Are my eyes really blue?

If I’ve learned one thing from three seasons of Downton Abbey, it’s this: the only thing worse than a class-structured society is a class-structured society that thinks it’s a classless society.  Back in the day, the Earl of Grantham at least felt a responsibility toward the tenants, toward the staff, toward the greater good of the household. Now, certainly part of that responsibility was in the service of arcane values and obsolete ideas about how much shame would come on the house from the kitchen maid getting knocked up or from somebody taking tea with a women whose maid used to be a prostitute or whether the daughter ran away to marry the former chauffeur who’s all Irish and shit…but let’s face it, most of that could be sorted with a healthy dollop of second-wave feminism and a case or two of Tab and Virginia Slims.

But we got away from that!  We have a classless society!  Except we don’t. Lop off all the people who have crazy money, and then draw the line of demarcation between everyone with a college degree and everyone without.  Because somewhere back there, the executive decision was made that college should be for everyone.  Not in the sense that everyone needs a college education, but that everyone needs a college degree.  Try breaking into the white-collar workforce in 2013 with only your high school diploma.

Just like that, we have a line of demarcation that puts a fairly expensive toll gate in front of the middle-class lifestyle. You will go to the best, most impressive school you can get into, and hang the cost, you will take ALL THE STUDENT LOANS and then pay them back for twenty years afterward.  This sounds an awful lot like what we were taught in the early 90s about the Japanese education model: work your ass off through high school, go to the cram schools, take the high-stakes tests, get into one of THE six universities in Japan that you MUST get to in order to secure your future…and then coast.  Just ask any faculty at an American university about their students.  It’s difficult to shake the impression that we’ve got a bunch of kids mainly interested in finding new and interesting ways to get onto Texts From Last Night while helicoptering boomer parents demand to know why they only got a C in their class.

So there’s that.  But what happens once you’re in the middle class?  Or not?  Well, consider retirement…Social Security isn’t going to be there in its current form.  You can’t so much live off it now, and the Sabbath Gasbags will piously tell you it’s meant to be a safety net, not a hammock, and that your 401K empowers you to save for your own retirement!  Responsibility! Ownership society!

I don’t know if there’s a 401K option for those folks running the checkout stands at the Piggly Wiggly.  I know for a fact I didn’t have any sort of retirement plan to check boxes for during my days as Temporary Deputy Assistant Produce Manager (read: lettuce wrapper) in the summers back in the old days.  But let’s assume that yes, you have an employer who has a 401K match, and you’re going to put back the max amount and hope against hope that whatever mutual fund manager runs the service isn’t putting it all on mortgage-backed securities or PointCast or whatever.

Now. You’ve met some sweet young thing and gotten married and want to start a family.  But you can’t stay in this one-bedroom apartment forever.  So now to your student loan payback and your 401K savings, add a mortgage of your own AND child care expenses, because you’re only getting three months unpaid leave to pop out a kid.  Maternity leave?  Work from home?  How the hell are you going to work the produce cooler from home? Are you going to run that road grader from the comfort of your living room?  Nope.  Find child care.  Probably another thousand bucks a month on top of your student loan payback (let’s ballpark that around $300 per quick Google search) and your mortgage (let’s be kind and peg that at $1100, the national average in 2011, and just ignore those hot weeping tears in California) and look, you’re already shelling out $2700 a month.  Or over $32,000 a year.  And that’s before you put back for your retirement.  Or pay for a car. Or groceries. Or electricity. Or the GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip for that kid we mentioned earlier.

As of 2006, the median annual gross income per household member was $24,672. GROSS income. So one half of that couple is working full time just to float the mortgage, the child care and the loans, and it’s still not enough.  The middle-class lifestyle itself – two kids, a house with a picket fence, you know, the American Dream – is a luxury good. So there you have it.  You’ve got a middle class that can afford to be middle class – as often as not by foregoing home ownership, or children, or having dodged student loans somehow – and a working class that consists of a bunch of people, blue-collar and white-collar alike, who are only one paycheck or two at most from having the music suddenly stop – and finding themselves without a chair.

And then, you have the upper class.  The seriously upper class.  The much-derided “one percent,” the people who don’t have to worry about whether they can go to Tahoe this year or whether the kids will be able to stay in their private school or where the new BMW X5 is coming from.  The problem doesn’t come when people earn that kind of money.  To some extent it’s what the market will bear – if it costs $50 million to put Robert Downey Jr in a movie that grosses $1 billion worldwide? Pay the man – but the market isn’t always perfect.  Especially when a CEO can get a crazy amount of money in bonus after a year where the company tanks.  Or when a bank has to be bailed out by the Feds – and a big chunk of taxpayer change goes toward paying out the bonuses of the traders and managers who wrecked it.

The problem isn’t people who earn crazy money, or even the ones who have crazy money.  But there are too many people who think they deserve crazy money – and once they have it, that they deserve it irrespective of market conditions, future performance or their own judgement.  These are the Ayn Rand devotees, the Mitt Romney base, the “job-creators” – the product of the great 80s realignment that changed the fundamentally respected element of American business from the man doing the work to the man he works for.

It’s part of the problem around here.  There are far too many people in Silicon Valley who thirty years ago would have been sucking down Perrier on Wall Street and bragging about their new Rolex and BMW.  Now they’re all in Northern California looking through their Google Glass as they don’t look where they’re going on their way back to the Google shuttle that will take them back to their place in San Francisco they bought with cash, while the average mortgage in the Valley rises back to a point that someone with a five-figure income simply can’t afford any longer.

We have spawned the 21st-century Masters of the Universe.  More on that later.

So we now have the potential to print a 3-D firearm.  Well, sort of.  Sixteen parts, plus a common nail to use as a firing pin (try using a piece of plastic to pop the primer on a bullet).  This is at once a bigger deal and less of a big deal than people think.  On the one hand, yes, here is a gun with no more metal in it than a nail (there’s no reason you HAVE to include the six-ounce chunk of legally mandated metal to make it trip the metal detector).  On the other hand, this is a single-shot gun, apparently – there doesn’t appear to be any sort of magazine.  In addition, some extra steps are apparently needed to toughen up the “barrel”, which while interchangeable for different calibers also appears to be unrifled and thus less accurate. (A short, unrifled barrel is not going to be very useful at anything but very close range.)  Too, since you’re using ABS plastic instead of metal, the whole thing is bigger and bulkier than an equivalent metal firearm, so concealment is going to be tricky – it’s a lot of trouble to go to for one shot at a time and problematic reload options.

The most important part of the gun, though, is the most important part of any gun: the bullet. A gun with no bullets is only useful inasmuch as you can bluff or club someone with it.  All the power a particular gun can impart is based on how many bullets it holds and how long the barrel is (for accuracy and giving the gunpowder long enough to burn to build up maximum force behind the bullet).  Everything else is down to the cartridge itself, and that’s generally a function of how big the actual piece of lead is and how much (and how potent) the burning gunpowder behind it is.  Which makes things tricky with a 3-D-printed plastic gun: the industry standard for a 9mm cartridge (the bullet with its casing and gunpowder and primer) is 31,000 psi.  Which means your plastic gun has to stand up to a momentary burst at 31,000 psi, which means that by and large your plastic gun is going to fail after more than a couple of shots.

By no small coincidence, this gun is called the Liberator, after the FP-45 Liberator of Second World War notoriety.  It was a bog-simple gun, stamped out of sheet metal in bulk at a GM plant, that could fire a single .45 bullet and be reloaded with another single bullet in about a minute with the use of a dowel to extract the fired casing.  Not very practical. But the point was to drop them all over Occupied France, where anybody could potentially have one – and ideally, use it to pop a German soldier and take his superior weapons. Similarly, I’m sure the idea is that you in your occupied country can print out the parts for this gun separately and severally, including a barrel that fits whatever sort of bullet you can get your hands on, then pop in a nail for a firing pin and use it to cap somebody who has a better gun that you can then take for yourself. 

Thing is, something like this has existed for a while – in the 50s, the gangs of New York would fashion “zip guns” out of a hollow car antenna and a simple wooden handle, able to fire something like a lightweight .22 bullet (plenty deadly if it hits you in the head, make no mistake) at close range…assuming it didn’t blow up in your hand.  Simple shotguns aren’t tough to put together, as a one-round shotgun is basically just a long tube for the barrel, a hammer to hit the end of the shotgun shell, a trigger to drop that hammer, and a stock to brace against your shoulder.  So improvised firearms are not new.  Indeed, the ability to generate one from a 3-D printer (sort of) isn’t even that big a change at present; how many people have access to a 3-D printer?  And more importantly, how far are you going to get with a brace of single-shot plastic pistols that have to be reloaded every time you shoot them, when the Oppressive Socialist Fascist United Nations One World Government army is coming at you with real honest-to-God machine guns and assault rifles?

The risk posed by 3-D-printed firearms, right now, is that they make it that much simpler to improvise.  Some random kid can download the plans – and then, if they can find a 3-D printer and a bullet, they can make a zip gun.  Then again, if they can download some plans, find a car antenna and a .22 bullet, they can also make a zip gun.  Or they can just obtain a real gun – a top-quality 9mm pistol costs an order of magnitude less than the 3-D printer needed to print the parts for this one-shot gun.  Of greater concern should be the 3-D printer’s ability to produce, say, a 40-round magazine for an assault rifle in places where magazines of that size are already restricted.  Somebody whose cheap Chinese AK-knockoff now has an extra 40 rounds between reloads is infinitely more dangerous than somebody with one .380 bullet in a thick plastic pistol.

The moral of the story, as with most things involving guns, is that you have to think things through.  Which is not a hallmark of the firearms debate.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has released its 2013 “Who Has Your Back?” report.  They evaluate tech companies on “which companies help protect your data from the government” – whether the company fights for users’ privacy rights in legislation and in court, whether users are told about government data requests, whether they require a warrant for content, etc etc. Not surprisingly, AT&T and Verizon do horribly (one star between them out of a possible 6 each) while Dropbox and Google pull five each and Twitter gets all six.  Nicely done…

…but it kind of misses the point.

There is a sort of neo-libertarian ethos in Silicon Valley that says that the government is ultimately your enemy, that only private innovation can save us all.  You need to be safe from the prying eyes of Uncle Sam.  As for the prying eyes of Mark Zuckerberg, or Scott McNealy (who famously said “you have no privacy. Get over it”) or the Beast of Mountain View…well, that’s something else entirely, isn’t it?

Not really. As a test, I’ve been using the new Google Now function for iOS with my dummy Google account.  It doesn’t have any calendar data, I don’t get email there, and I rarely if ever log in for search (anywhere), but it does have location data turned on.  So far, all I get is an occasional weather update (of varying accuracy), location-specific transit timetables (which are actually right handy at a glance) and a constant slew of Zagat cards for local dining establishments – which would probably be more useful if I was anywhere but work and home this week.  Maybe this weekend I can see how it looks.

But that’s the thing: the new Silicon Valley Web 3.0 lifestyle requires that you entrust private companies with your data.  None more than Google and Facebook, whose entire current business models fall apart without your constant contribution of personalized information.  I don’t know offhand of any EFF report on which companies protect your data from the depredations of the private sector, but right now, I suspect a lot of companies would have a lot of explaining to do.  For instance, after their latest bout of WTFery, I dumped Path.  Not because they did something awful – it seems like this latest stink about spamming was a result of poorly-chosen defaults, user cluelessness, slow networks and the oddity of texting landlines in the UK.  But coupled with their automatic harvesting of the address book last year or so, it suggests a company that is at best careless about their use of your data.

This valley needs a good solid industry-wide policy about what companies can do with your data.  Whether they can share it internally between products (is it OK for Google to go through your email and find flight data to remind you about?) or sell it along to other companies (looking at you, Facebook) or keep it seemingly in perpetuity (back at you, Google).  Look at that EFF list again: Amazon got two stars and Apple only one, but they’re also the only companies on the list whose business is based primarily on selling you actual things.  The others are either selling you an OS (Microsoft), selling you access to the network (AT&T, Verizon, Sonic.net), or – this is the important bit – providing you with some sort of service that’s free at the point of use.  If they’re not making money by selling something to you, they need to sell something to somebody to make their money.

This is another place where William Gibson had it right: in the long run, corporate dystopia is far more likely than government dystopia. Right now, the feds have a lot more limits on what they can do with your data than Google does.  Uncle Sam needs a warrant; Google can just point to your login and say “you consent to a worldwide irrevocable license to harvest your organs and sell the contents of your brain.”  The Bill of Rights lacks ambiguity.  The EULA lives by it.  It’s past time for a tech sector that scorns lawyerly jargon and obtuse legislation to live by its own ranting.