For some reason Ustream only recorded the first 70 minutes of that program, so the remaining 2+ hours is lost forever. Apart from this inaugural Christmas Message, which must be preserved for future generations! If the video player does not appear immediately below, try watching it directly at Viddler.

Warning: There is “strong language. Well, not by my standards, but maybe by yours.

The full text is over the jump, should you wish to read along. However my main aim in putting it there was to attract Teh Googles.

Also, the Message is riddled with continuity and other errors. Perhaps, if you’re bored, you can amuse yourself by listing them in the comments. I won’t mind.

My especial thanks to ’Pong for the massive amount of work on this silly project.

His Benevolence Stilgherrian’s Christmas Message 2008

Good evening, sheep. Sorry, “subjects”. We trust that you’ve had time today to partake in the traditions of Christmas.

The gluttony. The binge drinking. Bongs and backyard cricket. False affection for the relatives you hardly know. False enthusiasm for presents that you’d never have bought with your own money. A fight with your parents about something that’s so deeply repressed in your childhood memories that you can’t remember what it was about — neither of you can — but you know that you hate them you hate them you hate them!

Another drink. Another bong — though perhaps later. Furtive sex with a person you later discover is your actually a close niece or nephew. Another three drinks. Then the depressing realisation that you’ve paid for this. Your credit card is exhausted. And so are you.

By now your guests have departed. You’ve stumbled back inside, ignoring the cyclonic disaster hell that is your back yard and the rest of your house — the rest of your life. You slump on the couch, pour an even larger drink to wash down another year of complete misery. You turn on the TV. You realise that, like every other year before, all 40 channels are full of shit.

As I say, you pay for this.

And so here we are. Cheers!

As your Tsar, I’ve had a challenging year in 2008. And I suppose you have too, but in a simpler, proletarian kind of way.

The global economy has collapsed. Apparently you shouldn’t lend money to people who can’t afford to pay it back! Apparently credit default swaps are really just a kind of expensive game of musical chairs. But the music’s stopped.

The signs of global warming have become obvious, and all of those predictions — the Arctic ice packs melting, the most rapid variation of climate, of floods, hurricanes, of fire, drought — they’ve all happened just as was predicted three decades ago.

The pointless wars over oil continue. We respond not by decreasing oil production [sic], but by sinking billions of dollars into last century’s transport system.

But let’s not forget the true meaning of Christmas.

Let’s remember a young man — maybe around 30 years old — a man of Middle Eastern appearance, we’d call him today. He dedicated his life to helping people, to healing the sick. Though a humble man, he was mercilessly attacked. He was accused of the most heinous of crimes — accused of horrific crimes — a pawn in the vicious game played out by a militaristic empire.

I refer of course to Dr Mohamed Haneef.

Dr Haneef was the chosen scapegoat of a government led by that miserable toad John Winston Howard — the Man of Steel — supported by his evil Minister for Immigration Kevin Andrews.

A year ago we celebrated the end of Howard’s depressing anti-human regime. We hoped that Chairman Kevin Rudd’s Iced Vo-Vo Revolution would change everything. But only last week the enquiry into the whole Haneef debacle said that there’d been mistakes at the highest levels of government, at the Australian Federal Police. Nevertheless, the Rudd government said it still has full confidence in its police commissioner, Mick Keelty — a man who two years ago actually suggested forcibly “re-programming” people’s political beliefs. Need I point out that that is the most fundamental breach of people’s human rights?

Meanwhile Chairman Rudd has failed to address the fact that Australia is the largest per capita consumer of carbon fuels — more than any other nation on the entire planet — and his Minister for Being a Complete Prick, Stephen Conroy, is trying to implement the most comprehensive censorship of the Internet of any Western democracy.

Fuck this! Fuck this!

Fuck this!

Some famous historian once said that it always takes a few years for the world to notice how things will change.. Or was it that tanned young apprentice plumber that I had the other year. What was his name? Anyway, whoever it was, with hindsight we can see that the United States became the world’s global leader at the end of World War One, but it wasn’t until the end of the Second World War that everyone became aware of that.

Similarly, the Industrial Age is over, and with it the great industrial age empire of the United States of America and the corrupt, secretive military-industrial complex of the Neocons. Dick Cheney has been indicted. They’ve even voted in a blackfella for President!

But look, before we get carried away with the audacity and hope of President Obama’s new regime, consider the words of Crikey’s Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane:

Politics is more or less based around people of high principles and good will discovering that the obtaining and exercising of power involves doing bad things, distasteful things, amoral things, [it] involves unpleasant trade-offs and not just the famous half-loaves of compromise but [the] stale, mouldy crusts. And it’s all the more that way because its symbiotic partner, its Siamese twin the media, dislikes complexity and nuance, in favour of the same simple narratives, repeated with an ever-changing cast of characters but the same plots and [the same] moral lessons over and over again.

Yet all this is changing. And the players are afraid.

The newly-hyperconnected world means that politics and the media is changing. Radically. Witness the reporting on the Mubmai terrorist attacks. Witness the reporting on Thailand’s People’s Alliance for a Not-Quite-Democracy. Witness the speed at which resistance to Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall is organising itself. Haha!

The 21st Century has finally begun, and in the year 2009 we will see it unfold. Cheers!

Looking more locally, let us consider the achievements of the New South Wales state government.

[long pause]

Even more locally, I’m pleased to see that in my village of Enmore in Sydney, next to Newtown, it’s full of children. While it’s easy to complain about the pushers — what Americans would call “strollers” — which are bigger than Belgium, there is a joy in seeing the next generation coming into being. And not in that disturbed “we must protect the children” kind of way which imagines children are threatened by pretty much everything on the planet. But in that wondrous, joyous, happy way which I know every parent watching this tonight understands.

Children are our future. They’re growing up in a world where they’re always connected to the global grid, where they know themselves whether some person they’re talking to is one of their peers or some creep — and it’s only ignorant politicians with their own outdated agendas, with their own pervasive ignorance of information technology, who don’t understand.

Well fuck them! Fuck the lot of them!

Cheers!

Finally, let us remember the words of that great poet:

In touch with the ground
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Scent and a sound, I’m lost and I’m found
And I’m hungry like the wolf
Strut on a line, it’s discord and rhyme
I howl and I whine I’m after you
Mouth is alive all running inside
And I’m hungry like the wolf.

Goodnight. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

You may now kiss my ring.

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• There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT.
• Remembering the Space Age: Arthur C Clarke dead at 90.
• Super Hornets are Go.
• Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up. I don’t really think Jason is evil, but I do worry about the self-centred anti-human attitude of many people connected with Internet start-ups.
• New national anthem: I am So an Aussie, when the Snarky Platypus and I created, yes, a new national anthem. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
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• Leaving room for elephants: a chat with David Attenborough, a personal fave since it harks back to an interesting time in my life. This is still one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done. Ever.
• Angry geeks: “Don’t waste money on internet filters”, one of many articles I posted about censorship, but which outlined the key issues way back in January.
• Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

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Despite all the rhetoric about “protecting our children” and “children are the future”, our governments seem determined to prevent them preparing for the real future. Take NSW schools minister Verity Firth…

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald tells us the NSW government will receive $285M for new laptops — which will then be blocked from accessing social media and most everything else.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth [pictured], said the Government would prevent access to the social networking sites, and other sites, even when the laptops were used at home.

“We don’t want these kids to be using these computers for the not-so-wholesome things that can be on the net. And they won’t be able to because essentially the whole server is coming through the Department of Education.”

So kids will be prevented from using their computers to connect with and understand their peers and the real world because of this continuing paranoia about unspecified “not-so-wholesome things” and parents being too lazy to supervise their own children.

Maybe Ms Firth needs to read Mark Pesce’s Those Wacky Kids, or watch the video. As Pesce quite rightly points out, if the classroom is the only part of these kids’ lives which isn’t hyperconnected, then the classroom will be seen as irrelevant.

Rupert Murdoch is right to say we have a 19th Century education system. Our Minister seems intent on keeping it that way.

A 16-year-old at last week’s forum on Internet censorship said she’d prepared one assignment at home but couldn’t present it at school because all the source material was blocked.

“I have been surfing the web for most of my school life, at school and home, with filters and without, and I have never accidentally stumbled upon pornographic material,” she said.

“We want education, not restriction.”

In another “generous” move…

“[Students] can take it home, back to school, and then after four years, when they leave school, they can take their computer away with them.”

Wow. Already kids tend to be given cheap, underpowered equipment “suitable for students”, as if their research and assignment-preparation was somehow less demanding, their time of less value. I’d be amazed if the laptops actually survive all four years in a kid’s backpack. But if they do, by then they’ll be a year past end of life and way behind current standards.

This isn’t a generous offer, it’s a government either too lazy to collect and recycle the old computers, or too clueless to realise how fast computing changes.

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Bangkok, 7 October 2008. A Jeep explodes near parliament, killing a man. Body parts are thrown up to 20 metres.

Meanwhile, 5,000 members of the royalist People’s Alliance for Democracy are occupying the Government building grounds — well-organised but largely peaceful. Thailand’s Constitutional Court forced Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej to resign a month earlier, but his successor Somchai Wongsawat is seen as a corrupt puppet. PAD has given him until 6pm to resign. He does not. The car bomb detonates. The ultimatum expires. The demonstration explodes into riot.

Tear gas. Gunfire. 381 injured. Another death. It’s the worst violence in 16 years.

Meanwhile, in Sydney, my ex-pat Thai partner and I are sinking beers. We take our laptops online but not even Thai news outlets say what’s happening now.

Then, using Twitter, we find @smartbrain.

Twitter is a global social message service. Often inane — the world’s weirdest cocktail party — it’s also powerfully immediate. During the Sichuan earthquake it spread news half an hour before the wires.

As tanks roll into the Old City, @smartbrain hops on his bike, just as he’s done throughout the PAD occupation. In 140 characters or less, he reports to his Twitter “followers”.

6.30pm: more army trucks. People are cheering them. I hope they are on our side.
6.31pm: old guy here says it’s not teargas. It’s m79 explosives. Whatever that is.
6.32pm: people being ferried out of rajawiti shout that it’s explosives, not teargas.
6.35pm: screams from the zoo. Monkeys don’t like teargas either.
…
6.45pm: three more trucks with army troops. Can someone please tell me whose side they’re on?
6.51pm: six shots. Wonder where. Shooting at makkawan now? Seven shots.
6.52pm: huge convoy of army trucks.
6.52pm: eleven.
6.53pm: police moving on makkawan. Over a dozen shots now.
…
6.53pm: one shot every few seconds now.
…
7.15pm: three more army trucks. People are cheering them. Still no confirmation who’s side they are on.
7.16pm: army is headed to government house. Either to help or to do a pincer movement with the police.
7.17pm: ok. Army is helping to kill us, the shop vendor beside me says.
7.17pm: confirmed by survivors running from royal plaza. The army is not here to help.
7.18pm: confusion reigns. Vendor beside me is hurling abuse at the soldiers.
7.20pm: i think there are two groups of army here. Those in blue scarves are smiling. Not many though.
…
7.35pm: at royal plaza. Teargas everywhere.
…
7.41pm: is being gassed twice in one day enough? One more round i guess.

He also snaps pictures on his Nokia N95. They’re online in minutes. It’s fast, engaging, and distributed at almost no cost.

We don’t need journalists to tell us “there’s teargas” or “Gordon Brown announced tax cuts” — @smartbrain and @DowningStreet tell us. But we’ll always need journalists to uncover what’s not being said, to interpret, to analyse.

Journalists’ challenge is to create new ways of storytelling. Maybe live Twitter streams will be one of them. Maybe not. But with inexpensive tools and easy distribution, journalism is being liberated from the creaking mechanisms of industrial-age media factories and entering a new golden age.

Further Thoughts

Preparing this essay for republishing online reminded me how the medium frames the message. It was allocated half a page in a printed report, so it was edited not for the needs of the storytelling but according to how many splotches of ink would fit onto a slice of dead tree.

Now I’m not unhappy with the editing. Indeed, I was reminded how a good sub-editor can help focus the words — and the storytelling was improved by leaving out some of the details of Thai politics. However it did mean some of @smartbrain’s tweets disappeared, and I wanted them to stay for this version.

6.52pm: eleven.

… is astounding. One word. By itself it means nothing. In the context of the live Twitterstream, though, counting the gunshots eloquently portrayed the escalation of violence.

7.41pm: is being gassed twice in one day enough? One more round i guess.

… is an example of how this live Twitter coverage ain’t your traditional “objective” journalism. @smartbrain is telling us he’s heading back into the action. A witty remark like this would be frowned upon by any traditional news editor, but it’s engaging — and if we’re engaged by the writer we’ll read what he or she has to say. Isn’t that the aim of the media?

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I’m surprised. I thought that given Senator Conroy’s three-in-a-row victory as “Cnut of the week”, this week’s winner would be Clive Hamilton for his irrational rant in favour of Internet censorship in Crikey yesterday. But no.

Hamilton is certainly Cnutworthy, trying to hold back two strong tides of change: the change of the Internet, which will deliver whatever people want to send down its pipes, whether you try to block it or not; and the tide of rationality which increasingly renders shrill fear-mongering and name-calling irrelevant. But no.

The winner was Qantas for continuing to resist a tide of public opinion which clearly shows their reputation slipping thanks to unreliable service — which appears in turn to be the result of cuts to maintenance processes.

Last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live is online for your viewing pleasure, though it’s not the same without the live chat.

But Clive Hamilton… Two hints, Clive.

First, in a hyperconnected world, we can see that your depiction of the opponents of censorship is a lie, because we can just look up their words directly. We can see that you’re continuing this crap about “They want to flood the world with dirty, dirty pornography”, Conroy’s grubby name-calling tactic. No, Clive. The arguments are really about ISP-level “filtering” being a total waste of money because it’s easy to circumvent and detrimental because it degrades Internet performance and blocks legitimate material.

Second, just wanting something doesn’t make it possible — or even desirable when you think through the ramifications. Even if we take at face value the assertion that “93% of parents of teenagers… [support] automatic filtering of internet porn” — and I must admit I’m sceptical of that figure because Newspoll has form — that doesn’t mean it can actually be done. Unlike fear-filled parents, Internet technology’s behaviour can’t be changed by telling it scary stories about “Net videos of a woman having sex with animals” or “Watching someone being raped”.

You can assert all you like that…

Independent expert opinion appears to be that filters can sharply reduce the availability of material deemed offensive or unsafe at the cost of a small degree of degradation of the system…

… but it isn’t true.

We’ve linked to the actual report before. We’ve read past the government-pleasing Executive Summary and looked at the actual numbers. We’ve seen that deceptive people have cherry-picked the numbers, always using the best of the best score for effectiveness and the best-of-the-best score for speed degradation when they were for two different filters. We’ve read how none of the filters can deal with peer-to-peer traffic. We know from network engineers that just encrypting the traffic and sending it through anonymous proxy servers defeats central filters.

This. Has. All. Been. Done. Before. And. Wishing. Really. Really. Hard. Will. Not. Change. It.

What’s truly appalling about Hamilton’s rant is that the man trained as a mathematician. He should be well aware that computers do not respond to rhetoric. He should have more respect for numeracy, and respond to the numerically and technically literate arguments which point out that ISP-level Internet filtering simply will not achieve the aim of “protecting the children”.

This. Has. All. Been. Done. Before. And. Wishing. Really. Really. Hard. Will. Not. Change. It.

We have dismantled your lies before, yet you keep repeating your lies. Why is this?

A quick visit to Clive Hamilton’s website reveals that immorality is his current bête noire.

[T]he paradox of modern consumer life is that we are deprived of our inner freedom by our very pursuit of our own desires. [Hamilton] turns to metaphysics to find a source of transformation that lies beyond the cultural, political and social philosophies that form the bedrock of contemporary western thought.

His search takes him to an unexpected conclusion: that we cannot be truly free unless we commit ourselves to a moral life. The implications of this conclusion are profound, and they challenge many deeply held beliefs in modern secular society.

Now a man may certainly choose a moral path. Morals can be debated, though, and morals change and have changed over time. Merely claiming that one has morals doesn’t give one the right to slur others.

“Logic without moral clarity is no logic at all,” says Hamilton. Alas, Dr Hamilton, you are wrong. They are two different axes of measurement. More to the point, Logic without logic is no logic at all.

Hamilton, like Conroy, has slurred those criticising the government’s poorly-thought-out and technically useless plan to “filter” the Internet. Hamilton has, like Conroy, simply avoided addressing the coherent arguments being put forward and has instead resorted to name-calling, fear-mongering and outright lies.

Hamilton may think he’s taking the moral path, but he’s wrong. He’s behaving unethically. He’s being a hypocrite. In my view that’s truly filthy.

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[This article was first published in Crikey on Thursday, along with the superb Conroy a fearless combatant in the war against free speech by their Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane. I've added a few extra links and changed it from Crikey's typographical rules to my own.]

As any farmer can tell you, fencing is bloody dangerous. The stretch-wire-between-posts thing, I mean, not the pointy-steel-pokey thing. One mistake and it’s THWACKKKK! Ten metres of barbed wire whipping into your face.

Senator Stephen Conroy is discovering the hard way that trying to build a Rabbit-Proof Firewall around the Internet is just as dangerous. As Bernard Keane points out in Crikey [Thursday], the standard politicians’ tactic — lying — doesn’t cut it in today’s hyperconnected world.

But even this morning, on ABC Radio National’s The Media Report, Conroy was still claiming it’s only about illegal content.

“There is illegal material on the Net, things like child pornography, things like ultra-violent sites,” intoned Senator Conroy. “What we’re seeking to do is take technology and actually enforce the existing law… We’re seeking to use new and emerging advances to block access to sites like that.”

“Let me be clear,” he continued. “We are committed to work with the industry to see if it is technical feasible — that’s why we have conduced a laboratory test and we’re moving to conduct a live test with ISPs, and that’s Labor’s policies.”

Thing is, we can all download the results of that lab test Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filters and read for ourselves, on page 2, that the tests covered “technology to filter illegal or inappropriate content”, and on page 21 how the test sites included those rated PG, M, MA… Despite Conroy’s repeated assertion, the tests explicitly included perfectly legal material.

Why conduct tests of something you don’t intend to implement? A waste of taxpayers’ money, surely?

Why continue with a “live” test when the lab test demonstrated such poor performance?

As Crikey has reported (Tuesday, 9 July 2008, Internet filters a success, if success = failure) [local copy], even the best filter has a false-positive rate of 3% under ideal lab conditions. That might not sound much, but Mark Newton (the network engineer who Conroy’s office tried to bully last week) reckons that for a medium-sized ISP that’s 3000 incorrect blocks every second. Another maths-heavy analysis says that every time that filter blocks something there’s an 80% chance it was wrong.

Senator Conroy was back-pedalling this morning:

A whole range of people have said, ‘Hey, let’s expand this!’ That’s a debate that we will come to. We are no further than establishing at the moment whether it is technically feasible. In terms of what some of the Senators claim should be included on the blacklist, I’m sure that when we get to the debate down the track, if it proves to be technically feasible, there’ll be a whole range of people with a whole range of demands about what should be on the blacklist. But what we’ve committed to do is practically implement what’’s on the blacklist at the moment.

Conroy justifies continuing the trials by saying Labor “made this commitment back when Kim Beazley was leader of the Labor Party.” True, they did. They also committed to a Coast Guard and a Department of Homeland Security — both well and truly dropped.

Whatever Conroy says, this is arse-about policy-making. Surely the sensible way to proceed would be to decide what Australians should and shouldn’t see on the internet, express that in a coherent policy, and then ask the technologists and educators how to achieve that aim.

[Added 1 November: Assuming, that is, that you actually have a legally-valid mandate to construct a comprehensive, centralised, secretive, unaccountable Internet censorship machine.]

Mark Newton was spot on when he said:

Politicians assume that parents are ignorant about the Internet because politicians are ignorant. Yet parents came to grips with it years ago; the last remaining social group in our country who expresses difficulty with the Internet appears to be baby-boomer Federal politicians, whose child-rearing days are mostly well behind them.

Well, the Government is now getting a crash course in hyperpolitics. Those online are better connected, smarter, and faster. We can spot the lies.

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The journey home was enlivened with an interesting experiment. Instead of me broadcasting Stilgherrian Live — bright TV lights in a moving car at night would be a plan full of FAIL — we created an inside-out radio station. Some of my followers on Twitter took up the offer to send us links to music — which we streamed live from YouTube. The audience chose the music and we listened to it.

This experiment in crowdsourcing a playlist was remarkably successful. I’ll publish the music later. But even more remarkable was the power of the hyperconnectivity. Even though we were driving through rural New South Wales, we were still in touch with our friends — wherever they were too — doing the usual things we do of an evening, like swap links and tell each other bad jokes.

I’ll have much more to say about this soon. But for now I must rest.

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• Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
• Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
• The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

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