The Cyber-Bullying Thing - Part 1: The Trolls Are Here Among Us

The moral panic of the hour is cyber-bullying. It thoroughly deserves to be and it is long overdue but the trouble is that moral panics, especially during the silly season, do not make for well-informed or well-considered discussions. The gut tends to react, the knee tends to jerk and before we know it some politician in search of a headline has come up with a poor solution to the wrong problem.

(Sorry, politicians, I do try to maintain a level of respect for your calling but this kind of thing does happen.)

Anyway, here is my contribution. This is what I know.

There have been some tragic cases recently. Kids have been driven to suicide by bullying or the threat of blackmail in a way that seems to adults like us to be shocking and incomprehensible. But I'm afraid these dramatic cases are only the tip of a vast and painful iceberg. Abuse, bullying, and targeted and relentless denigration are commonplace and if picking on a kid can grind them down, can succeed in making them vulnerable and depressed, then the malevolence only increases. Every day children who are miserable enough to be contemplating suicide are being told to get on with it, to "fuck off and die!".

And the worst of it is, this is not the action of a small group of sick and twisted psychopaths. We hear talk of "trolls", a weird breed of on-line stalker who specialise in abusing people apparently just for the fun of it, but the reality is worse. Our children are doing this to each other. Our children could easily be victims, most likely we would never know, but the horror is that they could just as easily be the bullies.

Quite what is going through kids' heads (or adults' heads, come to that) when they are posting these appalling messages is hard to imagine but we cannot blame it on some freakish mental abnormality. It just seems that some quite normal kids find being on-line as disinhibiting as being drunk. They have no sense of boundaries or consequences, almost no sense of reality. They apparently take no responsibility for the damage they are doing, the pain they are inflicting or the tragic consequences that could well ensue.

So when people say this not a technology problem, that is not entirely true. We demonise our young people very easily when it suits us, but surely this generation have not suddenly become monsters. The clue is in the term "cyber-bullying"; this is a problem associated with social media and the interweb. Bullying itself is not a new phenomenon but something about being on line seems to bring out the worst in some of our children, to negate their natural sense of empathy and to encourage them to behave like psychopaths even when we know they are not.

So here is a very important point: The problem is not to find and root out some small group of sick individuals. The problem is what technology has done to the culture that our kids are growing up in. We know that kids can be vicious, we always were, but something about social media makes it worse and we should be acutely aware of that.

The other side of the problem is the victims. Why don't they report what is happening to them?

(Let me be clear, I'm not blaming the victims. They may have been suffering months, even years, of abuse and misery and the last thing they need is to be told that it is their fault. Nevertheless, the victims do not report what is being done to them - even though they have plenty of opportunities.)

To be honest, I don't know why they don't but there are some possibilities:

* Perhaps they are afraid of the consequences. The classic dynamic is that the bully forces the victim to be silent because the consequences of saying anything would be worse. In this case threatening dire punishments may do more harm than good; it only gives the bully more reason to enforce a culture of silence.

* Or, more subtly, the victim may feel that their status as a victim would only be reinforced, that they would be ridiculed and pitied even more if they had to cry for help. That would make teachers and parents more part of the problem than the solution.

* Or perhaps they don't identify what they are suffering as bullying. That may seem absurd but these kids have done the courses, been through the workshops, composed the slogans and designed the posters so why don't they take their own advice? Well, for us as adults it seems natural to have a clear idea of what kind of behaviour is acceptable. We may disagree a bit among ourselves about where the boundaries lie, but there is a consensus that boundaries do at least exist. Adolescents' notions of acceptability, on the other hand, may be more fluid. If they pick up their sense of what is appropriate from their peer group then they will be even less inclined than most adults to make a stand. Criticising would make them more of an outsider than ever.

But whatever the reason, it's simply a fact that most victims do not report that they are being bullied or ask adults for help. They may share what is happening with friends if they are lucky enough to be part of a group but even then the misery has to stay private in case the friends find themselves in the same boat. So if this is the case, how would a new "Report Abuse" button help? It may be important to have one, it may be an important symbolic recognition of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be a solution. Technology may be involved in the problem but that doesn't mean that the problem will be solved by a quick technical fix.

It seems more likely that the solution would involve understanding what is going on in the victims' heads - the mirror image of trying to understand what is going on for the bullies. And somehow to introduce adults into the equation - not necessarily as the police or even the counsellors but as external reference points for what life should be like, what our kids have a right to expect from life and what kind of abuse is simply unacceptable.

So having outlined why I think so many potential solutions wouldn't work I'll post a second part of this blog in few days to expand that point about adults and to explain how critical I think it is.

War is Caused by Religion, Obviously!

Like most people of my acquaintance, I suspect, I smiled wryly at an article from the Daily Mash that somebody had posted on Facebook the other day. It was a message, supposedly from Voyager 1 which is just leaving the Solar System, explaining that it was now ashamed of its origins and that “while I’m grateful for all of mankind’s help in launching me, I think it’s best we go our separate ways until they can learn to stop massacring people for kneeling to a different fictional deity."

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/good-riddance-says-voyager-1-2013081978759

A good gag and of course I can afford to smile, safe in the knowledge that I am on the side of good against evil, the side of enlightenment and progress, satirically mocking the forces of ignorance and arrogance, the toxic cocktail that is the cause of human conflict.

But something about it niggled and I started to ask myself whether this is really true. Are wars and massacres really caused by religion? Are the great military machines and the guerrilla armies across the globe really devoted to punishing or converting heathens? Put like that it didn't seem so obvious. In fact I couldn't think of a war that was really fought to make people kneel to a different deity, fictional or otherwise? Conquer them, maybe, subdue them probably, steal their land and their women, pillage their resources but convert them? Really?

So I started to run through some wars and slaughters: First World War? No, that was Imperialism. Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust? No, that was racism and nationalism. The Cold War, Vietnam and all the other vicious little proxies? No, that was world domination. Could we blame it for Stalinism and the Soviet Gulag? No. Cambodia? No. Rwanda? No.

But at least we can blame religion fairly and squarely for Northern Ireland and Islamist terrorism, can't we?

Well, in all honesty no, not even them. Religion is a powerful signifier. Among other things it signifies race, culture, national identity, economic and political power, and historic injustice. For those who feel themselves discriminated against and oppressed, it provides a sense of identity and a rallying cry. For the powerful and the oppressors it provides a convenient excuse and a way of deflecting attention from what is really going on. And so the language of religion provides easy labels for conflicts that are actually about something else altogether, something deeper and usually much more complicated. In Northern Ireland, for example, religion (or rather religions) are the hashtags for a tribal and political conflict that has deep and bitter roots - even though the deity is the same! And Islamism is not even a religion. It is a resistance movement against what they see as the decadence of the West, against the tsunami of commercial and cultural junk, the Coca Cola and the X Factor, that threatens to engulf the Islamic world. Religion is the rallying cry but it is not about religion - it is about us.

So if it is not true that wars and massacres are caused by religion, where does this myth come from? And who would want to perpetuate it? And why?

Well, us. We perpetuate it. And why? Because it allows us to tell ourselves that just by losing our faith in God we can somehow dissociate ourselves from all the horrors of human history. We have the vision to see that the causes of warfare and mass slaughter are really incredibly petty and that superior beings like ourselves are above them. We can pretend that progressive and enlightened atheists like us are somehow immune to the racism, bigotry, selfishness, greed and the blindness to injustice that are the real causes of warfare. More than that, by blaming religion we can just shrug off responsibility for the consequences of our economic domination, our cultural imperialism and our ecological vandalism. Mockery and ridicule is a way of shifting the blame onto people who think there may be more to life than this.

To me that is both ignorant and arrogant. And ignorance and arrogance is a toxic cocktail...

Wind Power

One of the limestone quarries in my area of Somerset in the UK has applied for planning permission to install four wind turbines each 80m tall to help reduce its energy bill. It employs a lot of people, it runs on electricity and its bill increases as the hole gets deeper and thus in microcosm we have a dilemma and a debate, even a conflict, which is unfolding across the country and indeed the rest of the world.

Not surprisingly in a largely unspoilt rural area there has been some shock and considerable opposition and since our Parish is next door and our Parish Council, of which I am a member, has been invited to comment, I have been sent copies of many of the submissions. To my mind the arguments fall rather neatly into two groups; the ones that are irrelevant (and in any case wrong) and the ones that draw attention to the real downsides of wind power that we all have to address.

The irrelevant and wrong category was summed up by one objector who claimed that wind power is a very ineffective way of making a marginal contribution to reducing CO2 emissions but that government subsidies made it a very efficient way of transferring cash from hard-pressed taxpayers and consumers into Swiss bank accounts. Nicely put, it has to be said, but irrelevant in strictly planning terms and also wrong on every count.

Calculating the cost of producing electricity turns out to be remarkably complicated. Of course there is the capital cost of building a powerplant in the first place and dismantling it at the end of its life which has to be spread across the lifetime of the plant, there is the cost of fuel (if any) which may vary dramatically over that time, there is the labour to run and maintain it and some guess has to be made about the interest rates that will determine the cost of the money to do all this. But there is also the ticklish issue of what accountants call the 'externalities'. Are we talking only about the cost to the producer which will be passed on to us as consumers with a little profit margin on top or should we include the costs and risks, such as pollution, that governments and other people have to bear? To put it crudely, are we talking about how the market will operate or the net effect on the planet?

Anyway, the people whose job it is to calculate the 'levelised costs' of these things say that as it happens wind turbines based on land are currently the cheapest way of generating clean electricity. In fact if you include the real cost of the CO2 pollution that conventional power stations produce, their main 'externality', then wind is already comparable with gas, which provides over 40% of our electricity. And as the cost of turbines goes down and gas goes up, wind will rapidly become even more attractive, becoming cheaper than gas even for the producers - perhaps by 2020.

 

It is true that wind turbines and other clean sources of electricity are currently subsidised but it turns out that in one way or another all electricity production is. Fossil fuels, for example, produce carbon dioxide which changes the world's climate. We know that this is in some vague sense a bad thing but we could see it as an 'externality', a cost that somebody else is having to bear. The people who are most affected by climate change, the poorest communities and the most vulnerable farmers in the world, are in fact subsidising our UK electricity production by bearing a significant part of the real cost. 

Nuclear energy is also subsidised in two important ways - by a guaranteed price and a cap on their insurance costs. The French company EDF is currently demanding a guaranteed price of £90 per megawatt hour for electricity from the new nuclear power station they are about to build in Somerset when the current wholesale price is £45. They need double the current price and a complete lack of risk or their power station will apparently be uneconomic. And this in spite of the international agreement that nuclear power stations do not have to carry full accident insurance. It is estimated that if they did the cost of nuclear electricity would rise by a factor of at least two - probably much more. The remaining risk is carried by the government and thus by us as taxpayers - as Japan is finding out.

By contrast, the current subsidies for wind power are intended to be temporary. Their purpose is obviously to encourage installations but beyond that to encourage the development of mature technology and a mature market as quickly as possible. They will be phased out (unlike the subsidies to other sources) although there is debate about the timescale because the manufacturers and investors in this area obviously need confidence that the market that is being established will not suddenly collapse. But once wind turbines become established as the cheapest form of production, it can be assumed that government subsidies will not be needed. (And of course part of the point is that they do not need to be subsidised by the poor and vulnerable in the developing world either.)

As for the implication that the quarry owners are doing something iniquitous in taking advantage of the current subsidies to reduce their costs and make a bigger profit, I was astounded to discover that we live in such a rabidly anti-capitalist part of the world. I'm no great lover of large corporations like the one that owns the quarry but it seems a trifle unfair to offer them subsidies to encourage them to do something we want, like reducing their carbon footprint, and then to blame them when they have temerity to  accept.

And finally there is the point about making only a marginal contribution. In fact renewables as a whole, of which wind turbines are the most economic form, currently contribute about 10% of our electricity supply in the UK and the government aims to increase that to 15% by 2020. A minority, to be sure, but still significant - and of course important in our international efforts to persuade the big players, the USA, China and India, that they should be doing the same.

So as it turns out, wind turbines on land are a very effective way of making a significant contribution to reducing our carbon footprint and indirectly the carbon dioxide production of other countries. Not only that, the current subsidies are helping to develop a mature sector that in a few years time might be the only unsubsidised way of producing electricity in the country.

Like I said, wrong on every count.

So what about the objections that are right? What are the downsides that should be recognised? 

Well, first there is the visual impact of course. They are an enormous intrusion on the landscape and the fact that they move draws the eye even more. If every method of producing electricity has a downside, then this is the big one for wind turbines. In this case the downside would be borne by the very local community that is going to use the electricity, which is unusual, but it is a downside nevertheless and an 'externality', a cost that somebody will have to bear. And it would seem to me to be a matter of common justice to compensate people who bear a particularly large share of this cost - but we do that for other kinds of power stations and industrial plants. In that sense these turbines are nothing special.

For people living very close there is also a rhythmic and irritating noise and the local authority apparently has no policy yet on how close houses and wind turbines can be. This is something that should be rectified as soon as possible and the policy should be based on objective evidence and good practice elsewhere. Otherwise it will look as if the decision is based on personal preferences or a whim. That's no way to decide issues of energy policy and employment.

And thirdly, in this particular case the turbines would be close to Asham Wood, which is a rather special place. It covers 140 hectares and is the largest and most diverse semi-natural wood in the whole Mendip area. It is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and is home to some unusual fauna such as a good population of dormice but whether the turbines would have a significant effect on wild animals seems open to debate. They would have an impact on our enjoyment of the wood but that is not the same thing! 

Much is made of the effect on birds and bats and there was the famous case of the Needle Tailed Swift which should have been in China but got itself lost and turned up in the Outer Hebrides to the West of Scotland in June this year. Bird watchers got very excited until it flew straight into a wind turbine and was killed. Many other birds and bats do the same, especially during migration, and die from a combination of direct impacts and probably 'barotrauma', the effect of sudden pressure changes, but it seems that the total number of deaths is several orders of magnitude (maybe thousands of times) smaller than other man-made factors. A collection of corpses beneath a turbine is very obvious but when compared with the effect of modern farming practices or pesticides and fungicides, it would be lost in the noise.

So what do we conclude? 

For me this is where the rubber hits the road. There are real costs here but they are kind of costs we are going to have to accept, and the compensations we have to work out, if we are going to keep a big electricity user like this quarry working without, as I said, trashing the planet - and particularly trashing somebody else's part of the planet.

A common trick to aid thinking is to flip the problem round. If we already had the turbines installed and we wanted to remove them to make the area more beautiful even if it meant relying on expensive and polluting fossil fuels and inflicting climate change on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, could we justify that? 

I don't think so.

Getting Started

So here is my thinking space - just in case anyone wants to know what I think.