virtualeconomics

Watching the English on credit

Michael Lewis's article about the collapse of Greece has been getting a lot of attention; here's my favourite bit...

"The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: financial-disaster tourism. The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way."

And what did we learn the English wanted? When the lights went off, we spent our unearned largesse on creating a new aristocracy, chosen almost as arbitrarily as the one we spent the last 1000 years laboriously getting rid of - a bunch of bankers who happened to be in the right place at the right time and were cheerfully handed all of the spare money, enough to last them for generations. Almost nowhere was there an odder or less publicly useful response, and yet like the Irish, the Icelanders and the Americans it seems to sit comfortably with the very nature of Englishness. 

and like that...he's gone

"VaporStream Inc...allows consumers and corporate users to send email and instant messages that can't be forwarded, saved or printed and leave no electronic record after they are read". But take-up is slow and paying customers are numbered only in the thousands. Says WSJ (which incidentally has a really neat new feature so that if you copy a block of text off their site it automatially includes a thing saying "read more at..." with a hyperlink. Smart, guys, very smart).

Which begs the question (amongst others) - what about a basic screen capture? What, indeed, about simply taking a photograph of the damned screen? Sending an email that leaves no trace is a moronic ambition in the first place and unacheivable in the second - if you want to have a conversation off the record so that you can deny it later, sit down, with just one other guy, and tell them what you want them to hear. Keep doing it, one guy at a time, until they've all heard it. Sure it takes longer, but this is conspiracy 101 folks.

The challenge here isn't that people are too dumb to know they need to buy this thing for a few dollars a month - it's that they're not dumb enough to imagine they do when the workarounds are obvious and trivial and the real solution otherwise.