Review of "Why it's all still kicking off" by Paul Mason

I really like Paul Mason. He writes very well, about stuff that is important. This book is in many ways a survey of the present moment - or rather an update of a slightly earlier survey of a present moment - and so it's inevitable that there will be things in it that look a bit dated or have turned out differently. That is no reflection on Mason, only on the limitations of writing a book versus a more 'hot' medium. Of course a book makes for longer and more thoughtful treatment of complicated subjects than a twitterfeed or even a blog, and you can read it in a different way, more slowly and flicking backwards and forwards.

This book is about the intersection of social, cultural, technological and economic trends – and shows how these have affected and driven a series of not-all-that-connected events, from the Arab Spring to the underclass riots in England. He writes with insight and passion about the places where strange ecounters are taking place, between slum dwellers (the arse end of the globalized economy) and what is in effect the lumpen-intelligentsia (the arse end of the globalized education market), which he characterises as the graduate without a future. He covers the unhappy meeting-points between the traditional organized labour movement and the more radical, deliberately non-organized horizontalist protest movements.

He has a real feel for the limitations of both, and understands the all-too-real risk that the latter will fall in love with itself. I'd say that was more of a certainty than a risk, and that in a few years time no-one but left history anoraks will remember the Occupy movement; it will be there in the roll-call of missed opportunities to build a new kind of movement, along with the Dialectics of Liberation and Beyond the Fragments.

Unlike many others writing about new social movements he's got a good understanding of the opportunities presented by new technology, though here too he is aware of the limitations and the risks. I think he should have managed a hat tip to Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion”, but you can't have everything. In general the book feels well-researched and has lots of references.

Now a couple of negatives. Considering he's Newsnight's economics editor there isn't that much economics in it, which is a shame. That relates to my other criticism – that he's a bit weak on the relationship between the new technologies that he writes about and the labour market. One of the reasons why all those graduates don't have a future is that the jobs for which their institutions were created to prepare them are going away. Arts and humanities graduates were created to fill the middle layers in bureaucratic organisations of the public and private sector, because mass market manufacturing and service delivery required much complex interaction.

Information technology has done away with a lot of that interaction, replacing the live labour of the bureaucrat with the dead labour of the software programmer. Better software based on more, clever code and using more powerful processors and network protocols has done away with lots of what we once thought of as 'creative' jobs – remember how RobertReich thought we were all going to become 'symbolic analysts'? The graduates without futures are the people who were prepared for symbolic analyst jobs that don't need doing any more – software does it better.

Second negative: I don't understand Mason's bromance with Manuel Castells. I watched Mason introduce and interview Castells at an LSE event (later broadcast on the BBC) and I thought that Mason himself was much more interesting and personally engaging than Castells. I'm not sure whether Castells is as special as Mason seems to think he is, or as Castells himself clearly thinks he is. In particular, I don't think that the 'alternativeeconomic practices' that he makes so much of are all that important. In another time we used to call that the 'grey' or the 'black' economy, or just spivery. Is this really the basis for a new society growing within the shell of the old, or is it just old-fashioned cash-in-hand work and bartering, perhaps facilitated by some new mechanisms of trust and recommendation supported by the internet? And is it therefore really a basis for a challenge to corporate capitalism, or a sort of weedy consolatory 'Poujadism of the Left', to cheer ourselves up that we can't afford the stuff that we used to? I'm all in favour of people not buying crap that they don't need, and it would be lovely if we could just bypass the structures of capitalism to create a pre-figurative socialist society based on mutual aid, but I am not convinced that the 'alternative economic practices' that both Castells and Mason seem so keen on are leading us there.

Oh, and one more thing. Mason works for the BBC, and good luck to him for that. Sometimes that sends the Daily Telegraph into a howl of rage because it “proves” the corporation is really run by Trotskyists. My concern is the opposite one; who is providing this kind of coverage of alternative movements useful to? It was Susan George who said that radical intellectuals should study the rich, because any research into the poor and their mechanisms of solidarity would ultimately be used against them. I don't at all intend to imply that Mason is a turncoat or a traitor or anything like that. His book is inspirational; but not everyone who will read it is looking for inspiration.

But hats off to Paul Mason for writing what is a really very good book about where we are at and where it might go. It's made me think more than a whole lot of meetings and magazine articles, and it deserves to be read and debated widely.

Update on PaySafeCard

Finally bought myself a PaySafeCard voucher, at this place on Paddington Street, in Marylebone. The process was indeed perfectly anonymous; I handed over a £10 note (minimum amount) and the bloke behind the counter handed me a receipt with a pin code. Haven't tried spending it online yet. I'll post another update when I have.

The mystery of PaySafeCard, the anonymous online payment vendor that isn't

I was quite excited to discover PaySafeCard - an online payment provider that allows you to spend cash online, as anonymously as cash itself. It's possible to go into a shop, buy a voucher for cash, and spend it online without providing any sort of ID or using anything that is tied to ID.

Or at least it would be, if I could find somewhere that actually sold the vouchers. The PaySafeCard website lists lots of outlets where you are supposed to be able to buy the vouchers, but every single one that I have visited has never heard of PaySafeCard. It seems to be one of the things that you are supposed to be able to do at the PayPoint machine, but in practice it isn't possible. Anyone know anything about this?

Film review of Joyful Noise

Watched on DVD. As they say, that's two hours of my life I'm never getting back. Grim, loosely plotted, uninteresting characters, devoid of dramatic tension or interest. I quite liked the music (despite the dreadful lyrics of the romantic/gospel song  - funny how they work both as a song to a sexual partner and to Jesus - why has no-one else mentioned this?) but it wasn't enough to save this pile of crap. Not a big Dolly Parton fan, but she doesn't deserve anything this bad. Looking at her face all messed up with multiple surgical interventions only worsens the whole experience, as if wasn't awful enough already.

IMDB says 'People who liked this also liked', and one can't help thinking: "poking red hot needles in their eyes, or walking barefoot over broken glass".

On the history of English awkwardness

If you are English, you've probably had the experience of being a conversation with a European – say a French or German person – and beginning to feel uncomfortable that it was going on just a bit too long. The 'are we still talking about this?' feeling. If you are the European, you may have had the opposite experience in a conversation with an English person; you are just get warmed up when they change the subject. Probably by making a little joke.

I've been the English person, and for twenty years I've been aware that English people need to change the subject of conversation more quickly than Europeans. I've also noticed that even among themselves English people seem to need to change the subject of a conversation quite often. Talking about the same thing for any length of time is considered 'getting heavy'. Perhaps I'm not quite as English as I ought to be, because I also have a bit of a tendency to grind away at a theme after others would like to switch – or just because I've noticed this. Most of the Europeans with whom I've discussed this understand what I'm talking about straight away, though they hadn't been consciously aware of it.

Why should this be? Here is a hypothesis. English people don't like talking about anything for long because it might lead to a disagreement, which might in turn lead to an argument. An argument would involve some sort of emotional engagement, which would be uncomfortable and unseemly. The avoidance of confrontation of any kind seems to be pretty fundamental to English conversation patterns. Of course there are rows, and disagreements, and there is verbal aggression – quite a lot of it. But much of the time English conversational sparring takes the form of banter – jokey teasing – rather than argument of any kind.

I suspect that this might be related to the Restoration Settlement after the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. I know this seems a bit of a long shot, but hear me out.

In the Civil Wars the English got very serious about religion. They had massive arguments about doctrine and ritual. For a while they tortured, massacred and executed each other for believing, or affirming, or preaching the wrong thing. They smashed up churches and destroyed images in a way that was deliberately and self-consciously sacrilegious.  By the end of the seventeenth century they were traumatised and exhausted, and the settlement that they reached was that a wide variety of doctrinal positions and liturgical practices could co-exist within the same established church.

I think that this was quite unique in Europe. In other countries the church ended up following the 'cuius regio' principle, and those who didn't like it could adapt or leave. But the churches themselves were much more doctrinally homogeneous.  I don't want to hold England up as some utopia of religious tolerance; the Netherlands were much more tolerant, and the English still excluded both Catholics and Dissenters from acceptability. Nevertheless, the English church included both people who thought of themselves as Protestants and people who didn't – and it still does. I don't think this happened in any reformed churches in Europe.

I think the price that the English paid for this was an agreement not to discuss matters of religion, or rather to transmute them into matters of personal taste, about which there can be no right and wrong. This conversational convention has gradually spread to other areas of public discourse (try disagreeing with something that someone says about the weather, or try getting someone to disagree with you by saying something that's obviously not true). This might also explain why the English intellectual tradition is so resolutely anti-theoretical, in matters of philosophy and politics and even science. As Marx observed, "If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas."

Remember this next time the French guy you are talking with seems to be worrying a subject to death like a dog with a bone. It's not him that's got a problem, it's you.

Film review: Looper

Time travel paradox films. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all, or so it feels anyway. The fact that Bruce Willis is in it means that I couldn't help think of Twelve Monkeys, which does the same thing but much, much better.

Didn't like the plot, the characters, the way it dealt with the time travel issues. Plot full of holes, and the basic premise - that time travel technology has been developed but is outlawed and is only used by criminal gangs to dispose of their victims - is just ridiculous beyond words. I didn't even like the way the future looks, either in 2044 or in 2074, both of which are depicted. Waste of time.

Film Review: Ulysses

I've seen this once before, but didn't remember much apart from an episode in which a faux-Zionist flag is raised by Hasidim outside what looks like Dublin town hall. Watching again after having read the book, I am surprised by how good it is. This was never going to be an easy book to turn into a film, and I think Strick made a good job of it. Other reviewers are bemused by the fact that it has been brought up to date, so that it takes place in 1960s Dublin rather than early-twentieth century Dublin. That seems to me to have been a good decision, because it wasn't really written as a period piece. The stream of consciousness stuff (particularly Molly Bloom's final soliloquy) works better in film than on the printed page. Barbara Jefford is a wonderful Molly - what else was she in?

Film Review: The Pirates! In an adventure with scientists!

Watched this on my mobile, so some issues with the quality of the image, and sometimes with the sound. A kid's film really, but I am a sucker for Aardman and will watch anything that they do. No effort whatsoever at historical accuracy, but I did rather like the animated version of Darwin. And making Queen Victoria the villain (villainess?) was a nice touch; indeed making the crowned heads of the world the collective baddies suited me just fine. You can't start children early enough on resistance to authority.

A Singularitanian Utopia or a wasted afternoon?

Sometimes you go to a talk or even that just blows your mind – you're overwhelmed with the breadth of the speaker's ideas, or the eloquence with which she concretizes and synthesizes thoughts that have jostled for attention in your own mind. Or you feel that they've opened a door to a whole new domain that until now had been entirely unknown to you.

Sadly, Ian Pearson's presentation at 'ASingularitarian Utopia Or A New Dark Age?' wasn't like that at all. Instead, it was a warmed-over mish-mash of technological cornucopianism, seasoned with Daily Mail-style reactionary harrumphing about 'political correctness gone mad'. It was sad, too, to see that there was little push-back from the audience. The London Futurists that organized the event seemed to lap it all up, and the question and answer session (you couldn't call it a debate or discussion) were really about matters of details. Afterwards, some of the comments posted on the meeting suggested that this was indeed English politeness rather than silent assent. Even where Pearson was at his weakest – his ignorant endorsement of climate change denial – the questions were the kind of polite requests you'd ask of a genuine authority on the subject. 

Pearson began with a brief restatement of the idea of the singularity – the notion that the rate of intellectual and technological change will soon approach an asymptote, and that this will lead to the emergence of superintelligence. Everything will start to change (that is, improve) very quickly, building on the ideas that have gone before, and we'll become superintelligent, thus getting lots of wonderful stuff that will solve not only our present problems but the underlying problems of the human condition, including sickness and mortality.

He argued that technology would indeed soon solve all of the problems that bothered us at the moment – resource problems would be solved by asteroid mining, for example, and better extractive technologies. The apparent crisis of water shortages could be solved by graphene straws, that could enable fresh clean water to be extracted from muddy puddles. This fatuous rubbish should have been indication enough that we were in the presence of someone who was prepared to announce 'solutions' to problems that he hadn't spent even a moment studying.

But we needn't have been worried. Pearson told us that he'd tracked the predictions that he'd been making since the early 1990s, and he'd been right 85% of the time. This does rather beg the question “If you're so smart why ain't you rich?”, and the obvious explanation that it's rather easy to make a lot of predictions that are going to turn out to be true. In 2030 cash will be worth less than it is today, shares will be worth more, and there will be more people around then there are now, and there will be a war going on somewhere, to quote four predictions that are very likely to turn out true.

I've always had near-boundless admiration for engineers. I love the orderly way that they approach complex problems and the way that they are able to organize themselves to work together. Policy-makers should take this kind of approach much more often. But Pearson's diatribe revealed the limitations of this perspective. There was absolutely no consideration that anybody had ever thought about any of these issues before, or that there was any need to bring any knowledge or ideas from any other intellectual discipline. For example, one of his technological riffs was the idea of 'bacterial computing' – that nanotechnology would make it possible to hybridize bacteria with self-replicating computers. Thus, conflating computational power with intelligence, and both with what is measured by intelligence tests, he declared it would be possible to make a pot of yogurt with the IQ of Europe. Similarly, it would be possible to make machines that were 'conscious', without any definition of what that meant (or acknowledgement that anyone else had ever thought about it), within two years. Well, I'm still waiting for my personal jet-pack.

When he'd finished telling us about all the wonderful stuff that was coming real soon – augmented reality, who would have though of that? - he then moved on to discuss the downside of all this change. The downside turned out to be liberal ideas. He put up a graphic to represent all of the dangerous nonsense that was leading us into the New Dark Age promised by the title. There is, it seems, a slippery slope that leads from equality for women, to racial equality, through equality for gay people and then on to animal rights, 'political correctness' and moral relativism. This in turn leads to the questioning of authority and the growth of 'anti-knowledge', which broadly means blog posts that Pearson doesn't agree with and Wikipedia articles that he finds wanting in some way. Actually my experience of Wikipedia articles on subjects that I do know something about is that they are usually pretty good; and such research as there has been done on the quality of Wikipedia articles seems to back up my experience. But why let actual research get in the way of a good rant?

'Moral relativism' in Pearson's view is any change in moral codes. So the decline in bear-baiting and public executions as a form of entertainment, and the advent of the idea that it's wrong for people to own other people, are presumably examples of moral relativism, and thus no doubt bad things. Curiously, he argued that 'political correctness gone mad' had resulted in the rise of a new 'Spanish Inquisition' (code for someone having challenged his reactionary ideas, since he didn't seem to have any visible injuries from his interrogation at the hands of this new Inquisition), while simultaneously lamenting the decline of organised religion which had previously provide us with a stable moral code. Hard to make this kind of stuff up. 

By this time I had almost lost the will to live, and if I'd been sitting on the end of an aisle I would have left. Unfortunately I wasn't, so I had to endure his declaration that he was an expert on climate science too, and he wasn't worried about climate change at all. There was 'a lot of crap on both sides of the debate', as much from what he referred to as the 'warmists' as from the deniers (of course, he didn't call them anything so pejorative . Anybody who disagreed with him was a mindless anti-science environmentalist, the sort of people who did more damage to the environment than all the corporations that there had ever been.

Time to declare a bit of an interest: I work as a technology analyst, and sometimes my clients want me to predict the future. Sometimes I try to do this, and I write about it. Sometimes I am spectacularly wrong – I managed to write hundreds of pages about 'value added data services' in the early 1990s without mentioning the internet, and I thought that SMS would never take off. I have no problem with people thinking about the future of stuff or technology, or about how our civilisation is going to turn out. Indeed, we have to do this if we aren't going to just let shit happen to us. Pearson's closing assertion that in the end our politicians will always wake up and pull us back from the brink of any disaster is belied by many examples of civilisations that did not pull back and went right over the edge to destruction.

But it's hard to resist the observation that this kind of futurology is not much more than science fiction, only without the literary merit. Although Pearson paused to appear to reflect on whether any of these 'inventions' would be a good thing, he didn't do much reflecting, let alone proper thinking about what the implications might be. It was if the phrase 'unintended consequences' had never been uttered by anyone, ever, and that there was no example of this anywhere in human history. On a more positive note, if Pearson really was BT's futurologist for 16 years, then there is hope for all those of us who do this sort of thing for a living. 

Review of "I give it a year"

For a romcom this was actually quite funny. Some really nicely observed bits of awkwardness. My favourite was the team dinner for the people working in the NGO, where they are dividing up the bill and discussing who did/didn't have a starter. The threesome scene was also very funny. Overall it was a bit less than the sum of parts, but better than most of the happier ever crap that gets made into romcoms.

Review of "Hitchcock"

A bit boring really. Must remember not to see films about film-makers. Hitchcock not particularly nice or interesting, even though he made interesting films. Was not nice to people, developed creepy crushes on his leading ladies, was not all that nice to his wife. No suspense in the film, because we all know Psycho is going to be a success. Not convinced by the hallucination scenes in which Hitchcock fantasizes that he is in contact with the murderer who inspired the book and film. Not bothered that he eats from the fridge at night and diets during the day - it's just not interesting.

Only one really funny moment which I won't spoil. Generally the film only comes to life when Helen Mirren is on the screen. Not a long film, but it felt long.

Review of The Old Ones in The Old Book: Pagan Roots of the Hebrew Old Testament by Philip West

This book describes how the Jewish (and subsequently Christian) religions emerged from a rather different set of beliefs and practices. The ancient Israelites and Judahites did not practice what came to be the Jewish religion. They worshipped a god called Yahweh, but they did not believe he was the only supernatural being. Sometimes they were monolatrists – that is, they only worshipped this god, even though they believed there were others. Sometimes they made side bets and also paid homage to other gods, including Baal (like Adonai, a title rather than a personal name), Anat and Asherah. It's easy to see the evidence of this in the Bible itself, once you read it with an open mind rather than from a perspective that believes the patriarchs, and the Israelites, were proto-Jews. West's book is nicely footnoted with proper references to the Biblical text without being dry and academic. He has a good feel for some of the linguistic issues in the text too – pointing out examples when it uses unfamiliar words for what would have been familiar objects, and thinking through what the significance of that might be.

He has a nice little riff on Polytheism vs Monotheism at the end, which I personally find quite compelling because I've been thinking on the same lines myself. We hear so often that Monotheism is morally and intellectually superior to Polytheism that we rarely stop to think why that might – or might not – be true. I'm not any kind of theist, but once you start to think about it Polytheism seems to make more sense of the world and its moral challenges than Monotheism.

It's only a little book, but it is a great gateway to the world of Biblical studies; proper Biblical studies, that is, not the kind of brain-numbing indoctrination that religious organisations' bible classes peddle. Once you acknowledge that the Bible is a collection of different books, written at different times by different people with different sorts of objectives, you can really begin to appreciate and enjoy it. It's both familiar (in that we know a lot of the stories and the characters) and strange (in that there is a huge amount of material that we just ignore because it doesn't fit into our religious schema). As an atheist I go back to it often, and never fail to find something both new and enjoyable. I'll keep West's book next to me when I do, and I'd be delighted to find more books by him.

One tiny little quibble; this is a popular introduction to academically respectable theological and biblical studies. So why no reference to another such book, “Who wrote the Bible?” by Richard Elliot Friedman, which is also a great account of the documentary hypothesis? Perhaps there's a good reason, but it seemed a surprising omission to me.

Film Review: Because I said so

Execrable. What was Diane Keaton doing in this? Surely she can't need the money that much. Not acting, that's for sure. Lousy plot, hopeless dialogue, rubbish directing. I know it's a romcom, but even so...

Film Review: Lincoln

Enjoyable film, not very nuanced history. Mainly looked great, in a grey and sepia sort of way. Mrs Lincoln (BTW Sally Field does look a lot like the pictures of her) was from Kentucky - someone with local knowledge tell me whether that was a good Kentucky accent?

The Southern representatives who came to negotiate peace terms were appropriately vile - wouldn't have been out of place in 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter'.

No suggestions as to any of the debates about whether Lincoln really wanted to free the slaves or preserve the union; nor any understanding as to some of the contradictory dimensions and racism within the Abolitionist movement.

Film Review: 'Exit through the gift shop'

Just watched this (recorded from Channel 4). Thought it was a really interesting film, though not entirely sure what it was about. Started out as a documentary about a guy shooting footage of street artists, and ended up as a film about the same guy deciding that he was a street artist - and selling his stuff for impressive prices. It seemed to me that he was no more an artist than he was a documentary maker, but what do I know? Or anyone?

Interesting footage of art collectors drooling over street art - there aren't many kinds of rebellion that can't be co-opted, are there?

Film review: Les Miserables

Just got home from seeing this. Bemused by the fact that everyone in the cinema seemed to think it was wonderful - a ripple of applause at the end, people all around me saying it was the best film they'd ever seen...

I thought it was mainly drivel. Occasionally enjoyable drivel, mind, with some great art design and scenery, some nice actors to look at, but still drivel. It's a film of the West End musical, not a film of the book, and if you liked that you'll probably like this.

It's basically a melodrama with three themes - love conquers all, God redeems and forgives everyone (except the baddie inspector, who has to kill himself when confronted by an act of charity without strings), and revolution is ennobling but not anything to do with politics. The revolution/barricade scenes are the most stirring and have the best music, but they are completely vacuous. The revolutionaries are wealthy students who want the people to rise up in their support, but they don't. It's pretty funny that when the central character, Jean Valjean, dies at the end he goes not to Heaven but to Revolutionary Heaven, with a super big barricade and all the characters who died in the film singing and waving red flags and tricolours.

And like the West End musical, there's not one good song in it. Half an hour later and I have forgotten them all.

Dave Rosenberg's The Battle for the East End

I really enjoyed reading this, and learned a lot about a struggle that I thought I already knew about. There is a lot of detail, and some really well chosen anecdotes and presentation of primary material. It would have been nice to have had more pictures, though these are available in lots of other places.

It's a very generous book. The author freely admits that most pre-war BUF members went on to fight for Britain against Hitler. He acknowledges Mosley's personal charisma, and the extent to which his economic ideas were genuinely advanced and even progressive. He's more than generous about the role of the Communist Party in the fight against Fascism, though he gives appropriate space to dissident Communists like Joe Jacobs who have criticised the sometimes dismal tactics adopted by the Party (until the 11th hour of the Battle of Cable Street it was telling militants to stay away from the East End and go to a rally for Republican Spain in Trafalgar Square).

In fact, the only group about which he's not generous is the official Jewish leadership, principally the Board of Deputies. It's easy to despise the supine, cringing attitude of the Board - which argued that Fascism per se was not a Jewish issue, and that it placed full trust in the tolerant culture of the British people and the institutions of the British state. But that's been the political strategy of Jewish leaderships pretty much everywhere for at least a thousand years, and while it's not pretty it can be said to have worked, at least for the leadership groups themselves, for most of this period. Allying with the authorities to seek protection from popular discontent is what Jews have done. Since most rebellions and insurrections up to the modern period failed, it was a strategy apparently justified by history. And it's not obvious, at least to me, that when these leaderships praise the wise and tolerant authorities, that they are as stupid as they seem to be. It is at least possible that they understand what they are doing - that they know that the British people are actually at best ambivalent about immigrants, but that they think it's wiser to praise them for their tolerance, and then to appeal to that 'better nature' than criticise them for their lack of it. They might be wrong, but that doesn't make them stupid.

My other criticism is that the book doesn't locate the Jewish struggle against Fascism in the East End in terms of the overall politics of the CP. It was Mosley's misfortune that the critical time for his movement coincided with the CPs turn to the strategy of the Popular Front, and that this strategy seems to have been successful in the context of the Jewish East End in a way that it was not pretty much everywhere else. By and large the CP's strategy of allying with the "progressive wing of the bourgeosie" was a terrible failure. In Spain it led to the crippling divisions within the workers' movement and the persecution of the left. But among the Jews of the East End, where the 'progressive businessman' was at least not an oxymoron, it made some sort of sense. The immigrant community contained lots of people who identified with the left even though they are middlemen, professionals, or petty traders.

It sort of sticks in my throat to see the CP characterised as 'democratic forces'. Actually this is the CP of Stalin, and its fight against Fascism was about to take a most unusual turn. The strategy that it adopted in fighting Fascism was always subordinate to foreign policy needs of Stalin's USSR. Maybe the Jewish People's Council was not only a CP front, but it didn't survive the CP's twists and turns, and it didn't become an alternative centre of gravity for the Jewish community.

Nevertheless this is a great, readable book which I heartily recommend.

Kvass

I made some kvass. I'd had it from a stall in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and it had stuck in my mind as a nice not-too-sweet soft drink.

I mainly used this recipe but I also followed the 'raisin in each bottle' technique from another recipe. I bottled it in PET water bottles and I gave them a good squeeze before I screwed the lid on. Even so they fermented a lot, and several of the bottles exploded, a bit like in this video.

Still, the kvass was nice, if not exactly like the one I had in the USSR. It was a bit darker. I suspect that this mildly fermented drink is a bit like what the 'small beer' that they drank in the middle ages was like.

Karen Armstrong's History of God

Putting my review here, in case the tax-dodgers at Amazon get grumpy and refuse to publish it.

"Lots of interesting information about debates within Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but a rather partial account that focuses on the intellectual content of these debates rather than their social, political and institutional context. So lots about the debate within Orthodox Christianity about whether God has one substance, or whether he is three or one person, but nothing about the process whereby Christianity became the state religion and how that related to the need for a single position on doctrinal matters. Similarly with Judaism - you'd think Hasidism emerged just as a reaction to intellectual currents within rabbinic debates; the massacres of the 1640s, and even the name of Chmielnicki, don't even figure.

Perhaps more important for this atheist reader, there is a sleight of hand which is barely acknowledged. The God worshipped by Judaism, Christianity and Islam is a personal God, and the idea for him emerged from a tribal deity that was very much associated with some human and some super-human characteristics. The God of the philosophers - some distant first cause without any personal or human characteristics - is a very different entity (or as she would have it, not actually an entity at all, but something more profound). It might make sense to build a set of social institutions around placating and 'worshipping' the personal God, but the second one can only be contemplated. Worshipping it makes no sense. And yet religious clever-clogs, and people who make a living out of religion, somehow manage to conflate the two. It would be unfair to say she doesn't write about this, but I didn't see it satisfactorily addressed.

That said, there were some really good parts in the book. This is the first time I've ever understood why it was so important for the Greeks to have those rows about the essential nature of the trinity - it was an argument about the limits of human understanding and cognition, which is important for us now in relation to cosmology and physics, but the Greeks didn't have the instruments, so they made it a discussion about God. And she also touches on the way that the Romantics replaced a sense of the divine with a sense of the aesthetic, particularly in relation to nature. As one who only has what other people call spiritual feelings in relation to this sort of thing, it's nice to know it has a lineage, and it actually made me want to go and read Keats and Wordsworth.

So all in all, time well spent, despite a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction about the book."

Web of Things company Evrything and Plato's theory of forms

Went to see Evrything yesterday - an interesting Internet of Things start-up with a heritage in the really rather clever Web of Things group at Zurich University. Lots to say, much of which I will cover in a proper Ovum report in our new 'On The Radar' format. A few things that won't go into that can go here though.

I couldn't help being struck by some of the philosophical aspects of what the company is trying to do. Essentially it wants to create a digital version of physical objects, and to use this to link to applications and control systems. It's not all that interested in exactly how to establish the linkage between the physical and the digital object - it knows that this can be done, and that there are various communications media and protocols that can be used. It's more interested in managing the digital version of the object. There is no particular reason why the digital version of the object should not continue to live on after the 'death' of the physical object from which it was derived - the digital avatar of my Ikea table lasting longer than the table itself.

This reminded me of Plato's theory of forms, whereby actual cubes are but imperfect copies of the 'real' cubes which exist in the perfect world of forms. I think that the Gnostics developed something of a spiritual and moral doctrine out of this, and a theological one that said that the imperfections of the physical world proved that it was created by a malign demiurge rather than the perfectly good God who was the real ruler of the universe.

Not sure exactly what relevance this has to Evrything's technology or business model, but I can't stop thinking about it - and about the implications of physical manufactured goods beginning to have digital lives of their own, separate from their physical antecedent.

Reflections on The Year of the Flood

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I've been thinking a lot about 'The year of the flood' lately. I read it a couple of years ago, but I haven't stopped thinking about it. It's a good novel – not exactly enjoyable, because it is a dystopian fantasy, but very thought-provoking and not entirely devoid of hope.

It's set in the same scenario as 'Oryx and Crake'. There are some good characters and plot twists, but the real business of the book is the group known as God's Gardeners. The group is interesting because it is a survivalist cult with liberal, left-wing leanings. The group is religious in form. It prays, it has sacred books and songs, and it teaches its youngsters through catechisms and repetition. There is a strong suggestions that this has been a deliberate strategy by leaders who don't believe literally in their own religious teachings, and who have covertly used aspects of the modern world like computers that they present to their followers as somehow unkosher.

The Gardeners expect that some sort of catastrophe is coming – the 'waterless flood' – and their practices are mainly about preparing for that. They teach the members, especially the young ones, how to grow food, prepare medicines from natural materials, and how to defend themselves against attack. They prepare stashes of food and materials in secret, inaccessible places called Ararats, and they learn how to get by without many modern tools and social structures. Perhaps most important, they prepare mentally and culturally for the inevitability of disaster. Although their ideology might be thought of as deep green, they are primarily survivalists rather than political activists, though some are involved in conventional political activity sometimes.

When it comes, the flood is not what they seemed to have been preparing for. It's not triggered by the internal contradictions of a civilization that has drawn too heavily on its supporting environment and fouled its own nest, though Atwood depicts that toxic reality very well. Instead, the collapse is caused by an extraneous factor – the laboratory-made epidemic distributed via combined aphrodisiac-contraceptive pills described in Oryx and Crake. The plot concentrates on the experiences of a few of the Gardners, both before and after the collapse. There is no attempt to portray the survivalism as an overwhelming success, but it nevertheless does help a few cult members to live through at least the initial stages of the disaster.

Survivalism is rare among greens. This is surprising really, because lots of us are not particularly optimistic about the future. A lot of the climate change activists that I know have little faith in the readiness or the ability of politicians or states to deliver the change needed to prevent even runaway climate disaster. “Sustainable business” is mainly greenwash, and community action and bottom-up initiatives are whistling in the dark – they make the people involved feel better, but they do nothing to turn the supertanker that is our catastrophe-bound civilization.

So why aren't more of us preparing our own personal or even communal adaption and mitigation strategies? Is it because it isn't done to admit defeat on the political question, for fear that if only we had held on and continued to believe we might have achieved a happy ending? Or because we've grown up with too many movies and books in which the central characters win through in the end, despite overwhelming odds and a seemingly-impossible situation?

Interestingly, the Right doesn't have this problem. Before their recent turn to climate scepticism, the BNP used to think a lot about ecological catastrophe – particularly around the issue of Peak Oil, which fitted nicely into a nationalist world-view. Rightwing blogs and websites carried a lot of discussion about how to move to the countryside, grow food and prepare for the coming collapse. I haven't looked lately, so I don't know if it's still there – there is only so much poking around in those corners that one can take.

Perhaps it's time we at least started to have some conversations about community-based responses to climate change. To its credit the Transition Town current (which elsewhere I have been rather critical of) at least does this, albeit in a rather apolitical, Poujadist sort of way. At least it's a start. Time to engage; at the very least, the sign of us actually preparing to deal with catastrophe will have some rhetorical value, as evidence that we really do think that the shit is going to hit the fan – that we are not just talking about climate change as part of some bureaucratic conspiracy to cheat honest Daily Mail readers out of their God-given right to cheap electricity and petrol.

Fifty Shades and the sadomasochism of everyday life

Lots of women are reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Really really lots. They read it on trains, on planes, in airports. Quite a few of them complain that it was badly written and that it was a struggle to read all five hundred pages, not to mention what a drudge it was to read the sequels. Some compare it adversely to 'The Story of O', which was much more literary, apparently. Few mention that it was any sort of turn-on.

What's unusual about Fifty Shades is that it's S&M for women. Although it's often taken for granted that womens' sexuality is somehow linked to masochism, there isn't much evidence of this in the form of material actually aimed at women. There's a huge amount of material designed to gratify male masochism. S&M permeates 'straight' male porn, and non-porn or 'soft porn' depictions of sexy women. Fetish clothes and props like whips and riding crops abound. These objects have more or less become signifiers of sexualisation. Images of men being dominated by leather-clad women with whips are commonplace in fashion photography and in music videos. What was once a slightly shameful 'outlaw' sexual orientation is now heading for the mainstream.

What is behind this? I think that sexual masochism, for both women and men, is a response to the increasingly complex demands of modern life. Everyday life involves ever more choices. Some of these are trivial (like which of 27 different kinds of milk to buy), but they still take up brain resource. Others are both very difficult to make and of great consequence – how to save sufficient money to avoid an old age of misery while still managing to live somewhere decent enough to bring up a family. This paradox of choice has been much commented upon. It's been observed that the richer you are, the less time you seem to have – because having more money means that more options (even for pleasure) are open to you, competing for your time and mental resources.

Everyday life involves more role conflict than it used to. We are parents for longer, because though our 'children' have their own ideas about how to dress, socialize, and spend their time earlier than their predecessors, they are financially dependent on us until much later in life, because the demands of the education system, the labour market and the current housing market are much more cruel to them. We are children for longer too, because our parents live longer than their predecessors, surviving the physical ailments that used to kill them to 'enjoy' a life of declining mental faculties and social disadvantage in a culture that does not celebrate or value old age. The flexible labour market means that our jobs are not secure, the 'delayering' havoc of repeated waves of management consultant-led reorganisations have done away with the expectation of a career path, and a self-managed career means both frequent job changes and lots of effort to demonstrate 'good attitude'. And that's at the same time as being a good parent and a dutiful child.

There are a few palliatives to this. A few people can manage to practice mindfulness and meditation, consciously and actively clearing this stuff from their minds when it isn't helpful or appropriate – but this is really hard word that takes a lot of training and effort. Activities that offer total engagement and 'flow' can do the same thing via physical discipline, which some people find easier than mental training. Joyful submission to a religious system cuts down on lots of choices and gives strong guidance on how to resolve those that remain. For those looking for a quick fix, safely bounded fear of the kind offered by a horror film or apparently dangerous theme park ride can provide a few hours or minutes of relief by focusing the mind exclusively on present circumstances.

And then there's S&M sex. Sexual arousal provides the focus on the moment, and sexual submissiveness provides the abication of responsibility and the demands of role. Under the control of another, it's possible to escape from all those choices and conflicting demands. For the time of the session, the submissive is completely absorbed in their own feelings, of both pain and pleasure. It's been suggested that the these two sensations are linked rather than opposites, that the distinction between them is not as clear-cut as sometimes supposed – or that at least some people have their wires crossed in such a way as to confuse the way that they experience pain and pleasure.

That may be so, but I think the pay-off from sadomasochism is primarily social and cognitive rather than physiological. The benefit is the freedom from choice and responsibility; pain is the price that the submissive pays in order to lend versimillitude and make it feel like the freedom is genuine. That's what the props are for too – the whips, the bondage, the fetish clothing. They are necessary to sustain the fantasy, in the same way the price of a lottery ticket is needed to sustain the brief fantasy of winning the lottery. Having nasty things done to you, or being forced to do nasty things, is proof to yourself that you really can't make any choices, and are therefore genuinely 'free' from your responsibilities.

This has usually been presented as the domain of high-status men (as depicted in the film about Cynthia Payne 'Personal Services', where all of the clients seem to be generals and high court judges), but it now seems to work for lots of men, and as the success of Fifty Shades illustrates, for women too. We've all got too much responsibility and too many choices now.

The consequence is that S&M comes to stand for the kind of transcendence from the everyday that sex used to represent. When music videos represent a woman as sexy, she wears leather or latex and waves a whip about. Whereas once a sitcom would get a laugh out of allowing a couple to be discovered having sex, now it depicts them as having S&M sex. When an advertisement depicts an executive having a session with a prostitute in his office, she is a dominatrix. For many men, the props of S&M have become quite literally fetishes, in that they are imbued with the aura of sex even though they are not sexual objects.

Ultimately this is bound to lead to disappointment. As  S&M becomes mainstream, it loses the power to offer total absorption. It's one thing for Madonna to suggest that she is a bit of a dominatrix in her personal life as part of maintaining her fifty-year-old 'edginess'; when Kylie Minogue not only incorporates S&M scenes into her stage act but is also is photographed at a charity event with a pair of nipple clamps we've entered a new phase.

The extent to which S&M is already a familiar theme in advertisements suggests that this process is well under way. Eventually that whip will remind you to buy shoe polish rather than take you out of yourself.

There is another reason, too, why S&M sex is not a useful escape route from the pressures of everyday life. Acting out domination fantasies actually takes a great deal of care and attention. Few people really enjoy serious amounts of pain and discomfort. There is a thin line between sustaining the pretence that the submissive has surrendered control and actually hurting. As the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin, and lots of others more sympathetic to S&M have noted, it is the submissive who is really in control of the S&M session. But where can the submissive find someone who is up to this difficult task? More men might be inclined towards submission, but there isn't a corresponding increase in the number of women who want to play the role of the dominatrix. They're all out looking for their own Christian Grey.

S&M is not an escape from the pressures of everyday life but a dead end, an engagement with yet another set of roles and responsibilities to be negotiated. Maybe it would be different under socialism...

The sharing economy and the casualisation of labour

I love sharing and the sharing economy. I think the idea of collaborative consumption, P2P 'production', and commons-based economics is great. I'm attracted to the idea of sharing physical goods, either through joint purchase, through commercial sharing schemes (like car clubs) which provide 'thing as a service', and through making my stuff available when I am not using it. The internet makes all of this a lot easier, though it's important not to overstate this - after all, public libraries are an old idea.

I like the sharing of 'non-rival' goods even more. There are some things that I can share with you without having to give it up myself - digital goods are an example of this, though not the only one. If I put my music collection in the cloud, other people can enjoy it as well as me, and even at the same time as me. Lots of people do this without any expectation of reward, as part of a reciprocal thank you to other strangers who do the same thing. It's wrong and silly to call this piracy or theft, and to put it on a par with going into a shop and stealing a physical object.

At the same time, it's clear that this does have implications for the earnings of the producers of non-rival goods. We can argue about whether the way that the value chain for such goods is structured means that the main losers are not the actual producers but the bloated middle-persons who sit between the producers and the consumers. But it's obviously true that the internet is making sharing easier, and thereby reducing the returns to the ultimate producer. It's harder to make a living as an independent artist producing recorded music. A little bit of artisanal production and the life-style that went with it has been destroyed by the forces of the internet. These forces include not only me and you sharing our records on an 'outlaw' website, but also the massive advertising businesses of the internet, who make their money by selling our eyeballs to the sellers of physical and other goods. These are as much winners from the sharing economy as the musicians are losers.

This is not a unique phenomenon in history, as the history of printing, and then radio, show. There was a time when the production of illuminated manuscripts allowed some people (mainly monks) to sustain a higher standard of living than the pure sale of their labour power would have given them. There was a time when being able to manipulate a wooden pen and steel nib to produce nice handwriting was skill enough to provide a decent living.

The latest generation of 'sharing' internet projects takes this one stage further. Taskhub and the older Taskrabbit are happily endorsed sites like 'People who share' as if they were a benign, P2P community-building phenomenon. Taskhub's launch video portrays it in exactly that way, with a little group of more or less equal people taking each other's dogs for walks, doing each other's ironing, and then getting together for a party. This is just dishonest. These 'task' sharing sites are not about sharing at all; they are about making the market for low-grade casual service work available to more buyers, and making that market work more efficiently so as to drive the price of casual labour down. It's a nineteenth century hiring fair, with all the misery that this entails, but hidden away behind screens and avatars.

The return of domestic service over the last twenty years has been little discussed. Alongside Downton Abbey and the return of Upstairs Downstairs, many people who cannot afford full time servants nevertheless buy domestic service on a part-time, cash-only, undocumented basis. The proliferation of dog-walkers, cleaners, child-minders and so on indirectly provides a cheap labour subsidy to these people's who employers, who can get them to work for longer hours because the reproduction of their labour power is done for them more cheaply than they could do it themselves.

Many of the buyers of domestic services see the relationship as mutually beneficial, and so it is - as are all buys and sells of labour power in a 'free' market. They are just not equally beneficial. One side in the market is in a much weaker position than the other. They are often women, often immigrants without documentation or language skills to get better jobs, often needing to work around their own childcare needs. The absence of little lace caps and aprons as servants' uniforms makes this culturally more acceptable.

Task sharing sites are not part of a 'commons-based' approach to sharing out the work; they are away of expanding the market for domestic service to a new layer of users, and in the process driving down the price of casual labour to the lowest possible level.

On Democratic Socialism

Revolutionary socialists have a narrative. In that story, the capitalist system and the power structures that sustain are overthrown by an uprising of the workers, more or less organized, and more or less led, by a party of revolutionaries with a sense of opportunity and a winning program. The power of the state is more or less seized and used to destroy the power of the capitalist system and its ruling class.

Democratic socialists have a narrative too. In their story, a party of reforming socialists wins an election, takes over the reins of the state, and uses its power to re-organize the economy and redistribute wealth and power. This doesn't happen all at once, but the first steps towards it prove sufficiently successful and popular for the reforming socialists to be re-elected and take the plan further forward. Society thereby becomes more fair, equal and humane, without all that nastiness of fighting in the streets and firing squads.

In their occasional engagement with revolutionaries, democratic socialists are keen to point out how rare successful revolutions have been in advanced capitalist countries. Uprisings are neither necessary nor possible, and the revolutionaries are indulging themselves with a retro-bolshevik fantasy rather than taking part in the serious work of proper politics. A fair point.

But how realistic is the democratic socialists' own narrative? For it to make sense we have to believe:

• That a party of the left will actually adopt and seriously advocate a program of major reforms – in the face of the criticism and ridicule that it will face from its external opponents and the mass media, and despite the internal resistance to adopting policies which are 'unrealistic' (that is, counter to the interests of the rich) or 'unpopular' (that is, criticised by the mass media).
• That the party will be able to win an election on the basis of this program – even as the external criticism builds, and the army of 'independent experts' from mainstream economics, think tanks, and 'business leaders' constantly explain why it runs counter to the natural laws of the market.
• That after it has won the election, it remains committed to the program, despite all the further obstacles and discoveries about how difficult it is to implement in the face of obstruction from within the machinery of the state (including both the bureaucracy and the organs of state only nominally under democratic control), and continuing domestic and international pressure.
• That the powers of the government are sufficient to carry through much of the progam, despite the limits set by 'the rule of law', international treaty obligations and the power of the financial markets.
• That despite all the inevitable setbacks the party remains popular enough to win further elections so that its steps towards a fairer society can be sustained rather than reversed – and of course, that the government is not overthrown by force or other means, or that its ministers do not meet with unfortunate accidents or assassination at the hands of 'lone gunmen'.

We don't need a whole hand to count the examples where this has happened. Most of these relate to historical episodes where the legitimacy of the 'natural laws of the market', and/or the authority of the traditional ruling class, has collapsed as a result of manifest economic catastrophe, defeat in war, or collaboration with an external enemy. In other words, the democratic socialist narrative is as much a fantasy as the Trotskyist wet dream of a re-run of October 1917. It isn't going to happen.

The Swedish example is probably the closest that reality can offer to match the democratic socialist narrative. What is striking about it is (a) that it has been replicated so rarely – few other European countries have seen long unbroken periods of rule by democratic socialist parties and (b) how similar the result is to what has been achieved in other northern European countries without the repeated electoral success of democratic socialists.

Take Germany, for example. Here too, as in Sweden, there is a different model of capitalism, with a greater role for direct state intervention in the productive economy, more tightly regulated labour markets and housing markets, alternative frameworks for finance and investment, and a modicum of redistribution to protect the weakest and innoculate against the spread of 'social problems' resulting from the market allocation of wealth. And there's legislated worker participation in management, equality legislation, tight environmental regulation. And all this sits alongside a fundamental unequal distribution of wealth and power, private ownership of the media, capital markets which are open to international participation. For democratic socialists in Anglo-Saxon countries, Angela Merkel's Germany is the pinnacle of what they might aspire to.

All this rather begs the question: if the German model of capitalism is what we are aiming for, what is the point of democratic socialism? If there is a 'realistic' aspiration for something more, apart from sustainable careers for democratic socialist politicians in administering this utopia, then I think we should be told. And if not, and this kind of 'feasible socialism' of redistribution and intervention through market mechanism is the best we can hope for, then maybe it's not the party of the left that ought to be the object of our attentions, but the party of the democratic right – perhaps the problem isn't that we have the wrong socialists with the wrong program, but that we have wrong conservatives.

Alcoholic ginger beer

No claims for originality here, except that I have metricated and reconfigured the amounts to fit my saucepan and fermenting vat.

To make 10 litres of  ginger beer: 

• Use 0.36kg of peeled and grated ginger root, 2.1kg's of sugar, 2.5 lemons - juice, but also zest. 
• Boil and simmer all ingredients in a large pan for 30 mins (enough to get really lovely ginger taste). 
• My biggest saucepan is 5l, so I do all the ingredients in that much water then pour into fermenting barrel, and top up with cold water.
• Make sure water is lukewarm and add 1 sachet of champagne yeast - I bought it on ebay for next to nothing.

Wait 7 days. Bottle, leave for further 7 days at room temperature. 

This is actually the most tricky part. I use plastic water bottles, and I make sure I squeeze them when bottling to allow room for expansion. I tried bottling in glass once and was lucky to escape with my life. 

After seven days chill and enjoy!

According to the original recipe the finished product will be around 4 - 5 % proof. Not sure if this is true, but it has quite a kick anyway.

Extreme Citizen Science

Last week I attended the 2^nd Citizen Cyberscience Summit on behalf of my employer, Ovum. It was probably the most exciting place I've been – at least in a work context – for the last ten years. The conference had been moved at the last minute to the Royal Geographical Society to cope with the unexpected number of attendees, and it was buzzing from the very beginning.

The crowd were mostly young, with a preponderance of postgrads, though there were a few greyheads too. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was fairly evenly balanced between men and women – much more so than most of the industry events that I attend. Everyone was really friendly, in the kind of open smiley way that I usually associate with music festivals. The discussions were lively and good-natured; I think I only heard one tetchy comment across the entire three days.

The fact that I'm writing this up now, having taking three days to digest, is of course a reflection of my age. Most of the other participants were blogging and tweeting as they went, as well as checking out the websites and blogs of the presenters as they spoke.

There was a trend towards the more weird and wonderful as the conference went on. The first day included some fairly mainstream citizen science projects, which were about crowd-sourcing effort and attention – using wannabee-scientists to do some heavy lifting on science projects that might otherwise be difficult to do. Examples included the rather wonderful Oldweather.org, which is about getting historic weather data for climate models. The data source is the logbooks of the Royal Navy, since ships' captains recorded detailed observations (along with time and position) every day of every voyage. The logbooks themselves have been scanned, but the images are not susceptible to machine reading – so volunteers do the reading and the data entry. The reward for this are only symbolic, but the results are fantastic. In one year 24,000 volunteers have transcribed 800,000 logbook pages. Similar projects included Planet Hunters, and Stardust@home.

Interesting to note that there were quite a few Israelis around – the conference was organised by Mordechai “Muki” Haklay of UCL – and his students, organised at the “Extreme Citizens Cyberscience network. Ofer Arazy from the University of Alberta spoke about citizen science as a peer production community, and invoked the spirit of another Israeli, Yochai Benkler. On the second day I found myself sitting next to Liora Malki-Epshtein, another lecturer from UCL. Given recent discussions I've had with friends about what a self-centred, materialistic and unequal society Israel is, I wondered whether the interest in co-production is a sort of protest against the loss of an earlier culture which was - at least ostensibly – committed to equality, sacrifice and voluntary participation.

By the second day – at UCL itself – the tone and the content were more radical and more avowedly political. Instead of focusing on getting citizens to support and participate in 'proper science', there was more emphasis on science that served community activists. There were projects on community noise mapping through smartphones and web apps, projects on community air qualitymonitoring through self-built connected sensors, and a DIY "satellite" imaging kit based on helium balloons and open source software from the US-based Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS).

The inspiration of open source, in terms of both hardware and software, was everywhere. One of the sponsors was the small Italian open source electronics company Arduino, and one of the most compelling speakers was Tom Igoe, a co-founder of the company as well as a lecturer in the completely wonderful Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. On the third day he led a workshop where those taking part (including yours truly, who hasn't made anything more complicated than a curry for years, and who last wrote a line of code in 1977) built their own sensors from scratch and then programmed them using C.

All around were people sharing things, making stuff together, swapping ideas. There were DIY sensors to monitor the levels in sewage outfalls – the fabulous Dontflushme project, which also included an internet-connected lightbulb.

A few times in my life I've had the sensation of a curtain being pulled back to reveal another world – where all sorts of great things have been going on, out of site, for a long time. I had the same feeling at the beginning of the 1990s, when I discovered the magazine Mondo 2000 and the first few editions of Wired. During the day I was writing reports about “value added network services” for telecoms companies, and in the evenings I read about what weird groups of scientists and 'hackers' were using the internet for. There was, of course, no connection between the two activities. The telecoms companies were not interested in the publication and knowledge-sharing tools of a bunch of particle physicists; they had serious networks to build and commercialize, running important services like EDI, X.400 email and store and forward fax networks.

I had the same feeling at this event. No-one here was likely to become rich from their inventions, and most of them had no interest in doing so. The stuff they are building isn't “enterprise-grade”, it isn't secure, and there isn't a viable business model. Pretty much the same sort of things that any expert would have said about the web in 1992. The tools that these people are making and using, though, will turn out to be important, and they will be part of the story of what the internet does next. 

There is so much more to write about, but I feel I want to post something now, if only so that I can begin to sleep at nights again rather than wondering how I am going to put this experience in to words. It's made me question so much, including what I am doing with myself, and why the practices of the industry analyst companies are all - without exception -- so wedded to outdated industrial-era production techniques and management styles. I can't help thinking that all sorts of businesses, but especially ours that is so much about knowledge production, can learn a lot from the motivations and behaviours of citizen scientists.

Documents in my reference library

A random collection of links to documents - not all favoured, just a place to keep the links so as to file the hard copy (sometimes in the round filing cabinet).

http://neweconomics.org/publications/the-art-of-rapid-transition

 http://www.climate-change-jobs.org/sites/default/files/1MillionClimateJobs_2010.PDF

 http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/From_the_Ashes_of_the_Crash_1.pdf

 http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/The_Ratio.pdf

http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/A_Green_New_Deal_1.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Good_Banking_webReady.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Compass%20Banking%20WEB.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Compass_Plan_B_web.pdf

http://www.lithium.com/pdfs/books/Lithium-The-Science-of-Social-eVersion.pdf

http://www.haringey4020.org.uk/report

http://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/4b98dac5-0c99-4439-9292-72bfcd7a6dd1

Edward Bond's Bingo

Last night we went to see Bingo by Edward Bond.

We were all pretty fed up with it, and bored at the absence of character or plot development.

I've since had the chance to think about it, and I sort of understand it better now.

Edward Bond is a avowedly Marxist playwright. He thinks he's the English Brecht. He's not writing entertainment – the point of the play is to drive home a point. In this case (as so often) it is that the process of capitalist development involves brutality and cruelty, which is graphically depicted on the stage and described off it. The point is introduced early on the play – Shakespeare meets the nasty Coombs character, who explains that his plans to enclose the common will hurt the poor but benefit the town in the long term. In a short speech he manages to articulate the main principles of capitalist economics – the self-regulation of the market through the price mechanism, the re-allocation of resources to more productive uses, and so on.

The rest of the play is just driving this home. There isn't really a plot, we just see the full implications of this being played out. The poor do suffer, the vagrant girl is hanged, violent disorder and protest is crushed with greater violence. The Shakespeare character is perhaps a proxy for the middle class audience that Bond expects to be seeing the play. He is unhappy about the suffering but is concerned about his own financial security, and so refuses to act. Most of the play shows him not acting, and meditating on the fact that he hasn't. 

Unsurprisingly, this is not very enjoyable to watch. If there is another theme, it is that the family – particularly relations between parents and children, but also between husband and wife – are based on deceit and disrespect, not love. Both of the families depicted are unhappy, though the wife in the servant family is at least kind to her mad partner, while the wealthier Shakespeare is not kind to his mad wife.

So no plot really – just a long speech about the misery of capitalist accumulation, in period dress and with Shakespeare as a character because it's a play.

Here is the link to the good Wikipedia article about the play http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_%28play%29

By the way, the other playwright in the tavern is Ben Johnson – Christopher Marlowe was dead by 1593, and the play is set later, around 1615, when Shakespeare is old.