The Wiki Man

If you have used Oxford railway station recently, you may have noticed a strange electronic sign on the up platform displaying a ‘parking code’, a seemingly random three-digit number. I wondered about this and asked around. It seems that, when parking next to the station, you can either ‘pay and display’, in which case you pay a kind of rip-off-the-clueless-tourists hourly rate, or else you can pay by mobile phone. By including the ‘parking code’ when you call (it can only be seen from the platform, and hence is known only to those with train tickets) you pay much less. It’s a system of discrimination where there’s one price for rail travellers and another for everyone else — you could call it aparkheid.

It takes a more ruthless person than me to walk past any of the defunct branches of Borders without feeling some pangs of conscience. I am sure the chain made some mistakes (it had a strange habit of opening vast, hangar-like stores in out-of-town retail parks such as Lakeside, places not generally known for their wide-ranging literary tastes), but its shops were usually well stocked and staffed. No, it is people like me who are responsible for this bankruptcy, our every Amazon visit a further nail in the coffin of the traditional bookseller. How long before the proper bookshop becomes as rare on our streets as the traditional tobacconist?

Much as it pains me to use the Spectator’s pages to plug another publication, I can’t help being impressed by the Economist’s invention of a new kind of subscription service. Much as it pains me to use the Spectator’s pages to plug another publication, I can’t help being impressed by the Economist’s invention of a new kind of subscription service. Like many people, you probably enjoy the Economist, but just not quite enough to read it every week. Perhaps you simply can’t make time in your busy schedule to learn more about the prospects for electoral reform in Turkmenistan.

I’m not frightened of flying. Or spiders. Nor, like one friend of mine, do I have a crippling fear of tomatoes. But I do suffer from mild koumpounophobia — the fear of buttons. I should add that, in my case, it is more a mild distaste than a full-blown phobia. While I wouldn’t care to be ravished by a pearly queen, I am really only bothered by loose buttons, not those attached to clothing — so I can wear shirts happily enough. Recently, though, on the ‘takes one to know one’ principle, I have begun to wonder whether Apple’s Steve Jobs might suffer from a more extreme form of this condition. Photos of Jobs suggest he has a remarkable distaste for visible fastenings, seams or other attachments on his clothing.

You know how it is. You’re driving down some remote B road in rural Britain and your petrol tank is running low. At last you stumble on some tiny petrol station selling some fabulously obscure brand of petrol such as Anglo or Burmah. When you pull in, the weirdest thing happens — a live human being walks over to your car and offers to fill your tank. Theoretically, we should be delighted by this. But most of us under 60 probably find it faintly disquieting. Filling a petrol tank is now something we prefer to do for ourselves. Of course there may be a Freudian explanation for the male urge to fill up.

At an airport recently I saw a sign for the public telephones; it was a symbol showing a round telephone dial with a receiver across the top. Nothing odd about this, you may think — that is if, like me, you are over 40. If you are under 20, on the other hand, it may be incomprehensible, for at no time in your life has your telephone looked even remotely like this. At the very least, the symbol must seem absurdly anachronistic, like those twee signs you get on loo doors where the man and woman are wearing Edwardian costume. The change is not confined to the phone’s shape, either. The whole meaning of the word ‘phone’ is different among the under 20s, as shown by a friend’s teenage daughter when petitioning her parents to buy her some gadget for Christmas.

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. Even in my most right-wing moments, I don’t want to open my Spectator to find articles proposing a selective breeding programme (though, come to think of it, this may have been the idea behind the Spectator Editors’ Dinner — I left around 11, so never got the chance to find out). All the same, his attack on eugenics, as with many anti-Darwin assaults, seems to focus on the evil done in the name of eugenics rather than the science itself.

Most debate about modern architecture revolves around aesthetics. This misses the point. I quite like the way many modern buildings look — what I hate is the way they work. Say what you like about traditional architecture, no one has ever approached the portico of the British Museum and asked, ‘Any idea where the entrance might be?’ By contrast, until recently (when a design team installed some intelligent signage), you could circle the Barbican for hours and still have no idea how to get in. Once inside, you were faced by a baffling array of stairways all heading in random directions. One requirement of good public architecture — like good software — is that people should navigate it instinctively.

Judging by my fellow passengers on trains or planes, I am in a minority in being more addicted to words than music. While perfectly fond of music, on long journeys I am slightly unnerved by the many people in headphones who can sit for three hours at a stretch staring vacantly into space. I could easily survive that long without an iPod, but would start foaming at the mouth if I had to last 20 minutes without anything to read. I also admire wordsmiths more than tunesmiths. Until his verbal assault on his brother (‘He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup’), I never had much time for Noel Gallagher; now I think he’s a genius.

Every time I am forced to listen to whingefests such as You and Yours, I wonder if it’s time to invent the mirror image of a consumer affairs programme — where Britain’s largest businesses get to expose the behaviour of their worst customers. Every time I am forced to listen to whingefests such as You and Yours, I wonder if it’s time to invent the mirror image of a consumer affairs programme — where Britain’s largest businesses get to expose the behaviour of their worst customers. ‘And, in a packed programme this week, Tesco launches a shocking investigation into the behaviour of Mr M. Jones of Rotherham after he ignores repeated requests not to urinate in the drinks aisle ...and we finally get to ask J.

If the definition of a true communist is someone who would willingly live for a month in 1970s Poland, the definition of a true capitalist should be anyone who could spend a month in Las Vegas while reading nothing but Hammacher Schlemmer mail order catalogues. Even hardened materialists can find American consumerism a little much. A bizarre-looking $300 item I once saw turned out to be an oriel window for your cat. (The idea is that you fix this to your window frame so it protrudes through the sash window of your 32nd floor apartment, allowing your pet a 180° view of the outside world.) But there is a good side to this.

Imagine for a moment that every policeman in Britain were issued with two or three tracking devices, each the size of a small packet of chewing gum. Magnetically attached to a car, it would record the target’s every movement for 48 hours using its inbuilt GPS. When retrieved and plugged into a computer, it would plot the places visited by the suspect as a line on Google earth. Now imagine the same device equipped with a simple SIM card and mobile phone transmitter. A little larger now, perhaps the size of a small matchbox, the device can be programmed to send a text to a pre-assigned number revealing its position, speed and direction of travel. Send a simple SMS code and it might reply with *00015.6716,E,5108.3743,N,8.87,338.42*060909,151948.

There is an experiment in behavioural economics which involves showing people some item — a mug or suchlike — and asking them what they might be prepared to pay for it. Some time later, you contrive to give them an identical mug for free. You then ask how much they want to hand their mug back. The figure they cite is significantly higher than before. This discrepancy, which defies conventional economic models, is known as the ‘endowment effect’. An extreme example of this was demonstrated by Dan Ariely, who found that students who had been unsuccessful in the ticket lottery for a major Duke University basketball match were on average prepared to pay only $170 for a ticket.

It isn’t every day you hear the suggestion that British imperialism has ‘done more to alleviate poverty than all the world’s aid programmes in the last century’, and to hear such praise from the lips of an American is rarer still. All the more so when the American in question is an eminent economist called Paul Romer and is speaking at the TED Global event in Oxford (see www.TED.com), where earlier in the week Gordon Brown had received a standing ovation.

Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry. Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry. Exhibit B was a quotation from a sceptical ‘youth’ report written by a teenage intern at Morgan Stanley, who suggested that because he and his school-age contemporaries didn’t use Twitter, it was doomed. Hmmm. This report did make me wonder how many people would want to befriend anyone whose idea of fun at age 15 is to work in a bank. But, even if his inference was wrong, his facts are largely right. Most people his age don’t need Twitter. For one thing, they don’t have many friends.

Henry Ford supposedly said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ This quotation is often used as an argument against relying on market research in the pursuit of innovation. Bill Gates voiced a similar thought to Ford’s when he suggested that ‘people don’t know how to want the things we can offer them’. A glance at human behaviour makes it hard to argue against this approach. After all, most technology is what economists call an ‘experience good’ — something whose value only becomes apparent once people have tried it for themselves, like mobile telephony, Sky+ or, come to think of it, heroin.

I was all set to write a scathing piece about Lord Carter’s newly published Digital Britain report (http://tinyurl.com/ksp9t7) when, in a break with journalistic practice, I decided to read it first. In fact many of its proposals make sense. For instance I now accept the case for the controversial 50p-a-month tax on phone lines in order to subsidise broadband provision in remote parts of the country. I also like the report’s plans for expanding 3G coverage, and the idea of handing over FM frequencies to new, ultra-local radio stations.

Whenever you make an optimistic prediction, you risk being wrong twice. First there is the risk that the prediction itself is wrong: 1,000 Concordes by 1973; flying cars; food in pill form. More often, though, it isn’t the prediction that’s wrong but the optimism that accompanies it. The commonest failing of techno- optimists is to be right about future technologies but naively idealistic about the lasting enjoyment they will bring. In reality, yesterday’s novelty soon becomes today’s annoyance (email, for instance), while many innovations fall victim to habit, snobbery or prejudice.

It’s called Spotify. I don’t know why. And I have no idea how it can make money for the people who have invested in it. But this is the internet we are talking about, where all of us can enjoy good things for years while it falls to other people to work out how to make money from them. So, if you live in Britain (or Sweden, Norway, Finland, France or Spain), don’t waste any time reading the rest of this article — go along to www.spotify.com and download the free version now. Those who first want to know what it does may want to sit down now, since you’re in for a surprise. What the Spotify software allows you to do, and quite legally, is to use your PC to listen to almost any music you like — on demand, instantly and free.