Tag: The Guardian

News outlet.

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“Tree” highlights the need for Credit Arbitration for playwrights

A thought prompted by the Mark Brown article in The Guardian.

The Guardian

The abridged version of the story is that Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley were removed from a theatre production after four years of work.

“Tree” now claims it was created by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Idris Elba, and has failed to acknowledge both women for their contribution.

You should also read the Medium article Tree. A Story of Gender and Power in Theatre, where they explain in their own words what happened.

Medium

What strikes me after reading this, is how weak both were made to feel, and how little power they had to have their claims recognised. Basically if you don’t have huge reserves of cash to litigate, there’s not much you can do.

Anyone who knows anything about screenwriting knows that writers are frequently replaced. A new writer is brought in to do a rewrite or polish, punch up the dialogue, fix this hole in the plot, the list goes on.

When this all goes tits-up, and there is a dispute over credit, screenwriters can turn to the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Credit Arbitration service for help.

Writers’ Guild

The aim of the service is to ensure “each writer’s contribution to the shooting script is properly valued and rewarded with the correct credit”.

There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent service for playwrights. It’s probably something the Guild should get into, but for some arcane reason, can’t.

I wish nothing but good fortune to both Allen-Martin and Henley. You’re not alone, we’ve all felt that same weight, frustration, and disappointment.

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Spyware is used to target dissidents

Prompted by a Jon Swaine and Stephanie Kirchgaessner article in The Guardian, about “UK rights advocate co-owns firm whose spyware is ‘used to target dissidents’”, I think about what kind of film the story might be.

Twitter

This article is full to the brim with all kinds political intrigue, hypocrisy, big money, hacking, terrorism, repressive governments, dissidents, and the glamour of the art world.

There are a dozen ways to build a plot around what’s on offer. There’s the journalist uncovering a conspiracy version. I have in mind something like The Parallax View (1974) or State of Play (2003). There’s an innocent accused of a crime version. Think Enemy of the State (1998) or The Pelican Brief (1993). There’s a version from inside law enforcement. Something like The International (2009) or Serpico (1973). It could easily be part of the plot for a spy film like Casino Royal (2006) or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011).

My initial thoughts have the husband of an imprisoned dissident kidnap a wealthy art dealer Jill, and hold her hostage. The kidnapper starts to make demands of the art dealer’s husband, Jack. Conspiring with each new demand to expose his corrupt activity. As the plot drips through it becomes apparent it’s actually Jill’s spyware being used to hack Jack’s phone. All kinds of his secrets are exposed to the world. The kidnapper holds one last secret about Jill’s husband. When the two men finally meet to exchange their partners, Jill demands to know the final secret. When the kidnapper finally has his wife, he reveals Jack’s last secret to Jill. The news is so devastating to her, she kills Jack. We are left wondering, never knowing, his secret.

Interesting update: 03 February 2023

In a statement on 28 January 2020 The Guardian printed a retraction, accepting “that Mrs Peel is not, and was not, involved in the management, operations or control of NSO, an Israeli cyber intelligence company”.

The Guardian
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Facebook is a data collection machine

A response prompted by a Kari Paul article in The Guardian.

The Guardian

The Sturdy app shows anyone who wants to see that Facebook is not a social network, it’s a data collection machine.

A new Facebook app will allow users to sell the company data on how they use competitors’ apps.

How does Facebook use the data it collects? I think it’s using our data against us. When I first wrote that sentence it came out as, “using it against its users”. I quickly realised, even if you don’t use Facebook, you come into contact with someone who does, Facebook knows something about you through them. When it says it’s connecting people, it really is, it’s mapping the many ways we brush against each other.

Imagine you’re walking along Piccadilly at 3.30 in the afternoon. Someone takes a picture, and posts it at 3.31. Facebook knows something about the person who posted the picture, and the location of everyone captured in the photo. What if Mark Zuckerberg was walking along Piccadilly, and at 3.32 someone spat in his face. The picture taken at 3.30 might show the assailant. It makes everyone in the picture a suspect.

Facebook gets to work cross-referencing various accounts, pulling up the latest facial recognition software. Suddenly the police are at your door, making you account for your actions between 3.15 and 3.45. You were minding your own business, but now you have to prove it, you have to prove somehow you didn’t spit in Mark Zuckerberg’s face. They’re not trying to prove you did it, you’re trying to prove you didn’t.

At this point I can hear a certain section of the population repeating a mantra, throwing it in my direction like some spunk sodden flannel, “nothing to hide nothing to fear”. That’s not an argument, it’s an accusation. You assume I have something I hide because I don’t want to account for my whereabouts.

Now imagine the world taking a sudden turn towards the authoritarian? What if people below a certain income level aren’t allowed to walk along Piccadilly? The police are at your door, questioning you about the assault on Mark Zuckerberg, but arresting you for being too poor to be on Piccadilly.

Who knows how this technology is being used, or will be used in the future? Facebook aren’t mining data because it’s fun, they’re doing it because it’s worth something. The information they collect can be used for what? Changing your purchasing habits? Telling you what you know about the world? Influencing elections?

Facebook is not a benign force, it’s a privately owned data collection machine.

Now ask yourself how’s it being used?

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Latest data shows steep rises in CO2 for seventh year

The Guardian

Fiona Harvey in The Guardian a consistent rise in temperatures. The climate is changing, the globe is warming, global warming will be on your doorstep sooner than you think.

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Tories are deaf to anything but their own voices

Robert Booth reports in The Guardian, “United Nations poverty expert has compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses”.

The Guardian

I wanted to write something angry about this government, at the way they have so wilfully and aggressively attacked the poor, but I don’t have the strength to list all of their many failings. I know this, their attacks on the poor are an attack on us all.

For as long as I can remember they’ve promoted an agenda of individualism, while absolutely refusing to see how we individuals interact with all of the other individuals around us.

They can’t see and don’t care, not everyone was created in their image.

Take social care. When you reduce spending on social care, old people who end up in hospital will stay longer. They can’t go home if they don’t have the right kind, any kind, of care waiting when they get there. Most people don’t have the privilege of a private nurse to look after them. Longer stays in hospital are one of the many reasons waiting times in accident and emergency are so long.

Consider the recent rise in knife crime. I have no problem saying it’s a direct result of Tory cuts to youth services. At risk individuals who would’ve been helped by a youth club or a social worker, have been abandoned to the care of gangs. When individuals with little or no self-respect start demanding respect on the streets, challenges are met with violence.

These youngsters aren’t getting the kind of care and support most of Tory politicians enjoyed growing up. They’re being sent the message you’re on your own, you have to survive by any means necessary, but without the wealth and self-belief you need to survive in a world of individuals, fighting other individuals for a slice of the pie.

It’s easy for the Tories to blame bad seed individuals for young people dead on the streets. They point blank refuse to see their part in the problem.

As wealth inequality rises, crime will rise, and the Tories will blame the criminals, not considering their crimes in creating a society in their image.

I know they’re deaf to anything but their own voice.

How else could they behave the way they do?

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Teenage girl in Malaysia kills herself ‘after Instagram poll’

Jamie Fullerton in The Guardian describes the sinister face of social media.

The Guardian

There is a cold inevitability to this headline, a sadness going way beyond the mountain of sadness connected to this girl’s death.

Makes me wonder, what kind of people is social media engineering?

We really are all fucked if we’ve become a world where voting on someone’s death, or life, is given so little thought. My guess is every one of the 69 per cent who voted “death” didn’t think she was serious. Their response to “Really Important, Help Me Choose D/L” was as random as flipping a coin. They didn’t think about the question, or the outcome, they just flipped a tail instead of a head at the toss.

The even more worrying implication is the lack of of critical thinking in her followers, in those who voted. Would this girl still be alive if she had put an “L” before the “D”? I’m going to make a dangerous assumption and say she put the “D” first because she had suicide in mind. Her metric was already headed in that direction, the answer just confirmed her choice. The 69 per cent chose randomly, and followed blindly.

That has ramifications reaching way beyond this girls suicide, taking us somewhere over the horizon, and dropping us in a well so deep we may never get out.

In a complicated world social media makes everything binary, simplifies a mater of life and death into a choice between, “D” or “L”. Ironically they understood the difference between the abstract “D” for “death” and “L” for “life” but not the nuance of putting “D” before “L”.

There are no binary choices. I fear we are forgetting that fact, forgetting how to navigate complexity.

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Humanity must save insects to save ourselves

There’s a real Martin Niemoller “First they came…” sadness in Damian Carrington’s story in The Guardian.

The Guardian

This is another in a long line of stories warning that our actions are causing an extinction level event. People are slowly waking up to the facts, but a large proportion remain silent, either wilfully ignorant, or openly hostile to the idea that our behaviours need to change.

For some reason this makes me think of Martin Niemoller, a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany, and critic of Adolf Hitler. He spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp, and after the war believed Germans had been complicit, through their silence, in Nazi atrocities.

He wrote this very famous speech.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

I don’t think our crisis is quite as linear as Mr Niemoller’s, ours is more of a cascade, that gets exponentially worse with every pound of material extracted from the planet. You might describe our complicity in our own destruction like this.

First they destroyed an insect, and I did nothing – I was not an insect.
Then they destroyed an amphibian, and I did nothing – I was not an amphibian.
Then they destroyed a reptile, and I did nothing – I was not a reptile.
Then they destroyed a fish, a bird, and a mammal, and I did nothing – I was none of those things.
But that was not enough.
They kept on killing.
Killing more.
On more.
More.
On.
Until they destroyed all of the insects. And still I did nothing – because they are a pest.
And more.
On.
Until they destroyed all of the amphibians. And still I did nothing – because they were in the way.
And more.
On.
Until they destroyed all of the reptiles. And still I did nothing – because they are on my land.
And more.
On.
Until they destroyed all of the fish, and all of the birds, and all of the mammals.
And still I did nothing.
And more.
On.
Because there was nothing left.

That’s more of a word game than some lofty attempt at poetry, but unless we do something to stop our current trajectory there will be nothing left.

The earth will survive but we will not.

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’
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Cocaine found in all shrimp tested in rural UK county

There’s something both very concerning and extremely funny in this story by Agence France-Presse in The Guardian.

The Guardian

Cocaine “in all shrimp” tells me those responsible for water purification are allowing contaminated water into the environment. I can’t imagine these cockroaches of the sea racking out lines, so there’s Charlie in the water.

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Cocaine shrimp

There’s also a heavy dose of funny in the appalling lapse of public safety. The population of Suffolk must be partying hard to secrete that much marching powder into the water supply. I can see the internet going bonkers over the idea that people will be able to get high eating shrimp.

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Thatcher decline caused crime

Jamie Doward in The Guardian reports a first of its kind study linking the “industrial collapse of Thatcher years” to a rise in crime.

The Guardian

“Four decades after Margaret Thatcher swept to power, research has found that in areas where the coal, steel, ship and railway industries were hit during the 1980s, young people were much more likely to find themselves in trouble with the police.”

Those people currently wringing their hands over the rise in knife crime might want to take a long hard look at this study. It confirms what anyone who doesn’t look the wrong way down a telescope knows, there’s a “link between offending and economic factors”.

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Prohibition doesn’t work, never has, never will

The Guardian

Daniel Boffey’s report for The Guardian exposes a couple of things. Not only are drugs being bought anonymously online, and shipped using the relative anonymity of the postal service, it also confirms what the authorities don’t want to admit, prohibition doesn’t work, never has, and most definitely never will!