Is Waterstones the worst bookshop in Britain? Well at least in the top five, or maybe even top three of useless consumer experiences? The biggest gripe I have against them is that there is never any interesting books in their stores. I can spend hours in the store in Picadilly (’the biggest bookshop in Europe’) and come out without buying a single book and feeling annoyed and unsatisfied. Contrast that with the local Oxfam bookshop, our local library sale or the Amnesty International Bookshop, or our local independent bookshop Cogito. I can easily spend 2 minutes in any of these shops and buy at least one book. Recent acquisitions include:

‘Out of the People’ - JB Priestly - Amnesty International

‘How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World’ - Francis Wheen - Library sale (ongoing)

‘Journey Home’ - John Hillaby - Oxfam bookshop

‘Teeside’s Economic Heritage’ - G.A.North - Oxfam bookshop

‘Here Comes Every Body’ - Clay Shirky  - Cogito

Ok, so at least three of these books that are unlikely to still be in print. But from past experience of going into Waterstones, asking for a book by someone called Clay Shirky would be like asking for a book written by a cat. A visit to Cogito’s yesterday morning on the way to get the FT resulted in the book being ordered there and then. It arrived this morning and I picked it up on the way to get today’s FT. Now I like that and I call that service. Cogito’s is designed to *browse* and as much of that is about atmosphere, social interaction and previous experience, and the fact that the people who run the shop are actually interested in books. That might seem an essential criteria for a bookshop but not necessarily. I can still remember the truamatic experience of trying to order ‘The Internet Constellation’ in the large chain…

Which brings me to Clay Shirky’s book itself. I was expecting this to be a.n.other light weight book about the internet, influenced by Wired and looking for the validation from that audience type. But hey no, having started the book this evening I’ve found it gripping and thought provoking stuff. Now this is risky, writing favourably about a book after reading 40 pages - but if it continues in this vein it’s going to be a good read. 

And the initial premise of the book - the way that people are a social creation, who then create technologies, and that those technologies then influence social interaction - is a good one. Some of the early observations Shirky makes about co-operation, collaboration and the social nature of being need to be stated. It’s almost like a German Ideology for the internet age. Yeah, it can all seem pretty obvious when Marx and Engels point out that we all need to eat, have shelter and so on before we can do much else- but it’s amazing how these basic points are so hidden by the layers and layers and layers of commercial ideology that suggests we exist in a world were all our needs are effortlessly met - because they are not -and that’s just in the west. The further we travel from the commercial heart of capitalism, the more the struggle to meet basic needs becomes more apparent and immediate; the closer people are to a hand to mouth and day to day existence. 

And the heart of the beast is sick. The recent events have indicated a stroke, if not a major heart attack. The patient is alive, but in what form and for how much longer? 

What has struck me so much about the last few weeks is how much people around me (friends, family, neighbours, casual acquaintances) are talking about this crisis - which has now gone way beyond banks (as I said it would a few weeks ago - it’s a collapse of values). I’ve had conversations about production, demography, how we live, how we could live, social change, political change and so on. These are not revolutionary conversations in themselves but they are much more radical (and some have a revolutionary content) than casual conversations usually are. There is a sense of awareness that we are living in a genuinely world historic period, where what happens now will have a lasting influence for decades to come. 

And that makes Clay Shirky’s book even more timely. ‘Here Comes Every Body’ would be a good slogan for the year 2008. The layers of commercial ideology are extremely brittle; the existing ideology has partially dissolved through its internal contradictions. It opens a space for critical thinking about the world. 

When I got home from Cogito’s with my new shiny copy of  ’Here Comes Every Body’ up I sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and reading through the FT. There on the front page is a photograph of the ever more creepy Peter Mandelson. On page 12 however, there’s a headline ‘ You say you want a revolution’ which starts with the quote from Schnews:

“Blimey…you spend 15 years struggling against global capitalism and then the bloody thing collapses of its own accord”

And then goes on to state that sales of Das Kapital  are soaring. 

And somewhere else I read that the people of Iceland are re-discovering how to connect with each other - a consequence of the economic crisis. ‘People are more polite’. 

‘Here comes every body’ and the internet, and the whole experience of ’social networking’ is going to change as well. Before it was just about communicating with each other; but now we’re faced with a crisis where we are going to have re-learn and re-discover how to cooperate and collaborate in order to survive. Whether the internet helps or not is up to us …in this sense, we are ‘every body’.