JANUARY 20 of this year, the day of President Bush’s inauguration, was also the occasion for a novel form of protest against the President and the war in Iraq. “Not One Damn Dime Day” was, according to its sponsors, an opportunity to speak out against the war by boycotting all forms of consumer spending for 24 hours. “Open your mouth”, their electronic missives implored, “by keeping your wallet closed.”

In its injunction to sit at home and be a tightwad for the day, the Not One Damn Dime Day campaign was an exercise in militant slacktivism. Slacktivism, the phrase itself a rather lazy haemorrhaging of the two words slacker and activism, is the counter-intuitive idea that you can somehow change the world and topple its complacent political classes without even rising from your chair.

In the UK, an underground army of slacktivists is driving the latest literary trend — a slew of reasonably priced books offering tips on how to make a difference. Change The World for a Fiver, for example, outlines 50 modern commandments on how to bring about global justice — such as smiling, planting a tree and learning some good jokes.

The Armchair Environmentalist, meanwhile, offers a “can-do” approach to saving the planet, one which includes buying low-energy light bulbs and reusing envelopes. In France, the slacktivist ethic takes the form of a radical laziness at work. The Das Kapital of the movement is the economist Corinne Maier’s recent bestseller Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness) — a book whose unique recipe for workplace resistance is to do the least possible work and, in the words of Maier, “screw the system from within without anyone noticing”.

In the United States, the slacktivist prefers to propagandise from the comfort of his couch or computer, usually wearing his pyjamas. He is especially fond of firing off endless e-mail petitions — putting his name to e-mail lists of people decrying Third World debt, forwarding appeals on behalf of dying children — all blissfully ignorant of the fact that online petitions, being unverifiable, have no influence whatsoever on the activities of governments or multinationals and end up deleted or in the bin.

What the slacktivist lacks in productivity, he or she makes up for in self-righteousness. Another slactivist protest, beloved by some American heterosexual liberals, is to protest against prohibitions on gay marriage by refusing to tie the knot.

The problem with slacktivism, the ultimate in easy-to-do, feel-good politics, is that its methods are indistinguishable from simply doing nothing. This is the politics of taking a huff. Far from being radical, its idea that the political urge can be satisfied by simply pressing a button or filling out a form is the ultimate in mind-numbing consumerism. Its efforts are unlikely to disturb the sleep of anyone, not even the slactivist himself.

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