Listening to the radio this morning I was struck by the odd similarity between three of the major news items.

Firstly, ubiquitously, there’s the economic crisis – which more and more seems to boil down to the fact that people – that’s you, me and them – got greedy. With the boss of Barclays now earning nearly 120 times the wage of the average employee (when 30 years ago it was about 13 time) it seems people are finally waking up and demanding equality, and movement towards a financial system in which people, not just profits, matter.

Secondly, there’s the Leveson inquiry into the behaviour of the press, and in particular the mess over phone hacking. Behind all of the lurid details of whose messages were listened to and which celebrities were outed for doing what, we have to remember that the driving force behind all of this was simple: selling more papers. We simply cannot express disgust at what went on if we too were titillated into reading the stuff. It seems now that finally people are waking up and demanding a media in which people, not just puerile stories for profits, matter.

Thirdly, a shocking report into the state of the care system, which has left countless elderly and vulnerable people abused and maltreated.

‘Findings included carers neglecting tasks because councils paid for too little of their time.’

As the reporter highlighted on a piece on the radio this morning, people are finally waking up to the fact that a genuine sense of empathy needs to be restored to a care system that has been run by council accountants and bean-counters for too long.

With all of these disperate stories, the over-arching sense I get is that there appears to be an awakening to the terrible poverty at the heart of capitalism. The market has failed, not because it hasn’t always turned a profit, but because the market has let people down. Capitalism has proved profitable for some, but has impoverished the spirits of so so many more.

Over the weekend I went to the Bank of Ideas building that the Occupy London protesters are now squatting in Sun Street. And though yes, there are unrealistic idealists, what I found was a network of concerned and genuinely caring people.

Perhaps in the midst of what is a pretty depressing news cycle at the moment we can find hope in this resurgence of empathy, of a wider realisation that people, ordinary people, do matter, and our laws and systems do need to reflect that first and foremost.

One of the key questions that has been often asked about the ‘Occupy’ protests is ‘what are your proposed alternatives?’ This, I think, is often asked with a background attitude of ‘I really don’t think you have any alternatives, do you?’ The implication being, before you moan about how bad things are, make sure you have a fully worked solution to how you can undertake improvements.

One comment on a previous posted ended with this:

What alternative ways of living are the occupiers proposing? and what alternative are you proposing? If you’re really suggesting the occupiers mutiny, as opposed to just complain, then surely that entails appropriating St Paul’s as rebel territory and mugging any banker that comes within range? If that’s not the plan, what are the new ways of living that will transform our society?

Couple of points on this.

Firstly, it is part of the corruption of power to insist that any protest or critique against the dominant system comes fully formed. When you’re being beaten down, it is entirely valid to simply scream in frustration, without any idea what changes need to be made.

Secondly, that said, I do want to reflect on the sorts of changes that I think we need to see. Importantly, they do not involve mugging bankers. In fact, in some ways it would be inappropriate to blame the bankers at all. Why? Because bankers are not ‘bad guys in an essentially good system.’ They simply lucky guys in an essentially unfair and unjust system.

Zizek makes this point in his typical style in the video above, when he comments that Hitler was never violent enough. Why? Because, however radical, he worked only to make the system work for him. Counter this, Gandhi was far more violent – why? Because he wanted to dismantle the system entirely. He wanted the whole thing to stop and change.

So the point is not to mug the bankers as some attempt to redistribute the wealth that they have pooled into their possession. The only ethic behind this is jealousy – you’ve got more than me, so give me some. The fundamental point is that we need a different system – or, more poignantly, a different ethic.

In other words, the changes that need to be made need first to come at the inner, personal level. We need to deal with our own desires to be rich and wealthy, to use more than our fair share of resources. Without that, all we are wanting is to swap places with those who have done better than ourselves out of the current system.

Interestingly, the debabcle at St Pauls fits nicely into this. Why? Because at the centre of the debate is the ethical question of what constitutes ‘Christian’ economics. What Would Jesus Do? is the right question here, but, it seems, the Anglican church has come a very long way from that original radical ethic. Compare this:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

(Acts 4, 32 – 35)

to this:

The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.

(38th Article of the Church of England)

There are nuances and interpretations, I’m well aware. But the grandeur and opulence of St Pauls does seem to sit rather too comfortably in the Corporation of London…and does seem a very very long way away from the spirit of radical equality that the gospels and new testament talk so much about.

Mutiny

Or just read the text…

In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from here under the imposing shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, a plain, leather-bound volume went on sale among the fine bibles and illuminated religious texts of the day.

What it lacked in aesthetics it made up with its arresting title: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. Captain Charles Johnson’s book was an instant hit, lapped up by the same crowds who flocked to the banks of the Thames to see the bodies of freshly executed pirates hanging in chains.

Why, nearly 300 years later, do we still flock to all things pirate? Why are we happy for our children to dress up in eye patches and torn trousers to go to pirate parties when we would probably be less happy to send them off to one with an ‘aggravated robbery’ theme?

The brutally violent lives of sea-faring 18th Century thieves have long been domesticated into polite children’s books with titles like Pirates Don’t Change Nappies and Shiver Me Letters – a Pirate ABC, yet while children point cardboard swords into the backs friends, demanding they walk to their death from chipboard planks laid on the floor, we know that Somali fishermen are holding men at gun-point, demanding millions of dollars in ransom payments, while across in Brussels, having won a huge section of the youth vote in Sweden, the leader of The Pirate Party is enjoying the trappings of being a member of the European parliament. In countless homes hooky DVDs that Hollywood technologists will have used sophisticated encryption and watermarking techniques to prevent copying of are being watched illegally, following frightening warnings about copyright and media theft, despite the story-line itself being buxomly full of swash-buckling thievery. Perhaps the striped t-shirt and eye-patch is all wrong. Children should be sent to parties with a plastic bag of pirated movies, or arrived in inflatable ribs, toting AK47’s.

Pirates are everywhere. Why? In his 1724 book, Captain Charles Johnson called them ‘hostis humanis generis’ – the enemies of all mankind – so why do pirates adorn t-shirts, skateboards… and even baby bottles?

Why do we think children should be dressed in images of death and violence?

The reason is this: deep down, we know that pirates say something to us about freedom from oppression, about standing up to systemic violence, and about taking back free access to that which has been enclosed and privatised by the wealthy.

Captain Johnson’s description of pirates – as romantic and sometimes daring people, who were nonetheless needlessly violent, greedy and out to pillage all they could from the good Empires of England and Spain – is the impression most of us are left with now.

The historical truth is somewhat different. Sailors aboard Royal Naval ships and merchant vessels were some of the sorriest men alive. Here were poor men who found themselves, in the words of surgeon of the time, ‘caught in a machine from which there was no escape, bar desertion, incapacitation, or death.’ Historian Marcus Rediker writes that

‘sailors suffered cramped, claustrophobic quarters, “food” that was often as rotten as it was meagre… they experienced as a matter of course devastating disease, disabling accidents, shipwreck and premature death. They faced discipline from their officers that was brutal at best and often murderous.’

The merchant ships were the engine of the emerging global capitalism. They transported slaves from West Africa to the plantations, and sugar and other commodities back to England – where they were sold for huge profits, all of which went to the small number of merchants and shareholders. The sailors on these vessels were utterly excluded from this wealth. Though providing the skill and muscle to make the entire enterprise work, they were brutally treated and could expect to live only a couple of years. If injured, they were thrown overboard or abandoned on land to die.

The decision to ‘turn pirate’ was a decision to wrestle back some autonomy. These sailors knew they were going to die anyway – at least by turning pirate they could enjoy life for a while. ‘A merry life, but a short one,’ was their motto.

When they did turn pirate, life on a ship changed dramatically. Officers were democratically elected – and could be democratically removed too. Food was shared equally among men of all rank. When booty was collected the Captain only took two shares where the lowest took one – income differentials that would make modern CEOs faint. Pirate Captains like Bartholomew Roberts had his crew sign up to a code, which demanded no fights on board, no gambling, and lights out by 8pm. Moreover, anyone injured in the course of duties could expect generous compensation. Loss of a limb would be met with a payment of around £20,000 in today’s money. This was healthcare for the common man as had been never seen before.

Have you ever wondered at the clichéd view of the pirate with their wooden leg, hooked hand and eye patch? It may seem ridiculous, but does this not speak to us of a society that did not discriminate against the disabled? Pirate vessels were hugely inclusive, welcoming people of all races and faiths. Pirates would attack slave ships and invite slaves to join them – setting free those that didn’t.

Yes, there was violence and theft. But we have to understand that the levels of violence were dramatically less than that which they had come from, and they saw their theft from Royal ships as no more than what they deserved – for these merchants with their special charters were simply robbing other ships from other nations, and plundering colonies of their natural resources.

What pirates were doing was reacting against a capitalism that was exploiting them, but from which they were totally excluded. Rediker again:

‘Pirates abolished the wage relation central to the process of capitalist accumulation. So rather than work for wages using the tools and machine (the ship) owned by a capitalist merchant, pirates commanded the ship as their own property and shared equally in the risk of their common adventure.’

They were, in other words, standing in the long tradition of beating down those who enclosed ‘the commons.’ Back on land, in the years surrounding the ‘golden age’ of piracy, landowners were increasingly enclosing land that had been worked in common in order to work it for their own profits. This movement of enclosure was one of the most destructive acts in English history, as it removed people from the land that sustained them, and eventually led to them moving to cities to sell their labour in the factories of the industrial revolution.

This is why pirates still resonate with us now: pirates always emerge where economies or cultures have become ‘blocked.’ Where the commons has become enclosed for the good of the wealthy, pirates will rise up and agitate until things change.

We see this in the Atlantic piracy of the early 1700’s, which bubbled up as global shipping grew, making a few very wealthy, at a huge human cost.

We see this in the book piracy of the same time, where illicit publishers like ‘Henry Hill the Pirate’ disobey the crown and the guild of printers to produce cheap editions of books ‘for the benefit of the poor.’ Publishing was a blocked monopoly – the crown granting the right to print to a very small number of guilded printers, who in turn would never print anything critical of the crown.

And we see this in Somalia too – where men who have had their waters ransacked of fish by huge European trawlers, and then poisoned by surrounding states dumping toxic waste, see the billions of dollars of consumer goods being shipped past their barren shores in steel containers and think, ‘you owe me a little of that.’

We see it too closer to home in our music collections, where people grew tired of another £15 on an album of tired songs written by bands with fat contracts who frankly didn’t deserve it. Mick Jagger can rant all he likes about wanting 70 year copyright on his material, but he must know deep down that all The Stones did was sing the blues, and the blues have always been drawn from the deep musical commons that stretches way back before recording was even possible.

And now we see it here at St Paul’s too.

Why do find pirates everywhere? Because we know that in every part of life ‘the commons’ is being eroded and enclosed and privatised for the good of the few at the expense of the many.

Bar a few village ponds and the odd piece of heath, the earth we walk on has been enclosed, and the shared rights that we used to hold together are now held by private owners. We have survived the factories, yes. But our alienation from the land that we still depend on for our daily sustenance, and for the raw materials that are the building blocks of our houses, clothes and possessions has had a profound impact. Unaware of how food was made, we started to lack any care for what ended up on our plates. Unaware of what went into the clothes we wore, we allowed sweat-shops to prosper. Lifted from the earth by air-conditioned cars – privatized, enclosed transportation – we remained ignorant of a climate that is out of control. And as we plug in our headphones to listen to another X-Factor winner covering a song we can no longer quite place, we no longer hear the buskers on the underground, moved from their tunnels into specially branded zones.

We didn’t have time to think about these things, because rather than spending our time living, we had to spend more time earning a living: 9 – 5 the polite contractual joke as we do all we can to rake in what we can to pay the mortgage while we can and save what little we can for the rapidly retreating retirement that we can hardly believe will ever materialise.

We didn’t have time for leisure, because inflation had forced everything up save our salaries, all to bail out a tiny clique of money-men who bet wildly on how much debt they could sell us, and, having lost big-time, went crying to the government, threatening to pull the whole financial system down around them if their private losses couldn’t be shared publicly.

Yes, the only commons we have left are the publicly-owned debts we share having bailed out the privately owned banks.

We didn’t have time, we didn’t think, we weren’t aware. But fuck it, now we have time, now we are thinking, and now we are aware. And now were are here, at St Pauls, where pirate mania first began.

We are not much brutalised, nor often beaten or left unpaid, but our lives are no less reduced, narrowed and controlled by powerful forces far beyond our control. So now, more than ever, we need pirates to rise up again against the princes, the captains and merchants, raise the Jolly Roger, and restore to life some democracy, some fairness… and not a little merriment.

Avast occupiers, stay strong and mutiny!

The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant.

There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement  - though I’m not sure if this was a compliment or not – and that without the scandal of police brutality (or inevitability, one might say) it would have already died down and disappeared.

Either way, it’s happening: people are occupying Wall Street, and demanding… well, just some basic justice. Teachers and nurses and factory workers didn’t run up toxic debts – gambles, effectively – that have cost the world economy trillions of dollars and meant spending on services for those less well off has had to be cut. No, that was those in the banking sector. And their reward? Government bail out money, and Christmas bonuses. Privatised profits and nationalised losses. Pretty damned perfect.

If you’ve visited here at all in the past couple of months you’ll know that I’m working on a book on piracy, and why we continue to be fascinated with these maritime thieves. Well, it’s proving to be utterly absorbing, and I’m genuinely excited about how it’s turning out. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a niche area and I don’t expect it to sell hugely – but I do believe that for those out there undertaking activism like Occupy Wall Street, it may contain some very useful stuff.

Here’s the thesis: pirates emerge whenever what has been traditionally in ‘the commons’ becomes enclosed for private benefit. Those who turn pirate are not the powerful, nor the influential. They are the oppressed, those who have simply had enough and have no more to lose. Having been stripped of everything by an unjust system, they decide that they might as well live a ‘short but merry life’ for a while, because they’re dead either way.

This ambivalent affinity with death is important. Pirates sailed under ‘the jolly roger’ – a flag that did not signify so much that they were bearers of death to others, but that they represented the dead, the discarded, the rejected themselves. Because they were already ‘dead’ they had nothing to lose. Now here’s the thing: we tend to think of pirates as thieves, but after the reading I’ve done, I think it’s more accurate to say that their thievery was simply them getting on with what they’d always done, but for their own good, rather than that of the system. Moreover, they did so in a way that was more equitable (their code demanded that profits were shared equally) and more inclusive (they were multicultural, multiethnic and multifaith.)

This is what ended up scaring the sh*t out of the emerging capitalist empires of Spain and England: here were a strata of people who simply didn’t care. They were living ‘off the map’ and outside of the ethical code that reinforced class structures and kept the money flowing to the wealthy princes and merchants, even though the ships – the engines of this new global economy – were run entirely by brutalised sailors.

So here’s my tuppence-worth for those out in Wall Street, or Greece, or wherever:

1. Ask yourselves this: how much do you still have to lose?
2. Pirating the bankers will not necessarily mean thieving from them. It will certainly mean carrying on what you do best, but in an economic loop that is more equitable, and better connected to ‘the commons.’ The transition towns movement has a lot of good to say on this.
3. Appreciate that your occupation is a TAZ. It will meet resistance, and it will be broken, but while it holds you should use the liberated space to create and build social and physical networks that will survive and thrive and regroup once the inevitable enforced clearance comes.
4. History is with you. But it says this: you won’t win this round, and you’ll be portrayed as losers. It will take time, but good things will come – not at first from above, but among one another.

Not had much time to post – flat out at work preparing for a school inspection, and reading and writing when I can too. All of which ironically brings me to post about the very idea of work… It starts with rather a good story, which I hope you’ll bear with before I try to make my point…

I’m reading The Many-Headed Hydra – Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Life of the Revolutionary Atlantic – which opens with the fascinating story of the Sea Venture, which left England for Virginia in 1609.

The ship was commissioned by the Virginia Company to restock (and effectively save) the fledgling settlement in the Americas. It was part of a fleet of three ships carrying supplies, criminals being sent to work on the plantation, skilled labourers and Virginia Company money-men. The Admiral of the Company was even himself on board. It was thus a micro-society, containing men and women of every class. And it was a new boat whose timbers had not yet sealed.

After 6 weeks at sea the fleet hit a storm, and the Sea Venture was separated from the others. They battled for three days in a hurricane, and the boat was taking on water so badly that every man, woman and child – regardless of status or position was tasked to bail out constantly to save the ship. Exhausted, they eventually considered themselves lost and, thinking themselves so close to death, cracked open the supplies of rum, deciding that now they had worked together with no regard for class, if they were going to die they might as well die together in the same way in a merry feast.

As they drank, the helmsman spied land and wrecked the ship on Bermuda, whereupon all were saved. Expecting a hostile, haunted isle, they were surprised to find it a virtual utopia. Food was plentiful, the environment beautiful… they could all survive with very little effort.

A long way from home or rescue, most of them set about making a new life for themselves – a life far better than they had ever known. They needed do little work, and once shelters were made they enjoyed themselves and considered themselves new Adams and Eves.

But a small number of them – those who had positions of power within the Virginia Company – were very unhappy about this. They demanded that everyone work to make new ships, and that they should aim to make it on to Jamestown. Of course, the rest disagreed, knowing that as soon as they reached there they would be worked literally to death as slave labourers.

Considering it their divine duty, the Virginia Company officials set about re-establishing class divisions and a culture of hard work, and did so with the establishment of capital punishment: killing those who refused to tow the line.

Thus, eventually, the vast majority ended up back on ships and heading for Jamestown, which they found starving and ravaged. Most died there.

The story is a famous one, and even at the time created quite a stir. Shakespeare almost certainly based The Tempest on it, and many philosophers were troubled by the problems it created: viz, are human beings created for work or leisure?

As I’m so under the cosh at the moment with my own work, it’s something I’m thinking a lot about. Why am I working so hard? Certainly not all of it is for personal satisfaction, and far too much is about paying the bills. It’s a vicious circle of needing to work to make enough money to sustain the lifestyle I’m told I need if only I’d work a bit harder…

And all the while there are those who do so little, and make so much. Step up Carlos Tevez…

The nagging question is this: to what extent are we still suffering this Protestant Capitalist work ethic? The movement of people off the land and into the factories was certainly driven in part by hard-core protestantism…

Early settlers in the Americas were shocked by how little the Native Americans did – and yet how well fed they remained. We just seem so tied into this crazy system of labour, and it’s killing us all, and the planet, and I don’t really see much being modelled elsewhere. Most of the church seems to preach a gospel of labour. ‘They chose their preachers like they chose their horses,’ as RS Thomas wrote, ‘for their hard work.‘

We may have patched up their homes a bit, but we still demand so much from the working classes. And still punish hard those who step out of line and demand an alternative life…

I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view.

One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed his production line techniques to make the Model T: there were suddenly so many of the damn things coming out of the factory gates every day that it became a nightmare working out where to put them all.

I think this throws up some interesting points. Firstly, if I say I’m going to a park, there’s an inherent idea of freedom and movement within a city context. A park is an open space, where we have a wider and more open horizon. But a car park is precisely opposite to this. Cars are sold to us as objects that give us masses of freedom – think of all the ads with uncluttered open roads – and yet in a car park we find them castrated and motionless: the car park is a place to store objects that are redundant. The ceilings are low and dark, the space reduced in order to pack more vehicles in.

We mostly use car parks when we travel in to city centres for shopping. So the car park – this problem space created by the economics of mass production, is the place where we go in order to consume and transport back more and more stuff, all of which has been sold to us via the same message that it will bring us more freedom and self-worth.

I think this is why car parks, no matter how well dressed up, are inherently depressing places: they are where the consumer dream hits the concrete buffers. All these things that have promised so much, transported in cars that cocoon us in leather and conditioned air… and here we are on level 4, underground, trying to find the right change, the smell of piss burning in the stairwell.

Thought it would be good to catch people up a little on what I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. As you’ll know if you’ve read here for any time, one of my areas of interest is around pirates and piracy. I posted a series entitled ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ some time ago which you can get to here (start at first post, obviously). That prompted quite a bit of discussion on various sites, which I rounded up into some links here.

Having taken the discussion about pirates a little further in the publication of Other (US version here) I felt as though I had probably done enough. However, things never quite work out that way, and a series of insights I’ve had recently a) through some psychotherapy and b) in conversations with Pete and others have led me to want to write a more comprehensive work on the place of pirates within our culture.

The basic thesis will be this: pirates emerge wherever cultures have become ‘blocked.’ This applies to the traditional idea of sea-faring pirates, who, as I’ve explored a little in Other, arose as a rebellion against the merchants and princes who enslaved them. They were victims of a blocked economic order, and their rebellion was an essential act of unblocking which eventually gave rise to a more equitable system.

Moreover, I’ll want to argue that this piratical act was part of the founding principle of America – called by some ‘the first pirate nation – and that this principle has been sadly lost. By exploring the phenomenal rise in media piracy I’ll examine how this has again occurred because of a blockage, and that tighter and tighter copyright laws and digital rights will do nothing to solve the problem. Indeed, if America is to regain something about the dream it seems to have lost, a return to piracy should be welcomed.

Finally though, my interest is in why pirates have remained so fascinating for children and parents alike. And, using some stuff from Star Wars and The Godfather, as well as some ‘dark inversions’ of parables, what the last part of the book will explore is the way that pirates gift us a way of unblocking the often difficult move from childhood to adulthood, and, by linking this to an atheistic view of the Christ event, we can see the pirate figure of Christ performing a radical act of theological unblocking too.

I currently don’t have a publisher for this as yet, but am talking to people about what I might do with it… which could end up a work of piracy in itself. But if you’re interested and would like to see it completed, then bombard me with encouragement and I’ll get off my ass to finish it. I mean, it’s only going to save the US from economic doldrums and the Western Church from certain death Can I get an ARRRRRR from you, you lubbers?!

I’m currently consulting on a BBC programme to be broadcast in the autumn which is all about the mathematics of everyday life. Not allowed to say any more about it, but there is a section there about how Google can inform hospitals of impending flu epidemics days before they actually hit by tracking the search terms people are using.

I raised a question as we looked at that that has been (partly) raised in The Independent today: if Google can do this with health stats, can they, indeed are they, doing it with financial information too?

It appears that they are prepared to admit that they can tell the Bank of England about where house prices and unemployment figures are going, using the same technique of analysing search terms, but there is nothing in there about whether people might be using these techniques to predict rises or falls in currencies, stocks or commodities. What they do admit is that:

“There is also evidence that these data could provide additional insight on a wider range of issues.”

It would not surprise me one bit if they were, or if some within the organisation are, under the radar effectively making insider-dealing trades – buying and selling with good foreknowledge of what is going to happen in a particular market.

Personally, I’d like some clarity on this from them. Why? Because they are aggregating information from millions of individuals, and then as sole guardians of that information, possibly putting it to huge personal gain.

Capitalism relies on information vacuums: I can make money knowing something that you don’t. What concerns me is that this effect is magnified to a near-infinite degree with the quite extraordinary data-set that Google have access to. I think it’s very important that they offer some clarity on this, and are perhaps given some advice by financial regulators about what they are legally allowed to do.

I posted some thoughts on Friday about the problem of information coming too quickly for us to reflectively process it – and turn information into useful knowledge and wisdom. The analogy I used there was of a conveyor belt. When it runs slowly the packets come off at a speed that allows us to sort them, whatever our taxonomy may be. But when things are speeded up we get more stuff – which in a consumer world always seems good – but get so much so fast that we have no idea how to usefully use it.

I want to consider another perspective which I think may be useful here: our growing digital obesity.

Obesity is an energy balance problem: more food energy is consumed than is required given the activities we are involved in. Our inactivity and continued bloating becomes self-reinforcing: consumption becomes comforting, and energy use uncomfortable.

It seems that with the consumer-capitalist West’s problem of expanding waistlines comes a parallel problem: information obesity. We consume far more information than we can usefully make use of. Our data feeds (yes, isn’t that interesting usage that’s cropped up?) are always on, and always offering more. And the more information that comes in, the less we feel like actually making good use of it. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

We are simultaneously becoming the most well-informed and slothful generation ever. Knowing everything, and doing very little. Our bodies crammed so full of del.icio.us fresh information that we are unable to move.

The question I posed in the last post was this: how do we throttle the flows we have available, and carve out time for reflection? The solution is proposed was to give more time to sleep: that period when our brains are not receiving new information, but given time to post-process and connect up the data it has been fed.

How does this apply to information obesity? Well, it seems that sensible diet and regular exercise are key. What are you really going to lose if you limit the information you consume each day? Perhaps a dietary purge of your feeds, your follows, those Facebook ‘friends’ that you don’t know from Adam, would help. But that won’t be enough. We need action too. We need to exercise, to take the food we have been given and do something good with it. Scribble, protest, draw, think, campaign, walk, run… Because if we don’t, all of these creamy, sweet information is going to clog us up and lead our hearts to arrest.

We’ll be covering some of this at Apple 8 – Social Networks and Social Action this Weds, 13th. And looking at Information Obesity in particular at Apple 9 on November 17th.

A free supplement in The Independent today is all about spread betting: what it is, what the pitfalls are. It was pretty clear: there are potentially huge rewards, but because you can bet whatever money you like on each share, you can actually be exposed to huge losses too.

Fine, whatever.

But what disgusted me about the articles in the supplement was the total absence of any mention of what buying a share in a company might mean. The old fashioned view of acquiring a ‘share’ was precisely that: one bought into a company because you wanted to invest in what it did. You believed in it, so put some of your money into it.

That view has clearly been eroded, and over the years ownership of shares has less and less had anything to do with a relationship with a company or what its practices were. It became purely about profit: your money came back to you, and then some.

What depresses me about spread betting is that this alienation of the investor from the company they are investing in has been exaggerated to the maximum. A spread better may only hold a position in a company for a matter of minutes. They have no concern for the employees, for the environment policies, for the conditions the cleaners work in… Their only concern is a very quick transformation of their capital into…more capital.

In Marx’ Capital he outlines the development of money, and the exchanges that typically occur with a market: a man might bring some linen to sell, take £12 for it, and use this £12 to buy a bible. The linen and the bible have equivalent value – the money has simply facilitated the exchange between a number of individuals. Marx denotes this a ‘C-M-C’ transation: Commodity (into) Money (then back into) Commodity.

Extrapolating this exchange sequence, we can see that the seller of the bible now has £12, so we could look further and see C-M-C-M-C-M-C…. going on ad infinitum.

All well and good. But Marx’s insight was to see that this chain could be read a different way through a simple phase-shift and become M-C-M-… Money is exchanged for a Commodity, which is then exchanged again for Money.

The question he poses is this: why would anyone exchange their money for a commodity, if they were simply going to get the same money back? The parity only works for the C-M-C exchange of commodities. For M-C-M the parity looks absurd… until the idea of profit comes in.

And this is the insanity of spread betting – and all share dealing to some extent. It is totally uninterested in the commodities the facilitate the profit. What does this mean in practice? Abuses of human rights as workers are exploited, and abuses of our environment as the planet’s resources are exploited. Those spread betting have no material interest in these things – only profit can be of interest to them.

The romantic ‘old’ view of buying a ‘share’ in a company is not so old and romantic, as it happens. And stake-holder ownership of companies by workers is one of the key recommendations of The Spirit Level in the battle to reduce income inequality and thus improve life outcomes for everyone in society. Conversely, spread betting increases inequality and instability in society.

It seems to me – given the current financial climate – grossly irresponsibly of The Independent to write a supplement without considering the wider issues at all. The only negative they considered was personal loss of capital. The deeper problems of economic instability and widening inequality wer totally ignored.

And so I’d say this: no one with an interest in human rights or the environment, certainly no Christian, should be involved in spread betting. It’s an unethical way of making money. Period.