Published Date 12/19/13 2:50 PM

A ruff DRAFT

I love affinity group organising, its a very effective way of getting good stuff done. Lets look at the highs and lows of a few such inspiring groups.

First 2 years #climatecamp were affinity group organised (manifested), it worked very well, the was no “democracy”. Process grew and smoothed this in-till the project “ossified” into the naive mess that you see in the film “just do it”, it went down hill when #bureaucratic #consensuses process brought a highrahcky into existences run by people who had no idea how to do real/horizontal things.

The first few years of London #hackspace were afferently group organised (hacked), it was an exceptional friendly and open space, with few fundamental problems. Only later has it started to fall into the arms of “bureaucracy” which some naive people might call democracy. The common space, decision-making and creativity are now “ossified” and the trolls are breeding and dispoling the decision-making e-mail list.

In both cases the transition came about because of the limitations of affinity group organising – that small close nit groups, while nimble/very effective, move on. The resulting spaces are then filled with less imaginative/creative/lovely people, who leave the space open to trolls and blind ego wankers.

Affinity group organising is the best we have for anarchist/libertarian/horizontal ideas about life, but the is no working horizontal process for passing on responsibility to new affinity groups – thus they are annual flowers, they fade and die too soon to be a real alternative to traditional society. What can we do about this?

The same happened to UK #indymedia, though that was also different in some ways.