MP for Westminster: Tomlinson "in the wrong place at the wrong time"

Mark Field is the MP for the Cities of Westminster and London. When the G20 came to London this April, it was in his constituency that tens of thousands of protesters came to make their voices heard. Numerous incidents during those protests have been scrutinised by the media and the police watchdog, the IPCC - but none has received more attention than the death of Ian Tomlinson. A local newspaper vendor, Tomlinson got caught up in the protests, was struck and thrown to the ground by a police officer and died soon afterwards - a sequence of events initially covered up by the police, until cameraphone footage emerged.

My friend Mike Bennett wrote to Field, as one of his constituents, expressing concerns about the policing of the summit and asking a series of questions about the "relationship between police, public and politicians". Mike has published his letter and Field's reply on his website.

What startled me was the phrase Field used to describe Tomlinson:

"an innocent man who appears to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time"

Is it me, or is this is a deeply inappropriate description of the situation?

What if Tomlinson had been a protester - would he still have been "in the wrong place at the wrong time"? Or would that have made him fair game?

Help Build Some Amazing Treehouses!

One of the most exciting things happening in London this summer is the Treehouse Gallery that's planned for Regents Park - and, if you have any time on your hands this month, you can help make it happen.

The gallery is the work of some of the wonderful people behind the Temporary School of Thought which I was involved with back in January. All kinds of magical things are planned for the treehouses through the summer - and I'll be curating three days of strangeness from 7th-9th August.

Right now, a team of volunteers are building the treehouse structures offsite, at Area 10 in Peckham:

Steph and Claudia, who have organised the project, tell me they could do with some extra pairs of hands. The build is going on from 9am till midnight every day, so there is plenty of opportunity to get involved. So if you have a spare couple of hours - or even a spare few days - please do go and support them.

For more information, go here.

Wanted: university leavers to try out Signpostr

Back in January, I asked how we could use social media to help people cope with the personal consequences of the recession. That post sparked a lot of conversations and several projects. From today, we're looking for people to start trying out one of those projects - specifically, young people who are leaving education into the toughest job market for a generation.

Signpostr is a response to the rapid rise in unemployment here in the UK and elsewhere. The site is about helping each other find a way through the recession. It gives people a space in which to:

• talk honestly about the realities of the current job market


• find and share information about resources that are useful for finding work and living cheaply


• create projects, gather people and resources, and get things started

The situation is more urgent today than it was in January. Even if the current signs of economic recovery continue, hundreds of thousands of people are still expected lose their jobs in the months ahead. Among the harshest hit will be those leaving education this summer. As the Guardian reports this week:

figures compiled by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit, which works with careers services, suggest that one in 10 of this year's graduates will be out of work, and many more will be working in bars and retail to make ends meet, or leaving the country.

So it is with those graduates that we want to start testing Signpostr.

From today, the site is open to those with .ac.uk or .edu email addresses - and we are looking for people to try it out and help us improve it.

If you've just left college or university and are looking for work, try it out - add some Resource listings for things you've found that help save money or increase your chances of getting a job; create a Project for that idea you've got that you'd like to make happen; tell people what you need and what you can offer.

If that's not you, can you help us by spreading the word to people you know who are leaving education this summer? Send them a link to:

http://alpha.signpostr.com/

Finally, you can follow @signpostr on Twitter, where we'll be talking about the site, sharing ideas about looking for work, living cheaply and helping each other through the recession.

Thanks to everyone who's joined in the conversations that fed into this project - both online and face-to-face! I look forward to continuing those conversations as we put Signpostr to the test.

Why journalists write so much rubbish about Twitter

Around the start of 2009, the media here in Britain discovered Twitter. At times, it's been hard to tell whether the service had just crossed the chasm or jumped the shark. What's distinctive, though, is quite how bad the reporting of Twitter has been - significantly worse, I would say, than the equivalent coverage of Facebook, when it made a similar leap into public consciousness a couple of years earlier.

"Oh yes," my dad said, when I mentioned Twitter to him back in February. "It's one of those things that people are using that means they don't have real conversations any more." I couldn't blame him for getting this impression - I'd heard the same report on Radio 4 earlier that week - and I'm no unbridled techno-enthusiast myself. Yet what has annoyed me about the reporting of Twitter is that these claims of its anti-social effects are so dramatically at odds with my experience as a user. I can honestly say I've never met a tool which has led to so many interesting offline, face-to-face experiences.

Of course, the media coverage is unlikely to harm Twitter. My mum even signed up for it the other week. (You can give her a nice surprise by following @dougaldsmum!)

But, since I keep hearing the same recycled nonsense, I thought I'd write a couple of posts about why I've found Twitter such an exciting tool - but, first, about why the media find it so difficult to report well.

As I see it, there are at least three significant problems when it comes to covering Twitter, over and above the usual reasons journalists get things wrong.

1. Because it was Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and co who brought it to their attention, they focus on celebrity Twitterers. The trouble is that trying to understand social media by looking at the behaviour of celebrity users makes about as much sense as trying to understand society by looking at the behaviour of celebrities.

2. A number of eloquent and apparently expert voices have offered very strong opinions on the service, without having used it or apparently paid much attention to how others actually use it - in some cases, making unjustified use of their authority in other fields. Oliver James, Alain de Botton and Baroness Susan Greenfield are all guilty of this. (And don't take my word for it - Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist, accuses the Baroness of "abusing her position as a professor, and head of the Royal Institution... using these roles to give weight to her speculations and prejudices in a way that is entirely inappropriate".)

3. Twitter takes time to get your head round - and journalists are permanently in a hurry:

• The value of Google was immediately obvious the first time you used it and got good search results, whereas the value of Twitter grows on you gradually.


• We don't have good short-hand ways of explaining what it does. ('Micro-blogging', for example, is a really misleading tag.)


• To complicate matters further, getting the best out of Twitter generally requires the use of an external client (a program that runs on your desktop) such as Tweetdeck, rather than visiting Twitter.com directly. Most non-specialist journalists, like most internet users, are only beginning to adjust to the possibility that the web isn't about going to sites, but about information coming to you.

So unless a reporter has been using the service personally for long enough to get a feel for it, they are very likely to pick up the wrong end of the stick. Or mistake the stick for a snake.

Video: The Long Doom?

Here are the videos of my talk at the London Long Now meetup on May 27th. Thanks to Paul for organising the event - and to Vinay for filming it. To find out about future Long Now events in London, go to their Meetup page.

Space Makers: Tony Sephton, Desksurfer.com

Tony Sephton is the founder of Desksurfer.com, a new site that gives businesses and organisations a simple way to sell spare desks on an hourly basis - and gives freelancers/etc a way to find temporary desk space. The site just launched in London and is currently looking for more offices to offer desks.

I was keen to talk to Tony because Desksurfer is a really simple example of making use of slack space/time. In fact, it's an idea that several people have floated around the Space Makers Network, so it's great to see it put into practice.

I'm also interested in how this could develop in other directions - Desksurfer provides cheap deskspace, but are there also circumstances under which you could provide free deskspace through a similar model? (Having a Freecycle version as well as an eBay one?) And how about home-based co-working, as Jelly are doing in New York?

Heterodox Futurists

I had a very interesting evening last night, talking at the London Long Now meetup, on the subject of 'The Long Doom?'. The question mark matters, because I'm not interested in making predictions, nor in pessimism. What I wanted to explore was how we get better at imagining a wider range of futures - at making the distinction between "the end of the world as we know it" and "the end of the world, full stop".

I'll post a video of the talk and the discussion that followed soon. In the mean time, I wanted to share some links to other people whose long-term thinking about decline and collapse scenarios has helped me get my bearings. They fall into the category (which I just made up) of "heterodox futurists": that is, they think and write about the future, while standing outside the orthodoxies characteristic of mainstream voices and organisations.

John Michael Greer, whose erudite comparisons between the current state of the world and the rise and fall of previous civilisations appear weekly at The Archdruid Report.

Dmitry Orlov provides darkly entertaining reflections on the parallels and differences between the present-day USA and his experiences of the collapse of the USSR. (Both of those blogs have also been distilled into excellent books - Greer's 'The Long Descent' and Orlov's 'Reinventing Collapse'.)

Drop-out intellectual Ran Prieur is a constant source of thought-provoking links and his essays offer an unusual balance of social critique and techno-curiosity.

Finally, Eleutheros's occasional posts at How Many Miles From Babylon are worth the wait (though concerned less directly with the future than with the present, as seen from the outside).

There are plenty of other interesting voices out there, associated with the Peak Oil community, the Transition Towns movement, "anti-civilisation" anarchism, mutualism and other positions, many of whom provide a useful balance to mainstream narratives. What I appreciate about those I've listed here, though, is that they speak for themselves, exploring a set of ideas, and not acting as the voice of any particular group or movement.

So, who else should I be reading who falls into that category?

The Collapsonomicon #1

Things are getting busy, so I thought it was time we started a Collapsonomics-themed weekly email. I haven't set up a proper email list for it yet, so if you want to sign up, get in touch at info@collapsonomics.org. (I'll also try blogging it on here each week.)

Events

Today - 3.30-5.30pm: Noah's lecture on 'Collapse Dynamics' at the London School of Economics. Graham Wallace Room, 5th floor, Old Building:

http://bit.ly/lse_map

Today - 6.30-8.00pm: Space Makers Network meetup - joint event with Silicon Hackney at SPACE Studios on Mare Street, an organisation that has been taking over buildings on cheap leases to provide space for artists since 1968. Nearest tube Bethnal Green.

http://bit.ly/spacemtg

Wednesday - 7.00-8.30pm: "The Long Doom?" - I'm talking at this month's Long Now meetup. What would long-term economic contraction look like? At Demos, Tooley Street, SE1 2TU - nearest tube London Bridge.
http://bit.ly/longdoom

Thursday - 6.30-8.00pm: Talking about the past and future of financial markets with former hedge fund manager John Loder. This is a small group session at the School of Everything offices, followed by pints at the Camel.

http://bit.ly/camelmap

And finally...

Homeless or Hipster? Learn how to tell the difference:

http://bit.ly/homester

Then try the quiz:

http://bit.ly/hipless

G20 Reflections: Sousveillance

The big story of the events around last month's G20 summit was sousveillance: 'the conscious capture of processes from below, by individual participants'. The death of Ian Tomlinson and the subsequent unravelling of the police account of events marked how far social technologies have changed our society, even since the last major summit in Britain, the Gleneagles G8 meeting in 2005.

That week itself marked a breakthrough for the role of members of the public in newsgathering. When the 7/7 bombings cut across summit and protests alike, it was camera phone images which told the story. However, while "user-generated content" had already been a buzzword in the news industry for a year or so, the conventions by which this material should be incorporated into reporting were still emerging and had yet to change the way news was created.

What the Ian Tomlinson case highlights is how far we have now moved towards a new information eco-system. It is significant that:

1. The key footage was gathered not by a protester but by a banker visiting from New York - the cameraphone in the hands of the passerby is now an important tool.

2. Other footage was largely posted on broad platforms like YouTube rather than narrow platforms like Indymedia.

3. News outlets in general are now largely comfortable with the idea of leading on stories driven by user-generated content.

4. Some news outlets (e.g. the Guardian, Channel 4) are developing a fairly sophisticated ability to work with user-generated content - not only providing a channel for its wider dispersion, but playing a role in piecing together a large number of individual elements to provide context and a degree of verification, giving credibility to stories which challenge the official version of events.

The deeper implications of this are interesting. Any of us who have been on a few protests over the years know that the policing of the G20 was hardly exceptional: practices such as kettling, baton charges on crowds, aggressive use of police horses, removal of ID numbers and so on have been common, in many cases for decades. In the past, it has been possible for senior officers and politicians to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, or even encourage it, while maintaining a public line about the decency and high standards of the British police. That situation only remained tenable, however, so long as the flow of information about events on the ground was relatively weak. Most people in this country will tend to take the word of a Chief Constable or even a Home Secretary over that of the most articulate, reasonable and well-groomed anarchist. However, the same people can react very differently to video footage providing direct evidence of police aggression.

What is interesting here is that, without any change in the values and standards professed by politicians and senior police officers, the stronger flow of information is likely to change the actual practice of policing. (This reminds me of an argument Slavoj Zizek makes in 'Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?' about the tactical effectiveness of taking appearances at face value: rather than simply pointing out the gap between words and reality, one can use the words as a point of leverage for closing that gap.)

How far and how deep will sousveillance go? Where else could society be radically changed, simply by holding existing professed standards to account, with the support of new and stronger flows of information from below?

One other story caught my eye recently - the reporting of the video of an Abu Dhabi prince torturing a man he claimed had cheated him in a business deal. Johann Hari's astonishing investigative report on Dubai (a great piece of old-style journalism) highlighted the disturbing foundations of the Middle Eastern states which have come to play a key role in the world economy. Could more direct documentation of the realities of these countries ever lead to a radical change in the ability of western countries to profess democracy and human rights whilst relying on their money?

The conclusion of Hari's piece, though, acknowledges the extent to which the extremes of inequality and injustice in Dubai are only a microcosm: more generally, our economic life tends to be dependent on situations in other parts of the world which we'd rather not think about. Which brings me, finally, to my friend Vinay Gupta's essay on 'The Future of Poverty' and the question which he poses: what will be the consequences when - as is set to happen in the next decade - cameraphones and mobile internet become widely available to people who still don't have the basics of clean water, decent sanitation or reliable food supply?

These are the kind of questions which we explore at the monthly GlueSniffers: ICT for Development meetups I organise with Vinay and Mark Charmer of Akvo.org. If you're interested in joining us, sign up to get alerts when we schedule a meetup.

How not to predict the future (or why Second Life is like video calling)

Yesterday afternoon, I was speaking on a panel at the National Digital Inclusion Conference. We'd been asked to talk about "what learning should look like in 2019, and how technology will have changed how we consume, create and collaborate to develop ideas, knowledge and skills."

That got me thinking about how bad we are predicting the future of technology - and I saw a parallel which I'd not noticed before.

My usual example of poor prediction is the mobile industry. Video calling was expected to be huge, but it turns out hardly anyone wanted it. Text messaging, on the other hand, was an unexpected success. The point is that the technology landscape is shaped not just by what we can do, but what we choose to do - and simpler, less impressive technologies may turn out to be vastly more powerful as social tools.

What struck me yesterday is that the video calling vs text messaging situation has played out all over again online in the last few years. Except that this time it wasn't video calling but virtual worlds - and it wasn't text messaging but Twitter. Again, people's demand for high-tech, highly immersive substitutes for face-to-face experience were massively exaggerated - while the real story turns out to be the social power of stripped down, simple bits of communication that weave in and out of our First Lives.

(Of course, the reason most of the recent media coverage of Twitter has been tripe is that the journalists responsible haven't used it for long enough to realise how much of its power lies in the face-to-face interactions and relationships it sparks - but that's a post for another day...)

"How to Freecycle Woolworths!"

For those of us who've been arguing for the creative reuse of empty space as part of a response to the recession, there was exciting news last week. The Department for Communities and Local Government announced £3m in small grants to help people reuse empty shops for creative and socially beneficial projects. Here's what they say:

People are increasingly worried about boarded-up shops and vacant land in their towns and cities. It is vital that we do all we can to enable vacant properties to be used for temporary purposes until demand for retail premises starts to improve. Not only will this help to ensure that our towns and high streets are attractive places where people want to go, it can also stimulate a wide range of other uses such as community hubs, arts and cultural venues, and informal learning centres, which can unlock people’s talent and creativity.

This kind of temporary use of empty premises has great potential for those "real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media" that I've been writing about. (Thanks to Noel for first drawing my attention to the "slack space" movement in the comments on the original Social Media vs the Recession post.) And the turnout for the second London Alternative Third Spaces meetup at the Hub a couple of weeks ago was a sign of the amount of energy gathering around these projects.

Last week's announcement wasn't just about funding, although that was what made the headlines. Plans for encouraging temporary use also include:

• a simpler process for local authorities to waive "change of use" planning permission requirements
• providing specimen documents for landlords making temporary use agreements
• a pilot project in five town centres, in which local authorities act as intermediary - agreeing a temporary lease with a landlord on behalf of a local community group
• and, of course, funding for grants "to help with cleaning and decorating vacant premises, basic refit for temporary uses, publicity posters, and other activities that can help town centres attract and retain visitors"

It sounds like the details of how these grants will work are still being worked out, but all in all this an extremely promising set of proposals.

One further thought, prompted by a conversation with Dan Littler. Last week's announcement accompanied the launch of a guide for town centre managers on 'Looking after our town centres'. To make sure the widest range of people have access to information about the grants and other measures, though - and to contribute to the success of the projects they create - it would be great to see a practical handbook for "How to Freecycle Woolworths!" (At least, that's what we'd have called it in the days of Pick Me Up...)

Once you start looking, there are a lot of existing examples of the creative and constructive reuse of empty space, around the UK and beyond - and a lot of knowledge of what to do (and what not to do) has been accumulated by those involved. It feels like time that knowledge was tapped.

Announcing 'The Dark Mountain Project'

Today is an exciting day. After a year or so of meetings in pubs and emails backwards and forwards, it is time to announce the Dark Mountain Project - a literary and artistic movement for a time of massive global change.

The project grew out of a conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, started by a blog post in which he proposed:

a new publication: not a magazine, exactly, not quite a journal either, but something between the two and somewhere else as well. A publication which will match the beauty of its writing with the beauty of its design. A publication whose mission will be to reclaim beauty and truth in writing, but without sounding too pompous about it. A publication which will reject both celebrity culture and consumer society with equal vehemence. A publication which will celebrate our true place in nature in prose, poetry and art; which will hunt down ancient truths for modern consumption.

Gradually, that idea has taken a fuller form, and between us we have written a pamphlet which is intended as a first step towards that magazine. Over the next three weeks, we aim to raise £1000 in donations towards the costs of publishing that pamphlet as the Dark Mountain Manifesto and building a website to support the movement.

Why are we doing this? Because of the times in which we find ourselves. Because a collapsing economy and a collapsing environment are turning all our assumptions on their heads. Because nothing that we currently take for granted seems likely to come through the 21st century unscathed. Because civilisation as we have known it is coming apart at the seams.

We don't believe that anyone - not politicians, not environmentalists, not writers - is really facing up to the magnitude of this. We are all still wedded to the idea that the future will be an upgraded version of the present. It is in our cultural DNA. Perhaps this is why, as the warning signs flash out ever more urgently, we still go shopping, or plan for more economic growth, or campaign for new energy technologies, or write novels about the country house or the inner city.

A civilisation is built not on oil, steel or bullets, but on stories; on the myths that shore it up and the tales it tells itself about its origins and destiny. We believe that we have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the story of 'progress', of the conquest of 'nature', of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

We believe it is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain project aims to foster a new movement of writers, artists and creative thinkers, a new school of writing and art for an age of massive global disruption. We are calling it Uncivilisation.

Very soon, we will be launching the Dark Mountain Manifesto, as a hand-crafted pamphlet and online. At the same time, we will launch our website. If enough people seem interested, we then plan to begin publishing a journal of Uncivilised art and writing. And if that takes off, there is much more that this nascent movement can be doing to help create the stories that will define these new times.

For the moment, though, we are looking for help. The Dark Mountain Project is not a prescriptive attempt to tell people how to write or think, but the raising of a flag around which we hope like-minded people will gather. So we are looking for people who might want to be involved: writers, artists, illustrators, designers, thinkers - anyone with whom this strikes a chord.

The other kind of help we need is money. Zac Goldsmith has already generously donated £1000 towards the cost of publishing the manifesto and launching the full Dark Mountain website. We are looking to raise the same amount again in donations over the next three weeks. If you can afford to contribute towards getting this project off the ground, please visit our fundraising page on Fundable.com. (Everyone who donates $20 or more will receive a copy of the manifesto and an invitation to our launch event.)

The challenges of the 21st century are too often framed only as technical problems requiring solutions. I believe that this is a form of denial. What we face is a challenge to the imagination - the challenge of imagining a liveable future in a changed world. I hope that the Dark Mountain Project can help place the imagination at the heart of our response.