Joe is Online – Free during May in the Kindle Store

My first novel Joe is Online is currently free in the Kindle store on Amazon US and Amazon UK until the end of May, at the very earliest. 

Why is it free? I’ve recently completed my second novel and, on the basis that it’s slightly less weird than the first, am sending it out to literary agents at the moment. The second novel is a story told by the wife of a British prime minister… but it’s not Sam Cam. Nor Cherie. Nor Norma Major ( though that would be a cracking story )

Happy reading.

 

Pimping out your children on social networks

Someone told me tonight of what sounds like the most cynical and revolting social media app conceivable, which is apparently under development and soon to launch. In essence it combines the worst aspects of Facebook and Instagram to produce timelines of your children, documenting the little darlings’ life stages from their twelve week scan through their first day at school, presumably to puberty and beyond.

The plan, apparently, is to harvest the data gleaned from these life-stages and sell them to corporates. So a large manufacturer of kids’ trainers would have a rough idea of not just their likely tastes at certain ages but also their probable shoe size. Every conceivable toy manufacturer would know exactly which adverts to send through to their parents, pulling in keywords from status updates to garner an intricate digital footprint of children who are far to young to even know the meaning of the word consent, much less grant it.

This social network – nascent in every sense – will apparently be closed and private. The goal is to allow parents to show off their ds or dd to distant friends and relatives who’re unable to be there for every first word or crawl. This, so goes the thinking, will counter concerns by some about putting their kids’ images on places like Facebook. The payoff for the company involved is a very specialised and marketable dataset, which like any other of its kind would be sold off to the highest bidder.

That we’ve reached this stage is almost unfathomable. The best rule of thumb when putting anything online is to consider whether you’d be happy with those words or images continuing to exist in perpetuity, even if you’ve chosen to delete them. Because that’s the likely outcome of anything one posts these days. You’ve already signed up for it by accepting the privacy agreement you never bothered to read.

Many people I know who’ve had kids initially balked at putting pictures of their children on Facebook. They started out with the best intentions, but as time passed succumbed to pressure from Aunt Zelda in Queensland for a drip-drip of photos. Then Cousin Pete in California wanted pictures, too, so it became a lot easier just to dump them on Facebook as a one-stop shop, rather than having to email them each time. These are new parents, of course; they’re busy and tired.

As months passed the survival-instinct hormones which instilled an urge to protect bordering on paranoia wore off, and the occasional baby photo became as frequent as any other status update. At the same time Facebook introduced ‘life events’, which sounded fairly innocuous to begin with. Until, that is, one starts to ponder the trend towards entire lives being documented on social media. Cradle to the grave.

What seems to have escaped the comprehension of these parents is that their children haven’t read the privacy agreement either. Worse than that, though, these kids haven’t been given the opportunity to click past it without a second glance. They have been signed up to an endless and constant digital existence on a for-profit social network, in effect against their will. Their footprint on social media has been conceived and executed without their consent or knowledge, so much so that by the time they realise it’s happening it’ll seem standard and normal.

On reflection it shouldn’t really be surprising that this new app is just around the corner. It’s merely building on what already exists, and designed to pull in those parents who’ve so far chosen to be refuseniks to what is a quite unsavoury pimping out of people’s very identities on a digital landscape. In effect the app already exists, it just does it far less explicitly.

Facebook insists that no child under 13 may have a profile, but in a roundabout fashion these children are already being given one by their parents. Their ‘life events’ are being added to a global for-profit dataset, appended to their parents’ profiles. Does anyone seriously think Facebook couldn’t find ways to extrapolate  that data into a quasi profile of its own if it wanted to? By the time they reach the threshold of owning an account, many will find they’ve already been tagged, mentioned, face recognised and geo-located dozens of times. Not dissimilar to a battery human hatched in the dystopia of The Matrix, these kids have been given a digital projection shaped by their parents and their parents’ friends, one they’ll struggle to delete later even if they tried.

This is not paranoia or rehashing well-trodden concerns about privacy, it’s a development which has huge implications and poses important questions about self-identity and self-actualisation; issues that kids have always had to grapple with when growing up, but which now appear to be taken out of their hands before they even get round to thinking about them.

I’d go as far as to say that anyone who readily floods the internet with images and videos of their children is displaying questionable parenting, inflicting upon their kids their own insatiable urge to constantly have an online presence. At best it’s the old mantra of living through your kids to the nth degree, at worst it’s the wholesale pimping out of a vulnerable person’s very existence.

The Guardian has just started a project to find out how hard it is for people to erase their online footprint and are running a survey about it here. 

Britain’s energy policy under DECC will go from afterthought to political football

For the past week apocalyptic headlines have declared Britain perilously close to running out of gas, largely because no-one ever bothered to build the kind of storage infrastructure that’s common in France and Germany. They can store three month’s worth of the stuff while we’ve only got capacity for a fortnight.

Anyone trying to get any sense out of government on these issues is met with stonewalling. DECC and the National Grid like to pass the buck to each other, normally issuing terse statements about the viability of our ‘energy mix’ and generally declaring that all is well. They claim gas storage is a red herring because we’ve still got our North Sea gas to draw on, pipelines to the Continent and a burgeoning wind energy sector both onshore and off.

There is another view, though, which runs like this; while successive governments have been obsessed with wind energy, unfortunately the wind only blows some of the time. Governments have encouraged companies to build gas or nuclear power stations, but under a rather demented vision for the future at DECC these are only meant to be a backup for when the wind isn’t blowing. As such DECC has decreed that any new nuclear power stations should be built without direct government subsidy, something which has never happened anywhere in the western world. Where, exactly, the incentive to plough billions into a facility which the government really only sees as a backstop?

It’s hardly a surprise that these firms are giving government the finger, which is exactly what happened last month when Centrica became the latest firm to pull out of a plant-building deal last moth. Eon and EDF have both balked at similar prospects in the past twelve months. Five years after the government announced sites for a new generation of nuclear power stations, only one is remotely close to being built, at Hinkley, and even then everyone’s holding their breath to see whether EDF and DECC can agree a ‘strike price’ – the long-term amount the company will receive for electricity generation. The deal could easily fall through and if it does the prospect of an energy shortfall within a decade becomes a foregone conclusion.

Part of the problem is coalition; the Lib Dems in control at DECC make little secret of their desire to carpet the countryside with wind farms, and flagship legislation has been delayed thanks to interminable wranglings over the Green Investment Bank between the department and the Treasury. The government seems determined to press ahead with shutting coal-fired power stations despite the looming energy shortfall. EU directives are blamed for this, even though the UK often seems to be the only member state which pays the slightest bit of attention to them.

But most people accept the problem runs across successive governments. So it’s somewhat surprising that nobody’s really looking at how Labour’s energy record contributed to the problem. Any study of that record must include the behaviour of Ed Miliband, who was in charge of DECC for nearly three years from 2008. Ed Miliband’s pre-occupation was storing carbon, not gas, and his only real piece of legislation dealt solely with these. At least Miliband understood the need to build new nuclear power stations, landing the onerous gig of trying to turn around the New Labour supertanker, which for most of its time in government refused to even look at nuclear investment.

Even so Labour could and should have enacted the sort of legislation during Ed Miliband’s tenure at DECC which the coalition is trying to implement now; liberalising planning laws to allow big gas storage projects to be built, fast-tracking planning considerations on nuclear sites. That work was only beginning when Labour left office, since then the coalition has dragged its feet. DECC under Chris Huhne did almost nothing to expedite these processes, and it’s quite baffling that nearly three years into the coalition the legislation to do so hasn’t even been given Royal Assent and is unlikely to get it before the end of this year.

Even if the lights don’t go out at some point later in this decade, we’re facing a looming time-bomb on energy bills. At the moment they’re being kept artificially low by cheap coal imports from America, which has a glut of coal to get rid of now they’re dining out on shale gas. Once we start to turn off our coal-fired stations to please Europe that suppressant on prices quickly vanishes. If the shambles surrounding negotiations on whether to build a new power station at Hinkley are anything to go by, the prospects for averting both energy insecurity and fuel poverty seem remote.

One thing that all politicians should be able to agree on; the Department for Energy and Climate Change is a disastrous, dysfunctional department whose two concerns seem to neuter its effectiveness at achieving either.  Certainly this was the case under Labour but its inertia seems only to have been amplified under coalition, with every indication this would remain so if the next election produced a Lib/Lab one.

It’s hard to trace this torrent of bad decision-making back to the source, although the Blair/Brown refusnik attitude towards nuclear seems a likely candidate. What seems apparent is that we currently enjoy a Secretary of State for Climate Change under Ed Davey, supported by an energy minister in the form of John Hayes. The problems Britain faces in terms of future energy security mean this setup needs to be entirely reversed; we haven’t had a full-time energy secretary in this country since 1992, with results that are becoming more obvious with every passing week. Our collective memory of three-days weeks and power shortages appears to have lapsed, at a time when our reliance on computers to get things done should’ve made us more focused on energy security, not less.

Instead we face a future where a harsh winter similar to this one coupled with an unexpected pipeline shutdown could realistically lead to gas rationing. But worst of all we will see political parties blaming one another for an entirely avoidable mess, one which will do more to hamper Britons’ standard of living than any omnishambles budget or recession could ever achieve.

Who I am

I’m a writer based in east London. I was born in Northampton and studied at St. Andrews and Edinburgh.

So far in 2012 I’ve written extensively for Huffington Post UK as political editor and I’ve been working towards completing my second novel.

During my time at Huffington Post UK I broke stories including:

- The first revelations that Department for Education officials were bypassing FOI by using their private Hotmail accounts.

- The news that Ed Miliband’s senior press adviser had jumped ship to fight a marginal seat.

- 12 hours before confirmation the news that Grant Shapps was the new Tory party chairman.

- The first journalist to reveal the makeup of the 1922 Committee after elections in May 2012.

I focused on interviewing rising star MPs including Stella Creasy, the former Corby MP Louise Mensch and newly-promoted minister Liz Truss.

The rest of my bylined reports are listed here on Huffington Post UK.

I also established HuffPost in the Parliamentary Lobby and Press Gallery, worked at launch to recruit more than 200 writers to the site’s blogging platform, and curated content on HuffPost UK politics’s social media channels. As of October 2012 the Huffington Post’s politics section was attracting over 500,000 unique UK users a month.

Prior to working on the launch, establishment and growth of Huffpost UK, I worked as a political reporter for BBC Radio 4 on The Westminster Hour and The Week in Westminster.  I focused on analysis of forthcoming policy and party politcs, as well as the 2010 General Election and the formation of the coalition. Some of my reports are stored here on Posterous. 

I previously worked on the Today programme for two years during the financial crisis from 2008 to 2010.

I published a novel in 2011 called Joe is Online – a cyberterrorism thriller told entirely through digital documents. It can be found on Amazon.co.uk here.

In early 2011 I also coached radio presenters to improve their shows.

At the moment I’m finishing novel number two. It’s not a sequel to my first story and I hope to finish it by the end of 2012.

I’m also judging a category in The Political Book Awards 2013. I’m working with Jacqui Smith and Lance Price to judge the “Debut Political Book of the Year” category.

Current Projects

Until October 2012 I was political editor of the Huffington Post UK and the stories I wrote are listed here .

I’m now working on finishing my second novel. I hope to have this finished by the end of the year.

There are links to my first novel on Amazon  ,  on iBooks ,  and on Smashwords .

‘Joe is Online’ in iBooks

After a long wait, my novel is now in the iBookstore, which means it can be directly downloaded to iPads and iPhones and iPod Touches.

Until now people with these devices had to go through Smashwords, get the file and go through a fiddly process of getting it onto their device.

Here are the links to the book in various countries:

UK iBookstore

US iBookstore

Australian iBookstore

Clicking through these links on an Apple device should in theory take you straight to the ibookstore.  On a desktop computer it’ll just take you to a landing page.

‘Joe is Online’ … is online

Joe is Online is my epistolary novel on cyberterrorism and suicide cults.  It was published in March 2011 by me.

In 1997 a 13 year-old boy with no friends called Joe went online.

He decided the offline world was too harsh be real.  With the help of an internet psychic called Magda Magenta, Joe unleashes a series of co-ordinated attacks on the world, beginning online and spreading into the offline world.  He develops an online cult populated by people who’ve also been let down badly by the real world.

No-one can trace their source until a quiet, shy professor in terrorism called Penelope Hunt discovers a link to Joe.  She finds herself pulled into a conspiracy which transcends race and religion. With only a radical tele-atheist to help her, Penny decides to shut down Joe’s activities, placing her own life in grave danger in the process.
‘Joe is Online’ spans continents and decades. Its setting is the boundary where the online and offline worlds meet.

It’s on the Amazon Kindle Store to sample and buy in the US and the UK

You can also buy it and read 20% of it for free at Smashwords.  Use coupon code BM62L at checkout to get it for 99 cents (normally $1.99) before Saturday 26th March.

The formats here work on iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and pretty much any other e-reader, however because of its formatting ‘Joe is Online’ is regrettably not compatable with Stanza. If this is a problem download iBooks for free from the app store, drag the .epub file to your ‘Books’ in iTunes and make sure it’s synced to your device.

It also has a Facebook page, please go there and ‘Like’ it (if you do).

CAUTION:  ’Joe is Online’ contains very strong language and adult themes some might find disturbing.