Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons. There are several fantastic quotes scattered throughout the document, but one of the more interesting ones is this:

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoplesâ?? attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the worldâ??s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

I find that particularly fascinating (and promising, in fact). I’ve always found Marx’s works to be interesting and still relevant in today’s society, especially in the fields of sociology and political economy, despite some of my friends still having a chuckle and saying that he has absolutely no relevance in today’s world. In fact, one of the first lines of an economics text I read a while ago said that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marx was proved “wrong”, never mind that since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 it was recognised amongst the Left and others that Lenin’s revolution bore no resemblance to Marx’s ideas. At any rate, it seems he may have relevance in tomorrow’s world.

On a related note, this document ties in nicely with another paper I’ve started reading from the Oxford Research Group entitled Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, which argues “that international terrorism is actually a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends”, such as climate change and resource competition.

(And if you want a summarised version of the Global Strategic Trends report, the Guardian have done an article on it).

For anyone interested in privacy, security and surveillance issues, Roger Clarke’s website is a must. Well-researched and insightful, it has become a regular read for me since he covers a lot of issues that have arisen from technology-saturated societies and the natural marriage between IT, governments and corporations in creating ubiquitous surveillance.

Today’s quote is from a paper Clarke wrote in 2006 entitled “What’s Privacy?“, in which he offers this wonderful definition of privacy:

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a ‘personal space’, free from interference by other people and organisations.

We would do well to keep this definition in mind before privacy simply comes to mean that corporations and governments can still conduct massive surveillance and collect information on you, but they’ll try make sure it’s secured from unauthorized access. Privacy is not, and should never be, the same as data security.

The International Herald Tribune have a wonderful article up on why we laugh. Through a study conducted by neuroscientists Robert Provine and Jaak Panksepp, they produced some rather interesting evidence to suggest that we laugh not because something is funny, but because “It is a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.”

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

This expands on previous research from Panskepp that showed animals laugh, too. There is also a fascinating paper available from the 1996 issue of American Scientist written by Provine, which gives further detail of his previous research into the subject.

I’m still curious why I laugh at a funny film or TV show when there’s no-one around. Surely that’s not a social function?

“It’s like watching you get beaten to death with croutons.”

– Bruce Sterling on the “passing” fad of blogs and Twitter, courtesy of El Reg. You can also read a bit more about his speech at the Technology Review.

BBC4 just screened Nahid Persson’s Prostitution Behind The Veil, which was nominated in 2005 for an Emmy award. It also one a Guldbagge in Sweden for best documentary in 2005, and. achieved honours at the Creteil International Women’s Films Festival.

Born in Iran in 1960, Nahid Persson fled the country over twenty years ago and now lives in Sweden where she has studied microbiology. She also founded a radio station there. In 1993 she began studies at Film-och TV Skolan, and received master class education from 2003-2004. (Danish Film Institute)

The film was excellent, if rather shocking. Persson has returned to Iran “make a documentary, but not this one.” In Iran, “she finds the divisions between the classes greater than ever, unemployment has skyrocketed and widespread disillusionment provides a lucrative market for an elderly man, Habib, who sells prophecies on the streets” using canaries to pluck random, written predictions from a box. Deciding to make a documentary about the fortune teller, while filming “she was both shocked and intrigued to discover” Habib shared “his accommodation with Minna and Fariba”, two female prostitutes who are both heroin addicts. As Persson explains, the two “women were happy that someone was interested in their plight”:

“We had a natural relation. We trusted each other,” Persson says. “They even asked me on several occasions to go with them when they were going to meet some of their regular customers, because they were from some police station. But I didn’t do it out of the fear that I had to film someone who wears the uniform of a pasdar [Iran’s Revolutionary Guard]. And it was also better for them that I didn’t do it.”

Both women had become drug addicts due to addicted husbands. Fariba was given it by her husband to treat her kidney pain, and slowly got addicted; eventually “her husband sends her into the street and tells her, ‘Go bring clients.’” According to the film, Fariba had two children, one of which she still had, but the other, a three month old baby, was sold off by her husband. Minna’s story was similar in that her husband was arrested for drug running and more, and she turned to prostitution when she ended up living on the street with her child. She claimed she had no idea of his crimes, but he did get her onto drugs, too. Both women are often forced to take their children with them as they seek clients.

The film reveals how Shia Islam law can be used to “legally” conduct prostitution:

Men in Iran can find a way to buy sex and still comply with Muslim law by way of “Sighe,” a temporary marriage legal in Shia Islam. A Sighe marriage can last from two hours up to 99 years. Both Minna and Fariba participate in this pseudo-marriage with many of their customers

The film is well made, and sympathetic to the characters, and reveals a hidden side to Iran, where an official Iranian report concluded in 2000 that “Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635% among high school students and the (growth) rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109%.” The film looks at some of the prime causes of this: unemployment and poverty, and the fact that contraceptives were banned after the Iranian Revolution which led, from 1970 to 1990, to an almost doubling of the population from 28.4 to 54.6 million people.

All in all the film is worth watching to try and gain a better understanding of the social issues Iran faces.

Great doc just screened on BBC called Is business the real Big Brother?

“As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we’ve been doing.”
- Dr Kirstie Ball, Open University

You can download it here. (I just started reading Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Excellent, expect a review soon, but definitely read this book).

Wired is reporting that a video game that exists within the online game Second Life is causing a stir - apparantly because it’s mimicking the real world where parents no doubt moan the fact that their kids are online all the time playing games like Second Life.

“People started to complain that Tringo was harming the culture,” says Wagner James Au, the writer who has reported on Second Life as an “embedded” journalist for the last three years. “They felt it was ruining the social nature of the game. People were just showing up to play. They weren’t socializing or buying stuff any more.”

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game.

Of course, this said as much about the nature of Second Life as about Tringo. Second Lifers do not regard their world as a game: It’s a social environment, a chat room on steroids — a platform for an alternate life.

Just goes to show, even alternate realities can’t escape from reality.