Month: February 2016

Published Date 2/29/16 1:55 PM

DRAFT of 3 examples of “working” contemporary alternatives and their malcontent’s.

The Village Butty
A lovely project provided originally by a hard-working individual with small funding and continuing energy. The need, boaters need a warm dry open common place, if their unique contemporary “village” culture is to survive the long term slow and grinding pushing out of CRT and local councils, not to menturn the self inflicted internal sabotage of its own often mad dispoleing crews.

The village butty is a re-booting/rebrinding of the older james’s butty for hiar, the early project had burned out then faded due to the the off balance of money making outreach and community value boater use. In the end it alienated both and with a waning of good will and no money coming in the butty was going to be sold. A new younger more energetic crew came in to save the day, with a real crowed funding outreach, boater community lead, the butty was saved.

But the is a denial/unknowing of the need to balance/manage community that is pushing this out of balance to the money making side (fair anufe the failer of this side of the balance was the resion for the need for the reboot). But if this understandable swing reaction is not brought back into balance then the good will of the community side of sustainability  balance will be lost and with out this it becomes harder to keep a boat working on the water, aspesheraly in such a small place as London. The boater community provides the couler and direct practical support when needed, as well as its own headaches 😉

This needs a community hart-hart gathering to unblock the constipation that is currently blocking the shit from coming out, a bit of composting will need to be preprepared for this gathering for the resulting smell not to drive people away.

The London Hackspace
One of the few continuing/ongoing “secessess” of alt-DIY organising in the UK. It is not only a fantastic place full of interesting, competent and active people, its organised in a way/model for how grassroots could be expanded out to fill in more social spaces.

Was originally set-up and run by a competent invisible affinity group as the space grew this became an opaque affinity group, with suseass and increasing membership this opaque group became visibly dysfunctional due to dilution and burn out of the original core crew. Affinity organising, while still core, was submerged into bureaucracy, hard rules and angry trolls hitting each other with them filled the online spaces and left the real world space dulled and filled with low level broken.

The space continues and a big smoky flare up and resulting gathering helped to resolve the surface issues, but the underlining fractures have not been addressed to truly sustain the project, lets hope it survives the move to the next premisses and continues to grow and mutate.

The Hive Dalston
This one started well but fell into an ideological clash that became hidden in a smoke screen of personalty politics. The lack of any clear vision made it impossible to resolve as the underlining tensions were blocked from being spoken. One side pushed the other aside and took over sole running of the project, it became a ideologically driven shadow of what it needed to be, in this it moved to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution, making it hard to continue to support the project in any way.

This is not beyond rescue, and the balance between (selfish/stupid) evil and (open/growing) good is still in the air. One solution, a moment of evil, a bit of power politics would put this project back on track, light and dark need each other, some times the devil is right.

Conclusion

To move all these projects on we need to reknit the broken bones of the past.

Published Date 2/21/16 3:07 PM

Would like to test some bits from banggood for cheap offgride life. If you would like to push me a donation on the button on the left would help to make this happen.

Here are 2 potentially useful pieces of off grid kit

12000mAh 12V Car Jump Starter Car and laptop/USB Power Supply Battery

In theory this should charge off a portable solar panel, and run a laptop and any USB device. Almost all of these will fail to charge off 12-14v needing 16-19v to charge properly, this one says it will charge off a boat/car (12-14v) so good to test if this is true so I can recommend it as a backup winter boat/summer travel power source.

Nitecore MH20 CREE XM-L2 U2 1000LM USB Smallest LED Flashlight 18650

This would not only make a good flash light for dark nights on the tow-path it would make a good anti mugging device to scar away undesirables 1000 lumen is blighting bright. The current touch i use for this is only 70 lumen which works fine. This charges by USB so easy plug and forget no battery’s to replace.  Will it work? Hands on testing is the only way to tell.

If you would like to support reviewing these products and many others click the donate link on the side bar

Published Date 2/10/16 9:55 PM

To illustrate what a mess we are currently in. Solar power over the last 10 years has plummeted in cost and crept up in efficacy, leading to a shift to sustainable energy in many western country’s. This decrease in cost had nothing to do do with western entrepreneur and the capitalist path. The funding (huge subsidy) was paid by the Chinese government (and the people it taxes). It was a state planed and funded attempt by the chines communist party to gain dominance in this new era, they did this by top down building of huge solar power factory and infrastructure, the plan was to bankrupt the western producers by swamping them with cheap products and then profit from cornering this global future industry.

This seceded up to a point but they over steeped the production so were caught in a spiralling decrease in price that easily swept away the nebulous western solar industry. But also run away and undermined their own economic base, central planing in a “capitalistic” hybrid system is hard to control. So, we have a moment of hugely under priced solar flooding the world market. This has been proven to be very challenging to our existing energy monopoly’s. With no indigenous solar industry left the is nobody to lobby our legislators any more to keep the market open. Our monopolist are putting legislative blocks on solar roll-out in place to prop up their old industry’s and apart from some green’s the is little standing in their way.

China inadvertently doing evil dose the would a huge favour, but the “evil” in the end taints the “favour”. Its clearly a mess and if we still had a grown up politics maybe we could do something to mediate this mess.

Published Date 2/8/16 5:21 PM

At the end of the 20th century we had a forceful right wing ideological push to reshape western society’s. The Thatcher/Ragion years started the push to create a world were “There’s no such thing as society”, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared “There are individual men and women and there are families.”

30 years latter we now live in this world. This idealogical world-view is deeply embed in nearly every part of western cultures and is still pushing to powerfully shape the wider globe. This ideological push was a reaction to/consciously against a 20th century “social liberal” ideologue that had grown from the destruction of 2 world wars in the 20th century.

Were are we now? The enlightening thinking form this is that conscious pushing of ideology has the power to shift society and define what it is to be human. The is proven power in “thought and action” on “human nature” and our social lives are continuously shifting to this “power”. The issue we face today is that we have a denial of this power from both the right and the left which highlights the deepness of the right world view.

Food for thought, can we escape, were is the ideology of the liberal/left?

Published Date 2/6/16 5:05 PM

The Hive Dalston – big society community centre a product of voluntarism and activist fashion with dose of hipster. Started out as an exciting project between radical (free party/activist) squatters and a more mainstream arts groups. The idea was to take up and use the Tory “big society” legalisation that had been pushed though at the start of the Cameroon government but has been lieing fallow since.

The is a incentive for the social use of empty property, that landlords could get local tax exceptions for their empty buildings if these buildings were put into local community use. As with most Tory ideas this was actually a direct attack on locale democracy, by starving it of the tax revenue and potently replacing its core social services with volunteers rather than paid professionals. Any use of this “legislation” would have to walk a tipe rope to stay within the system, to sustain the project, while not falling into the trap of pushing the Tory agenda of privatisation and NGO thinking that are core to the ideas of a “big society”.

The Hive soon failed this tightrope walk and fell into the direct Tory project, the fragile radicalism pushed aside and the space filled with wannabe “arts” and NGO spiritual fashion, it became a scruffy “community centre” on the cheap. If it survives and spreads its a viable model for replacing what’s left of the pail shades of the bureaucratic “pay your way” centres that are left over from the more rigid social justice/culture as social good of the 1970’s heydays.

The resulting burn out and walk away has left the Hive project less than shiny, its make or brake for it to find the next space. Can projects like this walk a tipe rope to stay sustainable while remaining relevant is the question. And do people care unuf for this question. to actually matter is the root of the issue of this post.

Published Date 2/1/16 6:52 PM

Am writing this for people who are actively leave the mainstream 9-5 society and move into disrepute subcultures to live their  lifes.

Issues of group organisation crop up reugally and are generally badly resolved leading to a consistent life sapping churning of bad will and trails of failed groups.

For most people directly in these subcultures this is not an important issue as the majority just dip in and out of this shifting social soup for them the mainstream is a easy fall-back. They are less likely to notice and by the time they do notice the churning of growth and decay, they are ready to leave back to the (dulling) safety of the mainstream. Rinse and repeat is a apt description of the passing of each short generation, and the a causation of alt-culture haveing a bad reputation in the mainstream.

Over the next few posts am hoping to have a look at a few different groups am involved in that are at different stages of “crises”. Lets look at two concepts from the 19-20th century first:

Small groups of a less radical nature tend to use one of these organising structures for their spaces (the wikipedia links need filling out)

A village hall, is a non commercial space for community events that is a open space for for all the social/political/cultural activity a community holds in common. Its a “neutral” space for groups to build community cohesion. It will generally be run by a elected community of members of an active and open local group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_hall

A church hall will share many of the same uses and structures but will have a tendency to be more narrowly focused in the areas the church has negative attitude. Ie. a Catholic church would probably not host a meeting of groups supporting abortion issues, more conservative churches would not host the young socialists or the anerakist black flag legal support etc they may have issues with other religions usesing the space. In general the would be “moralistic and idealogical” restrictions on the open use of the community space that would highlight some parts of the commnerty and disadvantage others. The final arbiter would probably be a the head of the local management committy reporting to the vicar would would be sacturned by the church hiracky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_hall

The recsion we have overlapping Village Halls and Church Halls in most villages should be obvious for these two short paragraphs. In the 20th century both of these older institutions were supplemented by a third more modern institution that directly replaced the church focus and expanded on the role of the village hall in larger urban arrears.

The community centres grow out of the spread of ideas about social justice and the value of couture in the middle of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_centre (this link is more filled out and worth a read)

In the late 20th century these areas were then degraded by commercialisation, their community empowerment focus becoming lost (must pay way).

They also suffered from the suffocation of bureaucratisation with was a produced of mid 20th century thinking and organising.

We have 3 of the more traditinal mainstream approaches to a “space for the community” with the “romanisations of the past” thinking we are currently rebooting older ideas, the idea of a village hall is coming back (and in more conservative circles church halls are being re-introduced). Its good to think for a moment that they were products of their time and place and will need rebooting in a form that is appropriate for the different 21st century thinking/society we live in today.