Published Date 6/28/13 8:02 PM
Sandals and a straw hat for a riot, the face covering is for the tear gas and the was lots of it. Memoires, the mic cover was made of a piece of cutup packaging material and the mic was lent to some one latter and there dog eat it. Soon after the police van was set alight (you can see the man with the newspaper moving to light it and through it inside the petrol socked van) we left, about 20 minutes after that, the gunshot that killed is heard.
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 6/26/13 4:34 PM
(DRAFT) The finished film has no people in it and long shots of organising lists and the camp infrastructure rather than the issues and characters surrounding the campaigns. This might seem strange at first but its important to realise that films don’t show the world as it is rather they all have a peurpures, a point of view, the point of view here is recruitment of new creative and competent people to use and live on the site.
The space empty of peopule is open for peopule to come in and fill it with life and creativerty. The song by seizetheday “thank you” is both a thanking the people who built the camp and thoughes who will come (the films audience) to keep the site open and perpusfull.
The use of long video lists of “rubish rules” and “todo list” is to highlight that that this is not just a place to party its a place of work and creativity/responsabilerty. The library and free shop is about showing that this is a sustainable alternative culture, not just a transentery protest. The language used throughout is conversational and inviting “pop in for a cup of tea, the is lots to do”. The shot of the Anarchy caravan followed by the green garden is about that both fluffy and spiky activists are welcome.
The whole film is shot in bright sunshine, full of greenery and flowers to give a sense of buty/attractiveness – obversely in the middle of winter poring with rain the would be another view… The final shot of the nuculer base is a small part of the video – as its about protest camp cultures, rather than the issues involved in the campaign. Anybody who argues, and some will, about this is missing the point. With out a healthy camp the campaign in weekerend, this the film has a 2 step purpose, rejuvenation of the camp to then renew the campaign.
You really don’t need a big camera to make a good film. The film was shot entirely on a Samsung note II mobile phone in 720p resolution. I shoot at this reduced resolution to help with rapid file upload as with full HD it is almost imposable to upload the huge files reliably.
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Faslane Peace Camp has been here for 30 years campaigning against nuclear weapons.
People living in all weathers, a community of committed campaigners. The camp has been a base for actions, a ecological alternative, a home for some, a eduction for many
Phone to find if the is space to stay 01436 820901 or 07511793227
http://faslanepeacecamp.wordpress.com
Just down the road is a HUGE nuclear missile base that we have to do something about…
Video: http://hamishcampbell.com
Music: http://www.seizetheday.org
Published Date 6/22/13 6:03 PM
The are two types of security in activism (DRAFT)
The is the outline of what am talking about here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_security
Hard security
“hard security for traditional mechanisms like authentication and access control, and soft security for social control mechanisms.”
Encryption and anonymity, hiding communication so that people can trust that there interaction is with the people they think it is with and nobody eales. in activist cercals this has a strong tendency to centralise activist infrastructure and activity around a small “shadowy” group. And history tells us this is the easiest place for state, and corporate spy’s to live in these encrypted/secret shadows. Examples dailymail and Guardian
Soft security
“Soft security attempts to discourage harm and mitigate any damage, while quality control attempts to improve a product and weed out non-conforming output. The social controls on the production of Wikipedia documents demonstrate both principles, using discussion pages, accessible edit histories, policies and guidelines, in contrast to traditional document control mechanisms such as workflow and authorization, to achieve both soft security and quality control.[2]
In commercial security, soft security is often achieved through training of staff to manage the environment (1) to make disruptions more noticeable, (2) to make disruptions less socially acceptable, and (3) to create a perceived vested interest in the public.[3]”
Openness, activity streams, bring communication into the open to building trust. Using open tools so that you have a very direct and continues inside into what’s going on so you can actual see and trust the popule you are working because you can see them. This builds a secure working relationship and dynamic and effective community of action. Pleapole who have something to hide stand out and are easey to see.
The is a case for hard security in activism and we have tradition to facilitate this – phone, meetups, affinity groups etc. the problem am highlighting here is the online infrastructure that we use to implement so called hard security in activism are almost all based on clinet server infrastructure which in hand with the geek obsession with hard security makes the admin of these centralised services into a fatel weakness – if I was a modern police spy i would be an activist syes admin running the group website and e-mail list and it is very easy to take on these responsibility and stay int he shadows.
For hard security in activism the is a much better model of peer to peer model were the is no centre, it is horizontal web of trust. this is not popular amuncest geek activism for a number of resions probably the most important (unspoken) resign is one of control. An example of a workable open source tool that activist could use is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroshare would be good if a group of activist tried to work with this.
The ideas behind soft security is that the open web is simply not an appropriate tool for “spiky” organising and that most of the client server “secure” tools are pseudonymous at best and blatantly open at worst, this would be fine if people understood this but they don’t and these tools are pushed on less techy people as the right this to do. This is both dangerous in a very practical sense and damaging as it makes activism much less dynamic and flexible. The tech tools activist use dampen there effectiveness and lead to a continuation of top-down working practices.
Activist hard security is currently both damaging to the movements from its dysfunctionally and from it pseudonymous. So if soft security is a much better model for MOST activist organising and is actually what the HUGE majority of activist are doing when they use facebook for organising – the question of facebook opens up a hole other connected can of worms.
Very good DRAFT wright up of these issues here http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 6/11/13 11:37 AM
This is the state of the #stopG8 twitter account as the main convergence center is raided by hundreds of police:
Using individual Facebook accounts – who sees the content they post is decided by the advertising driven algorithms of Facebook and everything they post is sent strait to the corporate and governmental agency’s they are fighting against.
The website they have built is not only dysfunctional (it only allows corporate embeds of video all opensource or activists embeds are blocked – only google owned youtube works) it’s a control freaks love affair and a re-creation of the Soviet Union.
UPDATE: the video embed whent up in the end https://network23.org/stopg8/media/video
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 6/9/13 8:02 PM
The web is fundamentally a peer to peer network, as are human relationships. Let’s look at a recent activist website built for the G8 protest in London https://network23.org/stopg8. It is a one way approach – a directing tool for a small minority of unknown and unknowable people to direct the majority of people, with limited ways for the majority to talk back or take part in the web organising.
WordPress the tool used here is a a top-down tool, original a single user blogging platform, thus its useful for hierarchical opaque organising, which goes hand in hand with “closed security” minded geeks and activists – the problem oveasuly lies in the fact that such tools restrict peoples online involvement and this leads to a dampening and shrinking of offline involvement or the moving of open organising onto the closed web of Facebook etc. Wordpress is fine for a noticeboard site or personal blog but not for any form of self organising or group networking, its broken as a way of building a dynamic social moveme
A more obvious activist approach would be to use opentools such as wikis and forums, and self organising web spaces to build a creative movement “open security” model were people could could build “trust” by activity feeds. A tool for this would be single sign in site built on liferay such as http://visionon.tv
“Closed security” gives the dangerous illusion of anonymity were non exists, this both gives control to a small group of unaccountable activists and dampens self organising – the life blood of activism.
“Open security” widens ownership and builds spaces for creativity, its based on transparent trust networks. It builds security as the is no foles sense of anonymity – if you wont to organise something “spiky or norty” you whisper at the back of the pub.
The is no security in centralised activist infrastructure as you don’t know who actually runs them and you don’t know who is upriver of their hosting providers. The is a clear danger that this pseudonymous is mistaken for true anonymity and this danger comes at a clear organising cost. At the moment we have a clear failer of activist web culture, which can be seen in the shrinking of activism ( and its replacement with clicktivism) – post a comment if you would like to have a go at fixing this.