That’s if a new book called The Geek Manifesto is to be believed. Find out more here: http://geekmanifesto.wordpress.com/

You might be one too. You can also have a go at calibrating your level of ‘geekness’ using the picture at the side. How many of these features are to be found in your personal space? Be honest now.

The serious side to this is that the Geek Manifesto is a call for evidence based politics and it appears that the Cabinet Office is taking note. They have published a paper on Evidence Based Policies here:

 Test Learn Adapt

Even though RCT’s (Randomised Controlled Trials) have some methodological and cost limitations, this is certainly a better way to decide what to implement than the opinions of Michael Gove (let them all learn poetry by 5), or Iain Duncan Smith. It could certainly have benefited Andrew Lansley’s tortured NHS reforms. Our local experience (in Camden) is that his new style GP’s have led to massive decreases in user satisfaction – alongside greater difficulties in getting to see a doctor. Funny thing is no-one ever speaks about the emotional well-being and attachments we form with GP’s and surgeries that we have been going to for years, taking ourselves, partners, children to a place that becomes familiar and from that, safe.

We don’t want corporate spin-offs running GP surgeries, however efficient that means. It’s not efficiency we go for, its care, reassurance, information.

In an amazing set of proclamations the Convservatives last week attempted to shroud their economic incompetence by demonising a small group of people, the very poor and deprived, and blaming them for our woes. When this runs into trouble as a tactic, as it will since the facts don’t support it, they’ll switch to blaming foreigners (people in Europe) for our ills

Last week, Eric Pickles a man who is clearly not in food-poverty, arrived on our TV screens to tell us that 120,000 problem families were at the root of many of our social ills and that he was going to sort them out. Again, we are told that there are dangerous, unprincipled people out there, our own Al Queda if you like – but not to worry, our good men and true in government will protect us from them.

If you look at the facts more carefully, you’ll see that these are in fact deprived families at the bottom end of our society with few resources.

Here is a more reasoned presentation of the facts:

http://fullfact.org/factchecks/problem_families_costs_eric_pickles-27396

In terms of mobilising support for this condemnation from the majority of us, it is easy to see that in our anxiety about the loss of our well-being and prosperity, it’s tempting to point the finger at those who look scruffy, down-at-heel, and may be poorly educated or otherwise marked by poverty. Much easier in fact than blaming the robbers in suits who have gambled our wealth away while pocketing the huge proceeds as they did so. This latter group have highly sophisticated PR, marketing and litigation machines at their disposal – and at some, childish and primitive level – we are in awe of the super-rich. We are envious. We dream that one day we might win the lottery and become like them and cease having to care or negotiate with everyone else for our entitlements.

And if, like me, you’re a consultant or a researcher, don’t think that our part of it all is exempt from corruption. Here’s a reminder from Saturday’s New York Times:

“Having fallen from respected insider to convicted inside trader, Mr. Gupta has now exchanged the lofty board room for the prospect of a lowly jail cell.”

So said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, after Rajat K. Gupta, former head of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, was convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud.

There is something so cowardly about blaming those who cannot defend themselves that I am ashamed to be a citizen in a country where we pour scorn onto the deprived rather than lending a helping hand, while the rich and powerful across the land push for even greater pay and less regulation of their greedy impulses.

Here, paraphrased is his demolition of our government’s favourite metaphor about the need for austerity – likening it to a family who has spent too much. He made these remarks several times while in the UK last week to promote his new book: ‘End this Depression Now’.

So why is the British Government reducing investment and slashing thousands of public sector projects and jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger? Here is Krugman’s answer:

“Over the past few days, I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.

And there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.

And that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”

Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria. These are also countries that are among the happiest in the world, both being in the top 20 for income equality [having low GINI coefficients] and in the top 15 on the UN’s Happiness Index. You’ll find these figures compared with our own country in my next post.

And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describing Ireland as “a shining example of the art of the possible.” Meanwhile, the Cato Institute was praising Iceland’s low taxes and hoping that other industrial nations “will learn from Iceland’s success.”

So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

The ‘front’ was impressive – a refusal to be bowed or cowed by adversity, a willingness to find some good and things to applaud among the bad news.

Meanwhile in the back, Cameron and his wife were clearly in the audience in front of the Palace last night and were ignored by the commentators. His significance dwindled as  the nation turned to tried and trusted emblems of stability and connectedness like the Queen. We even had ‘three cheers for Her Majesty’ – responded to with gusto by the thousands in the Mall and at parties all over the UK.

However, on Wednesday morning we troop back to work and face once again the reality of our situation. Double-dip recessions are extremely rare in the UK. It is quite common for the economy to falter during a recovery with one quarter of negative activity but you have to go back to the mid-1970s, when the first oil shock of 1973-74 was followed by stagflation in 1975, to find a genuine double-dip downturn.

In the past, even during the 1930s, recoveries have been well under way by now. This time, despite the massive stimulus that has been chucked at it, four years into the deepest depression of the post-war era Britain is going backwards. Output is more than 4% below its peak in early 2008, living standards are falling and there is no sign whatsoever of the much-heralded rebalancing of the economy.

This is a terrible blow for the coalition, which now stands accused of over-cooking austerity – as predicted on these pages – and thus killing off the tentative recovery that was under way when Labour left office almost two years ago.

There is a way forward – advocated by the world’s leading economists – the stimulation of growth by the government rather than the ill-fated Quantitative Easing which has been seized upon by the banks as a way of building up their balance sheets and has not been distributed where it could do good – among the SME’s across the land. Osborne’s Thatcherian ‘I am not for turning’ is looking increasingly like the ‘out of touch with reality’ ravings of the Red Queen in Alice. When will they wake up and help us?

In a world that has become increasingly isolated, where many of us do not know our neighbours – or if we do – still wish to talk about what’s on our minds, the site seemed to offer a safe haven that was not a corporate ruse for separating us from our money.

Inevitably, to sell such a social ideal meant that money had to be made so that investors could enjoy some proceeds from our conversations and the invidious banner ads started to appear. For me, it all changed then: I began to smell a rat.

I found myself ignoring these ads or spitefully dismissing them – even though to do so meant I had to give some reason why I didn’t like them. Truth was I didn’t like them because they were there!

Today we reach a position where the young man who invented the site is now being sued by thousands of people who feel ripped off because they were denied the knowledge that the forecast income for Facebook  had been revised downwards, due to the growth of smartphone access to the site (where ads and marketing are not visible) which makes no money for FB. According to those suing, these downwards forecasts were only revealed to huge, elite corporate investors or those involved with the flotation like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs [again!]

If you create something that is a contribution to humanity that is what it must remain – a contribution. You cannot expect to get rich on it. None of the world’s great contributors from Jesus to Gandhi have banked riches from their gifts to the rest of us. Mark Zucherberg will find himself poorer not richer and though he may laugh on the way to the bank it will be gallows laughter.

Within three days of the fanfare, shareholders have filed a lawsuit at the Manhattan district court accusing Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg and his advisers, including Morgan Stanley, of concealing from them a “severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts. On Tuesday, a similar suit was brought by a different investor in a California state court.

My moniker Loss of Face(book) has been replaced by a better one: Fadebook.

This has all the symptoms of a bubble, don’t expect the shares to hold up. They will fall more next week and the week after. Facebook’s revenues were $3.7bn last year. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, had revenues of close to $29bn and is valued at half Facebook’s current value. Apparently, founder Zuckerberg is so focused that he hasn’t noticed that he’s become the world’s xth Richest Person. What a guy!

The Tories transformed a crisis of capitalism into a crisis of public spending, and determined that the most vulnerable would make the biggest sacrifices. But taking away support from the disabled, the unemployed and the working poor is not straightforward. It can only be achieved by a campaign of demonisation – to crush any potential sympathy. Benefit recipients must only appear as feckless, workshy scroungers, living in opulent quasi-mansions with wall-to-wall widescreen TVs, rampaging around the Canary Islands courtesy of handouts from the squeezed taxpayer. Benefit fraud does exist – according to Government estimates, it is worth less than 1 per cent of welfare spending – but the most extreme examples are passed off as representative, or as the “tip of the iceberg”. The reality of struggle and strife is all but airbrushed out of existence.

That really for two reasons: the first is that it simply makes us uncomfortable to think of the abject misery perhaps no more than a stone’s throw from our own homes. The second is that we too, in the middle class are struggling and afraid: our real incomes have diminished steadily since the late 1970′s. We need someone to blame for our growing discomfort. It is too threatening to blame those wealthier and higher up the status ladder than we are: they might fire us or crush us or otherwise disturb our complacency. So we pick on the poor, the weak, the immigrants, the defenceless and create campaigns like those of the Pub Bore Richard Littlejohn in the Mail.

Next, comes fascism and joining together to take measures to punish the feckless scroungers among us. Your unemployed neighbour next year. You the year after?

“It is indisputable that the Government have used the power of fear and nightmares to mobilise the population into acceptance of a desperate situation. For a year now we have been hearing tales of how dreadful it is…how we must cut the deficit…how unsustainable our debts are. How everyone has to take some losses – even those who have next to nothing to start with.
This, I believe has created a cloud of anxiety across the land and no-one has listened to the more reasoned voices of two of the world’s greatest economists, Paul Krugman and Joe Stigliz who have consistently pointed out that in a period of very low interest rates and low inflation, debt is not the problem, stimulating growth and job creation is the issue. Have a look here:

http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/Crisis.cfm

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/”

Since then, the growth predicted by Osborne in response to his austerity measures has failed to materialise as these writers predicted. Not only that, sensing the deep unfairness of holding the ‘little people’ to account for these problems driven largely by the greed of the rich & the inefficiency of the state, social unrest and polarisation are blossoming in politics across Europe. Neo-Nazis have taken 7% of the vote in Greece, while the richest 1,000 persons in the UK have increased their wealth by £155 billion over the last three years. That is enough for them alone to pay off the entire UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30 billion to spare. These people have not been subject to any tax payback whatsoever commensurate with their gains.

This is not an anti-capitalism polemic; it is an anti-inequality one. Some 77% of the budget deficit is being repaid by public-expenditure cuts and only 23% by tax increases. These cuts hit the poor the hardest, as does the increase in VAT. Despite the biggest slump for nearly a century, the 1,000 richest are sitting on a cash pile even greater than that at the height of the boom. Their wealth now amounts to £414bn, equivalent to more than a third of Britain’s GDP. The increase in their wealth has been £315bn over the past 15 years. Much of that has been accrued relatively free of taxation through complex accounting and avoidance schemes. If they had been taxed even at the going rate of Corporation Tax of 28% it would yield enough to pay 70% of the entire deficit.

It seems though that virtually the entire population of Westminster – on both sides of the house – cannot turn its hand to recovering tax from the powerful: much easier to cut Sure Start, Tax Credits and benefits from people with small voices. More riots are inevitable unless the Government turns its attention towards growth & claiming tax back from those who can afford it.

The fact is that the state and big business have more resources to spend on technology than you or me. And more time to spend establishing elaborate protocols to manage ‘call volumes’ than we do. To pay my tax on line I must quote a 17 digit number which changes every month. There is, underlying these new technologies a groundswell of disrespect and lack of consideration of the customer/citizen, so much so that nearly everyone dreads having to call local services, government departments or financial institutions of any type.

Surely, this is just a minor aspect of modernity?

I suspect not, I suspect that beneath this technology driven disrespect there is a growing contempt among the powerful – reflected among those working for big organisations – for the little people. Recently riots were sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan – an incident that has still not been explained. Casual violence against citizens seems commonplace among the police. Here you can find the video of the assault in Peterlee,

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2012/05/11/cctv-shows-peterlee-police-staff-assaulting-man-cctv-61634-30947850/

The attack was condemned as a form of torture by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). But no-one was sacked: one officer was fined £40.

This is not an isolated incident. A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted. According to a watchdog’s report, prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers based on “relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect”, but none resulted in a guilty verdict.