Eulogy for my Mum Sylvia Green

 My Mum Sylvia Green died on the night of 2nd February 2025. This is what I said at her funeral.

Most of us knew Sylvia as an exemplar home-maker - a wife, mother, grandmother, and of course daughter. She fulfilled all of these roles to the max, and though she didn't really think men and boys needed to know how to cook, she did manage to teach me most of what I know about that.

And she was a transmitter of Jewish culture too, in language and home ritual and family stories, and of course food. Most of what is important to me about my Jewish identity is what came to me from my Mum.

But though she would have been the last to say so, she was also an intellectual. She loved books, and theatre and film. She would tell me the story of a film that she had seen, and it was like I'd seen it myself. She was a wonderful story-teller. 

This was despite the fact that she'd had almost no formal education at all. Her school life wad disrupted by the war. She stopped school at nine years old when the family moved to Brighton to escape the Blitz, and she never really went back. 

Her psyche was shaped by the war. She told me stories of the terror of nights spent in air raid shelters, of coming in the morning to find familiar buildings gone or in smoking ruins. Her rather was a registered alien, never naturalised as British. He had to report weekly to a police station. And he was never naturalised because of what happened to his own father, deported to Russia during WW1 for refusing to be conscripted in to the British army.

All of that shapes a person. My mum struggled for years with depression. Most of that struggle took place inside her. She never let it impact on how she behaved towards others. Mum was always in motion, always doing things for other people. Even when I visited her in the care home where she sat wheelchair bound, she was offering to go and make me a meal.

She was resilient and brave. When Louis was born in Sydney, she got on a plane, by herself, even though she had never spent a minute abroad without Dad before. She took a courier flight to Australia via Tokyo, and she told us how she'd left the hotel to go for a walk in a city where she spoke not one word of the language and could not read the street signs. 

Although it was Dad who told the stories of his activist past, Mum had her involvement too. She was probably the only person who took part in the 35s Group of Jewish women protesting for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate and also went to Greenham Common, with Ruth, Minnie, Sharon and Karin to protest against cruise missiles.

And I want everyone to know how much fun she was - not only when she was a lovely booba to our boys, but also when I was little, and we sued to schlep all over London to medical appointments, and we would make up stories about the people we saw in the tube - who was a spy, which one was going to a secret meeting, and so on. 

And that's how I want to remember her, not as she was in her very last years, but how she had been for all the years before.

Post script - thinking of all the things we went through, like her teaching me to drive, and the time we had a front wheel tyre explode on the motorway en route to Manchester and did a 360 skid into the hard shoulder, and me walking round the lake at Valentines Park with her, trying to offer her undergraduate-grade psychotherapy...

Shlomo Epstein

My mum's grandfather, who I knew when I was a little child (until I was about eight, when he died) was usually called Solomon Epstein, though he seems to have sometimes been called Itzko. He was a tailor in the East End, and worked for other master tailors. He was never a master himself, and seems to have been unemployed outside the season. Family tradition says he had attended a yeshiva but became a Bundist, back in the town of Pruzhana (now in Belarus but then Eastern Poland). Later he was very pro-Communist, if not a party member, and thought very highly of Stalin.

He hadn’t meant to emigrate to England. He’d taken a boat to America but was refused entry, perhaps at Ellis Island, because he was suffering from the eye disease trachoma. As a result he ended up in London. 

He must have already been married to Sarah Trappski, who was the mother of his three daughters and a son; I know this because Sylvia’s father, Louis Epstein, was born in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). I have a picture of him with his wife and four children, in which Sarah looks quite plump. A later picture of her, when she was probably already ill (I think with TB but it might have been cancer), shows a very emaciated woman.

He was married two more times after Sarah Trappski died (she’s buried in Frankfurt, where I think she went for treatment which was unsuccessful). The first time he married the widowed mother of Louis’s wife (Sylvia’s mother, known variously as Fay, Fayge, and Ruchel), the second time another widow called Lena, who had a daughter in Israel - I remember a picture of her in her army uniform. Lena kept chickens in the backyard, and fermented and pickled, and my mum remembers her infusing cherries in alcohol. 

When conscription was introduced in WW1 he wasn’t liable to be conscripted, because he wasn’t naturalised British. The British government went to some effort to sign military conventions with the governments of allied nations, allowing it to either conscript non-naturalised immigrants or deport them to serve in their ‘home’ armies, but it didn’t do this with Russians because there was some recognition that they were refugees from Czarist oppression. This changed in March 1917 when the first revolution overthrew the Czar, and the Kerensky government continued to fight alongside the allies. In August 1917 the Anglo Russian military convention was signed, making Russian subjects liable to conscription or deportation. 

One of the documents in my possession is of some sort of certificate, issued in 1918, by the Russian Embassy in London, then based in Gordon Square. It shows that the embassy staff have manually corrected the headed notepaper to remove the word ‘Imperial’. On the back, in pencil, is some text in the first person about Shlomo/Itzko - I don’t think he wrote it himself. It describes how he came to England and concludes with words that emphasise his claim to be a Russian.

As described in Harold Shukman’s book ‘War Or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917’, the mainly anti-war immigrants were advised by their socialist leaders to opt for deportation - it was assumed that the government was too busy to organise deportation and transport to Russia. This turned out to be wrong (though perhaps not bad advice, given the level of slaughter on the western front by then) and the immigrants - Jews, but also Lithuanian miners in Scotland - were rounded up and put on a ship for Archangel. 

Shukman describes what happened to them thereafter. By the time they arrived there was no Russian army left for them to serve in, and they wandered around Russia during the early stages of the civil war. At some point in 1918 they reached Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Ukraine. I have a composite picture, with lots of insets, showing portraits of what was probably the deportees; some text on one of the insets says ‘Members of the Convention, taken in Ekaterinoslav XI 1918.’ There is also a picture of a ship and some railway lines. 

Shlomo spent several years in Russia, during what must have been the civil war. At some point he is said to have found his way to family members who stayed behind in Russia, and there recovered from typhus. Eventually he found his way back to London (some time in the early 1920s), though family tradition says that when the ship docked he wasn’t allowed to disembark, and had to return the following day on another ferry. 

Kasatchok!

For years the Red Band in London, and then the Stroud Red Band, played a tune called Kasatchok. It's a Russian traditional dance tune, or so I thought. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we stopped playing it, not because we're boycotting everything that ever was Russian, but it didn't feel too good. Someone pointed out that a kasatchok was also a Ukrainian dance; did that make it better? Did the fact that it was a Ukrainian cossack dance make it worse again? After all fear and hatred of cossacks in part of Jewish folk-memory; my dad told me that in the 43 Group they used to call the mounted police in London "cossacks".

Then a friend reminded me that there are Italian words to the tune, which became a song of the Italian partisan resistance to the Nazis - Fischia il Vento. With that name it was programmed into a little electric keyboard that his child has. Here is a nice version by the Modena City Ramblers, an Italian lefty band...for some reason they are wearing kilts to perform this, perhaps because they think of themselves as playing Irish traditional music.

And then I remembered that the song used to be played a lot at Jewish weddings and barmitzvahs, at which the young men would try to dance a pseudo-Russian squatting dance that they would call the "kazotzkas", which would result in everyone getting very sore thighs. In fact I had once thought of it as a Jewish tune, and I recalled that there was a Hebrew version. I'm pretty sure we sang it once or twice in my Zionist youth movement, and it turns out that it was translated into Hebrew as early as 1945, probably as part of the Socialist-Zionist love affair with all things Soviet.

And finding the Hebrew version on YouTube, I also came across this, which has to be a strong contender for the weirdest thing on the internet - a Yiddish version, syncopated, performed by some sort of folk choir from Birobidzhan, in a made-up Jewish folk costume. Are these people actually even Jews? What tradition does this costume, and this song and dance, form part of?

Of course it turns out that the tune is not a traditional one but was written by Matvey Isaakovich Blanter,  a Soviet (Jewish) composer in 1938. 

The Smithsonian Incident

I spent my twenty-fifth birthday in Washington DC. Specifically, I spent it walking around The Mall, and visiting the museums there. I was on a paid-for research trip for my Ph D, but I felt I deserved to have my birthday off. So the afternoon found me in the Smithsonian Institute, a big and deservedly popular museum of American history. In the foyer there was a big display about the words of the song “The Star Spangled Banner”, which featured the actual flag from Fort M’Henry, a huge facsimile of the hand-written words and a picture of the poet Francis Scott Key, who had written them. Looking online I see that the flag is now part of a different display.

I had known a little bit about Scott Key, because he is one of the characters in Sabbatical, a novel by John Barth, an author that I was then rather fond of. In the book Scott Key is a sort of reluctant and belated convert to American patriotism, so his writing the poem “Defence of Fort M'Henry” is all the more poignant; the display does not mention the racist dimension to the lyrics, which include the words “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave” referring to the fact that the British forces included newly freed slaves.

And while I was musing on this a coiffured southern woman began to tell her daughter, in a loud voice, about how the sight of the still flying flag had inspired Scott Keys to write the poem. She was reading from the caption to the display, but she hadn’t twigged that Francis Scott Keys was a man. Well, the black and white engraving showed a head with long flowing locks, and Francis - or at least Frances - is a woman’s name.

And hearing this, I was transfixed - held between the need to correct her mistake and the rudeness of contradicting a parent in front of their child. It would be worse because my voice would clearly identify me as British, and the Brits were the villains of this story (and most Hollywood films). I did a little wrestle with both sides of my conscience. Imagine the daughter in the future, repeating the same stupid error, and being humiliated by it. Imagine the woman’s humiliation at being corrected in front of her daughter, and by a Brit. 

I did nothing. The moment passed, they walked away to look at something else. I’m still not sure if it was the right choice. 

Zionism: from both sides, now

From early on Zionism had two different aspects, and this is still important now. In Palestine it acted as a movement and an ideology of colonists, seeking to take over a territory and dominate the local inhabitants. But in Europe, where Jews were an oppressed minority, Zionism was a movement of nationalism (albeit an odd one) for an oppressed people, offering solidarity, cultural renewal, and self-help organisations. Now in Israel (and Palestine) Zionism acts as an ideology and set of institutions for Jewish supremacy - many Israelis say that Israel must be the state of the Jewish people of the world, not a state for all its citizens. But for Jews around the world, Zionism still means Jewish cultural identity, the national pride of a minority that’s not always oppressed but is often fearful.

For non-Jews, including anti-racists, it’s not always apparent how much Jewish identity has been subsumed into Zionism. Radical anti-Zionist Jews who have broken with the mainstream Jewish community, and its identification with Zionism and Israel, have found their own version of Jewish identity. But for most Jews in Britain identification with Israel is a very important aspect of their Jewish identity - even if they are privately unhappy or very unhappy about the government and some aspects of Israeli society. The idea of Israel as a refuge for future Jewish refugees still has a very strong hold. It’s bound up with the memory of all the Jews who didn’t manage to escape the Holocaust, and the memory of how migration to Palestine provided an exit route for those few who did escape or managed to survive the extermination.

I grew up Zionist. I went to a state-funded Jewish primary school that was run by a Zionist organisation. The Hebrew that I learned there was the Israeli kind - I didn’t even understand why older people pronounced Hebrew in a completely different way. The songs we sang were Israeli songs, in Hebrew. We celebrated Jewish holidays the way they did in Israel. There were maps of Israel and Israeli flags all over the school...I don’t think there was one British flag or map of Britain. Later on as a teenager I went to a Zionist youth movement, where we went camping, and got off with each other, and sung more Israeli songs and practiced living like a utopian community.

Eventually my politics took me away from most of this. I mainly look at Zionism through the eyes of its victims, although I can still connect with some of the emotional memories I have about Israel as a rescuer. I also know that some fascists and conspiracy-theorists use Zionist as a code-word for Jew, and sadly that some of my friends and comrades on the left can unconsciously slide into using antisemitic themes and imagery when they’re - rightly - calling attention to Israel’s crimes.

I’d like to persuade more British Jews to oppose the Israeli government and the Occupation, and to support equal rights for all citizens in Israel. I hope more people in Britain will stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, and will support their struggle against Israel. But I hope that it’s possible to do this in a way that doesn’t involve a frontal assault on the personal and cultural identity of Jewish people, and that means treating the issue of ‘Zionism’ with some nuance and sensitivity.

(Afternote: I wrote this as a comment on someone else's Facebook post, and then re-posted as stand-alone Facebook post of my own, and now I've put it here to give it a more permanent home. It was intended originally as a short response, and there are some aspects that deserve more substantiation or exploration. But it's here as it emerged, and I think I still stand by what's in it.)

RSA report on Cohousing

So I read the RSA report on cohousing - see here - and my main take-away is that it wasn't really about cohousing. There's lots about what is broken in the UK housing market - in particular, the lack of actually affordable (as opposed to "affordable", now a term with special meaning that specifies a discount from overblown market rents rather than a relationship to disposable income), and the poor terms and conditions that apply to renters but not so much to mortgage buyers. There is quite a lot discussion about forms of tenure, with particular emphasis on mutual ownership, rental co-ops, a community land trusts.

That's all very interesting (really, it is) but most of the report misses the point about cohousing, which is that it is form of occupancy, not a form of tenure. The cohousing community where I live, and most of the others in the UK and the US, is primarily based on owner-occupancy, though there are some private renters (living in homes owned by individuals, not the community or any other institution) and some lodgers. The tenure is more or less bog-standard leasehold that you'd find in many blocks of flats. In Northern Europe there are lot more rental-based cohousing communities, with the community (or a housing association) acting as the landlord.

The distinguishing feature of the occupancy is really the self-management. Other developments have shared facilities. It's a common feature of high-end developments (pool, gym etc.). Old-style US condominiums have residents' association rooms and facilities, and shared laundries seem to be common in US apartment blocks (though not in British ones). The new commercial 'co-living' set-ups like The Collective have them too.

The difference is that in co-housing these are managed and maintained, and cleaned, (for the most part) by the residents themselves, and it's the organisation of this that means that people are necessarily entangled and involved with each other. Not everyone is equally involved, but it seems to be true that the more you put in, the more you get out - at least in terms of loneliness reduction.

Our community has frequent (thrice-weekly) communal meals, prepared and cooked by community members through a rota, to a rolling meal schedule, in a communal kitchen and dining room that is beautifully maintained. The eating together is important (though not every cohousing community does it), but it's the self-management - the rotas and the inevitable shift swaps, the menus, the food buying - that keeps people entangled with each other. The upside of cohousing, the connection with other people, is exactly the same as the downside - that you are inextricably bound up with other people.

When my partner and I tell our friends about it, they often react that they wouldn't like to have all of those obligations...and they might be right. In one sense, the people in cohousing are just like everyone else. There isn't a common ideology or philosophy. Not everyone is particularly generous or self-less. Some people are involved with wider communities, some aren't. What distinguishes them is their ability to tolerate these obligations, and that level of entanglement with other people and need to take the views and preferences of others into account. I suspect that this is a not such a common characteristic, especially in Britain, especially now. If I'm right, then cohousing won't be a cure for loneliness, at least for many people - though it is a good vehicle for those who are that way inclined. It's probably worth noting that even in those Scandinavian countries where it's well established and relatively easy to establish the proportion of the population that lives in cohousing remains below 5%.

It’s been a not-entirely-great year

Maybe the Facebook robots are even cleverer than we know. Most of my friends seem to have had those “It’s been a great year” posts created for them, but the robots seem to have left me out. I’m grateful. It’s not been a great year.

This time last year I posted a picture of a hospital corridor with a pathetic bit of tinsel hanging from a fluorescent light fitting, or something similar. It caught my eye while I was visiting my dad in the Acute Unit at Whipps Cross Hospital, and it seemed to sum up perfectly the contradictory feelings that I had about me, and him, and all the other people including the staff, being there. And part of this not-great year is that he died, in June, after more than a year of dementia and degeneration, so that by the end he was more in hospital than out of it, even though there was not usually anything that could reasonably be called a treatable illness afflicting him.

I dream about him often, not as he was at the end, but more like the way he was about fifteen years ago, when he was an active and engaged grandparent to my two boys, as well as to my brother’s two daughters.

This time last year I also compiled a list of all the things I’d done during the year – trips, work reports, blog posts and book reviews. It seemed worth doing, to confirm that something had actually happened. It rather felt that I’d been in stasis for years, and the log proved that I’d actually done something.

There doesn’t seem much point in doing the same this year, which has been eventful enough. I was made redundant from Ovum, after 14 years there, in April. I’d been imagining that happening for years, from the first time the company was acquired, so it didn’t come as a surprise but it was still a shock. The process was followed to the letter, and I can’t complain that I was treated unfairly. I was offered a much bigger redundancy sum than the statutory entitlement. I was given the chance to interview for a role a bit like my own. And there were some comedy moments in the whole thing, because both I and the other interviewee didn’t want to stay anymore, so we both had to compete to be allowed to leave with the redundancy money.

I didn’t do any more work for Ovum after the beginning of April. In principle I was on a 30-day consultation period, but the outcome was pretty obvious. Then I had three months ‘notice period’, during which I was strictly prohibited from doing any other money-earning work, but not debarred from making contacts for future freelance work. In the end that proved a bit pointless, because I was offered a position by M2M/IoT specialist analyst firm Machina Research, which has proved to be rather exciting and even a bit fun.

All that free time allowed me to spend some time with my dad as his condition deteriorated. I didn’t really know that he was on the final stretch of his life, though, because the slide was so gradual it was hard to notice the progress. Ruth and I went on holiday to France in mid-June. Dad had seemed a little better of late, and was out of hospital when we went. He died while we were still away in the Pyrenees, and we travelled back within the day.

Part of the run-up to the holiday had been the death of our cat, Beauty, who had been with us for nine years or so. It feels odd comparing the death of a pet to the death of my dad, but it all seemed to part of the same thing, a series of blows that life had become. This was how it was going to be from now on.

Of course, it wasn’t. The not-great year has had some great moments too. I’m very proud of my sons’ achievements this year – Louis got a Distinction in his degree, Lexei won a scholarship to help support his studies.

I am closer than ever to Ruth, who has been a partner and best friend through all of this, and who has helped me dealing with some stuff that has hung about in my life for – well, all of it, really. Together we’ve had a year without the twists and turns of the cohousing group that we left at the end of 2013, and we’ve had the pleasure of living in the Springhill cohousing community for the month of November, and discovering that we liked cohousing in practice as well as in theory.

I published a novel, One Shoe Tale, which has had some nice reviews. We got some new cats, who have turned out to be fine animals, funny and affectionate and full of life.

So screw you, Facebook robots. It’s been some good and some bad, because that’s what life is. I might have done without some of it, but that’s not what life is.

Time to hang up that skull and crossbones flag...?

Here’s a funny thing. A few years ago, in a piece for Ovum about the long-term future of telecoms and all that, I segmented the consumer market into three categories: Digital Citizens, the mainstream consumers of media content and applications; Digital Metics, those largely excluded from the digital world by reason of poverty, transience, lack of skills, or even choice; and Digital Outlaws, who rejected the mainstream world for a DIY ethic and an interest in encryption, open source, free content, and so on.

I thought of myself as belonging in the latter category, even though I’m not that much of a hacker. I used Linux (Ubuntu) on my personal laptop. I used a G-Box for my smart TV. I got my content through BitTorrent kind of on principle. I even used an alternative version of Android on my Samsung smartphone.

In the space of about a week I’ve ended up turning my back on almost all that. My new laptop, an Asus X550C, won’t play nicely with Ubuntu (it won’t recognise the wireless connection, or even install properly). We despaired of the G-Box, which needed to be rebooted almost every time we used it, and made it fiendishly difficult to add a new channel ever, and we bought a Chromecast instead, which has turned out to be rather brilliant and really simple to use. Ruth got herself a Netflix subscription. And I got a new Samsung phone, and I can’t face going through the tortuous process of installing Cyanogenmod on it when it’s working quite well at the moment and I can’t think what the actual benefits would be.

Right now I don’t think this is a permanent change of mindset, but perhaps the mindset will follow where the behaviour has led. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Why I take pictures of war memorials

Why I post pictures of war memorials

I find war memorials really poignant. I take pictures of every one that I come across; it's become a bit of a tic. It's my tiny way of honouring the people – usually young men – who died, like leaving a little stone on the grave; but it's also a way of making a statement about war and the pity of war.

Most memorials are about the First World War – WW1 or the Great War, if you prefer. There are few hamlets in Europe so small as to not have a memorial to soldiers who died in this war. Since I've tuned in to them I am struck by just how many memorials there are – in schools, colleges, workplaces, railway stations, gardens. Part of the point of taking and posting the pictures is to mark the sheer volume of the memorials. By taking pictures of every one that I encounter I try to convey some sort of comment on the sheer volume of the slaughter. Like the end scene in 'Oh What a Lovely War'; one memorial might glorify war, but hundreds or thousands can't.

Most Western European monuments have a little add-on for WW2, and sometimes for subsequent wars; for Britain and France, the casualties of WW1 far outstrip those who died in WW2. But I've also found memorials for the Crimean War and the Boer War, with great columns of names of young men who died. In Italy I've found Risorgimento memorials, and in Milan railway station there is a Fascist memorial to the young men who died subduing Ethiopia; it is right next to a memorial to young Italian anti-fascist partisans, concretizing the way that Italy manages to have it both ways.

I've seen some unusual ones – there's a memorial to Portuguese soliders who died on the Western Front in Brussels, and I didn't even know that Portugal had been in the First World War. In one small town in Italy I found town with a plaque commemorating the fact that all the young men who had gone off to the war had returned safely.

I take the pictures because they help me to resolve something of a contradiction in the way I feel about the wars. I am, for the most part, against war – though not all wars. I have little sympathy or admiration for the politicians who send young people off to fight and kill. I don't much like the institutions of the military. But I respect the soldiers, and their bravery and their comradeship, even if I don't always think much of the purpose for which they were sacrificed. What can we feel about the Crimean War now, except sorrow for the young men who died in it?

Taking pictures and posting them helps me to resolve this. Partly I think it's because the memorials inevitably subvert their own purpose. The point of the memorials is to commemorate the sacrifice of the soldiers who died in the memorialized war, and thus to make that sacrifice – and future sacrifices – seem glorious.

But the permanence of the memorials, and the long list of names of dead boys which outlast any personal commemoration can't help but remind the onlooker that their names don't live for evermore. The world goes on, the war dead are for the most part forgotten. Those who survive get on with their lives, apart from ritualized remembrance. The first picture I ever took, of a war memorial on a small church in Elsworthy Road, Swiss Cottage, summed it up perfectly; the head of the surmounting angel had come off, and it bore the motto 'Their names liveth for evermore', but the names themselves had been eroded by pollution and were unreadable. It has since been restored, but it was the unrestored one that had the most poignancy and meaning for me.

So the war memorials actually constitute – for me, anyway – a statement against war. So I'll keep taking and posting the pictures.

On bereavement

My dad, Norman Green, died on 23rd June 2014. We were on holiday in France when my mum phoned to tell me the news, and we were home within about eight hours. I didn't say much, or feel much, during the journey home. Ruth did most of the practical stuff – dealing with Ryanair, for example, who were surprisingly decent. The nuts and bolts of getting home seemed to consume most of my mental energy, of which there wasn't much.

I hadn't had much preparation for bereavement. No-one close to me had died since my grandmother in the early 1980s. Then, I'd not felt anything until the funeral and the final sight of her coffin, at which I had cried and cried and been unable to stop. I didn't cry at my dad's funeral, though I came close the night before, sleeping on the floor of what I must now learn to call my mum's flat. From time to time I have felt ashamed that I haven't felt more sad. Some people say that this is normal and that it will hit me later; we have talked about whether it was because in some sense the progress of dad's dementia meant that we had already adjusted to the fact that he was no longer with us. I don't know.

Leon and I had a discussion about whether it was acceptable to post a message about dad's death on Facebook. In the end I decided that it was OK, and I am extremely glad that I did. The messages of condolence and support that I received were very welcome. I was really grateful for them, and will try to do the same for others in the future. I never realised how important they could be, and how little it matters what the actual words are.

We all felt very well looked after by my mum and dad's synagogue. I've been to funerals where a rabbi has delivered a lame and impersonal eulogy to someone that they self-confessedly didn't know, but nothing like that happened here. The officials at the ceremony were really kind and supportive – it helped that the main functionary was Scottish and  looked and sounded like a Jewish version of Sean Connery.

The rabbi was happy for Leon and I to say a few words ourselves. There had been something of a comedy moment the night before the funeral, when he counselled us that there were some things to which our eulogies could not refer; any enjoyment that dad had taken from eating non-kosher food, or any pleasure he had derived from mixed dancing. Although these  had indeed been among dad's favourite things we managed not to mention then, though the rabbi had looked distinctly nervous when Leon began the lead-in to a joke about a rabbi and a Catholic priest on a train.

Although I do a lot of talking for a living I wasn't at all prepared to give a eulogy for my dad, even though I had imagined myself doing exactly that from time to time. But I managed to say how much of what I considered important in myself had been formed in early conversations with my dad. He brought me up to be against racism from a very early age.

He was a visceral, tribal socialist, and would have cut his hand off before he allowed it to vote anything except Labour. The basics, he explained, were that the Tories wanted high unemployment and low wages, and Labour wanted the opposite. When I was still really little he enjoyed telling me how Nye Bevan had called the Tories vermin. And when I rather mindlessly repeated what the TV news had said about trade unions, dad had told me that working people needed unions to defend themselves against bad and unreasonable employers. Although he had put himself through night school to qualify as an optician, and was therefore both a professional and a businessman, he continued to think of himself as a working class person who done well, not as someone who had risen out of his class.

Like everyone, he was a man of his time. He had liberal views on homosexuality – I can remember him telling me that it was wrong to discriminate against or punish people for how they were born. He never really got feminism or women's rights, though Ruth and her mother schlapped him to Greenham for a CND demonstration. I can remember his bewildered expression as a group of protesters chanted 'no men' at us, who had come there to support them. He couldn't understand  why they would do that, and as I tried to explain it to him realised that I couldn't either.

Dad was not a bloke-ish man. He was mainly uninterested in sport, though he liked to watch boxing and took me to watch “professional wrestling” at the Metropole in Brighton when I was small. He didn't care much about cars, though he'd been proud to own a Jaguar for a few years, as a sign that he had done well for himself. He resolutely refused to do DIY, insisting on his inability to do anything with his hands, even change a light bulb or a plug. Of course, as a man of his time he never did any housework at all – it would be wrong to say he refused to do it, because my mum has been a woman of her time and would never have asked him. In his later years he often asked if there was anything he could do to help her, but he wouldn't have been capable of finding the dishwasher, much less loading or unloading it.

His non-blokeishness extended to his love of children. He was really, really happy to play with little children, to make funny faces and noises for them, play peek-a-boo, and so on. He loved all of his five grandchildren – Louis, Lexei, Juliana, Raquel and Selin. He was proud to have been present for the birth of his own children at a time when the expectation was that 'expectant fathers' paced up and down outside the delivery room.

First and foremost dad was an anti-fascist, of the physical force kind. Of everything that he done in his life he was most proud of his time in the 43 Group. I don't think he was a physical brave man, despite his long participation in various kinds of martial arts training, which makes his involvement in street-fighting all the more special. He loved that he had been part of the group, constantly read and re-read Morris Beckman's book about it, and was always happy when he had the opportunity to talk about it with a new audience.

As he got older our views diverged, and we disagreed about Israel and Zionism in particular. But I loved him all the same, now as much as ever, even though I will never hear his voice again.

Interesting website about multi-generational cooperative housing in Germany

Here - and there is an associated page (in German!) about financing cooperative housing, which looks worth a read too.

Barcelona February 2014

I went to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2014. Instead of rushing back at the end I stayed for the weekend and had a great time. I went to the Barcelona History Museum, and really enjoyed a special exhibition about the World of 1714 - the year in which Catalonia found itself abandoned at the tail end of the War of Spanish Succession and its independence came to an end.

I went with Ruth to the Sagrada Familia (only the outside - couldn't face the queue) and then on to the even more wonderful Modernista Hospital de la Santa Creu I Sant Pau.

We did Nick Lloyd's brilliant Civil War walking tour, which brought Orwell's Homage to Catalonia to life and almost moved me to tears. 

We walked all over Montjuic (yes, Jew Mountain) and visited the Catalan National Art Museum. I particularly liked this picture by Antoni Arissa.

And I met up with Phil Shepherd, and with Jamilla Evans-Evans, neither of whom I have seen for at least fifteen years.

Reflections on William Morris

I went with friends to the William Morris Gallery on Saturday. It was a lovely day, the gallery had lots of beautiful things to look at, and items from Morris's personal and business history. Morris was for the most part a top bloke - against anti-Semitism in the left at a time when it was mainly acceptable, an opponent of authoritarian tendencies in the SDF and a genuine democrat, with awareness of the ironies of his position as a supplier of fancy furnishings to the idle rich.

So what is it about him that gives me the creeps? Partly I think it's the whole Merrie England thing. There is a long tradition on the right of celebrating a pre-industrial time of harmonious, organic community, before capitalism and industrialisation. Philip Blond, the 'red tory' and sometime advisor to David Cameron on 'big society', is one of the latest manifestations of this, but it has a long pedigree among both the mainstream right and the far right. Sometimes these people call themselves 'Tory Anarchists'. It's mixed up with a preference for Medieval art and craft alongside imagined Medieval social relations. Chesterton is a very articulate spokesman for this ideology.

The trouble is that there are those on the left who are attracted to this - they like the idea of small communities, simple life, self-sufficiency, localism, craft work rather than industrialisation. Of course there are left-wing versions of this too...and some versions that are just not too picky about who they hang out with. I don't have a problem with localism; I do have a problem with those who can't tell the difference between friends who advocate it, and enemies who affect to for entirely other reasons.

I think that my problem with Morris is that he is just too close to all this - the medievalism, the preference for craftwork over industrial production; even though he is himself a decent sort he acts as a sort of gateway drug for reactionary ideas within the left.

Why I created my e-petition for a referendum on whether England should leave the United Kingdom

I'm not a nationalist of any kind. I don't think that England would be better off without Scotland, and I wouldn't necessarily call for separation from Scotland if I did. I don't bear Scotland any ill-will – like a lot of people in England, I'm quite sympathetic to Scottish independence. I like Scotland, and on my visits there I have been increasingly aware how much it is already a separate country.

I'm aware of the dangers of letting nationalist genies out of bottles, as happened in Yugoslavia. I'm aware of the danger that England without Scotland will be even more weighted towards the Tories.

I am, though, fed up with shoddy, ramshackle constitutional arrangements that sometimes pretend that the 'United Kingdom' is a federal state, when it so clearly isn't. The collection of 'nations', 'principalities', 'provinces' and what-not that make it up are not treated in anything like a common or symetrical way. If there is a Scottish Office, why isn't there an English Office? Why isn't there an English Parliament?

The United Kingdom is no longer a sensible working arrangement. Political manoeuvring and the games between Cameron and Alex Salmond might allow it to be preserved even further past its sell-by date, but that would be shame when there is a chance to put something better in its place.

I'm fed up with not even knowing what to write in the 'nationality' section on forms, and not knowing where to find my country on drop-down lists – is that United Kingdom, or Great Britain, or England...?

I'm also mildly fed up with the hypocrisy of politicians who pretend that they care what the electorate think, and go through the charade of these e-petitions, but don't really give a toss.

So creating an e-petition on an English referendum gives me the opportunity to have a go at all of this.

If any of this resonates, please sign the petition. It will at least be entertaining to hear the excuses that 'unionist' politicians come up with as to why Scotland can leave the United Kingdom, but England can't.

Economic illiiteracy at the BBC

I was surprised and disappointed to hear the BBC constantly repeat without any significant challenge the government claim that the public sector strikes were going to cost the nation half a billion pounds. This is a ludicrous, made up figure, based on the most spurious methodology. Consider, for example, the amount attributed to the 'cost' associated with parents having to take a day off work because their children's school will be closed. Some of those parents will arrange childcare, which is actually a boost to the economy in the way that economists measure it. Others will use up their annual leave to care for their children, which might be a shame for them, but does not represent a cost to the economy at all; indeed, since untaken holiday is treated by company accounts as a liability it is arguably also a boost to the economy.

Similarly, much of the cost is derived from the loss to the economy of people waiting at airports to be processed. Surely many of those people will be visitors to the country; while it's a shame that their entry to Britain will be a miserable experience, the time that they lose was never going to figure in the national accounts. And what about the people who spend their time in the queues making phone calls or sending emails? Many of them are surely as productive as they would be if they were the other side of the barrier.

The half a billion claim is economic illiteracy, and it was wrong of the BBC to promote it in that way.

Help by Oliver Burkeman

I love the 'This Column Will Change Your Life' column in The Guardian, and this book is mainly a compilation of that.

Things I particularly wanted to follow up on were:

on the perils of perfectionism:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/19807

http://todoinstitute.org/

http://zenhabits.net/no-goal/


On the benefits of writing:


http://pwriting.org/

On the benefits of paying attention:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274


On bias:

www.ahealthymind.org/library/SpeedingwithNed.pdf

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/05/are-you-an-asker-or-a-guesser.html

Romantic compatibility and attraction:

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/


Work life:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all

research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/taskdiary.pdf

http://bigthink.com/ideas/18522

http://www.markforster.net/to-do-lists/


 On the psychology of money

http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/whistlestop-tour-of-research-on.php

On the Green Party and its political strategy (or lack of one)

All political parties have political strategies. For the major political parties, the ones with the hope and prospect of forming a government, the strategy in an electoral democracy is relatively straightforward; campaign to win enough votes to form a government then implement policies.

There is a degree of complexity about the relationship between principles, philosophy, policies and the campaign strategy, because the major parties have to simultaneously enthuse their core supporters while appealing to floating voters. Thus for most of its existence the Labour Party maintained a formal commitment to socialism while making it clear that this would have no influence on how it would behave in government. Similarly, for at least the 1950s and 1960s, the Conservative Party maintained a formal commitment to the idea of free market economics while making it clear that it had no intention of dismantling the welfare state or abandoning state direction of what it called the mixed economy.

This tension notwithstanding, the basics for the major parties (usually not more than two in electoral democracies) are clear. Of course, there are endless refinements – do you emphasise the appeal to your core supporters, or to the floaters? Margaret Thatcher's success in the 1970s and 1980s was based on the understanding that Labour had lost touch with the concerns of a section of its core. The Labour right has traditionally sought to win over voters with no enthusiasm for socialism, while the Labour left has usually argued that the party would win if only it articulated a genuine socialist programme. But getting enough votes to win a majority, and then to use the power that comes with government, is what it is all about.

Minority parties face an entirely different problem. They usually don't have the problem of managing the contradictions between their principles and the policies they advocate. But they have to face the single, overwhelming fact that they are not going to win enough votes to form a government. This means that they need some other story about how why their members should give up their time to further the interests of the party, and why other supporters should vote for them at elections.

Revolutionary parties, including the parties of the far right, have a story; simplifying enormously, it says that they will eventually come to power, though not through the electoral process, which is fixed against them. At some time in the not too distant future there will be a transformation (a crisis of capitalism, a race war, the collapse of the economic system), at which point they will be ready. Until then, the focus of their political activity is to achieve that state of readiness, by recruiting members, preparing a correct programme, winning support for their ideas, and perhaps helping to push along the arrival of the transformative event.

Other kinds of minority party need a more sophisticated strategy, and a story to go with it. For the last thirty years Britain's centre party, in its various incarnations, has sought to win enough seats in parliament to force one of the major parties to allow it into a coalition government. It also hoped that it could then extract a change to the electoral system to make the latter more favourable to itself, thereby ensuring that coalitions would happen more often in the future. Presenting itself as a centre party, more or less equidistant from both of the major parties, was important to this strategy because it increased the party's freedom of manoeuvre to choose its coalition partner, and thereby the price it could charge for its support. All political activity was really subordinate to this strategy. Policies were adopted which made it possible for the centre party to win votes from against both major parties. There was activity at the local level with the intention of building up an activist and voter base, to prove that the party could win elections; on the few occasions where it actually achieved power at a local level there was usually some unhappiness, because the rigorous triangulation between 'left' and 'right' was hard to maintain. Of course, it barely needs saying that the events of the last year have effectively trashed this political strategy, and the present incarnation of the centre party badly needs a new story to satisfy its members and its voters.

Most other minority parties can't play the triangulation game. They have to seek influence through putting pressure on one of the major parties. Minority parties of the right, like UKIP and some of the European anti-immigrant parties, present themselves as being truer to the principles of the major right-wing party than the party is itself. Where the electoral system allows it, they can go after voters who are to the right of the major party, and with the intention of influencing it after the election by using its MPs to support its efforts to form a government; they will demand a price for this support, which demonstrates to their voters that there is a point in voting for them. Minority parties of the left can pursue the same strategy, again providing that the electoral system allows it.

Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system makes this strategy much more difficult. There is little chance that a minority party will get enough MPs elected to play a part in a post-election coalition. The only way to influence the major party to which one is closest is to threaten to hurt that party, by attracting sufficient votes to make it lose in some seats; the minor party can thereby argue to its supporters that its existence provides a counterweight to the major party's natural tendency to trim towards the centre and abandon its principles to attract floating voters. This is pretty much UKIP's political strategy in a nutshell – to force the Tories to the right by threatening to lose it marginal seats. The problem with this strategy is that it expects people to be make very complex bets about the voting intentions of others. UKIP wants to frighten the Tories into thinking that they need to move to the right, but its supporters don't actually want to hand the election to Labour. The same would apply to a moderately successful alternative left-wing party with respect to Labour; in order to actually influence Labour, it has to be able to pose a credible threat of costing it the election, but it knows that this is not what the voters to which it appeals wants to happen. That's why it's not only the centre party that campaigns for a different electoral system. Again, it barely needs saying that the defeat of the AV campaign in the recent referendum means that barring a transformative event like an economic collapse, a new electoral system is not going to be on offer for several years.

Which brings us, finally, to the political strategy of the Green Party. The party has a lovely vision of how it would like the future to be – lots of regulation to stop economic activity from damaging the environment, a redistributive tax system and government spending to make society more equal and to ensure that the poor and weak get looked after better, encouragement for alternative kinds of production and consumption, and for alternative economic and social arrangements like mutuals and co-ops. On specific issues it has lots of great policies, which many people who don't support or vote for the party would probably like if they knew about them. It has an unrivalled analysis of what is wrong with Britain and the world, which correctly links together things that are deliberately kept separate by mainstream politicians, like the relationship between debt, financial crisis and environmental destruction, or between economic growth and increased misery.

But in the place where there ought to be a political strategy – a story about how the party actually makes a difference, there is an empty space. It's theoretically possible that the party will gradually win over enough voters to form a government, but this is unlikely to happen within my children's lifetime.

We could try to influence Labour by being a more 'honest' presence to its left; but doing that properly would require us to be honest to ourselves that was what we were trying to do. We would have to target Labour marginals, and to target our message at voters and seats that Labour could otherwise hope to win.

Alternatively, we could consciously move towards the centre party slot. Although Green Party members are these days more likely to feel comfortable with the left, its voters and its ideological heritage are a bit more diverse; and it would be possible to position the party as in some way beyond the 'old-fashioned' left-right divide. At least in the short term this would be a way of picking up more electoral support, and perhaps influencing all of the major parties' policies a bit. It would provide a sort of justification for electoral activity in the face of the fact that we are never going to win power through elections. Again, doing this properly would require us to be honest to ourselves about what we were trying to do.

In principle, we could even move over to the right, worrying at the heels of the Conservatives . There is plenty of precedent for this within the history of the environmental movement, and there is probably political space for a movement that was radically conservationist and anti-capitalist. But we are not those sort of people, or that sort of a party, and most of us would jump ship in the face of such a turn.

Finally, we could position ourselves as much more like the revolutionary parties, even if we were not advocating any sort of insurrection. We would seek to change the way people thought rather than to win power for ourselves through the ballot box. We'd throw ourselves into campaigns and social movements, and use electoral activity as an opportunity to do this, rather than as a way of getting ourselves elected. We'd use both kinds of activity to demonstrate the validity of our analysis and arguments. I think lots of us would feel comfortable with this kind of strategy, which would be compatible with our values, principles and preferred activities – marching, demonstrating and so on. The problem with it as a strategy for the Green Party is that it's a more or less superfluous role, because there is already a vigorous environmental movement engaged in non-electoral campaigning and lobbying, which is more or less successful and does not appear to need a political party. The only justification for doing this is the sort of argument offered by the SWP, that the movement needs some sort of disciplined vanguard to do the co-ordinating and provide the correct ideas. This is arrogant, and unlikely to get us very far.

So there we are. As far as I can see the party of which I am a member, and whose ideas and policies I support the most, has no credible strategy to shape its political activities, and is simply keeping itself busy in the hope that something will turn up to make our efforts worthwhile and important.

What's mine is yours

Hats off to Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers for writing this. They've synthesized and evangelized some disparate trends to show that there is something in common underlying them – a rejection of stuff in favour of services on the one hand, and relationships on the other. They've linked this to the sustainability agenda (because the production, consumption and disposal of stuff is wrecking the planet), and to the happiness agenda (because having more stuff doesn't make you happy, any more than eating more stuff does).

They distinguish between three different kinds of collaborative consumption – Product Service Systems (buying a service – like a rental car instead of a product); Redistribution Markets (like Ebay, but also Freecycle – to move stuff between people instead of making or trashing stuff); and Collaborative Lifestyles (the exchange of intangible assets like skills and time in moneyless contexts).

The book has a long introduction on how we got to here – the genesis of advertising and the creation of wants, planned obsolescence, and so on. The downside of this is it feels a bit padded – as with a lot of books about the new economy, what could have been a tight magazine article or series of blog posts has been blown out to make a book. Although it contains some fairly contemporary stuff, it's already out of date – no mention of Cameron's “Big Society”, for example. It's very anglo-american too; does nothing like this happen in Europe? Don't they do this sort of thing all the time in the developing world?

It's also a bit boosterish. There are times when it admits that a phenomenon doesn't really fit with their argument – a lot of what is sold on Ebay now is new stuff, so that it's become primarily a distribution market rather than a redistribution market – part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But it trips over this lightly, as if it doesn't really matter. It doesn't look at the antecedents of the product service system – after all, renting is hardly new. In the 1970s most people rented their color TV's because they were expensive and tended to go wrong. And businesses of all kinds are really keen to turn their product lines into service lines, because it makes for a continuing revenue stream – look at all the rubbish warranties that they are so keen to sell us, and the pay-as-you-go models that are becoming so common for IT equipment.

It also ignores the environmental impact of services, which can be at least as damaging as stuff; consider the airline industry, or the hotel industry. Just because it doesn't fill your house doesn't mean it's not trashing the planet. Not to mention the way that so many product service systems seem to make for such rotten jobs; at least manufacturing provided some skills and some dignity. Try working in a call centre, or a materials separation facility.

And it doesn't acknowledge the consequences of its own arguments. It trumpets that it's not anti-business, or anti-capitalist. But in the absence of a philosophy that takes in production for need, not exchange and accumulation, we really do need to keep making stuff and buying it and throwing it away. Our jobs, which allow us to pay the taxes which enable the welfare state, are premised on economic activity, which is mainly the circulation of stuff. We could have another kind of economic system, but if we don't, then stopping the flow of stuff throws us all out of work.

Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable read, and I'm glad it's been written and published. I think the book will help to spread the idea and make it seem more cool and attractive – even if Botsman and her consultancy are busy helping big business to work out how to take advantage of the trend. It's down to us to make sure that collaborative consumption becomes an element in the construction of a new genuinely human economy, rather than a cosmetic layer on the old one.

I wonder if the authors would be pleased or sorry that I ordered this book from the library rather than buying it?

Urban magic; The idea of an arcology

What's the attraction of arcologies, sea-steading, moveable cities and the like? Why are they such a common motif in popular culture as it relates to cities? Archigram's walking cities seem to be always in fashion, with retrospective exhibitions every few years. Philip Reeves' traction cities, as depicted in the Mortal Engines series of books, have introduced the concept to a new generation. The work of Buckminster Fuller is full of this stuff, from the mile-high dome over Manhattan to early plans for floating cities; and despite Fuller's inability to build things that actually worked in the way that they were supposed to, it remains popular with techno-hippy optimists who think that this sort of thing is a vision of sustainability.

I think it's because they are like magic for grown-ups. In children's books (and increasingly, grown-ups' books, but that's another story) magic is a way of easily resolving the problems of the physical universe – restoring the world to the way it was when you were little, and could get what you wanted without effort or deferment. In grown-up fantasies about the city, hermetically sealed or free-standing urban entities deal with the real-world problems of cities by pretending they don't exist, or by proposing technological solutions to them that work best in fantasy.

In the real world, the inhabitants of cities need food to be brought in every day, and it needs to be moved to where it's needed despite all those pesky people getting in the way. Sure, there have been times when some of this food has been produced within the confines of the city itself, and it's hard not to get dewy-eyed about dig-for-victory gardens, backyard chickens, and the urban pigs that graced London and New York into the nineteenth century. Others are turned on by urban agriculture as practised in Cuba, or by dreams of giant vertical farms within cities. But agricultural surplus in the surrounding countryside, and consequent surplus of population, is what has historically made cities possible.

Cities also create huge amounts of waste, which includes but is not limited to the organic waste products of their human and animal inhabitants. Disposing of this stuff is, and always has been, one of the biggest problems with which all urban settlements struggle. Again, the surrounding countryside has historically been the solution. Relatively straightforward arrangements have ensured that the shit was taken to where it was useful, with the result that the farms and market gardens in the vicinity of cities had above-average productivity.

As transport became cheaper, the definition of 'surrounding' countryside became wider. At the heart of the Roman empire, the city of Rome imported its grain from North Africa and elsewhere. When the empire collapsed under the weight of its political, economic and energy-equation contradictions, there was a move towards re-localisation. Transport did not become so easy or so cheap again until the nineteenth century; until then cities were usually smaller and more closely linked to their immediate region.

But by the nineteenth century London, as the centre of a global empire, was obtaining its grain from one continent and its meat from another, and thereby supporting a population far greater than its region would have allowed. In terms of economics, the city only made sense as part of a global system; in terms of ecology, it didn't really make sense at all. Despite a flourishing network of market gardens on the fringes of the city, its sheer size and population meant that the night-soil economy was no longer sufficient to move all of the shit, human and animal, away from where it wasn't wanted. The immediate result was the 'great stink', and the longer-term consequence was the Bazalgette sewerage system, which collects human faeces from within our homes, transports them in a gush of potable water and then dumps them, more or less processed, somewhere downstream of us. Moving people round the city presented an analogous problem, and modern methods of transport were only possible because they relied upon energy imported from outside the city's boundaries – first fodder, then coal and coal-fired electricity for trams and metropolitan railways, then petroleum.

Cities are complex technical systems, embedded in complex social systems, with the latter both logically and historically prior. Cities can't exist outside of a web of economical and social relationships, not only within themselves but with the rest of the world. The twentieth century was rich in examples of cities that were politically separated from their surrounding regions – think Hong Kong, Singapore, West Berlin, West Jerusalem, or Nicosia. All of these have survived and sometimes thrived because of the way that they managed to plug themselves into a bigger support-system.

The idea of an arcology, or of a city that can pick itself up and move out of its supporting bio-region to find a better one, is a fantasy of denial – of pretending that with the right technology, it would be possible to do without all those messy social arrangements. Some of these fantasies are influenced by green thinking, and others by its opposite – lots of the literature on 'seasteading' seems to be driven by the attraction of leaving the rest of humanity to go to hell, and the involvement of Milton Friedman's grandson is probably not a coincidence. There are utopian and dystopian versions of this, and some of the dystopias seem to be intended as warnings rather than blueprints. As a thought experiment, and as an influence on some more serious proposals for making cities 'smarter', these visions might be a useful tool.

Ultimately, though, in so far as they are intended seriously, these proposals are a kind of survivalist response to real urban problems – I can't hole up in the woods with a gun because I'd miss my cappuccinos, but my entire city can cut itself off from the world. As in Bob Dylan's “Talking World War Three Blues”, in which everybody sees themselves walking around with no-one else; all the people can't be all right all of the time. Believing that you can make your city sustainable by preparing it to go for a stroll belongs with the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Life After Armageddon.

Watched 'Life After Armageddon', a US dram-doc, on Channel Five the other night. It depicts a society brought to collapse by an outbreak of flu, which has such a devastating effect because the country is so interdependent; once enough people stay home because they are ill, or to avoid becoming ill, everything fails, including water, power, law and order, and food distribution.

The program was a bit crass and repetitive, despite talking head slots from some of my favourite collapse theorists, but the scenario it depicts didn't seem particularly far-fetched. It seems worthy of comment that many of the tools which we are embracing to deal with the prospect of climate change -- such as more efficient transport networks, smarter power grids, and more reliance on the internet for work, shopping, and control systems generally -- actually make our civilisation less resilient to shocks. I don't know whether the internet would really stop working, in the way it does in the movie, once the workers in the server farms stop coming in to work, but it does bear thinking about.

I suppose the upshot of this is that there is more to sustainability than reducing power consumption; it's important to think about resilience, and reversibility. Of course we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but we ought to be aiming to do it in a way that doesn't create new systemic weaknesses and threats.