Soi Cowboy is arguably Bangkok‘s most popular expat Night Entertainment Area, but now, even more than before, what happens in Soi Cowboy had best stay in Soi Cowboy….

In the mid-1990‘s the Internet finally took full root and blossomed forth in ‘viral’ pandemonium.   Everyone was discovering, and rushing to participate in the new technology – leaping headlong into the endless horizon.   Virtually overnight we were able to communicate worldwide with as many people as we wanted – and to do it simultaneously, should we so desire.   We were buying our first hand phones – again tearing down the fences – freeing us up to call from wherever we wanted, to whomever.   And if we so desired, we could do either or both of these things entirely anonymously.   We could even be someone else.   We could effectively drop off the grid for longer or shorter periods – at our whim.   This was one of the few times in history that there was a real, almost overnight technological ‘game-changer‘ – and one which could be availed by anyone.    We were in the new, electronic ‘Wild West‘ – anything goes, or at least it did.

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An artists conception of what the new $2 billion NSA intelligence gathering center in Utah will look like, once completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers next year.   Here “Big Data” will have come of age – having already surpassed it’s original goal of 20 terrabytes per minute, 24/7 – it will soon be handling data by the yottabytes (a ‘yottabyte’ is a quadrillion gigabytes).

However it wasn’t long before ‘the authorities’, be they parents, or bosses, or government officials, realized that this was just too much of a good thing – there was a lot of talk, a lot of buzz, out there that tended to undermine their ‘authority’.   It couldn’t be allowed to continue without ‘proper oversight’.   And thus, the spectre of censorship raised its ugly head yet again – the snake had, unsurprisingly, slithered into this new ethereal Eden as well.   And to a certain extent, control of the Internet made sense – most sane minds agreed it should not be allowed to harbor and hide pedophiles or those undertaking anarchistic or terroristic pursuits.   The Internet shouldn’t be the new refuge of the criminal class – regulation and monitoring seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Google’s Data Park, or “data farm” during the construction phase in South Carolina.   Google is planet earth’s second largest ‘data miner’ after the NSA, and has a total of 9 plants such as the one above, each covering from four to

(George Orwell), and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), it would appear at first glance that we are now rushing ever closer to a ‘Brave New World’, rather than Orwell‘s fictional non-utopia of ‘Oceania‘.   After all, we have found ourselves in a world where we are being buried in an Huxleyian avalanche of irrelevance and trivialities – more so than knowledge and truth being kept from us by Orwellian decrees and by Government censorship (if only marginally).   Orwell feared we would be a controlled, managed culture, where Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture (and he predicted this without ever having seen daytime television and soapies).   And the comparisons between the two continue…..

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A peek at Facebook‘s server banks.   Facebook is another major ‘data miner‘, and growing rapidly.   Their job however is made easier in that Facebook members willingly contribute reams of personal data about themselves.   Nevertheless, even without the need to provide gigantic search engines, they still use a massive 28 megawatts of power to pump data into Phase 1 of their new $210 million Data Center.   It currently covers 2.5 hectares – and growing.   They are planning two more such facilities in the near future, the third being 300,000 square feet.

However…. we shouldn’t ignore mankind’s ability to seek out an even more hideous scenario – one where we have the worst of both of these once-fictional dystopias.   Have a look around; are we not awash in trivia?   What percent of the population now spends most, if not virtually all of it’s waking hours watching Oprah, or CNN newstainment, or sports, or doing emails, or downloading TV shows and movies, or doing their “Social Media” thing with Twitter or Facebook, hitting the bars, or massage parlors, (you fill in the blanks).   And to extend the Huxley analogy one step further, in this seemingly benign world, our augmentations, our “soma” can take either legal or illegal forms, but are nonetheless readily available – always there, always at hand, to keep us ever more so attached to our world of relative oblivion and our trivial day-wasting continuum.   On the other hand, and not on the surface of things, do we not also have Orwell‘s “Big Brother” – who day-by-day intrudes ever more personally into our lives?   Well, if you have any doubt, I’m here to tell you that we do, indeed.

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A satellite photo of the NSA intelligence facilities, or the “Utah Data Center” for short, being constructed on, and next to the Camp Williams Military Reservation‘s now defunct airstrip outside of Bluffdale, Utah.   The NSA‘s data mining fingers will be sifting retroactively as well – as exemplified by the recent AT&T turn-over of 320 million internal USA and international phone records.

When the electronic serpent of Internet censorship first appeared in the ethereal Wild West‘s tree (mixed metaphor?), we said nothing – it seemed proper to be denying perverts and other criminals a new and unlimited playground.   But snakes can do only one of two things; grow or die.   And you don’t need me to tell you that the snake has continued to grow, worldwide.   Internet censorship has been around since before 9-11, but after that unmitigated, unforgivable attack, censorship -especially electronic- has gone into hyperdrive.   And again, for all honorable and much needed reasons.   Money laundering by terrorists and other illegal activities needed to be pursued with vigor.

But the snake needs to grow.   And two things (inevitable in hindsight) happened.   First, Governments around the world began to realize that knowledge (regardless of the nature of that knowledge) is power.   The more knowledge (read: ‘data‘) they have about ‘their sheep’, the more powerful their position in dealing.   The second thing that happened was the Internet went commercial – it became, on top of everything else, a marketplace.   And what would a marketplace be without advertising?   And how best to advertise than to know which individuals liked which ‘stuff’?   The answer to those questions is to ‘mine‘ the information about the multitudes of electronic media users from their own emails and by tracking the websites they visit.    Sound illegal?   Well, if advertisers were opening your snail-mail to find out your various personal preferences, you could have them thrown in jail – in America it is a Federal offence to tamper with the US Mails.   However on the Internet it is, for whatever unseemly, whatever irrational ‘reason’, entirely legal.

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NSA‘s Utah Data Center – to be completed in 2013.   No government since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War twenty-six centuries ago, has been foolish enough to ignore the life-or-death necessity for “intelligence“.   However, when the NSA, after 9-11, implemented it’s domestic surveillance program, Stellar Wind, there has been a not-so-quiet shit-storm of controversy over whether they have overstepped US Constitutional limitations.   It is not our purpose to enter into this debate, only to report it’s existence, and to remind all that Stellar Wind will affect you.

Both governmental and commercial electronic intruders, however ran into immediate problems.   They had accumulated altogether too much data – by orders of magnitude.   They would need help in order to wade through it all.   But where there is a will, or perhaps where there is enough money, there is a way.   And that ‘way’ is a brand new electronic way of walking: a new paradigm.   The software had to be bigger, ‘smarter’, faster, and had to have instant access – the latter obtained by refined Deep Packet Inspection filters (DPI‘s).   The process itself is called “Data Mining“, and it is part of the newest field in computer sciences called “Big Data“.   If you doubt this, or if you just want to frighten yourself, go ahead and Google “Big Data” and “Data Mining“.   To date, the two biggest ‘Data Miners‘ are the NSA and Google, with Russia and China a close 3rd and 4th.

But the Orwellian snake’s appetite is not yet sated.   Governments then realized they could use these new warehouses full of spinning memory disk servers to determine whether you are paying your taxes, whether or not you are lawfully collecting disability, and what you buy with your credit cards, and whether or not you associate with criminal types, or even whether or not you associate with other people who associate with criminal types.   There is virtually no limit to the detail that they can obtain about an individual, should they think they have the need to do so – up to, and including “every whisper” (as suggested in Wired Magazine and others).   This, my friends, is something far beyond, far more thorough, far more evil than that envisioned by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell.

And neither is the commercial snake’s thirst slaked – the Googles of this world are equally thirsty for all your data.   They claim that it is entirely for their directed advertisements, and all these personal details of yours are kept most secret, but that is patently untrue.   Dare I call them liars?   Not really, because if any one has ever read the fine print of what you agreed to when you chose to use Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome or various “cloud” email services, they tell you outright that your personal information is not really that private after all…..   Worse than this, is that this supposedly secure personal data frequently ends up on the grey market for resale (think theft, think spam), or provided to governments in quiet, closed-door agreements.

It is hoped that none of us still believes in the unfettered Wild West of the Internet.   It came and went in the ‘90‘s – and it won’t be coming back.   We have already seen the evil downside of this misused data, be it volunteered or stolen by spiders.   We have seen numerous examples of web censorship, where websites, to include Night Entertainment websites, are here today, and gone tomorrow -all at the whim of some local karachakan in some ministry office.   There is no warning, and there is no recourse – once you are on the blacklist, you have -electronically speaking- dropped your car keys in the lava.   We have seen in the news recently where individuals have been sent to jail – and are doing real, hard time for items they provided on their websites from third parties.   Again at the whim of ‘the authorities’.   We have also read the stories where employees have been fired, or prospective employees have been rejected because of a jest or a photo they have put on Facebook.   The situation is, of course, not getting better – in a world where ‘political correctness’ (Cultural Fascism) is equated to ‘illegal’, you don’t even need to break the law to suffer the hellfire of this new Universal censorship.   And in case you hadn’t noticed, we are on a one-way street.

So, going full circle, lets get back to our headline; ‘The New Puritans’.   -The New Puritans are those few out there that realize whatever they may say in email, or on the phone, or wherever they may go surfing in the Internet ether, any or all of it can, at least potentially, be used against them.   They realize that as far as Big Brother can examine them, as far as Google can mine their personal correspondence, they must remain as pure as the driven snow.   They must be able to show, by negative proof of indefinite duration, that they have been keeping their digital noses entirely clean in this ever-constricting dystopian digital age.

Specific to those Bangkok nightcrawlers, those who fancy themselves superstuds in a carefree sex-playland far from the prying eyes of ‘home’, you may want to watch what you blog, watch what you say on your muu tuu, watch what you email, watch what you post.   After having worked for the largest telephone organization in the USA for several years, I can tell you from personal knowledge, ‘everything is software‘, everything is potentially retrievable.   And ‘Part 2” of this is there is no “anonymous” – if they want to track it down (whatever “it” is), they can.   The snake in the tree of knowledge now has way too much knowledge, and it can bide it’s time before it decides to drop on the unsuspecting.   Save the regaling of your barfine conquests and bedroom braggadocio for the barstool.

For more informations and author: http://www.bangkokeyes.com

Of all the words that deserve a decent noun, ‘gloat’ stands head and eyebrows above the crowd. In fact it was only this lack of nounery that kept it off the short list for the seven deadly sins. Avarice doesn’t really cut it. Last year, I confess, I was guilty of gloatitude. ‘I have a perfect life,’ I said. ‘I have everything I need,’ I said. ‘With only a concrete wall and two-hundred meters of green baize I protected my garden from the monsoons with nerry a casualty’ I said. This gloatation did not go unnoticed by the gods. ‘We shall rain down on thee one hundred hells for thine glotary’, said the god foreman who had problems talking proper.

And rain he did. Its March. In Thailand, March is traditionally the month that gets progressively hotter and drier leading up to the crescendo of heat and dryness, Songkran. It’s when we run around in our tank tops firing water cannons at each other to convince the heavens to send down some liquid respite. March does not, and I repeat NOT rain delugely and tropically for two weeks without let up. But, according to the news, a freak high pressure front from China passed over central Thailand and got stuck here. It’s been coming down in zinc watering cans ever since.

I am writing this with a pen because, for three days, we’ve had no electricity. Before that we got a couple of hours a day. That’s probably just as well because our dodgy wiring is all underground and the only thing above the water level now is two-thirds of my house. Me and the dogs have been holed up here trying each other’s patience for a week now. Yes, they’re in the house. No bloody choice. It’s an island. We’re the family you see from helicopters waving frantically with SOS spelled out in damp underwear.

I kid thee not. Lang Suan is officially a disaster zone. The army is down the road giving out blankets. But all my neighbours have locked up and gone to stay with friends on higher ground. I have no friends, high or otherwise. I could go stay in a nice hotel but I have no idea how I’d smuggle in the beasts. So I’m stuck. Gogo’s had diarrhea for three days so things are pretty colourful in here. Psycho’s been racing up and down the driveway catching catfish and bringing them home.

No electricity means no running water. I’ve been stripping off and showering in he garden. No electricity means no communication. No computer. No cell phone charger. I have 7% left on my notebook battery so it looks like this will be my last dispatch. My flashlight is on its last legs and everything in the fridge is smelly. At the end of our lane the water is five–feet deep and my Toyota is only Mighty by name. It’s not a submarine. I’m out of food so I’m working on the dogs’ dry tasteless stuff. If we make it out of this alive I might reassess their dietary needs.

So you see? All this because of gloaticulation. If things are going well for you, take my advice and keep it to yourself.

Some of the worst readers of words are the people who wrote those words in the first place. There are notable exceptions of course but organizers of events assume the big names will give life to their writing. Audiences love to hear the books read by their authors, they say. But I bet you half the audience is there to take the piss. They couldn’t criticize the written word so all they have left to harangue is the lithp or the stuttutter or the downright amateurity. Reading aloud is a skill every bit as profound as creating beautiful prose. And most of us don’t have it. No matter how hard I try, I cannot stop myself sounding like Joyce Grenfell when I read from my books. Joyce was a very popular comedienne in England whose most famous character was a nursery school teacher. Against the odds in a class full of monsters, Joyce keeps her stiff upper lip whilst parodying every kindergarten teacher in England. I taught primary school for a number of years which perhaps explains why I lapse into, ‘You! Stop fidgeting there at the back.’ or ‘I’m going to ask you questions when I finish so I’ll know if you’re paying attention or not.’ And all my characters sound like the three little pigs or Rumplestilskin (Spelling check didn’t help at all with that one.)

So it’s good to know that a process is in place to cull awful readers like me and leave us with only true thespians. It’s called Literary Death Match. I first encountered this franchise in Shanghai. It was one of the highlights of the week, they tell me. Despite the fact that it wouldn’t be at all difficult for one to organize oneself, the LDM compare was flown all the way over from New York. In her little blood-red dress and her stilettos she brought a leggy glamour to the previously dusty literary stage of the restaurant. And here’s how it works. Four writers, presumably those who don’t know what LDM is, are called to the stage. These may be writers of any genre, preferably genres which are almost impossible to compare, like poetry and Honda Civic owner manuals. At the toss of a coin the writers are paired off and go head-to-head reading their most electric work (which must come in under seven minutes.) After the first two readers have read, we arrive at the judging. The three judges are supposed to be as ridiculous as possible whilst criticizing content, performance and intangibles respectively. The poet’s hairstyle might come in for a scathing, for example while her verse is left virtually untouched. The judges then select a winner from the contestants who will go on to round two.

The second pair then reads and the judges select an opponent for winner one. Anyone who goes over the allotted seven minutes is shot with a plastic plunger gun. And here is where I found the process to be a little disappointing. Plastic plunger guns hardly hurt at all. Were I organizing a LDM I would introduce the use of actual handguns. If the performance was truly awful, using the same principle as the Gong Show, the contestant would be mowed down in a hail of bullets. Yes, there may be gratuitous fatalities at first but it wouldn’t take long before word got around. In fact I think I’d make literary readings ‘open season’ on bad readers. Listeners could bring along their own weapons, perhaps we’d give a prize to the member of the audience who packs the most impressive piece.

But, back at the pansy version in Shanghai, the losers are still alive and they watch the winners go on to round two. Luckily, we are spared another reading. The competitors merely play a game. I was told that the games sometimes involve balloons and Jello. But as this was a sophisticated gathering and there was a camouflaged representative of the Ministry of Culture in the back row, the two winners were given a quiz. From a huge screen they had to identify whether the character in the photograph is a poet or a serial killer. Thus, recognizing the face of Anne Bronte and not confusing her with Cutthroat Razor Ethel McGuire would be to your advantage. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how many poets look like serial killers. There’s probably a high crossover rate.