Chris Anderson replies 24th July 2009
I found William Davies’s review (August) of my book, Free, interesting—but I had to laugh at this line about the long tail era: “He exaggerated this to the point of predicting the end of the blockbuster.” This is, rather ironically, untrue. The book never says that. It says the long tail represents the end of the “monopoly of the blockbuster,” not the blockbuster itself. This is the main misunderstanding about the book. You could even call it an exaggeration.
Chris Anderson Via the Prospect blog
William Davies responds to Chris Anderson
I concede that I have exaggerated this reference to the long tail. However, I think it’s fair to say that business claims made for the long tail have not (yet) been proven. That could change. I think the long tail thesis still works, though, in getting people to understand something different about online retail. You would not have pulled that off by making tentative, nuanced and anxiously realistic predictions. Exaggeration cuts through better and brings more people with it.
William Davies
Craig Brown’s memory 1st August 2009
Craig Brown (August) may not remember the details of many books he has read, but he is mistaken that the only value in reading is in the momentary pleasure. He has confused our conscious memory of events and details with the entirety of our selves. I do not remember many of the events of my childhood, but it was during this period that I learnt my native language and acquired many of the habits of thought and feeling that define who I am today. We are more than the memories we can effortfully bring to mind. Good books can change our beliefs, feelings and intuitions—without relying on the fragile surface of conscious memory.
Tom Stafford Sheffield
Prince Charles 3rd August 2009
I agree with Rowan Moore’s criticism (August) of Prince Charles’s abuse of his position at the Chelsea Barracks site, but to admonish Tom Stoppard and Andrew Roberts for supporting the Prince when they “might in their own line of business oppose interference with creative freedom” is surely to miss the point. Anyone can avoid attending a Stoppard play or reading a Roberts book if they wish, but urban architecture is inescapably a public intervention as well as a creative act—because we all have to look at it. Any argument that wishes this distinction away, likening a building to a book or a play, will always sound arrogant to the public, and does no favours to the defence of good modern architecture.
David Griffiths Huddersfield
Housing immigrants 3rd August 2009
Richard Reeves (August) mentioned the “evidence” of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to support the view that there is no preferential treatment given to immigrants in social housing allocation. Yet this report looked at the housing situation askew.
The sense of injustice that the assumed “racist hoi polloi” are harping on about is based on a commonly held and quite universal concept of fairness, namely the queue. Council housing allocations do not operate on a queuing system, but on a points system where the hopefuls have to bid in competition with everyone else on the housing list. So, for example, Mr and Mrs Jones, now retired, who have been sharing their two-up, two-down terrace house with their son Albert, his wife Edith and their daughter Sally for ten years and have a fixed number of points to their credit, have been bidding for a property for the last ten years.
But, at least in the Borough of Camden, if you sign yourself up for a council property within hours of entering this country—providing you have the right to be here—there is no waiting list for signing onto the council housing list. So, for example, a Somali family with three children arrives here and are rightly granted asylum. They have been given many, many, more points than Mr Jones and family because they are homeless and desperate. Mr Jones has at least got a roof over his head and his child is not traumatised. But each time a new batch of war-torn asylum seekers are granted the right to be here, and each time a European skilled migrant worker arrives here, Mr Jones and family drop further and further down the ever expanding council house bidding list.
The result is that the poorest members of our society, with the smallest portion of the cake, are having to share out the crumbs with all the newcomers. I often wonder how the higher echelons of our society would feel if the government today declared that anyone with a spare room in their home—or indeed with a spare home—had to house an immigrant from a war-torn country or a skilled worker and his family from Europe. Even as I write, I can feel their indignation mounting and I have my knee jerking ready to scream racists at them.
E Chambers London NW3
The database state 1 1st August 2009
Tim Kelsey (August) makes a strong case for the potential benefits of data sharing between public services. But by assuming that data collection itself would be unaffected by this, he underestimates the costs.
He proposes that “no one who uses a public service should be allowed to opt out of sharing their records,” assuming that people will continue to use services as ever before, with added benefits accruing from their data being shared. Yet it’s possible that this would actually result in lower use of services, and less information being gathered which could be used.
If, to take one of his examples, health data from GPs were automatically shared with the Benefits Agency, support to vulnerable individuals might be better targeted, or a greater number of benefit cheats could be caught. A less desirable result might be that some of the most vulnerable in society would be more reluctant to seek healthcare at all, knowing that their details would be used for other purposes. In that case, not only might the efficacy of healthcare be reduced for the very people who need it most, but the expected benefits might also fail to materialise because the data would no longer be collected in the first place.
Central government is increasingly looking to health services data to help achieve unrelated policy objectives in areas such as gun and knife crime and immigration. But if the effect of data sharing is to deter people from seeking healthcare, the benefits may prove to be illusory—and the cost irrecoverable.
Chris Jones Norwich
The database state 2 1st August 2009
Cheerleading for the database state, Tim Kelsey misses the point in a variety of ways—not least on the responsibility for data security and data loss. It is obvious that more readily mined health data would have at least some benefits, and there is plenty of overlap between the interests of those campaigning for better access to public data and those opposing it. Just as with minerals, however, data-mining rights create problems when those who reap the benefits are different from those who have to deal with the fallout afterwards.
Kelsey describes with enthusiasm the private sector organisations who go to considerable lengths to collect, maintain and keep secure large volumes of data on something as trivial as our shopping habits, but then airily dismisses the concern that someone might find a mass of health data to be valuable enough to steal or leak. The fact is that personal data has black market value. Can you imagine the resale value of an MP’s STD appointment? If a government department mislaid a pile of folding money in the post, it would be a career-limiting calamity and a clear structural error, yet if it loses a pile of personal data records, it’s currently seen only as an embarrassment.
Keeping shared data both safe and anonymised is actually surprisingly difficult—and it’s a task that gets much more difficult with larger records and with more sharers. What Kelsey is proposing is a thief’s bonanza.
Norman Gray University of Glasgow
In praise of bureaucrats 14th August 2009
As one of those bureaucrats who works in standardisation, and who edits the quarterly online magazine, Standards in Defence (SID) News, I’d like to thank Prospect for publishing Brian Eno’s “In praise of bureaucrats” (August). When the newspapers feel obliged to give the public sector a good kicking without really understanding what we actually do, it is an inspiration to know that we are supported by the man who put the oomph into early Roxy, has worked with Talking Heads, U2, recorded the wonderful Here Come the Warm Jets, and influenced a whole range of bands from the Banshees to Franz Ferdinand.
Alastair Jackson UK Defence Standardization (DStan)
Send letters by post, fax, email to letters@prospect-magazine.co.uk or leave a comment on our website
I found William Davies’s review (August) of my book, Free, interesting—but I had to laugh at this line about the long tail era: “He exaggerated this to the point of predicting the end of the blockbuster.” This is, rather ironically, untrue. The book never says that. It says the long tail represents the end of the “monopoly of the blockbuster,” not the blockbuster itself. This is the main misunderstanding about the book. You could even call it an exaggeration.
Chris Anderson Via the Prospect blog
William Davies responds to Chris Anderson
I concede that I have exaggerated this reference to the long tail. However, I think it’s fair to say that business claims made for the long tail have not (yet) been proven. That could change. I think the long tail thesis still works, though, in getting people to understand something different about online retail. You would not have pulled that off by making tentative, nuanced and anxiously realistic predictions. Exaggeration cuts through better and brings more people with it.
William Davies
Craig Brown’s memory 1st August 2009
Craig Brown (August) may not remember the details of many books he has read, but he is mistaken that the only value in reading is in the momentary pleasure. He has confused our conscious memory of events and details with the entirety of our selves. I do not remember many of the events of my childhood, but it was during this period that I learnt my native language and acquired many of the habits of thought and feeling that define who I am today. We are more than the memories we can effortfully bring to mind. Good books can change our beliefs, feelings and intuitions—without relying on the fragile surface of conscious memory.
Tom Stafford Sheffield
Prince Charles 3rd August 2009
I agree with Rowan Moore’s criticism (August) of Prince Charles’s abuse of his position at the Chelsea Barracks site, but to admonish Tom Stoppard and Andrew Roberts for supporting the Prince when they “might in their own line of business oppose interference with creative freedom” is surely to miss the point. Anyone can avoid attending a Stoppard play or reading a Roberts book if they wish, but urban architecture is inescapably a public intervention as well as a creative act—because we all have to look at it. Any argument that wishes this distinction away, likening a building to a book or a play, will always sound arrogant to the public, and does no favours to the defence of good modern architecture.
David Griffiths Huddersfield
Housing immigrants 3rd August 2009
Richard Reeves (August) mentioned the “evidence” of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to support the view that there is no preferential treatment given to immigrants in social housing allocation. Yet this report looked at the housing situation askew.
The sense of injustice that the assumed “racist hoi polloi” are harping on about is based on a commonly held and quite universal concept of fairness, namely the queue. Council housing allocations do not operate on a queuing system, but on a points system where the hopefuls have to bid in competition with everyone else on the housing list. So, for example, Mr and Mrs Jones, now retired, who have been sharing their two-up, two-down terrace house with their son Albert, his wife Edith and their daughter Sally for ten years and have a fixed number of points to their credit, have been bidding for a property for the last ten years.
But, at least in the Borough of Camden, if you sign yourself up for a council property within hours of entering this country—providing you have the right to be here—there is no waiting list for signing onto the council housing list. So, for example, a Somali family with three children arrives here and are rightly granted asylum. They have been given many, many, more points than Mr Jones and family because they are homeless and desperate. Mr Jones has at least got a roof over his head and his child is not traumatised. But each time a new batch of war-torn asylum seekers are granted the right to be here, and each time a European skilled migrant worker arrives here, Mr Jones and family drop further and further down the ever expanding council house bidding list.
The result is that the poorest members of our society, with the smallest portion of the cake, are having to share out the crumbs with all the newcomers. I often wonder how the higher echelons of our society would feel if the government today declared that anyone with a spare room in their home—or indeed with a spare home—had to house an immigrant from a war-torn country or a skilled worker and his family from Europe. Even as I write, I can feel their indignation mounting and I have my knee jerking ready to scream racists at them.
E Chambers London NW3
The database state 1 1st August 2009
Tim Kelsey (August) makes a strong case for the potential benefits of data sharing between public services. But by assuming that data collection itself would be unaffected by this, he underestimates the costs.
He proposes that “no one who uses a public service should be allowed to opt out of sharing their records,” assuming that people will continue to use services as ever before, with added benefits accruing from their data being shared. Yet it’s possible that this would actually result in lower use of services, and less information being gathered which could be used.
If, to take one of his examples, health data from GPs were automatically shared with the Benefits Agency, support to vulnerable individuals might be better targeted, or a greater number of benefit cheats could be caught. A less desirable result might be that some of the most vulnerable in society would be more reluctant to seek healthcare at all, knowing that their details would be used for other purposes. In that case, not only might the efficacy of healthcare be reduced for the very people who need it most, but the expected benefits might also fail to materialise because the data would no longer be collected in the first place.
Central government is increasingly looking to health services data to help achieve unrelated policy objectives in areas such as gun and knife crime and immigration. But if the effect of data sharing is to deter people from seeking healthcare, the benefits may prove to be illusory—and the cost irrecoverable.
Chris Jones Norwich
The database state 2 1st August 2009
Cheerleading for the database state, Tim Kelsey misses the point in a variety of ways—not least on the responsibility for data security and data loss. It is obvious that more readily mined health data would have at least some benefits, and there is plenty of overlap between the interests of those campaigning for better access to public data and those opposing it. Just as with minerals, however, data-mining rights create problems when those who reap the benefits are different from those who have to deal with the fallout afterwards.
Kelsey describes with enthusiasm the private sector organisations who go to considerable lengths to collect, maintain and keep secure large volumes of data on something as trivial as our shopping habits, but then airily dismisses the concern that someone might find a mass of health data to be valuable enough to steal or leak. The fact is that personal data has black market value. Can you imagine the resale value of an MP’s STD appointment? If a government department mislaid a pile of folding money in the post, it would be a career-limiting calamity and a clear structural error, yet if it loses a pile of personal data records, it’s currently seen only as an embarrassment.
Keeping shared data both safe and anonymised is actually surprisingly difficult—and it’s a task that gets much more difficult with larger records and with more sharers. What Kelsey is proposing is a thief’s bonanza.
Norman Gray University of Glasgow
In praise of bureaucrats 14th August 2009
As one of those bureaucrats who works in standardisation, and who edits the quarterly online magazine, Standards in Defence (SID) News, I’d like to thank Prospect for publishing Brian Eno’s “In praise of bureaucrats” (August). When the newspapers feel obliged to give the public sector a good kicking without really understanding what we actually do, it is an inspiration to know that we are supported by the man who put the oomph into early Roxy, has worked with Talking Heads, U2, recorded the wonderful Here Come the Warm Jets, and influenced a whole range of bands from the Banshees to Franz Ferdinand.
Alastair Jackson UK Defence Standardization (DStan)
Send letters by post, fax, email to letters@prospect-magazine.co.uk or leave a comment on our website
