Summer is officially over when well-paid columnists return from their hols, tanned and invigorated, having read widely and considered deeply and bend to the task of illuminating our lives with new thoughts.
Unless you're Henry Porter.
It is somehow very right that after a crap summer, Henry Porter should return to The Observer today and offload the same pompous crud that he was shovelling before he went away.
Yes, it's the "we're all doomed to live in a world like The Matrix because nobody will listen to my warnings about the surveillance society" theme. Again.
It looks like he popped back in the office, checked his Google alert box for "surveillance gone mad" stories, cut and pasted pars from a couple of political features he read over the summer and there you go.
I'm waiting for a magazine called Flipside to run a feature I've done on children and surveillance and the way we catalogue young people in all sorts of different ways. Meanwhile the IT project for one of these systems has just gone pearshaped. (Janet Murray has a good piece on it).
Porter - if you're going to write about this stuff endlessly give us a new tune and some facts.
(BTW: his mugshot on the Observer website looks like he should be holding a card with a row of numbers on it. Very scary.
Update: donpaskini points out one glaring contradiction in Porter's column. Sadie's Tavern has taken a stiletto to Porter previously. Anyone else want to join the gang?
Comments