Oblomovka

2009-06-08»

Actually, making people laugh is far less humiliating than having most people laugh at you, which has been the primary result of me coming out as a libertarian a few months ago. I could not have timed it better: while most of my friends (and me!) have been taking the piss out of libertarians for years, the recent downturn and the general narrative of What Went Wrong means that now that libertarians are about as popular as Marxists were in 1989. It doesn’t help that in the meltdown of the post-Bush Republican party, some of the remnants have seized upon sweet little shards of libertarian rhetoric as something to bind onto their crazy-cat-religion, conspiracy theories, and Obama Derangement Syndrome to make a comforting nest of denial.

My comfort during this time of tribulation has been Brian Doherty’s hilarious, moving, and, yes, often creepy Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, a broad look at the fall and rise of libertarianism in the United States (uh, and Austria, I guess) from the point of view of someone who adopted it almost literally for its punk rock value. Brian’s majestic and incredibly completist survey  covers everything from the mirror-Marxist machinations of Murray Rothbard, to the sex life of Ayn Rand, to my favorite libertarian of all, Andrew Galambos.

Galambos believed that not only was intellectual property identical to other forms of property (and thus inviolate in the libertarian tradition), so were individual ideas. He allegedly used to put a coin in a jar for the descendants of Tom Paine every time he used the word “liberty”, so that they could be refunded for his use of Paine’s term. Much more concretely, he required everyone who listened to his lectures to sign an NDA, agreeing not to reveal any of his “property” without first negotiating with him for their personal right to spread his ideas.

I have meant to use Galambosianism as an example of the dangers of too much IP protectionism for several years, but sadly his defence of his property was so complete that his ideas are utterly obscure and his name so unremembered that it’s been hard to be able to find anything to cite. Brian Doherty is to be commended for bringing his name back into currency, albeit by actively breaking the very principles Galambos espoused.

Anyway, Doherty made me realise that my take on libertarianism isn’t so far away from the mainstream of the tradition. I always assumed the anarchists were on the even-wackier side of the fence, whereas Doherty brings them center-forward, and argues that it was only in the 1970s that so-called libertarians even considered consorted with Their Enemy, The State. Before that, the libertarians were making the same kind of arguments that any other anarchist group worth their druthers was making: that this State business was a mistake from the start, and needed to wither away as soon as was logistically possible.

I like this position as a political stance to take, because I’ve always been emotionally close to anarchism as a theory, and rather comforted by its lack of any practical consequence. The closer libertarians get to being included in any government, the less I like them. I’m not a libertarian because I think they should in charge. I’m a libertarian because I don’t think anyone can be trusted with that much responsibility. I’d rather busy myself trying to think up institutions, tools, and cultural capital that can be created to prevent that from ever happening.

Actually, that’s close to a lie. The reason I’m a libertarian is an accident of timing, and of influences. Here’s an interesting (US) fact: Generation Xers, like myself, are more loyal to the Republican party than Boomers or Gen-Yers. I can imagine why that despicable fact is true. I grew up when the Left was indulging in a severe self-detonation, and laissez-faire ideas were briefly fashionably new and exciting. I read what I now realise were proto-libertarian tracts under the bed (I also read some awesome Marxist propaganda, but it didn’t really catch). In fact, I fall precisely into a distinct category in Brian Doherty’s taxonomy of libertarians, which he describes here:

[Robert Anton] Wilson’s libertarianism represents a unique strain within the modern movement, a libertarian house in which there are many more mansions than there were in the 1940s to 1970s. Libertarian scholar Chris Sciabarra believes libertarianism needs to become a more “dialectical” philosophy, subsuming more about human life and culture than just politics. He should appreciate the Wilsonian style of having libertrian values inform not just politics but a vision of a life entire. Wilson edited the School of Living’s journal, which had been called Balanced Living and which he renamed A Way Out — a way out of a way of life, state, church and culture that seemed a trap. He scandalized the more puritan among their vegetarian clean living readers in the early 1960s with articles celebrating Wilhelm Reich, sexual liberty, and Ezra Poun, and running poems by Norman Mailer.

Hippies. Anyway, this sounds much more like the scion I’m attached to, although it’s always sort of depressing to discover that your entire outlook is still determined by books you read when you were fifteen. I shall never laugh at geeks quoting The Moon is A Harsh Mistress again.

It also means that I think it perfectly understandable that a generation younger than me (and it’s amazing how many of my Gen-Xers are in denial that there could possibly be such a thing) is less enamored with the L-word. I think I came out as libertarian out of a desperate desire to become more radical as I grew older, rather than just settle into some genial liberal senility. As it is, I’m just playing exactly to type. There’s probably other more exciting philosophies than my warmed-up P.J. O’Rourkism right now. I’m not so old that I’m not fascinated to know what they are. Any ideas?

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2009-06-05»

When do you stop being a reader online, and start being a participant? This would seem to be an important question, especially among those who insist that the exact ratios between consumers and creators should determine how significant the result is. That is, if most “user-generated” content on the Net is made up of a tiny percentage of the overall audience, should we care about it less? Me, I don’t think so, but for arguments that get bogged down in exactly how “democratic” the Internet is, it does seem to be critical.

What I do think is that the very fact that the line is blurred is in itself significant. Let me contrast it with my experience growing up in the Seventies and Eighties. I didn’t go to arty clubs in London; I didn’t make my own teen fanzine. I didn’t even send off for any fanzines. What I did was buy Time Out, and FactSheet Five, and read the reviews. Obsessively. I loved it. I don’t know why I rarely watched the films I read about, or buy the thousands of zines that Mike Gunderloy (pboh) obsessively reviewed each issue. It just seemed a step too far, somehow. I was perhaps a little scared that the reality wouldn’t live up to the dream. But I’m sure there were thousands, hundreds of thousands like me. People read books, never knowing there are whole communities of book-readers who create conventions and have conversations about those books, writing fan fiction and holding long correspondences with the author. It’s not that they can’t imagine it, but it’s that there’s a natural stopping point. You’d have to be crazy to finish the latest Neil Gaiman book, and then think you could write him a letter.

When I went online for the first time, that distinction blurred for the first time. I’d read my heroes posting items, and then I’d reply (just really because the keyboard was there, and the bulletin board prompt gave you that option), and my heroes would write back. I’d be involved. It was barely a transition. It’s the same frisson people get when celebrities call them out on Twitter. Actually, they don’t even have to be acknowledged; just the figment of a conversation is more than you’d expect reading a book or watching a film.

This may be obvious, or even hard to imagine a world without that lack of transition if you’ve grown up with the Net. Talking to Debbie today, she described how Sears Catalogues were called “wishbooks” in the early West, and we talked about how FactSheet Five was a wishbook, too. It broadened your mind: but it only occurred to the most ambitious (or deluded) that you could actually pursue those wishes, or that they represented anywhere that was truly accessible: just viewable. I think old media taught us to observe the spectacle, but assume it took place somewhere else, somewhere remote.

It takes a while, even online, to notice this is possible: that such-and-such may have a blog, and might read the comments, and might reply. But it’s not quite the same leap, especially as you quickly find yourself in a community of others making those leaps just like you. It’s not how many create; it’s how easy the jump from watcher to do-er is. The two are connected: the easier the transition, the more creators there are. But the transitions the thing. Not everybody wants to be a creator; but everybody who wants to create should at least know that that is an option.

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2009-06-04»

A couple of months back when I decided to go and see some live comedy in the city. I mostly avoid watching stand-up, because I’ve picked up the habit from real comedians of sitting at the back, nodding and saying “Okay, that’s funny”, instead of actually laughing. Also, after a decade or so of orbiting comedy, I was pretty burnt out on watching it. The last time I’d seen any stand up in the US was in 2002 or so, and it wasn’t that appealing. Racist jokes about Mexicans and other people who don’t go to comedy clubs, extended Seinfeldisms, and witty self-deprecation from guys who were hovering dangerously close to public self-loathing didn’t seem that interesting.

The show I went to in April was interesting, though. Even the new acts were clearly very polished, and the established acts were clearly going in interesting directions. Nobody made bad mistakes, and some of them were making deliberately great “mistakes” — trying out new directions that most circuit stand-ups just don’t dare do. The mood of the show was very upbeat and friendly, and the comedians obviously liked each other and hung out socially. I went away thinking “there’s something going on here”, and spent the night clicking around the web to find out what it was.

Here’s what I patched together. In 2000, San Francisco got a comedy college, started up by old hand Kurtis Matthews. Matthews had been doing comedy from 1984 onwards, starting in L.A. and rising up with Bill Hicks, Jon Lovitz and others. In the late Nineties, he burned out on the dream and instead pursued his (by then) elaborate fantasy of actually getting a proper office job and not having to live out of Travelodges, Denny’s and unfriendly bars. But still the back-monkey wouldn’t exit: he still wanted to be involved in comedy, just not as one of its many frazzled front-line infantry in the sweatshop comedy club chains of America. So he started teaching comedy in his home town: taking all those people who wanted to do stand-up the way some people want to sky-dive — not necessarily as a career, but as a primal fear to overcome — as well as semi-professionals who wanted some honest feedback and advice from people who weren’t, at that moment, drunk and waiting for buffalo wings.

My stand-up career began and ended on a Summer night in Edinburgh in 1990. I’d finished college. My parents had just separated, so I didn’t really have a home to come back to. I’d rolled up to the Fringe without any shows to be in, because one of my friends had called me and told me that my best friend had broken up with his practically-wife, and was now sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. Oh, and they were all trying to run shows and sleep in the same room, as you do when you go to Edinburgh for the Fringe. I think I was there on a combination-mission of suicide-watch and youthful rubber-necking.

I also desperately needed to know what to do with my life. My college friends, Ben Moor and Al Murray, were both setting off to London to be famous. Others, like Stewart Lee and Rich Herring, were already there, grinding through the circuit. Armando Ianucci was I think doing some weird thing on Scottish radio, but there were rumours he was heading down south too. We all knew Armando was brilliant. We all wanted to be there when he hit. Meanwhile, my father, alone and worried that I was become attracted to a duther education course in Advanced Bohemian and Defaulted Student Loans, had put in an application in my name for a job at a computer magazine called .EXE. They were asking for 1000 words and an example of my coding style.

I hung around Edinburgh, without a show. I stood in as compere for a lunch show we did called the £1.99 cabaret, masterminded I think by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley. Eventually I plucked up enough courage to do a real open mic, outside the protection of an audience half-made up of my friends. I’d seen Stew and Rich do it; it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

I don’t remember much. I remember we all had 30 seconds or so before we were gonged off. I remember a Scottish lady actually standing on a table and screaming at me “You’re shite!” for most of my half-minute. I remember running into Simon Munnery, but I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I wandered around Edinburgh’s yeasty night for hours.

At the end of the night, I decided, grandiosely, that I had two options as a life goal. Either I could do stand-up, or I could try and devote my life to writing a computer program that would make people cry (with happiness or sadness, I didn’t care). I plumped for the latter. No-one I explained it to understood what I meant at the time, because this was before Myst or Doom or the Internet. A few weeks later, I went for the interview at .EXE. They asked me who my favourite comedians were. They hadn’t heard of them, because all my comedy heroes were 23 years old or younger. I was 21.

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2009-06-03»

So it was being stuck without wifi in the Library of Congress the other week that finally made me decide to overwrite the T-Mobile firmware on my Android G1 with something with root access. I was talking with the US Copyright and Patent offices about how to improve access to copyrighted material for the reading disabled (in the hopes, partially, to encourage them to support the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at WIPO the following week).

I know some people frown on net access at such affairs, but as Cory once noted, if you think people are distracted when they have net at meetings, you should see how distracted they get when they don’t have net.  A bunch of us were scrabbling to get information in and out of the public meeting in advance of the transcript becoming available. So, for instance, I recorded my comments onto my phone, and then mailed them out to the rest of the EFF international staff to hear as they were already preparing to fly to Geneva.

The same thing happened, only more fervently at WIPO, with Jamie Love and other attendees  frantically twittering out to the wider world about the imminent attempts to kill the treaty, and thus getting the visible external support they needed to put pressure on countries to keep the Treaty alive (thanks to everyone who contacted their governments, by the way).

All of this networked analysis and activism gets much harder when you don’t have laptop connectivity. Because my G1 phone wasn’t rooted (and T-Mobile forbids tethering apps in Google’s Android app Market), I couldn’t link my computer to my phone’s 3G network. And I wasn’t quite ready to multi-task listening to my fellow panellists and attempting to re-flash firmware at the same time.

I’m glad I waited. It turns out that these days, it’s relatively easy to drop in a version of Android that gives you power over your own device. These instructions on how to root your G1 take you through the tortuous (but by now pretty foolproof) procedure.

In the end, I chose to install JesusFreke’s distribution of the Android OS, which now has a great little utility to manage who gets root on your phone (each application’s request is intercepted, and you, as user, get to allow or deny it). This tethering application is incredibly easy-to-use, and lets you share your 3G connection via wifi or bluetooth (I haven’t tried the bluetooth). You can WEP encrypt the wifi connection, or allow access to only selected users.

Of course, next time I go to the LoC, I’ll be sure to keep the wifi node open. I wouldn’t want the MPAA guys doing without!

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2009-06-02»

Brief summary: Having a great deal of fun.

I am currently trying to break my brain by simultaneously book-kegging Austrian economics and feminist science fiction (as well as the conventions thereof). I am truly enjoying the mental thrashing I endure as I flick from glorious syndicalist manifestos to fierce denunciations of unionism, optimistically chatting with Seasteaders while sceptically surveying current libertarian paradises. I’ve been reading up on Dale Spender and William F. Buckley, Murray Rothbard and Murray Bookchin. I’ve gone politically non-linear. It’s akin to snorting magical policy pixie dust off Ken Macleod‘s bare back. I hope to have some screwed-up ideas of my own, very soon.

I also have a s3krit pr0ject, which I am currently bad at, but getting better. You shall not hear of it until I fail to suck. I also have a not-so-secret work project, which I hope to introduce to you soon, if only as I angst through to its final production. But most importantly, I have agreed to conduct an internal psychological experiment (n=1) that will involve far more blogging. Hooray! Onward! Outward! Excelsior!

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2009-04-28»

You go away from the Internet for a couple of days, and all hell breaks loose. Everyone dies of swine flu, and then the Rails community goes into one of those fantastic explodey nosedives where all the geek social fallacies come out to play (probably including the one that claims that all geek social fallacies are on that list).

Maggie Koerth-Baker, BoingBoing’s current guest blogger, gives the best answers to the whine flu epidemic.

And, completely belying the normal trainwrecks that occur in comment threads about sexism in the tech world, here’s the best encapsulation on the Presentation of Doom and the whole You’re Just Offended Because We’re Flipping Sexy Rockstars response, taken from the Slideshare comments:

It’s not about whether it’s porn or not porn. Those commenting on people’s supposed hypersensitivity to nudity or bodies are completely missing the point.

It’s about presenting women as ‘the other,’ not ‘us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins.

Can I just say that slowly, oh so nanometer-by-painful-nanometer slowly, we are perhaps getting better at dealing with both pandemics and parochialism?

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2009-03-24»

I gave up picking just one woman in tech who has inspired me over the years. I certainly knew that I couldn’t list them all. Here’s a roughly chronological list, which breaks down at the end when I realise that there could be no end.

I worked a Saturday job as a teenager at an IBM dealership when I was around thirteen. The first professional programmer I’d ever met worked there. She was incredibly smart and calm, and I remember being very impressed that you could actually make a living wage coding, instead of having to hide away in your bedroom hacking up ZX Spectrum platform games until somebody mystically gave you a Jaguar.

To save time, I will now skip a little arbitrarily (hello, Verity Stob!) across a few decades.

Out of my entire generation of Net-inspired London geeks in the Nineties, Pouneh Mortazavi was the only with enough initiative to do what everybody else dreamed of: she upped sticks to San Francisco alone. First she worked at Wired, holding together their databases; thereafter she started the Flaming Lotus Girls. She was always like some George Washington of a self-collected militia, marshalling and deploying technology and resources, cajolling and inspiring.

My ex-wife, Quinn Norton, has a aircraft-carrier full of skills and virtues, but if I had to pick a technological trait I admire most in her, it would be her ability to see its historical context, as well as extropolate it into the far future (and also her Perl coding style, which is the weirdest damn thing I ever did see).

Leslie Harpold simultaneously drove up the standards of web design, usability, and common human decency online. She’s still missed.

Annalee Newitz and I worked at EFF, and shared a career in writing 1000 word pieces on 1000 year topics, before she finally ran off to join the io9 intergalactic circus and exploration unit. She’s the embodiment to me of the one of the sublime joys of technology: jumping into the deep-end with just a laptop and a head filled with implications, and asking smart questions until you know as much as the expert will admit.

Cindy Cohn, legal director, and Shari Steele, executive director, of the EFF: I simply can’t list how much you owe those two people — but free crypto, and a censorship-free US Internet is probably a good start.

Suw Charman-Anderson, the creator of Ada Lovelace Day deserves a place on this list just for that, but she’s takes her place here because of her work binding technology and civil liberties together as the co-founder of the Open Rights Group.

I suspect Valerie Aurora will be on many people’s Ada Lovelace Day lists. A kernel hacker who can write, and whose writing can make me laugh out loud or smack my head in revelation.

Liz Henry wields technology as it should be: a fire to protect what’s right, and a blast of fresh air to winnow out what’s wrong. I’ve never seen any quite so able to pounce on new tech and bring it swiftly to bear on a societal problem, as well as explain its uses to those who might otherwise be bypassed by this revolution.

Becky Hogge was ORG’s second executive director, and another forger of ideas. Astoundingly good at herding other geeks, tech wonks, and MPs into spaces where they could all understand each other.

I get far too much attention for doing one single lousy talk about “life hacking”, whereas Gina Trapani deseves all of the credit for turning a dumb idea into a a brilliant, long-lived work of real usefulness — and for cranking out the code.

On the same note, butshesagirl‘s Getting Things Done application, Tracks, got me through some tough times. I admire anyone whose managed to keep an open source project on course, but I was particularly impressed by bsag’s skills. I watched and I hope learned.

And now no time to talk about the community chops of Cait Hurley, Rachel Chalmers’ piercing analysis, Rebecca Mackinnon’s work at connecting the world, Sara Winge’s genius at O’Reilly, Anno Mitchell’s sardonic Web 2.0 charisma, Strata Chalup’s sysadmin and southbay knowledge, Kass Schmitt sailor and LISPer, Silona Bonewald’s politech savvy, Sumana Harihareswara’s geek-management hybridism, Ana Marie Cox’s snark, Cherie Matrix’s cultural vortex, Elly Millican’s web aesthetic, Wendy Grossman’s sceptical optimism, Desiree Miloshevic’s globe-trotting ICANNoclasm, the piercing tech analysis of Susan Crawford (now working at the Whitehouse!), Sarah Deutsch, Kim Plowright, Paula Le Dieu, Charlie Jane Anders, Violet Berlin, Biella Coleman, Alice Taylor, Sophie Wilson who designed my entire teenage life…

These people make the world my daughter, Ada, lives in. I’m honored she has such shoulders to climb.

This was posted as part of the Ada Lovelace Day project; if you’d like to read more, I enjoyed Liz and butshesagirl‘s entries, spent a long time thinking about this sad and all too typical story, and saved the story of En-hedu-Ana, mapper of the stars, for Ada’s next storytime:

The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,

She consults [employs] a tablet of lapis lazuli

She gives advice to all lands…

She measures off the heavens,

She places the measuring-cords on the earth.

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2009-02-21»

So my schedule these days — I have a schedule! Do you know what a change that is in my life? — anyway, my schedule these days generally involves collapsing asleep at 9PM and waking up, actually refreshed, at around 8PM. I have traded away several hours of my life in return for not feeling attached by a very taut piece of elastic to whatever is the closest bed, tugging tugging tugging me back.

I greatly enjoy feeling well-slept, but it does mean that my usual hours of blogging (and doing any other writing or wild-eyed crazy plotting) are now contemptibly small.

Like everyone, I am still working out how to make do with less.

Also like almost everyone, I stayed up very late on New Years Eve 1999/2000. I wasn’t wandering the streets, drunk like a skunk. I was inside Netscape Communication’s server management offices, munching on sushi, and watching techies desperately guarding against the chance that the Y2K bug would take down netscape.com and other important pieces of Internet infrastructure.

A few minutes before the clockover, I realised that all the clocks in the ops center were set to slightly different times (all the better to see which ones failed, I guess), and I would have no real idea of when midnight actually happened. I eventually got hold of an accurate time signal (I think I caled POPCORN, which is the US’s speaking clock). I was the only person in the cubicles who actually knew what the time really was.

In the seconds around midnight, different engineers would shout out to their colleagues that key services were still operational: “Web3 is okay!” “DNS3 is Okay”.

At the exact moment of 00:00AM, 2000 AD, I can reveal that, at Netscape, the primary concern was the fishcam. “Fishcam is … okay!” (Big cheer).

You’ll be pleased to know it’s okay again.

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2009-01-06»

Swear to god, I woke up this morning with the following words on my lips: “I am like unto avenging God!”

Forty-five minutes later the driver of the 14 bus let me and all the other passengers know that my flies were undone.

As part of her leaving announcement, Gina Trapani mentioned that she’d been doing lifehacker.com for four years. Shocked, I double-checked, and yes, Lifehacks.com, the domain I registered minutes after coming up with the talk title, was registered on around midnight on 2003-09-26.

Over five years! That is strange and disturbing to me. Super-super-super ironically, it’s probably been my least productive period yet. I’m okay with that, in the way that you can probably forgive Europe for dropping its GDP a little during that first, tricky, world war. In those five years, the world planed me a new surface or two, mostly against my grain. I have learnt valuable lessons, but have yet to find anything I can actually trade for them.

I’ve never been truly ambitious but I have been historically, shall we say,twitchy. These days I have been growing placid. I am amazed with the magic of making my own dishes of burgers, potatoes and peas, walking in parks, and having clean laundry. I frequently go to bed early. I have a big ole beard. Young people suspect me of harboring inner wisdom, though they do not know it is all about getting infinite lives in Chuckie Egg.

Of course, all of this fondness for zen calm and gentlemanly decay happens just when my local hemisphere decides to pinball between economic collapse, n-dimensional wars, or perhaps just a planetary extinction event. Yeah, I’m all sleepy, and Bruce Sterling, the world’s oldest smart-ass punk, is right there behind my back, setting off the firecrackers.

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2008-12-16»

I’ve moved up in the world, at least geographically. I now live on top of Bernal Heights, rather than skulking at the bottom of it. I am now sitting in a little corner studio that exactly fits my remaining belongings. I am going to stay up this hill for the rest of the recession, hoping that even the fittest of the Darwinian food-rioters won’t have the puff to get up here. This will only work after all the petrol runs out of course: currently they could just drive up and run me over when I go to get coffee, and drive off to feast on my bagel. I need to think this through.

I wish I could say the new place has bought me peace of mind. Actually, I totally could (it’s lovely), but I’m trying to make this post about the scare I gave myself this weekend, and I needed a segue.

So.

It was my own fault. I was reading a thread on Metafilter about the 1983 post-nuclear portrayal “The Day After”. Many people scoffed at the fear shown at this TV movie, directed Nicholas Meyer (later to direct deathless classic Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan). For really scary, they agreed, the British equivalent, 1984’s Threads would be hard to beat.

Now, I didn’t watch Threads at the time, I don’t think because it was banned in my house, but more because I was locked upstairs nailing my brain to a ZX Spectrum. Also I don’t think I needed to be scared any further on the topic of nuclear annihilation at the time: aged 15, I was probably already maxed-out on long semi auto-biographical poems about its grim inevitability. My quota would not have been raised.

Nowadays, I’m a man however, and have put childish things like nuclear winters behind me. I’m all about the global warming now. Also, it’s pretty hard to watch anything the BBC drama department put out in the eighties without giggling a bit at the forced moralising and the peculiar mannerisms (and *cue* radiophonic workshop!). So, in a sort of shared dare with my fifteen-year old self, I kicked up the show on Google Video, and fast-forwarded to what everyone agreed was the really creepiest bits, about ten minutes from the end.

Argh. I had completely forgotten how into your bones all-out nuclear war got. On a conscious level, I was critiquing the postnuclear horrorfest as hard as I could, but damn it mashed all my buttons. I was seeing the scenarios play out under my eyelids every time I tried to get to sleep for the next few days. It was very, very, well done.

Over my many hours spent awake, I started forming a protective defensive sheath of narrative criticism. In terms of the realism of postwar life, my first thought was it played to a theory of a studied helplessness of individuals without a society around to protect them. If they’re just left alone, without the threads that the play uses as its key metaphor, things will just fall apart.

Now, I don’t think that’s true: societies are far better at rebooting themselves than this, even I’d suspect under the enormous stresses of a nuclear winter. The first impression you get from these minutes, is that humanity has just descended into brute-hood completely. They’d either do better than this, or die a lot quicker. (At this point you’re going to go and watch the movie, right? If so, I am in no way responsible for your nightmares, and I certainly don’t want to hear about how hard you laughed at it. Spoilers ahead: a bomb goes off, etc).

But actually, looking closer at those final minutes, far closer than anyone should, there’s also an off-screen implication that there is some kind of postnuclear society. It’s just that the people we are watching, Ruth and her daughter, aren’t part of it. There are hospitals, and law and order, and education: but they are minimal, the resources are closely hoarded, and Ruth and her daughter aren’t part of that society.

That makes more sense, and also fits in with how I remember lots of British serious drama at the time. It concentrated on the horrific lives of the underclass or disenfranchised in some way, lingering over its horror, and then basically screamed at you at the end. Extra marks for implying that your nice middle-class family might end up that way, Tess of the D’Urbervilles style.

I’m not saying that is a bad thing. It’s one of the functions of drama to expose what happens to the worst off. But at least in recognising the trope I, possibly horribly, got a bit less scared by the scenario in this case. You can feel pity for the individual living in a medieval world, but then you can sneak out and imagine some King Henry VIII-type revelling in his single roast two-headed chicken.

Or maybe that increases your horror at the injustice. But, for me (who always tried to guess how long Ingsoc would actually last before collapsing), I’m more optimistic knowing somebody is better off offscreen. I guess, given the horrible choice, I’d rather somebody was left holding the canticles than the whole world be echoing the experience of Ruth’s daughter.

It’s also because I am radioactively burned by all of those dramas that take you down the line of depicting the nether regions of depressing experience. I think concern drama pretty much shot all its wad at us in the 70s and 80s, when lots and lots of horrible scenarios (mostly involving no money, disability, or drug abuse) played out in predictably horrific yet inevitable way.

Because you can’t actually end that particular fictional device with someone coming out of it okay, you end up turning your watchers into more voyeurs than activists, and also narratively reinforcing that everybody below a certain income level (or number of nuclear winters) is always helpless or thick. (Threads has the extra twist, because everyone in it was individually helpless to stop a nuclear war, and the implication is that everyone became even more thick as a result of society collapsing into Ibsen-like horror.)

I do not think this form of artistic agit-prop had the right effect. It lead, I think, to horrible right wing people deciding that topics of concern deserve what they get because they are helpless and thick, and horrible left wing people deciding that these people can be treated like children because they are helpless and thick. I clutch what threads I do of individual libertarianism, because the bits I like don’t actually assume those things, although I do think it is often over-optimistic about how useful local intelligence and ability can be in many situations. Frankly, after gnawing my knuckles over the premises and depiction of Threads twenty-five years later, I can do with all the over-optimism I can get.

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