Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Joey is reading a magazine called ppaper, and she tells me about an article about Facebook and Google, and the Internet and how it should tie us altogether to be closer, but it goes onto say that it just isn’t happening.

After the latest awful redesign Facebook has now officially become rubbish. The holy water is just not there any more.

Socialising and friendship has become a TV show. There is something not quite real about this brave new world of passive virtual friendships, and I am completely sick of Facebook and Twitter. They should bring people closer together, but Twitter is only popular because it has a few candid celebrities on it.

Why be passive when you can be actively involved in your friendships? Why just sit back and watch like a voyeur would watch a porno?

Most people have no choice. Whilst at work, maybe you have a boring moment and maybe check Facebook for a few seconds. You pet your virtual dog, post something you think is witty, browse some photos of your friends getting drunk in a dark room, then you leave work late and don’t have any time to spend with your real dog or your real friends and family. I don’t like the way this use of technology is going.

The blame doesn’t lie at our door, it’s just the way the world is going. It’s quite scary really, how it’s taken advantage of our nature.

Rather than broadening and enriching our lives, some things are starting to eat away at it. Rather than meeting face to face we’re trapped on the end of a cable, and whilst Joey and I use it as a life line until I go to Taiwan in May, the surprising thing is the much shorter cable between one side of a town and the other splits the neighbourhood, empties the pubs and flats and sucks any debate or social interaction into electronic oblivion.

I am glad I have met a girlfriend who sees the world as clearly and as logically as I do.

The world may be in trouble, but we’re okay. We are now freed.

Imagine what it would have been like in the first world war as a heroic fighter pilot. Aeroplanes had only been around for 10 years and were made of wood and fabric.

On the training fields, you strap yourself into a wooden ‘bird cage’ and fire up the tiny propellor engine. You’d rattle into the air and observe the battlefield below from high up above. Your observatory man would drop bombs and take survilance photos, then you’d come back to base and have a beer.

Soon the German enemy would get wind of England’s tiny airforce of 33 planes, so the battle was now to be waged in the sky as it was on earth.

For these men, shooting down an enemy plane was nothing personal. These men were just doing their job. The wrecked plane would ignite and fall to the ground in flames, the pilot would be burnt alive, the flames from the engine in front of him engulfing him as he nose-dived. But after taking a kill, our heroes would never get to see the impact of loss on the enemy pilot’s family, the end result was not emotional - it was that of broken wreckage smouldering on the ground. They couldn’t even put a face or a name to men they’d just that moment shot down at close range.

Though one day a top ace of the British Flying Corps got a look into the cockpit of a plane he’d just shot down, the pilot dead from a bullet to the head, but also curiously a small terrier dog slumped dead in the cockpit.

The dog had been up in the plane, a mascot. The British flying ace felt something new - these planes he was shooting contained men just like himself, he was murdering man after man, their lives, the hopes and dreams along with them going down in flames. In situations such as these, there is no such thing as ‘the enemy’.

Even with the politics and technology which allow people to kill a faceless enemy, many times have soldiers looked into the enemy’s eyes as they kill, but rarely do they see the dead man’s family realising for the first time that ‘dad’ won’t becoming home again, or the moment’s in dad’s life which humanise him.

That it took a dead dog to make the fighter pilot realise this shows just how impersonal war can be. But after this, our hero was never the same. His mind got the better of him and his conscious was torn between continuing his successful elegance to his comrades and quitting altogether to get married and start a family featuring two kids and a pet terrier.

Sadly, before he could get his mind straightened out, the fighter pilot did something stupid. In the heat of battle, he swooped down over a wreckage he’d just shot down, he could bare no longer the impersonal nature of war, and flew by as a tribute to the fallen enemy. On the ascent back to the skies his plane was riven with holes from ground based machine gun turrets, and his engine set ablaze. The fighter pilot took out a pistol from a small pouch in the cockpit, and before the fire had chance to engulf him on the way down, he shot himself.

The best way to stop war is to make it personal.

The FIA knew they were breaking their own rules when they introduced the new points system, which was incidentally suggested by one Bernard Ecclestone. A crafty bespectacled genius of the highest order in my opinion.

The FOTA gaggle of united teams is bad news for the powers that be. In fact the battle between the teams and the FIA and commercial rights holders recently spilled out into Chelsea basements, with a leading F1 figure using the News of The World to expose Max Mosley’s weekend leisure persuits. Mosley subsequently hired a private detective and has admitted as much that he knows ‘for certain’ who set him up. The news on the grapevine is that this leading F1 figure will soon be exposed to the tabloids as well and possibly criminal proceedings will follow. But knowing Max, he’s probably waiting for the right moment for the great reveal.

The battle over control of F1 is nothing new, after all it was Bernie and Max themselves who came from the team’s half, and overthrew the FIA equivalent in the 1980’s.

Having done this, they’re better prepared than most to see of this new challenge from the teams.

Their method is to divide and conquer.

First of all, split off the independant teams, whom’s interests have always diverged with that of the big corporate teams and car manufacturers. The independants have been slung a few carrots, namely the budget caps and unlimited technical freedom. The car manufactrers who until recently had money to burn (and they will do so again one day) don’t like the idea of sticking to a £30 budget limit. They spend that on corporate hospitality buffet food and wheel nuts alone.

Sir Frank Williams would rather spend it on flywheel KERS. That’s the first division sorted.

It’s in Bernie’s interest to divide FOTA too. So having spoken to the independant teams, he put it to the FIA that ‘all’ the teams would really like the new points system. Of course the lower spending teams would like it - they’d snatch a few lucky wins early on (before the big spenders like McLaren could fix their crock of a car) and end up winning the drivers championship on 30 points!

The indies have also been thrown the very nice gesture of being allowed to cheat. Whilst the likes of Ferrari and McLaren have rear deffusers as flat as a super model’s bottom, Williams and Brawn have done all sorts of fancy things with their rears. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Toyota is now also an independant team in all but name, having had their budget slashed again (when the economy dived) and again (when Honda pulled out) and again (it was a windy day in Japan). Soon the survival of the team will depend on them making a profit! Who’d have thought it!

Well I am completely on the side of Max and Bernie. I know their plan may be criticised by some as making F1 unstable and giving it a bad press, but I actually love these shenanigans and political games. It adds another dimension to the weekends rather than just the racing stories.

And I am on the side of Max and Bernie because they’re completely right to divide and conquer the manufacturers.

The future of F1 lies with the independant teams, not with the large faceless corporations who cheat their way to championships with their massive budgets. Spending more on a car is the same as having a bigger engine and it’s a crying shame that the most innovative people at Williams, Red Bull (with Newey for art’s sake!) and Brawn GP will at some point this season have their winter inginuiety overtaken by a McLaren leaving a trail of burnt money from it’s rear.

I’d also like to see a relegation / promotion system in place, and you’re not going to have any fresh teams or the drama of relegation whilst the corporations have a money powered strangle hold over this great sport.

This blog is a preview of my new F1 website, starting soon at www.brawnf1blog.com

McLaren - what has gone wrong? The most resourceful F1 team on the grid, with the biggest budget has got it wrong. At least it seems for all the world that way from winter testing.

Testing comparisons are often misleading but I am reliably informed Brawn’s hot times were done with a respectable 50kg of fuel onboard. McLaren, at their best couldn’t get within a second of this. The team spent most of the winter puffing and painting around the track 2 seconds back from the front. That puts them in Force India or Super Aguri territory. Incredible.

That the clear pace setter in such a competitive field was fighting for it’s very survival just last month is even more remarkable. But it’s about time Jenson Button had a car able to portray his talent in a fresh light. Just how good is Jenson Button? This year, thanks to Brawn GP, we may well find out.

With the fuss over McLaren’s disarray and Brawn’s jubilation, it’s easy to forget the other half of the winter story - that of Renault, who found themselves in a McLaren-like position during the first few tests before turning things around very suddenly and that of Red Bull, who’s stunning looking Adrian Newey designed challenger was undoubtedly putting in Brawn style performances earlier in testing. This story is by no means over.

Drivers like Vettel and Alonso clearly have more to add.

Williams & Toyota meanwhile also have potential to surprise although my source at Williams suggests internal politics and leadership issues are effecting the team. Maybe the great Sir Frank Williams does not have the single-handed control over the team’s direction any more, in the same way that Patrick Head cannot dictate the technical side as masterly as he did in more straight-forward eras.

Meanwhile BMW have had a low key winter in many respects, at least in that their pace has neither been bad nor stunningly good. The journalists seem unwilling to notice BMW, or indeed even The Red Barons, whom I suspect will more likely put a damper on the revolution come the Australian Grand Prix next weekend. The Red Barons have a habit of doing that.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that despite a few incredible times from Brawn, the majority of winter testing has been incredibly hard to call.

And it’s not the first time McLaren have sandbagged during the winter, allowing others to steal the limelight to attract sponsors.

So take this revolution with a pinch of salt. Brawn GP - more so than anyone else, need new sponsors!

Future products, I think, have a habit of revealing the true flaws in the previous product.

For example looking at the new Ford Street Ka reveals that many people who bought the plain old Ka thought they could do without a roof in sunny England, and complained that the interior just wasn’t quite plasticy enough.

Likewise, that NASA plan to replace the Shuttle with a metal bucket on a parachute reveals that NASA thought the Shuttle was a real shitter that kept exploding and killing people.

Also the fact that my year old £1000 Macbook Pro has started to creak reveals that many people have experienced this and that is why Apple have decided to make the new one out of one big laser cut block of aluminium with no joins, for £1700.

This is why they are rich.

Things are slightly different on the internet. When a website is replaced by a newer model, it’s usually replaced by a different website altogether. Whoever achieves this will turn from a slumdog into a billionaire over night.

On the internet there is a nasty little class system at work too.

MySpace and Facebook are prime examples. When MySpace became full of ‘my first komputa’ chavs we all moved to Facebook. When all the Facebook applications turned into spam and viruses which started attacking us we all moved to Twitter to be around more respectable company, such as Stephen Fry.

The problem with Twitter though, is for the first time in the history of the internet it’s actually a step backwards.

The principle is right but the website itself is far too basic, and for once in the case of Twitter, “keep it simple stupid” is not the answer.

An example - you follow lots of interesting people, let’s say just 7 of them. However if just one person per day has a case of verbal diarrhea and spews out 10 messages in the space of a couple of hours this pushes all your other interesting friends off the page every single day.

And for some reason I never feel compelled to look at more than one pages worth of Twittering.

Meanwhile on Facebook, the problem seems to be that nobody really tweets enough, because you’re all scared of what people might think (you bunch of complete cowards).

People don’t seem to be honest, or frank, or blunt, or to be quite frank and blunt - have much to say at all, with a few exceptions. It’s all become a bit safe, it’s all become a bit of a peacock show of fluff, a bit of a bluff. Photos from an uneventful night out are made to look like a 1980’s cocktail party at Elton John’s pent house.

I enjoy reading those notes or blogs from friends who risk their neck and don’t really censor themselves, especially when they have a unique style and a theme or use photos to head up their note. A spammy ‘25 things’ note is just not quite the same.

Beyond the obvious ‘look-at-me’ value from the uploader and the obvious ‘voyeurism’ from the viewer, there doesn’t seem to be much incentive to keep using Facebook, especially as we all have mobiles, email accounts and - mouths.

The reality of Facebook’s day to day ramblings are nothing like the 18th century era Marie Antoinette orgy that people like to portray them as.

As Stephen Fry would say, “It’s all become a bit low rent”.

In fact the sensible people have vanished altogether to conduct their lives in private, and Facebook is dying on it’s arse. Which is a shame really because it’s uniquely addicting, potential ego boosting and occasionally speak-your-mind joyously entertaining.

The fact is though, that Facebook, and MySpace before it, and Friend’s Reunited before that (pah!) all made absolute billionaires out of their creators.

For anybody that joined Facebook only not to really use it, or to leave later on, here is a customer waiting for a replacement.

For the millions who have flocked to the company of Stephen Fry on the not-quite-the-full-deal Twitter, there is an opportunity in waiting for some lucky inventor.

There is a slumdog out there somewhere ready to step up with their idea for the future of social networking, the customer base is huge - the whole of the world wide Internet.

I have a feeling that this time it won’t be a revolution, but an evolution of what went before.

It’s simple really. Forget stupid pokes. What would you really miss if these websites disappeared today?

What do I miss about MySpace?
The ‘my website’ feel of the customised page and the music orientated design. I didn’t miss the tatty customisations by chavs and the bad technical side.

What do I miss about Facebook?
It’s become something of a jack of all trades, master of none, witness the awful pop up MSN style chat, but it does still have it’s uses. Organising events and a spam-free friend-messaging emailer for one, and a good way to get your blogs and photos noticed, another. I won’t miss the fact that it’s now ever so out of fashion and slightly naff, and the abject failure of the open ‘apps’ side, which was once so promising. Facebook, in the last 6 months, has not played to it’s strengths.

What do I miss about Twitter?
Nothing yet, but when it’s gone due to being a bit rubbish, I’ll miss having a first hand insight into the world of famous people and being able to follow (without the many annoying distractions on Facebook) those friend’s candid enough to reveal something interesting, the moment it occurs. It’s also a good way to get a feel on the news, on opinions, on the pulse of the world’s people. As a collective text it (regrettably) makes news agencies and journalists redundant, or at the least turns huge news organisations into ‘just web editors’ collecting together 2nd hand news from Twitterers. However if it kills the tabloids and ITV I’ll be more than happy. Bad quality journalists without an interesting voice of their own when there is pressure placed on the market, will be the first to die off. However at the other end of the scale I hope professionals, like at the BBC in most cases, make it into the next decade alive.

Now some suggestions:

Imagine a searchable text generated by people, like Twitter but based on locations. When the US Airways plane crashed in the Hudson, you could use a Google Map’s style interface to view what people were muttering as they looked out of their windows (of nearby flats, not the plane, ahem). Similarly, a radar of famous / interesting people would be handy, because this is pretty much what all the success of Twitter is based on - and don’t let the Open Source tech nuts tell you differently. If they had their way instead of a map we’d all be searching for secret code words prefaced with hashes on some kind of black and white terminal screen.

I think the next generation website has to take some cues from video games as well. A class system could be in place where people could rise up it based on how much they say and how interesting it is. The higher class you are the more you’re noticed in the community. Community leaders would emerge and get due recognition. This would be a motivation for people to be more candid, and to stop simply looking on mutely.

Many of my closest friends are on Facebook - but because they’re not techno nerds like me - they never really say anything or use it.

Something needs to happen to motivate them to get more involved. The same person might happily play a casual game on the Wii but never write a blog. Current ways of blogging and surfing websites are not interesting enough to bring these technocasual people on board, which is a shame because they’re usually some of the most interesting ones, who actually have lives to lead

The final aspect which must be present is that the website is primarly a communication tool. Facebook has gone some way to replacing email for casual social chat, and even some business communication. This is a huge feat. It’s not effected by the same spam which blights email, when you get a message on Facebook you know exactly where it came from.

So the new website must:

Have a sense of community but with a class ladder, leaders and followers. Video game style.
Be more locally based but expandable via a location based search to gauge moods and news first hand
It must pander to people’s egos in some way.
It must have a voyeurism aspect.
It’s got to be a communication tool, a casual means of expressing oneself in the company of friends.
It must contain multimedia like photos and videos.
It mustn’t go to far and be the jack of all trades. YouTube does video, I hear

These are the key aspects, and in my next blog I’ll try and put them into a fully formed idea for a social networking website of the future.

PS

Congratulations for reading this far. You must really really really had wanted to get to something more interesting. Well… tough!

I have just booked a flight to Hong Kong to see my girlfriend and I’ve realised that being 29 gives you a good sense of how time is accelerating.

It seems like only yesterday that I was in my early 20’s. Applying that same logic to the future means I’ll be 40 in a blink of an eye!

In the grand scale of things we human beings pop in and out of existence like little electrical particles, so I better make the most of my fizz whilst I still have it.

Too often the most important things in life like girlfriends, wives and work have to be compromised for them to fit together unless you’re polygamous.

Rather than go for just 2 weeks to see Joey in Taiwan, I’ve decided to take a working holiday and do what I do already but instead of the raining sky and the old desk, I’ll have my girlfriend for company, with the warm pacific breeze and a view of a river.

In Hong Kong I’ll buy up all the shops and sell them all on eBay, and if they let me back in to get my flight back to England I’ll do it all again for the benefit of Mr eBay UK.

I also want to ride on a scooter through the mountain roads.

Instead of walking through traffic to Tesco after a days work in front of the computer screen, I’ll be able to pad around bare foot on sandy beaches with the one I love, after a days work in front of a computer screen.

It may be enough to make me leave England forever, although I will miss my oven, mum and sister.

And Mini Eggs.

The good thing about this new global world tied together with the internet, cheap flights and elastic bands like a ragged ball of wool that a kitten might throw down the stairs, is that when you go on holiday you can take your laptop with you and work your little socks off in the same place as you ended the 2 week holiday in.

The bad thing about our ragged ball of wool world is that you become torn between two homes, which even when connected with dancing multicoloured lines of thread, the fact remains that they’re very very far apart indeed.

Choosing one becomes impossible.

It’s a far cry from when our grandparents used to move around the corner when they got too old.

I guess at 29, my time has come to move around the word before moving around the corner.

U2 – No Line On The Horizon

The album starts with a faint horn in the background, before the wails of guitars come in. The song is:

1. No Line on The Horizon. This is about Bono. He’s looks out at a huge vista, hazy white plains top and bottom blended into one, like being lost at sea in the fog. The song is about Bono checking his bank statements.

2. Magnificant. This is also about Bono. The songs starts like a bulldozer hoisting up huge wedges of concrete, this song begins with the sound of powerful metalic reverberations, with a humming bass line before the machine gun fire of Larry Mullen Jr’s drums rips through the junk yard ambience, paving the way for the crisp yearning voice of Bono, cooing ‘Magnificant, Magnificant… I was born, I was born…’. This is about when Bono gets out of bed in the morning and looks in the mirror. ‘Only love, only love… can leave such a mark’.

3. Moment of Surrender. This song is about Bono. The song begins with a haunting pipe organ against the backdrop of African style drums. It’s about a weekend Bono had last year, where he bought a round of drinks in a pub, which he refers to as the fabled ‘moment of surrender’. “I was punching in the numbers, on an ATM machine” he mourns.

4. Unknown caller. This is about Bono. From an opening which sounds like the barking of dogs over an echoing chime of a guitar outside in the summers breeze, before Bono sings ’sunshine, sunshine’, this is about a nice sunny day Bono had last year, which was interrupted by a Skype call on his Apple Mac, which caused his computer to crash. “Force quit, and move to trash”, suggests Edge’s backing vocals, in reply to Bono’s wail of “Speed dial, no signal at all”. Helpfully edge continues, “Restart and reboot, you’re free to go. Password, enter here, you know your username so put it in…sush now..” After that Bono went back outside with a cider.

5. I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight. This is about Bono’s wife. “Every beauty has to go out with an idiot”, he sings. “The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear”.

6. Get On Your Boots begins with a rapid fire tumble of drums before Bono remembers seeing a really hot East African woman at a funfair during a trip to raise funds for AIDS. As Bono revealed on the Jonathan Ross show last week, Get On Your Boots is East African slang for putting on a condom. Bono spent a lot of time around the funfair, and when he met her, he fucked her behind the ghost train. This is what the song is about.

7. Stand Up Comedy. This is about Bono. “Stand up, this is comedy”, sings Bono. This song is quite self explanatory really.

8. Fez / Being Born. Fez is an instrumental about Bono and features Bono singing “let me here the sound” (a line from Get On Your Boots) over and over again. It’s a recording of the funfair where he met the sexy African lady, and that’s what he shouted to her behind the ghost train as she screamed with delight. Being Born is also about Bono. “6AM, African sun… lights… flash past”, pretty self explanatory really: this is about his journey back from the funfair in the morning.

9. White As Snow. This is about Bono, and is very haunting. It’s about when he visited Birmingham. He drove up from London, singing “Where I came from there were no hills at all”…”The land was flat, the highways straight and wide.” Him and Edge would drive up but get stuck in traffic jams. “My brother and I would drive for hours like years instead of days. Our walls are every passing stranger, every face we cannot know”. They got there eventually, but the shops were closed.

10. Breathe. This is probably my favourite song on the album about Bono.

“16th of June, Chinese stocks are going up
And I’m coming down with some new Asian virus
Ju Ju man, Ju Ju man
Doc says you’re fine, or dying
Please!
Nine-oh-nine, St. John Divine on the line, my pulse is fine
But I’m running down the road like loose electricity
While the band in my head plays a striptease”

This is about going mad.

11. Cedars of Lebanon. This is about trees. The Cedars of Lebanon are a species native to the coast of Lebanon, the Mediterranean lapping against the beautiful shore. Unfortunately the trees are now all shot to pieces. A sad Bono recalls, “This shitty world, sometimes produces a rose”.

He’s speaking about a young kid, with bright blue eyes, playing with friends amongst the cedars near the beach.

Now it’s just a wasteland.

Next week, Automatic for The People analysed in detail.