In 1970, the Allende government found itself the coordinator of a messy jumble of factories, mines and other workplaces that had long been state-run, others that were freshly nationalised, some under worker occupation and others still under the control of their managers or owners. An efficient strategy of coordination was required. The 29-year-old head of the Chilean Production Development Corporation and later finance minister Fernando Flores – responsible for the management and coordination between nationalised companies and the state, and his advisor, Raul Espejo, had been impressed with Beer’s prolific writings on management cybernetics, and, like Allende, wanted to construct a socialist economy that was not centralised as the variations on the Soviet theme had been.

Allende, a doctor by training, was attracted to the idea of rationally directing industry, and upon Flores’ recommendation, Beer was hired to advise the government, and the scheme he plunged himself into was called Project Cybersyn, a ‘nervous system’ for the economy in which workers, community members and the government were to be connected together transmitting the resources they had on offer, their desires and needs via an interactive national communications network. The whole idea would seem, frankly, eccentrically ambitious, even potty, if today the internet were not such a quotidian experience.

Although never completed, by the time of the coup, the advanced prototype of the system, which had been built in four months, involved a series of 500 telex machines distributed to firms connected to two government-operated mainframe computers and stretched the length of the narrow country and covered roughly between a quarter and half of the nationalised economy. Factory output, raw material shipments and transport, high levels of absenteeism and other core economic data pinged about the country and to the capital, Santiago – a daily exchange of information between workers and their government, easily beating the six months on average for economic data to be processed in this way in most advanced countries.

Paul Cockshott, a University of Glasgow computer scientist who has written about the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by computing, is a big admirer of Cybersyn as a practical example of the general type of regulation mechanism he advocates: ‘The big advance with Stafford Beer’s experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system rather than a system which, as the Soviets had tried, was essentially a batch system in which you made decisions every five years.’
Staff tallied the data and seven government surveyors (seven being the largest number of people who can comfortably participate in a discussion) viewed real-time economic processes for immediate decisions from a space-age, Star-Trek-like operations room, complete with Tulip swivel chairs with built-in buttons, but the aim was to maintain decentralised worker and lower-management autonomy rather than to impose a top-down system of control. The intention was to provide an Opsroom overseeing each industry and within each plant. At the factory level, it was planned that workers’ committees would run the Opsroom. Figures were avoided in favour of graphics displays under the belief that people should be able to engage in economic self-government without formal mathematical or financial training. Vast, economy-wide co-ordination is not the same as centralisation.

When the government faced a CIA-backed strike from conservative small businessmen and a boycott by private lorry companies in 1972, food and fuel supplies ran dangerously low. The government faced its gravest existential threat ahead of the coup. It was then that Cybersyn came into its own, when Allende’s government realised that the experimental system could be used to circumvent the opposition’s efforts. The network allowed its operators to secure immediate information on where scarcities were at their most extreme and where drivers not participating in the boycott were located and to mobilise or redirect its own transport assets in order to keep goods moving and take the edge of the worst of the shortages. As a result, the truck-owners’ boycott was defeated.

After that other September 11 almost forty years ago, when the bombs fell on La Moneda, the presidential palace where Allende took his own life rather than surrender to Pinochet’s fascists, the fires that destroyed democracy in Chile also took the world’s first non-Stalinist experiment in economy-wide planning with them, replaced by another economic experiment of an altogether opposite character: the monetarist structural adjustment of Milton Friedman, infamously replicated by Margaret Thatcher and her dozens of imitators.

Today, 40 years later, systemic change is on the table again. After decades of defeats, there is a burgeoning – if still fragile – sense that far-reaching transformation going beyond a tinkering with the system might be necessary and, crucially, achievable.

So you would think that the period would be ripe for discussion of a post-capitalist economics, for a blossoming of competing concrete proposals of what a thoroughly different economic system might look like. Yet very few have engaged in the hard thinking about what could happen ‘the morning after’ a presumed victory. We are undergoing the biggest economic disaster since the 1930s, an unprecedented global slump that may turn out to be worse than the Great Depression, and no one wants to theorise about the day after tomorrow, fearful that we may be ‘building castles in the air’.

This is the utility of Allende’s Cybersyn for us in 2013. Cybersyn is not some quirky historical curiosity. Nor was it a utopian dream. Rather, Allende’s experiment was a real-world example of post-capitalist planning that needs to be scrutinised in great depth and then appraised to see what bits of it, if any, can be redeployed were ordinary people once again to win power.

Richard Dawkins, professional atheist and Twitter provocateur, has branched out beyond his recent foray into Muslim journalist-baiting to offer his recommendations for parliamentary reform. Following Labour ex-minister Frank Field’s call for the new Archbishop of Canterbury to give up the 25 seats the Church of England appoints to the House of Lords, and have the seats awarded instead to people from civil society, Dawkins burped out a series of tweets saying that these seats should be given to scientists and other ‘elites’.

‘Replace Lord Bishops by (elected) heads of Royal Society, British Academy, Roy Coll Physicians, Royal Academy etc,’ he tweeted, adding: ‘I want to be operated on by elite surgeons, flown by elite pilots, have my car fixed by elite mechanics. Why not elite electors of Lords?’

Each of these colleges of presumably godless elites would select their own representatives to the upper chamber, a suggestion that was met with a chorus of approving retweetage from the atheist brigadier’s amassed troops of skeptics, secularists and science fans.

Who decides?

However fond of science and evidence one may be, it should be simple to spot the problem here. Who chooses which colleges of elite experts, scientists, technocrats? Perhaps we could have an expert panel that has an expertise in choosing experts. But then how is that expert panel chosen? Perhaps there are experts in expert panels that have expertise in choosing experts. One way out of this infinite regression is that grizzled old idea, democracy.

Dawkins is not alone these days in his greater faith in elite experts than in lumpen voters. The crisis response of the European Union has been to hollow out democracy and put in place new institutional mechanisms that remove fiscal policy-making from elected chambers and place it in the hands of unelected technocrats, central bankers, judges and diplomats instead.

As they could not be trusted to push through the necessary austerity and structural adjustment in the face of popular opposition, elected leaders have been thrown under the bus in Greece, Italy and Portugal by EU powerbrokers. And across the European periphery, ‘troika’ wonks are flown in to superintend governance. Without experts at the reins, Brussels says, electorates will keep voting themselves ever deeper into debt.

This elite anti-political stance – encompassing a fear of ‘excessive’ democracy, contempt for ordinary people and a faith in experts – is just the contemporary expression of an older distaste for taking democracy too far that dates back to the revolutionary republican upheavals that followed Dawkins’ beloved Enlightenment. Kings may have been overthrown or cowed by the insurgent Enlightenment-reading bourgeois, but that was as far as it was supposed to go.

Upper houses – Senates, Bundesrats, Chambers of Peers, Councils of State and so on – were all intended as wiser, wealthier, more knowledgeable checks on what US founding father James Madison described as the ‘fickleness and passion’ of lower chambers. They are in essence houses of republican nobility. (And, in the House of Lords, actual nobility, but its bicameralism is defended for the same reasons.)

Two Enlightenments

As one of the world’s leading historians of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel, has documented, there were in fact two Enlightenments: the moderate Enlightenment of Rousseau, Newton and Kant that embraced science and secularism but made its peace with or defended established power; and the radical Enlightenment of a hardier bunch inspired by Baruch Spinoza, the ‘prince of philosophers’, who went further, targeting the injustice of the entire social order and demanding democracy, equality and what we now call human rights.

There is much to be celebrated in the arrival in recent years of a popular militant secularism and cheering of science and reason. From the youthful Skeptics in the Pub groups popping up across the country, to homeopathy overdose die-ins, to the popularity of ‘science comedy’, it is hard to be curmudgeonly about a revival in Enlightenment thinking when Louisiana schools are teaching that the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution.

But there can also be at times something a little bit sneering and, well, elitist, about bits of this ‘movement’, the same attitude that inheres in the affinity of Dawkins and his followers for a scientised House of Lords, that democrats amongst the geeks would do well to try to excise. There is insufficient effort at understanding why people might embrace religion, New Age mumbo-jumbo, or alternative medicine, and occasionally a smug dismissal of the dumb, unlettered mass of humanity. Is this not the contemporary analogue of the moderate Enlightenment, an elitist rationalism comfortable with illegitimate power and disdainful of ordinary people?

Another famous haranguer of religion, Karl Marx, understood religion to be a protest against real suffering, and that the struggle against religion is pointless without a struggle against a political economy that requires religion as its analgesic. His frequently over-shortened quote, that religion is the opium of the people, continues: ‘The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.’

A House of Lords with 25 extra godless scientists is still a House of Lords. The living flower would not have been plucked.

According to the Daily Mail, when the venal killer is Margaret Thatcher, decorum and respect for the dead must prevail. But when the murderer is Osama bin Laden, well, Waheeey! It’s partaaay time!

Based on the Daily Mail’s moral algebra, the answer to when street revelry is acceptable can only be when the dead are easily enumerable. Then death parties are ‘moments to remember’.

But when we are talking about excess deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise – the kind that it takes epidemiologists to estimate with a margin of error and a level of confidence – or deaths in apartheid South Africa, or Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or Northern Ireland, where the link between the killer and killed is stochastic rather than deterministic, then public celebrations are ‘macabre’.

The paper on Wednesday denounced the ‘Flames of hate: 30 years of Left wing loathing for Lady T explodes in sick celebrations of her death’. Those marking the occasion with revelry across the country, from street parties to working men’s clubs’ extended closing times, were all engaged in ‘sick celebrations’.

The Mail fulminated against these ‘ugly’, ‘disgraceful’ ‘Thatcher death parties’ where ‘some people drank champagne while others walked around in Thatcher masks’ and ‘revellers cheered and handed out “Maggie death cake”‘ and party balloons.

At the very least, the argument goes, it would have been appropriate for those who disagreed with her policies to remain silent out of consideration for her grieving family.

A contrast

But just under two years ago, it was a different story. There were no thoughts for the deceased loved ones, no strident calls for decency, good manners and propriety. When Osama bin Laden was summarily executed by US Navy Seals, avoiding all niceties of due process, the Daily Mail joined with millions of Americans who took to their streets and parks and bars to celebrate the death of their enemy.

These were not ‘drunken mobs’ this time, but instead ‘euphoric crowds’. People who climbed atop street lamps and other structures were ‘daring’. ‘Many threw caution to the wind as they clambered to high vantage points to wave flags,’ the paper said.

These were ‘moments to remember’ and a time to be ‘proud to be an American’.

‘Memorable scenes at Times Square early today, with many waving U.S. flags in celebration,’ cooed the captions that sub-editors added to photos of the merry-making.

‘Fancy that! Actor Rob Lowe joined New York City Firefighters in Times Square to cheer the news of the death of Al Qaeda Leader!’ the paper continued, cheering along with the West Point Military Academy cadets who stripped down, started a bonfire and threw glow sticks out of their dorm rooms.

It was, the article’s four authors wrote, an ‘emotional high’.

Sing it

Efforts to propel ‘Ding dong, the Witch is Dead’ to the top of the download charts are self-evidently odious to commentators, but when Miley Cyrus’s ‘Party in the USA’ became the ‘official funeral song of Osama bin Laden’ and people played the tune outside the White House, this bubble-gum-pop thanatology was somehow unremarkable.

At the time former US President George W. Bush described the extra-judicial killing as ‘a momentous achievement’ while Tony Blair offered his ‘heartfelt gratitude’ for this ‘huge achievement’. Condoleeza Rice found it ‘absolutely thrilling’ and was ‘overwhelmed with gratitude’ while David Cameron expressed his ‘great relief’ and saluted the “great success”.

Elsewhere in the world the Polish foreign ministry put out a statement describing their ‘moment of happiness’, French foreign minister Alain Juppé said ‘I’m overjoyed’, and the Canadian prime minister declared his ‘sober satisfaction’. German leader Angela Merkel expressed ‘joy’ and the Dutch prime minister ‘presented his compliments to President Obama’.

Oh, and Charlie Sheen tweeted: ‘Dead or Alive. WE PREFER DEAD! Well done SEAL team! AMERICA: WINNING that’s how we roll.’

Well I say: Ghoulish, the lot of them, showing no respect for Bin Laden’s grieving family.

Largely missed in much of the coverage that focussed on the sheer nuttiness of those crazy happy-clappy Yanks, was that this sorry development is the predictable outcome of the broadest assault on public education yet by a US state, an agenda of radical privatisation that some of the most prominent New Atheists such as Dawkins, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and philosopher AC Grayling appear to be more than comfortable with.

As part of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s education system passed in May, pupils are to receive publicly funded vouchers to attend privately-run Christian schools teaching the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme, which attempts to disprove evolution.

One ACE textbook reads: ‘Have you heard of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland? “Nessie” for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.’

The Creationist, ‘young Earth’ logic holds that if it can be proved that dinosaurs still exist, then Darwinian evolution is shown to be false.

‘The ACE curriculum seems even to get the details wrong,’ Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science in Education, America’s leading anti-creationist organisation, told this reporter. ‘The ACE textbook identifies the Loch Ness monster as a plesiosaur – but plesiosaurs weren’t dinosaurs, as any eleven-year-old interested in palaeontology could have told them.’

‘The ACE curriculum wouldn’t be appropriate for public schools, both because of its scientific failing and because of its religious agenda,’ he said, adding that ACE and other fundamentalist materials are widely used in Christian schools. ‘But the situation in Louisiana is complex, because a new state-wide private school voucher program is involved, and it’s unclear to what degree the state will be required to oversee curriculum and instruction in the schools benefiting from the vouchers.’

Jindal’s law, the focus of two lawsuits from teachers’ associations, establishes the largest voucher programme of any state in the US. So far, around 125 private and religious schools have the green light to receive publicly funded vouchers given to families to pay for tuition. The vouchers shift millions of dollars out of the public education budget, delivering a windfall of cash to fundamentalist schools, worsening conditions in the public sector.

Any organisation that declares it can provide educational services is entitled to receive the vouchers. Democratic oversight of quality or curriculum has been replaced by ‘parent choice’.

Diane Ravitch, US Undersecretary of Education under George H. W. Bush and a one-time booster of vouchers and charter schools, reversed her opinion in the wake of a major national evaluation by only major national evaluation of charter schools was carried out by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond and funded by pro-charter foundations that showed 17 per cent of charter schools received higher scores, 46 per cent were no different, and 37 per cent performed significantly worse than public schools.

Describing her outrage at Jindal’s scheme, she wrote this month: ‘The voucher programme is a bold effort to privatise public education by taking money away from public schools and giving it to anyone who claims that they can offer some sort of an educational or tutoring or apprenticeship program, in person or online, regardless of its quality.’

The school that is to receive the most voucher students, New Living Word in Ruston, has no library, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune, and lessons are composed of instructional videos about chemistry or English with verses from the Bible plonked in the middle.

It is not that Louisiana authorities are not performing due diligence; the undermining of such oversight and checks is intrinsic to such systems.

Defending the plan, state education commissioner John White said: ‘To me, it’s a moral outrage that the government would say, “We know what’s best for your child”…Who are we to tell parents we know better?’

In 2013, the state plans to extend the programme to ‘mini-vouchers’ that can be cashed by private vendors for tutoring, online courses and apprenticeships, further chipping away at public education funds.

Louisiana is not some bumpkin outlier. Public cash being channelled toward Christian right teaching is happening in at least 13 US states, according to Bruce Wilson, a researcher on the role of religion in American politics, delivering funds to some 200,000 pupils.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last month unveiled his plan for education, which would see Jindal’s voucher scheme rolled out nationwide.

Wilson argues that under Romney’s plan, schools employing ACE curriculum and similar efforts such as the 2007 edition of the Bob Jones University biology textbook that tells students: ‘Is it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls… The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke… Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.’

Beyond the lack of evidence for improved educational results, one of the key criticisms opponents mount against vouchers systems, charter schools and their UK variation, academy schools, is that all these versions of introduction of ‘choice’ into public education actually eliminate or significantly reduce democratic accountability.

In a number of US states, members of a local board of education are elected by voters; school budgets face referenda; meetings of the board must be announced in advance, open to the public and entertain concerns of citizens, while schools awarded vouchers, charter schools, free schools and academies are no longer democratically accountable to local communities.

This is why it is far from unfair to suggest that Dawkins, Krauss, Grayling and company are inadvertently aiding the creationist presence of Nessie in schools. Asked in a chat in 2010 on Mumsnet, the online discussion for parents, whether he would support the creation of an atheist free school, Dawkins replied: ‘I like the idea very much, although I would prefer to call it a free-thinking free school.’ And, taking the unaccountable private approach to the post-secondary level, these three noted New Atheists are pushing ahead with the establishment of the New College of the Humanities, a private, for-profit, elite US-style university in the UK offering £18,000-a-year courses. Grayling for his part has said that said the private route is the only path left to deliver a high-quality humanities education.

Dawkins, Grayling and the rest of the atheism-for-elites cohort will say that their efforts would be precisely the opposite of what perhaps could be described as Louisiana’s Schools of Caledonian Cryptozoology.

But surely the point is not to have atheist schools for the godless wealthy and Bible-thumping schools for everyone else, but to ensure through the democratic construction of secular curricula – which is best ensured via healthily funded state schools – high-quality education for all.

Sneering at God-botherers in the US south is easy. The biggest blow Dawkins and friends can deliver to creationism in schools is to come out robustly in favour of public education.

Trichet has proposed what he calls ‘federation by exception,’ whereby if a country’s leaders or parliament ‘cannot implement sound budgetary policies,’ that country will be ‘taken into receivership’.

Recognising that it would not be possible in the timescale necessary to respond to the crisis to deliver a fully-fledged United States of Europe with the associated political and fiscal union, including fiscal transfers and common debt issuance, the former ECB president, who left office last November, said this ‘next step’ can at least be taken.

‘Federation by exception seems to me not only necessary to make sure we have a solid Economic and Monetary Union, but it might also fit with the very nature of Europe in the long run. I don’t think we will have a big [centralised] EU budget,’ he told the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington ahead of the G8 meeting this weekend and ahead of a make-or-break European Council meeting 23 May where EU leaders will discuss the fiscal, banking and political earthquake that is rumbling across southern Europe.

‘It is a quantum leap of governance, which I trust is necessary for the next step of European integration,’ he added.

Domestic fiscal policy has already been shunted off to unelected technocrats for vetting prior to assessment by elected parliaments as a result of the European Semester system, so in some ways, he is right to say that this is just ‘the next step’ beyond the still to be approved Fiscal Pact.

Of course, Trichet is now out of office, but he remains a policy heavyweight in European circles, and if the eurocrisis has shown us anything, it is that having a popularly sanctioned pulpit from which to speak is immaterial when it comes to whose voices are important. If anything, in being freed from office, Trichet is also now freed from the pretense that active ECB officials have to at least publicly maintain that the central bank only focusses on monetary policy and does not concern itself with the political governance of the provinces that lie within its territory. He can come out publicly with his proposals and not make them via secret letters to Italian prime ministers or orders to Portuguese elites.

At the same time, it should be underscored that this is not an official proposal from any EU institutions, and it remains to be seen what sort of hearing it will get, although reports from Washington suggest that his proposal was warmly received by economists and EU officials in attendance.

Nevertheless, let’s not be under any illusion that this proposal from a leading European ‘deep thinker’ is not a direct response to the elections in Greece this month that decimated the centre-left/centre-right austerity consensus in that country.

Trichet is in essence saying here that when the people elect the wrong parties, they have forfeited their right to democracy.

Acutely aware of what he is proposing, he declares that such a step would indeed have democratic accountability so long as it is approved by the European Council and the European Parliament.

But the European Council is a legislative chamber that never faces a general election. Its members, the presidents and prime ministers of Europe, are not elected to that chamber, but to their domestic parliaments and assemblies. And the European Parliament is not yet the parliament of a European government; even after the Lisbon Treaty, its powers remain very limited compared to the European Commission and Council, and, crucially, it does not have the power to initiate any legislation.

Should Trichet’s proposal or anything remotely similar somehow make its way to the Strasbourg chamber for its endorsement, any MEPs who cherish democracy must loudly oppose them.

If MEPs cannot muster sufficient numbers to do so, then the chamber would instantly be exposed as a Potemkin parliament, serving only to provide a facade of democratic legitimacy to an otherwise anti-democratic regime and so very far from the seed of a genuine European democratic order that many deputies wish it to be.

When governments are using the economic crisis as an excuse to strip away what remains of the post-war welfare-state consensus, when the likelihood of runaway climate change threatens civilisation, when unending wars and the collapse of civil liberties have become just ‘the new normal’, is it really the time or the place to raise the admittedly on-the-face-of-it nutty slogan ‘Nationalise Facebook Now’?

Oh yes, comrades, it is.  Or at least something like it, because the irresolubility of all these issues is ultimately the product of a common problem all tangled up with how we approach the ol’ Facebook conundrum. Sceptical? I’m feeling you, but roll with me here for a minute.

On Friday, an article by John Brownlee on Cult of Mac, the Apple news website, shone a light on a decidedly creepy little app called ‘Girls Around Me’, a geolocation maps service that uses freely available data from Foursquare and Facebook to deliver a map of women who have recently checked into different nearby locations via Foursquare or been checked in by someone else via FB and who have publicly visible Facebook profiles of women.

Brownlee describes how someone might use what the Daily Mail accurately rechristened the ‘Let’s Stalk Women’ app. He uses it to look up a girl called ‘Zoe’ who has just checked in to a local watering hole called The Independent:

“Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”

“Okay, so it looks like Zoe is my kind of girl. From her photo albums, I can see that she likes to party, and given the number of guys she takes photos with at bars and clubs at night, I can deduce that she’s frisky when she’s drunk, and her favorite drink is a frosty margarita. She appears to have recently been in Rome.”

“So now I know everything to know about Zoe. I know where she is. I know what she looks like, both clothed and mostly disrobed. I know her full name, her parents’ full names, her brother’s full name. I know what she likes to drink. I know where she went to school. I know what she likes and dislikes. All I need to do now is go down to the Independent, ask her if she remembers me from Stoneham High, ask her how her brother Mike is doing, buy her a frosty margarita, and start waxing eloquently about that beautiful summer I spent in Roma.”

The author used the app as an object lesson in the privacy issues relating to social networking and, in this case, geo-location mash-ups, that too few people pay very much attention to. By Saturday, Apple had pulled the app from the iTunes store and Foursquare had blocked Girls Around Me’s API access to their data.

The discussion around the subject in the last 48 hours has focused pretty much exclusively on two issues: a) nudging people into better decision-making around the sort of information they share online; and b) forcing companies to deploy use of shared data in an ethical fashion.

If more people begin to pay closer attention to online privacy as a result of all this, tremendous.  But such a solution to the problem remains dependent on a) the knowledge of the consumer and her ability to act based on that knowledge (Facebook’s privacy controls are notoriously labyrinthine); b) the willingness of other firms to act swiftly to respond to breaches or in this case perceived breaches of their rules governing the use of their products (however creepy Girls Around Me is, it does not appear that the company behind the app, Russian firm I-Free, actually did anything that was not allowed); and c) regulation in this area to keep pace in with technological change.

It took an excellent blog post by science-fiction author Charles Stross – best known for his novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, set in a post-technological-singularity world, and who is used to extemporising on the possible social implications of technological change – to think a bit more deeply about the meaning of this episode.

Girls Around Me may have been shut down, but, as Stross argues, the app is just “symptomatic of a really major side-effect of our forced acculturation into Facebook’s broken model of human social interaction—a broken model shared by all the most successful social networks, by design—and that it is going to get much worse, until it kills people.”

He imagines a near future of other, far nastier mash-ups of geolocation and aggregation of publicly available data, with apps “being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy.”

He envisages a ‘Yids Among Us’ for anti-Semites. He wonders how such technology could be employed in a Rwanda-style situation, with, say, a ‘Hutus/Tutsis Near Me I Can Massacre’ app.

Beyond malevolent uses of geolocation, Stross notes that there is already an algorithm out there that can accurately guess the sexual orientation of an individual based on network connections. Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, two young computer scientists at MIT, developed it to show how network data implicitly reveals private information, by determining that the percentage of a user’s friends who identify as gay is strongly correlated with the sexual orientation of that user.

It’s an amazing piece of science in the public interest. The paper deserves a full read if you have the time, but suffice to quote the authors’ conclusions:
“The privacy controls of Facebook, a multi–billion dollar corporation, offer anaemic protection … [O]ur model built from relatively simple network data was mostly unimpeded by Facebook’s privacy efforts. Future extensions of this work need not be limited to Facebook and could be applied to telephone call records or even e–mail transactions, as those communications rely on social connections. Who is to say that companies are not already doing the type of network analysis presented here behind closed doors?

“Extensions of our work to other networks has profound ramifications. Network data shifts the locus of information control away from individuals. Each individual’s traditional and absolute discretion is replaced by that of members of his social network.”

Network data, search-term data mining and tracking of online activity is already being successfully used in behavioural advertising to recommend books you might like to buy and a selection of appropriate do-it-yourself products when you decide to refit your bathroom.

Using algorithms based on search queries, Google can predict flu outbreaks faster than epidemiologists of national health agency flu surveillance.

I’m sure that some employers would be very interested in an application that accurately predicts which employees are likely union organisers or those most open to joining a union, while governments might want a programme that can guess the identity of political dissidents or anticipate who is about to break the law.

Is this unnecessary fear-mongering? Grindr, the gay dating app that employs GPS to locate other gay men in the area, and which could have been the perfect hunting tool for violent homophobes, has not resulted in any explosion of gay-bashings. The Rwandan genocidaires did not need Facebook or Foursquare to perpetrate their massacre. And governments intent on citizen surveillance will do so whatever tools are available.

So technological advance is certainly not the cause of injustice. However, it can make its performance more efficient. Counting machines were not responsible for the Holocaust, but, according to the historian of the relationship between IBM and the Nazi regime, Edwin Black: “without IBM’s machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler’s camps could have never managed the numbers they did.”

It all depends who is wielding the technology. Knives can be used to cut up cauliflower or to murder Tutsis.

As Stross notes: “The app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.”

I suppose we could always switch providers if we don’t like the way a particulr business operates. Now, it’s never the case that it is as easy as the free-market fundamentalists pretend it is to switch providers of a good or service when one is unhappy with the product, but it is true that that possibility is there at least for some items, like cheese or pillow cases. Except that Facebook isn’t a regular product. It is an effective monopoly.

Google Plus arrived last year with its modicum of superior identity and privacy management compared to FB, but hasn’t met with the success Google expected, largely because a customer cannot shift their brand loyalty in the social networking world as easily as they can from Coke to Pepsi. They would have to convince all their friends to jump ship at the same time.

Facebook, like Google’s search product, has no viable competitors and for the above reason, is unlikely to any time in the near future, making Facebook a what is called a ‘natural monopoly’.

Historically, natural monopolies emerged in those industries where the massive capital costs involved presented significant barriers to entry and discouraged competition (railways, electricity, water, etc.). In almost all cases, these industries were also utilities that everyone needed access to – what could today be described as ‘essential services’. Search I think it is fair to argue should now be viewed as just such a utility, as essential as water or electricity. Social networking for its part is closing in on being as essential as telephony.

Natural monopolies are in general robust entities, but do not have to last forever. Natural monopolies can sometimes be undermined by technological change (such as Britain’s canal system in the 19th Century by the then-new technology of railways). Google’s search (although not its other products) is a natural monopoly that is ripe for such a toppling. A new search engine with much more powerfully intelligent semantic search, able to understand more closely what a user is looking for, could quickly challenge the mighty Google. And Facebook is not forever. Remember MySpace, or Friendster?

Thinkup for example, is a free, non-profit open-source ‘data-liberation and analytics application’ that aims to build in its words a decentralised information network “that connects to today’s social networks, but isn’t centralised and dependent on a company or investors.” Diaspora meanwhile, still yet to go into beta status, is trying to build a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service in order to allow users to “communicate directly, securely, and without running exchanges past the prying eyes of Zuckerberg and his business associates.”

But Diaspora is likely to run into the same problems as Google Plus in trying to get users to jump en masse over to its concept, and it is already handicapped by having none of the market-dominance advantages that should have helped Google.

More fundamentally, there is a problem in viewing the problem as just a technical challenge to be overcome by the right start-up: Even if a Thinkup  or Diaspora  manages against all odds to dislodge Lord Zuckerberg, in the meantime, both FB and Google remain private natural monopolies, with all the problems that such entities entail. And ‘in the meantime’ may in any case be a long, long time.

And will the new boss be much better than the old boss? It depends on the new entity’s democratic accountability.

So what should be a progressive response to this brave new world of privacy-mulching social-network natural monopolies? I can’t believe I’m quoting Milton Friedman here, but here goes. The arch-liberal economist wrote that in response to a natural monopoly materialising: “There is only a choice among three evils: private unregulated monopoly, private monopoly regulated by the state, and government operation.”

Leaving a private monopoly alone and unregulated – the situation we have at the moment – is clearly not tenable. And progressives rightly have historically argued that natural monopolies do not make good candidates for regulation alone due to much of what made them natural monopolies in the first place – they are the most adept sorcerers of regulatory capture (what happens when a regulation or regulatory agency intended to serve the public interest and keep a close eye on an industry instead advances an industry’s or company’s interest).

So what about Friedman’s third option?  Once upon a time, when when natural monopolies were creatures of a single nation state, and before the neo-liberal mania for deregulation and privatisation infected policymaking some 30 years ago, electricity firms, water companies, railways and the like could be placed into public ownership. For all the problems this sometimes presented, on balance, public ownership of natural monopolies served the general interest to a much greater degree than the alternatives. I’m not going to rehearse here the problems of deregulated, privatised water, electric, rail, waste management and telecoms that we have seen since this epoch, but they are manifold. (If you’re interested, the Public Service International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich is an excellent resource)

But what should be the progressive response to these new kinds of natural monopolies, ‘digital natural monopolies’, which have become so not – or not largely – as a result of capital costs but as a result of other types of insurmountable advantages that flow from a networked world? Very few people have given this much consideration. There are privacy and digital rights advocates aplenty (La Quadrature du Net, the Open Rights Group, Electronic Frontiers Foundation, etc.), which all do great work, and Europe’s increasingly popular Pirate Parties, who now even have two seats in the European Parliament and won another four last week in the Saarland state elections in Germany.  But the online rights discourse (including separate but related subjects such as net neutrality, file-sharing, etc.) is often dominated by a libertarian politic.

The libertarian character of the digital rights conversation has something of a split personality. Its activists and lobbyists are caught between a recognition that state intervention in the market is required, for example, to preserve net neutrality, and a deregulatory neo-liberal instinct that prevents them from conceiving of a return to public ownership of the telecommunication companies – a move that would preserve net neutrality; ensure high-speed internet access to all locales, not just those that are profitable; and enable a redistribution of their windfall profits back to public-interest journalists and independent musicians who have been hit so hard since the advent of the internet.

A more progressive politic, from those less fearful of public, democratic intervention against the market, has something to add to this conversation. What it is though, I’m not quite sure yet.

Is it possible to construct an argument for public ownership of the likes of Facebook and Google? Is it even desirable? Is the prospect of the state as superintendent of all this personal information really a preferable alternative to a private, profit-seeking business as superintendent? Which state would do the owning? These are truly global companies. The UN then? But the UN is not a democratic structure. Can an international non-profit social network co-operative be built instead, democratically controlled by its members independent of both the market and the state?

O Wikipedians, to have a social network with your ethos rather than the mercenary avarice of Facebook’s owners.

I don’t have an answer, but the key point here is that we need to start thinking about what it might be.

Progressives need to start thinking much more deeply about issues such as geolocation, social networking, search, data mining and other digital issues – and how they relate to global governance. These topics cannot be left to be framed by the libertarians of the likes of the Pirate Parties and breathless, unlettered internet-guru douchebags.

And here is how all this is tangled up with issues of global warming, austerity and even war: The 21st Century seems to keep throwing up significant public policy challenges that only a system of international and democratic governance can solve (climate change, the financial crisis, transfer pricing, tax havens, the internet), yet we do not have such a system.

So these issues are being tackled in the absence of such a global democratic arena simply by the most powerful ‘sector stakeholders’ – might makes right.

We have an International Criminal Court, but in practice it’s the International Criminal Court for Third-World Criminals Only. We have the UNFCCC, but it’s a few key countries that shepherd the process to the disadvantage of the developing world. ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) against genocide and crimes against humanity is an emerging international legal norm used to justify so-called humanitarian intervention, but can never be employed against the most powerful countries and their allies. And the European Union is a grand experiment in post-democratic transnational governance that is sidelining democratically elected chambers in favour of technocrats and diplomats.

Less-than-democratic international structures are being built with or without us. A global system is already being fabricated – politically and digitally – whether we’re paying attention or not.

In response, sober, practical yet genuinely transformative proposals for the construction of a democratic global system – a global republic, if you will – need to start being developed without being dismissed as pie-in-the-sky maximalism.

So maybe the slogan on the banner shouldn’t exactly be ‘Nationalise Facebook Now!’, but, erm, it should be something. Let’s start thinking what it might be.