Restore RIO!
by Michael Carberry
Many grandparents enjoy having grandchildren to stay during the school holidays. But as we live in the South of France and our youngest granddaughter lives in the North of England, we see her very rarely in person. Hence, it was a particular pleasure for us when she came to visit during the summer. At just five years old Kathryn is very much the baby of the family. Having been born three-quarters of a century after her grandparents and in a different millennium, her conversations provided an interesting reflection of how much the world has changed since my wife and I were growing up in the early 1950s.
We first had an inkling of this when, still only four years old, Kathryn told her nursery teacher that her daddy was “nocturnal”. Intrigued to hear the word coming from a four-year old, the teacher had asked gently what she meant by that. Kathryn replied, quite correctly, that, as a bar-manager, her father worked very late into the night and spent much of the day sleeping. Some time later, at the advanced age of five, while busily gnawing on a spare-rib she had been given for lunch, Kathryn had given her father a “surprisingly long lecture” on the importance of bones in the skeletal structure of mammals, the difference between bones and cartilage and how some marine creatures have no bone skeleton at all – just cartilage. Shortly after, her other grandmother, a former primary school teacher, told us she had been astonished when Kathryn had observed that the tomato ketchup she was carefully squeezing on to her lunch was, “a very good example of a non-Newtonian fluid”. All the grandparents had to do a quick internet search to establish exactly what a non-Newtonian fluid was!
So, when she came to stay with us during the summer holidays, I was not surprised when, while feeding the fish in the garden pond, she talked very knowledgeably about the life-cycle of frogs and butterflies and how the evaporation of water from the pond was part of the cyclical movement of water around the environment. I tackled her about non-Newtonian fluids, saying I did not really understand what that meant. She frowned, looked at me rather pityingly and said “It’s all to do with the molecular structure” (sub-text: “You probably don’t understand that either” – I probably don’t!). Nevertheless, she then went on to give me a series of lectures about the solar system, the phases of the moon and black holes in space – “very dangerous because if anything goes in it never comes out!” I remarked that she seemed to know a great deal. She nodded sagely. “Yes”, she agreed, “I may be small but I’ve got a big brain.” Although I had to smile, I believe this was not so much childish conceit as a simple statement of fact. She was aware that, compared to other mammals, human beings have proportionately larger brains enabling them to process large volumes of complex information.
I should make clear that neither her parents nor grandparents think that Kathryn is some sort of child prodigy or budding Marie Curie; just an ordinary little five-year-old who happens to enjoy watching child-oriented science and natural history programmes on her tablet. Lest there be any doubt, when not discoursing on non-Newtonian fluids or black holes in space, she is equally happy watching cartoons of Wylie Coyote and Road Runner or recounting her latest adventures with Liliane – a pretend fairy friend and personification of a fairy doll recently given to her by her aunt. Indeed, it is quite reassuring to know that our granddaughter is a perfectly normal five-year old with a vivid and creative imagination. We know that behind the high-level language and seemingly advanced scientific concepts Kathryn’s level of comprehension is necessarily limited. Without the maturity and experience to know otherwise or the developed critical faculties to evaluate the material she encounters she has to take everything on trust. So that if she were told that the moon was made of green cheese or that babies were brought by the stork, she might very well believe that too. And herein lies my point.
Technology and the internet are powerful tools for education and the dissemination of information. But also, for the dissemination of not just misinformation but of disinformation, propaganda and hate speech. Kathryn’s screen-time and content are carefully curated by her parents. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for all children, especially teenagers, many of whom spend hours on their computers or mobile phones without adequate parental or adult supervision. Not least, because, unlike with a five-year old, such adult supervision is simply not realistically possible. And, of course, it is not just children or teenagers. In a world where a majority of people get their news from social media sources rather than established providers with high standards of journalistic integrity and fact checking, millions of people, children and adults alike, are being drawn by algorithms and confirmation bias down rabbit holes pushing malicious belief systems such as racism, misogyny, antisemitism or Islamophobia. The world-wide increase in both far-right and far-left populist political extremism has been fuelled and facilitated by the internet. As for example the recruitment of perfectly normal, but immature and vulnerable, young British Muslim men and women to leave home and join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Caliphate in 2016-17. The mob violence in the UK following the appalling murders of three little girls in Southport by a seriously disturbed young man in July 2024, was sparked by disinformation on line, much of it traced to far-right sources in the United States - exactly the same kind of malevolent influences which had provoked the young man into his appalling crime in the first place.
Most of us, even those who like myself grew up without so much as a telephone or television in the house, would now find it difficult to live without the internet for communication, on-line banking, shopping, booking tickets, research, or a myriad of other tasks. But we have already seen how an unregulated internet can quickly become a cess-pit of pornography, violence, political extremism and cyber-crime. All technology is a double-edged sword. It can bring immense benefits but also serious dangers. The challenge is how to achieve one without the other. The answer, as with every other technological advance from motor cars to nuclear power stations, is appropriate regulation. Regulation is not, as some would maintain, a constraint on freedom or entrepreneurial drive. Rather, it is the hallmark of a civilized society which cares about the welfare of its citizens, especially those most vulnerable like the elderly, children and young people. The challenge is how to do that in the face of global corporations and their billionaire owners like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg who have their own agendas to pursue and which put profit before public interest.
As technology becomes global, so regulation must also become global if it is to be effective. We already have many long-standing global institutions like the Universal Postal Union (UPU) or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). These have set rules for international postal and telegraph/telephone communications for more than a century and we tend to take them for granted because of their obvious utility. Others such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are more recent and their utility have perhaps been less obvious to the man in the street. Established in 1948 as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO, which replaced GATT in 1995, has worked tirelessly to promote international trade by reducing or eliminating trade barriers such as tariffs or quotas and so avoid a repetition of the disastrous tariff wars of the 1930s which were such a contributory factor to the Great Depression. It is only now when Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to everything the WTO has achieved with his crazy tariff policies, that we see how critically important it has been. Similarly, Trump’s disastrous war in Iran has effectively put an end to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the basic principles of UNCLOS, with catastrophic consequences for global energy prices and the world economy.
The rules-based international order (RIO) must be restored. Those who argued for Brexit on the grounds of “taking back control”, or who wish to leave international organisations like the European Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court because they believe it does not suit their national interest, are flying in the face of history and common sense. In an increasingly interdependent world, we need common, mutually-agreed rules if we are to avoid confrontation and conflict. The international community needs to reject Trumpism and restore both the WTO and UNCLOS as key elements of international relations. We also urgently need to develop similar international legislation to control the internet and the use of Space. Only then can we be sure that the Kathryns of this world can grow up to enjoy the benefits of the extraordinary technological advances of recent years without their dangers.
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