The current state of our political systems, particularly the electoral process, raises fundamental questions about the nature of democracy and representation. The problem is the system is designed to maintain the supremacy of the powerful, perpetuating conflicts and minimizing real democratic engagement.
Elections, rather than fostering democracy, exacerbate divisions and repeatedly fail to address critical issues. Parties capitalize on trivial matters, manipulate voters, and converge on worshipping of the #deathcult with policies that benefit commercial interests.
Historically, elections have been chosen as a means to exclude the majority from meaningful involvement in power, reflecting a distrust of democracy by the powerful. The UK’s political model, shaped in the 18th century, survived the introduction of universal suffrage largely intact, maintaining a system where elected representatives are disconnected from the interests and needs of the real people.
Despite alternatives such as participatory democracy, popular assemblies, and sortition (random selection like the #OGB), powerful, and everyday interests stifle their implementation. These alternative social technology models prioritize #4opens community involvement, deliberation, and consensus-building over the spectacle of elections.
Participatory democracy, when well-designed, has proven effective in addressing complex and divisive issues. Citizens’ assemblies and constitutional conventions have successfully tackled issues such as equal marriage, abortion, and climate policy, where elected representatives have struggled. This in a native, messy form is how all activism is organised.
The next step needs to build up grassroots democracy with a project like the #OGB to supplement, push aside and then replace traditional parliamentary chambers. Such a system would ensure that decisions are made by a representative sample of society, rather than by career politicians shaped by money and lobbying.
The guardian article argues that general elections result in a form of representation that is skewed, and the voices of many are left unheard. In response, progressive voices within the #mainstreaming community are calling for the implementation of projects like the OGB as a native governance model.
The OGB provides a more inclusive and representative form of governance, where decisions are made collectively and transparently. This addresses the shortcomings of existing democratic systems by leveraging digital technologies and community participation. However, the success of the OGB depends on the support of coders and community members who are willing to contribute their skills and efforts to development. This initiative requires both technical expertise and a commitment to the #4opens path.
In summary, the #OGB represents a promising approach to governance within the #openweb paths, offering an alternative to traditional democratic structures and emphasizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven decision-making.
We visited the ship scrapyard, to see what they had in terms of lifeboats and boat parts. The problem was that the boats were old, worn and damaged from being removed without any care from the scraped ships. As Northam Europeans, the 3ed party sellers were asking for unrealistic prices at the same level as the better/newer boats in the UK, just converting the UK web prices to euros. This makes it unrealistic to buy a boat here.
Changing the European Union (#EU) to be more competent and progressive on social and tech issues requires concerted effort and engagement from all the stakeholders, including activists, citizens, civil society organizations (#NGO), policymakers, and Eurocrats. I outline some #fluffy strategies for driving change within the EU:
Engagement and Advocacy: Citizens and civil society organizations can engage with EU institutions through advocacy efforts, lobbying, and participation in public consultations. By pushing concerns, proposing solutions, and advocating for progressive policies, grassroots movements can exert pressure on policymakers to prioritize social and tech issues.
Policy Innovation: Grassroots and “organic” experts in the fields of social and technology policy can develop and promote “innovative “native” policy proposals that address emerging challenges and needed change. This includes regulations that protect the #4opens paths, promote community, and foster #KISS technological innovation reasonably.
Transparency and Accountability: Promoting transparency and accountability within EU institutions is core to ensuring that decision-making processes are open, inclusive, and accountable to the people. This involves pushing for #4opens transparency in policymaking, access to information, and mechanisms for holding people and policymakers accountable for their actions.
Capacity Building: Investing in capacity building initiatives enhances the knowledge and expertise of policymakers, civil servants, and “grassroots” stakeholders involved in shaping EU policies. This includes shifting funding, training, resources, and support to enable all stakeholders, focusing on the grassroots, to effectively engage with complex social and tech issues and develop evidence-based policy solutions.
Coalition Building: Building coalitions and alliances among diverse spiky and fluffy stakeholders amplify voices and increase collective influence on EU policies. By forging partnerships across wide sectors, groups and organizations leverage their collective strengths and resources to drive the needed systemic change.
Public Awareness and Education: Raising people’s awareness and educating citizens about social and #FOSS and #dotcons tech issues is essential for building progressive policies and initiatives. This includes conducting #DIY public campaigns, organizing #4opens educational events, and leveraging grassroots media and #4opens digital platforms to inform and mobilize the engaged people around key issues.
Participatory Governance: Promoting participatory governance mechanisms within the EU enhances peoples engagement and democratic decision-making. This includes establishing platforms like the #OGB for public participation, citizen assemblies, and deliberative processes that enable people to contribute to policy development and decision-making.
International Collaboration: Collaborating with international partners, organizations, and networks amplify efforts to drive change within the EU. By sharing “native” practices, sharing knowledge, and coordinating advocacy efforts at the international level, stakeholders strengthen their collective impact and influence the needed global policy agendas.
Overall, changing the EU to be more competent and progressive on social and tech issues requires a grassroots approach that involves activism, engagement, advocacy, policy innovation, transparency, capacity building, coalition building, public awareness, participatory governance, and international collaboration. By working together in active fluffy/spiky debate across sectors and borders, stakeholders can contribute to shaping the change and challenge to build an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future within the EU and wider world in the era of #climatechaos
I moved my boat to Oxford a year ago, it’s an interesting city with strong academic roots, I have taken part in a few hundred university seminars since arriving. This is a few notes from an activist prospective on the university path. The common issue with these Oxford seminars, is outlined in my notes, this is the disconnect between academic discourse and the real-world challenges faced by activists and movements. A few of the key problems I have highlighted over this time:
Co-optation of activism: Both right-wing groups and NGOs have co-opted the concept of activism without understanding or utilizing its purpose and path. This leads to a distortion of its original intent.
Assumption of liberal path continuation: Much academic work assumes that the liberal trajectory will persist, despite mounting evidence from climate science indicating otherwise. There’s a failure to acknowledge the urgent need for alternative paths in the face of #climatechaos and its social and economic ramifications.
Lack of focus on future paths: We need studies examining potential future trajectories led by both the hard right-wing and progressive left. This is particularly relevant given the likelihood of a post-apocalyptic scenario for many equatorial countries due to #climatechaos.
Disconnect from real-world activism: The events are, too, often status games rather than meaningful discussions about addressing the pressing issues. There’s a failure to engage with the messy realities faced by activists and movements on the ground.
Academic feedback loop: The feedback loop between academics and activists is flawed, with academics relying on poor sources and engaging with #fashionistas rather than those actively “working” in grassroots activism. This results in a caricatured understanding of activism and its challenges.
Irrelevance of academic thinking: Academic thinking needs to be criticized for being detached from the practical realities faced by activists. That it’s focused on building consensus and engaging in definition games rather than addressing the substantive issues.
In summary, the common issue is the disconnect between academic discourse and the lived experiences of activists and movements, leading to a lack of relevant insights and solutions to pressing real-world challenges.
Join Worcester College Provost, David Isaac CBE, as he interviews leading role models about their lives and careers.
Bridget Kendall MBE has spent over 40 years as a BBC journalist, joining as a graduate trainee in 1983. She was BBC Moscow correspondent from 1989 to 1994, covering the final years of the Soviet Union and the first years of post-Soviet Russia. She was BBC Washington correspondent from 1994 to 1998 during the Clinton Presidency. From 1998 to 2016 she held the senior role of BBC Diplomatic correspondent, reporting on major global trends and crises, and analysing their impact on Britain and the world.
Kendall was the first woman elected Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge in 2016. She was appointed a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 2020, the same year in which she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. She is also an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall. Her awards include the James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism, a Bronze Sony Reporter of the Year award, a special award for International Reporting from the Political Studies Association and an MBE in the 1994 New Year’s Honours list.
A Cambridge child studies #Oxford to study Russian, she goes onto the BBC
This is the #mainstreaming view of history. How much should we move away from the current mess? What other history’s can we tell, what is a useful and safeish path next, as this current path is ending.
How would you change if the message from the top changes.
Although cattle and sheep were central to the everyday lives and wellbeing of Bronze Age communities in northwest Europe, they are strangely lacking from our narratives of the period. After the Neolithic, it seems, archaeologists rarely consider domestic animals to be interesting. However, Bronze Age people clearly thought otherwise, as the careful deposition of complete and partial animal bodies in graves, pits and ditches suggests. The traces of cattle and sheep are present in other ways too, in hoofprints around waterholes and in landscape features like droveways that appear at this time, but we too rarely consider what such evidence can tell us beyond the economic significance of animals and their products. Integrating multispecies and posthumanist perspectives that highlight how living with animals involves intimate interaction and interdependency, we ask how it might be possible to explore the role of cattle and sheep as active participants in Bronze Age social worlds. By reconstructing the intertwining of people and animals in life and death, we can consider how together they generated Bronze Age worlds of work, sociality and meaning.
The impact of #colonialism, this narrative, has shaped our history. We need to decolonise this excerpted story.
#Animals as economic and status significance, rather than looking at animals in their own sense. Living with connection to them, Proximity to Humans, animals sharing houses.
Science and isotopes
Wild animals. In twining human and animals lives in the Bronze Age.
Arcology of ideology, shifting our view away from the current mess. Searching for care and community in human history, agenst the modernist view of individualism and hierarchy. Can bone, stone and layers of soil tell this story.
Can we learn about human relations from animal study’s.
“Irregular” #migrants moving along the Western #Balkan Migration Route aspire to competing visions of Europe, and Europeanness, and along their journeys they encounter multiple competing, overlapping, or intersecting political projects. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in #Slovenia since 2021, this presentation will explore how various imaginaries of Europe are instantiated in the wake of Yugoslav socialism, EU integration, and an ongoing “migration crisis.”
Fun workshop on the European activist times, interesting, but not sure if much use on the subject of immigration.
#Academics, playing the determination game, is long and dull and more about statues games. As with most of these events the subject is scanned over and all the knowledge is in these statues, definition games rather than the subject itself, it’s a meta conversation.
Friendly parasite’s, sometimes it’s useful for activism to have same #mainstreaming to point at when talking to authorities. But the issue is the normal, academics talk to #fashionistas not the people who get stuff done, so it’s a caricature you end up pointing to, but one the “authorities” can relate to, a useful mess. That becomes a real problem when this becomes the history of the movement. A bad feedback loop that we keep repeating, and we are in now
The right-wing and the #NGO crew have both coopted the idea of activism with some of its traditions and without any use of its purpose and path.
This academic aproch looks at gender and the shift to liberal norms and what effect this will have on the current patriarchal governments in the Middle East
Good points from a economist about the coal transition as a starting point for studies like this. The is unseen prier art.
This studie has the normal issue of the sustainability of the unexamined political middle, this assumption is unlikely to hold in the next 20-30 years. As we see today, a hard shift to the right, which at best will open space for a shift to the left.
So much of this thinking and academic work assumes that the liberal path will continue, with no understanding that this is an unreasonable path if you look at the scientific data of climate change and its social and economic outcomes
What we do need is study’s of the next hard right-wing and progress left paths. With the issue in mind that the more likely path is post apocalyptic “Mad Max” world for meany of the equator countries. This applies to the Middle East, the subject of this studie.
With growing #climatechaos even this above “normal” politics is likely only possible for the non equator countries, for large parts of the planet the norm will this
Q.can the Middle East manage this shift in any real way?
My view: Seeing these people, in the room, as self blinded evil would likely be an understatement. They are fixated on status in the current world, the shift we should be talking about does not exist for them yet. The politeness, in #Oxford, is unkind at best in this growing mess.
In the #openweb of digital innovation, there is a culture revered for its ingenuity and technical prowess – the hackers of old. Yet, beneath the surface of their achievements lays a problem, one that has led to the downfall of many endeavours: the #geekproblem.
In the early days, hackers were pioneers, pushing the boundaries of what was possible, though as their influence grew, so too did the imbalance within their communities. The projects that thrived, that embodied the principles of openness and collaboration (#4opens), were not only the work of these geeks, but wider diverse affinity groups where social leadership was core.
The projects that flourished had strong social guidance, with the geeks playing one part in the larger diversity. A healthy dynamic, with different perspectives and different skills, complemented each other to further common social goals.
However, over time tragedy grew when the geeks seized control of the foundations and the #fashernistas, with their penchant for superficial trends, hijacked the facade. With the geeks at the helm and the fashernistas dictating the direction, the once vibrant projects slowly over time withered and died.
The demise of the #openweb was not a sudden event, this slow and steady decline was orchestrated by those who valued personal agendas and status over collective progress. The geeks, blinded by their technical prowess, failed to recognize the importance of social partnerships, while the fashernistas, eager to climb the ladder of #mainstreaming success, sold out the principles they once claimed to champion.
And so, the legacy of the #openweb was tarnished, its promise of democratized access and decentralized trust, betrayed by those who prioritized their own blinded interests over the “native” common good. Yet, amidst this wreckage, a glimmer of hope remains – a reminder that progress lies not in the hands of the few, but in the collective efforts of all who dare to dream of a better world. Let’s try not to make the same mistakes with our #web1.5 reboot in the #Fediverse, please.
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To avoid repeating this mess we need to mediate the tragic reality that within our #fashernista circles, there exists a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a destructive force that accompanies their every endeavour. Their relentless pursuit of trends and their blind devotion to the #deathcult have left a trail of destruction in their wake.
We need to actually use the #4opens project, as a beacon of hope amidst this chaos, a reminder that there is another way forward. Not doing this is leading us on the path to failure, contributing to the ever-growing piles of #techshit.
There’s much to be learned from this cycle of destruction and renewal. It’s time to embrace the lessons of the past and walk a better path, one guided not by the whims of #fashionistas or the allure of the #deathcult please.
The crypto mess talking about governance https://medium.com/@lawrencelundy/no-such-thing-as-decentralised-governance-2a6c6f97382f Lawrence Lundy-Bryan’s perspective on decentralized governance is a reminder that while we aspire to decentralization to break free from oppressive authorities, we should recognize the need for some form of governance. Keep in mind, the key is to establish a type of “central” authority that is accessible and allows for direct participation in governance.
This is a project that comes from proven practices, an effective path for countless activist groups worldwide over centuries. This approach, outlined in detail, offers a balanced perspective, ensuring acceptance across ideological spectrums. Overcoming initial resistance from both narrow-minded liberals and dogmatic #geekproblem factions is essential to overcome for implementing this approach.
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a balanced approach, appealing to a wide range of groups and serving as a bridge between diverse perspectives. Overcoming resistance and gaining acceptance of projects like the #OGB is a proven path to advancing grassroots tech and activism effectively in the era of #climatechaos
14:00-15:00: Nick Stevenson (Nottingham): Democratic Socialism, Degrowth and the Commons: Raymond Williams, Marxism, and the Anthropocene
15:00-16:00: Martin Crook (UWE Bristol): Marx and the Ecocide – Genocide Nexus
16:00-16:30: coffee break
16:30-17:30: Esther Leslie (Birkbeck):
Marx between Fire Theft and Theft for Fire: On Land
(and Everything Else) as Social Product
17:30-18:00: Conclusions by the organisers Laura Langone (Oxford/Verona) and Bernhard Malkmus (Oxford)
This event is organised by Dr Laura Langone, Visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford’s Sub-Faculty of German and funded through Dr Langone’s MSCA FUNDS
NOTES from – Marx and nature
Surface time of capitalism, discipline and exchange, exploitation. This is always a revolutionary time.
The time of labour
Deep time, geographic, sea trade roots have lasted thousands of years, with a few new ones the big canals and coming up through the melting ice.
Eastry’s, brackish water, delves into queer humanitarians.
Environmental time meeting the human time of #climatechaos industrialisation, the ghrate accelerations, profits and tax. We do not yet live on the high sea.
Ships are never far from land when at sea, a confined and highracical workspace. Your life world is the same as your work world. Seafarer are pricernares of logistics on boats.
Next speaker
The inventured of economic growth in socialist thinking, Stalin pushed this, catchup and overtake the west. An organisation that become economised, over politics, state capitalism. Technocratic.
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I come from an academic background, but I would call my self now a more Organic intellectual
This often invokes fear in academics. Our fear of this kind of knowledge is very modern, we live in fear filled times.
* live on a boat in the “commons” of the waterways, one of the last parts of Europe that have this pre-modern vagrant life.
* But work in technology, where techno fetishism is endemic amongst what I call the #geekproblem
– In the nortical terms the captain and crew, as was sead earlier a master and slave relationship is core to this thinking with the coder as master and the computer as slave – us the users, digital surfs – our role is to fill the information flows with “content” to facilitate harvests data and attention for control of the (#geekproblem) masters and profit of the capitalists.
These people, who increasingly run and control large parts of our lives, are very hard to talk to, it’s my job to do this, and I find it increasingly difficult to cross this tech/social divide.
In technology this is taking us back to pre-modern social relationship of feudalism.
How would Max think of these issues?
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Boat life – I moor to university land on water controlled by a government agency EU that used to be enforced by the local counceal – they are in dispute on who has responsibility to nobody is taking control, so I live outside the laws in tempery “commons” this a lot of this on the waterways.
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Growth ideology was invented in the 17th century
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Willions an English eco-socialist, radicalising the UK labour movement, self-management tradition
post-modernism raises its head as in everything is socially constructed in modern sociology. Inherent materialism rejects this path.
Rejecting the Green New Deal as a pro capitalist path.
The politics of place, European Union and Brexit rejecting globalisation
Worry about the legacy of Marxism
In the margarines the is a real issue of scale and for social change we need to scale up.
A British socialist vs a communist approach.
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The #OGB is a balance approach, so no dogmatic group will except it. If a small group of people implemented the #OGB the majority of groups would expect it as it bridges the groups. We have to get this past this initial blocking of the dogmatists.
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neo-liberalism of climate change
Lemkin the annihilation of a group – genocide – the end of a social group.
Imperialism is a form of genocide, the imperative to expand.
Eco- criminogenic of capitalism
The human race is the indigigumes people and neoliberal capitalism is pushing genocide over them in the next 100 years. Capitalism might continue without the bulk of current humanity.
In Australia only modes of production that are useful to the capitalist state are keeps all the rest are exterminated, by bureaucracy or more forceful means. Exclusion from the means of production.
Extreme energy – is going to push the mess into every corner – driving #climatechaos
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The event was interesting, but had its moments of sectarianism and had thinking about the issues based on Marx, but no path to take or much of a sniff of a path out of the current mess.
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The small genocide of the boater community is a small example
The neoliberal pushing of #climatechaos will genocide large parts of humanity over the next 50 years in the service of an idealogical that might survive this mess, but our cultures and meany of our peoples will not.
Sheep devouring men – the clearances. Indiganalerty.
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Marx and nature,
Plant has a natural and an industrial meaning.
Unattractive work, the factory syteam of labour separating human labour from their selves, alienated labour.
The Irish famine, sol exhaustion, British imperialism in Ireland.
