Your country needs you, or at least your data

They have stolen your data?  Boo hoo.  Who knew?

Everyone knew.

If you thought your data was ever secure, then you probably live off grid, meaning you have a cabin in Montana or a zero hours contract in Eastleigh, either way, you eat roadkill, even if you do buy it from a shop called ‘Tennassee Fried Chicken’, and you find innovative ways to heat your home, such as chopping your own firewood or buying cloned keycards from a bloke in the pub.

If you are smart enough to read to the end of any privacy agreement, ever, related to the use of a free service remotely connected to anything featuring a silicone chip, then you are smart enough to stop reading two thirds of the way down, hit ‘decline’ and read a book instead.  Not on a Kindle.

If however, like billions of others, you see the words ‘yadda yadda yadda’ immediately after reading the word ‘heretofore’ and skip straight to pressing the button that states ‘I agree, I want to join a social network where I can view pictures of my ex, just to see how happy they are with their perfect home, and perfect kids and Jesus is that a Lexus they’re driving?’ then you should know that, at the very, very best, the senior leadership of North Korea are in an underground bunker, watching vast screens with your social media feed on it, laughing themselves stupid at your ongoing Twitter feud with ‘StarWarsH8ter’, in actuality a NK Bot run on a ZX Spectrum, 16k, which is still getting more likes and retweets than you.

I remember the first time I went online.  We plugged an external modem into the PC, loaded up Pipex Dial from a floppy, opened up the browser and…nothing, we had no idea what to do next until one of the group suggested ‘type www.playboy.com into that box there’.

The next thing that was said was ‘You realise GCHQ know we’re doing this’.  Nervous laughter.

But that was about right.  There has always been that awareness that, unlike traditional secure methods of communication such as purchasing porn from an out-of-town newsagents where the only reason you would bump into anyone you knew is that they were there buying porn too, or writing a letter, electronic communication has always been open to monitoring.

Back when newsgroups were a thing, there were essentially two types of newsgroup.  The first discussed kinky sex, the other discussed ‘Star Trek’.  I never worked out which had the higher quotient of virgins posting, but I firmly believe that whoever was in charge of internet monitoring back in the day is the world expert on two things, how to turn the spare room into a sex dungeon on a budget, and the definitive answer to just who the best Star Trek captain was.

Just what data is it on Facebook that people are so worried about being used?  I could understand it if it was something important, private and personal, like a picture of your genitalia or your browsing history, but apparently it’s just some fuckwit quiz outcome, basically the sort of thing that used to be on the back page of Cosmo (If you answered mostly A you are slightly slutty and think toddlers should be allowed to carry guns) or Jackie (If you answered mostly C then you and David Cassidy would enjoy smooching, and you detest free trade agreements).

Given that we have all basically made Mark Zuckerberg a Bond villain, I reckon the guy shows tremendous restraint.  He is the absolute ruler of a digital domain with over two billion citizens.  Imagine if you annoy him, your Facebook status could change from ‘Single but hopeful J’ to ‘I fuck babboons’.  And that’s best case scenario.  This is a guy who could change your status to ‘I like to get fucked by baboons.  I paint my ass red and let them go to town on me.  Then I don’t call them back.  Who’s the animal now?’.

You are, you ape fucking freak.

Essentially, don’t commit anything to a string of ones and zeros that you would not be happy to see stapled to a lamppost in your neighbourhood.

Jumping the snark

Some years ago, I wrote on G&P of my decision to stop reading ‘The Guardian’ newspaper.  This was, for the avoidance of doubt, the newspaper formally known as ‘The Manchester Guardian’, a publication beloved of liberals, lefties, vegetarians and the sort of people who criticise your lifestyle choices as if you were Cruella DeVille rather than a bloke in a shop contemplating the purchase of a pot noodle.  I read The Guardian back in the day because, before the launch of iPlayer, Netflix  and digital downloads for programmes like ‘Game of Thrones’ meant all we had to do to enjoy ourselves was watch teevee, I enjoyed its arts coverage and being informed about what books I should, and would fail to, read, what moving and improving foreign language films I would decide to see the latest instalment of the ‘Transformers’ franchise instead of, and particularly what new video games were coming out.  The newspaper was also the only thing in print with anything like a social conscience.

Something, however, changed for the worse.  Always somewhat self centered, the tone of the newspaper became smug and it was soon spouting claptrap in a manner that defied challenge in the same way the right wing tabloids, or a mate who has given up drinking and insists on joining you in the pub straight from the squash court with racquets protruding from a kit bag and opinions on the benefits of sobriety protruding from his gob instead of joining in conventional discussion in the bloke’s salon such as naming all the principal characters in ‘Bergerac’.

And so I stopped reading it, preferring instead to get my news from the BBC website, and Twitter.

The exception is Saturday when, because the newspaper, sports business and lifestyle sections come with the only teevee guide you can rely on not to have a picture of Danny Dyer gurning like a simpleton passing a satisfying stool gracing the front cover, is the teevee guide and so newspaper of choice.

Selective reading ensures incredulity and outrage at the breakfast table is kept to a minimum, like flipping channels when an upsetting story appears on the BBC News, or hitting the ‘mute’ button on the remote whenever Boris Johnson appears on television, allowing one to do the voices yourself as when one watches Crufts, or pretend that one is watching an ill-conceived spin-off of ‘The Muppet Show’ where the puppets are grotesque rather than lovable, or a play about one of those ugly but anatomically correct dolls they get kids to use when describing sex offenders, come to life, not so much dressed as a human as rolled around in a donations bag left outside a middle class charity shop, and decided to use its magic powers for evil.

But even a straightforward teevee guide is not safe from the tone of the newspaper as a whole.

Teevee listings should be a straightforward publication.  I want to know what is on and when, and I want anything related to ‘Doctor Who’ featured heavily.  Not much to ask.

For a while now though, the back page has featured a snarky regular feature about ‘when good teevee goes bad’ titled ‘Jump the Shark’.  In this feature, a writer or writers I’ve never bothered to check, briefly discuss the pivotal point where a hitherto beloved telly programme went shit.  The title is taken from the internet, which documents that it was the eponymous episode of ‘Happy Days’ where that show went from being cool to, well, not quite so cool.  As the internet is never wrong about anything, though I have yet to see a piano playing cat in reality, we must accept this as fact.

‘The Guardian’ have taken a half-arsed opinion and weaponised it.

The trouble is, of course, that the shows that jumped the shark number one, ‘Happy Days’.  This would make for a very short series in a teevee guide, and one that bore a tremendously close resemblance to the Wikipedia entry for ‘Jump the shark’.  The solution, if you are a hack unafraid of flogging the greasy spot where the format used to be, is to randomly pick beloved or obscure television shows and explain why they stopped being good.

The sense of regret that one experiences on reading one of these snarkly spiteful pieces is not even offset by the overwhelming realisation that you made the right decision swearing off this newspaper many moons ago.  There is a shame to not seeing that commitment through, not unlike the shame of falling off the wagon, of an illicit fag ten years after giving up, of murdering a badger with a hammer, of in the performing of an act of self pollution realising, at what should be the moment of unconfined joy, that one has Googled, safesearch off, an indecent image not of Katie Price, but of Katie Hopkins.  The shame and the self loathing rise as the bitter tears of regret begin to flow.

Ironically, this series of affronts will never itself jump the shark.  To do so requires a thing to be good before it can go bad, and this sad affair was never that.  Essentially, what we have here is the result one can only presume of somebody attending one of those meetings where ‘there are no bad ideas’ but missing the crucial point that yes, there are.  Do Walls do a Cornetto with fox shit in the bottom of the cone?  No, because that would be a bad idea.

Maybe be I should switch to ‘The Sun’?  Clarkson writes for it I understand.  Bet he wouldn’t criticise ‘Happy Days’.