Pic at left: one of hundreds of signs, for and against a recent referendum on further integration with the EU, still up in Dublin. Irish voters said no, and apparently, that's not good for the EU.
WMD: It's taken me two days to learn that: a) my hotel is right across from the building where Oscar Wilde lived and barely two blocks from both the Irish parliament and the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington. For that, you have to walk around, and also swallow your pride and hop on one of the ubiquituous but worthwhile tourist buses that do a continuous circuit of notable points in the city.
WMD 2: Some months ago, Microsoft sent me an advance review copy of its Zune. I mostly liked it, but instead of doing a review, meditated on the revolutionary utility of little machines. That column is here. Text is as follows:
'Little machines' weaponry of brave new world's battlefields
All quiet on Canada's technological front
Barry Link, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, March 26, 2008Celebrate, comrades, the Zune is coming to Canada. It's a tiny part of a larger and necessary revolution we all need to join.
The Zune is Microsoft's answer to the iPod, the Apple-produced device that dominates the MP3 player market. I've used a review copy of the Zune for the past month. I like it. The 80-gig harddrive version has an attractive metal casing and a generous 3.5" colour screen. Its interface is clean and smooth, and it ably plays music, videos and pictures. It has a built-in FM radio and syncs wirelessly with your home computer network. The software required for your PC to work with the Zune can only be used with a Zune, but its design is bold and clean.
If I didn't already have a couple of MP3 players I like and use, I'd consider buying a Zune, which Microsoft tells me will be sold in Canada this spring. But its availability north of the 49th parallel comes nearly two years after the first version of the Zune was unveiled in the U.S., and that's a problem.
Canada is becoming a technological backwater. Once we were world leaders in telecommunications, and brave enough three decades ago to try failed experiments like Telidon--a very limited but forward-thinking early kind of Internet. Now we sell off our advanced satellites to the American arms industry and hobble our national space program with lack of funding and vision.
On the consumer level, we're no better. We still don't have iPhones, Apple's revolutionary cellphone and pocket computer, even though they're in widespread use just over the border. Our domestic cellphone companies wrap their fees within incomprehensible pricing plans and charge mobile users ridiculously high rates. Check American websites of consumer retailers and place them alongside the smaller inventories of Canadian retailers. Compared to Asia, Europe or the U.S., we're Sierra Leone when it comes to price and choice in consumer technology. Compared to Sierra Leone, we're Nigeria.
The lack of consumer technology matters. Yes, we're talking about little plastic and metal devices that people use for listening to stolen Aerosmith tunes. But the key social and political battle in the next two decades will not be Senate reform, gas taxes or daycare subsidies. It will be the use of information by governments and corporations to corral and monitor every aspect of our lives. In past years, people resisted such measures with stones and Molotov cocktails. Our weapons of resistance will be the Internet and devices like iPods and Zunes.
These little machines let us fight back. Governments install security cameras on public streets. People use cameras on cellphones to record and place on YouTube the tasering deaths of innocent people by over-zealous police. Governments introduce "enhanced" driver's licences and passports with data chips. People use Facebook--itself the biggest corporate threat to personal privacy in years--to organize anti-war rallies and consumer boycotts.
Millions of people are setting up their own entertainment, news, and information networks and systems through tools such as Bit torrents, blogs and podcasting, the latter of which is a big use for MP3 players like the Zune. It's most obvious in the field of consumer technology itself, where thousands of blogs and audio and video podcasts produced by amateurs and individuals aggressively influence debate and markets. In consumer tech, companies that attempt to cheat consumers pay in bucket loads of bad publicity.
An iPod nano, Sansa player or Nokia smartphone is a funny thing to lift up on the battlements as an instrument of liberation. But we're in a post-AK-47 world. It's now a cliche that personal digital devices have allowed information to filter out of closed societies. Practically the sole source of uncensored images of violence in Tibet this month, and last year in Burma, came from individuals using cellphones and digital cameras.
Zunes and the vast flood of toys in our daily life are problematic, because they are meant to be tossed into landfills once they break, which is frequently. And consumer tech doesn't guarantee democratic resistance. Asia is awash in small computing devices, and yet is an underfed model of democracy.
These tools also come from corporations with little interest in individual liberty. As a recent Wired article pointed out, Apple is notorious for a corporate culture of secrecy and control. But as profit-driven entities, Apple and Microsoft must offer what the market wants. And what the market wants--whether it's privacy protection and continued personal freedom or videos of cats playing piano--is up to us.
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