The politics of size ...

... or why fat is strong in Spain.

Yes. I've been putting on the kilos over the past few months. A regular drip-drip of redundancies at work - and overwork in general - seems to have taken its toll. I visited my doctor recently and just before the appointment began saw the off-the-record notes on the computer screen that doctors like to make of their patients, notes which flatly contradict the open and honest relationship they are supposed to have with those under their care.

"Refuses to take even a minimum amount of exercise," ran the notes. That, about a person who walks an hour and a half to work and back.

Instead of typing me as the sort of person who is undeserving of NHS support because of his lifestyle, my GP might be better occupied trying to find out why middle-aged people put on weight.

8000 redundancies since April is one good reason.

Stress and lack of sleep another two.

Yet now I am out here in Spain, I find myself in a completely different world. This is a place of tolerance and unconditional relationship. Everyone says how much better I look than I did a year ago. Three daft days in Disneyland may be part of why I look more relaxed. But the most interesting observations describe me as being "stronger" (más fuerte) - that is to say, fatter in a good way. Here, people are looking to allow me a place I may occupy on my own terms instead of five-a-day exhortations to be something I am not.

Spain is a country where children are tolerated by society and encouraged to stay thus to a point that leads way past adulthood (yes, children remain children quite despite their rank chronology), rather than being brutally resized into nascent office tools at the age of eleven or twelve - or even younger.

And this relationship that a whole culture has with its offspring is repeated and re-experienced with everyone who visits and manages to occupy a space in it.

I am now a visitor.

I have not lived here for six years now, after having lived here for more than sixteen.

Yet I feel that in Spain, even now, I have a greater right to be fatter than I was in a way that Britain simply refuses to allow me to be.

I feel I have a right to be myself here - that being myself is, in fact, enough.

The politics of size is part of what is wrong with modern-day socialism. That overbearing desire to remake a nation for the benefit of the statistics, to resize individuals and their bald aspirations for the benefit of a collective - to redefine through political machination the instincts and ambitions and fires that drive us all to make our most important choices.

The food is so good here. The sense of being loved and approached rather than harangued and forcefully moulded is so right here. The right to just be and live and enjoy the weather instead of fighting it every day makes sense of one's existence in a way that Britain currently never offers.

Our politics, British politics, is like our weather. No climate. No predictability. Just unhappy spells of sunshine and heavy showers, coupled with a coolness of demeanour and a more than occasional storm of disgraceful controversy.

A place where public expressions of anger are quite the not-done-thing. Signs of weakness, even.

Oh, yes. I am a stranger in a land which has become strange to me again. I do not live their (that is to say, Spanish) politics any more, so can bask in the curiously detached non-existence that is all part of being a professional tourist.

But I have always been a kind of professional tourist anyway, even in the land of British socialism - never understanding entirely its rancour and rabid hurt. Perhaps I have assumed that my own sufferings were not located collectively enough for anything I might find distressing to have a wider applicability. Perhaps I have never seen myself as part of a wider collective and thus cannot empathise effectively with the hurt that the British socialist movement has always been so good at expressing.

Thus it is that holidays are good moments for understanding oneself, understanding one's ambitions. The hurly-burly of daily life obscures many truths.

I will continue to explore how I feel about life, as this holiday - a key holiday for me, containing as it will encounters with sadnesses as well as happinesses - develops into an electronic whiteboard of self-revelation.

In the meantime, for me, the politics of size here in Spain mean that I feel happy with myself and how I look at the moment for the first time in far too long.

For the first time in too many months.

Here, my michelines are made to feel at home.

How it would appear that Britain is just too able to make us all ill.

www.123people.co.uk

Here's a curious site. Want to know which bits of you are now freely available on the web?

Try keying in your name.

Go on.

You know you can't resist the temptation.

Out of curiosity, is this simple pulling together of public domain information into one easy-to-access place ever going to constitute an act of aggression against the identity of an individual? Especially if the identity thus drawn-up is demonstrably inaccurate or misleading?

I wonder.

Can't blame an algorithm, can we?

And why not? An algorithm is a tool - and a tool but an extension of humankind. Thus it is that what is an extension of humankind is an act not of God but man and woman.

Perhaps yet another area of endeavour where lawyers can find due cause to inveigle themselves.

To their hearts' content we might argue.

If, that is, they still have any left.

Anyone noticed how "wireless" is modern again?

Almost as if by magic the word "wireless" has regained its modernity. Once it meant what later became known as the "radio" - a device which in turn gave up its right to any sense of newness until the word "digital" got tagged on at the beginning. Now it's the turn of "wireless" again, as 3G telephony and Internet routers invisibly invade our airwaves.

Thinking back - as I am - to my grandfather's John Lennon glasses, I wonder now if it isn't too late to rescue the word "spectacles". MPs expenses and News of the World shenanigans mightn't be a bad place to start, eh?

On the dangers of worrying more about the shareholders than the filesharers (or how the community is king)

A disconcerting piece on Google's Microsoft moment. But a fundamental difference still exists between Google and Microsoft: Microsoft is and always has been driven by the need to appeal to corporate users - and in the same way that schools and education systems which use Dell/Microsoft combinations have brought children up to be adults in short trousers, so Microsoft has almost treated its consumer users as if they were mini-business people.

Google, meanwhile, has grown up in a much tougher market.

A consumer market where loyalties chop and change and where achieving a convincing adherence to a single idea is much more challenging than it ever will be when the fear factor employed in company environments can do its worst. With your boss breathing down your neck, you're unlikely to see allegedly unnecessary change as something to be dallied with.

In the meantime, as a consumer, as a free man or woman no longer bound by corporate doublespeak, at home you're quite ready to try out a new gadget, new browser, that free piece of shareware; you're quite ready to break away.

Quite desperate to, in fact.

This latter market is the one that Google has inhabited. And in a world of increasing change, where the fear of not keeping up begins to override the fear of making an allegedly unnecessary mistake, the reflexes it engenders will prepare Google far better for the corporate market it now wishes to engage with than the reverse has prepared Microsoft for the consumer market it is now trying to claim for its own.

The future is the community. The community - not the customer, not the shareholder, not even Google's hip stakeholder - will be king.

The community will mean altruism welded to self-interest combined with the dynamics of freeconomics, of exchanging products and services through the medium of electronically structured barter.

Maybe this is Google's Microsoft moment, after all. But it will only be so if Google loses the lightness of touch that allowed it to capture its users so consummately. It will only be so if it falls into the trap of using fear to keep its followers on board. It will only be so if it forgets who is king.

It will only be so if it ever gets to the point of worrying more about the shareholders than the filesharers.

That's why Web 2.0 is essentially 21st century democratic socialism in action.

And whilst we both need each other, whilst Google needs its demanding community of consumers and its demanding community of consumers needs all the services it provides for free, Google will remain far enough away from Microsoft for a real difference to be made.

For the difference is as follows: when Google gives you something free, you believe it's up to them to work out how to monetise it - you believe (even if it's not the case) that they're clever enough to turn water into wine. When Microsoft gives you something free, you just know it's a question of crass cross-subsidy - designed to kill a decent and competent competitor in its tracks.

Whilst Microsoft turns beautiful women into pillars of salt, Google is able to part the waves.

That's how it feels right now, anyhow.

The politics of ambiguity, being a part of a community and erosion as a beautiful object of contemplation

Sometimes, the technology simply doesn't work. Whilst Never Trust a Hippy kindly linked to my post on anti-politics the other day, and the backlink in question initially showed up here at 21stCenturyFix.org, it has - for some reason - now dropped off the foot of the article. The blog is set to show backlinks, so I don't know what's happened there. In parallel, Technorati hasn't pinged any of my blogs for weeks now - and even refuses to do so when I try manually.

Just occasionally, you get the feeling that no one wants to know.

Even when you know that the technologies are so complicated you'd be a fool to believe an intentionality.

(I do, however, note that if you look up "anti-politics" on Google, the article currently appears on the first page.)

Meanwhile, Paul has the first part of his version of "War and Peace" here. His underlying thesis is that the Labour Party still matters. I am inclined to agree, but as I'm really not absolutely sure in what sense, I do look forward to reading the rest of his discourse. At the same time, I find it fascinating that within the same political grouping we can find texts such as Paul's alongside texts such as Alex Smith's recent ones on factionalism (here, here and here). Theory and practice. Belief and government.

Experience rubs off and erodes one. But an erosion can also be a beautiful object, an object we may choose to contemplate and treasure. The natural world has many such objects. We are part of the natural world.

Perhaps what most dogs the British left, what may sometimes serve most to hold it back, is its blessed need to be coherent and downright. In the face of an ambiguous world, an essentially ambiguous and contradictory set of experiences we often fail to understand (not out of a lack of perspicacity but rather, simply, because the universe is sullen and unwilling to supply us easily with its secrets), the British left wishes to be entirely unambiguous. The British left wishes clarity above all - wishes the kind of clarity that does not allow for beauty; for the essence of beauty sometimes lies in its very absence of clarity.

If the personal was political and the technological has become so, how much more necessary is it for us to invent a politics of the ambiguous. We need tools to measure ambiguity, to track it, to understand it and to define it. We need to learn how to encompass it without destroying or misrepresenting it. We need to delineate ambiguity with accuracy and precision. We need to incorporate it into our ways of thinking and seeing.

We need, once and for all, to understand it and learn how to let it be, learn how to let it thrive, learn how to allow the fuzzy intelligence of intuition - and yes, even what we might term the poetry of politics - to infuse our political thought.

That is to say, we need to allow humanity to once more inform politics - to once more inform how as well as what we think.

Two sides of the Web 2.0 coin (or shareholders versus stakeholders)

Here's a story about how a private monopoly can outlast governments and consumers with ease, whilst this story tells how a competitor aims to engineer Internet access in Africa.

Each story is significant in its own way. The first company, Microsoft, was born out of a business model where the real customer was the shareholder and the external customer an afterthought. The second company, Google, was born out of a business model where satisfying stakeholders - that is to say, all parties involved in the success of the business; from ideas creation to end-user, from producer to consumer - was key to satisfying the shareholder. Google's goal is to undo a private monopoly - and, in the process, perhaps create another. Microsoft's goal has never been any other than successfully preserve that monopoly at all costs.

Oh. No doubt about it. The shareholder's still there, overbearing and overarching. But these two stories define, without a doubt, a generational difference of significance.

How significant, and how different, only time will tell.

Why anti-politics may be pro-community (II)

Bialik - I tried replying directly to your comment this evening, but my comment exceeded the maximum allowed by Blogger, so here it is as a follow-up post:

I think I'm still feeling my way on this subject. There are clearly conceptual imprecisions in the post and I'm afraid I haven't been as clear-headed as I could've been. But you yourself equate politics with party politics, or, at least, you seem to want to run them together - and I think where the thought processes behind what I've said might be leading us is to a point where party politics does not need to be the only form of politics that guarantees freedom from totalitarian states and tyrannies.

A lot of what has been going wrong for quite a while now is entirely due to logistical reasons where representation needs to be fairly observed and generally isn't. How we communicate our wishes, how frequently we can make them known, what those wishes really are, how we define and unreasonably choose to massage them ... all these things are logistically rooted (though they do of course have political consequences) - and all are a result of, as well as result in, the public being too many steps away from the decisions.

That is to say, even if we did want to act more democratically, more representatively, more accurately, our systems of communicating such opinion would not be up to the job.

I'm not talking about electronic polling systems or referendums galore here. I suppose I feel we should really consider the idea of "consultation" a dirty word. I am wary of using such concepts as they seem to me to be completely inappropriate to a real democratic socialism, if what we are looking for is to allow both a true and valid expression as well as an accurate representation of a voting public's opinion. Firstly, it's evident that the hierarchy implicit in the widespread usage by modern politicians of ideas relating to "voter/member/client consultation" clearly indicates who operates the levers and who is operated on. Secondly, we shouldn't even be talking about a voting public but rather a participatory public.

Our objective should be to create a state where each individual is able to easily represent themselves, and where communities can reach the necessary decisions they need to take periodically on the basis of such representations. That is to say, we should aim to weld the concepts of representation and expression so that they become one.

This is where Web 2.0 comes in. What Web 2.0 is now is but a scratching of the surface. Where Web 2.0 will be in five years' time, no one can know for sure. But what we do know is that communication is key to making life, and by extension politics, work - and never was communication as cheap, emancipating and widely available as today. I've blogged recently on the virtues of mobile Internet, of holding a computer in the palm of one's hand, and as capitalism serves to drive down the cost of communication until - for the first time in history - it becomes a right and a good as basic as that of water, food and housing, so capitalism will either have to re-engineer its virtues substantially to maintain its hold on us or Web 2.0 will destroy it from within.

And, perhaps, quite surprisingly, in the end in a mostly peaceable manner.

When we need only utility companies to engage in all those activities traditional politics has learned to feed off and sustain itself with - water, energy, food and now communication; in the future, education, continuous learning, the exchange of all kinds of discourses as goods and services - is when we will no longer need the kind of politicians we have had up to now - or, at least, not quite as much as we did.

A penultimate point. To come back to the title of the post, I do think it's fair to argue that to be pro-community in a Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing world is - quite inevitably and fundamentally - to be anti-politics and anti-politicians.

At least, to be anti-politics and anti-politicians as you seem to understand the concepts.

If I understand rightly, you feel that only party politics can guarantee any degree of freedom from tyranny and totalitarianism. Yet, Web 2.0 and everything that swirls around it, the freedom to create, to be a consumer-producer, to publish, be published and republish one's thoughts and feelings, to distribute to the four corners of the world (distribution is so important to lever true power), to print and film and share and remix, to engage in direct discourse with a planet which is full of people who inhabit an exactly similar hierarchy ... all of this leads us undeniably to one uncomfortable place for modern politics, modern politicians and both big and small governance of any kind - where the people can exchange goods and services without the intervention of money, the political structures that currently reign over us lose all purpose. Not only that - they lose all the resource which previously justified and allowed for their existence, all that income which allowed them to mean something; to declaim and exert their power over us and define what we meant and wanted.

In a way, capitalism and the invisible hand of the marketplace does seem to want - and be able - to win out over a planned economy. But perhaps what is really happening here is a plague on all our houses. Perhaps what is really happening here is that capitalism and its opponents, all of which have depended for so many centuries on making communication and knowledge goods with hefty price tags on them, will become spent forces in the face of this astonishingly seamless - and absolutely acquirable - set of tools we have suddenly been presented with; tools which allow us to engage in a discourse, that is to say, engage in both politics and labour of a most primary nature, with almost anyone and everyone we care to.

Finally, if we are truly pro-community, we simply cannot be in favour of the politics we currently look to and favour, just because we see it as the least worst alternative to totalitarianism and tyranny. There has to be a finer reason than that. Especially as many tyrannies currently coexist with our least worst scenarios.

Undoing, from within, the tyranny of capital over labour - and what's more, in a peaceable manner - is surely reason enough to continue, however inexactly and confusedly, with our pursuit of this line of thought.

Why anti-politics may be pro-community

On Facebook yesterday, Tom idly (or perhaps not so idly) drew our attention to the following idea: to be anti-politics is not a neutral or natural state of mind.

I think the underlying thesis runs as follows. To suddenly not want to participate in party political discourse plays into the hands of those who are always going to run the world anyway - but, even so, we must stand up and do what we can. Why so? A progressive's lot is always going to be a bitter battle against injustice. Thus it is we must get used to the idea and prepare ourselves to spend the rest of our lives spouting acrimonious jets of political spume.

But there may be another way. To be anti-politics - as it is currently structured - is the obverse of that coin we might call pro-community. As pro-lifers were reborn out of anti-abortionists, so anti-politicians can re-engineer themselves as pro-communitarians. Communities are all that individuals need for their socialisation to be complete. Democratic socialists do not need a globalised world to effect their socialism. They need a responsive sense of real individuals, removed once only from their environments. One step away is all we need. Parliament is already too far. The further we move away from our homes and villages, the greater the dilution of purpose and connection. In fact, in an ideal world we may be able to represent ourselves. Technology - fairly and justly applied - could serve such a purpose.

I wonder if Web 2.0 - and all that struggles to surface around it - can eventually provide us with the tools to create the socialism we clearly hanker after.

I think I've suggested before that open source behaviours mean that modern ways of harvesting data about the productivity of our economies severely underestimate their true output. We are effectively entering an astonishingly new phase in how we exchange goods and services, how we manage to serve each other, without the traditional structures or mechanisms that money imposes. Those of us who edit Wikipedia continue to exchange our skills and wisdoms on trust when we spend an evening writing an article on a word-processor we've downloaded for free, and which, in itself, is the sum of another's good works.

This is a truly democratic socialism. A jaw-dropping sociality of common interest, where altruism kicks off the processes in question and combines with overarching - and very real - needs to weld an unstoppable juggernaut of intellectual progress.

Yes. I admit it. I am slowly - but surely - becoming an anti-politician.

But this is only because - all along - I've been pro-community.

The Two-Headed Beast That Destroys Economies

It continues to beggar belief. These are the lives of ordinary people that those would see themselves as all-powerful have proceeded to destroy without compunction.

Robert Maxwell is supposed to have said there were two kinds of wealth: that which you possessed and that which you had access to. In his world, in the world of so many modern money men and women, the truly fun stuff is the latter. That's the stuff that really energises and excites them.

That was the stuff which, last year, brought us to our economic knees.

Our downfall has come about because those that possessed some wealth wished to use it to lever access to the vastly greater sum - a sum they clearly coveted - of what was essentially other people's wealth; ordinary people's wealth, the little men and women, the grafters in society - a wealth held, in fact, by the institutions the rest of us thought could be trusted to take care of their charges.

The desire to make money out of simple access rather than only ever act prudently on possession is the key to everything that has happened over the past year.

And now it looks as if Ireland is going to have to pay a terrible price for that economic incontinence.

Skyfire now works on iPlayer and I'm (kind of) done with politics

Well, I suppose it had to happen. I'm now watching, pausing and changing the volume on iPlayer, using the Skyfire browser on my Nokia E63 - a Symbian S60 smartphone. Whilst the BBC hasn't managed to get round to officially sanctioning - or perhaps that's engineering - iPlayer to allow the E63 to use it, other technologies, which allow us to use phones to fool webpages into thinking the device in question is actually a PC, actually make the whole debate quite irrelevant.

And this is what I want to do with politics. Pull the rug from beneath those who would use it to suffocate freedoms. Take it out of the hands of the professionals and make space for such activities in the daily lives of ordinary men and women.

Companies love to talk about the wisdoms of the work/life balance. It's now time to factor a third element into the blessed duality - politics. We do, in fact, need a blessed trinity. We need to be given time to get involved. In times of economic crisis, where over-production is in any case an issue, I suggest we should all have our working-week reduced by say five hours - with the proviso that we use these five hours to get involved politically in our local communities. Whether this be as a school or health trust governor, a housing trust partner or, indeed, a local councillor. Or whether this be simply a question of attending the meetings of political parties.

In the past, education was a privilege not a right. Those who had to work missed out on the opportunity.

Today we would look aghast at anyone who chose to propose such a relationship between the precious processes of learning and the wider populace.

It is time for us to be equally aghast that politics should be the preserve of the moneyed and the professionals with the time to dedicate to its practice. It is time for us to be awarded the time we need to practise the profession all of us despise and none of us can do without. It is time for politics to be placed on the same footing as health, safety and continuous learning.

It is time for politics to be an inalienable right - and for society to make space for its exercise.

What say you?