I attended the Theakeston’s Old Peculiar Crime Fiction Festival last weekend. On Friday I drove though sheeting rain over the border into Yorkshire and headed for the spa town of Harrogate and The Old Swan Hotel which is, by the way, where Agatha Christie holed up during her mysterious disappearance of 1926.

Although I didn’t actually stay at The Old Swan, that was where the Festival was held and so I spent much of my weekend in its lush olde worlde environs. When I first arrived however, I have to admit that my nerves was jangling. I knew I was meeting up with my editor from Quercus, her assistant and my publicist Lucy, plus my editor from Headline, but beyond those people who was I going to talk to?

To explain, crime fiction authors, bloggers, publishers and agents are generally a friendly bunch. I knew when I arrived at The Old Swan that no-one would point at me and then suggest that the rest of the party burn me as a witch. But, in common with a lot of writers I don’t go into social situations very often. Most of my life is spent in front of a computer screen occasionally communing with my axolotls and their pet fish, as and when the mood takes me. Sudden forays into the real world of pleasurable social interaction are few and far between.

I get spooked and, as I approach a social encounter I wonder first what I should say and second what I will say. I think that maybe I should just say something witty, urbane and clever. I fear that what I might say is, ‘Hello, I’m Barbara, I write books. Please look away while I sink into the carpet.’ As it happens I usually just say hello and the person I am talking to, who is generally far more adaptive them I am, takes it from there.

Oddly on this occasion, I saw a few people I recognised and was amazed when they said, without any prompting at all, ‘Hi, Barbara, how are you?’ I was relieved that they knew me of course but I was also quite surprised also. Apart from my forays into the wilder side of London and my foreign trips I am something of a hermit which means that I can never really understand how or why people recognise me.

But then it occurred to me that other writers probably feel the same way I do. We all work largely in isolation and in situations that are more or less a state of hermitage. Unless a writer has few deadlines or is extremely gregarious then he or she will not go out a lot. So when we are ‘set free’ we do tend to be rather nervous as we blink myopically in the sunlight, pretending to be more confident than we are.

Later on of course, once time and alcohol have taken effect, there’s no stopping the average writer in full conversational flow. We all go from near silence to the apogee of garrulousness in much less than twelve hours. Noise levels rise, laughter becomes ever more uninhibited and suddenly six months or a years worth of conversation bursts out all in one go.

To be fair to my profession, we do listen to each other even if we are always anxious to make our own points as quickly and as fulsomely as possible. But it doesn’t matter because it’s all good natured and much of it, in this case, took place outside The Old Swan in the mercifully mild air of a rare warm British summer evening.

So they (my manuscripts in progress) let me out for a short time and very grateful to them I am too. However, oddly for me, my Harrogate weekend has left me wanting to do more socialising which is very weird indeed. I find myself a bit pleased and slightly unnerved by this phenomenon and wonder whether I could be turning a little but adaptive. But then I realise that that’s completely impossible and I go back to my work with a smile on my face.

Going out again? Within the month? Now let’s not go mad, shall we!

eBooks. There, I’ve said it. They’re everywhere but still nobody has a clue as to quite where the eBook is going to take us. It’s something that had to happen. The CD revolution in the 90s (was it really that long ago…?) and the advance of digital in all its forms had to hit the world of books sooner or later, and so it has.

Luddite that I am, I wasn’t going to buy a Kindle. It was a present from my daughter who loves her own Kindle dearly. When the book-shaped package was handed to me and it didn’t contain a book, I was a little taken aback and didn’t quite know what to do with it. So I did what a man should do with a new toy – I tinkered with it and pressed all the buttons. And it worked.

To my surprise, I like the Kindle far more than I expected to. I don’t know if others have had the same experience, but it hasn’t stopped me reading ol’ fashioned dead tree books. The house I live in already has several gradually expanding piles of books waiting to be read and now the Kindle is starting to see a To-Be-Read pile of its own accumulating as well, but the Kindle TBR pile is different.

Without expecting to be a fan of an eReader – there’s more than just the Kindle, there are Nooks, Kobos, iPads, etc as well – I’ve found that it has allowed me to read in places where I wouldn’t normally dip into a few pages of a book. I’m also reading stuff that I might not otherwise have picked up. A good few interesting books that I would probably otherwise have never seen or got round to buying have appeared on the Kindle.

Would I have read Jørn Lier Horst, Declan Burke, George Arion or Bogdan Hrib without stumbling across their Kindle versions? Come to that, I’d certainly not have got round to reading Damien Seaman’s The Killing of Emma Gross or Anya Lipska’s Where the Devil Can’t Go, both of them excellent and both only electronically published. This is where I also put in a small plug for the self-published The Dukkering Boy by my friend Fran Lewis. It’s young adult stuff, not crime. But Fran writes beautifully and deserves to be receiving the attentions of a publisher, one of those staid, august companies that do the dead tree books.

With Amazon, Smashwords, etc come the inevitable downsides. It’s so easy to publish that there’s now a huge volume of stuff out there that should probably never have seen the light of day, and to all intents and purposes probably never will. But self-publishing like this is new and this is where 50 Shades of Grey and doubtless future word-of-mouth bestsellers will gestate. The accessibility of the wider audience is also has a few murky depths. Reviews can be dashed off in the blink of an eye and clearly often are. Then there’s sockpuppeting, something that has gone on for a while and a subject that surfaced recently at the Theakston Crime Festival in Harrogate when one well-known author admitted to using false electronic identities to puff his own stuff online. I’m not going to go into it here, as I wasn’t there and an online argument has already been raging about this. Just google ‘Leathergate’ if you want to know more.

It’s worth pointing out here that if you like an author’s work, apart from buying their work to start with, there’s no bigger favour you can do him or her than come up with a few Amazon stars. It seems that these really do make a huge difference in the big scheme of things and a series of 4- or 5-star reviews are calculated into the mysterious algorithms that Amazon uses in promoting that author’s books to a wider audience. In the same way, there’s a huge disservice to be done to a writer by posting bad reviews. All of us have seen a few of those and you have to shrug them off, reminding yourself that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But some writers have attracted stalkers who post not just bad, but maliciously bad reviews in forums and chatrooms. It’s part of the territory, but no less unsavoury for that.

It’s Amazon that has become the behemoth of the book business in a few short years. Now Amazon is shifting gears and moving into publishing as well as selling books, garden tools, electronics and pretty much everything other than cars, so far, at any rate. The juggernaut growth of Amazon seems unstoppable and for publishing there are still plenty of unanswered questions, and probably a good few nervous publishers. Amazon’s move into publishing means that it is chasing with the hounds as well as running with the hare and it’s something none of us can ignore.

However, this is still a whole new world for writers, booksellers, publishers, agents and the whole gamut of the the book business. One writer I know who has been negotiating a publishing deal with Amazon tells me that they ‘prefer not to deal with authors who have agents,’ which sounds unsettling.

For a writer, Amazon can be daunting and the Amazon rankings that show a book’s position in the charts are one of the great mysteries of the age. Although there’s plenty of guesswork, nobody outside Amazon seems to know how these are compiled other than that the rankings are far more than a straightforward number based on sales. There are even rumours of black magic and voodoo being behind the mystery of the Amazon rankings. It’s almost on a par with the mystery of Atlantis.

A book can magically leapfrog half a million places places if half a dozen people buy it within the same half-hour, and drop back down just as fast. How’s that worked out? No, actually I’d rather not be told. I don’t have a degree in mathematics and statistics and would prefer not to have my own ignorance on public display. Maybe it’s best of we just live in the knowledge that Amazon’s rankings are best left shrouded in mystery.

But at the moment we have to live with the fact that the world of books is in turmoil and is going to stay that way for a while as books are sold at knock-down prices, and the future of paper, agents and traditional publishers remains open to question.

As John Steinbeck observed: ‘The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.’

Never more so than now, it seems. Steinbeck knew a thing or two and he was absolutely right, but it’s anyone’s guess what he would have made of eBooks.

The impulse motivating a lot of crime is greed. The outlier wants money for drugs, hot cars or motorcycles, beautiful women, expensive restaurants, foreign holidays—what are perceived as the good things that rich people, or at least well off people, use to identify themselves as successful, desirable, and admirable. Not to mention more sexually attractive. The determinist would argue our biology compels us to compete for mates and nature has no morality, only meaningful report card is the column marked reproduction success, so cheating and the rest of the card are worthless. In love and war there are no rules. Anything goes.

Many articles and books have hammered home the lesson that most acts of greed aren’t criminalized. In many cases, not only are such acts legal, the greedy are rewarded with large bonus, awards, put on the cover of magazines, appear on panels at Davos. When a huge company or firm threatens to blow up from an excess of greed, they turn to the government to safe them.

That’s why we need to talk about greed. We live in a time of vast inequality, a state that is defended by a sizeable portion of the population who happen to be the victims of such inequality. How did this happen? Have we been sleep walking for the last thirty years since President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margret Thatcher fired their starters’ pistol that allowed the greedy to spring ahead of us at the speed of light. All of this has happened in our lifetime.

How bad is it? What can we do about it? And how did hive create a unified mindset that greed was good? I don’t begin to have the answers to such complex questions.

What I have are a couple of pathways to explore, and one or two signposts that suggests a direction to move ahead.

Our perception of greed including the qualities that fuel greed—selfish and narcissistic attitudes and an absence of empathy begins to take shape in childhood

Most of us remember when as a child, a brother or sister, friend or neighbor, hogged more share of the popcorn or mom’s apple pie or the bicycle or the basketball never passing, always taking the shot from the corner. That was our childhood introduction to the idea of greed–actions that were tiny lessons in the art of selfishness. From an early age we calculate how other people divide and share time, opportunity, attention, and, of course, money. And one shouldn’t forget toys and invitations. My parents lectured me that being greedy was morally wrong and people wouldn’t like me if I were greedy. Of course you can be disliked for a lot of other reasons even if you’re not greedy. But that is another essay.

One would think with a lifelong series of lessons in the workings of greed in the back of our minds, we’d quietly resolve that once we grew up and ran things, we’d put a fence around greed, herd the greedy inside and watch them roam around being greedy among their own kind. An appropriate punishment is isolating the greedy.

The problem is, after we grew up the people who were greedy all around the edge of our life proved to have the kind of talent and ability most valued by the world of commerce. And there was no need to isolate the greedy, as they were perfectly capable to isolating themselves. Who else lived in gated communities?

As far as I can see, greed is a vast mall where pundits are gathering to talk about fair shares of this and that on a daily basis. Two recent stories made me understand that the lessons of greed learnt during childhood never fully prepared us with the way forces much larger than ourselves have scaled greed to unimaginable levels.

The first story about loan sharks or what the Bangkok Post called  “predatory lending cartels.” There are about 40 to 50 of these backdoor banking operations in Thailand. Apparently, two of the “businesses” have resources and what the Bangkok Post calls “backing to counter the authorities.” You get the picture—no one can do much about the ‘backed up’ greedy. They have juice.

The way it works in Thailand, is the borrower can opt for a 24-day repayment period or a “2% interest” payment plan. Under the first plan, the borrower repays an equal amount every day for 24 days. The average interest on the 24-day repayment plan is 50%. Under the Usury Law, the maximum is 28%, but as we have established if you have juice, you can squeeze out another 22% over the legal limit without too much of a problem. But the 24-day plan is a walk in the park compared with the 2% interest plan. Under that plan, the borrower is paying only the interest, and that continues until the day the borrower comes up with the principal to repay. Can’t come up with the principal, the borrower continues to pay for life.

Greedy lenders couldn’t exist without an element of greed in a large pool of borrower, especially ones who won’t ever receive a bank loan because they have no steady income or resources to put up as collateral. But they also want to buy gold, cell phones, iPads, and motorcycles. This class of upcountry lenders has an army of “black helmet” debt collectors who do nasty things to borrowers who miss payments. The handmaiden of greed has always been violence. When a borrower takes the money from one of these lenders, he/she forfeits his protection against intimidation and violence.

The upcountry Thai loan sharks show how greed can be organized and scaled on a regional and national basis, and how, at least some players in that network, are given a free-hand to violate the Usury Law and the criminal statues on threatens, intimidation and assault. The middle-class tends to write off the poor rural borrower, as someone reaping their bad karma.

The second story shows that Thailand’s loan shark operation is small change, backwater, out-of-date, out-of-touch money-making. When someone has a close look at the assets of the global super rich, we start to see the upper limits to which pure greed when left unregulated by government, and unbundled from any sense of ethics or morality, can take us. The Guardian  reports that 92,000 people or 0.001% of the world’s population has hidden out of tax view approximately $21 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of ice cream cones, basketball court time, and popcorn.

How much money is that? Three percent interest on that sum is equal, according to the Guardian, to the combined aid given by rich countries to the developing countries each year.

At one time it was said that money from the rich trickled down and everyone benefited. This hunk of an iceberg sits out of sight and despite global warming shows not only no sign of melting but no evidence of a trickle from a leaky kitchen tap.

A number of recent studies in psychology have shown that people have a burning sense of fairness. If A holds $100 dollars and the rule is she can keep the money provided B agrees, and before B agrees, A must make an offered division of the money. What the researchers found is that if A offered B $20 and wanted B to accept that offer so she could keep the $80, most of the time B would reject the offer even though B would be $20 worse off. The point is A loses the $80, too, and that makes for an incentive for a fairer offer, say a 60/40 split.

Our psychology drives people on a personal, person-to-person basis, to reject an offer meaning she will get nothing but at the same time knows the other person who made the unjust offer also gets nothing. Once we scale away from the personal level (the level we know from childhood) we discover at global level of big business and finance, that capitalism inevitably, without safeguards and restraints, will always produce an unjust allocation. In this case, there are several ways those who feel the allocation between the 92,000 and the rest of us is an unjust and unfair allocation of resources. It’s a gross misallocation of money.

Here are a few ideas: First, we have the necessary tools to find the money Second, tax laws could be passed to compel the 92,000 to pay taxes on such wealth. Third, enact an “unusually rich” law (there is such a law in Thailand, but that is another essay) which allows the government to claw back money someone can’t account for.

Saying you won a couple of billion in a poker game or a lottery has been tried (and mostly doesn’t work). It might be better to cut to the chase, and admit that anyone with wealth over $100 million is unusually wealthy. The excess money goes back to the State. The environment, climate change, education, medical care, scientific research would benefit overnight from this cash injection. Though, with the cunning of international banksters combined with this treasure scattered like rice thrown at a wedding, enacting such laws would be almost as difficult as enforcing them if enacted.

The anger over the unfairness of how income and wealth is distributed is coming to a head. Precisely because you can poke large holes in the possible three solutions above, the political solution seems impossible. When that happens, expect to see self-help fill the void.

It won’t be long before technology will allow determined Internet Robin Hoods to ferret out the super rich, their bank accounts, their hiding places inside the global Nottingham Forest. Once there is a consensus that the Sheriffs have been bought off, the risk increases that self-help will fill the void. The task is a huge one. The construction of a secure fence to encircle greed might be technically possible but with the amount of wealth involved, the super rich will have their army of  “geeks” to subvert the Robin Hood assault.

Only a true romantic would believe that our childhood promise to install a means to control greed can succeed. No matter where on the planet the money is stashed, it can be shifted, converted, hidden and more accumulated in the meantime. Will there be an accounting of the super rich? That’s already been done. But accounting and accountability are two separate issues.

The digital auditors need backing. They can run the sums. They’ve identified the world’s elite class of the greediest. It is now over to those who have their hands on the levers of power to adjust the rules and tax laws. The way it looks, though, they are holding hands with the super rich. The levers of power are part of their hidden ownership.

It would be too depressing to leave the matter like a crime everyone witnessed but no one can arrest the killer. In the oft chance, the internet Robin Hoods need some analogue help in chasing down the super rich, or some technical advice on what do to with them when they’re found and confronted, they might consider a consultancy contract with the Black Helmet debtor collectors in Thailand. The Men in Black Helmets know how to produce results. The 92,000 might try to bargain, bribe or come up with excuses. These guys, according to press accounts, are good; they no how to cause pain without leaving marks. But the bribing potential is a bit of a problem but giving them a percentage of the take should take care of that.

For anyone on the 92,000 Greed List, you better start running about now, looking over your shoulder, because I see a crew of 53 kilo Black Helmet debtor collectors recruited as freelance taxmen and they have your name and address, bank account details, and the message from Thailand is that these guys just don’t accept  “no” for an answer.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest book is a collection of 50 essays titled Faking It in Bangkok, which is available as a kindle ebook.

The most important moments in the writing of a novel come when the writer isn’t writing. That’s when the best ideas germinate and gestate. That’s why I’m going to Tuscany this week.

There are plenty of other reasons for going to Tuscany and I shall indulge in all of them in the coming weeks. But I’ve written here before about the need for writers to spend a good deal of their time doing either nothing or something other than writing — thus taking a long holiday is a very productive thing to do (That’s why I also plan on writing off the vacation against my taxes…)

Meditation is the most concentrated method of switching off the conscious writing faculties – and all other conscious faculties. I also use other techniques, like yoga. Perhaps surprisingly one of the best ways is to read good writing. (Reading bad writing, by contrast, makes you edit the stuff in your head and your writing faculties are painfully heightened.)

I happen to be taking a vacation in the country in which my next novel is to be set (and in which my current release, A NAME IN BLOOD, is set, albeit four hundred years ago in the time of Caravaggio.) But that’s not necessarily the point. I’ve loaded up my suitcase with research materials and I intend to devote an hour every day to something approximating work. But that work will be fairly speculative.

At this stage of a book (ie. almost the beginning; I know where the book begins, but I don’t know the end and I’m far from knowing the middle, which always comes last) I like to sit with a blank page in my lap, pens of several colors in my hand, and I start to draw something akin to the “Mind Maps” that were popular in the 1990s but which I didn’t hear about until a couple of years ago.

In the center of the page, I’ll write the title of the book, or a character’s name, or a clue. I’ll focus my mind on that page, at once allowing anything to come into my head and at the same time directing my thoughts outward, radiating away from the narrowing down that we tend to do when we believe we’re “thinking.” From there, I’ll draw connections to whatever comes into my head. When I’ve been at this for a while, a picture or diagram of that element of the book appears before me. That’s the way I organize the book – lists or pages of notes don’t work for me.

Now I’ve done this kind of thing often enough at home. After all, I live in Jerusalem, which isn’t exactly dour or everyday in the influences it brings into my consciousness. But I’m expecting Tuscany to produce a relaxation in me that will allow my creative energies to flow.

And even if it doesn’t, I expect I’ll manage just fine with the Chianti and the Fiorentina steak and the perfect espresso and the… Well, you get the idea. Try it yourself.

–

This is the third installment on my ongoing series about racism in Finland, as told through the eyes of the foreigners who experience it, and in this instance, a letter from a Finn who feels disenfranchised. I’m splitting the series between websites and blogs, because it’s lengthy. You can also find an installment on Murder is Everywhere.

An abundance of correspondence came to me through the good offices of a young Nigerian man who contacted me in desperation. He wrote me because, he said, I was one of only two foreigners he knew of who had thrived in this country. As a would-be author, he chose to write to me for advice about his prospects as a writer, and about how to survive and thrive in a culture that, although he has lived here for many years, continues to often mystify and even frighten him. This from a man who is trained medical professional and speaks fluent Finnish, is a good citizen and taxpayer, who has done everything that is expected of a Finn. And as an aside, is a really nice guy.

When he came to me, out of fear of retribution, he asked to remain anonymous in my posts about him and wishes to remain so. He has been attacked and beaten three times because of the color of his skin. He’s a good writer and has written charming travel pieces as well as touching autobiographical. Something has gone dreadfully awry when a culture emotionally shreds a talented and motivated person like him. He tells me his depression has lifted as a result of writing and some minor recognition for it. Nuff said.

The letters below run on gut emotion and much of what they write is venting. Catharsis. They have no substantiated facts, no academic credibility. The spelling and grammar are awful. Bear in mind that English is a second, third, fourth or fifth language for the writers, and writing as well as they do in English an accomplishment. And most importantly, consider that the inner worlds of human beings don’t function through facts, statistics and references. These writers are bearing their souls to you.

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

24.7.2012

COMMENTER 7:

Finnish people they are fucking stupid and crazy i wish i have never been adobted to this fucking shit country and spending 20 years of my childhood here…believe me it has made serious problems to me.

finns are a cave people,i haven t been able to socialize with them,only i have been able to socialize with people from other cultures.

Finns are very bitter and emotionally invalid people. for me it seems that finnish people are even so stupid that they cannot understand these things if you say to them.well what do they understand…nothing….

COMMENTER 8:

and I think it describes our nature so well. It has taken me years of living abroad to even begin to open up to other people and enjoy life, trust others and expect that they are mainly friendly. There is a sadly pessimistic streak in our national culture. We have poor self esteem. We think that others laugh at us because there is basically something wrong with us.

Or that’s how things were. I’m 46, and people of my age still mainly belong to the old school of Finns. The younger generation, however, has started to communicate with people around the world – Internet makes it easy for all of us now. I’m certain that our beautiful country will eventually be inhabited by a happy and well adjusted people.

Climate also has an effect on our personality. It’s not so easy to socialise when it’s cold outside and the last thing you want is to go and visit your neighbours. At summer even us Finns are happier and more talkative.

I hope that kindergartens and schools will do their utmost to help the younger generation to grow into human beings who can adjust living anywhere, with people from any culture – cosmopolitan people, people of the world.

My dearest friends are both Finnish and foreign. So are my enemies. I like to think I take people as individuals.

COMMENTER 9:

I was there in finland once upon a time and I dont know where else can be found suitable than that remote place for someone who is completely through with world and living? As if I was sinked very deeply in a grave, while still alive. Not any suicide would be probably that conscious, that resolute, that continuous and intractable.

Before i went there a friend of mine had said that people in finland have calm and deep souls. Who knows.. what lies at the bottom of it? impossible to find out..

The first weeks of my coming there i only spread fear and suspicion around. I dont know if they considered me as an agent or terrorist or something but i saw the fear in their face very clearly. I guess it was my black hair. Later, may be, when it is come to an agreement that neither i am “this” or “that”, that i am actually nothing at all, i started to see eyes opened with amazement and lips twisted with sarcasm instead of wrinkled foreheads with being startled. I can’t imagine anything more or as bothersome. My most simple, plain, natural movements appeared them as odd as a clown’s somersaults and springs in the circus.

When i spoke to them they were gawping at me as if they didnt understand anything. Then, they were murmuring something to one another, and this time i knew that i am understood, but disapproved.

Instructions, manners, good models they are all temporary things and there is no possibility for a human to get changed unless the environment change. Every evening i have been thinking the earth come to an end. And for this reason, every morning, when i opened my eyes, i was disappointed. “one more day?” , and “which day!”

Weariness and monotony were in the air, it simply gets you and you just start to become one of that people. I really used to loose my time sence, there and then, since everyday was exactly the same. Only saturdays you go to a bar, drink as much as you can till you forget who you are, and hardly find the way home.

It is said committing suicide is common in finland, i think they dont need to do anything special because living there is simply a suicide.

James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, released in March, 2011, earned starred reviews from all quarters, and was named one the best novels of the year by Kirkus. The third in the series, Helsinki White, was released on March 15 to critical acclaim.

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

FB: James Thompson author

Twitter: tassu15

Yesterday I discovered a deeply suspect part of my personality. I’ve always known it was there, but yesterday it came forth in full, ghastly gleefulness.

Basically I had an issue with a bank I have dealings with. The details are irrelevant beyond the fact that I had inadvertently missed one payment to them and they had fined me, frozen my account and told various credit rating agencies that I was now a bad risk. When I got their bill I paid it immediately but I did so with the full intention of calling them to ‘discuss’ what I felt was their gross over-reaction to one late payment.

Fortunately for me (their bill) they rang me first. Or rather some poor woman in a call centre rang me on their behalf. Now I should just mention in my own defence that I did say I was not in any way angry with this woman per se on several occasions. I was angry with the bank, which, like most banks in this country right now is a fairly discredited and despised institution. But my God did I go on!

How dare they freeze my account and tell the credit agencies I was a ‘bad risk’ after just one late payment! I’ve been a customer of theirs for over ten years and I’ve always broken my back to pay them on time in the past. They know I’m working, know I always pay my bills, who the hell do they think they are! I was so angry I was never going to use their services again unless they writhed on the ground before me in a frenzy of self abasement.

The poor woman at the other end tried to keep to her script. She wanted to enter my phone call as a ‘complaint’ and I, for my part, kept on saying that wasn’t good enough. I told her what I wanted was an official apology, from a person as opposed to a computer, signed by a human being. It took her a while to work out what that actually was but she did get it in the end and even asked for my address so that the letter I had requested could be sent to me.

Will I get such a letter? I doubt it. But what I don’t doubt is that if I don’t receive such a missive, they can forget about making any money out of me. And if I’m ever turned down by anyone for having a bad credit rating (which can only be down to them) then may God help them.

Although discovering that all high level banking in this country was basically corrupt over the past few years, has been a shock, it has also been quite freeing for ordinary people like me. Banks who have gambled with my money without my permission, have artificially and illegally fixed interest rates and have been proven to have been in business with some very dodgy people indeed, don’t deserve anybody’s respect. Nobody gives me a damn great bonus if I really screw up my job and so why should I bow and scrape to people who are feted in this ridiculous manner.

More and more people in this country are, like me, having a go and not taking their crap anymore. If I get turned down for a loan because of them I will scream and scream until they do what I want. After all if someone like the odious Sir Fred Goodwin, once head of the Royal Bank of Scotland – which he brought to its knees – can get a whole heap of money for being a shit I am quite entitled to a loan I will pay back with interest when I kick off like a crazy woman.

When I’d finished my call to the bank I punched the air in both celebration and with elation. I’d stuck it to them, which I had but I’d also made a poor call centre person confused and probably quite miserable too. At the time I didn’t care. That was the suspect part of my personality I’ve always known exists coming up. But today I have mellowed. I am sorry to her for my ranting and raving but I’m even more sorry that she has to work for such a devalued institution as a bank. Unless they really do something dramatic soon, our banks will be discredited for generations to come. And they will only have themselves to blame for that.

I don’t live in London. In fact, I rarely venture inside the M25, the orbital motorway around the city that provides its de facto limits. For the next few weeks, you can be as sure as hell I won’t be going near the place as the Olympics grind into action.

Pardon me for being a tired old cynic, but surely London needs the Olympic Games like it needs a hole in the head. You can maybe guess I’m not a fan? The whole thing is one long yawn as far as I’m concerned*, all those interminable races and events with milliseconds sandpapered off previous records. Excuse me, but to my mind  a race run in 37.62 seconds is is indistinguishable from a race run in 37.59 seconds.

The run-up to the Olympics has been roughly what could have been expected. It’s produced endless turmoil, the whole shebang is going to cost a fortune, and it’ll all be a frantic rush to get everything ready for the opening date. I seem to recall dimly that this happens with every Olympic Games as there are scandals over contractors not building to schedule, promises not kept, budgets that are forgotten as real cost of all this stuff inevitably spirals out of control. You’d have thought people would have figured this out by now and would have learned by experience, but apparently not.

London 2012 has had its fair share of scandals, not least that the private security firm contracted to supply security staff also managed to screw up and at the last minute the British government is quite literally having to send in the troops.

The latest joke doing the rounds is, how many G4S staff does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: six soldiers and a police officer.

The root of the problem seems to be that the criteria to qualify as a security guard at the Olympics are stiff, while the hourly rate offered by G4S was pretty dismal and not enough to attract the people of the calibre they were looking for. You’d have thought the principle of peanuts/monkeys was fairly well known by now.

The press has, naturally, had a field day with all this, as there’s nothing we Brits like more than abject failure as a spectator sport. The G4S chief honcho being coaxed into admitting his company had monumentally cocked up was a wonderful piece of radio, while also admitting that his company will lose a breathtaking amount of cash on the venture.

This is the unpalatable part of the whole thing. I don’t normally like to be a grouch, but the whole thing leaves a sour taste. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for sporting prowess. But what turns the belly is the thought of all those competitors who have trained for years, fought for a place, dedicated large chunks of their lives towards doing something superlatively well, scrimped and saved and scrounged sponsorship, and then travelled half-way around the world for what is for many of them the chance of a lifetime – while the fat cats are busily raking in the moolah on the back of all that effort.

The sporting ideals of the ancient Olympics (in which no women were allowed, men competed naked and the only reward was a garland of leaves) have been long left behind. You could be forgiven for thinking that the real winners in these games are the corporate sponsors who will gain some global mega-advertising through this. It’s also incongruous that a sporting event of this global magnitude with its supposed mens sana in corpore sano ethic is sponsored by a burger chain, a chocolate manufacturer and a fizzy drinks company. All you need is a cigarette manufacturer and a vodka distillery on board and you’d have the whole gamut of unhealthy crap represented.

Oh, and if you do happen to be one of the lucky ones who did get a ticket, don’t be tempted to smuggle in a sandwich. Food has to be bought on-site from one of the sponsors, preferably using a Visa card. Yes, Visa are another sponsor.

So the losers are likely to be the Londoners and the rest of the people who live in south-eastern England who are seeing their lives interrupted by the turmoil. Thousands of athletes and spectators are overburdening the creaking transport infrastructure, watching as the bigwigs in their chauffeur driven cars are driven back and forth along lanes closed to anyone else. We couldn’t have these important people being late, let alone mildly inconvenienced like the rest of us, could we?

So there you go. For the next few weeks I won’t be glued to the box or cursing that I didn’t get tickets for the middleweight discus events or freestyle caber-tossing. I’ll happily let the whole thing pass me by.

*That obviously doesn’t include Ladies’ Beach Volleyball, the only Olympic sport that’s even mildly tempting.

Fortunately Britain has one newspaper that concentrates on the real burning issues of the day. Syria descending into civil war? The economy coming apart at the seams? The government coalition tearing itself to shreds? No. Last week a Sun headline covered the terrible summer weather and the dire possibility that if it doesn’t improve, the ladies competing in beach volleyball events may have to cover up and wear clothes instead of the skimpy stuff the punters are hoping to see. That would be a disaster on an Olympic scale.

Technology is the major driver of change. Creative destruction is often used to describe the train wreck-like effect that new technology has as it destroys jobs, industries (think of publishing and newspapers), institutions, and markets. The bodies left in the path of creative destruction can be charted by examining the technological history as battle axes and arrows were replaced by muskets and cannon, only to be replaced machine guns, onto atomic bombs, and now in drones that deliver by remote control lethal ordnance.

What hasn’t kept with the rate of technological change is the way our brains process the big data that washes over our lives. It is likely that our cognitive biases and the narratives we invent from the patterns of information that stream through our lives daily are little changed over thousands of years. The fundamental neural wiring is 100,000 years old.

There is evidence for a disconnect between what new methods, structures, and networks that we have invented and how we continue to perceive and behave in the world. Most people’s behavior and mindset appear immune to technological change. The world inside their head is largely untouched by innovation. If you want to witness cognitive limitation, spend a little time in a courtroom or in a police station or a legislative assembly.

One of the reasons that crime novels, mysteries, and courtroom dramas remain highly popular as novels, TV dramas and movies, is people can relate to the conflict in perception, the stories, the mistakes, the lies, and the biases. I suspect it has always been so. We aren’t robots. We are cognitively flawed human beings who have the fancy idea that since we innovate, we, too, have benefited from this technology in the way we behave and think.

That is plain wrong.

Lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and police spend a lifetime listening to conflicting versions of events from those directly involved and bystanders. I call this the magic realm of ‘He said, She said.” Like watching a tennis match, each player hits the ball across the net to win a point only to find the ball comes back. In the courtroom game, people bring in their point of view, emotions, hindsight bias and assume their memory is the complete record of the experience, and any other version is wrong, biased, based on lies and fraud.

While technological changes that are designed to update our cognitive abilities, reduce the biases and flaws may appear in the distant future, there is an intermediate period of change that is happening now to redefine the ‘He said, She said’ world of diverse, confused and biased memory recall. In the real world, who ‘he’ is and who ‘she’ is, at least in my part of the world, is a significant factor in determining what happened.

One such technology is the car camera. Real time, video cameras with high resolution, good lens the camera is fixed to your dashboard or review mirror where it can record everything within 150 degree view of the road as you are driving.  In Thailand, where I drive on the highway a couple of times a week, I witness something approaching low-level warfare on wheels. That is likely my bias talking. But in the event of accident, having the video footage leading up to the event, in theory, eliminates the social status of the other driver and his/her story as the accepted version. Having a car camera that also records your speed would also be an advantage when the police stop and say that you were speeding.

I can see a couple of flaws in the car camera. It is possible the video recording would be confiscated and ‘lost’ (this has happened not with car cameras but with CCTV cameras in Thailand on occasions). Some places in the States have made it illegal to photograph or video the police. Shaking off our long history of cognitive biases will be much more difficult than landing a man on the moon.

From judges to cops, to school teachers and prison guards, welfare officers to bankers and government officials, their status has given them an edge when the stories they tell conflict with the stories told by those under their power and authority.  As more and more ways of monitoring come on the market, we hear the cry of loss of freedom and free will. That is mainly an illusion. We only have enjoyed a limited about of freedom since we became domesticated about 9,000 years ago, and free will was one of those just so stories we accepted on faith.

The yoke of flaw cognitive abilities and authority structures based on power rather than facts or truth, won’t be overturned as that is the nature of how we are, and revising our cognitive abilities won’t be easy.

Just as the modern GPS on iPads, cell phones and other devices reduces the chances of us getting lost when we travel to a new destination, the car camera promises a way to resolve the ‘he said, she said’ stalemate by producing a neutral way to establish the facts of what happened.

Those in power and authority will hate being challenged with the Third Eye. The technological eye that lacks bias, is not obedient to authority, and has no past or reputation to defend.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest book is a collection of 50 essays titled Faking It in Bangkok, which is available as a kindle ebook.

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Last Monday, 9^th July 2012, my new Hakim and Arnold crime series was officially launched. There’s a lot that is not exactly fun or glamorous about being an author but book launches, especially your own, are fantastic exceptions. This is not least of course because a book launch is all about you (me – you know what I mean!) and all authors have egos even if they manage to hide them very well.

Organised by my publisher, Quercus, the launch of the first book in my London based Hakim and Arnold series, ‘A Private Business’, was held at my favourite book shop. This is the Newham Bookshop in Upton Park, London which is a treasure box of fantastic tomes on London, women’s issues, fiction, history, children’s books – you name it, they have it, and they know all about it too. No ‘one size fits all’ book advice at the Newham!

In concert with Lucy my publicist at Quercus, Vivian who runs the bookshop provided drinks and nibbles to all the guests who included, staff from Quercus, critics, bloggers, Newham regulars, my agent, friends and family. We all crammed in to the packed book shop sheltering from the hammering rain outside (it’s July and the UK, what do you expect?) and many toasts were proposed to the new book, to my publisher, the book shop, my family and also to my friend Gilda O’Neill who died almost two years ago. A fellow author and fantastic East End social historian, Gilda was sorely missed by so many of us and I was just glad that her husband John could take the time to come along and join in the celebrations.

After the booze in the bookshop we then all went off to an Indian Restaurant just across the road for a fantastic buffet and, for me, lots of time to talk to everyone who had come along. The evening was eventually topped off with a drink in the pub next door to the restaurant, The Boleyn. And this was when I began to fill up, as it were. Newham as a whole, but especially Upton Park, is very special to me. Not only is it where my new series, as well as my World War 2 Hancock series, is based, it’s also where I’m from. My dad used to drink in The Boleyn and being in there again with so many people that I care about was very poignant for me.

Sometimes authors have their launches at very smart and swanky places like The Ritz or in massive, famous bookshops like Foyles. Brilliant though those places and launches are, though, I wouldn’t have swapped what I had for the world. Hakim and Arnold are out in the world now and, whatever happens, I think that they, as Newham people, have come out in just the right way.