Autistic Pride Day 2012

In December last year, Helen Green Allison MBE passed away. It’s fair to say she wasn’t a household name, but for those who came into contact with her work, her legacy and impact have been immense. As a founder of the National Autistic Society (NAS), she was responsible for creating an organisation that is now the leading UK charity for those with autism.

And yet despite the work of Allison, the NAS and their counterparts throughout the world, autism is still something that remains misunderstood. Over the last few years, in film and TV, a new stereotype has arose – the child with autism who struggles to communicate but who has the innate ability to not only tackle complex mathematical problems but use that to… Well, predict the future, or see the fundamental patterns behind the universe. And this isn’t intended to be anything other than sympathetic, as in Kiefer Sutherland’s new series Touch, but it does portray autism as, effectively, some kind of superpower. Maybe this is a narrative conceit that allows writers and producers to sneak autism awareness onto primetime TV, but how helpful is it really?

Today is Autistic Pride Day. I have a vested family interest in this and so it’s a day worth supporting, just so that people can get some idea of what autism and Asperger Syndrome actually are. That’s not an easy job – the autistic spectrum covers such a range of traits at differing levels of severity that everyone needs to be treated as an individual. There are no generic, one-size-fits-all answers.

But this is a good thing, because we all deserve to be treated as individuals; no-one should be labelled by their disability or their diagnosis, they should be labelled by their personality, likes, dislikes, their story and their heart.

That may come across as somewhat idealistic, especially in a world where misunderstandings of autism lead to things like the controversy over whether it’s caused by vaccines or the Gary McKinnon case. But the fact remains that Autistic Spectrum Disorders affect a significant part of the population and anything that can raise awareness of its realities is a positive thing. The child you think is misbehaving in a supermarket as people make muttered comments about poor parenting may be autistic; the socially awkward IT technician at work may have Asperger Syndrome. And each one of them is an individual, not a diagnosis.

(More information on autism is available at the NHS website.)

Fear of a Facebook Planet

And so Facebook has been floated on NASDAQ, leading to lots of economic excitement and Mark Zuckerberg become rich beyond the dreams of Luthor. It’s probably the biggest tech story for a long time, mainly because Facebook has become so pervasive. It’s everywhere.

But I’m a sceptic, bordering on techno-dystopian (maybe a lot of us are and that’s why Blade Runner is getting a sequel). I love the internet, don’t get me wrong, but nowadays Facebook leaves me cold.

I think it might be the privacy thing… No, wait, it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s the publicity thing. Facebook seems to want to know when we do anything – here’s your timeline, here’s what you’ve bought in Farmville, here’s your Words With Friends score, here’s a picture of you with a traffic cone on your head posted by someone you haven’t even thought about in years… It’s not content, it’s noise.

Now, I admit I’m guilty of that, mainly using my FB profile to tout my blog posts. I hope they’re not noise, but some may see it as such. Fair enough. I admit my hypocrisy.

But while that stuff may be noise to you and me, to marketing gnomes working long and hard in the data mines, it’s information. And now FB is going to make mondo amounts of money by hitting the stock market, it’s going to be under pressure from shareholders to keep making more money.

Now, it doesn’t make stuff, it’s reliant on one thing – our data. And when the pressure mounts to keep growing, to dive ever deeper into Scrooge McDuck-like piles of money, it’ll be our data for sale: our likes, dislikes, the people we’re friends with, the words we write in our status updates. People already look at stuff like that and think ‘ka-ching’, it’s going to get worse. In one sense this is the brave new world of the information society, get used to it, but FB may well be ground zero for this sort of thing…

(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came up with the bright idea of it becoming a pay-to-use service. That’d be interesting. I suspect Google+ would become a lot more popular…)

(And that’s before we get onto the Twitter joke that’s being doing the rounds: the reason Facebook has gone public is because no-one can find the privacy settings.)

I dunno. I sound like someone telling hoodie wearing kids to get of his digital lawn. At least I haven’t got on to how Facebook’s about to mutate into Skynet.

But the world will still be turning tomorrow; some people will be richer and social networking may or may not change into something unrecognisable or unwelcome.

And the sun will still come up.

10 Print “Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum”

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. It was a 48K model, I think, with rubber keys. You had to plug a tape recorder into it to load games from cassettes. This took minutes, accompanied by a screeching noise and a screen border that flashed primary colours. I’m remembering this now and it seems like prehistory, but back in the day this was the moment that computers really started to enter UK homes.

I eventually upgraded to the 128K model, with a built in cassette player. I think this may have been when I learned the only bit of code that I know, other than WordPress HTML tags (which don’t count):

10 Print “Hello!”
20 Goto 10
Run

This made ‘Hello!’ scroll up the screen forever, or at least until you stopped it. There are kids reading this thinking that this is the most pointless use of processing power ever encountered, but trust me, back when I was young this was awesome. It meant that the computer did what you told it to do. I swear, when the time comes to prevent the Technopocalypse, that bit of BASIC is really gonna come in handy.

And the games! Horace Goes Skiing (little blue man skis down a slope, but first he has to get across a busy road without getting run over!), Manic Miner (Miner Willy has to collect gems without getting killed by bizarre monsters!), Jet Set Willy (Miner Willy gets rich, throws a party, but then has to tidy up his mansion before he goes to bed!), Horace and the Spiders (Horace and some spiders!)… They were primitive and buggy (I’m not sure it was actually possible to finish Jet Set Willy) but they were addictive. Angry Birds makes them look like finger-daubed cave paintings, sure, but you’ve got to remember that this was all shiny and new and we loved it.

The next generation of games was my favourite, especially the stuff put out by Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. I pulled a few all-nighters trying to complete the Dizzy games – you can play Treasure Island Dizzy here. The Play button on my cassette deck fell off, and I had to load games by sticking a pencil into the mechanism. You can’t do that nowadays…

Times moved on, PCs became more advanced, the internet took over and games now look like movies. But the Speccy is worth remembering, as a herald of today’s networked world, and as gateway into technology and gaming and programming. On St. George’s Day, don’t forget to say happy birthday to a bit of technology of which Britain can be proud.

PS. I’m now going to be singing “Just Another Manic Miner” all day…

 

 

Occupy Schrodinger’s Cat? Occupy Wall Street and the Media Blackout

Early this morning, the New York Police Department evicted Occupy Wall Street from its base at Zuccotti Park. This isn’t the surprising news – the weekend saw a number of arrests at Occupy camps across the US – but the significant issue this morning was the treatment of the press. Accredited reporters were stopped from getting near the park; those who managed to sneak in were threatened with arrest. News helicopters were told to clear air space. A media blackout, in short.

This is something to worry about. Regardless of what you think of the Occupy camps that have sprung up around the world, you can’t deny that they’re overwhelmingly non-violent. And yet the police response to them has involved tear gas, projectiles and, apparently, Long Range Acoustic Devices. Heck, according to tweets from the park, a counter terrorist unit was on sight. This seems overkill, especially in New York which, ten years ago, suffered at the hands of real terrorists.

And yet the media blackout is possibly the scariest aspect of all this – it implies that the police and politicians know that things are going to go bad, even an element of premeditation. Not only does the US Constitution guarantee freedom of expression and assembly, but also freedom of the press. When this is ignored, it’s immediately a significant cause for concern. What’s the motivation? If the media isn’t there, bad things don’t really happen? You can’t prove that bad things have happened?

The truth isn’t Schrodinger’s Cat, dependent on an observer to fix an event in spacetime. What happened in Zuccotti Park has happened, and the truth will out. I’ll be interested in hearing the excuses that come from the defenders of the Constitution; a part of me wishes the UK had a written, codified Constitution, but if it can be so easily ignored, well, what would be the point?

Of course, this raises issues for the mainstream media. They haven’t exactly been present at Occupy events in significant numbers before, and maybe this is taken as tacit complicity in a media blackout. Coming at it from a different angle, the phone hacking scandal that’s still causing tremors for News International and the UK media in general has shown that reporters, newspapers and wider media structures can be irredeemably corrupt. Are people going to respect freedom of the press when its excesses can be so damaging to public trust and decency? Of course the majority of journalists aren’t involved with this but mud sticks, and that causes serious problems when a genuinely newsworthy event kicks off.

And yet, does the concept of a media blackout have much in the way of validity anymore? After all, we’re in the age of the internet, and anyone with a smart phone can theoretically be a citizen journalist. Police excesses may not make it on to Fox News or the BBC, but they can make it on to Youtube and Facebook and any other social media platform you can name. The problem at the moment is reach – the mainstream media is called the mainstream media because it’s mainstream; meanwhile, the internet is geared towards self-selecting niche audiences – it’s actually pretty easier to avoid things you don’t want to see, and that’s the trick – getting a message out there to people who’d rather ignore it, but who need to hear it. But, and make no mistake, the message will get out there somehow. It may have to work its way through a lack of accountability and cries of ‘fake!’, but it will get out there. And the best way to avoid that? Don’t do anything dodgy in the first place. There is an argument for secrecy, but that’s about protecting people, not harming them.

It’s hard to know where Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly and the wider movement movement will go from here. But if nothing else, it’s raising questions – about inequality, about corporate corruption, about the complicity of police and politics in this and now the state of the media. If that’s all it achieves, then it will have been worth it – asking questions is vital to a free society, and stopping people from doing that will only prompt them to ask more.

Ironically, tomorrow is American Censorship Day.

 

PS. One probably unintended consequence of all this, but one that is supremely telling in context, is the destruction of Occupy Wall Street’s library…

 

Frank Miller on the Occupy Movement

Comics over the last thirty or so years have produced quite a few superstars. Okay, maybe they’re not particularly well known outside the industry, with the exception of Neil Gaiman and possibly a couple of others, but if you’re a fan of comic books then chances are you have something by Grant Morrison on your shelves. Or Alan Moore. Or Frank Miller.

Frank Miller is probably the most influential Batman writer of recent decades, mainly down to two works – Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. If you’re not a comic fan, then you may have seen the movies 300 or Sin City – same guy. Well, Frank kicked up a bit of a stir over the weekend with his blog post on the Occupy movement.

Now, it’s pretty clear that Frank doesn’t altogether have the strongest grasp on current affairs – heck, he gets World of Warcraft’s name wrong, and that’s before conflating Occupy’s protests against corporate corruption with, I guess, the anti-war movement (I’d imagine there’s a reasonable crossover, but they’re hardly the same thing).

It’d be easy to take the blog post apart, especially when he gets on to suggesting that the protestors join the military so they can fight ‘Islamicism’ (which is interesting because Miller has never been in the armed forces while injured Occupy protestor Scott Olsen served with the Marines in Iraq before getting his skull fractured by police in Oakland, California). There’s really no point, because it’s an uninformed screed. However, it comes on the back of recent attention given to the abuse suffered by female bloggers, as well as racist comments relating to the news that the new Spider-Man would be half-black, half-hispanic. The question somehow becomes why, in a medium where most of the characters would probably support Occupy, or at the very least respect their right to protest, and where treating people with respect and compassion is a pretty standard subject for speeches from the likes of Superman and Captain America, does the audience reaction get so ugly sometimes?

(Of course, the flipside of that question is why wouldn’t it – after all, comics are still pretty white, pretty violent and female characters are more sexualised than the men… Just playing devil’s advocate…!)

I guess it’s an issue all of us who engage in online community have to face – the internet can be a harsh, nasty and unforgiving place at times. Miller’s blog post proves that, so do countless comments threatening to rape female writers, and while the majority of us no doubt find this abhorrent, the fact is those attitudes vocally exist. And while maybe the question should be “How can we bring civility back to the internet?”, the darker question is why does such behaviour happen in the first place?

PS. 3.12.2011 – And now Alan Moore has responded to Frank’s comments. Needless to say, he disagrees.