Aaaaaw.

Using the Guardian’s recently launched Open Platform, this little guy monitors your Twitter feed for “happy” and “sad” posts of those you follow and alerts you to the need to respond to people.

Via The Guardian Open Platform

According to TweetPsych, I often use twitter to tweet about my various senses, discuss positive sensations and feelings, talk about various cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc., talk a lot about jobs and  work, and often tweet about the future. My Social behavior rating is much higher than my moral imerative rating. Some people who think like me include drapetomaniac, werner, Phil_Adams, nickflare and renn.

Somewhat of an interesting web toy, but it analyzes your last 1,000 tweets, a number I’m no where close to yet. Still, the concept of analizing people based on their public content has potential. I doesn’t include a narcissism rating, which I guess must just be a given considering you have to be using Twitter in the first place in order for it to work, and thus think you can distill your Wisdom Tooth like insights into 140 characters to the eternal delight of your impending masses of followers.

According to it’s new site profiler, drew3000.net spends a lot of time talking in the present tense (case in point here) and often makes “references to physically upward movement, Like upstairs, climb, etc.” Hardly Freud, but it’s interesting that psychological analysis is entering the automated stage. Once the web really analizes what people are thinking about based on what we all put online, I think we’ll see a Skynet style response, which you could hardly consider unjustified.

Now, over to Brian:

The demo services that Opera offers are great, but they really are just demonstrations. It’s generating a lot of excitement and “wuh?” in equal measure on the discussions I’ve seen, which is something I recognise from my attempts to proselytize the edge to those already excited by the cloud.

It occurred to me (encouraged by Stef) that a great and timely Opera Unite application, just for the next few days, would be a web proxy  for Iranians. Run it on your Opera service, post your machine’s Unite URL onto twitter with a tag #spartacus, and Iran would be drowning in potential proxies to use.

A snarky tone of voice is also welcome, and other commentary about science, politics, religion, current events, etc, are not outside the scope of the site’s content. Anyway, let me know by dropping me a line via the contact page, on this site or through the comment area here or at Three triscuits and some spinach. Include links to your other writings online.

The site is new and is still going under some work, but I’d like to turn it into a readable, visit-worthy blog for lefty tech types working for The Cause.

The name, by and by, pulls from a throw-away line from Rachel Corrie’s journals that has always reminded me about the common plight of those who learn a lot of otherwise marketable skills, but use them for the good fight:

“…. I’m steadfastly pursuing a track that guarantees I’ll never get paid more than three Triscuits and some spinach”
— Rachel Corrie

It sort of reminds me of another side, from the film Casablanca, when Captain Renault reminds Rick, “The winning side would have paid you much better.”

So, in summery, if you’re the person who likes this sort of thing, then this may be the sort of thing you like. Drop me a line here or here.

Monday, March 30 / 10:14 pm / Blackfriers Station
These are interesting times for big ideas. The air in The City has an electric current of fear. There’s no real frenzy, but you can feel the occasional tingle. The G20 economic summit hits the ExCeL Exhibition centre in the Docklands on Thursday and presidents and anarchists are swarming in, attracted to the scent of an open wound, both hoping to feed off it, all of them using it as an opportunity to float grand schemes, new world orders or at least quick fixes.

Utopias. I’m a fan of utopias in general. The over-riding theme of the week is really utopian fancy, and I’ll soon get to that. Utopias are the ultimate expressions of big ideas. But before going off on that unpaved tangent: I want to bring in something else: my Reading for the week. I’m alternating between The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams. Neither are exactly new releases; both talk about deep societal change amid periods of uncertainty and upheaval. The two books also share another common distinction in that they are categorically nonfiction and accurate diagnoses of the turbulent times and situations in which they were written while also dallying in flights of utopian optimism. In both cases the authors are eager boosters of the changes they’re describing, in fact they are actively involved in making them happen, and both imagine the ultimate great new world that will emerge as a result.

Fanon wrote The wretched of the Earth in 1961. A psychiatrist from the eastern Caribbean island of Martinique and active in the Algerian Nationalist movement, he was participating in the eviction of French colonial rule even as he described the psychology and methods of the whole decolonization process. Fanon was also a communist and his writing is infused (and some say dated) with Marxist rhetoric. He ideolized the perfect decolonizaion/rabel movement, what it would entail and what should rise in its place.

Tapscott and Williams descibe a more recent revolution in their book, first published in 2006. Both writers are new economy evangelists in the thinktank New Paradigm and are as enthusiastic about quoting Corey Doctorow on the evils of copyright and DRM as they are about GM veep chair Bob Lutz gushing about the borderless, nationless corporation. The fling Web 2.0 jargon as much as Fanon tosses around the lexicon of communist revolution.

The two are strikingly different as well, of course. Some reviewers have confuse dthe collective struggle of communisim with what Wikinomics talks about in its examples on crowd-source collaboration and open source ideology.I think it’s pretty safe to say that Fanon would balk at this, but Tapscott and Williams put such thinking to rest early on. Mass collaboration is not communism. Self interest rests at its vary core and for them, the new normal of business opportunity is brinigng the chance for more people to generate personal wealth, not the descturction of the private business or the rebirth of the socialist dream.

But in light of this week’s battle of economic theories, I’d like to make the following assertion: Tapscott & Williams, preachers of new fluid Market economies, have more in common with Fanon the Marxist, while the unionists, environmental groups and even a number of the anarchists taking to the streets of London this week have more in common with the people they’re protesting inside the G20 summit, if seen in a certain light.

Tuesday, March 31, 3:20 pm Dove’s Cafe, Holloway Road
I know a journalist who changed her Facebook profile picture to show a notepad with the words “print is not dead.” I know the person who is revamping the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website, turning it into a multiple-user community driven news blog now that the paper has run into the ground. I’m a former print news person myself now working in the position of “digital media manager” contracting with people in the England, Scotland, the U.S., Canada and most recently, Slavakia. I’m a legal foreign resident of the UK, and a union member of an organization that actively argues against the use of foreign workers. They are, of course, completely off base on this subject. Unions took a strange quasi-nationlist viewpoint somewhere in the 90s it seems as a natural reflexive twinge against globalization instead of taking the logical step and advancing global cross-border representation.

As I said before, I’m a fan of Utopias, even ones that seem fairly dystopian to me. I’m to start a conversion course in psychology in the fall and one of the people I’m very interested in reading up on is B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who self-applied the title of “metaphysical speculator on a grand scale” and whose analysis of human behavior secured him the spot of most influential psychologist of the last century. I like that Skinner wasn’t afraid to look at his discoveries and advance ways of living around them, that too him looked entirely like paradise, though entirely horrifying to many of the rest of us.

Skinner’s  fiction, Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, describe, on the one hand, communal life devoid individualism and democracy, and where children are raised by the community in ignorance of who their actual parents are, and on the other hand, a place where the environment is clean, people work minimal hours and have copious amounts of personal time to devote to scientific discovery, the arts or whatever. Technology takes a lead role in easing the lives people here and “operant conditioning” ensures tht children grow up complient and socially productive.

Skinner’s vision wouldn’t fit with either Fanon or Tapscott & Williams in a number of ways, but one thing he shares with them is the need for moving forward. Advancing based on ideas, ability and creativity. Will we see that among G20 summit attendees? How about the people railing against them?

There are other types of utopias as well. A couple of weeks ago I was enjoying a brief utopia of my own: It was a warm sunny day down by the Thames, and I was walking with my son Jasper along the South Bank and decided to stop into the National Theatre bookshop following a quick nappie change in one of the building’s loos. There, next to the checkout, was the display of Evening Standard weekend edition with the headline blazing a typically provacative quote by the guy UK Islamophobes love to quote, Anjem Choudary: “I want to see flag of Allah flying over Downing St.”

Choudary also stated he wanted to see UK women in Burkas, people being stoned to death for infidelity, bla, bla, bla. There was no real context as to why the paper decided to interview some crackpot (again) who is essnetially an unemployed lawyer living on welfare and prone to saying crazy stuff. I’m sure it must have been a slow news day, so they called and asked “would you say that an Islamic flag flying over Downing Street would be a good thing? No, I mean would you just say that?”

The thing is, I’m not really worried about the prospect of this happening, and I don’t think anyone else seriously is, either. The UK is not about to undergo some vast tranformation into an Islamic state. Why should we consider it the threat the Evening Standard wants us to think it is. I think it sounds like an absolutely crap utopia, but then, it’s not mine. It’s likely not the utopia of the women he wants to see swaddled in burkas or the folks he wants to see stoned to death over a shag, either. But the fact that this guy wants to see it doesn’t mean we’re under threat of it actually happening. And I would postulate he’s at least recommending a change of some sort.

Brave New Worlds are often touted by angry people and politicians. Among the anti-globalisation camp, slogans such as “another world is possible” are pretty common. In the main, we saw the people who employ that line last Saturday while parading through The City in state-sanctioned demonstrations against the state. But do we ever see these other worlds as a result? Do we know what they would look like?

And who was out on Saturday? Marchers demanding to put workers first. Demonstrators upset about bank executives hoarding great piles of cash that was given to them in the form of already unpopular government handouts. People angry that unemployment rates are rising, home loans are out of reach and real estate values are dropping. People worried about looming environmental catastrophe.

By in large, these demonstrations weren’t disruptive. The marches went according to plan on paths pre-arranged and approved by police. BBC talking heads, those in parliament and even those heading up the different movements involved agreed, the message was delivered, and isn’t it a great system where everybody can get their voice heard?

It was sort of like in 2003, when the majority of most countries overwhelmingly opposed going to war in Iraq and more than a million people in London and around the world marched against it. Their voices were heard, registered, and everyone agreed we live in a great system in which people can openly criticize their governments. And then the lurid carnage kicked off in Iraq, which continues even today, and the number of people killed as a result has far exceeded the number of people who protested it just about seven years ago now.

I would imagine that the people who make the sorts of decisions that start wars or alter global economic policy looked at those people on Saturday — and the anti-war crowd back in 2003 — and figured their possible other world was about as likely as Sharia law coming out of parliament.

But tomorrow is April Fools Day, of “Financial Fools Day” as the protest camp is dubbing it, now that the anti-corporate camp has seized on branding strategies. Wednesday sees a shift to the other sort of demonstrations to take place this week. We’ve seen these before as well. At their best in recent history they stopped a couple of days worth of meetings by the WTO in Seattle at the end of the last millennium. They haven’t done it again. A lot of people I know and even more whom we’ve heard from via newspaper and TV are decrying in advance the violent actions that may or may not take place. A number of them were those taking part in the socially acceptable demonstrations on Saturday.

In the context of Fanon’s work, this is an example of the Left in the colonizing society eventually rallying around colonial interest. In the first section of The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence,” he dedicates a scattering of references to members of the colonizing class who intellectually take up the side of the colonized, until that is, the colonized take up action that is absolutely foreign to them and threatens to upset the basis of the relationship, most likely through aggressive means. He asserts that few intellectuals, if any, would want to live alongside “the native” in a completely decolonized context.

“Pacifist and law-abiding citizens, partisans, in fact, of order, the new order,” Fanon writes “these political groups bluntly ask the colonialist bourgeoisie what to them is essential: ‘Give us more power.’” Throughout the course of “On Violence” he makes the compelling case that these requests fall on deaf ears, because what an earth would possible compel corporate or governmental institutions to comply?

We can’t take this comparison too far. the Wednesday-Thursday anarchist crowd are not colonized people, but those who are using different, allegedly violent means to counter what they see is capitalist exploitation. So far, we have heard we are told we can expect a city-wide computer hack attack, thousands of anarchists converging on The Square Mile to attack police and anyone in at tie.

A colleague of mine has a boyfriend who works as an accountant in the city and is worried he’ll be pelted with rocks and rotten fruit by rabid anarchists. His workplace sent around a memo calling Wednesday a “mufti day,” which led me to ponder just what strange new Britishness is this? Wikidpedia tells me that the phrase mufti translates into “civilian attire” and that a mufti day is essentially casual clothes day. A mufti is an Islamic scholar and the phrase dates back to the 1800s when off-duty officers serving in The Orient dressed in the local attire. See, cultural appropriation fully engaged, and still no threat of Islamic flags.

Some of those who may commit these violent acts would likely knowingly or otherwise echo Fanon’s sentiment, that capitalism, and (in his book’s case) colonialism, set the context for the violence that the people are responding to. Fanon’s argument, with relation to the subjugated people living under colonial or occupation rule, could be argued to have merit. Whether the use of it (and depending if it actually takes place) has merit in The Square Mile by disaffected middle class youths in hoodies is another matter.

6:41pm St. Pancras Station
In 1811 the Luddite movement began to rage against the Industrial Revolution. They protested against and sabotaged automated looms that threatened to turn the textile industry into something that could produce their products on a mass scale at a lower price and employ cheaper labor.

In a tradional model of comparison we might look at this week’s protesters as our modern day Luddites, and they certainly invite the comparison. Anarchist websites such as Ian Bone are full of iconic imagery of movements such as these taking place in London and elsewhere throughout history. 19th century illustrations of bankers being set upon by the rabble, old newspaper coverage of uprisings, etc. adorn this and other UK anarchist websites.

But these are mixed with some common sense to counter the hysteria that traditional media tend to be whipping up about the coming demonstrations. In a post thanking “the press for giving us such limelight,” the Whitechapel Anarchist Group offers a reality check: “Yeah and we are really going to ‘Storm’ the Bank Of England aren’t we? Has anyone actually seen the building?? The height of the walls, the thickness of the concrete, the massive iron doors… Even the military would have a job on their hands with that one. Oh hang on I did read the other day that anarchists have a ‘tank’!”

“STOP PRESS: Animal Liberation Front have flooded the sewers with liberated minxes in a plan to drive the rats onto the streets of the City. Autonomists from Europe are riding on the backs of dolphins strapped with lazer guns to their heads up the River Thames. Anarchists have plants within the Metropolitian Police dressed in body armour ready to inflict blood curdlingly violence with tazers and batons on people wearing blue ties.” - Whitechapel Anarchists Group

Still, in their own messaging on blogs and in handouts, the Wednesday-Thursday protest crowd are placing themselves in a historical context, likening themselves to the Luddites and fellow travelers, like the scribes warring against the advent of the printing press, and later printers lamenting the web.

The G20 sumetteers would thus be the builders of the automated looms, the proponents of movable type and so forth. But the labels really don’t fit. Technology is being used to some degree on either side and mobile phones (the most invasive industry as far as effecting daily life goes) are a prime organizing tool of “la resistance.” Mobile phones have replaced nearly every other mode of communication. Wireless telephony now threatens service providers as it becomes usable on their devices. More on this sort of revolution later. And the G20 nations are not flogging the latest, greatest thing. They’re clinging to protectionist stances under other names and calling on the IMF to fix things.

Ahead of the ExCel Centre meeting, world leaders are already couching their entire part in this week’s escapade as “moving forward” and meeting the new realities of the modem world economy, but with little in the way of tangeable new ideas for doing it.

Let’s bring it back to the Ludites. Thney were battling against uncertanty. Much like the workers of the Pacific Northwest’s timber industry as old growth logging was being curtailed in the 1990s, the Ludites were reacting to a fear of the unknown. In this view, we can look at the protests as a continuation of it. The construct is changing, but the desire is to keep the same relationship: To identify as workers or consumers calling on governments and banks to give them their rights.

The Browns, the Obamas, the Berlesconis and, I don’t know, the rest who round out the 20, are fine with this model. As Fanon writes, when protesters make sigsn and go on the march, it’s a natural part of the barter. These world political and economic rulers are desperately trying to flog a dying horse to run just a little bit longer. Demonstrations fall well within the normal and expected rules of engagement, so can be categorized and left alone. They’ve got bigger things on their minds. Their economic model, bloated, unsustainable and sick on over-consumption, is giving way and they’ve no clue as to how to operate in any other environment. If it fails on their watch, they’re screwed. There’s no manual for it. So they want to flog the same utopia that more and more people see growing as likely as Islamic flags over Downing Street: Through our model of capitalism we can bring you affordable housing, education, the chance for decent health care and a clean environment and the possibility of a comfortable retirement. The expectation generation is starting to ease into the let down that this may be a myth, and the hissy fit is just beginning.

Viewed in this way, flogging the old construct of workers vs. the boss man, consumers against the company: most all of us are Luddites. But that doesn’t stop loom technology from spinning onward. The G20 governments are Luddites as well, trying to keep the same thing afloat even as change happens around them.

Wednesday, April 1, 8:35 am, Luton train to St. Pancras station (missing St. Pancras, and then awaiting the return train at the following Kentish town stop)
An easy commute in this morning what with so many city workers telecommuting, their various storefronts boarded up. If I may briefly swipe from Google news here, President Obama met Gordon Brown at Downing Street to discuss the “special relationship” and where to hang the Islamic flag, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is providing the hook for the obligatory world leader wives story, George Soros is framing himself as the referee as to whether the whole meeting will be a success and Police arrested five people over the weekend, seizing fake weaponry and several documents described as containing radical ideology. No one has toppled the system from within The Square Mile as of this writing. PCs all seem to be working virus free.

I’ve titled this week’s diary “Disruptive technologies,” which I’ve pulled from Wikinomics and am thinking of calling my new business. I just like the sound of it and the connotations. As the term is applied in the book, it happens when something, say bit torrent downloading, Napster, photo sharing, Creative Commons tools or whatever, enters the public market place and radically changes the rules.

“The new Web –which is really an internetworked constellation of disruptive technologies- is the most robust platform yet for facilitating and accelerating new creative disruptions” People, knowledge, objects, devices, and intelligent agents are converging in many to many networks where new innovation and social trends spread with viral intensity” - Wikinomics

According to Tapcott and Williams, the concepts behind disruptive technologies and aggragating mass collaboration aren’t just for making snazzy websites, they’re also suitable for considering how to run businesses, social movements, global trade and pretty much anything, and there are winners and losers, depending on who seizes on these opportunities: “The losers launched Web sites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers built walled gardens. The winners build public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners innovated with their users. The losers jealously guarded their data and software interfaces. The winners shared them with everyone.”

If we apply that to what’s going on with the G20 meeting, with its wide security parimiter, and exclusive list of attendees (leaders of top economic powers) and its lack of democracy or transparancy in process, we come to the conclusion that the Wikinomics authors would dub them, and thus their stated intentions — saving the economy — to be the losers.

If the demonstrators seek to disrupt the natural goings on of things, what can we say about their means with regards to Wikinomics or Fanon’s ideas about what makes a successful overturning of a system?

Today’s protest plans are universally being dubbed “a carnival” with all its celebretory connotations. The likes of Kate Nash and Billy Bragg will be using the demonstration as a venue to perform, which almost seems like a more successful marketing scheme for selling records than for taking a stand against The Man. The music magazine MNE reports that Bragg will perform ‘The World Turned Upside-Down’, “an English rebel song he popularised in the ’80s about the Diggers, a 17th century group of revolutionaries who tried to bring about a form of communism,” thus reinforcing the historical context that the various anarchist movements have established, and which the media has turned to in explanations of why demonstrations are mere growing pains that need to be expected.

Today’s Carnival organizer organiser Camilla Power also joins the lines of Brown, the police, et al when she says “I don’t think violence is any use whatsoever. I don’t think it would achieve the popular empowerment that a really lovely carnival atmosphere would achieve. This is a day for us to take over the space of the city and to laugh those bankers out of town.”

Not to justify violence, but let’s all be realistic. When in the history of the world have bankers been laughed out of town? Some have taken more seriously the rhetoric of University of East London anthropologist professor Chris Knight, suspended for “inciting violence” by maintinaing his group of merry pranksters reserve the right to pursue “the nuclear option” should they be pushed their by police.

Some Knight quotes (nicely compiled by the Workers’ Liberty website):

• “If he [former RBS boss Fred Goodwin] winds us up any more I’m afraid there will be real bankers hanging from lampposts”.
• “If they [the police] want violence, they’ll get it… All hell will break loose… Things could get nasty… Storm the banks”.
• All lights had to be put out after 8.30pm on Tuesday, or “our agents will find ways to enter the building, even if it means knocking down doors and ­windows to break in.”
• “I know I’m in my own bubble. But in my bubble I’m predicting we’ll have a velvet revolution in the next week or so …The police, backed up by the army, will try to hold the ExCel centre. While they hold that, they will lose London. Then I think Gordon Brown will go…”

I’m not the only one to spot more theatrical bravado than serious threats in Knight’s tone. I see more of the anthropologist at play than the revolutionary at work here. It’s almost like Skinner applying his ideas to paper for another speculative piece of fiction based on his theories. It’s as if Knight is seeing what he can stir up based on what he knows through the study of  societies.

Workers’ Liberty shrugs it all off as “Stunts and theatrics” in a web post titled “G20, theatrics, and stupidity.” The writer says these antics are “part of effective socialist activity. The prosaic routine of trade-union damage-limitation through sedulous attendance at committees and processing of grievances is very important – it builds the molecules of working-class organisation on which all revolutionary ‘compounds’ depend – and so is the day-to-day work of socialist literature sales and discussion meetings. But they can not and will not inspire young people into activist commitment without being leavened by colour and drama.”

He lost me at “effective.”

Knight, like the others, is offering a historical contxt, and one of rich tradition, but what are these traditions? If contextualized in the speak and imagery of the Diggers, the Luddites and the scribe’s mad rampage against the printing press, isn’t the result also already predetermined? The word I’m looking for is “failure.” How much do you want to invest in a doomed prospect? The horse that protesters seem to be betting on has as likely a chance of coming in first as the one that G20 summit attendees are pinning their hopes to.

“The metropolitan Left is in a quandary. It is well aware of the true fates of the “natives,” the pitiless opression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, there are limits; these guerillas should make every effort to show some chivelry. This would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left berates them: “You’re going to far; we can’t support you any longer.” They don’t care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it’s worth. As son as the war began, they relized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, from the preface of The Wretched of the Earth

Thursday, April 2, various locations
I’m too much on the move to record datelines today. I received a text this morning: “protester died at g20 demo at 7:30 pm yesterday. NHS says he collapsed in bank, attended to by paramedics, but died in ambulance. Solidarity demo at 1pm.”

I get texts like this. I like it. I get emails like this. No matter where I live, I subscribe to email lists like this, meet people who will send texts like this. it makes the place move and breathe. It’s news you won’t get or see anywhere else. Participate or don’t, but here it is.

Ian Tomlinson was a 47 year old guy who got caught between rioting anarchists and cops. And outside the fact that there’s actually been no authoritative proof about whether he was actually he wasn’t involved* in the demonstration in question, I note that the messages people are leaving in his honor at a makeshift memorial in front of the Bank of England, eulogizing how the man was fighting for a better world.

* INTERLUDE: Tuesday, April 7: The verdict is posted online: A) Tomlinson was not part of the demonstration in any way. B) Police earned their nickname, “the filth,” as it is shown that one officer is directly responsible for his death. The Guardian has on its website a video clip of Tomlinson walking through the protest area, hands in pockets, from his job selling newspapers, shortly before he died. The clip shows Tomlinson being assaulted by a police officer brandishing a baton (from behind, as all cowards do). Tomlinson was doing nothing to provoke the attack as the video clearly shows and the attack came without warning as the officer who attacked him, or any around them, offered any sign of a warning.

Looking around at the blonde dreadlocks and big, hoop-hole ear piercings at this particular protest, the trappings of the “modern primitive” snapping digital photos of the impromptu mourning session for Tomlinson with their mobile phones, I wonder if today’s tech-savvy demonstrators like the world envisioned by the diggers, luddites, etc., who they now model themselves on. Wednesday’s marches were in honor of the Diggers. At the G20 Meltdown website, we see that the manifesto asks “Can we oust the bankers from power? Can we get rid of the corrupt politicians in their pay? Can we guarantee everyone a job, a home, a future? Can we establish government by the people, for the people, of the people? Can we abolish all borders and be patriots for our planet? Can we all live sustainably and stop climate chaos? Can we make capitalism history?” It then cribs form the Obama campaign, offering a resounding “Yes we can!”  All great goals. Rhetorical question: Did the Diggers, whom they model themselves on, do this?

The Diggers was a phenomenal, short-lived movement running between 1642 and around 1648 (Anyone seriously looking at attempted utopian societies can’t help but notice how short lived most of them are). The Diggers were espousing a number of  ideas that a lot of people are just coming around to today: that people are a a part of the ecology and must live in a sustainable way and limit impact on the environment, they worked against authoritarianism and for an egalitarian, and agrarian-based society in which everyone works the land together. But they had burned out in just a few decades as the landlords, government and other moneyed interests around them tended to act fast to crush them whenever they arose. They were revolutionary for their time, but with a definite use-by date. The movement was dependent that everyone goes along in order for it to succeed. As history has pointed out at some great cost, everyone seldom goes along with any single idea.

There was a quiet, sombre tone to the day-after mourning for Ian Tomlinson. Far different from the day before when the “Four-Horsemen of the Apocalypse” marchers demolished an RBS bank branch and for some reason some anarchists decided to face paint themselves in the likeness of Heath Ledger’s Joker from Batman Begins. Talk about the strangest mixed-message of them all: Take a mainstream corporate Hollywood representation of what an anarchist is supposed to be (a psychopath) and go to town. It sort of reminded me how the anti-Scientology group decided to use V for Vendetta masks to protest Tom Cruise. Nonsensical off-topic pop culture reference anyone?

The press gave appropriately polite day-two coverage of the tribute. The whole thing fit into the popular consciousness script: warriors mourning one of their fallen. At about 12:30 I left the scene, strolled a few blocks down to where the Youth Fight For Jobs march to the ExCel Centre was kicking off. TwentySomethings and teens in identical T-shirts gathered at the London Assembly building, doing a call of “we fight and response “for jobs.” I followed them a while until they passed by A DLR stop where i hopped a train and decided to forgo the march.

The ExCel Centre stop, and the two preceding and following it were closed. According to the Google maps on my phone, I was somewhere two and a half miles west of where the summit and where the main protest was taking place. Seeing an area of a city amid a police lockdown gives you an idea of how quickly civil liberties can be tossed out. Miles of road devoid of human beings who aren’t in police uniform. It was like wandering a scene of I am Legend. I worked my way back through a series of estate complexes and park paths until reaching the small collection of vocal groups who had bothered to march all the way to the Docklands from the city.

The protest was along the main route where armor-plated limousines would be passing and included representatives from the usual corners of the activista enclaves, calling for a free Tibet, a free Gaza, a free environment, free food, free jobs and so on. IT was a small crowd, vocal, though mostly to one another. It was only the group of Ethiopians that seemed to be targeting the outside world or the BBC crew stationed among them. Eager to catch a glimpse of Obama as he whisked by in The Beast, they were mostly dressed in thier Sunday bests, holding aloft signs and mock coffins and showing anger that Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was invited to the G20 summit and accuse his ethnic-based federalist policies of promoting fighting back home.

I was just getting ready to take off and take the long stroll to the nearest DLR station when The Youth Fight Fr Jobs brigade showed up, at the end of their march, still chanting “Youth Fight” and “For Jobs,” though a few disreetly sipping from beer cans illustated that there may have been a stop off somewhere along the way.

Different people have varying perspectives on this movement, and when people like Tony Been speak, I give them some credit. On Democracy Now, the longest serving Labour member of Parliament talked about the new global realities.

AMY GOODMAN: Tony Benn, explain what the war in Afghanistan, or Iraq, for that matter, has to do right now with the G20, who are taking on these economic issues, this global economic meltdown.

TONY BENN: Well, they’re connected, because, you see, one of the great dangers of an economic crisis is it can lead to war. I remember Hitler coming to power very well. There were six million unemployed in Germany, and Hitler said it’s all due to the Jews and the communists and the trade unions. “Give me power,” said Hitler, “and I will give you jobs.” And he did. Half the unemployed, he put in the arms factories. The other half, he put in the German army. And we had another bloody war. And the two European wars from 1914 to 1945, in thirty-one years, cost 105 million lives, were lost in two wars, and that was not unpredicted with the grave economic crisis in the 1930s.

So far so good, but here’s what he had to say about the Youth Fight For Jobs campaigners: “And when I look at them, I think my generation made a complete muck of the world, and here’s a generation coming along that, through the internet and Facebook and all that, understand each other. They don’t have the hostilities about religion or race. They just know that they’ve got to put the world at rights, or we will end up with a nuclear war that will destroy everybody. I have huge confidence in the younger people.”

One of the interesting things at the demonstration area at the ExCel Centre was how racially divided it mostly was. The protests against ethnic fighting in the Congo and Ethiopia were in one area near the road while the more economic/climate crowd of middle class white kids were in the parking area nearby and along the road at the other end of the fenced-in demonstation zone. When the Youth Fight For jobs group arrived, they stayed near the entrance, had their speeches and left.

According to their website, Youth Fight For jobs website, the demands are:

• “The right to a decent job for all, with living wage of at least £8 an hour.”
• “No cheap labour apprenticeships.”
• All apprenticeships to pay at least minimum wage, with a job guaranteed at the end.
• “No university fees.”

“And I will give you jobs,” Hitler said. Anyway, hardly the multi-cultural global call for economic or human rights parity. None among them melded in with the Congolese or Ethiopian human rights crowd. Along with the call for better wages for university graduates there wasn’t a call to free Bitukan Mideksa, end Congo genocide or, outside a few Unison “welfare nor warfare” signs, calls to stop fueling war in the horn of Africa.

Fanon would have recognized the divisions right off the bat. Williams and Tabscott might congratulate their use of new media for campaigning, but I doubt they would look at their campaigning points as innovative ways of participating in the new economy. But I think all authors, in their own perspectives, would be especially dubious of the group’s almost fetishized clinging to the past. Much like the anarchists and their Diggers and the G20 leaders and their Great Depression comparisons, the union youth movement had their historical context firmly in place. In the final Youth Fight For Jobs speech of the day, one of the march leaders took the megaphone to deliver their message, only drowned out occasionally with cheering when the Ethiopian crowd thought it saw Obama drive by.

The young man speaking said today’s march was in the spirit and tradition of The Jarrow March of October 1936, when 200 marchers walked nearly 300 miles from Jarrow to London to lobby Parliament for more jobs and better wages. And this is important: The speaker said “and as we know, they didn’t get anything they asked for, except for £1 for the train home, where they continued to struggle in porverty.” That’s you’re bloody model, is it? That’s the proud tradition you’re carrying on?

on the way home, I decided I needed to stop in for a pint, and decided I’d take a stop in the Westminster neighborhood, or what could be described as the heart of Old Governemnt. The only paper really doing post-game summit coverage at that hour of the day was the Evewning Standard, and I found it quite a strange sensation to see paragraphs I agreed with in Andrew Gilligan’s analysis:

“For weeks, everyone involved in the G20 has been hysterically bigging it up. Gordon Brown hopes, or at least hoped, that it would rescue his premiership. The demonstrators have been feeding the media with thrilling predictions of mass chaos in the streets, hoping (alas, it seems, largely in vain) to provoke a police overreaction that would give them the moral high ground. Newspapers have been only too pleased to co-operate – it makes a great story.

But just as the anarchists in the City needed reporters and photographers to give substance to what turned out to be a relatively minor protest, the great circus of the summit itself relies on the media to confer on it an importance it does not fully deserve. And above all the suits and the anarchist crusties, those two great vessels each equally empty of inspiration, need each other.”

This post is not advocating a copy of Fanonian Marxism or adopting everything promoted by Wikinomics (though considering some of the latter couldn’t hurt either the economy or progressive movements). But both are examples of what economic thinkers and progressive movements desperately need. New ideas and actual outlooks that can be judged on their merits are in short supply. People will not be rushing out to spend, spend and spend based on what they heard on Thursday. Meanwhile, there was nothing in what transpired on the streets this week that would lead anyone to join any of these revolutions.

Archwilio y Teacher Support Cymru canolfan gwybodaeth am cefnogaeth ar faterion gwaith neu personol. Neu cysylltwch a ni ar y rhif cymorth 0800 085 5088.

253-xxx-xxxx: hejhef

d3: What’s up?

253-xxx-xxxx: Who is this

253-xxx-xxxx: Hello?

d3: You just texted me, who are you?

253-xxx-xxxx: Stephanie who r u

d3: Andy

Stephanie: Do i know u?

d3: I don’t think so. I know no Stephanies as of yet.

Stephanie: Oh.. how did u get my number or how did i get urs

d3: Don’t know. I replied to you.

Stephanie: Oh that was my sister had wroung number

d3: Well, ok. Nice chatting.

Stephanie: How old r u

d3: 37. Hey, do you know someone with a kid named Even? I’m wondering how he fared in that school fight.

And so we still don’t know what came of Even. Drat. The case remains open.

Fr: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
Watz up Tray
———————
3:43PM Tue, Oct 2

To: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
Tray?
———————
3:46PM Tue, Oct 2

Fr: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
u hear about even
———————
3:47PM Tue, Oct 2

To: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
Nope. Whats up?
———————
3:50PM Tue, Oct 2

Fr: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
He got in a fight with a 7th grader with 2 minutes left in school
———————
3:55PM Tue, Oct 2

To: 1-360-xxx-xxx
———————
think u may have the wrong number. I hope he survived tho. This is Andy. Do i know u? Phone number is not familiar.
———————
4:02PM Tue, Oct 2

No reply followed. I now wonder on occasion, what became of Even?