Tasers are the height of impoliteness
Posted: August 25, 2011 Filed under: Society, Technology | Tags: people, star trek, taser, taser deaths, taser uk Leave a comment »
Look at this thing! It's not a gun, it's the lovechild of a water pistol and an electric shaver.
Who here among us hasn’t honestly, at some point, wished that they could kill someone not for justice or revenge, but for convenience? Maybe it’s that annoying housemate who always gets to the shower first, or a terrible boss who blocks all your ideas, or that MONSTROUS BUMHOLE stood at the train station barriers, fiddling around with his bag because he was too DENSE to get his ticket out BEFORE he reached the gates, and now EVERYBODY is being held up and it’s been TWELVE WHOLE SECONDS now and this is just INFURIATING and – oh, he’s found it now. Well ABOUT BLOOMIN’ TIME. Tosser.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just kill these awful people and get them out of our way? Not KILL kill them, obviously. Properly killing people is really bad. But maybe we could, y’know, just kill them a little bit. Knock them out for a while. Get them out of our hair.
This magnificent dream has been enthusiastically taken up by film and TV, who have to struggle with the problem that violence is really cool and exciting and offers a fast way to resolve conflicts without any boring talky nonsense, but also leads to people getting hurt or selfishly bleeding all over the place. As we’ve mentioned, this is a BAD THING and as such can ruin your movie’s age certification. The solution is to pretend that it really is possible to just duff people up and knock them out without any nasty consequences whatsoever – Superman, Spiderman and all the other “-men” of the comic book world are heroes because they beat up bad guys but never ever kill. The best manifestation of this wonderful fantasy has to be the Phaser, from Star Trek – a wizardly technology that works just like a real gun, except it painlessly stuns you for a bit rather than messily spraying your insides all over the bookshelves. The show’s pitched battles between good and evil are basically a paintball match, but with better sound effects.
You tell 'em, Kirk.
Phasers aren’t real, which is probably just as well. But Tasers are. The name’s almost identical, they look like a kiddies’ toy raygun, and they promise to “incapacitate dangerous, combative, or high-risk subjects who pose a risk to law enforcement/correctional officers, innocent citizens, or themselves in a manner that is generally recognized as a safer alternative to other uses of force.” That is: they zap your nuts off with electricity, and you fall to the ground, still awake, in a grotesque twitching mess.
Before I go any further, a clarification: this piece isn’t really about Tasers themselves. I’m not actually against them, in principle – if they allow an officer to quickly and accountably respond to an immediate threat, without lethal force, then great. However, there’s a whole tricky quagmire of arguments around whether or not Tasers cause heart attacks, whether all those muscle spasms can properly damage you, and exactly how much it hurts to be shot by one. I can’t drive through that quagmire – this blog doesn’t have the tyres for it.
What I will say is this: it can be very easy to get carried away by all the exciting possibilities that a magic stun-gun has to offer, whether or not it really is as non-lethal as it claims. This week, there’s been a storm of controversy around the things, and looking abroad you can find some truly terrifying examples: like the tasing of a twelve year old girl who ran away from a truant officer, or of a lone man who ran onto the pitch during a baseball game, doing dangerous and threatening things like, er, waving a flag. Did these people deserve fourteen thousand volts of bowel-loosening shock therapy? Of course not – but they got it anyway, because the promise of a quick and easy, consequence-free violent solution is too alluring to resist. It can be addictive – like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer learns the Vulcan nerve grip, and promptly pinches his way out of every awkward social encounter.
Other people can be a real pain. They can be stubborn, wilful, ignorant beasts who get so far up your nose that they could carve a likeness of Bill Shatner in your bogeys. Dealing with them properly requires diplomacy, respect and phenomenal patience – a mature and considerate approach. Toddlers might bite and kick to get their own way, but we grown-ups are supposed to be better than that. So yes, if someone poses a real and imminent danger, then by all means zap their buttocks into a clenching frenzy, but let’s not start using these things as a cheap shortcut to deal with any slightly difficult situation. It’s just rude.
Crash! Bang! Wallop – what a crisis!
Posted: August 18, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Media | Tags: conceptual metaphor, debt timebomb, economics, europe, european economy, eurozone crisis, goldfish, leanguage, metaphors, US economy Leave a comment »
"Man, I wish that stupid castle didn't keep getting in the way of my swimming. What a mindless tribute to the endless human capacity for tackiness."
The European debt crisis is primed to explode. The US economy is a ticking time bomb with a short fuse. Britain, meanwhile is stuffed to the guts with economic H-BOMBS that could go OFF at ANY SECOND and incinerate your GOLDFISH – quick, better go stock up on lead-lined tanks and reinforced concrete versions of those little castles that everybody puts in there for some unfathomable reason, even though fish (being gill-bearing aquatic vertebrates rather than warty medieval monarchs) probably couldn’t give a wet slap about the detail on the crenellations or the defendability of the cornices. They’re just fish, man. They’re never going to need to hold their ground against a horde of rampaging Jutes.
There was supposed to be a point to that first paragraph, a point which goes something like this: there’s a certain specific terminology that’s springing up around the state of the western economy, one which paints the whole thing as a horrendously mismanaged superweapon whose hapless controllers are always just seconds away from making the final moronic mistake that will trigger the whole thing and doom us all. Imagine the Death Star being piloted by the Chuckle Brothers, and you’re more or less there.
Human society has a fascinating predisposition for taking metaphors and grinding them so deeply into the fabric of conversation that we forget that they’re even there in the first place. There’s a funky book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By that lifts the lid on this whole “conceptual metaphor” business, with examples like TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY*:
Do you have much time left?
He’s living on borrowed time.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tyre cost me an hour.
I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
Thank you for your time.
(*the authors insist on always writing out these metaphors in big capital letters, and I’m not going to disagree. I don’t want the robot death police smashing down my door for crimes against linguistics.)
Time, of course, is not a precious commodity. There’s absolutely loads of it around. In fact, the whole notion of time as a collection of discreet little chunks is a specifically Western idea, which plenty of people – say, Hindus – might disagree with. Yet because we’ve managed to precisely quantify time, and tie it up so closely with the way we understand work and pay, we’ve come to see time as a sort of currency. This idea has become so embedded in our culture that we talk about it constantly, reinforcing it through our language, without really thinking about it as a metaphor anymore. We go straight from the words to the emotional response, bypassing any conscious awareness of either how the mechanism works, or that there might be any alternatives.
This rubbish stock photo for motivational business presentations is a pretty strong argument for the idea that "Time = Money" is absolute doggyplops.
Getting back to the point then, this whole “economic bombshell” notion could well be a lot more dangerous than it sounds. If the same thing starts to happen here as with time, if people get so used to saying it that it just worms its way into their subconscious, drops anchor and refuses to leave, then there might be trouble. Because an economy is not a timebomb – it isn’t really a physical thing at all. It certainly can’t suddenly engulf you in white-hot fire, wracking your body with searing pain like you’re on the cover of an old Cradle of Filth album. I’m no expert on economics, but from what I can tell from lazily flicking through the financial news, the important thing seems to be confidence. There’s a load of people out there with absolutely truckloads of cash that they’re happy to keep pumping around the planet so long as they’re confident that everything’s alright. If that confidence starts to wobble, though, they shut down all the valves and sit on their enormous money mountains while the rest of us scrabble for pennies.
Confidence, like time, isn’t limited. It isn’t a rare compound that can only be found by employing dextrous Indonesian children to ruck through the droppings of a rare pacific sea weasel, scrabbling through the acrid muck in search of just one elusive, glittering nugget of hope. It’s a state of mind, something that you can inspire in others: but you won’t manage it if you keep shuddering on about how we’re all on the brink of disaster. If we change our tune, though, we might be in with a chance: TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY might be well and truly wedged into everybody’s heads, but there’s still a chance to change our metaphoric minds on the economy question. How about EUROPEAN MARKETS ARE DELICIOUS LOLLIPOPS or AMERICAN WORKERS ARE GODLIKE UBERMENSCH?
It doesn’t even need to be daft propaganda – just the absence of the usual doomladen fear-mongering might do the trick. Right now, the world is full of bankers and brokers hiding inside giant citadels of cash, guarding the gates to normality. They’re still a bit too scared to come out, but if we all settle down a bit and stop screeching for a second, we might be able to calm their skittish hearts and coax them back out. After all, they don’t need their make-believe fortresses any more than your goldfish do.
Time for gamers to get a bit of perspective (and no, that doesn’t mean buying a 3DTV)
Posted: August 11, 2011 Filed under: Games, Society | Tags: Birmingham, GTA, London, riot, riots, videogame violence, videogames, violence 4 Comments »
This photo speaks for itself, really.
At the height of the riots last weekend, with tempers running high and flames even higher, wild rumours and speculative nonsense were zipping around like turbo-charged fleas as a confused, terrified public grappled with the incomprehensible question: why would anyone want to do this? As things wore on, the twittering masses argued tirelessly over what was most to blame: poor public-police relations, disenfranchised youth, unemployment, cuts, inherent psychopathy, lack of education, gangs, left-wingers being soft on crime, right-wingers oppressing the poor, and so on and so on until the sun runs out of hydrogen and we all collapse into the eternal dustless void.
In other words, there was a lot of speculatin’ going on, and a lot of it was a bit silly. On Sunday night, during what now seems to have been the worst of it (fingers crossed), an unnamed constable was reported in the Evening Standard as saying: “These are bad people who did this. Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves.”
The response from the videogaming community was as rapid as it was shrill. Here are a few excerpts taken from forums at The Escapist and PC Advisor:
- My God, video games are turning into the type of scapegoat that communism was in the 50′s. Blame everything on them. Are games the only things that can be blamed for everything now?
- I wouldn’t be surprised if all the cuts are just going towards paying off the media to make pitiful excuses.
- This idiot believes that I’m merely on the brink of committing vicious crimes because it would be FUN!? If this theory were true, why aren’t the 100′s of MILLIONS of gamers out there committing such acts right now?
- this kind of article story is an unoriginal, ignorant, scaremongering story written by people who know nothing about the subject they write about and are trying only to sell newspapers by any means necessary, adding 2 and 2 to get 78.
Now, I’m a gamer myself. I’ve written before about the effect games have on children, and ridiculed some of the outrageous attempts to blame them for completely unrelated problems. I think GTA is brilliant – while the latest one was dull and painfully unfunny, Vice City still stands out as glorious cartoon fun in a hilariously parodied 80’s Miami. So, you could expect me to fall in line with the anonymous tykes quoted above, viciously springing to the defence of the poor widdle multi-billion-pound industry.
However.
They’re wrong, in at least two important ways.
Firstly, the constable had a point – GTA and other games must have featured in the looters’ lives. From what little we know, they were mostly young males aged 12-22, from low-income areas with high unemployment: all of which are factors likely to make them videogamers, according to a 2005 survey by the BBC. Gaming might seem like an expensive hobby but it’s not really, thanks to the secondary market in knackered old Xboxes and cheap, scratched disks – a galaxy of C-grade items spiralling around the twin suns of CEX and Cash Converters. These kids certainly didn’t start calling police “feds” because they’ve been watching The Wire, as Zoe Williams joked in her intriguing piece for the Guardian – they picked it up from GTA (among other places).
By now, the research shows unambiguously that violent games can and do have a negative influence on teens. Yes, fans can point out that these titles all have eighteen certificates and shouldn’t be placed in younger hands at all – a fair point, but one which serves only to shift responsibility away from the producers. The fact is, these games do end up being played by underage kids – it’s inescapable. However, look a bit further into the research, and you’ll see something interesting. Games only have a negative effect when played alone, regularly, for long periods and without any parental discussion of what’s going on. Also, they don’t have anywhere near the same impact on young people that family violence does. The point, then, is that violent games can be bad for kids but the badness is completely mitigated by decent parenting.
Most gamers are perfectly able to spend their days helping old folk cross the street before settling down at home for a bit of wanton destruction. We can do this, and enjoy it healthily, because we recognise the difference between the consequence-free world inside the magic box, and the real community outside in which we have responsible roles to play. These kids, probably for a long list of reasons (a list which nevertheless has the words SHODDY PARENTS scrawled across the top with a fat red marker), felt like they had as much of a stake in the streets of London, and in the lives of its citizens, as they did in the virtual Liberty City. Real shopkeepers were given the same consideration as virtual automatons, the notion of consequences became laughable, and grotesque trophies were swapped and bragged about. Which is exactly what the officer said – he didn’t blame Rockstar for the violence or accuse them of actively melting down that vital reality/fiction distinction, he just said that the kids were living out GTA for themselves. And he was right.
Rather than insist on flatly denying everything, gamers ought to engage with the real problems associated with our hobby
But gamers weren’t just wrong to blindly say that games had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were wrong in the way they said it: it’s shameful how childish and overblown the response was. Yes, a lot of the time games don’t deserve the stick they get, but you’re not helping anyone by screaming and stamping your feet like a rabid teenager frothily bellowing “IT’S NOT FAIR!” We need to take a much more nuanced approach to our industry, recognising that it has its dangers but that they are manageable, and far outweighed by the benefits. What we definitely shouldn’t do is react to every criticism with an absolute shitstorm of temper tantrums. That poor constable had spent an entire night fending off gangs of people intent on smashing his face in, and was gearing up to do it all over again. Like everyone else, he was tired and shocked and struggling to find an explanation for the unthinkable, so he made one slightly daft throwaway comment – and all we can do is hide behind our keyboards and jeer at him?
Gamers: it’s time to calm down and grow up. Just think for a second about how all that savage viciousness makes us look, and how much better it would be to show a little restraint now and then. There are people out there who’ve died trying to protect their businesses, who’ve lost everything in one mindless evening – they are the victims here, not us.
Thanks to Nick Fox Moran for the tip about this one
Tortoises versus whippets: how the ‘net makes fools of the lawmakers
Posted: August 4, 2011 Filed under: Technology | Tags: EU firewall, firewall, internet, Internet Watch Foundation, IWF, newzbin, newzbin2, piracy, yet more dubious references to little kids and excrement 4 Comments »
"Rarrrgh! What's the latest on Twitter?"
By now, we’ve all been poking around the internet long enough to know that it has an odd, twisted mind of its own. The visionary director Randal Kleiser, with brilliant foresight, captured the coming spirit of the internet age way back in 1992 with his superb speculative piece, Honey I Blew Up The Kid. A colossal, three-hundred-foot-high toddler? Wielding enormous power and potential, but easily distracted by shiny baubles and cuddly animals, inspiring terror and awe in those who seek to appease its whimsical wrath? That’s definitely the internet, that is. A hotbed of infantilism that’s adorably brilliant one minute and smearing its whoopsie in your slippers the next, impossible to predict or control.
Nevertheless, the stuffy dads of the world – that is, legislators and government types – are still willing to have a go. Everyone seems to be looking wistfully over at China’s famous Great Firewall and wishing that they had one too. Australia’s already had a decent attempt at it, making a system designed to sieve out all the porn (though it sometimes gets a bit overexcited and cuts off access to such smut-laden filthpots as, er, Wikipedia. Having said that, the exact same thing happened in the UK too). The EU has been making noises about doing it for years – albeit the sort of noises you make by sticking out your tongue between your teeth and squeezing air through your top lip. They caused a stir a few months ago when the minutes of some obscure group of moustachioed wonks came to light, detailing a plan for “a single secure European cyberspace” with a virtual border that blocks “illicit” content. “What’s that all about, then?” was the angry cry; “Er, sorry, we’re on holiday,” was the timid response which gave the game away: these chaps didn’t want to actually go to all the hassle of getting all their internet providers to talk to each other, and agree on how to get all the expensive technology in place. The fabulously saggy bureaucracy just wants to look busy, and then toddle off to Malaga for a fortnight. Really, this whole business is a nice excuse to have an extended “consultation period” – lots of meetings, lots of documentation, lots of nice biscuits and after a decade they’ll still be no closer to sorting it out. Best order a big tub of those shortbreads – the little round ones, with the nice thick chocolate around the edges. Mmm, lovely.
Since biscuit scientists invented the shortcake/chocolate fusion, the average number of meetings held in government and industry has increased threefold.
Here in Britain, things seemed to getting a bit scarier this week when the High Court ordered BT to block access to newzbin – not because it carried kiddie porn, which we’ve blocked for years – but, for the first time, on the grounds that it’s stuffed to the jowls with pirated films and albums. Yet within a few days, Ofcom also published a report saying that blocking websites is pointless and they won’t bother with it for now. Erm, pardon? The thinking here seems about as well co-ordinated as Charlie Sheen after a late night binge in a centrifuge. Then there’s the fact that blocking just doesn’t work, and that piracy itself isn’t a clear-cut evil – oh, and let’s not even go near the astronomical can of worms that is the Internet Watch Foundation (though do read this great article from Wired, which prises the can apart and lets the worms spill freely all over the rug).
Should we terrified by all this, then? Are our fundamental freedoms being quashed? Will we never again have easy access to crappy rom-coms for free? It’s impossible to tell, but I wouldn’t count on anything drastic happening in the near future. The only consistent conclusion that you can draw from all this is that the legal system – particularly here in the UK, with our system of checks and balances dating back over a thousand years – is not a particularly fast-moving beast, and it has no idea what to do about all this newfangled computer nonsense. The law’s a wrinkly old tortoise, plodding through the mud, while technology moves like a greasy whippet down an icy slope. The poor old judges just can’t keep up – remember when twitter ran circles around them? Astonishingly, it’s only a few days ago that they finally decided that it’s not illegal to copy music from a CD to your computer: you know, that thing everyone’s been doing since about 2001.
The rate things are going, it looks like the giant toddler can carry on stomping around for a good while yet, scribbling all over the fireplace and smearing pudding into the floor, while Dad looks on helplessly and considers forming a committee to investigate the potential options involved in buying a mop.
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NEW NEWS FOR OLD BUCKETS
- The meths-addled pigeon of churnalism continues to crap all over the statue of truth, with the revelation that an IQ survey which was widely reported all over the press was, um, completely made up.
- The ongoing parade of meaningless mobile technology patents takes a flirty twist as Microsoft and Google pull each other’s pigtails, while HTC volleys the ball back towards Apple in their own little tit-for-tat techno-spat. Sigh.
