The great Bill Gates conspiracy. A bit of context

In my previous post about the strange case of the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, I talked about those curious aspects of it that are, when all’s said and done, common to all such theories.

They’re impervious to lack of evidence. The fact that there’s nothing at all to prove that Gates is engaging in some sinister plot against the whole of humanity only shows how clever he is at covering his tracks.

Equally, no contrary evidence has any value. Any story showing that it simply isn’t true that Gates is doing any of these things, or even that they’re actually impossible in the present state of technology, are obviously wicked inventions by his acolytes, insidiously fed out to the gullible individuals who believe his protestations of innocence.

Well, as I said, this is the stock in trade of any conspiracy theory. But there is another specific aspect of the Gates story that’s worth looking at. That’s the global context in which it has emerged. Which is almost enough to make me want to launch a conspiracy theory of my own.

Look around the world today.

In China, we have Xi Jinping. He has had the constitution of his country changed so that he can remain in power more or less indefinitely. He’s been in the news recently for the way he has, at a legislative stroke backed by violent police power, wiped out the partial liberties that Hong Kong had enjoyed before.

More sickening still, around a million Uighur people, Muslims from Western China, are being held in what the regime calls re-education camps, and anyone else calls concentration camps. The figure of a million is a bit of a guess and the real figure may be much higher: the regime isn’t particularly forthcoming with the statistics.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have a Donald Trump for whom nothing matters other than his own advancement. He works to divide people, he advances racism, and he incites violence from some of the most despicable individuals in the country. And all the time, he has presided over the worst economic collapse the nation has known at least since 1929, and the deaths by Coronavirus of over twice as many Americans as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam war.

His own incompetence contributed to both those disasters.

Turning to a less significant country (but don’t tell its conservative voters – they like to think otherwise), we have Boris Johnson in Britain. He has in recent weeks defended, and ultimately failed to take any action over, Coronavirus lockdown breaches by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of his Ministers, Robert Jenrick. Again, the mortality due to the virus in the UK is far higher than in might have been, entirely down to the incompetence with which Johnson has addressed it.

Top right: Mark Zuckerberg, the enabler
Then, clockwise: Trump, Putin, Bolosonaro, Xi, Johnson

And the list goes on. Brazil has Jair Bolsonaro, a man presiding over the devastation of his country by Coronavirus, and who, after months of denying there was a problem, and refusing to wear a mask, has now tested positive himself. Or Vladimir Putin in Russia who has gone down the Chinese road, of a constitutional amendment to keep him in power for a lot longer, and who is almost certainly involved in a real conspiracy, to try to influence the US Presidential election through dirty tricks on social media.

Talking about social media takes us, of course, to the dominant figure in that world. Mark Zuckerberg continues to refuse to act against hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook. There are allegations that the massacre of the Rohingya in Burma was promoted through Facebook. And Zuckerberg can play his role, unaccountable to anybody, and free from any kind of control, regulation or sanction. He is one man, elected by no one, and running on his own authority a communications system that feeds information, or disinformation, to 2.6 billion people around the world.

So we we see these characters at work across the globe. Some of them are preparing conspiracies. That’s likely to be true of Putin, and his people will use the means provided by Zuckerberg. But others aren’t even trying to work conspiratorially. We know what Trump’s up to, we have a pretty good idea what Xi Jinping’s doing too.

And in this world, we pick on Bill Gates? Because he correctly predicted that pandemics might be more serious than war? And contributed money to combating the present one?

Why, it’s almost as though someone were trying to deflect attention from some real villains. Distracting us because they’re working to a hidden agenda we know nothing about. Spreading disinformation, perhaps through Facebook, so we don’t look at the people who really deserve our suspicion and distrust.

Curious, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Gates conspiracy theorists are putting this kind of stuff out right now? Or is it something more sinister?

A friend to treasure. Though we never met

Facebook does some things well. The best, in my experience, is that it can make friends of strangers, friends who haven’t even met, who in the old sense of the word, may never meet.

That was our experience with Bob Patterson.

It started with his posting occasional comments on my blog.They were always insightful or funny or both, and at one point Danielle asked me, “who is this Bob? He seems so clever and kind.” So in November 2010, we sought him out on Facebook.

That made us what I like to think of as “friends”. In the Facebook sense. With quotation marks.

Bob: a "friend" since November 2010, and then a friend indeed

The cleverness and kindness continued.

“He always brightens up the day, doesn’t he?” Danielle would say, as the occasional comments sprinkled our posts.

Gradually, they grew and blossomed into more sustained exchanges, and almost imperceptibly, we moved from simple “friends” to proper friends.

”You know,” Danielle added, “he could be a brother of yours, with his sense of humour and his attitudes.”

We had much in common, but he outdid me in gentleness and generosity of spirit.

It did occur to us that only chatting on Facebook, while perfectly satisfactory as far as it went, would never beat actually meeting, physically, in the flesh. Danielle and I could travel to the States to catch up with him in Kansas; then again, Bob seemed attracted to the idea of coming over to Europe so that we could all three travel down to Italy. Great plans, to be revisited at some unspecified date in the future, when we would all have more time.

While we were waiting, the comments continued. Never unpleasant, always warming. He’d crush a lousy pun of mine with a far worse one or, even more gallingly, a more subtle one. Or he’d simply throw out some gentle wit or wisdom.

On a photo of me trailing along fifty metres behind my dog, it was “dog walks man.” Laconic, perfectly balanced, entirely inoffensive, deserving a smile.

Back in December, replying to a post about the cough afflicting both Danielle and me, he wrote: “Mankoff and womankoff in your household? Get well.”

On New Year’s Day, he posted a card which advised us all to kiss someone who thought we were wonderful.

“The last creature to kiss me who thought I was wonderful,” Bob pointed out, “had ears down to her knees and legs up to her wagging tail.”

Deprecating his own insomnia just over a week ago, he posted: “Popsicle sticks are made from the wood of the white birch. Go back to bed.”

I enjoyed the whimsy of the thought, and as always with Bob, it left me smiling.

Those smiles, those little brightening moments, are what we’ll most remember of Bob. They’ll be cheering memories but, sadly, memories are now all we’re going to have. Because during the night of Saturday to Sunday, Bob who we thought had been recovering from his long spate of ill health, succumbed to it and died.

There’ll be no more comments, and it’s only now I realise how much I looked out for them: a “like” was always welcome, a reply still more so, the absence of a comment frankly disappointing. There’ll be no meeting in Kansas. There’ll be no trip to Italy. We waited for when we had time, and now time has run out.

It was wonderful to have had four years of Bob’s friendship. But I would have liked another five or ten or fifteen. We would both have liked to get to know him a great deal better and do some of the things we’d panned.

Which brings me back to the beginning. Facebook does many things well. But it’s only a vehicle, a medium. What brings it to life, what makes it shine, is people.

When it comes to people, nobody did more than Bob to make Facebook shine. With a gentle, warming, cheering light that did everyone who felt it good.

Farewell, Bob. We’re going to miss you. And remember with pleasure the short time we shared.

The strange case of Facebook and the right to privacy

It’s fascinating to watch the turns and twists of the debate over Facebook privacy, though I have to confess that I have some trouble coming to terms with it. After all, the ‘www’ in front of the Facebook address refers to the idea of a ‘worldwide web’. I have trouble with the idea that we distribute material worldwide but still expect it to be private.

I feel the same about the frequent criticism of Britain as the nation with most video surveillance of any country in the world. I mean, I don’t deny the fact. In one sense, I suppose it’s actually a bit comforting to be top in something, having just come bottom in the Eurovision song contest. But of course the critics are reacting to the invasion of privacy that these cameras represent.

Certainly there are video cameras everywhere. I see them all the time, in public places, on the public highway, on public transport. But note that word ‘public’. It’s not insignificant. Where do we get an expectation of privacy when we’re in public?

One of the exciting aspects of starting out on a career is the way you have to come to terms with new concepts and challenge many of the ideas you had at the outset. When I first got into marketing, I took up with enthusiasm the task of planning a publicity campaign for our wonderful range of products. It was going to be so good that we’d be fighting off the people wanting to buy from us. I briefed some outstanding agencies, I worked alongside them with passion and energy, we came up with a campaign that gave us real pride. So imagine my disappointment when I put a series of designs in front of my boss and he leafed through them with apparent distaste and obviously increasing anxiety.

‘Yes,’ he said finally, but in a tone that betrayed his reticence, ‘these should be highly effective. But do we really want our competitors to know all this about us?’

It was a Damascene moment. It was the first but by no means the last time I had met a businessman who wanted to trumpet from the rooftops the outstanding qualities of his products, while imposing the strictest possible confidentiality about them. The elusive goal he was seeking was, in fact, secret publicity.

You may smile at the idea. But aren’t the concepts of ‘Facebook privacy’ or ‘the right to privacy in a public place’ at least as questionable?

Change and the perils of not keeping pace

Presumably back in the middle ages, a father could watch his son working in the fields and say ‘no, no, it’s a lot easier if you put your right hand there on the plough’, or an ageing master craftsman could tell a young apprentice ‘I think you’d find it easier with the tool at that angle’. Both generations used tools that had barely changed so they could share their expertise, and there must have been comfort in that.

Not much like that now, is it? Today we can see technology introduced and superseded within a few years. As a child I attended an exhibition which included a demonstration of fantastic new technology in the form of a teletype machine. I typed out a message to someone several hundred miles away and got an answer seconds later – it was awesome. But then we got faxes. And now we have e-mail. Who’d dream of using a teletype today?

Sometimes the potential of a new technology is quickly seen and soon fulfilled. Visionaries saw the life-changing possibilities of the internet, and they’ve been proved right. Sometimes, though, we get it completely wrong. For many years, there was a widespread sense that cinema and then TV would kill the book. Why would anyone read when they can watch the film instead? Exactly the opposite has happened: the release of the film boosts sales of the book on which it’s based (Jane Austen would be amazed if she came back). We seem to be publishing more books each year than ever before (over a million new titles a year around the world).

Back at the beginning of printing, there must have been people who got it just as badly wrong. There must have been those who said to Gutenberg ‘movable type? It’s a nice idea but it’ll never catch on. The people who buy books are connoisseurs who prize beauty. You don’t really believe that one of those mass-produced things of yours would displace a top-flight manuscript?’ I visited the Medici library in Florence some years ago and it was striking that they kept right on producing glorious illuminations twenty or thirty years after printing had become established. You can imagine the last illuminators, shutting up the workshop for the final time and saying ‘to us it’s bad enough, it’s the loss of a job, but to the world it’s the loss of something incredibly precious’.

The reaction of the individual to these transforming changes continues to be a problem to this day. One of the difficulties is that when you write a letter to someone (remember doing that?), you are engaging in an essentially private task: you are alone with your sheet of paper; the recipient is alone in reading it. There’s something intimate about the experience. That habit of thought has spilled over into the new media too. We sit at a computer and feel the same sense of privacy: there we are, and out there is the person we’re writing to, and the world shrinks to just the two of us.

This can develop into a real problem when we’re using a tool like Facebook. We may be writing for just one friend, but a lot of others can read what we write, and suddenly it can become frighteningly public. The experience feels private, but it’s anything but.

The situation can become extremely awkward, for instance if you’re an Israeli soldier who is feeling homesick and you make your Facebook status ‘On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, God willing, we come home’. Qatanah is a Palestinian village near Ramallah in the West Bank.

The Facebook message was seen as a breach of security, so the operation was cancelled, for a few days anyway. On the up-side, I suppose Qatanah at least won a few more days of peace before the tanks rolled in and young men were rolled up. As for the soldier, he was moved to ‘non-combat’ duties. At first I thought that he would probably have welcomed the move, but then I thought how the military works: if anyone can find something so unpleasant that it can make you regret being transferred to it from combat duties, it’s surely the army.

The whole incident just underlines how careful we need to be with new technology. That’s not new, of course. That new-fangled stuff with movable type was just as bad – people took to writing whatever they felt like and distributing it to hundreds of others, and sometimes they paid for it with their lives, in some cases at the stake.

Life may have been duller, but at least it was safer, when sons could learn from their fathers to use technology that had barely changed in a generation.