Things have been quiet on Slow Planet lately. But don't worry: the Slow revolution is still gaining momentum all over the world. We're just preparing a radical redesign for the site behind the scenes. There will be lots more columnists and bloggers and space for the citizens of Slow Planet to air their views and come together. The new site should go live in middle to late September.

In the meantime, here is a link to a piece I wrote in the Guardian recently on the bright side of the current economic slowdown:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/24/ethicalliving.creditcrunch

See you very soon on the new, improved Slow Planet!

All around the world artists are grappling with our addiction to speed - hardly surprising given the intimate link between slowness and the act of creation. I know of at least one Slow Art Manifesto. And every week seems to bring the launch of another exhibition exploring the tension between fast and slow. A few days ago it was the turn of No Time To Lose in Aberdeen, Scotland. But today I want to draw your attention to a charmingly eccentric "slow art" project at Bournemouth University in the UK. It's called Real Snail Mail and its aim is to make us rethink our impatient relationship with time and technology. It works like this: Three genuine snails have been placed in a tank and fitted with receiving devices that let them send emails on behalf of visitors to a website. When a snail slithers past one of the transmitting nodes in the tank, it collects a waiting message from the site. It then slithers away at a very unhurried 0.03mph (0.05km/h) . When the snail passes within range of another node, the email is dispatched to the recipient. The whole process can take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. One snail, Austin, has emerged as the fastest delivery boy of the three: he has sent 10 messages with an average delivery time of 1.96 days. But his pal, Muriel, has so far failed to dispatch a single email. Anyway, I'm wondering if I can file my tax return this way...

Just back from a conference in Newcastle, England called Thinking Digital. It was a glimpse into the extraordinary ways that technology is going to reshape the future, revolutionizing every aspect of the way we work, play and live. It may even alter what it means to be human, as artificial intelligence catches up with the real thing and more and more gadgets - think medical nanobots patrolling the bloodstream or computer chips boosting the brain - are installed in our bodies. The most vivid picture of this sci-fi future was painted by Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and inventor, who appeared on stage as a ghostly apparition inside a slab of glass. He was thousands of miles away in California yet we could see and hear each other as if we were all in the same room. I found the crystal ball-gazing in Newcastle exhilarating, but also a bit troubling. It seems to me that as the rate of technological change accelerates, we urgently need to slow down and answer some crucial question, starting with: Do we really want everything that technology can deliver and will all the advances be benign? Even as a technophile, I have some doubts. What happens to memory, patience and the journey of discovery when all human knowledge is instantly accessible from anywhere? What happens to human relations when you can download the full profile of anyone you meet and read it on a Terminator-like screen on your contact lens before speaking to them? And who gets to write that profile? Above all, what happens when we are constantly connected to the Internet and no longer have any time or space for silent, solitary reflection?

One reason for the global obesity epidemic is that our bodies were designed for a hunter-gathering society and are therefore highly efficient at storing excess calories as fat. Today, when calories are permanently on tap and there is less call for burning them off hunting and gathering, our waist-lines are ballooning. As I sat there in Newcastle, with my own waist expanded from the buffet lunch, it occurred to me that maybe the same analogy works for the high-tech revolution. We are hard-wired to be curious and to want to connect and communicate with others - and those are wonderful instincts. The trouble is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we don't know when to stop. Just as we keep on eating even after our bodies have had enough food, we keep on texting, surfing and wilfing long after our minds have reached a frenzy of stimulation and distraction. The truth is that no matter how fast the technology becomes, the human brain is always going to need slowness. To rest and recharge. To think deeply and creatively - every artist, designer and inventor knows that deceleration is essential for the act of creation. We also need to slow down in order to look into ourselves and grapple with the big questions: Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is life really for? Nor is this a concern voiced only by monks and meditation gurus. Even the most gung ho geeks are starting to warn that being "always on" may not be the best thing for the human brain. Dipchand Nishar, the man in charge of wireless technology at Google, has said: "We had Generation X and Generation Y. Now we have Generation ADD." And other high tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, are coming to similar conclusions.

Yet this is not a call for a Luddite backlash. Technology is not evil; on the contrary, it has mind-blowing potential to make the world a better place. But as we enter the era of what Kurzweil calls "exponential growth in technological advances," the need for circumspection is greater than ever before. That means thinking hard about how best to apply each new technology rather than just automatically adopting it. Or put another way: As the pace of change quickens, we need to remember that some things never change, starting with the fact that we are human beings. And human beings will always need to unplug and slow down.

One big argument for slowing down and working less is that more money doesn't always make us happier. The roots of this thinking lie in a 1974 study by Richard Easterlin at the University of Southern California. He found that the happiness of a nation's inhabitants rises in tandem with growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but only up to a certain point. Thereafter, getting richer stops making us any happier. This, of course, calls into question our obsession with maximizing economic growth. But over the last 30 years the boom in happiness studies has encouraged other academics to revisit the data. Apparently, two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are about to publish a comprehensive survey of the literature which shows that happiness and per capita GDP continue to rise more or less in unison. In other words, making more money does make us happier. I haven't read the study yet, but already it raises some intriguing questions. What does it mean for the Slow revolution if working longer and earning more does in fact make us happier? How much does our happiness depend on the kind of work that we do? Do we need to build other criteria, such as health, education and the environment, into any measure of economic growth? How do we even define happiness? Lots to think about here....

On my last day in San Francisco, I visited a branch of the Chipotle chain (see last blog entry). Even on a busy, bustling working day, there were several office types happily waiting for their food. One woman, a fortysomething accountant, ordered a chicken burrito. "I don't mind waiting the extra time," she said. "It's reassuring that you can see them making the food fresh rather than just pulling it pre-made off the shelf like they do in other places." The man behind her, a young lawyer, nodded his head. "A lot of fast food is just too fast," he said. "If you slow things down a bit you get a more quality experience." I told them both about Slow Planet so maybe we'll see them on here soon. I can't speak for Chipotle's food, however. I was too stuffed from my own slow lunch even to try the chips and salsa.

The fast food industry has always seemed at odds with the Slow movement. Just consider the Big Mac: everything from the way its ingredients are sourced to the way it is prepared and consumed is all about speed ? at the expense of quality. But can fast food also be a force for good? There is an article in the current issue of Fast Company that supplies some food for thought. (Yes, I know, what is a proponent of Slow doing reading a magazine with a name like that? Well, it offers a sparky and insightful take on modern culture. And for some reason I have been given a free subscription...) Anyway, the article is about a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants called Chipotle. It's growing like a weed across the US, and could have 840 branches and sales of $1 billion by the end of the year. What makes Chipotle stand out from the crowd is that it takes a very ethical ? perhaps even Slow? ? approach to feeding the public. Staff make every burrito by hand, which means that customers queue for much longer than the four-minutes that is standard in the fast food industry. But they're happy to do so because they prefer hand-made over prefab fare and the burritos taste good. What's more, the company seeks to use naturally-raised meat wherever possible. It uses rBGH-free dairy products. All its pork is free of growth hormones and antibiotics and is humanely raised. The same goes for 80% of its chicken and 50% of its beef. This means prices are higher than you find at fast food rivals but again customers are willing to pay. This begs some intriguing questions. Is Chipotle's business model just a niche in the fast food market or is it the beginning of a sea-change? Already two of the biggest fast food giants, Wendy's and Burgher King, are exploring how to bring humane pork into their supply chain. If enough of the market swings in the right direction, we could be on the verge of a great leap forward in agriculture. But can a large corporation with hundreds of branches like Chipotle ever be Slow? Or Slow enough? And does that even matter if its business practices are nudging the market in a healthy right direction? As it happens, I have just arrived in Seattle. Maybe I should go sample one of these Chipotle burritos for myself...

There is nothing less Slow than a book tour. I'm now criss-crossing North America to promote my new book, Under Pressure, and my schedule is a punishing round of interviews, speeches and short-haul flights. The good news is that I only have to do this once every few years. And that I get a chance to catch up on my reading. Just started the hauntingly beautiful Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. The other day I came across an intriguing column by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times that reminded me of some earlier comments on this blog about how capitalism fits into the Slow revolution. It seems that the go-getting US middle-classes, one of the main engines of the global economy, are having a change of heart. After years of working longer and longer hours to pay for bigger and bigger houses and cars and everything else, they are starting to ask whether all the toil and hurry and stress are worth the trouble. In a study released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, middle-class Americans were asked to name their Number One priority in life. The top answer, given by 68 percent of respondents was: "having enough free time to do the things you want." Is this because Americans are warming to the Slow revolution? Or are they simply growing disillusioned with an economic system that seems less and less fair? Or both? Either way, some basic assumptions about the economic future are coming under review. For the first time in history, median family incomes adjusted for inflation actually fell during the last boom (1999-2006). And over 40% of middle-class Americans no longer believe that the "rich achieve their wealth through hard work and ambition." Maybe this is the moment to start hammering out a recipe for Slow capitalism....

I'm in Taiwan speaking at a conference called Between Fast and Slow. It is hosted by Dada, an institute that promotes art in public places, and is funded by the Taiwanese government. Taipei, the capital city, is a bustling beehive of a place but the Slow philosophy has really struck a chord here. There is a word in Mandarin, "kuai-huo, " that means "cheerful" or "thrilled." It is made up of two characters whose literal meaning is "fast living." When In Praise of Slow came out in Taiwan in 2005, my publisher here coined a new word for the title: "man-huo," which means "slow living." Since then, "man-huo" has entered the Taiwanese vernacular, with people using it as shorthand to describe a better way of doing pretty much everything.

At the conference, one theme that keeps popping up is whether Slow belongs more to the East or West. Are Westerners simply discovering and appropriating Eastern traditions? Certainly many of the manifestations of Slow - yoga, meditation, tai-chi, alternative medicine - hail from the Orient. But I'm not sure the East has a monopoly on Slow. I think the need to change gears is universal. Even in the West we have our Slow traditions - what is the Sabbath, after all, if not a call to put on the brakes? The Slow heritage has probably faded more in the West but that doesn't mean Westerners have nothing to offer. I prefer to think of the Slow Revolution as a coming together of East and West, with both sides learning from each other.

I've been away at a family wedding in Scotland, so the blog shifted into Slow gear for a bit there...Anyway, lots of food for thought in the comments to my last post. The consensus seems to be that formally plunging into conventional politics is not the right move for the Slow Movement at the moment. I agree. That image from Mikko of my sitting alone at the back of a parliament said it all. And who would have thought that Marx would hit the nail on the head in that rousing quote (thanks, Tom) about the need to avoid being dogmatic and doctrinaire? But the comments here raise a deeper question that we will all need to address the coming months and years: how will our economic system have to change to create a truly Slow world? Thomas fingers modern capitalism as the main cause of our hyper-accelerated culture. I agree that it is a key part of the equation but is it the root cause? I wonder if maybe the real driver of our fast-forward culture is our dysfunctional relationship with time itself. We are so neurotic about getting the most out of our time, both at work and at leisure, that we turn every moment of the day into a race against the clock. Maybe modern capitalism evolved in order to indulge and quench that desire. In other words, it is the product of our manic yearning to do more and more in less and less time. But then again consumer capitalism clearly stokes our desire to do it all and have it all. So maybe our current economic system is both the result and the cause of our speedaholic culture. Either way, this is a debate we should develop in the new Slow Work forum....

Tomas asks an important question. Should Slow Planet be "explicitly political?" For many of us, slowing down starts in a very personal way. I realized that I needed to put on the brakes when I felt myself tempted to buy a book of one-minute bedtime stories (yes, they really do exist: Snow White in 60 seconds) in order to speed up the evening ritual with my son. But if you follow the Slow philosophy to its logical conclusion, then the personal is not enough. Building a Slow world implies rethinking our collective approach to everything ? how we run our schools and companies; how we travel, practice medicine, raise children and build cities; how we make our food and care for the environment; how we manufacture and transport products. No man is an island and so the best way to slow down is to slow down together. And that means the Slow revolution must have a political dimension.

But what form should that take? Has the time come to launch an official Slow political party? My feeling is No ? or at least not yet. The Slow philosophy transcends the old Left/Right divide because it makes sense right across the political spectrum, but jumping too soon into conventional politics could polarize the debate and scare off people who would otherwise come together under the Slow flag. A Slow Party could also be dismissed as one-dimensional ? a problem faced everywhere by the Green Party. What's more, there is still a long way to go in the debate over how to translate the Slow creed into hard policy. Maybe the best way forward for now is to persuade existing political parties to embrace Slow ideas. Actually, that is already happening. One example: Britain's Conservative Party (that's right, the party of Margaret Thatcher) made admiring use of the Slow philosophy in its recent Quality of Life report. What do you think? Are there "explicitly political" steps that Slow Planet should be taking right now?