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….

Digital illusions

It's been a lot of months since I last blogged, and in the spirit of the hypocritical I've been working on a new project to encourage, cajole, inspire and support like minded people to blog about things I care about, making the best use of materials I provide, and in their own words. The idea is similar to Mumsnet, but I think I pinched it from Amnesty. Methinks it's time to revive this blog.

Internally we live in rightful fear that we send too many emails to people. This is true in the absolute, and worse when you consider that such minded people receive emails from every other organisation under the moon. As email fatigue becomes more oppressive, and organisations such as Avaaz and 38 degrees do us no favours here, the thinking is that we should get ever better as segmenting [pdf] our email lists. As if one can divine precisely what folk want to read – oh for such hubris.

We often segment by issue (e.g. Peace), but as an organisation we'll usually highly focused on one campaign at a time. So if you are a recent clicktivist, then you will inevitably become typecast by the Zeitgeist of our communications. If we segment such that we only send you emails about that issue, you'll become more entrenched as a specialist, while one suspects forward thinking, progressive folk are in the main pluralists. We lack the unwavering fanaticism of say the Tea Party.

This concerns me, if we confuse recency, and the short term fickle nature of clicktivism with a Cyclopean interest in our current comms. The data I have crunched, and the open rates that I have passed over, would provide suitable anecdotes to support such concerns.

So if I worry about segmenting clicktivists based on issues, should I have such concerns about segmenting based on whether folk want to get active online or offline?

My thinking about inviting people to blog, and connecting people together who already blog, is to develop new deeper paths of engagement for activists who want to do more online. Perhaps in activists who want to do more are already engaged offline, and clicktivists are not so much defined by the digital tools they use, but by lazyness, lack of time and/or lack of capacity to do activism for more than a 60 second burst.

Still there is that man on the Isle of Harris who wants to do something.....

Wyrd transitions

I am a capacity building geek, i.e. it genuinely interests me, and maybe even excites me, to investigate and develop new ways of inspiring, equipping, training and mobilising people to campaign on something that’s important to them – albeit broadly within my own preference for a progressive agenda.

So I started this blog to debate whether the organisations I’m involved in were right to move away from old skool offline activism (local structures, public engagement, political lobbying, subvertising, NVDA etc) towards the shiny new frontiers of digital activism. I describe myself as a reactionary simply because instinctively I’d prefer to be chaining myself to something, or driving a RIB full of climbers towards a coal freighter, than clicking on another link.

However I might be wrong, I might be in danger of going extinct and so the essence of this blog was to explore new online capacity building ideas, and to either a) come up with better ideas to justify my reactionary prejudices or b) to learn some new skills (blogging for one) such that I’d find a new role in this new world.

Then the fates intervened in and the organisational wont towards the digital turned into an internal restructuring with a focus on capacity building not to achieve change but to fundraise – while important, excites me less.

For a great many years I’ve argued that such folk exist – with plenty of evidence, folk who want to organise gigs, rattle tins, sort sponsored events and the like, but that they are distinctt from the wider activist base. The argument is that we should do both, enabling people to get involved in a manner of their choosing, giving people the creative space to come up with new campaign and fundraising ideas and that we should resource both paths separately, and well.

To give up on campaigning, or to much reduce it, in favour of fundraising seems counter intuitive, after 15+ years of capacity building to that goal. As the restructuring dragged on, as friends feared for their jobs, as I dabbled with emigrating to the frontline battle against climate change (i.e. the US), things went perverse or just Wyrd.

The plans to fundraise were abandoned, the capacity building team was halved in size, two of us were in essence made redundant, and I seem to have found myself in a digital team exploring the borderlands between online and offline activism. Somewhat poetic really considering the blog I started 9 months before hand.

Now don’t get me wrong, organisational I think we’re being a bit daft, and over time as our ability to deliver offline activism and events diminish, then the simple truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch will become apparent to the powers that be – i.e. what you get out is proportional to what you put in, and in order to have a passionate, inspiring network of volunteers you need to have people on the ground supporting that networ..

However as an individual with a predominately free hand to explore new ideas, to build new capacity building structures online and offline, to facilitate the training of people in skills I don’t yet possess, to try new things – just because, and to support such folk in delivering change – well it’s all quite exciting really, and if one is to believe in fate, destiny, karma in the strength of the wyrd, the clearly the gods are pleased with such paths.

A Dodo Sets to Sea

On a sunny Sunday autumn day I seem to have stumbled upon the inspiration to launch a new blog. To replace my past performance of occasional and ephemeral writings that have led to no particular destination. Not to mention the various ramblings that have helped while away a winter’s day sparking strange quests for new ideas, and entertaining drinks.

This is likely to be much the same, although the original inspiration comes from a shadow of a fear of imminent redundancy. As such I may have much more time to consider, to procrastinate and to research esoteric words before posting.

My premise is simple that I, as an activist, believe that change happens in the real world, not in some parallel virtual dream-space. Not, I’d like to make clear, that I am some internet sceptic like some of my colleagues. I freely admit the system exists, is as fascinating as it is useful but that is a critical tool not a goal, and a pale comparison of the diversity of human societies.

To clarify the politics of the title, I consider myself an advocate of the progressive left, which I may argue more of, at some point. I consider myself a reactionary in the means of which one achieves change, in direct opposition to the reactionary politics that I consider needs changing. No matter how well they are hidden under the banner of a big society.

For several years I have helped craft and shape activist networks, perhaps inspiring many to become involved in social change. And of late various organisations have paid me well to do such work. I’m also an activist of the old school, I’ve climbed buildings, lobbied politicians, boarded ships, had countless conversations with the public, been arrested numerous times and have done whatever I can think of to make change happen.

What worries me and what may lead to my redundancy is the rise of clicktivism, the idea that 1000 emails are more effective than a couple of hundred campaign postcards, or better yet a well executed piece of direct action. E-activism is a shiny new toy, and another campaigning tool, but it is not a replacement for real people investing real sweat, tears and time in the change they want to see.

But I could be wrong……

I may be an activist of the olden days, a Dodo refusing to accept the inevitable change. And clearly if such is the case then I want to develop new skills and abilities to embrace whatever changes are upon us, to be once more a changemaker.

So I will continue to argue the toss, to explore old ideas, and to research the mechanisms of social change. But perhaps I need to leave my island, to set to sea, to learn new web skills, to polish my writing styles, and who knows, perhaps to prove I can do so by starting some sort of activism blog.