Month: December 2014

Organiseing the 21st Century

Published Date 12/23/14 7:52 PM

Let’s look at how we acturly organise. Grassroots alternative streams (and #mainstreaming river with more complexity) can be split into a number of streams

* The horizontals

* The verticals

In the horizontals the organising is actually pretty opaque – lets look at the tributary’s

Organic consensus – This is rare and generally fleeting, a working example is the rainbow gathering, generally as the project settles into place organic consensus is replaced with one of the bellow organising strategies. The organic nature comes from shared myths and traditions.

Bureaucratic consensus – Common, but this tends to be only a surface layer obscuring the actual working practices which would be one of the others. It leads to ossification, see late climate camp process as an example of this. A current project is looking likely the “edge fund”.

Opaque affinity group – There is a group of people who are doing it, but you don’t know how or how to take on a role. A lot of alternatives are actually run like this, middle/late #climatecamp is an example.

Invisible affinity group – The thing just appears as if by magic, lovely as far as it takes you. Given time, this will burn out and morph into one of the other forms. Early #climatecamp is a good example of this, as is early #Indymedia

Open affinity group – The is hope in this hard to sustain one, an example would be the tech group at Balcomby anti fracking camp. These are hard/tiring to keep open “naturally” falling into a different strategy.

Then the verticals are more in the open

Democratic centralism (#SWP etc) top down and corrupt, good for the nasty crew at the centre that can last a long time by draining new blood from the alternative. Big noise and little effect.

Bureaucratic democracy (#NUJ) good as far as it goes but endless meetings and heavy use of cross subsidy to sustain the sluggish process, problematically reactionary dues to glacial adaptation to changes around it.

Career Hierarchy – most trade unions and the Labour Party, conservative and sluggish, can be captured by functioning opaque/invisible affinity groups and then used for their own ends – an example the #newlabour project.

Generally, the way things are on the river surface bears little relation to the undercurrents below the surface. Almost all organising that achieves social change is by opaque or invisible affinity groups. The more permanent, static alt infrastructure is Democratic centralism or Bureaucratic democracy. The parts that merge into the mainstream river are career Hierarchy.

We live in turbulent times, enjoy your ride on the choppy river.

Art money and society some notes

Published Date 12/11/14 5:53 PM

I went to a workshop at Space Studios on digital money and the arts. What follows are my notes – not a summary of the event so much as the threads it pulled for me, and the questions it raised.

Forms of money

There are multiple forms of money in circulation, each serving different social logics:

  • LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems): These tend to work for liberals and localists. The Brixton Pound, discussed at the meeting, is a current example.
  • Digital money: This works first for geeks, then for capital. Bitcoin and its endless clones follow this familiar trajectory.
  • Gift economies: These work for communities. Examples include London boaters and the Rainbow Gathering -both long-running, functional systems built on trust and reciprocity.
  • £££ (state money): This works for the state, and therefore for capital. This is the dominant system we currently live under.
  • Flatter: A potential path toward a practical digital utopia. (Needs more concrete examples, but the intent is important.)

Key problem: endless reinvention

The core point I wanted to get across is simple but routinely ignored: Don’t – repeat – use existing projects. Instead, everyone reinvents the wheel. We end up with hundreds of implementations of the same limited, fashionable ideas, none of them federated, none of them interoperable. Value is lost in the mess. Then the cycle repeats: rinse, repeat, move on. It’s both sad and destructive.

Space, power, and arrogance

There’s also the issue of arrogance: who is pushing whom out? Space itself has value, and control of space is control of meaning. Capital markets must expand or die. As a result, the things we value are constantly being consumed. This is colonisation of alternatives. Gentrification isn’t just about housing, its tentacles reach into every cultural and social space.

Money and social change

The world used to be regulated, in very different ways. After the fall of the Soviet Union, ripped-up money lay like confetti in public parks. Old systems collapsed overnight, replaced by temporary currencies. This transition shows something crucial: to change society, you have to change the money.

Art, value, and gatekeeping

Artists talk about reshaping the world, but what does that actually mean? What is art, and what is tart? The “chattering classes” – are they parasites, or do they have value? Are they vampires, or are they simply articulators of exclusivity? Who is curating the conversation, and to what end? What outcomes are actually produced?

And the deeper question underneath all this: where does value come from?

Community vs capital

Take the Rainbow Gathering as an example:

* Gift-based
* Global
* Nomadic
* Decentralised
* Reproduced again and again, everywhere, without ownership or branding

This raises a fundamental divide:

* Are you focused on community or on capital?
* Are you making for yourself, or for others?
* Is the work abstract, or is it useful?
* Does it live inside the art world, or outside it – in the space of use?

Many people are alienated from the establishment by gatekeepers who control access, legitimacy, and funding.

Attention, federation, and resistance

Attention is a currency. If we decentralise it, hierarchies will begin to crumble – not completely, but meaningfully. Bravely independent projects matter, but federation is the real solution.

And we must actively resist the colonisation of alternatives. Capital markets will always try to absorb what threatens them. Gentrification is ripe, aggressive, and ongoing, unless we build systems that are harder to capture.