Politicians prey on both these effects: they put out slanderous soundbites in the near-certainty that they won’t be sued, and they ‘help’ hacks by giving them neat little ready-typed ‘explanations’ of every event and policy. Those hacks in turn suffer a form of press release welfare dependency, and become lazy.
What we perhaps spend less time thinking about is just how unfathomably complex the whole world has now become for politicians themselves. I’m not for a second suggesting that we should be in any way sympathetic to their plight; they’re nearly all power-mad dullards anyway, and I fail to see why most of them should get any votes at all, let alone sympathy ones. But we should at least take this into account when trying to manage our expectations of them.
Consider: a senior politician emerges from an important negotiation and walks straight into a bevy of cameras and journalists. Expecting to be asked about the latest nuclear crisis with North Korea, he is instead questioned at length about the breaking news of CreditAgricole’s imminent collapse: does he agree that Frau Merkel’s initial comment is somewhat inflammatory?
Prime Ministers and Presidents are these days of course surrounded by legions of media specialists who brief them 24/7 about stuff like this, but there’s not a chance in hell they really understand what’s going on – because there is simply far too much going on. There has always been too much going on, but the difference now is that we all hear about it – and that means leaders have to respond.
There was a critical moment during the Cuban Missiles Crisis in 1962, when JFK and his brother Bobby received a hugely intemperate telex from the Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev – who (it was later discovered) was almost certainly drunk. The President took the immensely wise decision to ignore it, and Robert took the equally wise decision to hide it from the National Security Council. Today, it’d be posted on Facebook – so they’d have no choice.
Now we can all nod and muse and observe “Yes, well – but the genie’s out of the bottle now”. But actually, I’m not sure that’s the right analogy: I think the volume + speed + indiscretion equation means that we’re no longer sure what on earth has come out of the bottle any more. If you want evidence of this, just follow a comment thread on any major issue on any high-traffic site. The running conversation between threaders is one long dispute about ten different sets of facts, five different extrapolations from them, and 277 ideas about what should be done. We used to think that information is power, but today information overload is leaving decision-makers powerless to do anything except provide today’s solution: and as the saying goes, all they’re doing is creating tomorrow’s problem.
The tidal wave of incoming data via four hundred 24/7 news channels, thousands of news feeds, millions of websites, billions of emails and trillions of tweets has indeed made genuine international and econo-fiscal government one of instant reaction rather than proactive policy. But what created the need for all this largely erroneous information in the first place was trade and banking globalism. It absolutely guaranteed, from the moment the internet and it were up and running in the same epoch, that one day there would be a domino catastrophe.
This largely explains why, for the last eight months, the ‘location’ of the world trade imbalance crisis has seemed to skip from continent to continent and back again. It hasn’t: what has skipped around is the top news story at any given time. And receipt of that story means that the following day, the Singapore market is worried about Europe, the week after that the Australian bourse is neurotic about China, and after another few days the Beijing Government is anxious about US foreign debt.
Ignorance is indeed bliss. But ignorance is also a safety valve – a time lapse during which measured decisions can be taken, long-term trends studied, and decisions made about strategic direction. What I find notable is that top-class corporate concerns (whatever their PR and/or ethical problems) do not seem in many cases to have this problem. And the reason is clear: the information that interests them is infinitely more focused.
Whatever our feelings about BP (and mine can be summarised as ‘incompetently amoral’) it’s worth bearing in mind that they didn’t decide to befriend Gadaffi overnight. Its engineers and cost accountants have been making long-term calculations over three decades about the relationship between prices in the market and the cost of undersea exploitation. Those same strategists took the decision to make BP stand for Beyond Petroleum some ten years ago; the claim looks like a disaster now, but wisdom after the event is a luxury available to every smartarse on the sidelines. BP is unusually prescient among oil companies: it would be an ironic travesty if they were taken over now by the sort of US oilco that has underinvested in exploitation in favour of big bonuses and shareholder dividends for the last twenty years.
Santander as a bank has the same foresight: as does HSBC, BMW, advertising’s BBH, Virgin, and a host of other companies who use the gaps between data to look for practical planning rather than laurel-resting.
Regular Sloggers already know my views on what to do about the problem: scale government down to local level, and look to more entrepreneurial communitarian capitalism as the long-term replacement for global businesses and bourse finance. But perhaps this additional thought – also not new on the site – is also key: when it comes to the internet information tsunami, surely we will in the end go full circle?
What I mean is this: the future is not forty million bloggers and thousands of news feeds. The sector will grow up, and there is every likelihood that people will have a limited repertoire of sites they trust to offer added-value information analysis……in exactly the same way as, thirty years ago, I had The Spectator, The Economist, The FT, The Times, Panorama, Private Eye, Not the Nine O’Clock News, and BBC2.
The big, big opportunity here is for collectives, syndicates and mutually helpful portals to carve an important niche online. Huffington Post is the best (if not the only) example of this way of doing things at the moment – but Murdoch’s dopey paywalls will not be trumpeted down by idealism alone. People already pay for premium-quality specialist information; what more generalist news consumers will want over the coming decade is a tailored selection of news that explains. It’s the combination of ‘personal and interpretative’ that will give the service intrinsic value – something Murdoch’s Times titles spectacularly lack.
And so we return to the original problem: how can governments solve the overload problem? My own view is in two ways – one they’ll hate, and one that can only do them good.
The only they’ll hate involves diluting their power, devolving it to local level, and thus increasing their focus. The one from which they will benefit is to assemble just such a manageable media repertoire for themselves – even devote a Ministry to its analysis – and thus have a clear view supported by bright, practical people whose sole task is to think about ramifications five years from now – not what to tell the PoliticsHome site five minutes from now.
The Slog 