Heidegger in Silicon Valley: technology and the hacker way

‘Software is eating the world!’ US tech investor Marc Andreessen claimed in 2011, on the eve of launching his venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz. This extraordinary claim has become the mantra of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, codifying a new philosophy of tech entrepreneurialism and kickstarting a bold new era of creative destruction. Decoded it means: software engineers are world-builders – so look out! Bored with building apps, games, and websites, the latest generation of tech entrepreneurs are creating social operating systems for the societies and economies of the future. Reconfiguring the relationships between goods, consumers, and service-providers, these new social operating systems are swallowing whole marketplaces at a time, eating up business that was previously enjoyed by recruiters, cab companies, hotel chains, and estate agents.

Take the sharing economy startup Airbnb, for instance (recipient of $112 million in funding from Andreessen-Horowitz in 2011). Andreessen claims:

Airbnb  makes its money in real estate. But … Airbnb … has much more in common with Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Oracle than with any real estate company. … Airbnb is building a software technology that is equivalent in complexity, power, and importance to an operating system. It’s just that it’s applied to a section of the economy.

An operating system is low-level software that runs on a computer and directs its operations. Andressen’s application of this idea to a company like Airbnb speaks volumes about the ambition of the new startup entrepreneurs and their world-building philosophy. Just as a computer operating system organises the hardware resources of the computer unit, creating a functional machine, social operating systems refigure the ‘hardware’ of human reality, connecting people and things in new and productive ways. Airbnb puts people with spare rooms to rent in touch with travellers seeking short-term accommodation. Uber and Lyft put passengers looking for a ride in touch with drivers looking for a fare. TaskRabbit links people to a universe of micro-entrepreneurs who are ready to run their errands, clean their houses, and mow their lawns for a fee.

This is creative destruction on a grand scale. The social and economic strata constructed over decades is being rapidly redesigned by plucky young geeks in the shadow of the Google campus.

Maker democracy: Roberto Unger, progressive politics, and collaborative experimentation

It is Maker Day. You catch the ziptrain into the city. As the conburbs flash by, you browse the Maker Day app on your phone. Maker Day has only been around a couple of years. The Democrats got it started in 2020, after they seized the White House back from the Republican Party. The idea was to redress unemployment by cutting the working week to 4 days and making the 5th day Maker Day. This bold initiative has already paid off in a number of ways, not least by giving the unemployed something to do on Fridays.

Maker Day makes social innovation a community exercise. It gives ordinary citizens the power to collaboratively redesign social and political institutions. Some say it has revitalised the nation.

Outside the Maker Day pavilion, crowds of people are testing robots and drones. MAKE HISTORY says the sign above the door. You weave inside, looking for your crew. They are usually in the Library, but a Kidpreneur workshop is in session there and they are not to be seen. You study the grid on the giant whiteboard in the Community Hall, trying to decide what events to attend. For the last couple of Maker Days, you’ve helped a group of lawyers, urban planners, and community activists design a corporate-community partnership framework for organisations working to revitalise urban space. But this project is in prototyping mode, gathering data for a public review. You prefer to work at the coalface. As you MakerID says, you are an Ideator.

Today, you decide, you’ll pitch in with the Home Care Sharing XChange. Unless something else grabs your attention first. Maker Day kicks off Open Space style to ensure that there are always new projects on the table. People propose ideas for hacking institutions, and if an idea is popular, working groups are formed about it. Today’s open space sessions include some totally off-the-wall ideas, including: ‘Virtual Reality Gaming and Palliative Care: The Final Quest’ and ‘F*@k the Police: Urban Crime and Total Surveillance Solutions’. The great thing about Maker Day is that projects are experimental, so the wilder, the better. The aim is to generate institutional alternatives – as many as possible. Only a fraction of the ideas will be implemented. But who cares? The point is to have fun and be creative, and to work with people on disrupting the political imagination.

Maker Day is where the future happens. This is creative democracy in action.

21st century giving: how Facebook’s News Feed catalysed a culture shift

Facebook became a gift economy on September 6^th, 2006. Its users got a shock that morning when they logged on to find a News Feed in the place of their Personal Wall, which is what they’d previously seen in logging on. Everyone’s status updates had been routed into a single feed, which was continuously updated as their friends added content to their Walls. We are so use to aggregating feeds on social media today that it is hard to imagine Facebook without one. But prior to 2006, Facebook was a different kind of environment. Users had to visit each other’s Walls to see what their friends were posting. It made for a more private experience.

News Feed killed the privacy. Now everything was out in the open: posts, shares, likes, comments – everything. Thanks to News Feed, you could see everything that your friends were posting, in real time. Your friends could see everything that you were posting too. There was nowhere to hide. The platform was governed by an implacable transparency.

People freaked out. There was a major backlash. Users screamed violation of privacy. Critics called the site ‘Stalkerbook’ and threatened to decamp for MySpace. Zuckerberg offered a half-hearted apology for introducing the changes unannounced and without consultation, which inflamed the situation even more. Still, Facebook refused to budge. News Feed stayed. Contrary to expectations, News Feed turned out to be central to Facebook’s success.

When the wave of new registrations began the following week, few people had any idea that they were engaging a changed environment. For them, News Feed was what Facebook was all about – ‘sharing’. Once the initial furore had died down, people discovered that they liked News Feed. It meant that life on Facebook was never dull. There was new content every time they refreshed their browser window. It also meant that the more people contributed, they more they were able to stand out. Facebook was a time suck, but there was a reward system built into the design. Every contribution earned a tiny hit of egoboo.

Facebook took off. The site had 50 million users by October 2007 and it had doubled that number by August 2008. By the end of 2011, Facebook would have 850 million users, 50% of the total internet population. Just how much of this success can be attributed to News Feed is impossible to say. But the success of the News Feed concept was confirmed by the viral success of Twitter, another major social media company, which launched with a News Feed and nothing else. Since then, it has become standard practice on social media sites to feature an aggregating feed that compiles everything that people are doing on the site in one place. The all-in News Feed has become central to the social media experience.

Given that the News Feed concept hadn’t been tested in a commercial environment, it is remarkable that Facebook chose to introduce it at such a decisive stage in its development. Where did this idea come from, and what made Zuckerberg so certain that it would work? David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect (2010), caught a glimpse of News Feed’s origins in a casual conversation in which he asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s potential to change society. Zuckerberg responded by talking about the Potlatch, ‘a traditional celebration and feast of native peoples on the northwest coast of North America’. ‘Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?’, Zuckerberg asked him.

The Potlatch is a gift economy. So too, by implication, is Facebook.

The word ‘Potlatch’ comes from the Chinook language, meaning ‘to give away’ or ‘a gift’. Chiefs would host a Potlatch by gathering their tribe together and presenting them with a massive gift of food, blankets, furs, weapons, canoes, crafts, and more. The gift was dispensed at the end of a long and elaborate festival that involved speeches, songs, and spirit dances that could go on for days. The gifting ritual was the heart of the Potlatch. Everyone waited patiently to see what the chief would give. The bigger the gift, the better.

For the chief, the point of the Potlatch was to display abundant generosity. Any sign of stinginess would work against him. By amazing his tribe with a massive outlay of gifts, he sought to establish himself as a powerful leader, a figure of true status and nobility.

Sometimes, at a gathering of clans, different chiefs would compete to out-give one another. Each chief would seek to offer up a greater gift than the others, seeking in this way to cast the other chiefs in their shadow. Sometimes, this could lead a tribe to ruin. Sometimes, ruin was what was intended. The Potlatch could be used as a tool of war. By compelling the chief of a rival tribe to engage in an exchange that he couldn’t hope to win, a warring chief could force his enemy to impoverish his tribe in an effort to save face.

As the sociologist Marcel Mauss observed in his classic book, The Gift, the Potlatch inspires exorbitant acts of generosity. ‘The man who [gives] recklessly is the man who wins prestige’. The European settlers who moved west in the nineteenth century didn’t understand the Potlatch at all. European missionaries saw the Potlatch as a scandalous waste of time and resources and an impediment to the ‘civilization’ of the native people. One can imagine that the missionaries were offended by the egoistic nature of the Potlatch ritual. Following Jesus’ example, they aspired to the ‘pure gift’, an act of generosity that brooks of no return. In the Potlatch, by contrast, chiefs gave to establish their reputation and prestige.

The idea of giving to establish status was anathema to the teachings of the Church. The Potlatch was banned by the US and Canadian governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to the decimation of the tribes up and down the Pacific coast.

The traditional Potlatch has faded into history. The age of the digital Potlatch has just begun. When Facebook launched News Feed, it created a virtual Potlatch. By establishing a transparent space in which everyone could see what everyone else was posting, it created an environment in which status and reputation accrue to people who add value. In the transparent space of a real-time News Feed, users put their reputations on the line whenever they post content.  If they want to impress their followers, they need to share content that contributes something valuable. This dynamic ensures that most people think twice about their posts before posting them, which works to the benefit of everyone. It encourages people to curate the content that they share, reflecting on how it will add value for different audiences. As people post content that adds value for their audiences, and their audiences reciprocate by posting content that is valuable for them, the exchange of gifts creates an interpersonal dynamic that keeps people engaging with the feed.

This gifting dynamic is what keeps us coming back to social media, despite complaining about the hours it consumes in our day, how it fills our minds our trivia and distracts us from important tasks. Love it or loathe it, it has changed the mindset of a generation.

For a start, social media has made egoboo part of life for the digital generation. The term egoboo originated in science fiction fandom. Egoboo is the pleasure we get from being recognised for voluntary work and contributions. Facebook is designed to deliver hits of egoboo. Every Facebook user has experienced the thrill of posting something popular on the site. Few are immune to the dopamine rush that we get as ‘likes’, comments, and re-shares come flooding in. Facebook is designed as a gifting-egoboo machine:  we insert what we love, what inspires us, our passions and desires; and the platform delivers crowdsourced recognition and egoboo.

Online gifts can translate into real life reputational rewards. Since, on Facebook, every contribution is tagged with a proper name, users earn reputation capital for their gifts. For knowledge workers and other professionals, this reputation capital can bear real rewards.  By consistently posting quality content, users can establish tribal status that they can use to find work and build a career. Social media professionals most often resemble competing chiefs in a Potlatch, engaged in the effort to out-gift one another to build their reputations.

The success of Facebook and other social media sites has made reputation-based gifting part of contemporary life. The scale of it is staggering. Millions of people around the world are playing the Potlatch reputation game right now. They are sharing family photos on Facebook, breaking news on Twitter, design concepts on Pinterest, and comedy skits on Vine. They are expressing their passions, dreams, desires, and inspirations. They are leveraging their personal gifts in an effort to create value for others. The more that people create value through gifting online, the more they stand out, the more egoboo they earn, and the more they stand to receive from their communities. With every reciprocated gift, an emotional bond is forged between strangers and friends. This gifting dynamic brings the world closer together. It makes us part of a common tribe. It is increasingly flowing offline.

It is easy to underplay the influence of culture on people’s behaviour. Culture is ephemeral. Culture concerns people’s outlook on life, which remains invisible until they get a chance to express it in praxis. It has taken us a long time to appreciate the impact of online gifting on our way of life, probably because most of this activity has no practical consequence. It is only once the cultural approaches started to infiltrate productive activities, in co-design studios, co-working spaces, and corporate innovation labs, that we started to pay attention.

This is what is happening today. The success of Facebook and other social media platforms, from LinkedIn and Twitter to Snapchat, Tumblr, and Vine, has given rise to a new conception of how to get things done. We get things done through an open play of contributions. We get things done by engaging as peers and adding value in a generous and transparent way.

We see these cultural changes happening in a range of sectors today, predominantly environments favoured by digital professionals like co-working and tech start-up spaces. It is particularly evident in the design world. In co-design sessions, people innovate by giving everything they have to give to the session, knowing that it might not represent the final solution that everyone is looking for, or even something particularly useful, but that it is an honest attempt to move things forward. We don’t give with the expectation of return. We give because it is a noble cause, one that we want to be associated with, knowing that the social bonds that we forge through our gifts will pay dividends down the line, as our peers return the gifts that we’ve given them us in their own way.

The success of social media has catalysed a gift culture shift. It has given us a new sense of how to organise for innovation. There is a chasm separating this culture from the way that things get done in most organisations. Kirkpatrick reflects: ‘A world in which each individual has a clear window into the contributions of everyone else, potlatch-style, does not dovetail well with how most companies are run’. This is a problem for companies that want to increase their innovation capability. The only way around this problem is for leaders to let loose of the reins and create safe spaces for gifting and collaborative innovation.

Lines of flight: Deleuze and nomadic creativity

‘I am not a number – I am a free man!’ Patrick McGoohan cries in the 60s cult-TV series, The Prisoner. McGoohan plays a British spy who is held captive in a village on an island controlled by a faceless authority. The prisoner, known only as Number 6, has resigned from the secret service. It seems to be his crime. In the opening sequence, we see him burst into his spy chief’s office and passionately submit his resignation; he is subsequently drugged, kidnapped, and whisked off to the island. We never find out why he quit. 

The authorities on the island are as perplexed we we are. The prisoner is told that he will remain interned on the island until he has explained himself. But the prisoner refuses to do so. Instead, he seeks to escape. Insistently. The prisoner’s whole tenure on the island (the entirety of two seasons of the show) consists of attempts to escape and flee to the mainland.

Captured by the eerie bouncing balls that guard the island, the prisoner is hauled before Number 2 and issued a sardonic dressing down. ‘In a society, one must learn to conform’, Number 2 tells him. 

‘I am not a number – I am a free man!’ the prisoner replies. The moment he is alone, he is preparing to escape again.

We can see The Prisoner as a metaphor for the sixties counterculture. According to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), the counterculture was defined by the many ways that groups and individuals sought to escape the society of normalisation and control that their parents’ generation had helped create. 

The driving impulse behind the counterculture was not just to oppose the status quo, it was to get free of it – to head for the horizon with bloodshot eyes on experimental lines of flight (fuite – this can mean leaking, fleeing, or escaping). 

Lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists. 

In a series of books written with the militant psychotherapist Felix Guattari (1930-1992), Deleuze linked human creativity to flight. It is our desire to escape the status quo that leads us to innovate. Like the prisoner, we dream of being anywhere but here. We coordinate, form alignments, combine our powers and innovate. We remake the world on creative trajectories.

Deleuze’s idea of lines of flight can help us clear up a common misconception about the sixties counterculture. The counterculture was not fundamentally oriented against mainstream society. It was oriented away from it. 

It is true that the counterculture was defined politically by the rejection of the society that existed at the time. The Free Speech movement and Students for a Democratic Society were opposed to US government policies, especially the war in Vietnam. It is also clear that, in the 1970s, the militant end of the counterculture positioned itself against the state in the hope of creating a popular movement to overthrow it. But the counterculture per se was oriented away from mainstream society. Being against was a means, not an end. 

This is evident in Woodstock generation, which was driven by the desire for another world and way of life, and inspired by the belief that this world and way of life was possible. Having a ‘countercultural’ attitude and outlook does not necessarily imply that one is hostile towards the mainstream. It signals a desire to leave the society that exists, to leave it to its own devices, and to grow creative (with new devices) with other like-minded people.

The Apple I was hacked together on a creative line of flight. So, by and large, was the internet.

One of the best expressions of countercultural line of flight is the the 1960s and ’70s back-to-land movement. Drop City, in Colorado, was the first of many hippie communities that sought to create a new kind of society​. Between 1965 and 1973, thousands of middle class kids, in flight from Mom and Dad, society, the draft, careers, and social conventions of all kinds, came to Drop City and other communes like it in search of freedom and alternative lifestyles. 

The culture got by with a minimum of rules. Everything was set up to enable free-wheeling, nomadic lifestyles, which could be recreated or escaped at a moment’s notice. Nomadism, as Deleuze and Guattari understand it, doesn’t require moving around. You can sit still and be a nomad. Nomadism is a way of being. It involves refusing to be tied down by set categories and definitions. It is driven by a desire to experiment and explore, to learn, grow, and boldly venture forth on creative lines of flight.

The hippie experiment collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Over subsequent years and decades, the counterculture thrived. Today, the counterculture has been absorbed into the system of society – domesticated, to an extent, yet affirmed and enabled at the same time. The corporate mavericks who shake up markets with disruptive innovations create businesses on lines of flight. Each generation of teenagers is encouraged to define a new line of flight, starting with the rejection of the sounds and styles that have come before. 

Nomadism is a cultural norm. While plenty of people simply want to ‘fit in’, the best and the brightest want to break out and head for the horizon.

When we look into the future, we dream of a world that is radically different from the one we know today. 

We may be stuck in offices, trapped in traffic, tied down by debt or shacked to unhappy relationships. Inside, we are nomads. We are already in flight. The mainland awaits.

Social media as gift culture: the prismatic self

This is the third post in a series on social media gift cultures. The series draws on indigenous gift cultures to examine the psychological and motivational dynamics of social sharing online. The first post in the series, The reputation game, looks at the North American Potlatch to reflect on the enticements and rewards of sharing online. Social sharing involves a reputation game. The aim of the game is to win the favour of your tribe by presenting them with exorbitant gifts.

The second post in the series, Sharing circles and tribes, considers how tribes are formed online. Tribes emerge when participants share with select users, who return the favour by sharing with them. These sharing circles are typically based in common values and interests – hence, so are tribes. I indicate the unstable nature of sharing circles and how an affirmative attitude towards gifting helps sustain them. Imbued with the ‘spirit of the gift’, the gift becomes a token of gratitude for the sharing circle and the tribe it maintains. The more that we cultivate this spirit in our online exchanges, the more robust and fulfilling they become.

This post considers the challenges of sharing across multiple systems online. Active users of social media are often engaged across multiple sites, groups, and activities in real time. Multi-tasking online can be a source of signficant consternation. While missteps (below the threshhold of the screaming faux pas) are mostly overlooked, this doesn’t reduce the anxiety that users (particularly new users) feel when tasked with sharing across multiple channels in real time. It is easy to lose track of how one is expected to behave in different contexts.

When tech journalist Paul Miller returned to the internet after a year off, he was surprised to find how stressful it was to multi-task across services. ‘I had, like, three tabs open and I just didn’t know what was going on’, Miller complains. This is a familiar experience for users of social media, who struggle to keep up with the flow of information on multiple channels.

The solution is to find your tribe. Sharing across multiple channels is easier when we share with our tribes in mind. A thriving tribe gives back more than we contribute to it. Tribes are a living reservoir of cognitive capital and an infinite human resource.

2045 United Federation Report on the Great Transition: The Culture of Transition

The following passages are taken from the 2045 United Federation report on the Great Transition. This report, released on the eve of the East-West Realignment and founding of the United Federation in December 2045, was the first comprehensive account of the shift in social and economic relations that swept the world between 2015 and 2040, a period known as the Great Transition. The paragraphs are taken from Part 3 of the report, which deals with the role of sharing and social innovation in the Great Transition. For the complete report, see Realignment Mandate 12337 (released by authority of UF Secretary-General Tirrab Hassan 04/04/75).

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2045 United Federation Report on the Great Transition

Part 3: The Culture of Transition

Parts 1 and 2 of this report have outlined the policy and strategic planning work that underlay the Great Transition. We have described the vision shifts in energy and carbon policy that enabled the rapid development and roll out of carbon negative infrastructure, and the social policy associated with the transition to a Totally Mobilized Agenda, including the adoption of civil agency and ‘zero unemployment’ schemes, massive federal and state investment in sustainable cities, and the expansion of the social enterprise sector as a viable hub for commercial investment. We have seen how these policy and planning shifts contributed, between 2015 and 2040, to the re-engineering of the international economy and the creation of a global carbon negative environment.

Part 3 of the report looks at the social and cultural changes associated with the Great Transition. We leave aside the oppositional and countervailing views expressed in parts of the online and corporate media in this period. These views, and the reasons why they lost purchase on the public imagination through the 20-teens, are discussed in Part 4 of the report (see also Appendix 2: Dangerous Liaisons: Big Oil Inside the Beltway). Part 3 seeks to explain the widespread and well-documented shifts in social and creative culture that gathered steam in the 20-teens and fuelled the forces of Transition. We are particularly concerned to understand the role of ‘open source culture’ in this period and how it contributed to new historical framings and existential orientations.

Social media as gift culture: sharing circles and tribes

This is the second post in a series on social media gift cultures. I am interested in how indigenous gift cultures can help us understand the psychological and motivational dynamics of online social sharing. The first post in the series, Social media as gift culture: the reputation game, used the Potlatch ceremony of native North Americans to reflect on the enticements and rewards of sharing online. Social sharing, I argued, involves a reputation game – a ‘virtuous competition’ premised on the free exchange of gifts. As in the Potlatch, social media prosumers seek to create value for their followers through ‘gifts’ in the form of posts, tweets, pins, shares, comments, vouches, etc. The more value they create, the more reputation they earn and the more support they stand to gain from their communities.

In sharing content online, we are playing a reputation game. The object of the game is not to beat other players but to challenge them to greater expressions of generosity. It is a battle of abundant spirits that contributes to the common good.

This post shifts geographical focus from North America to the Western Pacific. I want to look at the Kula ring of the Kiriwina Islands to reflect on the nature and origins of social media tribes. Your tribes are comprised of people with whom you commonly chat and share online. Sometimes they are based in offline friendships, but not always. Shared values and interests are ultimately all that are required to hold a tribe together. If you are wondering who among your followers count as members of your tribe, make a list of the people who commonly like, favourite, share or RT the things you put online. Make another list of the people whose content you like, favourite, share and RT. Look for names that appear on both lists. These are the members of your tribe.

Nietzsche’s way of the creator: my north star

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is my favourite philosopher and greatest philosophical inspiration. I have spent years defending Nietzsche’s concept of will to power from detractors, explaining why it has nothing to do with domination and control. Nietzsche is a philosopher of creativity and spiritual health. If he comes across like a rabid dog, barking furiously at the world, it was because he dreamed passionately of a better world – a world of free spirits, risk takers and creators, people who selfishly seek to cultivate their powers so that they can unleash themselves on the world in powerful and dynamic ways.

Do we live in a Nietzschean world today? In many respects, we do. Still, creators walk a lonely path, for they engage in disruptive activities, and thereby ruffle as many feathers as they release birds into flight. I dedicate the following passage to the passionate dreamers of the world – the pathmakers, philosophers, and radical entrepreneurs. It comes from Nietzsche’s magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-4). It is called, ‘The Way of the Creator’. It has helped me find my way, and I hope it helps you find yours.

Would you go into solitude, my brother? Would you seek the way to yourself? Then wait a moment and listen to me.

“He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All solitude is wrong”: so say the herd. And long did you belong to the herd.

The voice of the herd will still echo in you. And when you say, “I no longer have a conscience in common with you,” then it will be a grief and a pain.

Lo, that same conscience created that pain; and the last gleam of that conscience still glows on your affliction.

But you would go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength to do so!

Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-rolling wheel? Can you even compel the stars to revolve around you?

Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitious! Show me that you are not a lusting and ambitious one!

Epic change: Foucault on ‘today’ as a moment of vision

We are living though remarkable times. Digital technologies are disrupting societies around the world, while our economies putter fitfully in and out of recession, and climate change sweeps whole suburbs into the sea. What is most remarkable about these times is how few people attend to their changing nature. Many people invest time and energy in distracting or shielding themselves from the changes that define the present. Even those who engage the present tend to treat it selectively, singling out those aspects of the historical moment that are relevant to their occupation and interests and zeroing in on them while ignoring the rest.

It’s time that we all took stock of the amazing times we live in. Because what we need today, more than anything else, are leaders – people that are capable of synthesising the chaos of the present, engaging with these changes and steering us through them. We need circuit-breakers, disruptors, people who look for opportunities in a crisis – people with the resilience to confront the present as a moment of crisis, the agility to mobilize multiple resources to deal with it, and the vision to mark new paths into the future. Today, our challenges are global in scope, yet so are our opportunities. The breakthrough initiatives that will define the coming decades will connect challenges and opportunities in unforeseen ways, putting us on paths towards goals that previous generations didn’t know existed. The great leaders of history have always been disruptive thinkers.

Five books that shaped my thinking

My thoughts are shaped more by life than books. The world is a book that we read implicitly. If the problems of the world do not engage us and inspire a response, a book will do nothing for us.

The following books have played an important role in guiding my work in the past decade. I have read many good books in this time, but these five stand out. The common factor is that they inspired me to break with ideas that I had become comfortable with and seek out new lines of inquiry. As Thoreau said: ‘A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting’.

1. Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Harvard University Press, 2001)

I read Empire in 2001, in the final year of my doctoral research. I was writing on the relationship between Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, two of the most important European thinkers of the 20th century (some years later I published a book on this topic, Foucault’s Heidegger). Meanwhile, I was following the progress of the anti-globalization protests that erupted about the world after the Battle in Seattle in November 1999, participating where I could. Empire provided me with a theoretical perspective on these events that shaped my research output between 2002 and 2008 and fed directly into the script for Coalition of the Willing.

Hardt and Negri’s argument in Empire is that neo-liberal economic globalization should not be understood as a kind of imperialism (where a hegemonic power invades other countries to capture their resources), but a new form of empire that tolerates no external limit and seeks to incorporate all life within its order. This empire employs the internet to organize the global multitude into a productive force; yet as it does so, it enables the multitude to form swarm-like pockets of resistance that coalesce across borders to challenge the status quo. Hardt and Negri propose that the multitude will eventually realize its collective power and establish a new political order based in the productivity of the commons.