Building a (modular) thought tank[These thoughts have been with me for a while. But a couple of things have sparked me off today: Emily James, talking about her documentary Just Do It, remarked that filming the young activists that are the subject of the film had made her come off the fence – where she had previously said “’it’s not my place to tell others what to do’ – in a sort of late-’90s relativist kind of way”. And it does seem like there is a genuine resurgence of reality amongst those of the current generation entering adulthood.
This got me thinking about how so much of internet culture is built upon those values of the ’90s which appear no longer fit for purpose – the myth of infinitude, the aversion to a stable identity, to commitment, to belonging - and also to attempt to map the tension between dispersion and centralisation, and to try to make the case for a new, higher, intelligent synthesis of the two.
And reading @leashless’
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/in_a_pag ... overty.pdfmade me ask – if these logical arguments are sitting unread on a server, if the truths and poetry and impassioned calls to arms Vinay has furnished us with are failing to spark the revolution, what would it take for something to happen? I think part of the answer to that is a new banner, or banners, or holarchic nest of banners, around which we can gather, about which we can build momentum, by which we can be recognised, with all the risks and triumphs which result from that.]
OK.
Let’s triangulate the space: On the one hand, diversity, openness, multiplicity, all the endless infinite unbounded possibility of the wild frontiers of cyberspace. Multiplying identities, loyalties, spreading ideas and memes through promiscuous chains of association; but also, knowing no-one, alienated from reality, divorced from spatiality, spaffing your best work out into the void for fear of actually having to commit to being part of something real - for fear of belonging.
On the other, enclosure, trust, linearity, immediatism, stability, security, concerted collective effort and achievement. Conspiracies, secret societies, gangs, child porn rings; but also, effective political movements, activist cells, tongs, special forces corps, brand-recognition co-ops, reliable and accountable media hubs.
It’s easy to see why the pendulum swung one way. Enclosure had won a long time before we turned up. Fossilised carcasses of once-vital political parties, running on sheer inertia and the locked-down lack of any chance of a viable alternative. Unions fighting to preserve the particular kind of capitalist exploitation that was around when the current bosses got their seat at the table. Corporations closing down the map on anything resembling independent operations or operators.
So when the opportunity came to board the Mayflower for an untamed new world of electronic release, it was relished: ” The Boomers started to conceive it; the Xers started to build it; but the Ys would board it, bound for infinity on a ray of light that would never look back.” Late-’90s cultural fissipation; identity politics dividing any last embarrassing attachments to ideology into ‘Real World’ soundbites; musical subgenres cross-breeding like HIV tropisms; fetishisation of gender and sexual diversity that never quite jumped the synapse from diverting entertainment to actual experimentation.
And then when dial-up went broadband, the gloves were off. A whole new continent to explore, and exploit, and eventually fill with obese depressed nihilistic memetic children. Simultaneously, you can see politicians appealing to Joe Average by decrying any connection to established political theory; “you and me,” they say, “aren’t like those pencilneck policy wonks - we’re happy not knowing the first thing about what ought to be done. Don’t you want someone like me - someone like you - to be in charge?” Political opinion outsourced to a multitude of research institutes and think tanks, which pretend to look afresh at the world and to stumble, a-politically, upon their brand of obvious truths. Technocratic consensus. The possibility of radical political change reduces to just one option - the scorched-earth shock doctrine of anti-political politics. Let’s just hope no real world problems come along that actually require positive collective intent to respond.
But we have now come to the limit term of that trend. A thousand political bloggers don’t add up to a healthy ecosystem of media megafauna any more than an uptick in plankton numbers makes up for the loss of the right whales.
A million individuals can overthrow a government (so long as it doesn’t fight back), but can’t build anything in its place, can’t stop the vacuum being filled by invisible, invidious forces worse than the nation state. Political indifference makes it easier to mock the established parties, but doesn’t stop the thin blue line from daubing itself in student red.
To be fair, there has been a real push to apply the potentialities of new technology, social space and interaction to politics and government, to pressure groups, activism, currency et al. And there is no doubt these overly structurated worlds can benefit from de-centralisation, de-hierarchisation, bottom-up feedback.
But we are beginning to recognise that simply handing over the valuable code of localism, connectivity and gift entrepreneurialism to governmental forces might just be to further enable the dismantling of the protective aspect of the state, and thereby extend techno-capitalism’s mass-appropriation of our lives. I think there is an equal extent to which the new world of free agents we have been building might advantageously adopt the advantages of enclosure where appropriate.
Maybe its time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. It is clearly no longer enough to connect online, to discuss and observe and critique, echoing voices in endless confabulations, safe in the virtual playroom until this year’s Zuckerberg decides to pull the plug. It’ s not even enough to gather, momentarily, around a flag of convenience, to create spectacle and sound and disorder, to win a battle but lose the war for lack of any viable - plausible - plan for reconstruction. It’s not enough to pass on information online, even to create our own hubs to collate it, for us all to know that we are right, if we continue to cede the central plains of national thought-space to the established outlets.
In short, we need to learn to build. We need to build… the first metaphor that came to me was “a thought tank”; we can’t make it across the shell-scarred no-man’s land of media lockdown and apathetic inertia on our own, so we need to construct some kind of collective vehicle that we can safely pilot to our destination.
Some of us will provide the engine of inspiration, of meaning, of narrative direction; some will provide the armour of bulletproof theory, political argument, prepared rebuttals to obvious counterattacks; some the weaponry of direct assault on the moribund paradigms of a dying system; and some the simple fuel of personal liberation and enquiry – all deftly welded into a single fighting machine.
But we don’t want to throw away everything we learnt from the other swing of the pendulum. We don’t want to become embedded once again in unwieldy, ungovernable motorised behemoths. What we need is something closer to the modular structure of open source ecology. What we need is to make everything in our lives cellular. When freedom and stability intermesh in creative harmony we get an effective holarchy.
Activists have got this started already. Climate Change Camp, say, or Climate Rush or Plane Stupid, cross-linking, multiplying loyalties (half the people there also members of Amnesty and Greenpeace) sub-divided into affinity groups, each in turn made up of individuals - a fractal conspiracy, splitting and merging like shoals.
Fine. But why stop there? Where did the Make Poverty History coalition go? Where are all the other arms of the Global Justice Movement? Why is it that Conservatives, or Republicans, can hold diametrically opposed opinions on matters of absolute importance to them, but still gather under a single banner, in order to win.
Aren’t we more aligned on the things that really matter? Once upon a time, schisms and ideological differences must have been overcome - there must have been genuine positive collectivising momentum - to create the Chartist movement, or the Unions, or the Labour movement, or the Civil Rights movement. Now, people wait to be told where to sit by their chosen charity. Where did this impulse go? How can we get it back? ( I know we’ve already got it back. A bit. But what of the people we need to create a critical mass? Do we really have to wait until things get so bad they are forced into understanding? Can’t we skip ahead to the good bit?)
And it’s not enough to think simply in terms of activism. The ideological territory has to be won back, inch by blood-soaked inch. The frames and memes of the status quo will not die easily. Individual opinions of lone bloggers don’t seem to be swaying the collective opinion of the masses.
So - A modular thought tank: leveraging the power of holarchic stability to gain presence and weight in the ideological arena.
A modular philosophy: the myth that a philosophy must appear, all of a piece, from the mind of a single individual, is passing along with the isolated gothic Western ego that produced it. Why can’t we model how we actually think; agreement on the broadest beams of the structure, with space for dissensus in application, in implication, in details?
A modular movement: To be part of a traditional political party means to sign up to their program, and any hope of change must be of change from within. A modular party can incorporate levels of diversity within it - the fundamentals are agreed upon, but the details are up for grabs. An internal holarchy of nested variation. Nowadays, when (the right kinds of) conversations can happen in public, with the public, with full transparency, this is not a weakness but an advantage. (Witness the crowd-sourced constitution in Iceland – diversity of opinion as guarantor of authenticity, of representativity).
And, within this, there is room for different types of movement. Dark Mountain, for example, is necessarily non-programmatical - a deliberately loose space for conversation. But, at a certain stage, the conclusions drawn from conversation become clear enough that people are willing to proceed to action from them, and that requires more enclosure, more containment, more collective unity.
At one point, Vinay said something about the Far Right in the US trying again and again to find the right electable plausible-looking but actually extremely conservative female that would resonate with the American public (Coulter, Palin, Bachmann) – and that, so long as they kept plugging away, it was only a matter of time until they succeeded.
This got me thinking: can’t we say the same about this global environment-poverty-justice-personal transformation thing that keeps on nearly becoming legible? It’s not anti-Globalisation, its not Make Poverty History, its not the Zeitgeist movement, it’s not the Global Oneness Project, it’s definitely not the Wayseers. But if we keep on plugging away, might it not take something from all of these? Does it need to be a zero-sum competition? Aren’t we merely searching for a single banner that says “We have gone wrong – ethically, ecologically, economically. We can go right”?
I guess I’m just looking at the gameboard and seeing the two poles unintegrated – at one end, progressive thought existing in a fragmented, atomised space; at the other, real power locked into immovable inherited structural blocs. What would it take to bring the two attributes into constructive interplay? What would it look like to genuinely raise a new banner?:
=Top level: Unification of environmental, pro-freedom, anti-poverty, anti-capitalist movements. We don’t need to invent this - it already exists. It just needs greater capacity for collective intent, and better branding.
Philosophy:
- Integrated theory of global justice. Evolving, holarchic account of thinking and plans; from top level of simple statement of values down through all the details, sublevels mapping the arguments and resolutions and reasons for decisions. So any child in the world with access to the internet can understand, argue, contribute.
Information:
- Global people-owned Media. Globally crowd-source funding for television, internet and print media to replace economically and politically compromised existing outlets. As in, everyone who would like to read a more radical, reality-connected version of the Guardian without the weak-willed obeisence to the celebrity/lifestyle/consumption features model, raise your hands now. If we own it, we can collectively vote on its editorial policy.
Action:
- Start Global Justice Movement political parties. Elect them.
- Activists fight on every other political front available. Keep doing what they are doing, but they make it clear it is part of the collective movement.
- Build alternatives - technological, social, communal. Start organisations and companies. Create and disseminate.
= Middle levels: National and regional movements, political parties, media outlets. Plus, specialised focuses on different aspects of global justice issues - organisations, companies, e.g. Greenpeace, Amnesty. Specialised media outlets. As we own the top level outlets also, why not an editorial policy of including a certain proportion of information and editorial content in top-level media from different second-level collectives? National newspapers. Local TV. Art: Collectives, movements, crowd-sourced feature films; enthuse, inspire, transmit, disseminate, reinstall, reinforce.
= Lowest levels: Now it gets interesting. Localised movements, grassroots activism, small organisation innovators, individual artists, all diverse and organic and creative and cross-breeding and cross-fertilising and mutating and feeding back in to the levels above. How much more interesting would a national newspaper be if there were genuinely modular movements happening across the country, rather than just the isolated incidents of a fragmented populace of individuals? How much more incentive would there be to form those movements if there was a higher-level tier that might report on your actions and ideas and manifestos and actions?
Preachers and hackers and athletes and inventors and protestors, all operating in a structured gamespace of practical and ideological ferment and exchange. But not on their own - organising themselves into affinity groups and tongs and movements and online hubs and aggregates and magazines. Leveraging the human instinct for collective gossip - all the energy that currently goes into sustaining celebrity froth - into a synergising collective focus, that actually might achieve something, that can contribute to something larger.
I am not suggesting anything new. We have all the arguments in place. We have a hundred thousand articles online already making the points we want to make, rebutting the arguments we hear again and again. We have the technology, the strategies, the policies, the constitutions, the legal models, the alternative steady-state economic systems, the means of organising and making collective decisions. We have much of the infrastructure in the form of governments, NGOs, universities, existing media channels. Our only obstacles to genuine unified action are psychological, cultural, social: we lack synergetic communication; we lack belief that we are the global majority; we lack a single banner to gather around. So here’s my pitch for infamy: “The Global Justice Movement”.
A more detailed fantasy to follow…
http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/6555 ... ought-tank 
