Doublethink and Doublespeak

Back in 2010 I set to sea to express confusion that offline activism had fallen out of fashion in a new digital world. Or perhaps I was hoping to learn to swim in that world by practicing my writing strokes – I can’t recall.

The new hope of mobilisation was the evolution into a more people powered organisation, getting the numbers and enabling people to act. Which felt like a previous episode c 2002/2003 casting active supporters into the same offline role – this isn’t exactly another chapter of Revelations.

Then there’s fragmented divisions about what mobilisation means? To the bosses it’s getting big numbers of sign ups, which means fundraising leads, like many marketing asks -i.e. income to fuel dull policy and politics work. To the folk in the trenches mobilisation is leveraging the power of the people to win campaign. Forcing companies to listen to their perception of their customers, or politicians to hear the voices of those they plausibly represent, or the media to magnify the stories of the many till those with power take heed. In summary the objectives of mobilisation was never to be fundraising targets, the goal is not to make money but to win campaigns. If the invisible elbow of mobilisation, i.e. our externality,  is fundraising then that’s excellent., and if winning campaigns encourages people to donate that’s how it should be.

So then is a blog somewhere where I’ve argued mobilisation as ‘getting people to do shit’, or perhaps ‘getting people to do useful shit’. With a personal goal of ‘getting people to do more shit’ against an organisation background of ‘getting more people to do shit’. With a nagging voice that perhaps we should be ‘enabling people to do shit’.

Recently returned from months working in India (something for a retrospective) I was lured into the restructuring of mobilisation teams, online, offline and mobiles into the ideology of the pyramid of engagement. I.e. one team focused on reach / outreach – finding new people to work with the organisation, one team focused on digital platforms and innovation - to enable people to stay active with campaigns and one team focused on engagement - to bring people closer to us, engaging them in discussion and deeper levels of activism online and offline.

Last night’s conversations in the pub about the next global restructuring sweeping our way, is the emerging role of engagement. Merging comms (old media), mobilisation (digital) with fundraising (street), and a hint of offline to do something new? Picking at the role descriptions of say an offline engagement manager, they reveal themselves as fundraising roles – probably representing DD expertise, which bodes badly for the digital roles and the collective engagement structure.

So if the passion and thinking behind mobilisation has become synonymous with lead generation and fundraising. And the new vision of engagement is destined to be subsumed by fundraising then in the battle of Doublethink and Doublespeak we need to invent new words and ideas to describe the work that we do – to give people the power to create change, online and offline, and to keep the wolf from our back.

Gothic Activism

Today’s most intriguing highlight has to be the invitation to speak at this year’s Altfest, the UK's largest alternative festival – and maybe only unless you count Whitby? Topic to be determined, but with the likes of Marilyn Manson, the Cult and VNV nation headlining it’s going to be a fun one. At least so long as they don’t try and find a climate sceptic to argue the toss, like previously organisers at the Synergy Project.

But then I got to thinking about how to tailor progressive and environmental messages to the audience, i.e. the assembled mass of the black clad tribe – and/or how to cope with the post punk nihilism and modern Goth / emo apathy?

After a few moments of fond recollections of the ‘Eco Goths against Apathy’ group that we played with for Witchfest one year, and then reincarnated for the Airplot special interest groups project (an idea I'd like to resurrect) clearly more research is in order.

So tonight heralds hunting for hidden messages in my music collection. I’ll resort to playing songs backwards if I have less luck, and to keep the Christian extremists happy. But VNV have opened well, with the lyrics to Foreward (Futureperfect 2009).

This is your world.
These are your people.
You can live for yourself today,
or help build tomorrow for everyone.

Das ist deine Welt.
Das sind deine Mitmenschen.
Du kannst heute für dich leben,
Oder für alle die Zukunft von morgen aufbauen.

C'est ton monde.
Ce sont tes gens.
Aujourd'hui tu pourrais penser qu'à toi,
ou aider à construire un lendemain pour tous.

Still the night is young, there is plenty to drink, and I am not alone, I am not afraid, I am not unhappy……

Digging and Dreaming

The struggle I have with this blog, is that when I’m doing activism I am hesitant to write anything profound about the why of it - or to incriminate myself, and when I have the energy to write about the why of it - I lack the inspiration that comes from the doing of it. Thus it had been what 2 years since I've visited here which accounts for the dust and the cobwebs,

But of late I have been chasing round the world and burning too much carbon to work with activists, volunteers, communities and organisations from Brazil to India, to the Philippines and beyond. So perhaps there are some new stories to tell, and enough of a pause and a reflection to revive this blog? Or to decide to stick a stake through its heart before heading on to the next narrative in the Middle East.

So here goes, the clock is ticking - if I can commit to composing something before the sun rises then there may be life here yet.