Gadget World

Book illustration by William Heath Robinson

Gadgets can be fascinating things and most of us are surrounded by them, they are part of our lives. I'm typing this post on a gadget, and a host of other gadgets all over the world allow me to publish it. But there is variant of the physical gadget which is just as interesting. 

Sometimes political policies and institutions are best seen as social gadgets. Maybe they aren't quite the same as my laptop, but they are supposedly designed to achieve something, supposedly have some kind of design parameters even if gadget is not the word we tend to use.

To my mind though, it's a good word because it does away with some of the fluff and mystique, allows us to focus on what policies and institutions actually do compared to what they are supposed to do - their design parameters as social gadgets.

For example, the euro isn't so much a currency, as an EU policy gadget. Unfortunately this gadget was launched as a crude prototype long before the bugs had been ironed out – such as fraudulent national accounting. Also, for those who bought the prototype believing it to be the real thing, the running costs of this gadget proving to be somewhat higher than they were led to believe. 

The EU itself is a prototype policy gadget with numerous design faults, few of which seem likely to be corrected, however much field-testing is carried out. We have many decades of testing and performance data, none of which is in the slightest bit encouraging.

Climate models are a mix of technical and policy gadget - but still gadgets which were supposed to predict the climate thirty years and more into the future. Now we find ourselves in that future and to our dismay none of the gadgets has worked, mostly because they were all prototypes made to the same design.

Unfortunately there is no prospect of us getting our money back on climate models, nor is there any prospect of a working version to replace the wonky prototypes any time soon. That’s my prediction anyway.

The Olympic Games is a sporting entertainment gadget designed to promote elitism, global sporting businesses and their sponsors. This gadget works by inducing a heightened sense of nationalism and hero worship among sports fans. Still, at least the Olympics gadget works, although some might see it as a rather expensive way to tart up two weeks every four years.

UK democracy is an old gadget which has been subjected to a number of illicit design changes in recent years. The wheels have been removed and replaced by skids, the engine is now powered by wind and the roles of pilot and navigator have been outsourced to a number of dodgy European contractors. 

The BBC is a gadget for entertaining and misleading folk at their own expense. This has been a very successful gadget, although it now suffers from the limitations of an outmoded design. The Beeb has become rather like a formidable but ageing aunt, relying too much on placid indifference to the real world and the disinclination of loved ones to notice obvious signs of dementia.

Will blogging gadgets make a difference? I don't think so.