They build robot hands, you see? That’s why I said “On the other hand”!

Truly my time is wasted on you, the reader.

• This computer is really ancient and has been through several disaster zones. As a result it hates me.
• I’ve had a really terrible couple of weeks, so it makes sense that it would choose now to strike at me.
• I know people, see? People who know things. People who know things about computers.

I try to avoid going online at the weekends, but on Saturday I tried to open my email. I use Thunderbird, which is usually very reliable, but to my surprise ALL MY MESSAGES HAD DIED AND GONE TO EMAIL HEAVEN. I mean all of them - every last message. Gone. Needless to say, emotions raced across my face: shock, anger, disgust, hunger (I missed breakfast) and finally resignation.

This morning I came back to my computer and found that my email had not magically re-appeared.¹ It was time to take action, which consisted of whining to my friends until somebody offered to help. Sure enough, Tom L. introduced me to Guru Stefano, who fixed things in about 40 minutes over Skype. In the interests of servicing the web, I explain everything here. Skip to the end if you find this sort of thing really dull - I’ve included a nice epigram to finish off the post.

Usually when this happens, you should look in the Application Data folder on your C: drive > Documents and Settings > YourUserName. This folder is normally hidden, so once you reach the YourUserName folder, select Tools > Options > View > Show Hidden Files and Folders from the menu bar. Inside the Application Data folder, you’ll find a Thunderbird folder - which is where all your emails are stored.

Except in this case when I looked in the Thunderbird folder I found not one but two “Local Folders” - the first called “Local Folders” and the second called “Local Folders-1″. The latter was the one that Thunderbird was trying to access, but it was as empty as my cupboard (the latter being the reason why I hadn’t had breakfast). I hadn’t installed, re-installed, deleted or updated Thunderbird, any other software or any profiles in the recent past, so why this had happened, I have no idea.

What had happened was that Thunderbird had “forgotten” about “Local Folders”, and had created an alternative “Local Folders-1″. This may have happened when the power was cut to the computer the previous day, but it appears that my hard drive has a surface error which may have contributed. I closed Tbird, and backed up “Local Folders” onto a separate hard drive (using the mighty mighty Robocopy) - this was when we realised that I had a surface error, as one of the files could not be copied. I then renamed “Local Folders-1″ to “Local Folders-1.OLD.TBD” and renamed “Local Folders” to “Local Folders-1″. I then restarted Tbird, which was fooled by the renaming and took the path to “Local Folders-1″.

All my folders have now been restored - and I can breathe a sigh of relief! However there is clearly a problem with my hard drive so I will be doing the following:

• Manually copying all messages into new folders.
• Making sure everything is backed up on a separate hard drive.
• Running Mozbackup more frequently.
• Getting a new laptop…

Wow. That was a really boring blog post, wasn’t it? Of course it’ll probably end up being the most-visited post on this blog, since trouble-shooting blog posts always seem to do well. My misery is the source of your pleasure; my ignorance the source of your knowledge. The story is told ((You might be wondering why the title of the post is “via Kosova” - it’s because Tom, Stefano and myself all worked there around the same time), the epigram is delivered and now I must rest.

1. This is my usual approach to problems - go away for a few days and see if it all works out. You’d be surprised how frequently this is effective.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.¹

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

Yeah, just imagine! Actually reading about how development works² would reveal that what they’re describing is one of Doctorow’s barely-readable novels rather than the real world. The model of sending out experts to tell the ignorant masses how to do things right (which the ignorant masses welcome with open arms, if they know what’s good for them, etc, etc) has been almost completely discredited as a vehicle for meaningful development since the early 1990s, making it deeply ironic that they would project their their self-aggrandising futurism onto such a retrograde screen.

1. This is a really uninspired, inaccurate and embarrassing title.
2. They could start with Duncan Green’s excellent From Poverty to Power, which is as good an overview of mainstream development thinking as you’ll find.

Ah, those were the days, when I would hang out with Rockwell and shoot cans off the top of Germaine’s afro. Everything’s different now, of course - Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Panopticon:

Conceived of as a theory of social control by the 20th century’s Michel Foucault, the Panopticon was originally the design of the 19th century’s Jeremy Bentham for a prison in which all the inmates would force themselves to behave because they would assume that every moment and act was being observed. Foucault argued that state programs to monitor and record our comings and goings create imaginary cages that limit what citizens do out of fear of being observed by those in power…

So far, so non-significant - the Panopticon is regularly trotted out in discussions about law and order, civil liberties, surveillance and so forth. Yet Vaidhyanathan questions whether the concept has any explanatory power:

… people tend to act out and get weird regardless of the number of cameras pointed at them. There are thousands of surveillance cameras in London and New York, yet those cities do not lack for the eccentric and avant-garde. Long before closed-circuit cameras, cities were places to be seen, not to be not seen… There is no empirical reason to believe that awareness of surveillance limits the imagination or cows the creative in a market economy under a nontotalitarian state.

This is where your doubts start to grab the sides of the kayak and start rocking, because I’m not sure that either Bentham or Foucault were worried that the Panopticon might prevent maverick art installations. The genius of the Panopticon is that it disposes of the need for the obvious trappings of totalitarianism - you didn’t need to keep an eye on people all the time when they’re disposed to keeping an eye on themselves on your behalf, even when you’re not actually watching them. Vaidhyanathan gets back on track though:

Basically, the Panopticon must be visible and ubiquitous, or it cannot influence behavior as Bentham and Foucault assumed it would.

But wait! We hear news (in our kayak) of the complete failure of the Panopticon from the UK, where Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard tells the world:

CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.

So even when the Panopticon is visible and ubiquitous, nobody cares. How’s that for rad irony? Foucault was wrong; he was also French, and now he’s dead; three strikes against his credibility. Vaidhyanathan now plumps for the Nonopticon (or latterly, Cryptopticon):

The Nonopticon describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. The most pervasive surveillance does not reveal itself or remains completely clandestine (barring leaks to The New York Times). We don’t know all the ways we are being recorded or profiled. We are not supposed to understand that we are the product of marketers as much as we are the market. And we are not supposed to consider the extent to which the state tracks our behavior and considers us all suspects in crimes yet to be imagined, let alone committed.

It’s none of those things - it’s just that we don’t care. All of this information is accessible, it’s just that most people can’t be bothered to track it, and the reason for that is twofold.

1. We don’t care that we’re the product of marketers because the marketers sell us shiny things which help us get our buzz on. The invisibility of this is partly what appeals to us, because it helps to maintain the illusion that we’re choosing our purchases and pleasures freely. Our illusion of control is more appealing than control itself.
2. We don’t care about the state considering us all suspects because our particular state has repeatedly shown itself unable to organise the Olympics a piss-up in a brewery. When you hear about human rights abuses attributed to surveillance technology, it always turns out that somebody somewhere dropped the ball and got embarrassed.

Of course all that changes if our state started to turn into that other type of state - you know, like the one I saw in that film about leftwing bedroom DJs - but in that film, the surveillance was ubiquitous and invisible, and the mixing was crap. Remember what I wrote earlier about the genius of the totalitarian? The real power of the panopticon lies precisely in its invisibility - you know that somebody might be looking but you have no idea if they are. The surveillance state that you see in The Lives of Others shows this perfectly - you don’t know if they’re watching or listening, or even who they are.

With a jarring shift in tone, Vaidhyanathan ends on a rousing chorus:

We must demand to know the terms of surveillance by our state and its partners in the private sector. We must be allowed to be agents in the construction of our reputations. We must insist on fairness, openness, and accountability in those institutions that commit such widespread surveillance. Otherwise we will cease being citizens. We will be subjects, mere fodder for our watchers, means instead of ends.

That’s all very inspiring, and of course I agree, but it misses one key point. Following the information revolution, we cease being citizens and become data points, the inevitable outcome of the layer of technology that’s being added to our societies and our lives. Bentham and then Foucault were absolutely right about how the Panopticon fitted their respective times, and the Panopticon is still with us.

In fact, the Panopticon is us.

(HT: Eric Rauchway at Crooked Timber.)

There’s a pessimistic view of human behavior embedded in library construction and the watchfulness of the sentries who guard them: if we, the public, could get at the books, we would most certainly destroy them.

There was the expectation that the barriers would be torn down with the coming of electronic libraries, that once the book’s spirit left its object, it would likewise escape its economic shackles. Certainly it makes sense: an electronic text isn’t degraded by copying in the same way that every reading is an infinitesimal destruction of a physical book.

Is this “infinitesimal destruction” - the sense that an artifact being degraded by those who value it the most - embedded in the nature of a book? I find electronic books ghostly and unsatisfying; the Kindle is a ouija board for the stillborn soul of a book, a mausoleum rather than a library. Is it wrong to want the world to collapse slowly around me while I collapse back into it?

Facebook claims to be “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”, but it doesn’t feel much like that to me, and Tom Hodgkinson smacked that claim down in his Guardian comment last week, With Friends Like These. Hodgkinson is a grumpy bastard Luddite - the column starts with the words “I despise Facebook” and gets more vitriolic from there - but he nails some of the deep and unpleasant realities behind Facebook’s founders and language:

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands.

Nobody has enunciated my concerns as well as Giant Robot, a Finnish electro group (and awesome Finnish group, by the way), in their track “Public=Shopping”. Now this track is about the commodification of urban life, but it resonates quite heavily with Facebook:

Public = Shopping
(Internet to make you shop)

Office = Desktop
(Internet to make you work)

Home = Bed and TV
(Internet to make you sleep)

Encourage to consume
Encourage to produce

We know what Facebook is (social utility, blah blah blah), but what is Facebook about? The simple truth is this: Facebook is about other people making money from your friendships. That’s not something I want - how about you?