I’ve always wanted to like George Monbiot. I admire the way he’s built himself up as a successful broadcaster and writer while remaining connected to the leading edge of environmental and social justice campaigning. I identify strongly with his anger for the status quo, with his passion for the idea that ‘another world is possible’. But the problem is that he’s never quite delivered when he writes about solutions. I’ve always found myself wound up by his articles and books, thinking that he’s missing something because of his particular brand of dissent. His complete focus on what’s wrong jars with my way of thinking. Anger can make you blind as to how to find solutions to problems.

So when I got my hands on The Age of Consent I was nervous. Would he deliver this time? Would he give me something to think about going forward rather than finding more that is wrong with the world? Overall, I think yes. I think he’s made an admirable attempt to move the debate about globalisation forward without falling for the other trap so many disappear into — claiming to have all the answers.

Monbiot hangs his analysis and proposals on the idea of the ‘metaphysical mutation’ of Michael Houellebecq’s Atomised. It’s a similar idea to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift in relation to the changing nature of thinking in science — as the old understanding slowly has its foundations eroded and members of the old order swap sides, a new order rushes into its place. Monbiot uses this idea to convince the reader that radical shifts could occur in the global order.

The Age of Consent will make uncomfortable reading for a lot of people in the campaigning movement. For much of the book, Monbiot turns his fire not on the traditional enemy (corporations, capitalism and the USA) but instead on some of the favoured ideas of the campaigners. First he takes on communism, outlining why it can never work for the poor. Then he takes on anarchism, deftly dismantling the idea that it might be an organising principle (!) for the anti-globalisers. He also cuts his way through localisation — a favoured rallying point for more moderate campaigners at the moment.

He then puts forward his ideas in the style of a self declared (and sometimes a little self conscious) manifesto. First there should be a world parliament which could grow gradually and begin without the participation of the US initially. Then Monbiot proposes we should rejuvenate an idea of John Maynard Keynes that was deftly sidelined by the US after the second world war — an International Clearing Union. The final idea is a Fair Trade Organisation to replace the WTO.

The Age of Consent isn’t a new paradigm of thinking but it does move the debate forward and the book is valuable for that. For the first time the global campaigners have a serious hardback to call their own with a set of proposals to work with. What will be interesting is how many people take up Monbiot’s challenge: “That we must seek, before long, to provide a single, coherent programme of alternatives to the concentrated power of the dictatorship of vested interests, is surely evident. You might, with good reason, judge that I have not formulated such a programme, or that I have formulated the wrong one. But simply to reject it is insufficient. You must, as I have suggested, then replace it with a better one.”

The movement’s success will depend on people doing just that.

Click here to buy.

Thomas Friedman explores a question I’ve been contemplating for a while here (free registration required).

Spam seems to be dominating my life at the moment, but not in the way you might think. I’ve just finished a piece of work for BT called Virtual Vice (go to www.bt.com/betterworld and click on Hot Topics) which looks at various aspects of misuse of the internet including spam, I’ve been invited to a ‘Spam Summit’ at the House of Commons on Tuesday and my email box is full of newsletters announcing special spam features (like this one or this one).

The irony is I hardly ever get any of the stuff.

Steven Johnson has invented a new game. Basically the idea is to see how many pages Google returns for a particular word and then see what percentage of those pages also contain the name of a particular person. That percentage is that person’s googleshare of the word. The idea has been put into action here.

The best I’ve found so far is Geoff Mulgan’s googleshare of connexity — he comes in with over eight percent.

There’s some interesting blogging going on about the economics of the publishing industry. Michael Blowhard (that can’t be his real name) has written a piece where he comes to the conclusion that people who want to write books must be ‘obsessed lunatics’. It has a huge thread following it including a rather peculiar resurrection of Milton Friedman… stone-age thinking gets everywhere.

Moveon.org’s newsletter focuses on the Bush administration’s moves in the past few weeks to lift the ban on the development of ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons. These are bunker busting warheads with an explosive force of 5 kilotons or less (about one third of the force of bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). What’s most worrying is that they are more “usable” according to those pushing for their development.

Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Canada’s National Post has a piece entitled ‘Whatever happened to the paperless office?’ about how bad futurologists are:

“Futurists, it seems clear, seldom have any idea what they are talking about. Even the most brilliant, Marshall McLuhan, who is to futurism what Freud is to psychiatry, was subject to extravagant fantasies. In 1964, he believed firmly that soon we would all design our own unique automobiles, with computer-directed factories operating like bespoke tailors. Others predicted the coming of the leisure society and the self-cleaning house.”

I have to admit to a little bit of sympathy for this view but it is a lot easier to criticise them for what they get wrong than for what they get right. I remember seeing a piece which tried to put a percentage on the amount of things various high profile futurologists had predicted correctly… it was much higher than I would have expected.

Five years ago today, I was in Birmingham for something special — a human chain of 70,000 people around the eight most powerful men in the world to call for the cancellation of the debts of the world’s poorest nations.

It was a glorious day — the sun was shining and the trees were a fresh spring green. As the thousands of people arrived by train, coach and all sorts of bizarre forms of transport, the city streets gradually turned white and red with Jubilee 2000 t-shirts.

At 3pm people spread around the city centre to make a human chain that stretched for 10km along main roads and backstreets, over bridges and under subways. And then they made a lot of noise. I remember seeing nuns, students, children, pensioners as well as a smattering of the great and the good. I remember the buzz when the call came from Tony Blair’s people asking for a meeting. And later in the evening I remember almost collapsing with exhaustion in a curry restaurant (which to this day I’ve never found again) with the team who organised the event.

I’m here in Birmingham again today, not involved in the planning this time and having had considerably more sleep last night than the equivalent five years ago. The Jubilee Debt Campaign (one of the successors to J2000) have got people back together again, in part to ask whether we made a difference five years ago. It’s a rather more sober affair and the weather is a bit more typical for Birmingham — grey and drizzling. But it is quite emotional to see many of the people who were here on that day again and Bob Geldof being here has added a bit of star quality.
 
When I think about the effect the chain had I’m torn. A lot has been achieved certainly — 26 countries are spending 40 percent less on debt payments today. But psychologically it seems world leaders think they’ve done enough. Of course they’re nowhere near. Many countries that desperately need debt relief have got nothing and the IMF are still pushing policies on poor countries that rich countries would not dream of inflicting on themselves.

But if you ask did we make a difference that day, my answer is yes. I think the world changed and a unique network was created, people who were touched by the event, perhaps it’s a little bit dormant at the moment… but I’m fairly sure it will return.

Read the Guardian’s article today about debt here.
BBC News Online cover today’s events here.

This month’s American Prospect cover story is by Harold Meyerson and entitled “The Most Dangerous President Ever”. It’s certainly hard hitting and articulates for me what is so deeply disturbing in our global situation.

“…by strategy, inclination and conviction, George W. Bush has been pursuing a reckless, even ridiculous, but always right-wing agenda — shredding a global-security structure at a time requiring unprecedented international integration, shredding a domestic safety net at a time when the private sector provides radically less security than it did a generation ago. No American president has ever played quite so fast and loose with the well-being of the American people.”

I encourage you to read the full article here.

Courtesy of Newsnight’s daily email, to pass, you need five correct answers.

1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
3) From which animal do we get catgut?
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5) What is a camel’s hair brush made of?
6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
7) What was King George VI’s first name?
8) What colour is a purple finch?
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10) What is the colour of the black box in a commercial airplane?

And here are the answers:
1)*116 years
2)*Ecuador
3)*Sheep and Horses
4)*November
5)*Squirrel fur
6)*Dogs
7)*Albert
8)*Crimson
9)*New Zealand
10)*Orange, of course