Published Date 11/2/11 9:46 PM

The is a churning of the wheel in activism, it is part of the explanation of why campaigns tend to tern in cercals, the social change we push is often bogged down by these muddy memory’s. The churning of the ground is mistaken for real movement, then activist get bored and move on to the next campaign. Its rare that the cart of activism moves any real distance.

Of course what is needed is for someone to innovate, get straw or wood under the wheels, leaver the cart out of the hole, organise a rope team to pull together, this gets the cart further along the road to where people really would like to go. Its a spark that dose it, but sparks that fall on muddy ground are soon snuffed out.

The memory hole keeps us all in the mud, it dampens the sparks that make things happen, its a churning that moves the mud in a facsimile of progress – and many people mistake the churning of mud for the moving of the cart. The failure of inspiration leads many to drop out of the activist path. The cart abandoned mired in the mud for the next group of idealistic and eager but forgetful crew to push and pull.

So the morel of this muddy and forget full fable? Please add your thoughts in the comments.

Published Date 10/25/11 8:05 PM

At protest camps, after a time it’s inevitable that things fall apart. At St Paul’s (Occupy 2011) today we had the health and safety rep shouting and waving petrol cans around while unscrewing the top in the middle of a crush of tents. “We must shut this down now.” He had a point, but this was a person at the end of his tether.

The London occupation has reached the stage where those who have taken responsibility are starting to burn out, this happens with all protest camps, the danger is these key people can be the kindling that burns the camp to the ground. How do we put fire breaks into our organising structures?

Sometimes we need to open up spaces. By stepping aside, we open the space for someone to come in to fill it. If we believe in self-organisation, then this moment of disorder is a healthy part of OUR society.

Published Date 10/18/11 4:07 PM

There is an issue of centralization around a single portal for different types of content on the web, and the withering of diversity of outcomes that this entails. There are a few successful implementations of p2p web structures such as blogging and RSS but they are exceptions, we have total domination of video (youtube) social networking (facebook) and micro blogging (twitter). Still audio, music, and images are less locked down, and text news is still a open platform. 

One way of avoiding this locking and control is the use of aggregation, the are examples of video aggregators such as http://vodpod.com and http://www.mirocommunity.org which we both use. And the visionontv project it self is an aggregating project (with a strong focus on production to balances/editorialise the output).

If you would like to see a open internet it is time to act.