Strengthen grassroots alternatives to resist the spread of fascism

The entanglement of hard-right politics and #climatechaos is a catastrophe that presents a dire scenario, where each exacerbates the other in a vicious cycle of destruction. As billions of people are displaced by climate disasters, the extreme right will capitalize on their suffering to expand influence. Conversely, as the extreme right gains power, climate policies are weakened, intensifying environmental degradation and further displacing populations.

The “human climate niche,” the range of conditions within which societies thrive, is shrinking due to global heating. Hundreds of millions are already stranded in inhospitable conditions, with billions more projected to face extreme heat and environmental stress by 2030. The impacts include heat-related deaths, water scarcity, crop failures, and the spread of diseases. As the climate crisis worsens, weather events like floods and hurricanes will devastate vulnerable regions, forcing people to flee or perish.

In the rich world, despite having the means to limit environmental damage, for the last 40 years choices to address climate breakdown have been systematically undermined. Culture war narratives, fuelled by billionaires and commercial interests, distort discussions on environmental policies, portraying even minor changes as threats to freedom. Climate science denial has resurfaced, and scientists and activists face relentless attacks and misinformation campaigns.

As climate impacts intensify globally, displaced people seek refuge in wealthier nations, to be met with growing hostility and xenophobia. Right-wing politicians exploit these crises to further their agendas, shutting down climate policies to protect the interests of oligarchs and fossil fuel industries. The cycle repeats: as governments turn rightward, climate policies are weakened, exacerbating environmental crises and fuelling anti-immigrant sentiment. The consequences are evident in Europe, where refugees are demonized and subjected to violence, while far-right parties gain power by scapegoating them. This manufactured hatred fuels fascism.

Preventing Earth’s systems collapse and combating the rise of the far right are inseparable tasks. To address these intertwined challenges, concerted action is needed to strengthen grassroots alternatives to promote active social justice, and resist the spread of fascism. Without such action, the consequences for humanity and the planet will be simply catastrophic.

By embracing projects like the #OGB people have a chance to shape decisions

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 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.

In conclusion, by embracing participatory democracy, we can create a system where everyone has a chance to shape the decisions that affect their lives. You can find more information on the #OGB project https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/openwebgovernancebody and support this on the link.

General elections are a travesty of democracy

The need for the #OGB (Open Governance Body) stems from a growing recognition of the limitations of traditional democratic systems, as highlighted in a recent article by The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/06/general-elections-democracy-lottery-representation Progressive movements are increasingly advocating for alternatives, and the OGB represents such an initiative within the #openweb community.

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 can’t keep making the same mess, please.

Looking at the Izmir ship scrapyard

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.

#boatingeurope #lifeboat

A European Future

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 paths, promote community, and foster #KISS technological innovation reasonably.
  3. 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 transparency in policymaking, access to information, and mechanisms for holding people and policymakers accountable for their actions.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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 educational events, and leveraging grassroots media and digital platforms to inform and mobilize the engaged people around key issues.
  7. 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.
  8. 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

The European Union: A “spiky” view

#NGI #NLNET

The problem with academic “thinking” in activism

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. Here’s a breakdown of the key problems I have highlighted:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Disconnect from real-world activism: The events are to, 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

#Oxford

Bridget Kendall in conversation

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.

Speaking a foreign language bracks down barriers

The Meyerstein Lecture in Archaeology 2024: The social worlds of Bronze Age animals

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.

#Oxford

Contrasting Balkan utopias: Navigating migration and futurity in the physical remnants of Yugoslavia

“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

#Oxford

Academics at Oxford

Economic Diversification and Climate Change in the Middle East

St Antony’s College, Dr Sarah Bush (University of Pennslyvania)

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 sustainabity 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.

Ideas please on how to talk to these people?

A tech story

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 lay 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 struck 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.

———————————————-

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 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.

#4opens

Encryptionists we do need to talk about Governance in tech

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.

The”native” #openweb based #OGB project discussed in https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB is an exemplary model of federated grassroots governance, which comes from this process https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/working-and-thinking-on-native-openweb-aproches-to-governance/2898 and this fallow up https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/working-and-thinking-on-native-openweb-aproches-to-governance/2898

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

“don’t be a prat” comes to mind.