The Blog From Hell

We’ve all had our share of complaints about big international corporations, they abuses they perpetuate and the crimes they commit, but perhaps – here in South Africa we have an even worse and more immediate problem. Our massive parastatals, they are as bad as any corporation – but in some ways worse. These entities are structured like corporations, operate like corporations – but are owned by the state (which means a significant part of their funding is taxpayer’s money), were constructed using money invested from the treasure (again – our money) and are run by money from the public (electric bills, tv-licenses and phone bills) – and to make it all worse – their markets are protected by law which greatly restrict or often even entirely prevent competition.

Now parastatals are not unique to South Africa, but they do seem to be much worse here than elsewhere. The British BBC is a parastatal broadcasting corporation much like our SABC – but the BBC is prohibited by law from encrypting their signals, prohibited by law from showing advertisements (the system is funded by license-fees on free-to-air channels, therefore the public has already paid – and they paid for programs, not ads). So how come no such restriction is imposed on the SABC ? Perhaps because they (like apparently all the parastatals except maybe telkom) is pretty much borderline bankrupt all the time. How does a company with so much state protection suffer to stay affloat ? Bad management is part, extremely bad service is
a bigger part. We choose to pay more on top of the required license fees to watch DSTV instead… and even if we never use
their service, we still have to fund them. But maybe, we’d be less disinclined to watch SABC if it didn’t have quite so many ads (how is it that the licensed channels even have more ads than the purely ad-supported eTV ?), if they didn’t mess up the ordering of episodes – and if they weren’t in general six seasons behind the world in everything they showed.

Basically, their attempts to be cheap, has made them worthless, but they can rely on a legal requirement that we pay them.

Of course, there is a lot of things to be said back-and-forth on this – and others have said them better, I’m merely laying groundwork here… what irks me is this: when a parastatal owns something, that thing was paid for by taxpayers and license-payers. The public in other words. We pay to purchase or produce this asset, so why is it that we don’t own it ?

Take the SABC programs for example, now I understand that licensed programs from other countries aren’t theres to give away, but by what possible stretch of the imagination can programs created by a state-owned public broadcaster using license fees paid by the public – not be in the public domain? How can these things be copyrighted – and then actually sold to competing networks at times (go see how much content on kyknet are licensed shows the SABC made in the past).

Surely, if we paid for this art to be created – it should be ours to rip, mix and share however we want ? I complained when telkom went public and sold off shares, that derived their value primarily from investment made with taxpayer rands in their
original infrastructure. The value of those shares were dividends on what the public invested in the parastatal – so surely, those
shares should have been freely divided among the population ? Instead, it got sold on the JSE and ended up in the hands of
a few already rich people and big corporations… we paid for it, yet somehow – they own it, and telkom and state officials cashed in big selling our property.
If I sell my neighbours car, that’s called fraud, apparently if the government does it- it’s fair dealing, just so long as they do it to everybody in the country…

I say it outright, there is no legal, moral or other justification for parastatal property to be treated any differently from public property, if it’s to be sold, the value should be returned to the people who paid for it: you and me. In the case of copyrightable material like radio and tv content – the reality is that this media has no reason to be owned ever – it should simply be made and broadcast as public domain, because it was created with public funds.
I can see a reason why not every member of the public ought to be able to do anything he wants with the telkom routing box on the corner, but there is no practical reason why we shouldn’t all be able to do anything we want with last night’s news broadcast, including creating parody shows of it and other forms of useful civil engagement.

I long favored the idea of public free-to-air channels, where anybody, even a small startup could create a television show, this is less relevent now, that is exactly what the internet is great at – especially since it’s hard to censor, it will require a lot less difficulty in regulating against “signal-flooding-everyone-else-out” and it just works… oh right, another parastatal named telkom is keeping broadband so expensive that it’s not really practical, but we can solve that – we will solve that.

What, if anything though, can we do when the media we are already paying to create, is not ours to reuse ?

The title of this post, is a quote from Cicero, yes the same philosopher after whom the next Kongoni release will be named, I am quoting it here as it is a fundamental part of my most cherished belief about humanity: that individualism is absolute.

Yes, that’s a hard line to take -but both logically, and morally – nothing else is acceptable to me. I am writing this because recently, a simple two line mention of a side-effect of  my believes led to a massive debate with one of my very best friends – at the heart of which was actually very little real disagreement – but nonetheless she perceived it as removing recognition from her.

As it happens, our real ideas about how to deal with things practically are almost identical – but there is a core and fundamental difference in our reasoning – one that I feel needs a bit more than a face-book comment allows to explain. That is the purpose of this post: to explain what I believe.

A much publicized study not long ago had a group of people holding what they thought was a voltage control button, as they watched people screaming in agony, scientists told them to turn the button up – they thought they were part of a project to measure people’s pain responses. What was really being checked was – at what point would they stop. 85% of them did not stop until the dial was maxed out. 15% stopped as soon as they felt the people were suffering too much.

The researches drew from this the suggestion that the vast majority of people will obey authority all the way to committing torture, but I saw a much more interesting aspect to the tests. The 15% who refused had nothing in common with each other,  no single identifiable shared characteristic, moreover – they had no identifiable characteristic different from the other 85% – they weren’t particularly smarter, or from a different area or race… so what does that suggest ? That the only difference here – is that some people made a choice to obey their conscience over authority, while others choose to believe that obeisance *is* morality – and that this difference is a matter of choice, perhaps in lifestyle, perhaps in  the moment – but always choice, not born in, not dependent on religion or riches or education – it’s personal choice only.

Now I say – this applies to all of humanity. I get offended by phrases like neurotypical and normal because it implies that there is such a thing as normal neurology, or normal human behavior – a concept I fundamentally reject. Why ? Because to suggest that is no different from saying that black people are essentially different from white people – it’s discrimination.

There are those for whom anti-discrimination is in celebrating the differences between groups of people. I am not one of them. I see the end to discrimination only in the rejection of the very idea of grouping people in any way, shape or form. History has had people grouped by everything from height (the Hutus and Tutsi’s of Rwanda didn’t exist 400 years ago, they were split up as different “races” based on height by the French colonialists), to skin color, and lately – neurology.

All of it is patently false. There are no races. There are no cultures. There are no neuro-anythings. There are only – people, individuals, each making their own choices, each with their own challenges, each with their own unique abilities and – importantly each entirely and exclusively responsible for their own actions.

Anything else not only paves the way for discrimination – it is discrimination. Don’t call me smart. Don’t call me gifted. Don’t call me an aspie or a white man or a heterosexual, don’t call me normal or typical or abnormal or atypical/  Call me Human, and call me AJ – anything else and I will take offense, anything else and you are discriminating against me and everyone else.

You, each of you reading this, have your challenges. There are no right answers, and no religion, book, philosophy, scientist or drug can give them to you. You figure out what you need to be the best you, you can be. Whatever approach you may take toward that – I will applaud that.

This doesn’t mean psychiatry or sociology is worthless, even if they do have 6 billion samples with nothing in common. They do identify trends and while you cannot ever draw conclusions (somebody could, no somebody will have 999 out of a thousand attributes tested and be the exact opposite of the the thousandth) if you do have a lot of the attributes in a certain piece of research, then you may have the one that it proposes help with. Try it, but know that it may be completely wrong for you – so try it sceptically, test it and only continue it’s pursuit if it is really working better.

And better doesn’t mean making you more normal or more like everybody else, that’s like a snowflake trying to be more like every other snowflake – stupid. Better means – being the best damn version of yourself you can be – however you, personally, define that (and nobody else can help you with that part).

So with this known… why do I still use labels about myself like “geek” or even “Afrikaner” ? Well there is a fundamental difference – I chose them, and I choose how far I conform to them. I am only a geek insofar as it suits me to be one, I only conform to geek values I agree with, I only enjoy geek entertainment that entertains me – I am only as Afrikaans as I want to be, I enjoy braaivleis and I like my language’s nature-  but I am not afraid to use a different one or mix them up, I don’t reject anything on the grounds of these labels either.

They are non-exclusive. Being Afrikaner doesn’t mean I cannot be a little Japanese as well – I am, there are aspects of Japanese culture I have adopted, same with German, British and American and many others – I am me – and I adopt parts of such cultures as they suit me and help me to express myself better.

I encourage the same in others, but don’t require it – that is optional, but I do and always will insist on judging you only by your own choices and will not accept any excuses. If you shoot somebody because somebody else held a gun to your head- in my book – you still committed murder (if you shoot the person holding the gun to your head, that’s self-defense). If you shoot somebody because you think you were born different from him – that is murder too.

And that is just the extreme to make a point – that point is, everyone was born different from you. You cannot feel sheltered in a group because there are no groups to feel sheltered in, we are – all of us, alone in a sense because we are truly unique. But that doesn’t mean you have to be lonely – quite the contrary, choosing your friends as individuals with no regard for anything but that person as a person, means you choose people whom you care about, and who will care about you -regardless all else, means deeper, more loving friendships and relationships.

So there, I have said my piece.