This post is the first in a series. It’s an experiment, in which I’ll be asking the internet for help with seven things in seven days - as I work out how to help all the projects I’m involved with to make it happen over the next few years. For some background, see yesterday’s post about Help and Happiness - and if you want to know more about who I am and what I do, check out my personal website.

I have exciting news: last week, I wrote four and a half chapters of a book. It arrived out of nowhere, demanding to be written - a response to current events, but also a reflection on my own experiences over the past few years.

Now, I want your help to get it into print.

Let me tell you a bit more about it. It’s called ‘First Life’ and it’s about how technology is disrupting politics-as-we-know-it - and why those of us who spent the past few years talking about this stuff mostly got it wrong.

Here’s a bit more of a summary:

“History is never finished: the danger is not to write about events while they are still ongoing, but to write about them as if they were not.”

In the early weeks of 2011, a wave of unrest which had been building for years broke across the Arab world. At the same moment, cities in Britain and the United States saw protests of a kind not known for a generation or more. All of this seemed to be animated and narrated by the new ways in which people were connecting and organising through social media. The revolution had a hashtag.

First Life is about how networked technologies are disrupting politics-as-we-know-it. If these tools are changing the world, it is because they reveal already existing tensions that could previously be ignored by the powerful.

It’s also a personal story from the strange borderlands between technology, policy and activism: a world in which anarchist hackers find themselves advising government ministers and millionaire angel investors put their money into projects run by people whose long-term goal is the end of capitalism.

It’s not an academic study or a political pamphlet, it’s a book full of ideas told through stories, something I believe can reach a broader audience.

Now, I’ve done the crowd-funding and self-publishing thing before with Dark Mountain - and it’s working again right now for Issue 2. (And how many self-published pamphlets get a lead review in the New Statesman?) But this feels like the kind of project which needs the heft of an old-school publisher behind it.

So here’s what I need help with today: I’d like to talk to a literary agent who knows the industry inside out and can help make this happen.

If you know the right person, maybe you could send them this post - and put us in touch?