Last year Cass Sunstein produced a revised version of his book Republic.com, titled — with crushing inevitability — Republic.com 2.0. In it, he critiqued the impact of the net on democratic discourse and public spaces. His dystopia is one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us only with the […]
Politics
Is Web 2.0 a manifesto for anarchism?
Here are some chapter headings from a book I read on holiday: The Theory of Spontaneous Order The Dissolution of Leadership Harmony Through Complexity Topless Federations So was it Charles Leadbeater’s latest book or Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything? Nope, it was the book on the left: a 01982 reprint of Colin Ward’s Anarchy […]
Neil Young: Living With War
[Click the image to hear Neil Young’s new album in full.] Even if I didn’t like all the results when Neil Young first donned a vocoder and got a synthesiser in 01982, when he put out a rockabilly album months later, followed by a country album, and so on, I liked the fact that he […]
Eno vs. Blair; Art vs. politics
This month’s issue of Prospect Magazine has the story that Brian Eno is organising a campaign that targets Tony Blair personally. At the next election Eno plans to “run a ‘white suit’, you-lied-to-the-people, Martin Bell-style candidate against Blair in his own Sedgefield constituency”. Prospect suggests his chances of success are not completely negligible. This would […]
The politics of location-based technologies
Attending the PLAN network last week, the biggest surprise for me — given that PLAN is an arts organisation — was how many of the speakers focused on macro issues of policy, regulation and infrastructure. This emphasis led me to search out Jonathan Grudin’s prescient paper from fifteen years ago, The Computer Reaches Out: the […]
RSA Day of Inspiration: my notes
I attended the RSA’s ‘Day of Inspiration‘ today, marking 250 years since the RSA was founded. I imagine a full transcript of the day’s talks will appear online in due course, and I’ll add a link to it from this posting then. So rather than try to replicate what will be done better elsewhere, here […]
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
Asking rhetorical questions of politicians from the safety of your own web site is a cheap and easy way of scoring points without any serious risk of comeback from the other side, but I can’t let one of Geoff Hoon’s statements in this Time Out interview go unremarked. Commenting on his love for early Bob […]
Transnational Institutions and Sovereignty
Prompted by David Rieff’s article in October’s issue of Prospect magazine and his talk at the RSA this last week — both on the subject of an alleged crisis of legitimacy in the United Nations — here are a few notes on transnational institutions and the redefinition of state sovereignty.
Age and Unrest
In an article in Prospect Magazine, David Willets MP (yes, I know!) develops a speculative argument from the stunning statistic that, of the 25 countries with the youngest populations, 16 have experienced major civil conflict since 1995. (By comparison, among countries with the oldest populations, only Croatia has been involved in conflict in the last […]
David Kelly and the Baha’i Faith
Interesting to see the attention given to the Baha’i Faith since it has emerged from the Hutton Enquiry that David Kelly joined the religion in 1999. I nearly became a Baha’i in 1995, intrigued to learn more after attending a Baha’i wedding, and again in 1999. In crude terms, the Faith is non-sexist, pacifist and […]