Citizen Media (II): citizen witnesses vs post-human images

 citizen media, on a high  No Responses »
Jun 192013
 
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I was at a fascinating Citizen Media event hosted and organised by the University of Manchester recently.  Some initial thoughts I had immediately afterwards can be found here.

In that piece, I provisionally concluded that:

[...] universal education, a glory of latterday progressive societies and perhaps a key reason for the much wider deprofessionalisation of society all of us are manifestly witnessing (from the already-mentioned craft of journalism to teaching to legal practice to even – in Google’s wonderfully weird world of medical search – that doctoring whose bedside manner we thought we would never give up), is no guarantor that progressive behaviours or beliefs will spread.  In fact, universal education is only able to assure us that all parties on all sides of political conflict will become powerfully better at their own particular brands of prejudice.

It is our responsibility, therefore, on understanding that citizen media does not necessarily equal constructive democratisation, to ask ourselves one simple question: what sort of citizens – and therefore what sort of citizen mediators – do we want to become?

It was rather a depressing point of view to take from a series of erudite papers which provided much evidence to the contrary.  So today, I’d like to turn the question around and ask whether the construct of Citizen Media is leading us not to more brutality but, rather, to a more analytical and constructive society.

I won’t deal individually with each and every discourse made – this wouldn’t be fair to those involved for two reasons:

  1. There’s no guarantee I would be able to fairly represent their arguments.
  2. They’re not here to defend themselves from my inaccuracies.

What I will do is list some thoughts I wrote down whilst listening to what they had to say.  This second post, then, will deal with two papers I felt spoke to each other – even where from quite independent starting-points and narratives.

Let’s start with the subject of citizen-witnessing – in particular, with respect to its implications for traditional photo-journalism and the attack from which a wider professionalised mediation of reality is currently suffering.  These are some of the randomised ideas I had whilst witnessing Stuart Allan’s words – let me emphasise, they are not intended to represent his arguments in any way, reliable or otherwise, but instead provide evidence of the sparks they generated in my own thought processes:

  • There are news-gathering processes of different sorts and different motivations: in it for the money; reckless and gratuitous; committed and engaged.
  • A citizen can begin to occupy the space of a journalist but, similarly, a journalist can begin to occupy the space of a citizen.  (This leads us back to the issue of social responsibility, but in normal corporate structures this is essentially impossible – a problem of “political economy”.)
  • Perhaps to achieve reliability in this different kind of witnessing, it might be necessary to disentangle “citizen” from “witnessing”.  Alternatively, the summation and output of citizen points-of-view through software and community can assign its own “objectivity” too.
  • Crowdsourcing and intelligence-gathering raise issues of trust and authenticity.  It may be possible to relocate citizen journalists and witnesses as a kind of raw data which a new journalistic profession of post-generation analysis can serve to validate and, thus, engender trust.  In this way, we could combine amateurs and professionals in symbiosis; a different relationship which nevertheless would maintain the tenets of professional journalism somewhere down the line.
  • The digital treatment of photos is like the verbal analysis of events: mediated in a similar way, no more nor less.  A frame placed at the time of capture is just as much an act of construction as a post-production airbrushing, as in exactly the same way a carefully chosen collection of words inevitably filters the direct experience of reality.
  • Professional photo-journalism has been termed “the heartbeat of humanity”: in this way, mediation doesn’t necessarily mean negative confection or a lack of authenticity.  Like art, such artifice may get closer to that heartbeat than a nominally unconstructed and citizen-based observation.
  • As professional photo-journalists lose their right to exercise their profession, “humanity is being robbed by people with money on their minds”.
  • The “Google-isation” of society: many professions are now being taught not to know things but to know where to find them.
  • We now live with crisis on a permanent basis – we have all become permanently prepared witnesses of violence.
  • Universal education is paradoxically leading to the deconstruction of the professions; an intelligent and trained mediation seeing its virtues being undermined.

Contrast some of the above with other images which have been, in a complicated way for me at least, defined as the product of post-human impulses.  My incomplete appreciation of this terminology has led me, in part, to reject it: I see it as being defined in terms of technology versus humanness, and yet do not see technology as anything but a tool which has always extended humanness: the discovery of fire, for example, is a clear hyper-reality – just as arrowheads, cutting implements and shields similarly were.

Also: “The digital is just social by another name.” (Brandotti, 2011)

Here, then, we have some further thoughts which, in my disorganised manner, I am equally unable to properly disentangle from Bolette Blaagaard’s own challenging presentation:

  • Objectivity is seen as a performance, which can be measured in terms of truth.
  • The lack of professionalism leads to the perception that the image is taken (a stolen moment) rather than made (fabricated and therefore not as authentic).
  • The photograph/image is defined socially: personal dream sequences are now publicly shared images, as the imagined “global consciousness” takes over.
  • Images taken from drones see people as ants; history as that of the masses.  The language of drone imagery is paradoxically that of Marxism more than capitalism (impersonal imagery; zero interpretation; zero subjectivity).  As journalism it can allow access to areas where traditional witnessing with relevant permissions would not be allowed.  But can it ever shrug off its surveillance-state overtones and carryover?
  • Perhaps drone imagery is not a “post-human” process at all (whatever that really may be) but – rather – a foregrounding of our analytical side over our emotional.  Perhaps the participation of computer software in both drones and crowdsourced intelligence-gathering is painfully – unexpectedly – moving us away from historically-felt emotions.  It is not a matter of losing touch with the essence of our humanity but, instead, of handing control over to a future logic and rationality – a logic and rationality which was always present but not always prioritised.  This, of course, for violent beings, is a curious process to undergo.  But not necessarily destructive.

I’ll be posting later tomorrow on another pair of trains of thought: a) on the subject of doing an encouraging “good” online; and b) on the subject of doing an unremitting “bad”.

In the meantime, I note that whilst capitalism is judged to be finally taking over from everything else history has offered, especially as it imposes its cruel processes of austerity in the times of crisis it is primarily responsible for, its characteristic sign of identity as a supposedly individualising and liberty-developing creature appears to be subsuming itself as it battles the contradictions of an Internet-mediated citizenship.

Thus it is that the very technology that an “individualistic” capitalism makes its money from is precisely the latterday tool which a “social” crowd is using to fight back.

A mighty contradiction, indeed.

Wouldn’t you say?


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Citizen Media: very academic thoughts mediated by a very non-academic

 citizen media, citizen politics, civic journalism, journalism, on a high, politics, technology, transparency  1 Response »
Jun 142013
 
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I’ve just spent two wonderful days in the company of very clever people, at the welcoming hands of the University of Manchester.  Sometimes I felt – from my position as an interested observer and (just about) mere citizen witnessing the event – that some of the English needed translating for my cloth ears.  But even where I struggled to get a handle on some of those terms which escaped me, none of the presentations in question failed to engage in some constructive way.

These were high-powered concepts which matched the serious times we are living.

As you will see from the programme link above, a broad range of subjects was covered.  The deprofessionalisation of mainstream journalism – in particular photo-journalism – and its corresponding issues of ethics and professional integrity linked in quite clearly with the progress which volunteer translator communities had made in the radicalisation – even the overt politicisation – of their labour.  The “crisis readiness” we are all being educated into possessing, that instinct to being prepared to film or snap any and every notable event, in particular those events which occupy the tragic public sphere, neatly engaged with Russian experiences in what was termed “shovel” organisation: the small, localised and politically non-threatening community organisation that has recently begun to accompany not only natural disaster but also relatively impactful man-made and administrative incompetence.

From many of the papers presented, it was clear that those of who occupy spaces in the Western Anglo-Saxon world are barely – if at all – aware of the prejudices we hold: from the mass digitalisation of government documents in Russia to the humongous (and highly active) online participation of the Chinese to the curious state of second-generation immigrants in Italy, the planet as presented through the lenses of these thinkers is never as simple as it looks.

Democracies which treat their citizens like second-class objects of disparaging discourse; one-party states which allow considerable internal dialogue; anarchist groups which organise in such a way as maintain their “brands” and their virtual presences; hierarchical structures which repeat but do not solidify; volunteers who are driven by imbalance to provide contrasting imbalance; worlds where a powerful couplet of bias and its corresponding transparency replaces that ever-so-durable veneer of traditionally institutional “objectivity”.

Frame being so important as it clearly is, we were presented with examples of highly contrasting journalistic practice.  These ranged from citizens in cases of extreme involvement to distancing drone footage attempting to shrug off its surveillance overtones; from overtly biased and authentically stolen moments to manufactured product, clearly pre-packaged and pre-digested primarily for the benefit of bottom lines; from devolving Silicon Valley web instincts to Hollywood-like impulses to teach podcast skills through star-riven trainers.

Essentially, that is, the push and pull between a civic contribution to a broader intelligence and that sliding scale of reward which greater “competence” often chooses to finally demand of the “consumers”.

Where we choose to volunteer, we start out on a journey of societal collaboration.  Where this reverts to being more a case of primarily learning a craft, that old old need to earn a living kicks in.  But in the grey area between one and the other, marvellous things can still be achieved by civic-minded witnesses of events that require mindful empathy.

I’ll be writing in more detail over the next couple of days on a number of the papers thus presented yesterday and today.  In the meantime, here’s a final thought to be going away with: universal education, a glory of latterday progressive societies and perhaps a key reason for the much wider deprofessionalisation of society all of us are manifestly witnessing (from the already-mentioned craft of journalism to teaching to legal practice to even – in Google’s wonderfully weird world of medical search – that doctoring whose bedside manner we thought we would never give up), is no guarantor that progressive behaviours or beliefs will spread.  In fact, universal education is only able to assure us that all parties on all sides of political conflict will become powerfully better at their own particular brands of prejudice.

It is our responsibility, therefore, on understanding that citizen media does not necessarily equal constructive democratisation, to ask ourselves one simple question: what sort of citizens – and therefore what sort of citizen mediators – do we want to become?

And only in defining this answer, and in fixing its location on the spectrum of behaviours the web currently displays, will we ever manage to rescue all the fascinating potential of citizen media from what might otherwise be interpreted (and ultimately seen) as the clutches of a universally educated cruelty.

____________________

Further reading: you might find the abstracts of the papers given of interest.  They certainly make interesting rereading for me, as I strive to sort my way through so many rich and splendid ideas.  A case of a citizen witnessing his own information overload perhaps?

:-)


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Chester Labour’s night of “Come Together”, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Desperado”

 Chester, CLP, democracy, Labour, on a high, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics  No Responses »
Jun 082013
 
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During the recent Prospective Parliamentary Candidate selection process here in Chester, which ended yesterday with the election of Chris Matheson, I’ve been blessed with several visits from a number of candidates. This, for me, was positive.  I was, therefore, looking forward mightily to the result.

This is the confirmation I received via email not long ago:

To all members:

At our parliamentary selection last night, Chris Matheson was selected to represent us at the next general election.

The selection process has been a long and hard one, generating an enormous amount of work. This has been made easier by the help I have received from a large number of people – thank you if you were one of them! This same teamwork will enable us to fight a strong campaign behind Chris, who I am certain will be an excellent candidate. That campaign begins now.

Sadly, my favoured candidate didn’t win; I did preference three candidates though – and I believe all of them ended up in the top three.

It was, I think (correct me if you know better), the first hustings I’ve ever attended.  Just shows how much of a politics wonk I actually am.

One of the speakers (not a candidate) described the evening’s events as moving.  And they were.  Held in a saintly church, they brought together many members who had, I am sure, drifted away post-Iraq.  This was, in a way, an opportunity for healing to take place.

The music that was played counterpointed the process beautifully.  The first two pieces, deliberately or not, as follows.

“Come Together”


http://youtu.be/axb2sHpGwHQ

“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”


http://youtu.be/3a7cHPy04s8

Presumably that Rolling Stones’ anthem reflected the sadness four of the five candidates would shortly be feeling.

Anyhow, in this saintly broad church which I hope Chester’s CLP will become under Matheson’s guidance, there is plenty of work to be done.  If Labour is to win nationally, Chester is one of the seats which must be on its hit-list.  Let’s hope, then, for the benefit of all those voters and families who are currently suffering under the violence of Tory misrule that Matheson, his team of workers and the grassroots apparatus – which Chester members and sympathisers could revert to being given half an intelligent chance – are able to wrest from the incompetents in our politics control of what should really always lie in the hands of the people.

I am, as you will see, a romantic a heart.  Perhaps the next and final song, which I heard last night in that glorious setting, at least ends up describing me the best.

“Desperado”


http://youtu.be/rE-U5e78WHc

Good luck to those who would enjoin this battle.  We truly, really, sincerely need them to know how to win.

And win not only one election but sustainably so – for many more.


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On the inevitable intersectionality of the worldwide web

 Internet, intersectionality, on a high, online constitutions, software, web  1 Response »
Jun 012013
 
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I’ve had a bit of a sharp learning curve this weekend.  The term “intersectionality” appeared on my inefficient radar.  I first read a piece by Ben Mitchell, where he said this on the game of “checking your privilege”:

By the end of yesterday, we were all at it. I even wondered whether there was some sort of league table with its own points system. From the very oppressed heading the pack, to the too privileged by half, facing the threat of relegation. One point for being a ‘PoC’ (person of colour. Keep up), two for being a ‘WoC’ (yep, you guessed it. Woman of colour.) With bonus points up for grabs depending on sexuality and disability. You’d probably be on minus points if you fall into the male, white, middle class category.

Tragically, that’s me. Until it dawned on me that I’m also Jewish. A proud member of one of the most oppressed groups in history. Privilege checkmate.  But, then I realised that lefties don’t regard Jews as oppressed minorities. Pesky Israel always gets in the way, and some of the stereotypes about Jews must have some grain of truth, surely? Look at Hollywood and the world’s media. I was back on minus points again.

The thing that’s most struck me about all this is how much it bears the hallmarks of the very people who brought you moral and cultural relativism: the post-modernist lobby. There is no one set, accepted, view of the world. No right or wrong, but a collection of opinions, each as valid as the other. Passing judgement must be done whilst recognising disparate voices, but one must not be too loud so as to drown out the rest. In the end, what you’re left with is noise.

This is what Wikipedia currently has to say on the matter:

Intersectionality (or Intersectionalism) is the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems ofoppression or discrimination.[1] This feminist sociological theory was first highlighted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Intersectionality is a methodology of studying “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations” (McCall 2005). The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religion- or belief-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of discrimination.[2]

I then went to a short post on language by Helen Lewis (which Ben in his piece had quoted from).  In it, and amongst other things, she says:

There’s a simple test I think any of us who have a “cause” should do. Imagine walking out of your front door, stopping the first person you meet and explaining your beliefs to them. Can you imagine them understanding? Can you imagine them caring?

Of course, I’ve already done something wrong in that opening paragraph. I’ve asked you to imagine walking out of your front door. But I can guarantee you that if I wrote that in a piece, I would get at least one comment “gently reminding” me that some people can’t walk, and some people can’t leave their houses. I’ve been ableist.

In essence, she’s arguing that in our everyday – generally understandable – language it is impossible to aim to include absolutely everyone.  A process of conflict and slighting of others will be inevitable; someone’s toes are bound to be stepped on.  If always using the word “he” in a conversation where both men and women might be implicated is wrong, using any word or phrase which excludes those other groupings who might also be involved is – the argument must go – equally wrong.  And this, Lewis suggests, is quite clearly an unsustainable situation.

In the first instance, I’m not sure I disagree with her on this one; but this might be out of “professional deformation” more than anything else.

Most of my life I’ve carried out the role of teacher: both to earn a living and as a father to three children.  Being a teacher teaches one patience; to be a teacher is not to be an evangelist for example.  I’m not looking in my life to force change but, rather, to bring it about through rational persuasion.  Coercion is not my weapon of choice.  Education – more often that not – is.  The experiences described here and here, therefore, where online bullying from supposedly progressive quarters leads equally progressive individuals to a certain – even profound – despair, is quite outside my ken.  I was, as a result, quite unsure how to react to the whole issue until I read this piece by Laurie Penny in the Guardian.  The concluding paragraph is what really hit home for me:

New words and phrases tend to make powerful people angry not because they are new, but because what they describe is modern and threatening. Repeatedly claiming that you cannot understand simple ideas like “privilege checking” and “intersectionality”, as people like Mensch, Hodges and many others have done, often means that you don’t want to understand. Some find it easier to argue “we don’t need this word” when what they actually want to say is “we don’t want this thing.” The conservative commentariat does not want to be asked to check its privilege – but it’s time to take a lesson from the internet and listen for a change. You never know, you might learn something.

And so it is that this paragraph from Penny is about the most perceptive thing you will read this weekend.  When Ben says of cultural relativism that …

[...] Passing judgement must be done whilst recognising disparate voices, but one must not be too loud so as to drown out the rest. In the end, what you’re left with is noise.

… in truth he is also passing judgement on the analogous (though not analogue) noise which people who would preserve their privilege like to perceive is the worldwide web and its multifarious interactions.

In the end, it’s neither a question of giving in to a cultural relativism nor an abandoning of the right to have an opinion: rather, it’s a natural consequence of an inevitable intersectionality the worldwide web drives us towards.

For people like Ben, it’s cultural relativism; for people like me, it’s a case of a democratisation of the whole process of opinion-forming.  Many people who were simply ignored by the overarching discourses of society, who believed they were to blame for their conditions and place in the scheme of things, now have an opportunity to express themselves on their own terms.

In my experience, where this works – and rightly so – it is a question not of imposition but of education: of people at the bottom finally – and ineludibly – teaching those at the top.  In fact, this is exactly what the best of the worldwide web is all about: a massive Everyman’s (where not Everywoman’s!) library for the 21st century.  And if some are imposing instead of teaching, this shouldn’t allow nor encourage us to bring into disgrace or disrepute the democratisation itself.

But something else strikes to the heart of all of the above: if Helen Lewis finds it so difficult to include all the people she is asked to include in her language, maybe it is because the democratisation of the whole process of opinion-forming hasn’t yet reached the levels it needs to.  Let me explain mansplain: I see nothing wrong in reading a piece by a woman where the pronouns used are “she”, “her” and “hers” when the (to date) more traditional “he” and “his” has been (a patriarchal) par for the course; neither do I see any reason to use “they”, “their” and “theirs” instead (even when I often do it myself in what is a clearly inclusive – or maybe cowardly – instinct on my part).

No.  If the democratising process of opinion-forming were truly consummated by now, each of us could use the language we were most comfortable with without this meaning we were using our privilege to maintain our networks of received opinion.  That we still feel maybe we can’t quite do so, that I – as a male using male language – am excluding people from my discourse rather than expressing my being with as much freedom as I deserve, is simply a litmus test and proof of the fact that the process I am describing is still not as complete as it could be.

What’s clashing here, the real and much wider clash of civilisations, is not the idea of single truths versus the relativism that says everything and everyone goes but, rather, the last-ditched attempt of those who grew up in broadcast media, politics and life in general to maintain life’s certainties as they were defined by the very few: individuals who now miss the very BBC-times of one-nation discourse; who would like to return to some (false) golden age where emotional gurus of national viewpoints reaffirmed our sense of permanence and unity.

Reaffirmed, that is, the sense of permanence and unity of those of us who benefited from the national viewpoints such emotional gurus expressed.

We can, after all, subscribe to the idea of certain universal truths and still believe everyone has an equal right to interpret them.

In no way is that noise; in every way, that is just democracy.

There was a time when our cleverness was individual and handed down; today, however, our cleverness more and more is the result of the crowd, mediated ingeniously by software constitutions which connect us outside the immediate reach of our traditional laws and ways of thinking things.

This is why intersectionality must remain, precisely because it is the cultural cauldron which our evermore virtual lives are leading us to.  And the implications and power of intersectionality must not be lost in what some would prefer to interpret as little more than the noise – the mish-mash even – of such democratisation.

If we truly believe in a world where everyone has – and is – a voice, we must not allow the impatient evangelists who might bully to drown out the absolute rightness of those who would carefully – and rationally – persuade.

The Internet and all its works are intersectionality squared.

And that is something none of us will be able to fight.


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Partisan Mil at Chester’s Labour Live event

 Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour, sorted  1 Response »
May 182013
 
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I must admit I hadn’t been to a Labour Party event for quite a while.  The local parliamentary candidate selection process did bring me temporarily back into the fold, and I had this to say about it most recently.  However, a certain Richard Beacham and helpers various appear to be creating an amazing buzz around what I had long felt to be a CLP hitting way below its potential.

So it was I went to what I believe is the first Labour Live event in Chester.  And in five short tweets from last night, here you can see my reaction to the whole affair:

At the Chester Labour Live event. Brilliant first act. Young singer-songwriter from New Brighton. Class young woman. Great songs and voice.

A folk version of Dancing Queen? With audience participation too? Now that is One Nation Labour! :-) Great stuff.

Stuck In The Middle With You plus iPad and stomping local brothers. Now if all GCs were like this …

You Can Call Me Al … or is that Arnie? Can politics really be this much fun?

Not so much Twist And Shout as twist and get them out. You could seriously win elections with such engagement.

And as I added, once back home:

@CllrSDixon ‘Twas an excellent show, wasn’t it? Never been to a GC like that in my life. ;-) @cwaclabour @cllrben

What a contrast to traditional Party occasions.  Yes, of course it involves allowing oneself to give oneself up to one’s emotions for a time, but the music was good, the conversation enthusing and I simply had a jolly good time.  No, I’m not the selfless kind who loves pushing leaflets through letterboxes; I much prefer to push words into the ether.  But I can feel much more positive about the Party more widely by getting out from behind my weapon of choice for the kind of show that Chester Labour put on last night.

There is a lesson in all of this: there is a moment in politics when desperate measures may be called for.  And those desperate measures may mean appealing occasionally to our less rational and thinking sides.  Democratic socialism of the kind I experienced last night – a local community opening its doors to culture and art in the good long-term cause of winning back government from one of the most incompetent administrations in recent times – is the sort of process and ideology we need to promote and develop.

Political parties as enablers rather than leaders; political parties which know how to bring different strands of protest together; political parties which know how to embed themselves in communities in a symbiotic and not parasitical way.

Whilst Pope Francis condemns the cult of money, MPs decide Google & Co do evil after all, modern life – and in particular politics – ignores the essence of ordinary people’s home and work experiences, and even I remember arguing that privatising intimacy was the ultimate privatisation of all, we see that overlording all of the above is an almost certainly deliberate process whereby serious centres of latterday power look to make of us all much more selfish beings.  And yet countering all the previous, surely more and more community acts of creative solidarity such as Chester’s Labour Live event last night can serve to re-establish a natural equilibrium in the way we see those around us.

Where powerful transnational processes have taught us to think only about maximising our individual and familial outcomes, the kind of political party which Labour may be transmuting into can surely, just as deliberately, re-educate us into looking to maximise societal outcomes too.

If Labour can truly learn to give to its potential voters as much as it needs to ask of them – and in that sequence and order in the grander hierarchy of relationships – then perhaps all is not lost to the selfishness that modern capitalism has ingrained in us.

So this afternoon, this is why you read Partisan Mil arguing that a future of human relationships still exists; is still salvageable; is still within our reach.

Don’t believe the Tories; don’t believe their corporate sponsors; don’t believe that money must rule our every transaction.

Live encounters; real events; natural extensions of hopes, fears, ambitions and futures.  All of this and more can be found in a Labour Live performance.

And hopefully, pretty soon, in a Labour Live political party …


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On loving Copland, Classic FM and the blessed common cold

 BBC, Classic FM, Freudian slip, music video, on a high  3 Responses »
May 142013
 
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I love Aaron Copland, I love Classic FM and – this morning – I do love the common cold.

It’s not often you get humour from this dear old blog, but this morning I almost fell off my chair.  A beautiful Freudian slip which almost slipped past my recognition of it.  As per the tweet below:

I’m pretty damn sure the presenter on Classic FM just mentioned Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common COLD …”!!! #classicfail

Lovely lovely stuff.  Matches the wonderful sun streaming in through the window at the moment.

Here’s the piece itself, from a BBC Proms performance last year.


http://youtu.be/ZdqjcMmjeaA


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The out-of-date nation-state (II) (some further reading)

 corporations, nation states, on a high, revolution, Rob Marchant  No Responses »
May 072013
 
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Yesterday, I suggested that if only corporations were moral, their way of shaping how state-sized entities might be was far more appropriate for a physically globalised and 21st century world than the legacy of nation-states we’re suffering from more and more.  As I observed in the post in question (the bold is mine today):

So if anything is now stopping us, if anything can explain our hatred for these behemoths, it must surely not be the things themselves but, rather, the way they’ve been hijacked for other purposes.  We shouldn’t be railing against the idea and structure of corporate bodies themselves but, instead, be identifying the miscreants who’ve subjected their missions to such stupid jackass strategies.

Much as political leaders have lately driven us to UKIP, so business leaders have driven us to moral despair.  We are clearly confused.  We are clearly bemused.  We are clearly unable to properly understand the shape of things.  But looking at these things with a cold and beady eye, three-dimensional, morally-respectable and transnational states of the kind corporations could potentially become make far more sense in a truly 21st-century world than the two-dimensional, mutually-excluding, geographically-restricted and xenophobia-leaning nation-states of the type we are clearly headed for.

Further thoughts and reading has occurred to since I wrote that post.  Firstly, I realised that perhaps what’s missing isn’t corporations which act more like the better nation-states but, rather, nation-states which incorporate the better aspects of the better corporations.

For there are, of course, many people who wildly fling about statistics – which may be made up or not – that argue bitterly against the alleged fact that around half of the biggest “economic entities” in the world are corporate.  As if all the nation-states that populate the globe are covering themselves in glory.  We only have to revisit the number of wars since World War II to realise that – even where possibly in cahoots with the private sector – many nation-states aren’t averse to using violence and death to achieve their external and internal policy objectives.

Some of them being these democratic nation-states we so love to look up to.

So just because half the world is corporate doesn’t mean that the non-corporate bit of it is doing us any particular favours.

The other interesting aspect of this whole argument is that it does appear the proportion of big corporate hitters in the top 100 is falling over time.  Or at least in the decades leading up to 2009.  The argument being that new corporate players have been recently emerging from Asia and other rapidly developing areas of the world, so taking some of the purchasing power and influence from the traditional corporate behemoths.  If we accept, or assume, that these new and emerging players operate in non-Western cultures and choose to play by some of their own rules, the chances that Western corporations can influence and manage the growth of such companies for their own benefit is going to be rather more reduced than if we were talking about start-ups in our homegrown economies.

What’s more, if the tendency I mention above is as described, it would appear that – over the recent past – political and nation-state unions may have been heading in the opposite direction: with the moves to cement Germany safely at the centre of the European Union, the historical impetus to protect Europe from war has led to a concentration of powers rather than a spreading out.  That this should take place within a supposedly democratic framework such as the EU, whilst corporate-capitalist organisations fight it out in what is, even so, hardly a free market, does lead us to some rather puzzling places.

Three pieces of further reading, then, to inform some of the ideas I’ve had in these past two posts:

  1. From Rob Marchant, with a piece from March this year on Labour’s internationalism and how it is at odds with standard business practice.
  2. From revolutionise.it, this pamphlet on reaching cross-party consensus by being forward-thinking.
  3. From an American PBS-linked organisation, sponsored it is true by corporate agents, we get this project on re-engineering corporate values and practices.

I think there is plenty to be getting on with here – and, we might even argue, to be considering seriously already.

Happy reading.

Hope it’s useful.


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On me, boring the pants off Labour hopefuls

 Chester, Labour, MPs, on a high  No Responses »
May 032013
 
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I’ve spoken to four Labour hopefuls for the parliamentary seat of Chester.  I’m not sure why they keep on coming.  The conversations are always long; and for me absolutely fascinating.  But then I don’t half speak a lot.

For them it must be sheer torture.

A sign of democracy at work, mind.

A good sign, that.

I appreciate each and every visit sincerely, and in the spirit each and every one was intended.

The most recent visitor to my humble abode, unannounced this evening but pleasurably received, shall remain (as with the other three) quite nameless.  There was plenty to talk about, though.  Two things I’d like to mention.

I realise now, as a result of this evening’s conversation, that the following is important for me when choosing a candidate for MP.  Two fundamental approaches.  One involves judging which person might be most faithful to their constituency; which person might be least likely to be swallowed up by Westminster and that black hole of community betrayal.  The other, in a cruelly globalising world, involves judging which person might be most effective for their constituency; which person might be able to set themselves apart from that black hole of community betrayal I mention and use it to engineer greater benefits in a wider picture.

The tipping point towards one candidate or another or another or another will be determined by how sure we can be of their fidelity and competence.  And since people grow as they live their lives, what we vote on now will never be what it becomes.

So we can’t ever be sure of anyone, can we?

Of course not.

But even so, we must take our decisions as people stand before us today.  In a sense, we must determine to what degree we want to risk our futures, and how: is the job of MP a potentially magnificent multiplying of the role of local councillor?  Or, alternatively, is it a far more complex throwing of the conceptual dice, as that big and foreign world out there is seen in terms of its multiple impacts on our much smaller existences?

Is it possible, in the end, to interact with the big – and change it before it manages to irrevocably change us?  I do wonder.  I think, in fact, I’ve wondered all my life.  I think, perhaps, this – above all – is what has stopped me from interacting.

Talking of which, I’d like to come to the second point I wanted to mention in this post.  The subject of One Nation Labour arose tonight: the contrasts it may afford, once decently articulated, between the divisive Tory narrative of turning one sector of the British people against another on the one hand and the collaborative future Ed Miliband’s Labour will probably wish to engineer on the other.  But an interesting phrase, connected to the aforementioned concept, also came up in conversation: a strongly expressed desire on the part of the candidate I spoke to this evening to radically change Britain for the better.  And my reaction was quite subdued; at the very least, we could say nuanced.  Let me explain why.

I suggested that instead of wanting to radically change Britain – which quite easily could be interpreted as yet another prejudice-based obsession to change people where people-change is impossible – we should begin to construct a narrative around wanting to change the structures, companies and ways of seeing and making society that impact on our ability to radically be the people we always have been.  That is to say, One Nation Labour should not end up a fresh-faced rerun of New Labour’s New Britain – forcing square pegs which are happy to be square pegs into round holes they quite vigorously dislike – but, rather, a newly forged adapting to those 21st century realities which involve the engendering of enabling instincts many good corporate organisations now use on a daily basis.

In short, instead of changing Britain, and by extension the people, we should be changing the environment in order to liberate and release the people.

The difference may be one of focus.  The implications would, however, be substantial.

It’s not the people who are at fault – even as the Tories would have us believe this is the case.  No.  It’s the round holes which refuse to place themselves at the service of us incorrigibly square pegs.

Now worked on and fashioned carefully, that would be a tale worth weaving.  If only the progressive souls amongst us would one day accept that the great political actors of the 21st century should focus on adapting environments to people and not the other way round.

Especially as the other way round has already been tried and found terribly wanting.

Electoral success would indeed come to those who might believe in such an approach.

My question running as follows: are we even able to properly comprehend the nature of the challenge?


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Going even further with Universal Benefits: how to get the rich onside

 on a high, tax code, the rich, triangulation, universal benefits, wealth, welfare  No Responses »
Apr 302013
 
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Paul writes a splendid defence of universal benefits this morning.  You can find this post over at his blog at the moment.  It’s clear from the shape he gives to the subject that it’s really rather a no-brainer for those in favour of a smaller state.  As he argues:

[...] A simpler, more direct and universal benefits system should appeal not only to those on the left but to those who believe in a ‘smaller’ state – it doesn’t require such huge state machinery, such massive bureaucracy and such complication. It does go against the grain in some ways – we like to believe that being more ‘targeted’ means being more efficient, and we’ve followed that mantra for many years, largely despite the evidence against it that’s all too clear for anyone who’s tried to work their way through the systems. Now, it seems to me, is a time that we can try to think in different ways about these issues. Think more radically. Universal benefits is one of those ways.

Mind you, those who remain in favour of “targeting” the deserving versus the undeserving find it just as impossible to go down a route that would clearly benefit their ideologies long-term.

I’m inclined, myself, to want to go even further.  I’d like to see us adopt the concept of a citizen’s income.  Pete does a beautiful exposition of the whys and wherefores of the subject in question here, coming to the following radical conclusion (the bold is mine):

Our society has moved from being dependent on unskilled manual labour (which was adequately motivated by threat) through to more skilled manual labour (which can be adequately motivated by the promise of money) and is now entering a time where we are more depending on mental labour – which cannot be motivated by threat and can only be only poorly motivated by money. Yet, our leaders still use both to try and squeeze more and more productivity out of us.

Why then, is there the dual insistence that some people, normally rich, will only be productive in return for extensive financial reward and others, normally poor, will only be productive when faced with some form of threat? We understand where our most productive activity comes from, and we also understand that productivity there is not very well motivated by promises of wealth or threats of poverty. So is now the time to, perhaps against many people’s intuition, start removing the link between work and having enough money to live on?

And for once, in a New-Labour triangulating kind of way, I’m looking to gain a broader acceptance for such radicalism.  Any changes such as seriously universal benefits for absolutely everyone – which in essence is what a citizen’s income would seriously constitute – would require the complicity of the rich.  As I argued a few months ago, the tax system we currently have surely only exists because the well-to-do – those who have the biggest voices in society – are fairly content with the current outcomes (despite all their wailing).  So how could we convince them to jump ship and take wholeheartedly onboard this logical extension of universal benefits as described above: that is to say, the aforementioned citizen’s income?

How about this idea which I drag out of the treasure chest of ancient 21st Century Fix trains-of-thought?  This one runs thus:

For some mad reason, it provoked the following train of thought in my fevered Saturday brain.  What if we paid for everything according to our tax code?  In an entirely – or almost entirely – cashless society, tax code information could quite easily be added to our credit and debit card chips.  In such a way, we could eliminate all kinds of income tax and use the tax code – instead – to determine how much we paid at point-of-sale.  Big spenders and big earners would pay more for everything – those with less would pay correspondingly far less.  The scale would be incremental rather than banded.  Poverty traps could be eliminated at a stroke.  We wouldn’t have to calculate VAT or chase its evasion or pay out tax credits or even child benefit.

An income-tax free state which allowed for properly dimensioned public services and strove to reduce the difference between the very richest and the very poorest?  Surely a Nirvana of some kind …

As a result of varying the price at point-of-purchase (a concept which, incidentally, the discounts you get for buying in bulk already contemplates) instead of varying the income you are left with at the end of year, we could suggest not only to the rich but – actually – to absolutely everyone that anything and everything they ever earned would remain in their pockets until a purchase was required.

Yes.  It would only work effectively in a state where every purchase was tracked – but isn’t that where we’re heading for anyway?  If the cashless electronic state of total state and information awareness is going to be our future in any case, why not make it work on our behalf as we properly break the already disintegrating connection between the motivation of money and the motivation of mental labour?

Don’t pay you for what you do.  Pay you, instead, for what you are: a human being, as valuable as the next; with so many things to offer society.  And in the meantime, allow the alpha men and women to keep a hundred percent of what they prefer to value.

Some final caveats:

  • We’d have to, of course, base the tax code on access to wealth rather than ownership.  Too many rich people would soon work out ways of getting around any definition based on the latter.
  • I can imagine a flourishing industry in reselling growing up: less well-off people might become professional shoppers for the better-off, so buying at lower prices than the latter should be paying.  On the other hand, this would create business opportunities – not necessarily a bad thing in such times.
  • We’d have to be pretty clear that hacking of such cashless systems – and at the very least, revolving-door mediation – to adjust tax codes would be an ongoing issue.  I have no answer to this one.

As you can see, a few thoughts to be getting on with on the table.  And as I mentioned to Paul Bernal on Twitter this morning, some of the above are clearly heretical.  But hasn’t the situation become sufficiently complex and problematic for heresy to be almost a requirement?

Isn’t it time we began considering how we might turn the systems constructively upside down?


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How about we started arresting the banks?

 corporations, latterday capitalism, laws, on a high, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 212013
 
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This story was brought to my attention by Paul Bernal on Twitter this morning.  It involves what he described as a Labour-funded think tank, IPPR, coming up with the brilliant (#irony) idea to turn unemployment benefit into a loan which would be repayable on returning to work.  You can find the story on the Observer at the moment here.

IPPR, meanwhile, is fairly transparent as think tanks go.  As per the Who Funds You? website, it gets an “A” rating – and on its own website lists current funders thus.  Quite a mixed bag, in fact: from charities and David Miliband himself to the European Commission, Serco (#hmm), Aviva, the consumer magazine Which?, a brace of Joseph Rowntree organisations and the City of London Corporation.  Hardly straightforwardly Labour-funded, then.

The news did, however, cause me to tweet in the following way:

Taxpayer bailouts; student loans; now the poor in their grasp. The real something-for-nothing scroungers are the bloody banks themselves!

And it’s true.  It seems to me that in a crisis entirely due to mismanagement in and around the financial sector – both technical and technocratic it has to be said – those who continue to pay the price for such disintegration are those hardest hit by its consequences.  So it is we reward instead of punish the banking corporations for having got it so wrong.  As money gets tighter for the poor, opportunities for the banks to make easy cash off our backs are expanded not only by the Wonga-style market forces of the desultory high street but also by the bright and bushy-tailed think-tank boffins themselves.  I can’t think of another sector in the world – or, indeed, in history – where failure was such a profitable act.

Nor, in fact, where it continues to get even more profitable.

But, on the train yesterday on the way to a Manchester policy forum, I stumbled across a solution to all our ills.  At the moment, corporations are legal figures with many of the rights and obligations of ordinary people.  This is well known and well documented and I shan’t repeat myself here.  However, what I would like to suggest is that a serious imbalance does exist as far as depriving the liberty of such corporations to act when under investigation – or, indeed, after being found guilty of certain acts.

Ordinary people, for example, quite often when arrested find themselves summarily deprived of their liberty – and no one questions the process.  Apart from the odd legal phonecall or interview or occasional family visit, their radius of action and ability to influence the result is radically reduced.  This allows for the police to carry out necessary investigations, untrammelled by the interference of too many interested – and perhaps self-promoting – parties.

This does not happen in the case of corporate entities: mostly, in cases of even quite severe misdemeanour (witness recent high-profile banking scandals around the long-term money-laundering of drug revenues by banks you’d hardly expect to exhibit such behaviours), we generally find such corporate figures – flesh-and-blood people in everything but flesh-and-blood – do not get arrested; do not need to request bail; and never get imprisoned.  Their liberty is never deprived; they continue to operate in the meantime; they proceed to make their money as before.

Sadly, of course, we often discover after the event that the potential for being fined for some act or another will have been factored into an annual budget before the crimes in question were committed.  A fine, even a large fine, even just the threat of a fine, becomes simply one more operating cost to be contemplated as the logistics of the year are calculated.

And although, on occasions, executives do find themselves accused of specific acts, the processes are so drawn out as to make any sensible adjustment to the direction of our socioeconomic fabrics impossible to engineer.  They frequently manage to stay at the top of their hierarchical games, despite the complaints of shareholders; despite the unhappiness of a wider consuming public; and despite the reputational damage this leads to.  With their battalions of legal support, these alpha men and women feel secure in their protective silos and bunkers of belief.  No wonder they behave as imperiously as they do.

In such cases, not only are the operations of the companies in question left untouched, the ability of their apparently criminal leaders to continue leading remains intact.

My suggestion, then, which came to me as I journeyed – quite appropriately – to the TUC’s founding place, is to engineer two new figures in company law:

  1. the figure of arrest without bail
  2. the figure of imprisonment

How would these work?  Well, in the case of the former, arrest without bail would mean the corporation would have to shut down all its operations immediately.  Just as a person who finds themselves under the same deprivation of liberty, whilst investigations into probable misconduct take place, so we should be able to do the same to a company.  And the mere threat of being able to do this would surely lead to a radical change in how fines and punishments for corporate maleficence were treated and assessed in the future by those who currently quite happily contemplate them.

In the case of the latter figure, the figure of imprisonment, we could suggest that a company might totally cease operations in a similar way once sentence had been passed a posteriori.  Under such circumstances, and for a certain period of time only, the company in question could not continue to occupy the marketplace, in much the same way as a person in prison must effectively cut off all connections to the outside world.

The result would be two powerful instruments to make the corporate figure far more like the human equivalent which – in so many cases – it loves to emulate.

Applied in particular to the banking corporations, it would send a hugely important message around the significance of competence, honesty and openness for our shared societies.

As well as, surely, end the terrible cycle of reward for utter failure – a cycle which appears to be the current tonic and reality of latterday capitalism.


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“The Forgotten Wealth Creators of Britain”

 Ed Miliband, Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour  No Responses »
Apr 192013
 
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Last night, I posted rather dispiritedly on the future of representative democracy:

This would appear not to be only morally wrong but also economically and socially disastrous.  So are we saying that an equilibrium of forces in democracy is bad for society?  The legislative log-jams you get in the US would seem to indicate, at an anecdotal level, that this might be the case.  But if the paper I quote from above correctly supports Kath’s assessment of the dynamics behind 1970s’ British politics – that is to say, an example of appeasement pure and simple – it’s a pretty poor road and destination ahead for the idea of trying to represent anyone.  In a more fractured and niche-like age, if we aim for a responsive environment, then we will only get pulled in separate directions – with the results Kath’s 1970s brought us; with the results that latterday American governance generates.  Meanwhile, if we aim for a more prescriptive environment, little more than an encroaching fascism of private largesse will emerge – a private largesse where powerful centres of control and understanding impose their will aggressively on the multitudes.  In much the same way as is happening right now.

I thought about this post for about twenty-four hours, but only wrote it after a local branch AGM and nomination meeting to vote for our preferred candidates to go forward in the Chester Labour Constituency Party prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) election process.  I suppose I felt obliged not to describe the details of the meeting itself, and instead spoke about my wider thoughts on the apparent futility of current representative democracy.

Not that the latter reflects my feelings of the evening with any degree of accuracy.  I am thinking more widely now, and found myself with a desire to write something yesterday.

Positively, however, one of the candidates who did get nominated brought my attention to the video below.  It’s about the forgotten wealth creators of Britain, and is obviously – why not? – a Labour Party broadcast.  Watch it first, and then we’ll discuss my reactions below.


http://youtu.be/i6j27pG4M-8

My reactions then?  It has a tonality and photography, a mise en scène, which so reminds me of so many series about World War II.  You can almost breathe the cream-coloured walls, the greens and browns of khaki-uniformed soldiers, the smell of working sweat – and the oppression of a Colditz-informed injustice, as powerful forces impose their will on ordinary working-people caught up in a wider conflict they barely – even now – comprehend.

If this is One Nation Labour, it’s a concept of nationhood which is beginning to be understood through the dynamics of war – perhaps, in particular, those dynamics of Fifth Column activists: the enemy at home clearly being the Tory Party and its hangers-on.  Or more accurately still, the Tory Party’s paymasters on whom the venerable organisation so clearly depends: for its funding, for its policies and – ultimately – for its soul.

And although I still find culturally two-dimensional, where not entirely inaccurate, the idea of a One Nation Labour which aims to contain all the nations of our islands, I can also see the potential power of the message: this video is just one element of the process, as the idea of the societal value of ordinary people working together gathers an undeniable weight through the presentation of undeniable evidence.

This is Ed Miliband’s Labour doing an updated Ronald Reagan: speaking to the people directly over the heads of the unrepresentative opinion-formers, in a language which does not simplify or reduce but – simply – uses the sophisticated visual markers which in a televisual age we are all used to and understand.

Good stuff.

Like it very much.

More please, along these lines.


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I am Thatcher

 Margaret Thatcher, mealy-mouthed Mil, on a high, youth  No Responses »
Apr 152013
 
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The advice they always give is play the ball, not the man.  Or, in this case, the woman.  But, in this case, she herself almost gleefully became the ball itself.  She cared little for avoiding the rough and tumble of brutally facing down opponents.  This video, for example, lays it out all too clearly for those who would care to emulate her style.  Be warned if you don’t like her: her ability to perform in the House of Commons was up there with the best – perhaps the very best.


http://youtu.be/okHGCz6xxiw

This, meanwhile, shows what the other side thought of her.


http://youtu.be/txBZ8cH1eVc

Or, perhaps, nihilism was what we all finally came down to.


http://youtu.be/3TFx9u1t1LY

To be honest, I started out writing this post with the express intention of proving to you that we lived in a country where soft power – that very English sense of fair play – ruled our hearts.  But in the light of the three evermore savage videos above, I do wonder if that’s really the case.

Thatcherism in three acts perhaps, laid bare for all to see?  For in reality, Thatcherism’s abiding quality was not in its falsely-drummed-up expectations of a free market Nirvana it not only never delivered but, perhaps, never intended to deliver.  No.  With the evidence contained in these three short videos, we can see that what she provided us all with was a naked reflection of the cruelty that lies beneath our very English inability to give proper vent to our opinions.

We do not essentially believe in fair play.  We believe in dominating and ruling others.  Our history says this; our Union Flag demonstrates this; our instincts to kowtow to authority prove this.  Thatcherism as hard power in a country where soft power generally rules our hearts, we find ourselves suggesting?  In reality, soft power never ruled our hearts.

White hunter, black heart.  That’s what being an Englander actually means.  Even down to the racist subtext such a metaphor employs.

Thatcherism’s achievement wasn’t economic; wasn’t political; wasn’t even social.  It was personal – as personal as you could possibly get.  It made saying what you thought, simply because it was what you thought, right, clever, witty and – above all – possible.  As long as, of course, you knew how to top the opposition.

Thatcherism made point-scoring the point of political debate.  She didn’t invent it, but she did exemplify, enshrine and make sacred its value.  And ever since she’s died, we’ve allowed ourselves to be sucked up in her dynamics.  Her very personal “-ism” reaches massively beyond the grave, precisely because she herself played the man instead of the ball.

Which is what we’ve spent the last week doing.  Not because we’re all bad envious lefties but – rather – because, at a human level, we’re all far more like her than we’d ever care to admit.

No escape, folks.  Even as the atheist defines themselves in terms of what they are not, so we are condemned to understand ourselves in our rejection of what we despise.

Our own prejudices.

Our own desires.

Our own wish to overthrow.

It doesn’t ennoble us, this hatred; this inability to disentangle.  But it does make it easier for us to understand what the future mustn’t be.

I am Thatcher and because of this, I am the least well-placed generation to enable a recovery of our better selves.

This week I will be voting to nominate up to three candidates to go forward in the selection process my local Constituency Labour Party is holding to choose a future parliamentary candidate for Chester.  All the candidates I have spoken to or read about are all substantially younger than I am.  In times of severe crisis, in times of institutional fracture, this is as it must be.  The only solution to the vagaries, infighting, battles and despair of the aged – the kind of internecine conflict the above three videos make all too manifest – is a transcendental renovation from the direction of the young of all our ways of seeing and doing politics.

I am Thatcher but I do not fear the future because I know the young will one day be in charge.  And in that despair which comes of failure, that despair I mention above, there is always a sense of hope and excitement that things may one day change.

As someone wisely said, life would be unbearable if it weren’t so unpredictable.

And that, my dear friends, is the crossroads at which we stand right now.


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Bloodless technocracy ain’t the solution – so what is?

 Ed Miliband, Labour, LabourList, New Statesman, on a high, revolution, Third Way, Tony Blair  No Responses »
Apr 112013
 
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The idea of yet another third way (or more grandiloquently put, yet another “The Third Way”) rears its ugly head again.  Whilst Tony Blair re-emerges from the ashes of Thatcherism, and asks us to “oppose smartly and govern sensibly” (personally, I think it revealing he didn’t choose “oppose sensibly and govern smartly”) in a piece headlined “Labour must search for answers and not merely aspire to be a repository for people’s anger”, it would appear that Ed Miliband’s Labour is already working out how to be both a repository for people’s anger (though not always in the way they’d prefer) (more here) and its channel, aiming as it is to weave the enthusiasm-winning patterns of community-organisation and policy-empowerment structures:

[...] If all goes according to plan, Graf’s system will transform the Labour Party from a centralised, rusty machine for mass leaflet delivery into a thriving ecosystem of grassroots campaigners. The key, Graf tells me, lies in giving ordinary members ownership of the policymaking process. Then they become not just cogs in a mechanism but evangelists for a cause. [...]

So whilst Mark Ferguson rightly condemns the bloodless technocracy of Blair alongside its all too memorable results (in both the good it stealthily obtained, as well as the bad its legacy became precisely through such stealth), and as we discard Tony Blair’s intervention in a debate already too stale, what answers (to use his terminology – ah, so maybe he does have a point!) do we look for next?

Bloody revolution is clearly no option at all.  Not for moral reasons either – the violence of violent property is causing unhappy pain in the streets of Europe, Africa, the US and elsewhere as it is.  Unnecessarily so, too.  If we went down the bloody route again, the negative outcomes would just pile up on all sides.  And on our watch.

In everything there must be balance.  And so managing change of the nature we have before us must involve managing change in a balanced way.

As I pointed out recently, evolution has had its day.  The only alternative now left us is to revisit a revolution of a kind: not the blood-soaked opposite of the bloodless technocracy which Ferguson rightly finds repellent in his post, but an alternative, carefully couched and parallel process of disruption.  A “positive disruption” is how some are now terming it.  A revolution which recovers its moral right to exist, via 21st century tools which recover its ability to be ambitious of objectively-measured success.

Just imagine a French or Bolshevik Revolution aligned with the techniques of modern business.  Yes.  If Labour is looking for “The Third Way” again, it could do worse than investigate such a way.  It would automatically find itself able to draw on a huge body of practical implementation in the corporations that already sponsor political parties – and yet, at the very same time, be able to rework the tools in question for a community-based infrastructure of Party organisers.

How about it then?  Neither cold-hearted technocracy nor hot-blooded revolution – but, instead, a society-metamorphosing disruption of an entirely bloodless nature.

Bloodless but not blood-free.

There’s the key to it all.


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A new bottom line – the whole of humanity itself

 on a high, social economy, sorted  1 Response »
Apr 112013
 
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This came my way via Jeff today.  At the bottom of this post on how we might renew our socioeconomic landscape with businesses which use profit for social objectives, we get this video on the Grameen Danone project.


http://youtu.be/0C3XQ3BTd4o

A little more background from Wikipedia before we continue:

Grameen Danone Foods, popularly known as “Grameen Danone” is a social business enterprise which, launched in 2006, has been designed to provide children with many of the key nutrients that are typically missing from their diet in rural Bangladesh. It is run on ‘No loss, No dividend’ basis. Initially, Grameen Danone agreed to create a small dividend of 1%/year to shareholders, however, in December 2009, the board of Grameen Danone agreed to waive any monetary return.[1]

The objective as follows:

Grameen Danone Foods aims to reduce poverty by creating business and employment opportunities for local people since raw materials including milk needed for production, will be sourced locally. The companies that make up Grameen Danone Foods Ltd. have agreed not to take out any of the profits out of the company. Instead they will invest these for creation of new opportunities for the welfare and development of people. Hence it is called ‘social business enterprise’.[10]

Here we see, then, an attempt to use the mechanism of profit-generating business not to concentrate further wealth in the pockets of investors but, rather, to focus on an external goal where money is made to work for a wider community.  In the broadest sense of the concept, maybe investors can become angels whose job and prime responsibility is to maximise outputs for as many disadvantaged people as possible in the shortest possible time.

That’s the theory, of course.  Many of you will still feel it’s tinkering with a socioeconomic environment way past its sell-by date.  And you may very well be right.

But we have to start somewhere, surely: somewhere which allows us in bite-sized and parallel ways to change apparently monolithic structures, without destroying everything there is or ever has been first.

The challenge clearly is to manage change better than anyone else has cared to in history.  Margaret Thatcher’s death has served to plunge the country into a recognition of the essentially divided and class-based it still is.  Change has clearly not been managed at all well.

I saw one tweet yesterday suggest we had been through a process of national therapy: I disagree.  Therapy, properly conducted, would have led to some real resolution and closure.  Instead, all we have had is the establishment closing ranks on the matter – whether accurately or not I am not qualified to say – and causing a whole set of buried attitudes to vigorously reassert themselves on both sides: on the one hand, on the Thatcher-admiring side, tremendous pride in a job well done; on the other, on the Thatcher-hating side, tremendous pain about a series of traumatic events, suffered much as one suffers in times of civil war.

In a century where trickle-down economics has shown itself inadequate to its avowed purpose, it’s time we devised a more complex system of motivating people in a free economy.  Not all of us in an age of splendiferous knowledge are primarily motivated by the idea of concentrating masses of wealth. Not all of us think that creating powerful empires of divide and rule are the neatest or coolest game on the global block.

Which is why we seriously need to adjust how we value our outcomes – and why we seriously need a new business model.  For both the needs that corporate capitalism finds itself unable to satisfy and the ways we now battle away and feel incentivised to continue working, something needs to give pretty soon: and that something is clearly the old bottom line.

Not time to do away with the idea of the bottom line as such – time, instead to change its moral focus from satisfying the wants of shareholders and a managerialist class to a much greater and more ambitious constituency than the traditional corporate capitalists ever aimed to please: that is to say, the whole of humanity itself.


http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc


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Revolution ’13: even this world of “hyper-knowledge” no longer necessarily equals power

 BBC, communication, Dan Hind, journalism, on a high, revolution, Twitter  2 Responses »
Mar 312013
 
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As regular readers of these pages will know, I find Twitter a very useful tool – both as an editorial filter of news and current affairs as well as something which freely helps to brainstorm ideas.

Today, after a lot of the latter last night, I came to this conclusion:

Is the #Twitter info-bubble the first time in history that knowledge *didn’t* confer power? #NHS #disabled #welfare It’s all here. And?

So let’s review how I arrived at this conclusion, which – if true – is pretty damning.  For even in a world of universal education, it would seem that just knowing what’s happening isn’t going any more to give you the edge.

It started off with me recounting the following:

Just spent evening talking to s’one who works in #NHS. Nose to grindstone, had no idea of stuff we see on Twitter. Twitter is info-bubble.

Other phrases included: “Are we so well-informed we assume everyone else will automatically understand? Or is this going to be a new and tragic digital abyss?”  And: “Must be some way of crossing digital abyss. Use Twitter to inform those who want to use. Create info in other formats for those who don’t.”  And continuing the theme: “We need what the BBC used to be, but progressive, based on news sources such as Twitter and made available in audience-crossing contexts.”  Along with: “@HoboCastro In same way BBC used wire & own journalists to bring world to our sitting-rooms, we now need to use Twitter to access same space”; and: “@HoboCastro It’s space we need to pursue: use Twitter as resource to be transformed in order to reach sitting-rooms of those at grindstone.”

The aim of and finality of all the above being that:

A transformational democracy must involve moving information from one concentrated and specialised space to a more general audience.

Of course, all journalism – all communication of any register – involves such processes of transferring information from a specialisation to a generality: you have tabloids which simplify and broadsheets which keep – or even studiously upscale to – complex.  The issue here, I suppose, is to what degree the integrity of the original remains intact.  Put simply: how much original data either drops off or is deliberately ignored.  If we see information as an equivalent to the energy of physics, something to be transformed repeatedly but never destroyed, then the integrity of the original becomes a far more important objective.  And any system which has as its objective the trawling of complex environments of “hyper-knowledge” like Twitter, in order to better inform a sovereign populace which doesn’t regularly (doesn’t want to/doesn’t know how to) access its technology, will have to keep as a primary goal this maintaining of the wholeness of the datasets.

So let’s drill down to a practical example.  In Dan’s piece, he says this of the BBC:

The BBC is another institution that has so far escaped the attention of the reforming imagination. But its journalistic failings derive from its nature as a creature of parliamentary opinion. If the executive and most of Parliament are uninterested in seeing an issue debated then the BBC remains silent. Given the centrality of the BBC in our information system its dependence on cues from an out of control political class lends mainstream coverage of public affairs an increasingly hallucinatory quality. When Westminster wants something – from a war in the Middle East to the privatization of the NHS – the BBC falls into line. Needless to say, it cannot describe the economy in ways that deviate from the parliamentary consensus.

Now it seems to be a noble and correct idea to want to reform what is essentially a publicly-funded – a user-funded! – institution so it better represents the people over their mediating representatives.  But what if this simply isn’t practical?  What if our democracy is so broken that such a step is impossible?  After all, as we’ve already seen, Twitter’s “hyper-knowledge” is conferring no edge over politicians who control the mainstream discourse.  What makes you think that they would care to give up such a beast – given the advantages it clearly confers?

No.  Whilst I agree with the goal, I would suggest (have already suggested) an alternative.  More generally here, and specifically in the case of the NHS here, I suggest that instead of aiming to remake institutions our neoliberal friends have already taken over, we begin to create and devise alternatives to the hallowed originals.  Today, for example, as per my tweets above and Dan’s cogent arguments, the BBC itself.

For just knowing and sharing knowledge with people who reach your level of extreme awareness of a situation – its truths, realities and veracities – is clearly not being enough to effectively transform democracy.  Twitter, in that sense, is a microcosm of small and emerging political groupings.  Activists who fiercely believe; political souls who not only know their theory but know how to apply it too.

If only they could reach the sitting-rooms of the people.

If only the six to eight o’clock slot in the evening was ours.

So that, then, is the twofold purpose of this post: a) to continue to develop the initial ideas held in my first two “Revolution ’13″ posts, applying them this time to an institution as profoundly important to the political direction of British communication as the BBC has been over the years; and b) to suggest that in order to do so, we use Twitter’s ability to triangulate a relatively unmediated truth as a resource from which such a parallel institution can be constructed.

For whilst governments like our current Coalition choose not to manage change in a constructively inclusive way, we must surely consider more proactive ways of acting than simply looking to modify from within: in essence, that is, proactive ways of defending ourselves from a political mentality like today’s.

One which prefers to play the eternal blame game instead of demonstrating any real political, social or technical competences in the matters that now so severely affect us all.

____________________

Footnote: even in the Twitterverse, it may be that knowledge does, of course, continue to be power.  Where you’re not the paying customer, you’re obviously the highly observed product.  Others may, therefore, be using our thoughts to anticipate and measure the tenor of citizens’ opinions, and carefully (though perhaps minimally) be adjusting political discourse to keep a shaky lid on mainstream public outcry.  But, in the end, I do not actually think this is a bad thing: openness should be our goal as a 21st century society, and we should act as we mean to proceed.

If anything will save us, it is our capacity to have ideas freely; to act on these ideas; and to implement them with all the means – both technological and intellectual – which we have at our disposal.

It’s in our hands, as always – as long as we don’t choose to use those very same hands in order to strangle our wisdoms at birth.


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I don’t like One Nation Labour – but I do like this from Ed

 Ed Miliband, grassroots leadership, on a high, One Nation Labour  1 Response »
Mar 302013
 
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I don’t think I’m liking One Nation Labour and how it seems to be hijacking the idea of identity exclusively for a single construction of the many nations which occupy our islands.  As I said late last night, I often find it difficult to feel love for a Labour Party which triangulates identity politics into a sorry and cowardly backside of ignorant prejudice.  I am – at one time – English, Croatian, Spanish, Spanish Jew, Croatian Catholic, lapsed Catholic, atheist and agnostic.  These are the influences my life has awarded me; these are the influences which no political party in Britain cares to represent.

So don’t, in such a series of events, ask me to fulsomely sign up to what – in any case – seems clearly to me to be a rerun of flag-wrapping strategies a much wealthier New-Labour epoch was able to afford to engage in.

Cards on the table, then.  I’m not a happy Labour bunny.

This, however, does attract my attention.  And this, in particular, makes me smile:

“It’s not just about winning elections,” says Mr Miliband. “It’s about constructing a real political movement. It’s a change from machine politics to grassroots politics.”

Perhaps there is time, even now, to do much more than simply win another election on the backs of frustrations, fears and hatreds.  Perhaps there is time to think – at this time – of kindness, humility, mercy and forgiveness.  A politics made for people rather than a politics made for politicians.  Politicians, finally, as enablers then – instead of pin-headed CEO-types perched atop pyramidal structures?

Maybe we will get there in the end, after all.

And maybe something can be rescued from the HR car crash, where party members and voters too have been treated by our government as little more than poisonous waste – a waste which is to be rapidly ring-fenced, and deposited wherever possible in the nearest political landfill.  As I commented, a little rantingly, over at Speaker’s Chair yesterday:

[...] f you want a debate on things we need changing – and any change manager of any reputation at all will tell you this – you need to get people onside first. Your people here (both professionals *&* patients) are your resource, not a toxic asset to be casually discarded. I don’t see how the discourses of Hunt and IDS & Co have been *anything* but disrespectful and unhelpful over the past three years. I do see there was some virtue in Cameron’s project, by the way – at least at the start: I posted yesterday on what his legacy could so easily have been. But the need for radical change requires far greater sensitivity in leadership, not less. It’s precisely the moment you need to be more able to rub people up the right way. This hasn’t happened. The government is not competent at people-management (both its own people as well as the voters themselves).  [...]

This latter criticism can, of course, be levelled at so many party-political and business leaders.  Sociopaths tend to be valued quite highly in such circles – especially by other sociopaths who haven’t quite yet reached the same dizzy heights.  And I do think we now have a society which is run mainly for the benefit of such folk.  If Miliband (E) is looking to change all of that – to plan not only for the psychotic violence of electoral war but also for the challenges of an unenviable period of fairly skint government – then I have to say I’m with him.

But before he’ll have my full approval, he’ll have to work out how to make One Nation Labour mean – and equal – multi-identity Britain.  Because if he doesn’t square that circle with wisdom, the consequences – somewhere down the line – will come back to savage him just as violently as any regime of austerity which – scalpel in hand – has operated unremittingly on its poor.

If independence and respect of the individual are so very important, independence and respect of one’s identity are equally so.

Citizenship and nationality should be a bond to release and liberate, not a straitjacket to tie up and constrict.  For me, right now, both party- and identity-wise, though perhaps not as much as yesterday, I currently feel the straitjacket is more the case in terms of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

But that can change.  That can change.  We can change it – if, truly, he wants not to lead us into battle but instead to enable our needs.

Your call, Mr Miliband.  It’s now your call.


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