Further reading: “With wearable tech like Google Glass, human behavior is now a design problem” by Sean Madden.

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And better again, Steinhauer has got a great sense of the Zeitgeist because he’s peopled An American Spy with characters such as Comrade Colonel Xin Zhu, the corpulent head of the Expedition Agency within Beijing’s Sixth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. He’s had 33 CIA agents killed across the world in a breathtaking act of liquidation, but he’s got to watch his back because Wu Liang and his associate, Yang Qing-Nian, of the Supervision and Liaison Committee, a branch of the Central Committee’s Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, are not fans. Xin Zhu speaks:

“It wasn’t just revenge, you know. Everyone thinks that’s what it was — the committee, you, probably even the Americans. Revenge factored into it, but it was also a practical decision. That’s something I’ll have to explain on Monday morning. By eradicating one of their secret departments, we have sent a serious message to the Americans, the same message we want to send with the Olympic Games. That we are the primary force in the world. We are a nation that has suffered long enough — that’s the past. The present is this: We are a superpower of unfathomable riches, and we will not stand for interference, particularly from a country on the other side of the planet that still refers to itself as the world’s only superpower.”

Yes, it’s only fiction but le Carré’s fiction was infused with fact and there’s a lot in An American Spy to suggest that Steinhauer intimately understands the nexus of global strategy and dirty deeds, too. His portrayal of Zhu is measured and menacing and the useful idiots who marched in Hong Kong at the weekend in solidarity with Edward Snowden would do will to read An American Spy. There are no paradises upon this earth.

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Candles

Days to come stand in front of us,
like a row of burning candles —
golden, warm, and vivid candles.
Days past fall behind us,
a gloomy line of burnt-out candles;
the nearest are still smoking,
cold, melted, and bent.
I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me,
and it saddens me to remember their original light.
I look ahead at my burning candles.
I don’t want to turn, don’t want to see, terrified,
how quickly that dark line gets longer,
how quickly one more dead candle joins another.

Constantine P. Cavafy (29 April 1863 — 29 April 1933)

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Ulysses famously celebrates a single day and the book is being read in its entirety around the world in one day this Bloomsday. Some 15 countries and 26 cities are involved, and it kicked off “in the track of the sun” in Auckland, New Zealand, last night.

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“There’s a blue sirocco blowing warm into my face
The sun is shining on the other side of the bridges
The cars going by with smiles in the windows
There’s a black cat lying in the shadow of the gate-post
And the black cat keeps telling me that love is on it’s way

Don’t go
Don’t leave me now
Stick around and laugh a while.”

Liam Ó Maonlaí: “The song could be for anyone. Parents, exiles, sons and daughters. For me, it’s a very personal thing, the death of my friend, Eamon. The day he died. A beautiful spring day, otherwise. A slow death. One year long. So much pain for the people around him. It’s not a difficult song for me to sing though. It’s a rejoicing song, in spite of everything. ‘Don’t Go’ is here and now.” (Speaking to Melody Maker in 1988).

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“But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks. After all, we as a people, through our elected representatives, drafted and passed FISA and the Patriot Act and what has been done here, with Verizon and assuredly with other carriers, is possible under that legislation.”

The Guardian is home to some very nasty types still in pain following the defeat of the tyrants they so ardently supported, from Stalin to Chavez. Since the defeat of communism, this lot has flirted with everything from Islamism to feminism in the hope of gaining some relevance again, but each “ism” is worse than the other and all that’s left now is the “faux-scandal”. Same old stuff.

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“There is a deep intellectual rigor to the design of iOS 7, and it’s hard not to see it as being profoundly informed by Ive’s background in hardware. In hardware, design is limited by physics: weight, density, size, connections, seams. Software doesn’t face those design limits. The old design of iOS 6 took advantage of that lack of limits, to its detriment. In iOS 6, you open a folder on the home screen, and linen is something you see underneath. You pull down Notification Center, and linen is something you see over. It’s both over and under. Hardware doesn’t work like that, but software can, because software can show you anything, conceptual logic be damned.

The design of iOS 7 is based on rules. There’s an intricate system at work, a Z-axis of layers organized in a logical way. There is a profound reduction in the use of faux-3D visual effects and textures, but iOS 7 is anything but flat. It is three dimensional not just visually but logically. It uses translucency not to show off, but to provide you with a sense of place. When you pull the new Control Center panel up from the bottom of the screen, its translucency lets you know that you haven’t gone somewhere new, you’re just looking at something over where you were.”

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Although Gene Hackman’s character does not understand the true meaning of the conversation he has recorded, he finds it deeply troubling. Sensing danger, he is increasingly uneasy about what may happen to the couple involved once the client hears the tape, so he plays it again and again throughout the film, gradually refining its content, constantly reinterpreting the speakers’ emphasis on particular words and phrases, trying to figure out their meaning in the light of what he fears.

The horrific tension so brilliantly portrayed by Gene Hackman in The Conversation comes to mind in considering the mental condition of those whistle-blowers who make confidential material available to the public. How do they deal with the risks? How do they cope with the often unforeseen consequences of their actions?

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. Three months since my last confession. I — these are my sins. Took the Lord’s name in vain on several occasions. On a number of occasions, I’ve taken newspapers from the racks without paying for them. I’ve — deliberately taken pleasure in impure thoughts. I’ve been involved in some work that I think, I think will be used to hurt these two young people. It’s happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work and I’m afraid it could happen again and I’m — I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible. For these and all my sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.” Harry Caul (Gene Hackman)

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In their Introduction, the two authors sing the praises of “digital empowerment”, the result of which is that “authoritarian governments will find their newly connection populations more difficult to control, repress and influence, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices (individuals, organizations and companies) in their affairs.” Then, comes this sentence: “To be sure, governments will always find ways to use new levels of connectivity to their advantage, but because of the way current network technology is structured, it truly favors the citizen, in ways we will explore later.”

Is “the citizen” here Jared Cohen or Edward Snowdon? The revelations about the PRISM project would appear to suggest the transition to a total surveillance society is underway and while Schmidt and Cohen don’t dismiss such dangers, they come across as somewhat naïve when they write: “In fact, technology will empower people to police the police in a plethora of creative ways never before possible, including through real-time monitoring systems allowing citizens to publicly rate every police officer in their home-town. Commerce, education, health care and the justice system will all become more efficient, transparent and inclusive as major institutions opt in to the digital age.”

More “efficient”, no doubt. But more “transparent”? One has doubts. That, by the way, is from the first chapter, “The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting”, which asserts: “Governments, too, will find it more difficult to maneuver as their citizens become more connected.” Really? The NSA data-mining PRISM project is, in fact, a partnership with at least nine big US internet companies, among them Google, Skype, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. Governments, it turns out, regardless of what Schmidt and Cohen say publicly, are very agile in The New Digital Age.

In a future where everyone is connected, Juvenal will be more relevant than ever: “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“But who will watch the watchers?”) he asked.

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