While reading Jamie Bartlett’s Radicals, I couldn't get off my mind the image of grinders, this self-focused group of people who believe that ageing is a disease and are not afraid of taking human evolution into their own hands by harnessing nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. Grinders are biohackers that operate in their own bodies. They seek to turn themselves into living DIY cyborgs by placing microchip implants inside their bodies. They are not exactly part of the transhumanist movement which think about how technology can extend and enhance human life; grinders take the idea of transhumanism to the extreme through physical modification.

Grinders and transhumanists are not the only radicals in Bartlett’s book. He follows a series of individuals and groups that have expressed radical ideas or try to find and establish a new way of existing. A transhumanist presidential candidate in the US, gatherers of magic mushroom-eaters and the establishment (on paper, so far) of a libertarian micro-nation in an uninhabited and disputed parcel of land between Croatia and Serbia. Jamie Bartlett explores how a comedian’s non-party movement became one of the biggest political forces in Italy, a commune which try to promote a new planetary culture and pursues self-sufficiency in Portugal and the eco-protestors movement, a new wave of environmentalists who have concluded (correctly) that saving the planet is urgent, and that formal politics can’t do it. He also investigates the rise of anti-Islam, anti-immigrant, multinational political groups like Pegida and the effects of the UK ‘Prevent’ strategy to counter Islamist extremism.

The visions for society the radicals present in this book could not be more different and often diametrically opposed. But there are also some striking similarities.They are all frustrated by the status quo and often voice similar concerns: a belief that politics had become too remote, that society is not facing up to the challenges of the day, and impatience with the traditional route of change. Jamie Bartlett explores what he sees as the “mega-challenges which are about to crash into our comfortable and complacent political arrangements”. The first is technological, the second is climate change and the final challenge is a haemorrhaging attitudinal confidence in democracy and its associated institutions. Jamie Bartlett finished his book in 2016 and the events that followed, add some credibility to his research.

Radicals is a fine example of investigative journalism. It is also a book of tales and Jamie Bartlett is a sensitive and thoughtful storyteller.

An excellent piece of investigative/political journalism which is funny and thoughtful and provocative all at once. Bartlett investigates a range of 'radical' groups, from the transhumanists seeking immortality, to the wacky but rather charming free-love community of psychadelics who create a 'ring of power' in order to stop the war in Syria by the power of their thoughts...

More chilling are the alt-right activists, yep the ones who claim they're not racist/fascist/neo-Nazis then call for 'gas chambers to be set up for Muslims'.

But where Bartlett challenges and provokes thought is where he addresses head on a kind of double-speak (and I would admit that I'm guilty of this): 'Yes, I agree we need radicals... but not <i>those</i> radicals'. His point is that a healthy, free, evolving and involving democracy has to allow space for those voices which are 'mistaken, absurd and offensive'. And his final point is, I think, one of the reasons he remains optimistic, even buoyant, in the face of the worst excesses of the emergent alt-right:

'Tommy Robinson [ex-English Defence League] and Pegida-UK [an extreme nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Islam group] are necessary for the existence of its opposite. Their presence forces us to examine our ideas, work out what we believe, why we believe it, and mobilise. If Pegida did not exist, the arguments against it - in this case in favour of multiculturalism, or an authentic British Islam - would lose their vitality and strength.'

An oblique but relevant and intelligent look at contemporary ideas politics.