Image from the artsagainstcuts blog

“We live within networks of messages, signs, information, and knowledge which produce our experience of ourselves, society, and all that we consider real. And, as power produces its subjects, so it gives birth to antagonists and the forms of resistance with which it is irreducibly implicated.” p.119 Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture

I haven’t spoken much about the protests against the cuts on here, I have been at a few, which you will have seen if you follow me on Twitter or Audioboo. But I haven’t felt like I’ve quite been able to marshall my thoughts to communicate them to you. But I have been there; I have seen people beaten to the ground, I have see the police charge on me, I have thankfully thus far avoided being kettled due to a combination of being dressed smart, luck, and sense of when people are suddenly pelting in the opposite direction. I have walked dazed bleeding people to taxis with directions and a tenner to the nearest hospital because (apparently) Police medics are only technically there to look after police. I have seen cold, frightened young people, stand together with parents, with older people, with disabled people, and be driven back like animals, penned, and deprived of food, toilets, water, liberty. And I have seen those people burn things to keep warm, seen hands raised and voices cry ‘don’t push us back, we’ve nowhere else to go’. I have seen angry angry people, some of whom aren’t even old enough to vote, raise the only voice they know will be heard; in violent action. And then I see what the media sees, because kettling is such a brilliant way to make sure all the photographers and the protesters are in the same place. So they smash a window, poke a princess. Violence is decried, the protesters dismissed. Despite the fact that that violence was not against humans, but symbols of the blind privilege of the ruling elite.

And I believe in parliament, I do believe that the majority of people there are there because they want to fight for the world which they think is best, and that the best way they can do so in small, measured wades through sticky, muggy, heavy beaurocracy. But I also believe that the mainstream media has hamstrung our politicians and society to the point that only the thickest skins make it. And thick skins get used to not hearing things in order to exist. So they don’t hear the cries of the people trapped just metres from their workplace.

“[the kettle] is also a media strategy which seeks to concentrate the spectacle of violent protest into a defined space precisely for the media. Thus the physical terrain of the kettled site is marshalled to produce violent spectacle for media consumption. It is a type of siege that lets the police appear under attack. The kettle thus needs to be understood as a form of media strategy deployed by the police to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’. The kettle attempts to cast opposition protests as such as radical, violent and in need of police repression, whose brutality is legitimated by this same spectacle of student violence that the kettle aims to facilitate.” Rory Rowan on the brilliant Critical Legal Thinking

And I also believe that the mainstream media has made us believe that politicians are not people, and politics is complicated; and made politicians believe that people don’t understand politics, and just aren’t interested.

I believe democracy is better altered, than burned to the ground. But I also believe neither will happen unless the media are forced to sing from our song sheets. I believe that the suffragettes and civil rights movement in the US show that civil disobedience and violence against property have their place in protest.

‘We hypothesise, then, the coming of an era which replaces the bearers of truth (divided unions, political groups with their identifying signs and their banners) with intelligence and shrewdness,’ […] ‘This era will be based on the social possibilities of falsehood, on the technological possibilities resulting from the destruction of rules, on the free exchange of products, simulation, the game, the nonsense, argument, the dream, music.” (written in Italy in the late 70’s) p.130 Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture

It’s the spectacle that separates us from our society, and it’s the spectacle that needs to burn, burn in the face of our anger, despair, loss, injury, ecstasy and oblivion.

don’t push us back, we’ve nowhere else to go

And while the bickering and spite bubbling out of the Netroots conference descends past valid points and into two sides of people refusing to listen, while the left of Westminister tries with the best intentions to form the version of their beliefs most palatable to the press, there are people out there taking action.

Tonight 100 students stormed a lecture by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt at a lecture he was delivering at LSE with shouts of ‘we are everywhere’, and people attending the lecture urged him to address them and ‘the concerns we share’ afterwards (paraphrasing).

The people of Tower Hamlets have occupied Mulberry Place in protest against council cuts.

And this Friday a dance protest will be held outside the Bank of England. Called on facebook ‘Dance Against the Deficit Lies’ the suggestion is that they would like to be:

“part of something so playful with purpose, that any aggression whatsoever (police kettles or the few protesters who throw stuff) will simply look preposterous.” (from the facebook event)

And I have hope. I am a hopeful person. These actions may not yet shake George Osborne from his sleep at night, they may not even make the news. But they are people standing up, resisting the kettle, resisting the spectacle, and saying ‘I am here to represent my own views’; each action a small end of the once-remove.

This post began in my head as a post about the interesting sparks of methods and ideas that a situationist might have recognised in the student marches. Not to say that any student may necessarily have heard of them or their part of the student uprising of May ’68. But the situationists, too, saw the spectacle, recognised ways to defeat it – the reclamation of city space, the reforming of the spectacle’s own words against itself.

Many people at the education protests will have seen the Book Bloc (pictured), which has faced the batons with wit, détournement and practicality.

Books became shields. They were the opposite of a work of art – or at least the work of art as the spectacle has conceived it.

“Just as everything which appears in opposition to the spectacle can be brought within it, so everything which appears within spectacular society can be reclaimed by the consciousness which seeks to subvert it.” P.32 Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture

I don’t mean that the situationists offer us any kind of template. But they recognised the tool we have in our ingenuity, our creativity. That with which this world was made, can unmake it.

And to the people bickering online now: stop it. To people complaining that Labour have somehow co-opted your suffering: stop it. To people sitting back feeling powerless: stop it.

The situationists made a point of “rejecting the ‘black-and-white simplification of the class struggle’ [… suggesting instead that] Revolutionary struggles become ‘molecular’; configurations of desires rather than solidarities between people or social groups.” p.124 ibid

The voices raised tonight in places where they should not have risen. The people sat in buildings in which they should not be sitting. The people dancing on Friday in space not designed for dancing. These are people rejecting the vision of our society that was built in their name, but not for them.

It’s time to take to the streets, it’s time to dance and bleed and cry and shout, to take the spectacle of politics, of the media, of left vs. lefter, protestors vs. police, and to turn it inside out.

Empty rhetoric? Rhetoric, certainly, this blog post it an unfinished story, why not go outside and fill it up?

Graffiti, poster, knit banners, make sculptures, dance, perform in the streets, mashup.

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the new narrative strategies emerging in the digital age- moving on from why and what they are, and what has provoked them (pretty much everything that I put into my two speeches at Notts Trent and Leeds Met in January) and instead considering the implications for us as a society, in their being our main way of consuming stories.

Stories are a massive part of how we learn and grow as a species. They allow us to try out other eventualities, other roles, understand the feelings of others, and our own place in the world. Stories are intricately linked to play, and playing (whether actually, or theatrically) is a recognised learning technique for both adults and children. (See the massive success of TIE in schools, prisons, and deprived areas, as well as the ways that children learn about their world). Likewise play – the ability to try and test for no reason other than the fun of it – is vital to creative thinking, whether in business and tech (where it’s called ‘innovation’) or in the humanities and social sciences, play, and narrative, is at the very basis of our evolutionary and inventive potential.

There is largely considered to be a point when we ‘grow out of’ playing. It is in evidence, in teasing, between friends, but proper immersive narrative experiences are thenceforth ring-fenced. There are areas where they are ‘ok’, and they include theatrical spaces, board games, TV, music, video game, radio, film, books. The arts, in short.

The film/television experience is inarguably passive when compared with the play that we experience as children, and with the ‘old’ narrative strategies of books (and to a certain extent radio – though ‘old’ perhaps not) where we are placed, if not in the position of another, at least in a world-constituting position of one type or another. We build worlds of the books we read with our imaginations, likewise theatre is necessarily world-constituting, the tension of live-ness with narrative, reality with suspension of disbelief, is an inherently world-constituting process – and a collective one at that.

Film and television are passive forms of narrative consumption, they are involving, largely individual, and can pretend to be interactive (the arbitrary decision of whether someone stays or goes is not world constituting) and are no less a form for that, but in terms of play, in terms of one key aspect of play – there’s something missing. Empathy. The process of placing yourself at the centre of creating a narrative – constituting a world – seeing it through anthers’ eyes is largely missing (though of course there are exceptions to this). I’m not arguing that film and television is bad art, but I do believe that to subsist on a diet of only filmic narrative will provoke illness.

Fewer and fewer of my contemporaries are choosing to read books, few play board games or go to the theatre, the two main trends in narrative consumption are the falling arc of the TV/filmic experience, and the growing video game experience.

Last year the biggest Amazon.co.uk seller was COD:MW2, outselling both Twilight and Harry Potter films (source). We spent more last year on video games than we did on both going to the cinema and buying DVDs, and in a 2005 survey done by the BBC 59% of people aged 6-65 played video games (48% were female),100% of 6-10year olds did. (source – pdf)

“With gaming you’re involved and in control. With other things you just have to sit back and watch. I’ve been gaming for most of my life.” Callum – 10 years old (source – pdf)

Do video games represent a move back to world-constituting processes? To player-as-protagonist? To some degree they do, but in the same way as film presents a fully formed other universe that you watch, (commercial) video games largely produces fully formed other universes that you traverse.

Here’s a meaty question – is the build-your-own character ethic of RPGs a new, fuller expression and exploration of our selves, or is it a more dangerous form of escapism, are we losing the link back to reality?

I have argued that the narrative strategies present in Pervasive Gaming – playful, theatrical experiences which take video game, film and tech ethics and apply them to performative, immersive, player-as-protagonist experiences – combat this escapism. I think that to some degree taking these digital ethics into a live context brings our world constituting back into context – in context to our selves. But what about the collective experience? That is something theatre and collaborative play alone represent – single person experiences, narratives that play out through headphones and that put you at the centre of the story are all very good, but they are individual. Where, now, is the collective?

I am concerned about my generation. Probably just as people always have been. I am concerned that the people I know see narrative as an escape, not a way to learn about the world, others. A whole generation torn away from a concept of society, who never knew it. Thatcher started it, and New Labour stamped out the remnants. Then the way that we used to make contact with the world and those around us – the arts that we used to re-see it – are similarly subsumed, first by a passive format, and then by an individualist one that pretends to activity.

It is empathy, the seeing the world through others’ eyes, that we need now. Love. Optimism.

“”Those who talk about revolution and class struggle, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints […] such people have corpses in their mouths.”” – Raoul Vaneigem

“Optimism is a political act. […] Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.” Source

The best, most creative, most active, most proactive and political people I know, are filled with love for the world, not hatred. If there is anger it comes out of disappointment, the kind of anger you’d have if your child stayed out late without your permission, the kind of anger that says ‘do you not see how much it hurts to love you?’

I fight for what I love in art as well as society. I know this tires some people. But I hope it is not me that they are tired with, that rather they are tired of the establishment that tells them there’s nothing worth loving that much.

Why is this relevant?

Because I believe art is still the way out of it, the way to the collective. I’m not arguing that film/video games are bad ways of consuming narrative – but that we need a balanced diet. There are projects like Duncan Speakman‘s Always Something Somewhere Else, that use GPS enabled locative narratives to locate you within one world, but the subject matter to connect you to the other side of the world, too. Practitioners like Andy Field, who are work with collective cultural memory, and collaborative creative theatrical environs. But this connective narrative trend is so far gentle. There are more complicated ethics involved when you put the weight of narrative on one participant, rather than a passive viewer, or a collective audience. When we place people directly into new roles, when we are so used to not playing, being fluid, you need to take care not to shatter people’s identities/worlds. I have been concerned that these single player narrative trends bring us further away from the sense of ourselves as a whole with others, our selves in other contexts, that they are essentially escapist. This would mean we are losing the political potential I think is central to the theatrical experience. But perhaps we just have to be gentle, move slowly. Play. Investigate.

We need to see that we have the ability to change things, make big choices, imagine different outcomes and bring them to fruition. I believe live in a world now where individualism is the main threat we face (I can’t have an affect, therefore I can’t stop bad things happening, and the bad things I do don’t count). I’d rather fight, love, and over come it, than not try in case we fail. Which is where I think I want to take my approach to this pervasive narrative trend in art. Because at the very least we need to be in it. Asking big questions of it.

Once again the Tories are out in force applying gaffa tape and No Nails to the shards of our broken country. This time they are offering tax breaks to shore up shaky marriages, and to prevent marriage becoming the scourge preserve of the middle-classes. The Tory rhetoric runs thus: Britain is broken! Societal values have been degraded! We need a return to traditional family values! The sanctity of the family unit is something often championed as the route to fixing our so-called ‘broken’ nation. The idea of family being at the heart of society is certainly tenacious – and harks back to nostalgic ideals that belong the Victorian age. There you will find the Angel in the House – the woman as central to the family – the hearth, submissive, caring, doting, safe. Is this the ‘intact’ time that the Tories are harking back to? Perhaps the 50s, where children born out of wedlock were forcibly adopted, when women were beaten with impunity and expected to cook, clean care for children whilst quite often also having a job? Maybe the 1970s, where women still weren’t allowed to open a bank account without their father or husband’s permission? Or perhaps that of up to 1991, where spousal rape was not only commonplace (the majority of rapes are still committed by partners), but legal?

Contrary to the politicians’ rhetoric, the structure of the family is far less important than the quality of its relationships, as a recent Gingerbread report demonstrates. Source

I’m not going to argue that family is not important, it certainly is, along with our education and peers, our family is one of the key influences that shape our lives. What I certainly will argue is that the Tory definition of ‘family’ is both outdated and damaging, especially when they use tax incentives to try and engineer it.

And yet those good old Tory brains carry on ticking:

So only the middle classes are getting married – and they’re all quite happy aren’t they? I know! Let’s make those troublesome working class marry, and then they’ll  be happy too!

Marriage is a symptom, rather than a cause of social stability. Simply putting incentives in place to bribe quite unhappy people into staying together ‘for the sake of their children’ isn’t going to magically create social stability. That kind of logic is cargo-cultism, and it’s lazy, and it’s stupid, and it won’t work. Penny Red

There’s also some lovely science to support Penny Red’s assertion, too:

Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study of children whose parents stay together for the sake of the kids. […] exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron’s policies […] It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums. Source

We don’t need to try and rebuild a version of the perfect family that never existed, or that isn’t useful or relevant. We don’t need these units which mould around heteronormative visions of economically dis-empowered women perfecting their ‘recession chic’, which keep unhappy and abusive relationships upheld, and men apart from the formative years and full lives of their children. We need a serious revision of what constitutes a ‘family’, and the responsibilities that go along with being a part of one.

I am part of what is (leadingly, painfully) termed a ‘broken’ family. My parents are divorced. I wouldn’t change that for the world. I love my mum and dad, and part of that love is wanting to see them as happy as they could be. They are better, wholler people how they are now, than they were for years when together.

We’re told women should have children young, and that this is incompatible with a career and education. Women of childbearing age are routinely discriminated against and new fathers have only very recently started moving towards anything nearing decent paternity leave. We’re told the ‘best’ environment for children is two married, heterosexual people, one of whom stays at home (or who should feel mighty guilty for not doing so).

This conception of family is inaccurate and damaging for all concerned.

So how about we reissue the word ‘family’ to mean anyone who loves you? How about we consider childcare as something that is done by women, men, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Parenting is open source, there is no ‘natural’ knowledge, new mothers can feel so alone, they rarely speak to adults, their work and social lives have been removed, it’s scary. If family was wide, sprawling, even if a father wasn’t available there would be so many role models available. Too many relationships break down because the way parental leave is structured ostracises the working parent from the outset.

Let’s not talk about the ‘break down’ of family through marriage, if divorce was only concerned with the end of love and not a failure – if people separating wasn’t (still) a social taboo – it would hurt all concerned a lot less. If women could study, or work, as well as care for a child with the help of a social network (family) there would be no ‘ticking clock’ to service, and if men were able – indeed expected – to take an equal share in home-running and childcare, there would be far less discrimination against parents in the workplace.

Isn’t it a strength that we accept marriages fail, not because of wickedness or moral laxity, but because of ordinary human incompatibility? Yes, it brings some problems – but [the aforequoted] study underlines that they are far less than the problems of imprisoning people in dead marriages, and lecturing them it’s for their own moral health. Source

Leaving aside all of the misogynistic baggage inherent in the marriage state, very few relationships last a lifetime, but your family does. Family is what we should be protecting, not marriage, but it’s families, poor families, that these pro-marriage tax breaks will damage most.

Cameron’s policies would simply shift more power and money towards those who already have it. The Married Couples Allowance would be a big redistribution of wealth to people who don’t need it, paid for by slashing help to the poorest people who really do – from Tax Credits to SureStart to the Educational Maintenance Allowance. And all for a dysfunctional outcome. Source

Iceland was recent placed first in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings. They are the happiest, healthiest, wealthiest and best educated people in the world. They also have the highest birth rate in Europe, the highest divorce rate and the highest percentage of women working outside the home (Source).

‘Patchwork families are a tradition here […] It is common for women to have kids with more than one man. But all are family together.’ Source

Now there’s a phrase, ‘patchwork’ – different in aspect, but together bound. I like that.

So be brave, politicians, legislate in that direction. Equalise laws, reform marriage and civil partnerships, incentivise parental leave for both employer and employee. Support social housing and sure start programs. Work towards improving on how things are, not towards how you fantasise that they used to be.

And have a lovely Christmas with your patchwork family.

This conflict consisted of 3 sides.

On one side, Simon Cowell, and everything that he stands for about homogenised music and coercive narrative driven so-called ‘reality TV’. He turns people, and art, into product, which he sells rather well, incidentally.

On the opposing side we find the #RATM4xmas collective, thousands and thousands of people who bought the Rage Against the Machine track, Killing in the Name, in order to protest the capitalisation of the music and entertainment industries. The song’s main message was ‘fuck you I won’t buy what you tell me’. People involved in this campaign also donated to Shelter.

And then, somewhere off to one side we find the tech-intelligentsia (tech, for the most part because the RATM campaign was fought largely online) who pointed out the irony that the RATM track was owned by SonyBMG, Cowell’s company, and that Killing in the Name’s anti capitalist lyric somewhat opposes rebellion-by-purchasing.

Cowell and the avatars of his narrative made their pleas, they spoke in the ‘emotional dialogue to camera’ format that their viewers recognise and their detractors despise. And from the the angry opposing side bile spilled forth.

“[..] nobody’s buying The Climb in order to actually listen to it. They’re buying it out of sedated confusion, pushing a button they’ve been told will make them feel better. It’s the sound of the assisted suicide clinic, and it doesn’t deserve to be No 1 this Christmas.” Charlie Brooker – in The Guardian

This campaign wasn’t just against Cowell and what he has done to music and entertainment, it was against the people who subscribe to that entertainment too. Oh, not always with such malignancy, but almost always with a sense of pity for those deluded enough to buy into the Xfactor – as if they didn’t understand that it was a simple and constructed narrative, as manufactured reality isn’t a part of all of our lives, as if ‘quality’ was an empirical judgement.

The Xfactor the cultural equivalent of a Disney film, but with less kitsch value. It represents a collective dream, a wish upon a star – the wish to be Stars. It is also easy viewing for people with heavy lives and tired minds. Sure the Xfactor pretends to be real, but so does theatre, film, television drama, video games. Reality TV just pretends to be a different type of real, one that is potentially dangerous. To rival this constructed spectacle is necessary, to discount its cultural importance is ignorant. If you consider Xfactor to be a blight, look for the source of the illness, and not the symptoms.

There’s also more that the rebellion of the #RATM4xmas collective represented – the fact that they *were* a collective was incredibly important. This was a people-driven, peer-to-peer campaign using primarily social media driven action. Hundreds of thousands of people were mobilised, it was Christmassy because they were Giving To Charity (the act that absolves all) but above all, hundreds of thousands of people voted with their wallets, they stood up against the spectacle – and in a way they would have been unable to do so more than 5 years ago. They were empowered by technology – this was action, not just outrage, not just words.

The most impassioned, and nasty debate that I’ve heard on the matter has, however, come from the last camp, from some of the tech-intelligentsia. “These kids have no clue, they’re stupid, it’s a black and white act in a grey world, it’s symptomatic of a whole generation who can’t see past the façade to the machine inside”.

Sure the RATM campaign reacted in a binary sort of way, but do you know what? Most of them knew by the end that the money went to SonyBMG, most of them understood the irony of singing ‘fuck you I won’t buy what you tell me’ as they bought along with thousands of others, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about the money, or charity, they cared about their culture, so they changed it.

They pressed the button that they had decided would make them feel better. And it did. Because it wasn’t just them, there were thousands doing it. To misunderstand this, to dismiss thousands of people as stupid is callous at best, and at worst, ignorant.

This was no revolution. This was a more-generally working class viewing public, versus the tech-literate, generally young, largely university educated (Facebook, certainly) online population, arguing how they wanted society. Not how they wanted it to be (this is just a Christmas number one, after all) – but that they wanted collectively to change it. Action to take, cause and effect, a kind of community that those who grew up in the 80s and 90s haven’t  really known. Big action, without anything between you and the button.

Did I buy the RATM song? No. I did buy White Wine in The Sun, mainly because I liked it, but also because a couple of people suggested it might be a nicer alternative to a sweary angry Christmas song. I also bought Pamplemoose’s song Always in the Season, because I really love the way it sounds and the things it says. Which I think is a good reason to buy something. And is no better or worse than anyone else’s choice.

Which is the thing really, that this is heading towards. No choice is less valid than anyone else’s, here. And in a way, all of these points of view yearn for the same thing: cultural and political engagement on a personal level. Which with betraying bankers’ bonuses, shamed politicians, a lazy, fact-less, right wing mainstream media and Cop15 having collapsed like a flan in a cupboard, might just be coming to a head just when we need it.

Here’s to a new decade.

Merry Christmas.

“There’s an issue here, I think, where lots of people are assuming a right over these things, I think people have got a bit confused about ‘rights’ issues, ‘we all have a right to cheap flights, or cheap alcohol, or cheap meat’ but these things are not rights, and actually where they’re detrimental to society as a whole I think we need to look at them.” Marcus Brigstocke, Question Time 26/11/09

Yesterday we saw the president of the COP15 summit resign, in the past few days we’ve seen rich countries try to rescind on the legally-binding Kyoto protocol, promises on critical deforestation (20% of global emissions) destroyed, and little to no progress on what is widely considered the last chance for our world to act as one to limit the potentially disastrous effects of man-made climate change.

So this looks like the question that we may have to ask now:

What do we do when it fails?

What do we do when our governments let us down? When the representatives of our world stand and suggests that they can conceive of the damages of the 1-2% GDP necessary to prevent run away climate change, but not in the 5-20% that no deal is likely to cost us. When they have lost sight of the fact that these petty discussions about money amongst developed countries for whom ‘growth’ has become synonymous with ‘good’, should be nothing to all the deaths, refugees, famine, drought, flooding and severe weather events that are taking second place to the pounds the dollars the yen, the made up values, traded through the air.

It may be up to us.

This may not be a bad thing. What has been less publicised (and much more persecuted) is the open sustainability forums and communities in Copenhagen, the 60-100,000 protestors walking through London, placards held high, the several thousand councils and organisations, schools and businesses, and tens of thousands of individuals who have signed up to 10:10, and the recent survey that revealed 75% of British voters believe “world leaders are on an important mission at the climate change conference in Copenhagen” (source).

I have spoken before about how I believe it is time for us to reclaim grassroots politics, to change top down political posturing into bottom up action. And I don’t mean the important but inactive protest actions of closing down power stations or stalling shipping routes (I do think these kind of media events [there’s no denying that’s what they are] are very valuable in raising issue awareness). What I mean is us, all of us, generating positive personal and community lead actions to reduce our own emissions, and to encourage others too. 75% of us currently support a deal in Copenhagen. People are always moaning about the ‘Nanny State’. Well now it’s time to grow up. Now it’s time for us to take responsibility for our own methods of living. Let’s return to a true meaning of ‘rights’.

You do not have a right to cheap flights, to travel, to meat in every meal, to fizzy drinks, or to change your wardrobe every season. These are luxuries. Unsustainable ones. We need to break the bonds that capitalism has sold us. Your rights are to equality, to lack of persecution, to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, to life and liberty. You do not have the right to impinge on the rights of others. Our growth driven profligacy is doing just that. Food riots, climate refugees, flooding, this is happening now. Governments can legislate – and it is important that they do so – to curb the emissions of big business, of public services, and of energy policies, but if they don’t, we still have the power to affect change.

Here’s a human right for you:

“Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” Article 29, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (though shame on them for the gendered language)

The greatest battle we face on climate change is lifestyle. We could cover 1/3 of the UK in wind and solar farms, combine that with tidal, hot rock, offshore wind power, and nuclear power plants along the whole of our coastline, we would still fall seriously short of our current energy consumption levels (Source). Because we’re not just talking about electricity here, we’re talking about heating, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, how and what we eat, gadgets, where consumables and clothes come from, how we throw them away, how we shop, what we expect from our food, our holidays, how we do our jobs. It all uses energy, it all contributes to the emissions that we, as a nation, and a world, have to cut.

And that really is down to us.

Up until the last 30 years we did not eat meat more than a couple of times a week – we have become reliant on oil based pesticides and fertilizers, on systems of farming that are eroding key nutrients and biodiversity. We ship our food over here, process it, transport it, transport ourselves to purchase it and then transport and ship away the 1/3 (one fucking third!) of it we waste (inedible food waste can be recycled too). 54% of UK transport emissions come from cars, 35% of global emissions are from agriculture and changes in land use (deforestation). These are things we can change.

“British consumers must cut down on meat and dairy produce, reduce their intake of processed foods [and bottled water] and curb waste. […] These are the three priorities identified in a report by the government’s independent advisory body on sustainability, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), which calls for radical changes in patterns of consumption.” (Source)

Reduce, Reuse, Recyle. Consumerism can be a democracy, we vote with our wallets; buy clothes that last, make smaller portions, mend things, travel less, walk to shop or buy online, take public transport, campaign to make it better, run programs at community centres, petition and force change upon local government. Support local renewable energy projects, invest in them, insulate your home, install solar panels for heating water, photovoltaic for generating your own energy, raise money for funds to support households that can’t afford simple measures like reflectors behind radiators, turn your gadgets off at the socket, buy tech that lasts longer, that you can upgrade, and that is sustainably produced and low in energy to use, encourage businesses to use tech to work more sustainably, put on jumpers and carpet your houses, eat less meat and dairy, avoid bottled water, petition your council to provide water fountains, eat more and local fruit and veg, buy fish from sustainable stocks, buy better, more expensive meat, less often.

Destroy the supermarkets, like they are destroying world food stocks. Processed food increases the energy used by – and decreases the energy value of – food and drink, it’s also making us unwell. Consider how many children you have, consider what you feed them, how you clothe them, and how you teach them to cook and live. Make your change, and do it realistically, sustainably, find new pleasures, and ways in which it does not make your life less liveable. We work hard, time is finite, so we also need to divide the workloads of our households more fairly. We need to reject the lure of fashion, of consumerism, of junk food, to provide cooking lessons at school, life education, and to provide people on low incomes with the means with which to feed their families well, shopping at a market is cheaper than at Tescos or Lidl, sometimes all it would take is an hour of childcare, or a veg box scheme with recipes.

Reduce your emissions as much and as soon as you can.

Today I am leafing through the barely penetrable Digital Economy Bill, and I am thinking. I am thinking that we are not being heard. For all of the petitions that we sign, the words we pour into blogs and articles, the posturing we do on twitter and facebook, how much are we – the online tech-literate – how much are we simply talking to ourselves?

It’s been almost a month since I sent my Open Letter to Peter Mandelson. I have had no reply. No acknowledgement. No engagement.

The Digital Economy Bill is not about a digital economy, it is about how an analogue one can cling to profit within it.

This is the creative industry versus the distribution industries. The online world is a hive of creativity, of emerging technology, of passion and code, of distribution of information and means, it is a place to be valued beyond money. It is also a dangerous place to operate if it is control that you want, that you need. This is an amazing and incomprehensible thing for government.

The 20^th century creative economic model has operated on a basis of scarcity – of distribution, of controlling numbers and controlling access, and this was all orchestrated via the grand narrative of fame. As web 2.0 musician Steve Lawson puts it:

I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star. The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity. Whereas the reality of high-dollar touring, promotional duties, photoshoots etc. is phenomenally dull. That’s why the rock ‘n’ roll myths were created – to cover the tedium that is the day to day reality of most touring musicians. The number that ever made millions from it is so small as to not really be statistically relevant when discussing what’s best for ‘music’ – they just had an enormous media footprint. Source

We are, for the most part, not calling for some creative chaotic utopia where the creative industries are either funded, or amateur, and we should not be losing artists because they are not ‘jack of all trades’ people – because they can’t design, market, distribute, and create. But we should be encouraging open and collaborative processes. It is in those spaces that you learn, and that you can plug your skills gaps with the expertise of others. It is in online spaces that you have direct access to your fans, your audience, your participants. That you can remove the necessity to market, or reform what marketing is.

You cannot legislate material that can be translated into information. You can, however, market experience, physical possessions, skill in a studio, the binding of a book. People like to touch. They like to breathe the heat of lights and smoke at gigs, they like the run their fingers over the cover of a book. I do not believe that the online world opposes that.

It also is worth mentioning that for those with money – those who lobby, and those, for the most part, who are in government, have never or can no longer recall what it feels like for finance to be finite in real terms – it is very hard for them to understand the motivations behind downloading something that costs less that £10. They see it as flippant, lazy and dishonest. They don’t understand that for many (and including myself) £10 is the weekly food budget. They don’t see that these things are done out of love, and that every spare piece of cash longs to be spent on seeing a band live, garnering what is worth more to us than money – physical experience.

So how about we bring this love to the physical world? Open Festivals – free to attend, sponsored, artists and musicians performing across the country– raising money for the Open Rights Group. We celebrate creativity, and we raise awareness and money.

This kind of action, as well as garnering money to support important and organised IRL action and lobbying (a power direly in need, not least to rival the weight of money behind the distribution industries), will also raise the profile of this issue to the ‘real’ sphere. Plenty of people who this bill will affect have no idea about how it will do so, or why they should care. We need to take this information to the streets. This will also speak in a language government understands. Clicking a petition is an important thing to do, but physical bodies in psychical spaces (and in British weather), that is action the establishment understands.

Also, how much should we condone civil disobedience? Proactive protest that does not harm people, or property, but that disrupts media events? Or DDOS attacks? Benign hacks which disseminate the message “it’s this easy to infiltrate a system, consider that when you vote on the Digital Economy Bill”. Raising the profile of the message in a way that demonstrates how much they don’t know about our world? Civil disobedience is a difficult point to consider, but I don’t doubt that some people will do so without consideration, should we gather ideas on how to do so without denigrating our intentions?

We also need to offer solutions. How to find and prosecute those who share copyrighted material for profit. Those who crack, propagate malicious code, set up bot nets and phish. Draw up new models for the music and film industries, fund studies into the gain vs. loss of people who love culture enough to ‘illegally’ download it. We need to do the work which the digital economy bill doesn’t, and set up a wiki to assess how the creative industries can and should operate in the online world. We can offer a publicly submitted memoranda to the bill, a 3,000 word document (about 6 sides of A4) offering our personal and industry expertise on a bill being proposed to parliament.

We need to speak up, because the most important things are only conspicuous by their absence. While the Digital Economy Bill includes measures that allow complete disconnection and up to

£50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000) source

And also allowing the Secretary of State

the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. source

Including imposing jail sentences. There is an awful lot that is missing:

[there is] nothing about ensuring that broadband is cheap, fast and neutral. Nothing about getting Britain’s poorest connected to the net. Nothing about ensuring that copyright rules get out of the way of entrepreneurship and the freedom to create new things. Nothing to ensure that schoolkids get the best tools in the world to create with, and can freely use the publicly funded media — BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Arts Council grantees — to make new media and so grow up to turn Britain into a powerhouse of tech-savvy creators. source

We need to make ourselves seen and heard. Why? Because we are this world; in varying but no more or less important ways we are stakeholders in the digital economy. The Digital Economy bill speaks entirely of the ignorance of our policy makers – but we can’t forget that it is our responsibility to speak to them about these failings, and in a language they understand. I am of the creative industry, some of you are too, but we are all the digital economy, because it trades in information, not money. We need to take this IRL, we need to take this analogue, we speak in their world, they need to learn about ours. Let’s act.

Image by Melvinheng on Flickr, shared via a creative commons license.

This is not a post about the things that are wrong with our world. This is a post about how we make them right. Of course it is not exhaustive, and by no means is it intended to be a detailed and flawless solution, in fact it openly admits that fact, because that (you will see) it is the point.

This post is in reaction to many things, but particularly in reaction to the recent #3strikes debate, the actions of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and a recently circulated confirmed rumour that suggests the same minister may have his sights set on the leadership of the Labour party. This is not a party political post, and I do not intend to argue why one man’s leadership would be bad for Labour, instead I intend to suggest that what this man represents is an outdated vision of politics, a vision that is bad for our country, and bad for our democracy.

Our society (and although I will talk more generally, ‘our’ here refers to UK society) is governed. We have democratically elected governments who, on the whole, make decisions and enforce laws with the intention of bettering society. I do not believe that anyone gets involved in politics for any other reason but improving the society they live in. This is the desire of the BNP, just as much as it is the desire of mainstream parties, their vision of a ‘better’ society might be opposed to the majority, but that is why they are not in power. Largely speaking, the party in power is supposed to represent the majority vision of what a better society is, and then strive towards it.

I do not believe that is currently so. Leaving aside first past the post reform and candidate selection, we wholly and entirely do not currently live in a democracy. The power is very much not ‘with the people’.

The Story

When Labour came into power in 1997, it was to the tune of a wholly broken opposition. 18 years of Conservative government had systematically deconstructed all that was of society and replaced it with the ethics of individualism. This was very good for a few, and catastrophic for a many. The many had finally realised. Labour won with more than just promises to renew, however, they won with what was for the first time, politics as marketing. It wasn’t just slogans, it was shiny adverts, they weren’t just promoting the values of the party, they were selling the story of New Labour.

Something else very important happened in 1997. The death of Diana. Others have pointed out before me how this marked an important turning point, not in politics, but in the media. This was the media as story, news not as reporting events, but as representing emotions. The papers spoke as though they spoke for us as they ordered the Queen from Balmoral.

Labour was in power without a credible opposition, and suddenly the press felt powerful. They could move the Queen to action. And someone needed opposing. If it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’, The Sun could also oppose it.

Story is a very hard thing to fight. It is much older than democracy, much older than society.

That was the beginning of the era of Spin. Labour had ridden into power on a narrative, and the mainstream media had assumed the role of opposition using the same. One proposed a story of a better society, the other claimed to represent the stories (wishes) of the people who lived in it.

You notice how neither of these groups are made up of ‘us’?

This is the politics that politicians such as Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and (yes, even) Boris Johnson represent. (Can you think of a better story than the bumbling fool made good?)

An Information Economy.

Spin is all about distribution. Spin is about controlling the narrative of politics; it is about packaging and marketing your version of events. Spin requires complete control of information.

Spin is not working. Our society has grown out of it. Our country has been made undemocratic because of it. Our politicians do not fear the people, they fear the press. The people do not trust their politicians because the press exposes the antiquated attitudes and secrecy within their ranks. However the Press only constructs an oppositional story, it does not deconstruct it. The press is also not run for anything but the benefit of sales. No matter how well standing the broadsheet, how ubiquitous the tabloid. The mainstream media choose their story, and then they spin their readers and politicians into it.

The internet opposes and undermines that.

We live in an information age. For better or worse that is something that must be accepted. There is a rival economy, and it consists of information, it is a world (democratically, one might say) built of a thousand individual narratives. No one claims to speak for others, if someone is championed, it is because one person had the words that echo with others’. In this context the politics of Peter Mandelson et al will not work. He is a clever man, and I hope clever enough to see that one voice, big business, Spin, the politics of ‘push’, are gone. This is the century of pull, this is the century that politics has to become mutual.

Wikipolitics.

Well, everything needs a title doesn’t it? (/a hashtag).

I have blogged before about how I don’t believe in apathy, but I do believe in disengagement. I believe that British politics is due a reformation. I believe that we can demand that. Are you bored of the tone of the Labour government? Do you really believe that a Tory one will be different? Are you looking for a protest vote? A voice? You will not currently find it at the ballots.

What is Wikipolitics?

It is a starting point. It takes the open-source ethic and applies it to government. I don’t propose that we edit policy documents. I do believe that parliament should be opened up, demystified, and the power taken back. How do we do this? We’ve already started, look at projects such as Louder, 38 degrees, look at the Trafigura backlash, the Iran election, the G20 protests.

We now live in a world where we construct our own media consumption, where we pull together, build our own stories. Politics and the mainstream media are clinging on to old methods of distribution and delivery.

Whilst still acknowledging that at least 2/3 of the world does not have access to the internet (the UK figure is something like 30%, with a further 7-8% only having narrowband access – source) and those who do are likely to be from more affluent, developed backgrounds, we also need to be aware that instant publishing and access to our own media channels is incredibly empowering.

We also need to pull ourselves out of the luxury of political disempowerment. It is our responsibility to be involved in politics. If it is not one with which we wish to be involved, then we need to change it.

Reformation, Reclamation.

We need to tell our parties: “Arm your backbenchers with Flips, with Audioboo, with simple wordpress websites. Open up. Work in real-time. And don’t be afraid. We know you are, we know you are worried that you will be criticised, pulled apart, but please remember that although it has not been so before, that is what we mean by democracy. That is the open-source ethic. Let us participate”.

This worked for Obama, he brought the US the highest election turnout in a century. But then he stopped. And that where it’s gone wrong. That’s when Murdoch took back over.

The mainstream media has characterised us as a pack of baying wolves. The politicians have been characterised as lying snakes and fat cats. 2/3 people believe they cannot affect decision making. Trafigura, Jan Moir, proves we can. How about we take that to the rest of politics? How about we build our own wiki-guide to how we want to be engaged with, how we want to ask questions of the policy makers, of the parties? How about we offer a route that bypasses the mainstream media – taking honest debate and mobile video on the campaign trail, introducing them to the modern realities outside the political bubble, having a conversation, rather than being delivered a speech. You may argue that there’s no point in participating in a broken system, but how else are people to know how to fix it?

Because this is important. As it currently stands it would take as many years to get women equal representation, as it would a snail to crawl the length of the Great Wall of China. As it currently stands we are bickering and buying our way to climate disaster. As it currently stands we live lifestyles of excess and complete unsustainability. And for all our excess, are we happy? Or are we to some degree living the lives and values that are sold to us – other peoples’ stories?

We are facing a hyper-connected, global village era, politics cannot continue to be its own island.

This is not a manifesto, it is a call to arms. And this is where I stop, because this is a story, too. It’s a story about us, but it’s still my version. We need to write an ending together. How can we open up the political process? What do we want to know? Do we think there should be more experts involved in policy making? Do we want to see cabinet meetings taking questions from Twitter? What tools can we offer? Comment. Engage. This is up to all of us. What can we build? (We have the technology). Go.

I am fed up of being told that my generation is apathetic.

My generation is absolutely and wholly not apathetic.

Disengaged perhaps, but that speaks of the end of a political era which is simply waiting to be reformed in a hyper-connected age. All of the demonstrations, meetings and online activism I am involved in are full of people my own age, I know many people my own age and younger who blog about global politics, about feminism, about the environment, about party politics.

What has disappeared is person-on-the-street working class union-led activism. There are far fewer people talking to and about the working classes anymore because they have been written off: that horrible phrase ‘Chav’. The 80s broke down traditional working class communities and then told them that the way to prove themselves was to consume – labels, gold, cars. The Loadsamoney generation, whom the middle classes look down upon as somehow gauche. The lesson taught by Thatcherism was that it was immediate proof of consumption that matters, not slow burn, drag yourself socially-mobile through education, which used to be the way to go.

My generation is the generation of the celebrity machine, which began in earnest with the advent of the manufactured pop band. ‘Don’t worry’ celebrity promises, if you are pretty enough, if you can sing, if you can kick a ball, you have a golden ticket to celebrity. Boys! Become footballers, Girls! Marry them! It was all about the golden ticket, not how you earned it, or how realistic the acquisition of it might be.

That’s the kind of hope that our modern brand of capitalism needs to keep us buying, to keep us racking up the debt. This is the age of the empty spectacle. The big show.

If society is organized around consumption, one participates in social life as a consumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, contemplation rather than thinking, and a degradation of life into materialism. […] Desires are degraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. P.8 source

But this big show, this spectacle, the media circus, unites us, it has “made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary” p.10 ibid

Traditional areas of radicalisation have been reigned in – monetised: universities are a prime example, you are indoctrinated into the debt system from the off, and the transaction becomes about what you’re due, rather than what you seek. But people are finding their political feet in new arenas. Online ones specifically. There’s a reformation coming. Because this is also the era of the global village, of hyper-connectivity.

I believe in an open-source wiki-ethic driven political system. This is not as silly as it sounds. I believe a lot that is wrong about our political system (not the people in it) is how closed down and archaic it is. It needs new forms, and new methods of communication. And I mean communication – that is listening as well as speaking. Too much policy is driven by the media acting as a self-appointed intermediary – they don’t speak for us, yet they affect change more than we ever could. I believe social media and the internet are key to unlocking the relationship between people and policy, and developing politics which are people driven, not media-told.

My thoughts on it all are still formulating, and someday soon I’ll publish them in a #wikipolitics manifesto. Until then I and my generation shall continue to be loud-mouthed.

Enter Louder.

Louder is a new socially-networked hub for campaigns which aims to;

…help make your campaign louder you will be able to connect up with other campaigns and those running them. Providing a much needed online space for campaigners, from international NGOs to grass roots activists, to link up collaborate and share experiences.

You can follow Louder on Twitter @louderdevelop.

This is the beginning. I know I’m prone to fits of passionate hyperbole, but I really believe that there is a reformation coming in the way our political system operates – a necessary return to grass roots, but now with the ability to be amplified, to produce genuine discussion and truly informed policy/politicians. Imagine if the debates for the next election didn’t happen in the mainstream media, but on youtube, recorded on the flip cameras of doorstep debate, with genuine worries being listened to and tackled by street-level activists. Imagine if you genuinely got to pose questions, engage. Who says the press is necessary?  (Apart from the press, obviously). They (including the BBC) need to earn their keep, prove their worth. At the moment they’re too lazy. (NB – we also need to remember 30% of the UK have no access to the internet, and 10% of those who do only have dial-up – source – something else which needs tackling).

I have been testing the beta of Louder over the past couple of days, and it promises to be really really exciting. Louder allows the easy creation of a home page for a campaign, events, and the plugging in and aggregation of key social media platforms, currently including images, video, youtube, twitter feeds, blog feeds and more. Here’s a quick screenshot of what I’d done in about half an hour of playing:

It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s powerful, almost like the Posterous of online campaigns.

Louder is launched this Friday at the ICA in London (at Tuttle), and needs as much feedback and participation as possible so they can hone the tool so it’s genuinely useful. Louder will open up and consolidate the process that’s been happening via the closed down world of facebook, and the disparate world of the blogosphere, bringing people together in a global grass-roots manner much more suited to our global village era.

Anyone following #guardiangag/#trafigura injunction outrage on Twitter over the past day, cannot deny that the internet is going to prove one of the main battlegrounds of future politics.

So get on there on Friday, if you have a cause, set up a campaign, if you don’t, have a play and provide feedback, it all helps, and it’s important.