Thoughtland

PK column in The National: Modern art is a refuge from the relentless neo-liberal marketplace

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 28TH, 2015

TO the Tramway, to see this year’s Turner Prize nominees. The cab gets nearer the great brick shed, barrelling through the tinseltown rain of Glasgow: I feel calmer as I get closer. 

There is almost nothing I don’t like about cutting-edge contemporary art, or contemporary artists. This will be a beautiful, puzzling, annoying, contemplative morning. 

And so it proves. One white-cube room comprises of a few tubular chairs, draped with fur coats, and little else. Another looks like not much more than a pop-up shop for hand-crafted building materials. 

Yet another seems to be an entire radical bookshop reconstructed from about 1981 (plus some TV monitors showing interviews with conspiracy theorists). 

The final experience is genuinely lovely: three female opera singers, vocalising a poem about physical pain, with yelps and howls bursting out of their elegant harmonies. However, they stand next to some font experiments, imprecisely stuck on the wall in A3 sheets. What? Why? 

Yet Janice Kerbel, the American artist responsible for this last piece, puts it well in her video interview. Perhaps the point of art is not to complete the experience, but to prepare and sensitise you to have an even more interesting one to come. Art should be more like instructions, a toolbox, a score. 

That’s one view, doubtless disputed by many. But it’s part of what I love about much contemporary art. We live in an age of capitalist-oriented design. Almost all of our everyday street-level experiences with objects and shapes – the shops, the brands, the mall, their contents – have been precisely calibrated to incite our desires, and thereby extract our cash. 

Of course, there are huge amounts of art and sensibility in this. Probably the only other white-walled caves (apart from art galleries) in Glasgow and Edinburgh are the Apple stores. Here, flowers gently bloom on the fascia of techno-watches, and the salespersons are as earnest and informed as any gallery attendant. 

And of course, art can be made with these devices. The aforementioned Kerbel sits before her big Mac in her promo video, drawling: “It basically all happens at the computer”. 

But even the most artisan-encrusted retail chain outlet (and there are many out there) aims not to give you a singular, or open, or fractured experience, but a regular, repeatable and reliable experience. 

When I’m having too comfortable a moment in these relentlessly fashioned places, David Byrne’s voice and jerky body crawls into my brain:

And you may ask yourself 

What is that beautiful house? 

And you may ask yourself 

Where does that highway go to? 

And you may ask yourself 

Am I right? Am I wrong? 

And you may say to yourself— 

My god! What have I done? 

A cheeky Nando’s might be an unlikely place to do a version of Munch’s Scream. But sometimes, in the big city, you want to be in a physical place which isn’t straining every sinew to capture your mind and heart, for fun and profit. And in most big cities I go to, the art gallery – or the boho sector – is the zone where you can de-program, just for an hour or two, before going back into the hustle. 

Does that make contemporary art galleries sound like churches or temples? No accident, in my mind. Religious interiors are all about a shaping of forms and symbols that points beyond mere utility. They seek to connect the devotee to a higher, broader, deeper, more historical order. 

Modern art galleries grant the largely secular artist that same opportunity – to shape the spectator’s experience in order to refresh it, not to exploit it. But what I love about contemporary artists, at least over the last 10 years, is that their art forms have increasingly challenged the major order of our times – that is, neo-liberalism. And done so as best they can, in their endlessly diverse ways. 

The artistic group Assembly in this year’s Turner Prize – a real contender – is a very tangible example. Its members are an architecture and construction collective who settle in communities – in this instance, a run-down Toxteth housing estate – and use arts, crafts and refurbishment to restore a sense of purpose and – an old-fashioned word – beauty.

William Morris (never mind William Blake) would recognise the spirit behind this. Waves of development may have turned the community’s buildings into shells. But what can re-enchant them is handicraft, the distribution of skills, and what seems like a wide open dialogue between locals and artists. 

There is something moving about the sweet kids of Assembly in their interviews. They echo the hands-on immediacy and easy networking skills of the student and Occupy movements of the last few years. 

This is what you imagine this generation might want to do when it grows up – to “be here, now”, rather than postpone their meaning-driven lives until they feel settled and secure. And how many of them think that security is coming, in these precarious times? 

My other favourite to win is Bonnie Camplin’s Patterns. Again, this is contemporary art with its hands dug deep into the undergrowth of daily concerns. Nothing much carved on a plinth here: television monitors showing videos, books laid out, a photocopier free to use. 

We can make sense of it by means of an excellent recent art book by Hal Foster. The Bad New Days identifies a few broad trends that have emerged since 9/11. Foster identifies the fall of the Twin Towers as the same kind of historical rupture that shaped earlier eras of art (eg, surrealism as a response to the First World War). 

Our current times are typified by the lurch from extreme crisis to extreme crisis, and contemporary artists have been responding in a variety of ways, says Foster. They’ve tried to anchor us in the storm, with a hint of a different way of being. Or they’ve compelled us to remember the past, even the recent past, in ways the endless demands of consumerism want to obliterate – what Foster calls “archival” art. Or sometimes they aim to take the excess of our times to absurd extremes – what Foster calls “mimetic”. 

Camplin’s Patterns triggers all of this. It’s as if the Mitchell Library had been taken over by a combination of mystics, leftists, UFOlogists and AI geeks. The credible (Buckminster Fuller) is promiscuously mixed in with the incredible (a guy who believes his backside has been “implanted” by aliens). 

The place feels like it’s been set up in a day, could be disassembled into a van, and reassembled the next day, to make its alarming connections in some other town. The old sensibility that says: “Where’s the art in all this?” has to be wrestled down somewhat. 

But we live in a world where the some of the most dangerous acts are fuelled by furious little cells of warriors and scholars. We may do well to sit in such a space for a while, and strain our sinews to understand such potent eccentricities. 

Is all contemporary art so counter-cultural and critical? I’ve spent enough lush hours as an arts reviewer in the gallery spaces of London. I know how much contemporary art floats knowingly on the rivers of tax-exile cash, flooding through its streets and lobbies. 

Decorative objects are still made to be bought by billionaire collectors, then displayed on mega-boats or corporate lobbies. (A recent show at London’s White Cube by contemporary of Damian Hirst, Marc Quinn, was a classic of the kind.)

But I’m with the fragile, bad-tempered, dogged, participatory, radically gentle ones of the contemporary art scene. I hope one of them wins next week. Go and see them in the battering rain of the south side of Glasgow, when they do. 

The winner of the Turner Prize is announced live on Channel 4 on December 7, and the show at the Tramway runs until January 17. 

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today).

 

PK column for The National: Embrace the ‘grey zone’ between Islam and the West

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 21ST, 2015

ENOUGH Islamophobia! It’s exactly what the extremist jihadis of Daesh want to generate in us. They want to destroy what they call the “grey zone” between Islam and “the West” – that pluralist space in which the faithful and the secular can accept their differences, and find their commonalities, as a working society.

It should be enough just to think for a moment of those professing Muslims among our own friends and networks to quell any fear or worry. But reflecting on the aftermath of the Paris attacks, I realised that I’ve been trying to engage with Islam for many years.

Intellectually, ever since the Rushdie affair (I interviewed Rushdie twice for BBC Radio Scotland, at the peak of the fatwa against him). This brought me into the orbit of major Muslim intellectuals (and now friends) like Ziauddin Sardar.

Zia, the editor of Critical Muslim, is a proponent of ijtihad – by which he means “reasoned and sustained struggle for innovation, positive change and uplifting progress”.

Romantically, in a certain way, as my life-partner Indra Adnan is 50 per cent from Indonesia, the largest Muslim county in the world. She herself was born Catholic, then turned Buddhist. Well, that’s another story.

But also, in recent years, geographically. The best way to unravel the scary “other” of “Muslim societies” is to go and visit some that seem to function well. What is “Islamic”, and what is a “state”, can conjoin together in ways that invoke the opposite of horror and revulsion – or intelligent curiosity, at least.

Firstly, in 2010, I was brought to Istanbul as the Scottish representative for the European Writers’ Parliament. The entrance to the city is startling – box-houses encrusting the hills like coral, with a huge floodlit mosque at the top of each one.

The street life in the city centre felt European. Women moved around in styles of dress you’d see on the streets of Glasgow or London. Hipsters and business people and traders whizzed around on public transport systems, with a familiar big-city stress on their faces.

The event itself, being a convocation of writers, was aiming to cause trouble. The UK novelist Hari Kunzru made an opening speech condemning the Turkish Penal Code 301, which says that whoever “publicly denigrates the Turkish Nation” can be imprisoned for up to two years.

The most high-profile offender is the Nobel-Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, who dared to mention the Ottoman Empire’s historical role in genocide in the First World War. But Turkish leftists like Murat Belge spoke volubly against it at my 2010 event. And in the conversations around the tables, the space between the secular-nationalist foundations of Turkey, and the Islamic daily culture of its people, felt tense but healthy.

Since then, the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan (whose party, the AKP, combines conservative elements both from Islamic groups and the business community) has become more authoritarian on a number of fronts. They violently suppressed civic protests in Gezi Park in 2013, and this year have banned access to Twitter and YouTube, as well as deported foreign journalists.

I can’t imagine the fiercely intelligent and committed Turkish writers I met taking this lying down. Yet I also want to hold onto the memory of entering the calm beauty of the 17th century Sultan Ahmet Mosque, or “Blue Mosque” – easily invited to move through the building, as other Muslims made their observances, exulting in its geometric splendour. As the dark tides of Islamophobia start to pull, you want a place like Istanbul to maintain its poise between Islam and the secular world.

Secondly, we did a family tour of Morocco in 2013 – taking us from Marrakech, through the Atlas Mountains, out to the beach town of Essaouira, and back again. We went at the peak of Ramadan, so until around the early evening all our hosts were evidently struggling with their hunger and thirst. But their evident care and grace towards us was striking and moving.

To travel through Morocco is to occupy deserts as blasted as any you could imagine – which are then brutally interspersed with vast melon farms, or new towns at various stages of construction.

Yet it’s the city and town life which is most startling. Trying to find your residence as you wend your way through the dark, overhanging alleyways of Marrakech is like a living experience of medieval city life. Yet when you enter into your riad, the space is surpassingly elegant – light streaming down into the central courtyard, fountains in water pools sprinkling, and the endless geometrics of Islamic design.

Of course, we had a tourists’ take on a complex society. But like Istanbul, the experience put the country on my mental map. I had read the works of Tahir Shah, the son of the Sufi sage Idries Shah, all the way through the trip – they’re highly recommended.

But the relaxed, super-sociable scenarios of Tahir’s books – where friends and favours are showered on bemused Westerners coming to stay in Morocco, because it is unnatural to imagine that they would have none – chimed very much with my experience in the country. Finally, this March, I was invited to attend a conference in Dubai by a American friend Noah Raford, who works for the United Arab Emirates’ Prime Minister’s Office as an adviser and futurologist.

Dubai, the Emirates and the Gulf states in general are a small part of my family history. Some of my uncles and their wives went over to various locations as foremen and civil engineers, in the construction booms of the and 80s and 90s.

They came back with their loot, but were otherwise tight-lipped about their lives there. I wanted to see what they’d helped to build, and to get another experience of a mainstream Islamic society.

The buildings of Dubai exhaust the superlatives. The drive-in from the airport is a like a slow-pan across a science fiction landscape, with the Burj Khalifa – the world’s tallest skyscraper – a neck-stretching impossibility made real.

I had read enough human rights reports on the near-enslaved labour conditions of the emigrant workers who had built Dubai’s megalopolis to have the futurist shimmer taken off. As for the experience of the event itself, it was an odd mixture of the far-seeing and the tradition-drenched.

White-robed male and black-robed female “Emiratis” – meaning native-born, but only 15 per cent of the total population of the country – moved confidently (and equally) around the sessions. They included the UN President Ban Ki-Moon, the Scottish Government’s economic advisor Mariana Mazzucato, and the founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, among others.

Noah had set up a stylish exhibition titled The Future of Government Services. It showed a projected UAE using every possible technological means of consulting the opinions of citizens – short of actual plebiscitary democracy. That’s the standard Western critique - and it would be easy to brush off the event as one monarchical elite happily entertaining other secular elites.

However, I was affected by Queen Rania of Jordan’s impassioned speech against jihadi extremism. The Emiratis constantly express a desire to align the “tradition and values” of Islam with the language of responsive government, and with the progress of science and knowledge, In their precarious regional context, that vision seems at least worth pursuing.

I asked my friend Zia what were the two things people should remember about Islam?

Zia replied: “We must not forget that Muslims are a human community. Like all human communities, it has people of all shades and opinions – ranging from liberal and moderate, left and right, to conservative, ultra-conservative to extremists and violent extremists.

“We must not allow the antics of a death cult to paint the entire Muslim community with the same brush. To do this would be to dehumanise them.”

He continued: “The most important thing about Islam is very simple and frequently repeated: In the name of God, the beneficial, the merciful. Every Muslim utters this formula countless times a day.

“Beneficence and mercy are two of the most important attributes of God. And these are the very attributes that Muslims are asked to imbibe and reflect in their daily lives. This of-repeated verse of the Qur’an also tells us just how far the Jihadis are from the true path of Islam.”

So keep calm and carry on, as the T-shirts have it. Or maybe let’s try a new slogan: Embrace the grey zone.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)

 

PK column in The National: Sovereignty alters the dynamic of emigration

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 14TH, 2015

THE rows of family faces at the dockside are tearful, or grim. They look up at the high railings of a huge ocean liner. Hanging over them, much younger faces also wave and mostly cry – though a few are already looking steadily out to the high seas.

For the heroine at the centre of the screen, and her relatives below, this is a terrible moment. Like tens of thousands of other young Irish people in the 40s and 50s, Eilis has been given the chance of a better life in America. The machinations of the Irish diaspora have arranged a job and lodgings for her in deepest Brooklyn.

Yet as the boat slowly moves off, the enormity of the decision becomes clear. The bright older sister will be left behind to her small-town bookkeeping job. Along with her frail, near-broken mother, they will both survive on letters and photographs; on rare visits that can only be financially justified as the fruits of real success.

But however stricken she looks, Eilis is off to a new life. Will it become a new home?

There are many pleasures to be taken from Brooklyn, the meticulous film adaptation of Colm Toibin’s novel, with the luminous (and Oscar-worthy) Saoirse Ronan as the young migrant at its centre.

But one is certainly that its story cleaves tightly to the strict social and physical limitations of its era.

The drama revolves around the flutter of airmails, a random encounter with a compatriot at a registry office, a visit back home that can’t speedily be escaped from, a dramatic single phone call in a wooden booth…

The emotions of Brooklyn depend mostly on how massive and intimidating the distances are between home and emigre; how severed or faltering their lines of communication; how sheer absence makes every little scrap of presence supercharged.

In our current era of relentless migration and movement, whether at a family or a continental level, does an old story like Brooklyn have much resonance? At least we can say, surely, that technology makes the separation of the ambitious loved one from the homestead a lot less dramatic (and traumatic).

When I visit my Mum in Coatbridge these days, we have a few rituals in place. One of them is to arrange a time when we can align our camera-enabled devices with those of her scattered grandweans, a decent wifi signal at both ends, in order that tough love can be administered live and direct to both Essex and Zuid-Holland. (Kids: no one said the future was going to be easy.)

Add to that the little blue dots that announce the appearance of “family and friends” on your social networks, often buzzing their presence in your coat pocket. Tech can make it seem as if family life was the same mix of jokes, advice, gossip, help, consolation and inspiration as it ever was. It’s now just scattered across the touchscreens of the diaspora.

In the early 50s of Brooklyn, rivers of hot tears flow as precious missives are read and re-read in dimly-lit digs. These days, a few lengthy blethers on Skype would surely sort most of that out.

But maybe not so easily. With his usual eloquence, Colm Toibin recently reflected on his heroine in Brooklyn experiencing both “the easy familiarity of home, and the hard-won familiarity of away”. The wise parent knows that the second kind is to be deeply respected.

Indeed, one of the great joys of social media – if your child is gracious enough to “friend” you – is the way it can show the narrative of the person they are becoming, out there on their travels and travails. And how interestingly unlike you that person is.

Brooklyn is masterful in the way that it uses costume – and the amazing emotional weather-system of Saoirse Ronan’s face – to show the steady victories that comprise Eilis’s “hard-won familiarity of away”.

On her sudden return home, Eilis blazes down the high street of her home village Enniscorthy, wearing populuxe sunshades and a bright yellow dress. These are the fruits of knuckling down to a retail day job in Manhattan, doing night classes in accountancy school, and keeping a puppyish Italian-American boyfriend in her thrall. I doubt the parental challenge of the return of the prodigal child is much different these days. You want them to turn up – whenever they do – and to surprise, even shock you with all the living they’re evidently doing, all the choices they make (and the consequences they take).

You’re glad to have them home, for a while – but you’re also glad they’re not fully at home, even when they’re here. You want them to be restless, to contain multitudes. Surely that’s “job done”?

It’s also hard not to watch Brooklyn with Irish modern history, and recent Scottish political events, in mind. The hard-scrabble poverty of the post-war Irish economy – and the stranglehold of Catholic morality – are very clearly identified as the great drivers of mass emigration.

Now, you’ll know very well the standard trope of Scottish nationalist discourse. We want full powers for our nation, in order that we can create opportunities and prosperity here – meaning that our young people don’t have to emigrate to find fulfilling, decently-paid jobs and prospects.

I vote Yes, but… We’ll need to sophisticate this trope a little – and under pressure from two directions. Firstly, Scotland will become a nation composed mostly of migrants to its shores, just like every other nation in the Northern Hemisphere. The pressures pushing populations up towards us from the South – the resource crises caused by global warming, the wars and strife consequent upon that – are massive and irresistible.

Even within its own genre of Irish-American movies – think of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, or Jim Sheridan’s In America – Brooklyn shows the gentler face of ethnic assimilation. In the Scottish near-to-mid term, the reality of mass immigration will not proceed with the same cinematic soft-focus. Scots will need to exert their imagination and empathy towards the experience of the migrant as strenuously as they are able.

But, secondly, even if we did strengthen the country through more and better self-government, would it be fair to expect young Scots to only, or even mostly, stick around at home for too long?

What about the glow on Eilis’s face, when she finally masters her sidewalk strut on a commute through Manhattan? What about the joys of not quite knowing where “home” is?

The ideal scenario is, of course, an independence that would compel Scotland to push its best and brightest out to every corner of the world; to trade and connect, tell our story, make friends and relations. An ambitious domestic base that would also require a global schedule; a diaspora that becomes a healthy loop between “home” and “away”.

A situation, perhaps, not unlike that of booming Ireland, in the decades long after the tough 40s and 50s, where the powers of state were adroitly used to modernise and globalise the country (with obvious flaws in the strategy’s latter stages), and reverse those decades of migration.

But let’s remember – as if we could forget – that Scotland still has to truly begin that stage in its national history. No matter how sepia-tinted and poignant the Ireland depicted in Brooklyn, you watch it knowing that their society has a different engine under the bonnet.

We watch them struggle to master themselves, in the early years of their sovereignty. We’ve yet to even properly start.

Brooklyn (12A), starring Saoirse Ronan and directed by John Crowley, is in cinemas now. Pat Kane is a writer and musician (www.patkane.today)

PK column in The National: Encrypting a cyber back door merely risks putting the key in hands of terrorists

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 7TH, 2015

THERE is one thing to be said for Theresa May’s proposals this week, contained in her Investigatory Powers Bill, to make the UK “the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West” (tweets Edward Snowden).

At least the argument is now firmly in the wide open spaces of public debate. We don’t need to wait for a Bond movie to ponder the perennial question of “who watches the watchmen”: that is, how we, the people consciously permit our security to be defended.

The technology in question isn’t invisible Aston Martins or exploding watches. It’s the Tory Government’s attempt to use the all-pervading social presence of the internet, and turn it into the ultimate “dragnet”.

Snowden famously let us know that all our “private” cyber-interactions were being traced, searched and read by GCHQ and other US agencies. May accepts all that – and now wants to be able to pursue it to the max, under some process of judicial and political permission.

I know. It’s hard to separate our heads and hearts from the horror of a Daesh beheading video. Or from the vast shadowy bulks of superpowers like China and Russia, moving purposefully behind the veil of the foreign news pages. How will their actions reframe reality today, tomorrow? Who will protect us from all this?

But we must try to be citizens, and at least deal with the polity that we can directly affect. We can think through the question of how our open digital society relates to the demands of national security. And we can think of it as indy-minded Scots, as well as reluctant Brits.

Take the idea that commercial digital companies should allow the UK Government to build a “back door” into all encrypted software – to be opened only in extremis, of course. There has already been much informed pushback.

Encrypted data is coded by senders in a way that means only receivers can “unlock” what has been sent to them. Nowadays, encryption tools are incredibly powerful. Indeed, some of the most powerful, like Tor, were originally devised by the US Navy. As an openly available resource, Tor doesn’t just enable US spying, but also the activism and plotting of all kinds of radicals – and there seems to be no “back door” installable.

The spectre of Islamist or anti-Western radicals using cryptography to coordinate their attacks is thus enabled, like many other of their angry threats, by our own actions and interventions. A lasting and painful irony.

Cryptography is also pretty banal and high-street these days. Many non-baddies who provide secure online services – like banking, or health, or many of our streamed online entertainments – are just straightforwardly alarmed at how this measure would evaporate their customers’ trust.

But even on their own security terms, the simplest knock-down of the Tories’ scheme would seem to be this. If we let this government, or any government, hold an encryption “mega-key” (the code that unlocks any and all back doors), then what happens if the key falls into the wrong, or at least the alternatively motivated hands?

This would make the principled whistleblowing of Manning or Snowden, never mind the tawdry data-hacking of commercial service providers like TalkTalk or the dating site Ashley Madison, look like minor street scuffles. Data access, for the ill-intentioned, would be total.

Could this happen? Consider our leak-ridden culture: what do you think? The ex-Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert, now teaching at Oxford University, gives a simple example of what could go wrong. (In case you hear “Lib Dem” and switch off ... while in the Coalition, Huppert was instrumental in blocking the last Tory attempt at state cyber control, known then as the “Snoopers Charter”).

Huppert recently wrote about the clumsy pratfall of the Transport Security Administration in the US. In response to passengers who feared their suitcases might be susceptible to interference by random handlers in airports, the TSA created approved luggage locks which only TSA keys were able to open.

Unfortunately, in a Washington Post article praising the initiative, someone in the accompanying photo posed with a set of the master keys clearly visible. The photo had enough resolution to enable people to copy the keys and make 3D copies. The TSA scheme is now utterly useless.

Scale that up to the level of a busy, and ever more digitally reliant society. One all-too-human slip, and the government encryption back door could make us all hugely more vulnerable to cyber-violation – not less.

The question of what security arrangements we would make in an independent Scotland hovers over all of this. Our current situation is a curious mix of the passive and the misguided.

The passive element continues to be the inability for Scots to put some distance between themselves and the interventionist belligerence of Westminster – whether it’s Middle-East raids, or defying nuclear non-proliferation with Trident renewal, or indeed an illiberal and intrusive cyber-surveillance. We wave our fists, then watch them act.

This networked planet is a flow of overt communication and images, as well as covert messages – a realm of “soft power”, as the diplomats call it. An independent Scotland could use its distinct security arrangements as a soft power strategy.

We would tell the world we are a non-nuclear nation, with a humanitarian-only defence force, actively seeking to be involved in conflict prevention and mediation, and committed to transparency and accountability to the greatest possible extent.

Independence would let the frustrated and alienated of the planet know of our good intent, which we’d be wise to follow up with consistent actions. Given how easily anyone’s malevolence can reach anywhere through global network, this may be our ultimate safety strategy.

However, we are where we are. It’s frustrating enough that an aggressive cyber-policy is largely led from the south of England – the major data cables come in to the UK at Bude, Cornwall, and Cheltenham’s GCHQ is the obvious behemoth driving all surveillance.

But even within our narrow powers, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favours (the misguided bit).

The world-class computing science departments of Scottish universities would be a research asset to a fledgling nation-state, trying to figure out how to get the cyber-security balance right.

However, as far as I can see, there is already a huge amount of Scots integration with the US/UK security state. 

Take Edinburgh University’s Academic Research Institute, which actively works with GCHQ. Or Police Scotland, inviting the FBI over to a cybercrime conference this coming December.

Police Scotland might also be part of the problem in another way. There is a consistent retort to the idea that the internet should simply become a “dragnet” of information, wide open for security forces to freely navigate. The retort is we could be wasting time, technology and resources making sense of an unfathomably giant mountain of data. 

“We are unnecessarily expanding the haystacks while we search for the needles”, said one National Security Agency insider this year.

Many experts say that if domestic terrorism and crime is our biggest threat, then it’s the police and security force’s strong social relations with the wider community – and the trust that people place in it – that brings the best results.

Can we say that Police Scotland – centralised away from its localities, strutting its paramilitary uniforms through our high streets and stop-and-searching with impunity, enthusiastically promoting advanced CCTV – is really on a mission to build up trust with the various communities of Scotland?

And as for the real James Bonds … It’s worth noting that the current Spectre movie is, to say the least, thoroughly sceptical about the powers of an all-seeing digital security system. 

Entrusting our national security to misogynistic killers like 007? Probably not. And in any case, it still matters precisely what nation we’re talking about.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)