An Air Force in Your Pocket
“Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” Mae West once asked of a police escort. The wonders of modern technology mean that you can now fit a lot more than a pistol in your pocket.
Last week I promised a blog post on cyberwarfare. I posted the first installment this afternoon, An Air Force in Your Pocket, featuring Nazis, atom bombs, and derring-do. In the next installment, I’ll look at what the shift from industrial age warfare to information age warfare might mean.
(If you’re interested in how changes in weapons technology have changed society, also have a look at Nobbling the Nobility (about the Iron Age) and The Medieval Hiroshima (about gunpowder)).
Electile Dysfunction
My uncle introduced me to the idea that there was more to political life than the two big parties. He stood in Reading East for the Ecology Party, forerunner of the Greens, in 1983. A couple of decades later, and on the other side of the world, I stood for the Libertarianz in Wellington Central. Opposites in many ways, we both dreamed of knocking the big guys off their perches, but knew it was a long game.
I wrote recently about how mainstream political parties are doomed. “Broad church” political parties are enabled by broadcast media. As those media fragment, they’ll take the political parties with them. Even with that in mind, recent opinion poll results from the UK have shocked me.
The two-party system we’ve known forever looks wrecked. Whether this is a temporary blip due to the Brexit shambles, whether the old Labour-Conservative duopoly is going to be replaced by a different duopoly, or whether the whole two-party system is falling apart remains to be seen.
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The first selfie was not very “insta”. Robert Cornelius sat motionless in front of his camera for a minute to take this portrait. The wifi would have been even slower, with radio waves not being discovered until 1888, 49 years after the picture was taken.
It took until 2009 for duck face to start trending.
Thanks for reading,
Bernard