Power! Unlimited Power!

I get a lot of my blog ideas from the Daily Telegraph. I'm not sure why, because I don't really consider myself a right-winger (or indeed any political persuasian, other than perhaps a commonsensist), and the Telegraph is probably the most right wing of Britain's "proper" newspapers. (It's often nicknamed The Torygraph, after the Conservative Party.)

I put it down to a trend I've noticed in popular and intellectual culture: generally speaking, even if you don't agree with their views, conservative commentators usually have much more interesting and thought-provoking things to say about a given subject than liberals, who, perversely (given that they're supposedly the 'free thinkers') tend to tow the party line and say exactly what they're supposed to. You rarely hear a liberal-leaning journalist say anything unexpected. And, worse, because they're so afraid of offending anyone, their views are generally unimpeachably banal and painstakingly anodyne - whereas conservatives are often unburdened by that concern and can rant on in flavourful and interesting ways.

Anyway, that wasn't what I really wanted to talk about, which was an article in the Telegraph today about The End of Wikipedia. There's a war on, you see. Between the Inclusionists (who believe that the point of the thing is that it's organic and created 'by the people', and therefore just about any article is justified) and the Deletionists, who ruthlessly eliminate articles they deem unfit, unnecessary or pointless. Apparently it has degenerated into factionalism, hatred and mistrust, as groups of moderators go around deleting, reinstating, chopping and changing articles at will.




According to the veterans, the flood of new entries has slowed to a trickle as the Deletionists gain the upper hand: whereby the principle was, in the past, to start an entry with a 'stub' article of just a few lines which might then be expanded at a later date, most stubs are now destroyed by over-zealous deletionists before they ever have a chance to grow. (Sort of like North Sea cod.)

"The old timers remember the early days when we used to say 'ignore all rules' and 'assume good faith', but people tend not to emphasise that now," says Andrew Lih, a turncoat from the deletionists to the inclusionists. Nowadays, he laments, the principle for moderators seems to be wielding a machete, not planting trees.

Very sad, but just goes to show that once you extend even a tiny amount of power, like the power to delete encyclopedia articles, to a group of people - in this case, the 1,000 or so moderators of Wikipedia - then a good number will use it in an abusive and authoritarian way. That seems to be one of those Fundamental Truths of human nature. From the Bolsheviks to the Sherrif of Nottingham to the Wikipedia moderators, we see it all through history.

Condonites and Actonites

Mamiko and I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room last night. It was fascinating stuff, but what is most interesting for me about the Enron debacle is that the lessons learned by Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay seem to have been completely forgotten. Only last year Japanese internet messiah Takefumi Horie was charged with one of the Enron bosses' crimes - decieving investors about stock price - and last month we saw the final fall of Conrad Black, the Canadian/British newspaper mogul charged with mail fraud and perverting the course of justice. What is especially chilling is that all these men were not simple businessmen: they were linked to - no, up to their eyeballs in - the political systems of their respective countries. Ken Lay was a close friend and confidante of the Bush family and mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary when Dubya came to power; Takefumi Horie was asked by then-PM Junichiro Koizumi to run for the Diet in 2006; Conrad Black was a life peer in the House of Lords. These weren't just ordinary moguls - they were figures of the establishment. They really should have been cleverer, if not more ethical.

It seems to me there are two schools of thought on the men who do these things (and they're invariably men):

a) That they were born bad, lied and cheated and conned their way to the top, and didn't stop doing it once they got there; their crimes were just an extension of a flawed and immoral personality type - they were sociopaths and narcissists with MBAs. We can call this the Condonian View, after Richard Condon, who once remarked that "It's no use kidding ourselves that [business moguls and politicians] are ordinary people just like us, because they're not. For all the similarities, they might as well be from another planet. Probably are."

b) That they started off good, moral and legit, but the more money and power they got, the more they started to believe that they were above the law and the less respect they started to have for it - they deluded themselves into thinking that fraud was their right and that they could get away with it; power had addled their brains. We can call this the Actonian View, after Lord Acton, who famously wrote that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

I'm not sure which view I hold to be true. Either way, both seem to suggest that the only reason men like Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Lakshmi Mittal and Mohammed Fayed haven't been tried for any specific crime is that they're too clever to be caught.