broadstuff

Today is a day that comes round once a century - 11/11/11 (And the US and UK calendars actually are in line too). It is also the day when the the Great War ended, and we choose to remember the dead on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which was when the guns stopped shooting and it was all quiet on the Western Front.

For a while.

George Santayana noted that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". As well as remembering those who fell, its also worth also rembering why another war started on the Western Front, especially in 2011. After World War One there was a time of conspicuous consumption, and then a Great Depression. During the Great Depression, the Ordinary Man was essentially mugged financially by the bankers and capitalists of that era while the state stood by or colluded. The net effect was to push the desperate Ordinary Man to vote for autocratic, populist regimes in many countries, even in the USA the New Deal was a major swing towards the Powerful State. It is now in danger of happening again.

After WW2 a new social compact was formed in the West, with State tax and spending forcing a trickle down from rich to poor to reduce wealth disparity. That compact has largely disappeared, the wealth gap has been in reverse for about 20 years (back to pre WW1 / WW2 levels worryingly), and the rump is now being increasingly rapidly rescinded. Despite being bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, the banks have not changed their behaviour at all - if anything it has got worse as they now know they won't be asked to pick up any mess they create. At least in the 1930's the US Government had the fortitude to bring in the Glas Steagal Act to separate "normal" banking from casino banking. In 2011 no government has had the balls. So 2008 will likely happen again, soon.

Unelected governments are now in power in Greece and Italy, Europe is now essentially being run by a cadre of unelected Technocrats, democratic process is being flouted left right and centre. In the UK the tax burden on the Ordinary Man is being ramped up, as subsidies are cut, in parallel with reducing tax burdens on the rich and corporate sectors.The tent cities in St Paul's and elsewhere are little different to the early protests of the 1930's, and mark the phase when most citizens still trusted their governments to act in their interests. The next steps, when people stopped trusting their Governments, are far worse - in the 1930's that directly led to the guns opening up on the Western Front again. We have been here before, the tragedy is if we don't remember it now, we will repeat it.

One of the big differences between now and then is modern comms technology that returns power to people - as the Arab Spring has shown, electronic comms can greatly empower the weak people vs the strong vested interests. Little surprise therefore that the strong are now arguing hard to restrict access to technology in tough times (eg shut down the Internet when there are riots). Hitler silenced his opposition by burning the Reichstag and blaming it on the Communists. Our role, in the Tech community, is to be very wary of useful public and democratic assets and rights being removed, and the removal being blamed on phantom "enemies of the state" or "economic necessities" - muslim fundamentalists, evil rioters, big bailout bazookas etc etc. And to speak out for these digital freedoms, because pressure to give them up is only going to intensify, and will come from all sorts of seemingly innocent and worthy angles.

So, while we remember the dead this year, it's not just 1918 and 1945 we must not forget, Its 1930 - 39 we also must remember now.

Interesting article by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch EU on Tech blogging in Europe - the times, he says, are a-changing:

Now, in 2011, the scene and perhaps the economics, are starting to change. The tech scene itself is bigger, there is more potential money around. There’s just more heat. I daresay a few people are eyeing up the market.

But even in standalone media terms it’s not a ‘straight’ play. Most of the European tech blogs are either run by people who also consult on the side, or, as in the case of TheNextWeb, are attached, like a Pilot Fish to a their host shark, to a large annual conference. However, recently, a couple of things have changed.

Other big guns have parked their tanks on the European lawn. GigaOm now has a European writer, Bobbie Johnson (based in Brighton), so does WSJ Europe (Ben Rooney, in London), VentureBeat has Ciara Byrne in Amsterdam and The Next Web (especially with Martin Bryant in Manchester) has done a pretty good job internationalising in English (although good luck trying to monetize that Dutch language blog guys). Wired UK‘s magazine’s site has become an important adjunct to the print title. Some might say it’s already the ‘Vanity Fair’ of tech. So, leaving aside the economics of online publishing, in editorial terms alone, pan-European coverage of tech and startups has never been better.

I do hope the economics change - we are that classic "Consultancy-with-a-blog" model Mike mentions above, in 2006 we felt that you had to put your mouth where your money was (or in blogging's case, wasn't...) and actually use the technology we were consulting on. We have certainly learned a lot from blogging and the blog has led to some interesting assignments and opportunities indirectly, and forged some good friendships, but it has certainly not been a profitable endeavour - we see it very much as a marketing cost. In fact, we took a bit of a hiatus this summer because we were so darn busy with client work!

It's interesting that the US blogs now have a "European Foreign Correspondent" too, so lets see, maybe Mike is right. Our own observation is that there are only 3 scenes in Europe that are really worth keeping an eye on - London, Berlin and the European emigres to Silicon Valley (with maybe Paris deserving the occasional glance as a 4th) as pretty much anything happening in Europe will wash up in one of these nets. Most of the running is still very US centric.

Mike also wants to see more attitude...well, Broadstuff has always been a tad, well, satirical - Bubblewatch has been this year's running joke - In fact more than one person has told us we could never get Ads owing to that Broadsnark. We are quite proud of that actually

So clearly we may even be on the right track.