I posted this thread on Twitter this morning, and I note all the irony in doing so:
The future of Twitter appears to be in doubt today. Advertisers have pulled out. Musk has slashed staff numbers. A nasty, right-wing dominated hate-fest may follow, although I hope not. But what if other critical media institutions went the same way? What then? A quick thread…
I have a passion for Twitter. I note I have sent more than 90,000 tweets since 2008. That's 18 a day, on average. This place has mattered to me. That Elon Musk might destroy it is a matter of considerable concern to me as a result.
I don't see how many good voices that have been heard as a result of Twitter would have got noticed without it. I would deeply miss the almost instant news on politics that it provides because most opinion I want to hear is on this site.
But let me also be honest, I can imagine a world without Twitter, largely because with little effort I can imagine a better replacement being created. I would even encourage governments to think about that possibility.
But I'd encourage that for a reason much more important. Twitter has, overall, been a good thing in many people's lives (but not everyone's, and we could all do without the hate). But let's not pretend it's critical.
There are things that are more important than Twitter which are much more critical now. Like Amazon's massive file server business, for example, which I gather is pretty key to keeping the web going.
Or Google. And I do not just mean the search engine. Its communication tools are vital to the functioning of vast numbers of organisations, from my university onwards. Microsoft plays the same role in other places.
I quite strongly suspect that much of government is effectively hostage to these organisations. And let's not pretend that they are wholly free of personality influence.
They are, admittedly, more mature organisations than Twitter. But in the event of someone with a massive ego and a strong political agenda antagonistic to the state staged a hostile takeover attack on them, backed by big money, would they stay independent?
I think we all know the answer to that. Twitter has proved that markets don't give a damn about the future of their own technology or the well-being of their staff or their contribution to society: that Twitter sued Musk to force him to take over is the clearest evidence of that.
So, are any of these other, more critical services immune from being taken over and destroyed? I see no obvious reason to think that they are in any way safe from such attack. And that leaves society massively vulnerable to these companies.
Worse, by letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws we have made it very hard for states to replicate what they do, which is ridiculous.
Musk and Twitter provide a real warning. We are deeply vulnerable to relatively few tech companies, and we can rely on none of them. My question is, what is society going to do to protect itself against the madness of this situation?
Isn't now the time to work out and on the alternative? Shouldn't this be the moment the US and EU cooperate to build an alternative to Twitter, and whilst they're at it to look at how keeping the web going if other critical companies fail might be found?
I'd rate the risk of that failure as quite high right now. We really do need to take action, and very soon. The world would fall apart without some of these companies now. It's too big a risk to not plan for their failure.
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It’s troubling that many of these services are monopolies. It’s the most customer-unfriendly and most unstable form of business.
I’ve thought for some time that countries should have a public sector alternative. Maybe Mastodon could be a way national and devolved governments could provide a state run public forum.
> Isn’t now the time to work out and on the alternative?
The annoying thing is, we started off with the alternatives. In the past one could self-host an email server. You could have your own file server. But managing these yourself was expensive and required a lot of work, so we steadily moved towards cloud-managed services where you pay someone else to do it for you, and let them reap the economy of scale. We could go back to self-hosting everything now, but it would cost us.
There are plenty of new alternatives being built right now, and with a little work they would be viable. Mastodon aims to be a twitter-like service which anyone can host a server of, moderate in their own way, and like-minded server owners can link together to create a “network of networks”. There are open office and productivity solutions like framasoft. You could still run your own mail server if you were willing to invest the time and money (probably more practical for a business than an individual).
If governments, universities and NGOs spent (public) money on open source, easily self-hostable, solutions rather than continuing to take out contracts with the big companies, we would be in a very different place right now.
> letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws
IP law provisions like DRM limiting what you can do with your own tech are some of the worst out there. But it goes beyond IP protections. Google largely benefited in the early days because Microsoft was being hammered by anti-trust investigations, and yet now (outside of the EU) they seem immune to this. In it’s early days amazon grew by similarly suspect methods. Our system (gov, legal, economic, I’m not sure which) has failed by letting us get to a point where these companies are so big with seemingly so little scrutiny.
Does Mastadon work?
It’s been a while since I tried to use mastodon. The biggest problem for me was the network effect. The fact that so few people, who I wanted to follow, used it.
Technically, it works well as a networking tool just like twitter. But their biggest challenge is whether they can get find people to use it for the scale that made twitter useful to kick in. Maybe now that people are looking for alternatives to twitter, it may finally get the push to grow.
I don’t have an account at mastodon nor on twitter anymore, though, so it’s difficult for me to fully endorse it as an alternative. I do like the idea of the “federated” ecosystem they’re trying to build – it seems much more technically sustainable.
Thanks
It’s having a big uptick of users at the moment. You do need to choose a server to begin with, but then you can see posts across the network.
Some of the bigger servers don’t seem to be accepting new signups at the moment (like mastodon.social) but there are lots to choose from, for instance mastodon.xyz and mastodon.org.uk. Handles look a little different, for instance mine is @chrisg@freeradical.zone. That full qualifier helps people find your username and server. I’d suggest adding that to your twitter bio if you sign up.
You can use the web app, but there are a multitude of choice of apps for mobile and desktop too. There’s also ways to automatically post your mastodon “toots” on twitter and vice versa, so it’s possible to get a presence there without giving up twitter entirely.
Thanks
Deleted my account Richard due to the redundancies announced and the way it was conducted .
I feel the power is where what created this platform , the people , without the people this platform isn’t viable and the opportunity arises for other platforms to come along and occupy that space .
Mr Musk is a free market capitalist , I’d kindly suggest he may wish to remind himself of that and free market capitalism works two ways .
Power To The People .
The fundamental problem with Musk is that the underlying motivation/drive is ‘opportunism’ – not what I would call strategic at all. He – and too many like him – see the opportunity to make money in everything without considering anything else. Even climate change is seen as an opportunity to make more money rather than solve the core problem, or their solutions themselves are not sustainable (those electric car batteries need precious elements that are in short supply).
‘Strategic’ used be about the longer term; now it is about grabbing as much for yourself as possible with as little effort as possible.
It’s an outlook befitting the fate of the Dodo. At least the Dodo couldn’t do anything about it. We can.
The thing that really irritates me about Musk however is that he cannot dance for toffee.
“There are things that are more important than Twitter which are much more critical now. Like Amazon’s massive file server business, for example, which I gather is pretty key to keeping the web going.
Or Google. And I do not just mean the search engine. Its communication tools are vital to the functioning of vast numbers of organisations, from my university onwards. Microsoft plays the same role in other places.”
Our attention is elsewhere because we are so badly served by Government, Parliament, and Central Bank. The public thus appears to think the only great problem we face is the Government, or the Central Bank, or the commercial banks; or perhaps the energy sector. They are no more important (and perhaps even less in some critical ways), than Big Tech.
Shoshanna Zuboff provided the context and history in ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ (2019); and things have moved on since then; the fangs of the beast have sunk further into the flesh of our communities: but hey, you can have anything you want delivered anytime, anywhere, and they effortlessly part you from your money, so painlessly you scarcely notice. They probably know more about you, your preferences, prejudices, politics and (critically) credit value, than you do.
If Big Tech ever decides it is commercially opportune to takeover the Banks, then it will become, to all intents, ‘de facto’ the Government; without the inconvenience of any responsibility; and with Parliament as little more than its creature. Never mind, nobody cares, because Big Tech has carried out successfully, smoothly and unnoticed, the seduction of, well everyone; because what Big Tech offers makes so much so easy; it is all so ‘convenient’ to most people’s ‘lifestyle’. We have sold out our privacy and liberty for the facile seduction of ‘convenience’. There is a price you will pay for all this. You will find out, but probably only when it is too late to do anything about it.
Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism nailed it – though a long and somewhat intensive read. its perhaps the definitive work on the subject. Along with Rana Faroohar’s Don’t Be Evil.
These are utilities and need to be run as such and not left to the markets and monopolies. As we’ve learnt to our cost with the privatised utilities in the UK, today’s model of capitalism and markets has no interest other than profit maximisation. Negative consequences for others – social, economic, democratic – are of no concern to their owners.
Competition authorities and regulators need to be massively reinforced with resources, funding and legislation. I have rather more faith in the European countries taking action than the US or UK which have sold their souls to the markets.
My reading last is already too long …..
Not a bad summary here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
Her previous tome In the Age of the Smart Machine back in the late 80s was also definitive as she was one of the first to understand how IT was profoundly changing the nature of work and organisations. Most analyses at the time had not moved beyond just seeing it as automation.
Thanks. Compelling
Just to endorse Robin Stafford’s comment – Zuboff’s ‘In the Age of the Smart Machine’ is a superb, and humane, book [IMHO]. The insights she gained were by talking to many workers, in various sectors, whose working lives were being impacted by this [at that time, truly] ‘New technology’.
Zubhoff also makes an appearance on the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ about social media and her contribution is a lot more incisive and to the point than her book – a neat summary.
The bit where she mentions that none of the users know what is actually being done to them is reinforced by a dramatised narrative that runs in parallel with the film that leaves you wondering just how online tech has got away with it?
I think that they’ve got away with it BTW because it is exploitative in a way that Neo-liberalism endorses – the technological ethos speaks of freedom for all but is in fact an exploiters charter with users free to be exploited. And also, because certain politicians would know it was useful. Those here advocating for some sort of State presence need to remember that the state can do anything – but its who is in charge that determines how it is used. That is a big problem.
‘The Social Dilemma’ is a must watch in my view. Those young people setting out to work in the tech business KNEW about the dark side of what they were doing and delivered it to a society operating the worst sort of capitalism and with faltering politics anyway.
The fact that some of the developers and funders are now asking themselves about what have unleashed indicates the abuse that takes place daily online.
PSR,
“The bit where she mentions that none of the users know what is actually being done to them is reinforced by a dramatised narrative that runs in parallel with the film that leaves you wondering just how online tech has got away with it?”
Read the book!
The answer to that is – Zuboff wrote a book explaining how and why it happened. I could start here by discussing “permissionless innovation”; but there is a long argument attached; this is not a suitable medium, and I have the real solution handy in short form: read the book!
“ the Age of the Smart Machine back in the late 80s was also definitive” here is a stand out quote (from memory), it made me laugh anyway:
“In the factory of the future there will be a man and a dog, the man will be there to feed the dog, and dog will be there to make sure the man doesn’t touch anything”
For what it’s worth – a lot of the underpinning of big tech was based on years of public (government funded) work, this has been pointed out by Mazzucato and others. Its is high time we called this in took over what have effectivly become (as pointed out elsewhere in this thread).
In the future we need to be much more proprietorial about whats being developed on the back of public funds, research and development and demand a rightful stake up front. This would also help prevent the dumping of costs from externalities.
I have worked in IT for fifty years. As I slowly slip into retirement, I am immersed in Web technology as I attempt to catalogue all of my specialist knowledge on a website. So, although old, I am pretty clued up. I do not use any Google products. I never shop on Amazon, and the boom in SAAS or ‘Mainframe 2.0’ as I call it will not survive the next cost/benefit analysis. I have four Facebook friends, more than enough, it’s like communicating by scribbling in the margins of the Daily Star. I left LinkedIn where I had hundreds of former students as contacts because its just another advertorial mess. Like Twitter, which will fail very soon if there is any justice, they can be replaced and should be on a regular basis. A generation is just a few years, and like biological evolution, something has to die to make room.
It’s not going to happen – just like Twitter, the human and physical capital is still there with financial failure. Unlike Twitter, core economic forces will keep services like AWS, Azure and GCP alive whoever owns them. Twitter is of no major economic significance (although it is to some individuals) so could disappear overnight. Same for other social media.
I admire your optimism
I saw & experienced the rise of PCs, the development of networks, the emergence of e-mail and the rise of the Internet.
Back in the early 2000s it became clear that the big players (such as Microsoft) no longer wanted to just sell computer programs. They wanted to sell serivces (= nicely recurring revenue).
Application Service Providers (ASPs) flopped initially but then came back as “the cloud” (truly a stupid name).
There is a move back to centralisation – with your mobile or PC (or tablet) acting as a terminal – little different from the terminals in the days of mainframes (I used to use a main frame terminal when we designed power networks and calculated fault levels – it was neat! – in 1979).
PCs etc used to act as independent computing assets – but this has now changed and many applications (programs) are hosted remotely. This is not a healthy development & as Richard noted, the corporate parasites have all sorts of Intellectual Property (IP) which they use to restrict competition. However, none of the software I use is remotely hosted, none of my data is held in “the cloud” – & I’d no more trust Google, Microshaft and the rest of the corporate computer rabble than I would Putler (the Ukraine name for Putin). The only thing I pay for on a regular basis is a VPN. After that, it’s slim pickings from Mr Parr for the corporates. Others should take note. Don’t fund large fat corporates, they are the problem, not the solution. Where possible buy (or er “obtain”) software which resides on your computer – not on somebody elses. As for storage, Terabyte drives cost peanuts – why would you want to use Google?
“Terabyte drives cost peanuts”
They do indeed. The biggest issue is backups.
How many redundant drives do you buy to be confident that your storage is backed up? How much time do you spend copying data around to make sure you do have a backup if any of your storage fails? Do you make copies of your data onto other storage media like Blu-Rays, or do you buy a tape drive? This is the hidden cost of storage if you care about keeping your data. It is something you don’t need to worry about if you use somebody else’s storage because they will have systems in place to take care of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I prefer to store all my own data, but I have also spent a lot of time and money on the backup side of things. It isn’t something that most people will do.
Michael,
in the process of finding the best way to ‘safely’ digitise my music collection that was acquired over a lifetime, I asked this question on the marketplace forum of discogs and from those far more savvy than me there is a simple, cost effective way to achieve secure storage and personal control of this storage – SSD but with the caveat that unless SSD is always ‘on’ data can be lost. Solution a mini PC (for music, fanless) 4-8W. 1 Terrabyte should be enough for anyone. I have to mention the other fact that is completely overlooked by so many – whoever controls your electricity supply also controls your ‘modern’ life, think generator + batteries. Batteries are nowadays a lot like computers, constantly being advanced.
“It is something you don’t need to worry about if you use somebody else’s storage”. Only if you give 100% trust to that someone else, and to every intermediate service and infrastructure between you and them. Any one broken link, be it from technical, commercial, or political change, can break the chain. But it isn’t either/or. Keeping your own backups as well builds some useful redundancy quite cheaply.
I don’t think SSDs need continual power. A backup routine will keep the content refreshed, though like every other medium they will eventually degrade and there will always be an ongoing maintenance cost. But while you have control of the physical medium you mitigate several layers of short term risk and a lot of transmission and access overhead.
I do both
When it comes to the backup discussion I think I have to really go back to my final comment, which was “It isn’t something that most people will do”.
I completely agree that there are solutions and I have invested in a tape robot, but most people just aren’t going to do any of these things. Even if they make some effort at some point they aren’t likely to do it reliably over the longer term.
As much as I don’t like to hand my own data to a multi-national and consequently have set up a whole system to look after it myself, the average man in the street is going to find a multi-national rather more reliable than the one device or drive that their data would otherwise end up on.
I admit I last used tape in 2001
Tape remains one of the best options for high capacity backups. I am on LTO-8 which will store up to 30TB on a single tape. It isn’t a cheap option when it comes to hardware, but I don’t expect to need anything better for a very long time.
Richard – maybe independent non profit, social enterprises – say encouraged by EU and governments would hopefully be less susceptible to political influence than govt-sponsored enterprises such as BBC.
Mr Parr reminds me to think things thru again. I(we) use Office 365 on up to 5 devices, and MS Azure (cloud) with quite a few ‘resources’ – including SQL servers etc.. Must try to remember why.
So easy to start thinking of MS and Google as friends. As you say , not a good idea.
I don’t have a VPN – probably should do.
But if as Richard and John Warren says – much of the world is already utterly dependent on Google/MS/ Amazon servers, it might not be much use being part of the small minority which isnt. ‘in the kingdom of the blind’ the one eyed man is not necessarily king. etc.
I also go back to mainframes – which we had to book for whole night shifts – with magnetic tapes breaking at 4 am, punched paper tape and card readers etc
Another world.
This has made me think…..
But I have to host this site in the cloud
Mr Broadbent,
“much of the world is already utterly dependent on Google/MS/ Amazon servers, it might not be much use being part of the small minority which isnt. ‘in the kingdom of the blind’ the one eyed man is not necessarily king. etc.”
I am no digital whizz, just a user of a laptop, and your point is well made. Here I must confess to falling in line. Covid changed everything. I came to lean on Google, Amazon and Apple far more through Covid and lockdowns than before, and cleverly their service was extremely smooth, efficient and convenient; and now? The past we knew, it seems like yesterday, has disappeared – gone forever. Going back isn’t just difficult – it is no longer there.
I am interested in Mr Stafford’s peruasive comment about Big Tech being utilities that “need to be run as such and not left to the markets and monopolies”. The problems here, however are manifest. To mention only a few, their monopoly status is almost global, which makes them more difficult to manage; and that status basically relies on US anti-trust legislation, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
In Britain we are further hampered by an endemic problem; we do regulation badly, and more often than not do it badly, deliberately. Neoliberal Governments use an old trick to paralyse regulation; less often through legislation, more often by a much more effective route; starve the statutory regulation of the resources to do the job. This is cheap and by far the most effective way of defeating regulation; because typically, nobody notices there is a problem if there is not literally a Grenfell disaster to flag it; and resource starvation has an added advantage – it is cheap to do (few complain if you don’t spend public money, and almost nobody notices if this means HMRC doesn’t raise multi-billions of tax that escapes their grasp, which is often the real, cynical purpose). That is why the Conservative Media stock-in-trade regularly writes hysterical articles about “Red Tape”. Regulation on the statute book is very useful, even if reduced by starvation to redundancy. No matter the Grenfell-type disaster, the existence of regulation provides a ‘straw-man’ for the extreme libertarians to beat to death.
Of course, there are neoliberal exceptions on ‘red-tape’; for example on immigration. They prefer labour shortages and Brexit; no matter what.
Not wanting to add to the tons of verbiage here, but I align with the old brigade, computing for decades. No, everything I want is on my desktop. Won’t touch the ‘cloud’ (what a name…). Oh, and surprisingly, no one has mentioned Linux. I moved off Win to Linux about a year ago – and will never go back to the Win world.
Excellent tweets and interesting discussion. Writing from the US. No chance to get the government involved. But we need alternatives. Social media, office and IT tools, etc should be public goods. They provide the infrastructure of today, like roads are infrastructure. There are examples of successful such public goods, such as linux and git. But open source software suffers from a lack of funding, both for development but even more for maintenance. The big question is: How to finance public goods.
Agreed
That is areal issue….
I hope the EU and UK get together to solve tech regulation once and for all. America resembles an oligarchy in many respects and it is not our brand of capitalism. So how do you create global giants without falling into this American trap? Airbus is the example to follow. Tech companies that have our view of the world not theirs
These companies are the private business part of the security agencies, I think they will be kept going.
They clearly are not
That does not mean they will not be kept going
But they could also be taken over
I didn’t mean they were firms owned by security services but people from those agencies are deeply embedded in them. Search for “Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy” and read details. They are not free speech platforms, they very much have to toe the US government line where the $billions are involved. That problem would exist also if such platforms were run by the government – China shows the way. I agree they have helped some people like yourself gain exposure for your ideas but probably you are not a threat to the powers behind the throne(s). The most important way to resist is to meet real people and talk to them. Also, I am sure they feed all our personal infomation to security agencies. I am not saying there is a global conspiracy but there are multiple mini-conspiracies maybe with competing interests.
Looking at this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/05/elon-musk-doesnt-know-what-hes-doing-says-former-twitter-executive
And this
https://fourweekmba.com/is-twitter-profitable/
It seems clear that Twitter is a bit of a money pit, in which case surely there would have to be a reckoning at some stage, its just that it has arrived now
Thanks
Bob Tomlinson – your wrong. It is how SSD’s function, they store data by capturing electrons which can just escape on the shelf. They are required by the JEDEC standards to be able to store data for a minimum of 1 year without power for consumers. They use NAND flash memory. These electrons ‘leak out’ over time and require the SSD to be plugged in to regenerate or reinstate the charges over the gates. If this isn’t done soon enough the voltage will change enough for the transistor to be changed which corrupts the data.
So as a mini PC uses such a low wattage and the fact that mini PCs are so cheap, it does seem to be a no-brainer easy solution.
Hello.
If anyone is thinking of using Mastodon, I found this thread on Twitter from John Bull @garius to be useful.
https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588827775628369920?s=46&t=kjiANMK26x4LoTcJlnHqcQ
Hope this helps.
That’s good
I will keep it, but doubt I am doing this yet….
Hi John Warren
I’ve read Zuboff’s book John – I recall she even mentions Hannah Arendt in it somewhere (sorry – I read too much perhaps). Zuboff is why I don’t go on Twitter and many other platforms and I’m weening myself off Amazon.
But so many people who have tried to read it John tell me that they could not get on with it, which is a shame.
So, I was suggesting the small set of interviews she does in ‘The Social Dilemma’ might be useful, as is the film itself that interviews – I think – some of the people Zuboff has been talking to and are mentioned in her book.
The naivete displayed by some of the tech developers BTW is staggering.
Another film worth watching is ‘Screened Out’ – about techs’ impact on young people. And also ‘The Great Hack’ which goes into Cambridge Analytica.
Thanks
I’d second all of that.
Spent my early working years in the IT industry and then consulting on strategy and organisational change. Zuboff was thinking about the people and social impacts of technology way back then. I’m inclined to think that the generalisation that techies fail to understand the social impacts has a large slug of truth. And senior management want to see technology as a silver bullet which will bypass what are fundamentally people and process problems. Seen it time and time again across all sectors. And it’s why so many ‘IT’ projects fail. As they are really about people, process, organisation and strategy.
When you look at the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk, you’d ask serious questions about their emotional intelligence. Their willingness to manipulate other people’s behaviour and emotions verges on the psychopathic.
Mr Stafford,
“And it’s why so many ‘IT’ projects fail. As they are really about people, process, organisation and strategy”.
A well made point. And now the threat has rapidly increased of political parties (but especially the Conservative Party, simply because it is the best resourced Party), that they are only too eager to resort to the Vote Leave strategy of using the capacities and power of Big Tech to bypass conventional politics and institutions (including Parliament) to interrogate selected niche audiences and exploit their prejudices and preferences for Party advantage (without the targets even being consciously aware of the exploitation). It doesn’t even matter whether the Party can actually deliver the results of the policies that emerge; that is mashed into incoherence by the spin that is the only product of our politics. Serving the public is of no value. Influencing, tricking or whatever delivers public opinion, no matter how crackpot the idea, is all that matters: in short what alone matters is the survival and empowering of the Party. I have never understood why the public believe Party is serving them, or could serve them when their real interests count for so little in the system; when it takes no imagination whatsoever to see that a political system based on Party will mean Party will always serve Party first, and last. In our political system, that is how it works.
When was the last time a politician actually answered a straight question, or indeed said anything substantive at all? PMQs is supposedly the PM and government being “brought to account” by Parliament. It is now a Question session in which the answers are POQs; Parlaimentary Questions to the Opposition by the Government. Or Conservative Government spokesman Oliver Dowden MP answering a straight question on Sky News about whether the PM knew about over-ripe Williamson Tweets when he appointed him; with Dowden’s answer literally a textbook triumph of the method: totally devoid of any content at all – a time filler that would have been more informative if the answer had been filled with silence.
Politicians carefully work hardest simply to reduce their accountability to the public to zero. Governments survive in power primarily to avoid accountability, or worse, face an election on unfavourable Party terms; the ill-fated fixed term Parliament was a failed effort to face a deeper problem that Parties are determined will not ever be faced; that all Party ever serves, is itself. All the devious manipulation is in order solely to save the Party in power from its electoral, or even its richly deserved, existential annihilation.
Since the democratic system we have is essentially a Party system, ‘Party’ will not ever face the fate it deserves. Second best therefore, is the end of FPTP and the introduction of PR; after all nobody can now claim FPTP delivers “stability”.
Nevertheless, PR must not be the d’Hondt system the Westminster Party system foisted on Scotland; because that solution deliberately delivered the specific PR system that retained most power in the hands of Party, and out of the hands of the elector. Party chooses the list, and that simply turns into MSPs the people the Party wants elected in Holyrood, and not those the electors would choose. In Scotland we therefore end with list MSPs, often at the top of their Party, electors would never vote to represent them.
And when I say senior management, I’d include politicians who are as bad or worse. Various Tory politicians claiming that the answer is a miracle App. Or outsourcing to providers who are only too keen to provide that technology based solution to what is not fundamentally a technology problem. Either because they are too naive/tech obsessed to understand otherwise, or because they just want the business.
First hand experience of the Criminal Record Bureau a few years back. An absolute case study of its kind.
As a disabled & chronically-ill person, it would be extremely difficult for me to rebuild my network of support, advice, information, etc.
I was a founder-member of the WowPetition and that initiated my establishment on Twitter. I have a massively smaller network on Facebook, but this latter is not especially user-friendly and its algorithms ensure it is difficult to reach folk without paying for the privilege. I hate what Musk currently stands for and his appalling treatment of Twitter staff. Alas, as a person with several ELCs, severe & chronic pain and deteriorating health, I cannot see a reälistic alternative at this juncture.
I am staying here
I think many people will