It is a measure of how impressive this book is that it was published on 2nd October 2025, that my copy arrived from Australia (huh? Dunno) and that I've already written an article about one aspect of it. Today, 29th October, I'm writing a review.

Cut to the chase: if you think that thinking is important, buy the book, sit somewhere quiet and read it, slowly and carefully, in sequence from beginning to end without going back. 

The premise is simple: 100 people who don't know each other and who were identified only by a number agreed to receive one fax per week for a year. Each fax would contain one question. A reply had to be returned, by fax, before the next question arrived.  Of the 100 that started, by the end of the year, 32 remained and it is them to whom the book is credited. 

Did I like the answers? Some very much, I was ambivalent about some and for some I thought "what a wanker." Which, I would argue, is exactly as it should be if we are to avoid a descent into dogma which is what is happening in the polarising world of the internet both by choice and by dint of algorithms (the latter point powerfully explained in one answer). 

The authors clearly hope that this work starts some kind of movement and in that I'm entirely with them but not necessarily on what kind of movement. One of the lessons set out at the end of the book is that the project hinged on the efforts of one person: when he took a week off, it unravelled fast. Outside the book, the authors have taken that lesson and are running with it, hoping to lead a movement. The only reservation I have about that is that some of them appear to have formed the view that their function is to be some kind of counsellor. Whether those are the same people as produced occasional responses that, to my empirical brain, seemed a bit too "Californian", with words like "sharing" being prominent, I don't know.

I don't think that's their value: I think their value is much more important than that. We hear about "disruption" in the tech industry where, all too often, it means "let's be illegal until we can't get away with it any longer." The Fax Club Experiment has the potential to disrupt everything we think we know about the way society works and how we react to it. It is, in its way, counter-revolutionary: it might undo the past half-century's drift towards "me first" and back towards "everyone together". Why? Because as a reader we rapidly see a snapshot of a group of educated people from around the world in a diverse range of lives all looking at one, often esoteric, question. 

Three things struck me: the most caring, sharing language was usually used by people who were the most focussed on themselves. These were often those who fancied themselves as a bit clever and demonstrated it with quotations from something they hoped would impress. 

The second thing was that there was remarkably little about how people viewed themselves within the family; indeed, there were remarkably few references to family at all. 

But it wasn't because it was all big picture stuff in which the family was too small: it was because the concentration was self-centred. 

That, of itself, is massively informative. Would we, individually, answer 100 questions that asked "if you" or similar respond about ourselves? 

The third thing is that the answers given, within those constraints, are extraordinarily diverse. 

If you put 100 (or 32) minds onto one question, will you get massive diversity of thought or convergence, bearing in mind that the respondents know nothing about each other. 

But...

Was the format tainted by one of the rules? Each week, in addition to the question, each respondent received copies of replies to previous questions and those replies were identified by the person's number. It raises an interesting question; could kindred spirits begin to cluster over time despite no direct contact? Could relationships develop with no direct contact. We can see that responses to later questions are influenced by answers to those that have gone before: we know because respondents say so. 

The Fax Club Experiment has influenced how I think, it's expanded it. That has surprised me: anyone who knows my work knows I have no borders. But perhaps I have boundaries, fences which my mind has not yet jumped. 

I hope that The 32 find a way to create their movement but I hope that movement lives by one golden rule: think your own thoughts,  freely, and be confident enough in them to express them.

But don't take my word for it: get your own copy and answer the questions in the privacy of your own bathroom, or wherever. The exercise might just change how you view the world in ways that will almost certainly be for the better.