2012 Manifesto for Humans

We are creatures of light, "committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity".  We are not cyborgs or pixels or cogs or numbers.  We are not tidy or easily stacked or even easily categorised.  But every year that goes by, the power of those who would like us to be - or who find it less trouble to process us by numbers - seems to grow. 

So here's the question.  How can we claw back something of our humanity from them during the year ahead?

Here are a few small suggestions:

1.  Refuse to be processed by robots.  Press 0 on the phone pad to get straight through to a human being if you possibly can.

2.  Refuse to be served by robots.  Shun the machines that would like us to use to check out our own shopping in supermarkets.  Even distance learning requires someone on the end of a telephone occasionally.

3.  Refuse to accept any new passwords.  Tell them that the more passwords we have, the more we have to write them down, and the greater the security risk.

4.  Ask the doctor to let us bypass the new 'Choose and Book' mega-system of out-patient referrals.  It is easier and cheaper for everyone in the long-run.

5.  Use small shops, small schools, small hospitals and small institutions of all kinds, and especially small banks.  Use those first shoots of the new human economy, from credit unions to co-operative nurseries.  Use them or lose them.

6.  Shift ten per cent of our spending to products made or grown within 30 miles.  If we all did that, we could re-balance the economy before the Treasury gets off its bottom.  These days, eating a home-grown carrot is a revolutioary act - even if we didn't grow it ourselves.

7.  Voice our scepticism of instituions that are at the top of league tables, or have done too well in their pursuit of government targets.  It probably means they have sacrificed the humanity of their service to focus on narrow deliverables.

8.  Avoid services run by would-be monopolists.  Shift just a little spending away from the likes of Tesco, Amazon and Virgin. 

9.  Forgive ourselves.  We can't possibly do all of these - and I admit to being slow about many of them myself - and especially not if we are supplicants to government largesse.  But we can frustrate their technocratic systems in small ways occasionally. 

10.  Failing that, read The Human Element and learn more about the problem - and the solution.

"Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the work of capitalist combination," said G. K. Chesterton in An Outline of Sanity.  "Do anything that will even delay that completion. Save one shop out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out of a hundred crofts. Keep open one door out of a hundred doors , for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison."

And if we can't do that, at least we can sing a little when we walk along the street.  That alone will humanise 2012 for me.