Dream of a thousand cats

The threat of climate change to human civilisation is obscene, and the most powerful argument for inaction is that it’s now too late to save our species from drought, famine, floods, water shortages, war and nuclear Armageddon.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’ve not been Jensen’ed yet, it’ll be a while before I head to the highlands, and I’m confident we could bring global emissions under control. It’s just that it’d take an international effort akin to World War II, and I don’t see politicians with the guts to deliver.

Still on occasion one sees a glimmer in a campaign plan, a sense of insane ambition that is passionate enough, if popularised, if shouted loud enough, could bring everything else into place. The promise of a collective dream, that if it came into being, would prove that humanity can do anything.

So how many people do you need to create a collective dream. There are 7 billion of us living on this rock orbiting the sun, of which perhaps some are too young to breathe life into their dreams. 1% of humanity controls nigh on more wealth than the 99%, and their collective dreams have become the paradigm. So if an equal number of free thinkers imagine enough, perhaps we can evolve the superstition of wealth into something sustainable.

OK so I want 70 million people to believe in something, to believe so hard, they are prepared to do something, to create the change they want to see, and to make reality out of such clouds, before things go truly Malthusian.

Google reckons 27% of the population is online, so what 1.9 billion people, which has promise. And whatever your belief about online and offline activism, perhaps these people have the power to spawn that dream. So my numbers change to maybe 4% of the world’s digital generation, or closer to home, 2.5 million UK citizens.

In Argentina (pop 40 million), in the world of the clicktivists, 1.5 million people signed a petition for a forest law. The campaign did so, by doing everything, by making everything subservient to the campaign, and by making the engagement and inspiration of people core to everything they did. This is possible here, we can do this, we just need the internal courage, not so much of the militarists of WW2, but of the Argentinian dreamers.

As a campaign the measly internal, and international, goal of 5 million defenders, still inspires, empowers and would allow us to rethink who we are, and how we do things. If our leaders had guts, we could do this. Or we can dismiss such goals, and the dreams behind them, as unrealistic, implausible and outside the scientific method of campaigning.

We can dream, the dream of a 1000, a million, 100 million or more and we can believe….

Observations in the pub

I stumbled upon this; Don't dump on me: the 4 behaviours of the social web, in an old fashioned way i.e. using Google as opposed to a clever digital tool. The theory behind it appealed, although I suspect it’s too clever to be actually true, and it got me to thinking.

Back in the day, when we were campaigning for the UK climate change law, we had at our disposal lots of energy, resources and youthful talent (myself excepted). We had a free hand to try many things, and my love of pubs, extensive research (drinking), a random Futerra lecture about engaging new audiences lots of pub conversations led me to push the idea of environmentally themed pub quizzes.

The theory went like this. Folk develop and shape their ideas in pub conversations – and the British spend a lot of time in the pubs. After a few pints, pub conversations evolve into a boasting competition – think the skalds of Viking sagas but without the weapons. The essence of a boasting completion is to impress your friends (and the opposite sex) with some innovative quip, or a delicate morsel of information – the Fact (capitalisation intended). Well performing Facts get remembered and recycled into the next pub conversation making one seem witty and urbane.

So the question is how to introduce such Facts into the conversation? We’d done beer mats – albeit badly, and whereas in hindsight there are probably a dozen other tools available (posters on toilet doors remain interesting to me), we ended up with pub quizzes. The idea would be to make them fun, focused on those nuggets- which people remember, and we’d build support for change, one pint at a time.

Then of course I asked a campaigner to write some questions (I was more naïve back them) and the quiz degenerated into a dull quagmire of climate geekery [pdf], and terrifying factoids to keep one up at night. So much for something light-hearted to reach new audiences and to sneak ideas into popular debate, but still the idea is sound.

So back to social behaviour; the essence is that in the digital world there are droplets (or content generator) who create ideas, or information. Then these ideas / information are distributed by sharers, tofolk (polishers) who then reflect, comment on and polish those ideas before republishing them. Again they are shared and polished again, until over time the waves of internet tides slowly shape those ideas into new pearls, ideas that have been refined, and passed around until they become the new memes of how things should be, or always have been.

As a theory, no one I know has seen it to be true, but again the idea seems sound, it feels like a series of pub conversation, and more how debate used to be, before the passivity of relying on Television to tell you what you think (Before TV).

100 years ago debate and the fundamentals of politics happened in church halls, working men’s clubs and public meetings and attracted large amounts of people to get involved / attend. Whereas a bit old skool but useful (I’ve organised a lot of public meetings), this remains how people discuss and decide what to think about an issue or a candidate. So where are those online spaces, the digital interactive challenges to spoon fed media? And how to create and nurture them?

New ideas do appear, and they are powerful when they do. Once upon a time, killing whales was completely acceptable, cutting down the rainforests was the sensible thing to do, burning fossil fuels was never going to affect humanity, but somehow the meme changed, and the abstract became something people care passionately about. So how to feed and propagate such ideas and memes in the digital sphere?

The theory of droplets, distributors, polishers and pearls is too academic for a pragmatist, but perhaps if I engineer the structures to create the conversation, to allow like-minded people to generate content, to discuss and to pass the content around – then maybe I can model a new theory, but based on an observable reality that matches the digital pathways we carve.