical communities. The idea of communities of interest was popularized in 1963 by Melvin Webber in an essay entitled “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity”.
Webber was enthusing about the freedoms provided by the new California freeway system. They were enticing. Freed from burdensome relationships with geographical neighbours of all ages and with divers interests, people could spend their waking hours in the congenial company of people who thought like them. These freedoms have been hugely expanded by the global development of what Al Gore dubbed the “Information Superhighway”.

It is now apparent that the freedoms are being purchased at a cost. In geographical communities in which people know their neighbours and recognize people they pass in the street, people trust each other, or know why they don’t. In a world consisting of aspatial communities of interest people know each other much less well. They may know about others’ interests, but they don’t know other members of their “community” as complete people. They do not know whom to trust. Much of the MIT conference was devoted to the problem of negotiating transactions under conditions of low trust.

Low trust creates a particular problem for governments. Governments rule over geographically demarcated parts of the world. Few communities of interest pledge allegiance to geographically defined areas. There is now a globe-spanning community of interest focused on a man who may, or may not, live in a cave in Waziristan. Fear of this man and the atrocities that might be committed by members of his community of interest now justify the inconveniencing of millions of air travelers and the intrusive surveillance of billions of people world-wide. The default assumption by governments is that everyone is a potential threat and should, therefore, be kept under surveillance. Despite the fact that no air passenger, anywhere, ever has been killed by a shoe bomb we are all required to take off our shoes when passing through airport security.

The hope that electronic mobility would substitute for physical mobility has been disappointed. Despite enormous increases in the time spent online we are travelling more than ever. The amount of time we spend in communities of interest, assuming we are not spending less time sleeping, must be time not spent in geographical communites. A Stanford Study has revealed a strong negative correlation between time spent on line and time spent interacting with family and friends.

As geographical communities are displaced by communities of interest we are increasingly likely to find ourselves living in propinquity (to use Webber’s word) to members of communities whose cultures we find incomprehensible and sometimes threatening. One of the presentations at the MIT conference was by John Mueller who briefly summarized the message of his excellent book Overblown. Overblown is his one-word label for the paranoid response of the US Department of Homeland Security to the threat posed by the man in the cave. His description of the paranoia that has transformed “the home of the brave” into a nation sufficiently spooked to acquiesce in the sacrifice of cherished freedoms was vivid and convincing. But he held out little hope of his evidence and arguments prevailing.  The world’s most mobile nation – physically and electronically – seems to have lost its nerve.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  In our paranoid world of communities of interest it appears that the millions off air travellers obediently removing their shoes are less interested in guarding the guards than in the protection they purport to provide.

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In December 2007 I delivered a Working Paper entitled “Managing risk in a hypermobile world” to the OMEGA Project  - a project dedicated to thinking about Mega Projects in Transport and Development.

I began thus:

“Transport projects facilitate new connections between trip origins and destinations. In so doing they disturb previous patterns of connection, often with difficult to predict consequences. Mega-transport projects do this on a grand scale and create risks and problems of complexity and uncertainty of unprecedented magnitude. It becomes impossible to define the boundaries of the fields of influence of urban mega-transport projects such as international airports and high-speed rail lines that connect cities to the rest of the world. Their specific consequences are beyond prediction. But it is possible to speculate about the nature of the problems that such projects will force us to confront in the future.

The world’s biggest mega transport project

The world’s biggest mega transport project subsumes all the others. It is the promotion of mobility. It is proceeding at a record-breaking pace. It is creating problems of complexity, risk and uncertainty on a global scale, and transforming the way in which these problems are perceived and managed, or, more accurately, struggled with.

All significant participants in the project are now globe spanning enterprises. The motor industry measures success by numbers of vehicles sold. Judged by this criterion, despite global over-capacity, it is prospering. Road traffic, in almost all countries, is at record levels and still growing. It is exploding in countries such as China and India (which recently launched the world’s cheapest car), and is growing even in the most highly motorized countries; and projects to provide the infrastructure to carry it are still providing lots of work for multi-national civil engineering firms. Growing still faster is the aviation industry, generating mega projects for plane and airport builders. And railways, after decades in the doldrums, are being revitalized by mega high-speed projects. The result is an emergent hypermobile society.”

OOPS!  The project that I described in December 2007 as proceeding at a record-breaking pace has come to a juddering halt. It is unclear when, or if, it will get re-started.

The world is now crowded with people who claim that they saw it coming – I amongst them. The concluding sentence to my Working Paper says: “Hypermobility breeds fatalists. Without egalitarian restraint of present trends, dystopian science fiction appears likely to provide our best guide to the future. “ The sudden restraint of (juddering halt to) recent trends has been anything but egalitarian. Dystopian science fiction may yet prove to be our best guide to what comes next. A PDF of the full paper can be read here.

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Dear Sir

Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which people would live within walking or cycling distance of jobs, shops, schools, doctors and friends was a noble vision. All these visionaries, including the eponymous author of the Abercrombie Plan, failed to anticipate the enormous increase in car ownership. The presumed local-scale functioning of these new settlements was destroyed by the car. Their inhabitants bought them, got into them, and roamed widely in pursuit of employment and supermarket bargains. They became car dependent.

The naiveté of the early visionaries is no longer excusable. The process has been going on for too long. John Prescott’’s vow to get people out of their cars and on to public transport has been overwhelmed by growing numbers of cars. Since Labour came to power the country’s motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh – 90 lanes wide.

The nation’’s vehicle population cannot be accommodated within a landuse pattern in which walking, cycling and buses are viable modes of transport for most of the human population. The Government’’s eco-town aspirations will be defeated by the Government’s transport policies.

An abbreviated version of this letter was published in the Guardian on 7 April 2008.

Continue reading »]]> My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Writing in 1909, not only did he anticipate television, the Internet, video conferencing, email, Amazon, Google and Globalization but, more significantly, the impact that they would have on our lives.

It is a short story about a world in which progress has run its course. This is how it begins:

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. … An armchair is in the centre … there sits a swaddled lump of flesh – a woman [Vashti], about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. … There was the button that produced literature. … and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

The Machine provided access – direct and unlimited – to mankind’s desired ultimate ends. It thereby rendered redundant the necessity for access to the multitude of intermediate ends with which our civilization is so preoccupied. Access to shops to obtain food and clothing, access to work to obtain the money to purchase them, and access to recreation to obtain respite from work – all such concerns had lost any significance. Scientific and technical progress had set humanity free, within mortal limits, to devote itself exclusively to its ultimate ends.

The result was a civilization of intellectuals in pursuit of abstraction. And despite its facilities for instant communication and gratification of all material wants, it was always irritably pressed for time. The almost infinite disproportion between what was accessible and what it was possible to digest either physically or mentally, created an endemic frustration that could not be appeased. There was a pervasive, though rarely articulated, anxiety about the purpose of it all:

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions.

On one crucial point Forster got it wrong – or, perhaps, not yet right:

Few traveled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was thegood of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

Perhaps we still belong to Forster’s “previous civilization” – the hypermobile civilization that “had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.” This “mistake” is now widely recognized by those who lament the inefficiency of our present “system” and who, in the vanguard of “progress”, chorus that “access not mobility” should be the objective of the planners of our transport and communications systems. The purpose of these systems is to take the waiting out of wanting, and they are succeeding brilliantly. I can now order a book from Amazon in the expectation that it will arrive tomorrow, or if that is not fast enough, I can download it today. Like Vashti, the central figure in the story, I can order food, music and clothing, and communicate instantly and costlessly with friends anywhere in the World, without leaving my keyboard. And like Vashti I can give and receive electronic “lectures” – or blogs – to and from anyone in the world who is online.

My anxieties and dissatisfactions with the wondrous benefits delivered by this Machine, are represented by Forster in Vashti’s son Kuno. Kuno’s hexagonal cell lay deep in the earth beneath what was once known as Wessex, and his mother lived in an identical cell deep beneath the surface of what was once New Zealand. And Kuno wanted to see his mother face-to-face:

“I want you to come and see me.”

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. “But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”

“I want to see you not through the Machine. I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

Kuno’s wants explain the behaviour of the still increasing numbers who attend conferences and travel to meet friends, and Vashti’s incomprehension is shared by the frustrated purveyors of video-phones and Internet-conferencing. Some years ago, waiting in Vancouver airport to fly to London I got chatting to a man about to fly to Toronto – to play bridge with someone from Toronto, someone from Scotland and someone from San Francisco. They had met and played bridge on the Internet, and now needed a “real” game.

The Machine Stops is more than a farsighted commentary on the destructive impact of on-rushing trends in transport and communications on human sensibilities and human intercourse. It crystallizes anxieties about the modern Globalization Project. It proposes that the World can become too interdependent and too dependent on the technology and transport and communications infrastructure that binds its diverse parts together. Certainly the isolated pedestrian peasant village is socially claustrophobic, undemocratic, and vulnerable to famine, disease and misunderstandings with neighbouring villages. But might there be a limit to the “progress” that has relieved these conditions?

Almost 100 years after Forster wrote his story our “master brains” are struggling. The Machine is showing increasing signs of stress. The master brains in charge of transport offer no credible remedies for the creeping sclerosis of the systems they purport to manage. Governments everywhere are issuing more and more guidelines, targets, directives, risk assessments, regulations and laws, to less and less effect. Control of the increasing flows of migrants and asylum seekers across international boundaries is breaking down. Britain’s Home Office, the department of government responsible for maintaining social order, has been declared by the master brain in charge to be “not fit for purpose”. And civil rights are being sacrificed in pursuit of solutions to problems that have grown beyond the reach of traditional democratic means.

Meanwhile the Internet goes from strength to strength. A recent survey found that the average Briton spends 164 minutes online everyday, compared to 148 minutes watching television. The distinction between these two media will soon be blurred by the delivery of TV to computers via broadband. But the current total of 34.6 hours per week, already approaching Vashti levels, continues to rise. And I, as a novice blogger, am a part of this phenomenon. A blog is a note in an electronic bottle cast forth on the vast cyber sea. The note-in-bottle mode of communication is almost always futile, undertaken in a spirit of hope rather than rational expectation. We shall see.