You'll Learn To Love Her. Warts And All. Nanny T-Mobile
I should not need to point out that it is a fairly well established fact that Britain is a nanny state, fond of cocooning our offspring in cotton wool. We pop them into Chelsea Tractors (because any other auto-mobile is just not safe for our precious offspring) and ferry the horrid little scrotes everywhere their cholesterol saturated little hearts desire. This saves them the embarrassment of having to use their poor obese little legs to take exercise. Perambulating is so last century. Besides we can't possibly allow our little darlings to walk to and from school for heaven's sake. Don't you know there's a paedophile lurking behind every lamp post?
Instead we glue them to the sofa in front of the X-Box or Wii and stand by ready to shovel crisps and happy meals into their rapacious maws whenever they utter a grunt. Contact with friends is strictly through social networking sites because it's so much more modern and up-to-date than having to deal with the hassle of speaking to people face to face. Beware of psyber-bullying though – one in four children is bullied by text message or through a social networking site. Be prepared to prove your credentials as a cool, caring 21st century parent by campaigning for a “panic button” on your child's hi-tech gadget of choice - remember the internet is made up entirely of dirty old men masquerading as schoolgirls. Don't do anything silly like filtering offensive emails or texts or worse, not allowing your child to have a mobile in the first place! It's every three year olds human right to carry the latest multimedia communication device. When your beautiful bundle of joy throws themselves under a bus because they can't live with the shame of not having this weeks must-have fashion item it could well jeopardise your status as victim and subsequent claims for compensation if you can be proven to have taken any action which could be construed as common sense. Don't do it.
Eventually they reach an age where they can legally fornicate and purchase alcohol - assuming they haven't died of a coronary or mutilated themselves in a cry for help along the lines of “Help me please, I don't know what to do! I'm a middle class spoilt brat with doting parents and far too much disposable income. I going to kill myself.” Then and only then, do we allow them outdoors to hang around on street corners where they can inject heroin into their rectums and film themselves gang banging goats to post on You-tube. Oh yes, there are so many dangers out there from which we need to protect the little ones.
However, Hexhamite prides himself that having recently entered my fourth decade on this small green-blue ball of rock and water, that I am no longer a child and have the nous to decide for myself what's good for me. I've developed an uncanny skill with the delete key for emails that offend me. I know that a knife is sharp and that I shouldn't insert it in myself or others. And the only panic button I need is the one which alerts the barman to the fact that my pint glass is less than a third full.
It therefore came as more than a little mild annoyance to discover that T-Mobile feel that I am some sort of simpleton in need of protection from the big bad world. Picture the scene: it's a Friday afternoon and I'm stranded in Newcastle Railway station for five and a half hours. Nothing else for it, I'll have to fire up my wireless broadband dongle (am I the only person who thinks dongle sounds like a dirty word?) and get to work updating the old blog.
Aha but you can't do that say T-Mobile. On the basis that all their customers are infants or imbeciles they have installed a parental filter as a default to protect us from “user generated content and social networking sites”. User generated content? Isn't that a fairly accurate summation of everything contained on the world wide web? To be fair T-Mobile haven't gone quite that far. To date they have contented themselves with filtering out Blogger and similar sites, presumably to spare our youth from coming into contact with anything not sanitised by the apparatchiks of Big Brother. Youtube is also on the proscribed list, to spare their tender eyes from the horrors of a teenage would-be Danny Boyle's graphic depiction of drug fuelled goat banging in the Gorbals. More peculiarly social networking sites are also off limits, thereby negating about 90% of internet users reasons for logging on in the first place.
What's he whining about I hear you cry. Why don't you just turn the bloody filter off? Now hold on there Jonny, credit me with some intelligence. You don't imagine our Deutsch Mary Poppins is going to make this simple do you?
The stark warning message advising me that my access has been blocked tells me to click here to turn off the parental filter. At which point it demands my credit card details in order to “register” for this service. As I'm sitting on platform nine and three quarters, I'm not inclined to whip out my gold card. Even if I was so inclined I couldn't because the card used to set up this festering turd of an account belongs to Mrs Angry and is currently languishing amongst the cobwebs at the bottom of her purse several miles from here. Fear not, there's a number I can ring from my T-Mobile handset. Except I don't have a T-Mobile handset! I have a T-Mobile sim card, contained in the T-f@#king -Mobile dongle which I'm using to read these wretched instructions. The mobile in my pocket is locked to O2.
To cut a long story short, several texts and telephone calls to the long suffering Mrs Angry, followed by the sainted lady making several calls to T-Mobile's Ministry of Truth eventually resulted in the Blogger embargo being lifted and my being able to post the present tract. It was pure chance that Mrs A happened to be at home on a weekday. Had she not been, the Hexhamite would probably be staring at the Cbeebies webpage and singing the theme tune to Thomas the Tank Engine.
Does it really have to be this way? Are we as a society so far gone that we have abrogated our own powers of judgement to a faceless telecommunications company? Are we so lazy as parents that we need our internet providers or the state to monitor what our children get up to online? It seems so. Except in this case it's gone step further, and it's we the adults who are being cocooned in cotton wool in the name of “protecting the children”. Oh sure we can turn the filter off. For now. How long before until Big Brother decides that adults should be protected too? Protected from what? Anything deemed subversive or which undermines the status quo. Anything which might encourage us to think for ourselves or question the actions of our rulers. In short anything which might cause us to raise our aspirations above the level of subservient drones.
When did it become acceptable for an ISP to set itself up as a moral arbiter, deciding what is and is not acceptable for us to view? By all means provide the tools so that we can determine for ourselves what we and our children view, but why should we have to go cap in hand to our ISPs to get permission to use the service for which we've paid good money? I am an adult and if I want to blog my insane views to the world that is my privilege. If I choose to watch grainy footage of Glaswegian junkies buggering Bovidae ruminants that should be my choice too. When restrictions are put in place by default it sets a dangerous precedent, because we don't know who determines what is acceptable and what is not. Well-intentioned do-gooding today is politcal repression tomorrow.
Government and big business are in each others pockets and when business starts setting up controls on access to information you can be sure that government is looking for ways to exploit those controls. T-Mobile's approach is censorship by stealth and I for one believe it needs to be nipped in the bud.
