All this business about bankers and CEO bonuses makes me uneasy. The pattern is now very familiar: it transpires that some despised ‘fat cat’ – a banker or the head of a quango, say – is due to be given a huge bonus on top of their already huge monthy remuneration. Outrage ensues. The aforementioned ‘fat cat’ is chased by the press and slandered by politicians and interest groups. The ‘Fat cat’ eventually issues a statement saying he will give back the money.

Don’t get me wrong. These overpaid buffoons irritate me as much as the next man. I don’t think they deserve to be paid as much as they are. The principle that the pay to a top executive should be a function of the lowest paid employee (or vice versa) seems elegant to me. And I certainly disagree with the concept of a bonus being paid when a company loses money or misses targets, whether that is in the public or private sector.

However, this business of going after the bonuses of these men (and they always seem to be men, don’t they?) feels a little like shutting the door after the horse has bolted. Or rather (to fashion a slightly better variation on the metaphor) it’s like shooting the horse after it’s bolted! It is wrong and misguided and misses the real picture.

It is wrong because there is a rule of law issue at stake. These men entered into legal (if confusing) contracts, which are now paying out in their favour. These people and the contracts may be unpalatable and immoral, but they are legal (if they were not legal, there would be no need for outrage, because the Fraud Office would charge them with corruption). These executives are clearly out of touch with the Common Man, as evidenced by their behaviour and actions in trying to claim a huge bonus in this era of austerity. But that personal pathology is not illegal either. The fact is, the law of contracts and employment has allowed a huge loophole to open up. We should not be surprised when some people exploit it.

The outrage is also misguided. Instead of expecting people just to be better and not exploit loopholes, the politicians and the public they serve need to collaborate to close such anomalies. This is the proper response when something happens that one doesn’t like.

Instead, we have the spectacle of politicians and the press hounding someone into foregoing something to which they are legally entitled. That may seem acceptable in the case of the hated bankers, but for good or for ill, the same laws should apply to us all and it’s a dangerous precedent to set. “First they came for the bankers.” vitriolic outrage over footballers or TV celebrity pay could be next. In many parts of the world, businesses that we deem perfectly normal are considered immoral, and the gains ‘ill gotten’. What would we say if the social conservatives in other parts of the world discovered the profit margins of a sex toy factory, and launched a popular movement to demand that the owners donated all their profits to charity?

The slippery slope argument holds good here. If, when confronted with a situation we don’t like, we seek to have that law ignored, waived, disregarded or broken to suit our moral tastes, then it’s is only a short time before that law becomes unworkable. That might be fine for some forms of civil disobedience, where The Law Is An Ass. But it is certainly not fine for contract law, which I’m pretty certain the majority of people believe should remain in force..

The solution of course is to change the rules, and it’s telling that the politicians find it easier to criticise the predictable outcome of an existing law, rather than do the work to forge a new one… even though executive pay has been a sore point since at least the last time the Tories were in power. Instead, we have this odd spectacle of the politicians expecting the most driven and selfish Alpha Male elements of our society to magically abide by a law that should exist, but does not.

Its a rather long Storify, so I won’t embed it here, but its worth pasting in the philosophical bit about mobile phone’s as an extension of one’s brain:

A mobile phone is not an implant, but it functions a bit like the bionic enhancements of science fiction lore.  Crucially, it should make us more productive, because of the time we save and the time we find (for example, when we sitting down on our commute, or sitting down doing our ablutions).

Read the whole thing.

Photo by Jeen Na

Disney are often at the centre of remixing controversies. They are notorious for stopping unauthorised use of their imagery through the courts. There is a huge irony here, in that most of Disney’s stories are remixes of The Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and the aforementioned Andersen. We cede our mythology to a corporation for free, then they mutilate it and charge us every time we access it – on DVD, toys and action figures, and on the paper plates, cups and balloons at children’s birthday parties.

It is unsruprising that iconoclastic artists use the images of Disney characters in their work. The growing roster of Disney Princesses and heroines, representations of an entirely unattainable way of life, are a prime target. In the past three days, three examples have passed through my ‘stream’

First: These Hipster Princesses at least look empowered:

Fashion Princesses Part I, by *viria13

Part II features Princess Jasmine, Belle, Rapunzel and others.

Meanwhile, Diana Goldstein presents a much more depressing set of Fallen Princesses, including Snow White as a stressed mother with a feckless husband, an obese Red Riding Hood, an aloholic Cinderella, and Pocahontas as a couch potato. Note how all the women are presented in their Disneyfied versions.

'Cinder' from the Fallen Princesses series, by Diana Goldstein

Finally, the work of Thomas Czarnecki takes on a similar theme, but in a much more sinister manner. His Princesses all look as though they have been used and abused by men – emphatically not a Happy Ever After. Alice and her white rabbit is probably most recognisable in her Disney version – blonde hair, blue dress:

From Enchantment to Down, by Thomas Czarnecki

All this reminds me of Angela Carter’s fairy-tales… and of course, Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden, the dark feminist faery-play by Judith Adams, in which I had a hand.

This has prompted me to wonder whether it would be feasible to run an organisation without a website. One could interact and share on Twitter; upload any AV content to sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube; editorialise on Storify and Facebook; publish all flyers and other documents to Scribd; use MailChimp as a mailing list and CRM solution; take money (donations, fees) via PayPal, and organise events on EventBrite. An online shop could be run through Amazon or eBay. Each of these services offers at least some space for a logo and summarised raison d’etre on a profile page, and many allow you to fully brand the pages you create.

What does this model lack? Well, it reduces websites to the sum of their parts. Each service does something very specific, and hones the functionality of that one feature or function. However, I think sometimes generic webspace is a virtue. It allows unexpected and complicated piece of content to be created. Also, I suppose the ‘bundling’ of several different types of content under the same top-level URL is a courtesy to the user.

Dissidents and anti-capitalists, and those concerned about online rights (which should be all of us, but in reality is very few of us) will have another criticism: this approach surrenders your content to third parties. Should you do something horrendous – like call for an end to theocracy in Iran, or remix some of Disney’s content, or be Julian Assange – then those who wish to censor you, be they government agents or corporate lawyers, can do so easily by petitioning these third party sites. In a crisis, you have a lot more control over our content if it’s all archived on your own web space.

Are there companies or NGOs that already use the websiteless approach?

This echoes the problems experienced by delegates to the Jaipur Literary Festival last weekend. Threats of violence (real and imagined) kept Salman Rushdie away from the podium, and even derailed a planned video-link appearance.

In both cases, the threats of a few reactionaries are spoiling the chances of ordinary people to enjoy their preferred leisure activities. In both these cases they are Islamists, although Hindu Nationalists are guilty of similar ad hoc censorship of artists such as the late M.F. Hussain.

But anyway, my half-formed thought is this: I wonder to what degree the practice of sport might be considered ‘expression’ in the same way as we think of writing as expression? The elegance of Sport is often likened to dance, which undeniably a form of artistic expression. And dancers are routinely referred to as ‘athletes’ with similar fitness regimes. The need for an audience is common to both groups too. If an audience is barred from a performance, then that is an infringement of the artist’s freedom of expression. Is not the barring the Pakistani cricket fans from the games (by virtue of the games being played in another country) a similar infringement?

The problem is not experienced by the players. Since Pakistan has a proud cricketing heritage, with millions of enthusiasts. Denying these fans the ritual of test matches feels like a denial of their cultural expression too. The Islamic fundamentalists are demanding that their conception of Pakistan trumps any other ideas of what is important.

This is probably an old conversation for Pakistani cricket fans. Yet it is seldom discussed here in the UK. The fact that the Test Match venue has been moved to Dubai is not remarked upon by the sports reporters. I think it is a useful issue to highlight, because if these similarities between art and sport hold up, then that would be a very useful point for free expression campaigners to insert into the campaigning rhetoric. One assumes there are more sport-lovers than literature-lovers.

I’ve argued before, in a post on paedos and prisoners, that in the human rights framework, a judgement that frustrates the populist sentiment is a feature, not a bug. The case of Abu Qatada is cited as an example of a problem, but I see it as the system working well. The man (odious as he may be) hasn’t had a proper trial, and the European Court pointed this out. What’s wrong with that?

The response from the reactionaries is “he doesn’t deserve a fair trial”. This implies a two-tier system of liberty and justice, an Us-and-Them approach which eventually dehumanises certain groups. We need an effective justice and security system to provide some protection against violence and extremism. But it has to apply a consistent set of rules and procedures if it ismto woeffort perky. And we also need an external court of human rights, to protect us from the careless elements in our own society, who are happy to dispense with due process whenever it is not to their taste. it’s a shame that our Prime Minister is pandering to these “careless elements” and I hope the other party leaders, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, do not follow suit.

The statement reads:

“This press release is being issued on behalf of the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It has come to their attention that certain delegates acted in a manner during their sessions today which were without the prior knowledge or consent of the organizers. Any views expressed or actions taken by these delegates are in no manner endorsed by the Jaipur Literature Festival. Any comments made by the delegates reflect their personal, individual views and are not endorsed by the Festival or attributable to its organizers or anyone acting on their behalf. The Festival organizers are fully committed to ensuring compliance of all prevailing laws and will continue to offer their fullest cooperation to prevent any legal violation of any kind. Any action by any delegate or anyone else involved with the Festival that in any manner falls foul of the law will not be tolerated and all necessary, consequential action will be taken. Our endeavor has always been to provide a platform to foster an exchange of ideas and the love of literature, strictly within the four corners of the law. We remain committed to this objective.”

I will write more on this tomorrow, but I will say for now that the repetition of the need to abide by the law seems a bit tone deaf, given the context – if reading aloud from a literary work “falls foul of the law” then the law is an ass and those who support it are enemies of free expression and literature. It is not too much to ask the organisers of India’s most important literary festival to understand that.

I love stuff like this – it speaks to the idea of a shared humanity and global culture, something that only the internet reveals.

And it is enriching art like this which is likely to be compromised by the propose SOPA legislation in the USA.  Yesterday a number of sites, including Wikipedia, went ‘dark in protest at the proposed law.  SOPA is a US initiative and so its difficult to know what we in the rest of the world can do to support it.  Signing this Aavaz petition (along with a couple of million other people) might be a good start.

Describing the chaos of the evacuation, survivors have likened their experience to the film Titanic.

You get this a lot with disasters, accidents and traumatic experiences.  “It was like a movie” say those who were there.

It is a description that grates, however, because those movies in question are attempting to depict a real life incident.  So of course any given real-life carnage is going to be “like a movie” because those movies are trying to be likereal-life accidents!

A less traumatic example might be when a model or movie star is described as being ‘sculptural’ or ‘like a sculpture’.  Well, of course they are, because the sculptor models his artwork on precisely those people!  Its a back-to-front metaphor. Taken to the extreme, one might describe Harrison Ford by saying “he looks like Indiana Jones” or “he looks like Han Solo.”

Yes, yes, I know we describe things via metaphor, and movies are metaphors. But to my mind “it was like a movie” still feels inadequate description of a real-life scene.

It is interesting that despite this decline, new technology can provide a facsimile of the old, communal TV viewing experience. Instead of discussing an episode over the water-cooler or at the school gates the following morning, we all have a ‘second screen’ and discuss it in real time over Twitter. This is not a particularly original observation, but I mention it because it is Twitter that tells me just how universally popular is Sherlock, the second series of which began last weekend, with Episode 2 to be aired later this evening.

Hilariously, given the above paragraph, I did not actually watch the first episode ‘live’ – instead I caught up later in the week via iPlayer. That doesn’t detract from how popular the show seems to be, at least among the connected Twitterati.

There are plenty of explanations for the success. The writing is excellent and funny. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch exudes an autistic confidence that is true to Conan Doyle’s original character. Mysteries and puzzles are always the most popular stories (c.f. the perennial dominance of detective stories over Lit Fic) and the Sherlock series adheres to the rules of a good detective story, presenting all the clues to the audience as they are presented to the sleuth himself.

However, I think it is the representation of technology, and the visual choices inspired by technology, which make the thing feel so contemporary. Holmes receives text messages and interacts with Lestrade on a mobile phone. Dr Watson has a blog, and the villainess of Series 2, Ep. 1 had her own Twitter account (both of which, as is obligatory these days, also exist in the real world and keep up the conceit). However, it is not just that the characters use technology that makes the show interesting, but how the director integrates that into the visual style. Sherlock employs the popular technique of overlaying motion graphics onto the action. It is method made easy by new digital editing tools (see the opening scene of Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell for an ostentatious example of the genre, as is Fifty Nine Productions’ work in Two Boys at the ENO). In Sherlock, the subtle use of this style makes the technology seem fully integrated into the way the characters view the world. The text messages flow past and through Sherlock, he barely has to look at his handset. I think it mirrors the way most of us live, with our eyes flitting between the screen and reality so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to remember how exactly a particular piece of information came to us. It certainly represents the way a large audience segment are experiencing the show. Are they watching Sherlock, or are they watching #Sherlock? Both.