Raising Hell: Issue 5: Our Dreams Are Small

What a fortnight. In just the last two weeks, we had people on the streets of Melbourne protesting the lockdown laws and calling for Bill Gates’ arrest. Scott Morrison has effectively walked onto the global stage and asked to see China’s manager with his demands they be investigated over the Covid-19 pandemic. I had a coffee at a cafe last Friday. Murder hornets.

Really though, the only thing any rational person has been thinking about is what happens when we re-open society after two months of shut down. Much of this has been coloured by the first release in a run of data. The result, in short, was expected: millions have been thrown out of work and half the country is living off some kind of government support. While this does not make for a good time for many, there is a curious thread in this blizzard of information. With the massive disruption caused by the pandemic, those on social security have experienced the first meaningful lift to their living standards in a generation thanks to an infusion of cash from the Coronavirus supplement. At the very same time, if the data is to be believed, the wealthiest among us — the investor class — have been bleeding red ink. In other words, the very bottom end of the income distribution has grown while the top end has fallen towards the middle. I’m no academic but this seems to offer a certain clarity to our politics over the last month. The sooner memories fade, the better…

Image: On his day off, journalist Travis Long went down to his local subway in Raleigh, North Carolina to photograph 11 demonstrators out protesting the lockdown laws — all well-armed with freedom cannons (Source: Travis Long)

Not that it is possible to tell where all this is going. As the machine boots back up, questions still remain. How many restaurants will re-open remains to be seen. Years of austerity means we are watching universities, the arts and the media approach the point of collapse (another reason why I’m grateful to my paying subscribers). At the very least, it’s possible rents in capital cities may fall as AirBnB apartments are no longer profitable given the total lack of tourists or international students. But hey, at least the stock market is making a buck?

Faced with this landscape, you may think our political leadership would respond by dreaming big. In fact, it seems the opposite is true. What this last fortnight has reinforced is just how small our dreams really are. Even as some quarters of the media (myself included) have been asking how we could make the future better, our political leaders have mostly committed to more of the same. The Coalition has antagonised our largest trading partner while simultaneously tying Australia to the ever sober and rational spectre of Trumps’s America (see the above image). In practical terms, those free trade deals written for the benefit of drought-hit Queensland dairy farmers and the South Australian wine industry have been for nothing. All the while the planet continues to cook and the best the Australian government has to offer are some dead ideas about how “technology” is the answer — going so far as to say they may pay for “clean coal”.

Labor, meanwhile, aren’t faring much better. Anthony Albanese has greeted the dawn of this new epoch not with a bold new vision for a better society but an announcement that the social security rate should lowered back down below the poverty line. In some ways it is hard to blame the guy, given the centrists in his own party are reasserting themselves. Former Victorian Labor Premier, Steve Brack (described warmly in the Fin Review as a “Labor elder”) exposed the terms of this ideological exchange when he declared the union movement “irrelevant” while being interviewed for a podcast. Somewhere, I’m sure, John Setka shivered. Even their rivals on the left side of politics haven’t had a fun time, as the Greens failed to pass a motion that would give the party membership a greater say in how their leader was elected.

So what happens next? I have no idea — except to say that the future will be more or less like today, with the added burden of a recession. Anyone who tells you otherwise, who says they know what is going to happen next is probably made in the likeness of Pete Evans. And if there is one lesson from history we should all take on board, it’s that whenever some sonofabitch starts talking about “manifesting our own reality”, run. Nothing good can follow.

Image: A highway in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi two months into the pandemic (Source: Irenaeus Herok)

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

• “Transport after coronavirus: how will we fly, drive, commute and ride?” (2020, The Guardian, 9 May)This fortnight saw the culmination of weeks of work, with The Guardian publishing this longer feature from me on the future of transport. The biggest value-add was the observation that Covid-19 has served as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on our social institutions, forcing a massive reduction in capacity in order to compensate — lest these systems collapse. Thought of this way, a lot of what has taken place over the last two months makes more sense.
• Beer and Other Sins: Kings Head ClosureI also filed the latest installment of my column to the upcoming issue of The Adelaide Review, this time on the closure of the Kings Head. As a study of drinking culture, this moment has been interesting for how people have adapted. Bigger picture, if one-in-three restaurants and bars do not re-open, we’ll basically be looking at the symptoms of a massive solvency crisis.
• Adelaide City Council GoofsIn the hours before this hit inboxes across the country I filed a story for NITV on a Minecraft map the Adelaide Council released inviting players to recreate Adelaide in 1836. In setting up a colonial groundhog day by having players act out that moment again and again and again, the council exposed a deeper conversation about history. This, I’m afraid, is a subject most Australians know little about — not because it’s hard to learn but mostly because it’s hard to hear. On top of this I have one more commission from NITV.
• The Saturday PaperI’ve also been putting together a feature on how the design of offices made us more vulnerable to Covid-19. Once these are done, I’ll be taking a couple of days to rest up so I can actually have a weekend and maybe stop myself collapsing in a fit of exhaustion. After that, I have a few ideas for stories I’ll be chasing so, stay tuned…

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

• Peter Dutton Really Struggles With This “Trust” Thing

  If there was any doubt all the promises about the Covid-19 contact tracing app were basically meaningless, news that Peter Dutton has been seeking to massively expand the powers of the Australian surveillance state should offer a certain clarity. The man whose sole mission in public life has been to concentrate increasing amounts of power into the department of Home Affairs, introduced a fun new bill that would allow ASIO to interrogate children as young as 14, ban troublesome lawyers from proceedings and extend compulsory questioning powers to those engaged in “acts of political violence”. Most Australians can, of course, rest easy knowing such powers will never be used against them. Download the app!

• I, For One, Welcome Our New Digital Overseers

  Not that surveillance is any better outsourced to the private sector. Even as bosses the world over have embraced working from home out of necessity, the lingering suspicion has remained: how do they know you are actually working? On cue, the tech industry has rushed to solve the problem and in doing so made the world fractionally worse. Once installed on a desktop computer, software such as that offered by Hubstaff, much like the Eye of Sauron, monitors your mouse movements, records how long you spend on social media, snaps photos of your through your webcam to make sure you are at your seat and tracks your phone to make sure you are actually where you say you are.

• In Search Of An Omega Man

  In a fun-new twist on this whole pandemic thing, scientist have warned the Covid-19 virus — allowed to let rip across the US and the UK — appears to be adapting to its human hosts. Biology being what it is, different regions of the world are seeing genetic mutations in the virus which may make the process of finding a vaccine (or inoculating through infection) more difficult in the long run. Whether or not this will moderate calls from public figures who have been advocating an immediate, sudden and total return to business as usual remains to be seen given “liquidate the underclass” seems to be an option that is forever on the table.

• The Rich Really Are Different To You And I

  Spare a thought for the beautiful people of the jet-setting crowd who spend their years hopscotching their way around the globe in permanent summer, skittering from tax haven to tax haven. With governments across the world (except for, maybe, countries like Brazil, India and the Philippines) forced to close the borders and jack up the deficit to keep their people from starving as they wait-out the virological storm that has been Covid-19, those whose mission in life is to contribute as little as possible to the societies which host them have found themselves unexpectedly landlocked. This makes it possible they may become — shock — unexpected residents of those countries. Worse yet, they face the prospect they may actually have to pay tax.

• Rich Guys Don’t Know What They’re Talking About: Other Rich Guys

  If dollars (US or otherwise) were a point-system, there is a persistent myth within market culture that says money equals knowledge. After all, how did those people get rich if they weren’t actually the smartest people in the room? Not so, according to Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Having spent the last fortnight watching billionaire investors pontificate on television about movements in the sharemarket, Brown told Business Insider the average person would be better off ignoring them. Why? Most of the time they were guessing and if they changed their mind tomorrow, they wouldn’t be going back on the tele to tell you about it.

• Think Global, Buy Local

  Moving from the domestic-sphere, a private boys school in Sydney, New South Wales has “leased” a public park from Inner West Council in order to secure “exclusive” access to the area after school hours. The deal, which serves as the covert privatisation of public assets, offers the boys of Newington College a fine lesson in the way of the world, teaching that anything is possible with enough determination, cash and political support…

• Failing Upward

  Where I recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

  This is a story about former Labor MP Mike Kelly. He was the man with the sweet moustache who, long before his stint in politics, had served in the Australian Defence Force. During his time in the service he deployed to places like Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He participated in the prosecution of warlords and despots like Saddam Hussein. He was, in some respects, a bit of a bad ass.

  

  Image: The moustache in question (Source: Wikimedia commons).

  And it was this social capital Kelly could rely upon when he ran for office and won the regional New South Wales bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro in 2007. Joining the Rudd government, he served as Minister for defence and since then served in a range of roles, but none so influential as his seat on the parliamentary joint committee for intelligence and security where the better part of the job is spent kicking it with spooks — notably, CIA officers.

  If this basic CV places Kelly at whatever point the intelligence community meets the lucrative business of defence procurement, the man would leverage these skills and connections for his post-politics career. When Kelly resigned his seat due to ill-health, he triggered a by-election in Eden-Monaro and revealed he had taken what he called a “desk job” with Palantir Technologies.

  If Christopher Pyne was anything to go by, the notion an old soldier might take a job in the defence industry after public life was hardly remarkable. After he resigned his post in federal cabinet, Pyne rolled straight into a new job as “defence consultant” for multinational business advisors EY.

  The catch for Kelly was that Palantir made the old-fashioned arms trade look downright honourable by comparison. If the thought of someone going back through your browser history makes you uncomfortable, Palantir — a company cut straight from the pages of a Marvel comic, should terrify you. Co-founded by Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire Trump supporter and Facebook board member who wants to live forever — and $2 million from the CIA venture capital fund Q-Tel, the primary business of Palantir Technologies really is your business. These are the guys who gave Cambridge Analytica their ideas and can track your car basically anywhere. They mine your data at an industrial scale and have been implicated in plots to smear leftwing journalists including Glenn Greenwald and that ol’ punching bag Wikileaks.

  None of which has clearly bothered Kelly. As a federal MP, the Labor rep praised the company on the floor of parliament in 2018 for their data-mining efforts that contributed to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. In announcing his new gig, Kelly praised his his new employers as an “amazing organisation” that was "populated with some of the finest talent and quality personnel in the world".

  We here at Raising Hell would like to go on record as wishing Kelly and his sweet moustache a capital “P”, Profitable post-politics career in the private sector. We would also like to remind his new friends at Palantir that if they wish to monitor our activities, all they need to do is subscribe below.

Good Reads, Good Times

• Sharon Learner, writing in The Intercept, has this long feature on the way US oil giant Chevron has been going after lawyer Steven Donziger. Donziger spent the last two-and-a-half decades representing Indigenous people and farmers in Ecuador as they attempt to sue the iconic American company for turning their homes into an industrial wasteland. Chevron, for its part has responded by claiming Donziger has been engaged in massive fraud. The lawyer has since been placed under house arrest, stripped of his assets and stopped from working after being convicted of bribery. The central witness against Donziger is a former Ecuadorian judge who has been deposed 50 times by Chevron, admitted to having lied and changed his story and who has since been moved to the US with a living allowance 20 times more than what he was earning as a judge. So much for the land of the free, home of the brave…
• This in the Scottish Review by Alan McIntyre is an insightful analysis about why the US will never, ever do anything about gun control and why it has no issue letting Covid-19 work its way through the underclass.
• If you were looking for a way to make sense of the Trump crazy, it is worth checking out this backgrounder in the New Yorker on the network of rich, libertarian types feeding the kamikaze President with his ideas.
• The Daily Beast had this story about how the bizarre 5G conspiracy nonsense is little more than a sales funnel for getting people to take up the banner of the far right.
• In our own regional neighbourhood, The Baffler have this essay on the emerging police state in the Philippines which is busy grinding the poor and desperate into dust.
• Just across the water, Overland have this piece on the Maori “duty to protect” and this sensibility, borne of a century of adversity, means they will act when the colonial government will not.

They Say The Camera Adds Ten Pounds (Of Pressure)

• In case you missed it (how could you?), the last fortnight saw protests by crowds in Melbourne chanting things like “arrest Bill Gates” during a rally of 5G conspiracy theorists. For me, this one of those love-hate moments. There was something beautiful about a pack of yahoos choosing 5G and a pandemic to make their stand for “freedom”. For the last (let’s just say) decade, the Australian government has been engaged in all manner of cruelties and stupidities and none of these people were anywhere to be seen. In fact, I’d wager the good majority of them would sooner tell someone protesting the government’s refugee policy or deaths in custody to get a job…

  If it is possible to learn anything at all from these useful idiots, it relates to the collapse of our institutions and the ability to generate reliable narratives upon which we can all collectively act. This, it has to be said, has been deliberate. The political programme of the small government crowd over last three decades has largely been to undermine institutions where they can’t otherwise be passed over to the private sector. The result has been a vacuum of information which has been rapidly filled by anyone with a YouTube account and too much enthusiasm. These guys (and the majority are male), though rightfully critical of authority, are the equivalent of snake oil merchants feeding their audiences something that feels truthy even when most legit conspiracy theories are happening right in front of their nose (See Palantir). J.R. Hennessy recently made this point better than I while explaining the tech side of things:

  “Being able to download a movie in three seconds and cloud-connected industrial robots don’t really figure quite as prominently in the popular discourse. This may well be because 5G is barely ready for suppliers to bundle up and sell to subscribers, but it certainly seems that, if you were a curious person wanting to find what all the hubbub was about, you would find fairly anodyne write-ups from tech journos about spectrum bandwidth and telco networks on one side, versus a sprawling narrative tying together evil tech companies, coronavirus, big pharma, and pedophile elites on the other. (Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is Huawei.)

  There seems to be a huge vacuum in the discourse which allows conspiracies to find quarter in people who might not be that way inclined, with only the vaguely Whiggish assumption that technology will just keep getting faster, better and more pervasive — and that’s just how it is — as the only counterpoint to the paranoid thinking.”

  But then, who are we, really, to stand between a group of peasants with pitchforks and a billionaire — whatever their reasons:

  The crowd has broken into chants of "arrest Bill Gates" at the anti-lockdown protest at Parliament House in Melbourne @theage. The crowd has grown considerably since midday.

  — Rachael Dexter (@rachael_dexter) 2:15 AM ∙ May 10, 2020

• There is no more awkward moment then when the Prime Minister begins to talk about “subsidies” and “handouts” as if the millions now getting by on Jobkeeper and Jobseeker were meth addicts.

Stray Thoughts…

• It is worth reading this Twitter thread where a virologist talks about 1) how they’re currently earning more on JobKeeper than they were as a working virologist and 2) how their former role in doing important stuff like vanquishing highly infectious diseases was overtaken when the government came to value a shiny buzzword like “Innovation” more.

Before You Go (Go)…

• Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that turns out to be burying toxic waste beneath children’s playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! Download the encrypted message app Wickr Me onto your phone or laptop and contact us securely at my handle: rorok1990.
• If you’re lurking and like what you see, throw me a subscription to get my screeds straight to your inbox every second Tuesday — it’s free. If you like what I do and want to see me do more of it, throw me a paid subscription — it’s $5 a month or $50 a year. Are you skint? Or flush? Well, you can also pay what you feel I’m worth by setting your own yearly rate.
• And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, or leaving a review or just tell a friend about Raising Hell!