Sunday 5 March 2017

Are standards of public discourse at an all time low?

I read a fascinating profile of a young Irish American Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Patrick Collison recently.* The business he founded with his brother, Stripe, is worth $9bn. The business is an online payments venture. The brothers, who were studying at MIT and Harvard at the time, spotted that the biggest barrier to getting a new business off the ground was the lack of an easy to use tool to process payments. Stripe provides a platform for app developers and other companies to accept money from online customers, in return for a small fee for each transaction.  I know that sounds like Paypal, but what Stripe does is provide the "tools and apparatus" for initially small companies to use, so presumably they get precisely what they need out of it rather than a vanilla service. The potential is huge: ecommerce currently accounts for just 3% of global retail spending.

But what caught my eye about Collison, who looks a geekish and youthful 28 - neither brother has a girlfriend - was what he said about politics and Donald Trump: "Much of what Trump said is something all of us should not only reject but have some sort of degree of responsibility to reject, be it the misogyny or racism or the rejection of fact as the foundation of political discourse."

There have always been lies, damn lies and election pledges. But have we moved on to a genuinely new, post-truth era of political discourse where facts are ignored or deliberately distorted? Of course, one persons "fact" is another's assertion and there really are lies, damn lies and statistics, or at least selective quotations.

The more traditional kind of political "lie" comes in the form of election pledges which, at the whitest end of lieing, are well intentioned promises which time proves to be unrealistic, unachievable or, in the case of Nick Clegg and tuition fees, dispensable. Or at least tradable in a negotiation. And some (but not that many I feel) are made knowing that they will have to be modified or compromised, which one might charitably call dissembling rather than lying. But there are downright porkies.

And now we seem to have the scenario of politicians effectively saying black is white, one might say in true Joe Stalin, rewriting of history mode.  Are politicians getting less honest? With Trump making remarkable and so far unsupported claims on Twitter about Obama having his phone tapped, has the quality, if that's the word, of debate descended into the gutter?

Respected American corresponent Irwin Stelzer noted that the recent  US presidential election had the worst level of debate ever seen, apart from by anyone familiar with any of the US presidential elections in recent decades.

And while the debate still rumbles about "lies" told by both sides in the Brexit referendum, even Boris Johnson's £350M a week and Project Fear's immediate emergency budget probably weren't as much of a false promise as Ted Heath's "cut prices at a stroke" in 1970.

Apparently this concern that lack of truthfulness will undermine democracy goes back to, well, the beginning of democracy in ancient Greece and a chap called Thucydides, who lamented the fall in standards of political discourse. (If anyone knows the precise quote please do tell me - I've seen it but I can't remember where. Old Thucydides was prolific and there's a ton of his stuff thrown up by Google).

Meanwhile, I wonder if Stripe will be undercut by companies that offer the tool set for a one off fee or an annual software licence, rather than a fee for every transaction. Transaction fees are the holy grail of this kind of business as they produce those lovely repeat revenues that roll in for no further work, but they are vulnerable to competition. If so, I wouldn't fear for the Collison brothers, who  already had form before going to America. Aged 16 and still at school in Ireland, Patrick won a BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition competition. He then started a software venture called Auctomatic with his brother, which helped eBay sellers track their inventories. It got investment from an American accelerator programme after failing to get support from the Irish Enterprise fund and was sold for $5million to a Canadian company while Patrick's younger brother John was still at school. "It was very useful experience for us" said Patrick.

Part of that experience was to concentrate on getting the culture in his team at Stripe right (the company now employs over 600 people). "Lots of companies have "no assholes" rules, but that's way too low a bar".

The thing is, politics is open to all and you can't control the culture like you can attempt to do in a company. It's up to the electorate to have what Joe Strummer called a "bullshit detector" to see through the fog of claim and counter claim, truth and half truth, out of context quotations and soundbites aimed to lead you to a particular conclusion.

As ever, caveat emptor: be wary of what you buy into.


*Sunday Times Business section, 26 Feb 2017

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