Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job...)

What I Learned (2003-10)

2010-12-30T20:44:00.008Z

It's the end of the year, a time for tidying up, finishing the unfinished, letting go of things.

This blog was my online home from 2006-9. By 2010, it had slipped to being a place where I occasionally plugged my latest project. There were various reasons for that slippage: Twitter became increasingly central to the way I use the internet, my life became busier than ever, as both Dark Mountain and Space Makers developed a momentum I could barely keep up with.

Besides those reasons, I began to realise that this blog had reached its natural end. Its title was a gesture to the question which guided me from as early as 2003, in the middle of the Iraq protests. That month, I turned down a staff job at the BBC and realised I'd have to make a life of my own, because the careers service didn't seem to have any that fit me.

I spent a while exploring the ground floor of the British economy, taking temp jobs in warehouses and call centres. After the pressures of the newsroom, I found the lack of responsibility a relief. Instead of using my brain at work, I could keep it fresh for evenings spent reading and thinking, starting to build my own models of how the world worked and why so much about it seemed upside down.

Working my way through the libraries of southwest London, I discovered John Berger, Alastair McIntosh, Hugh Brody and other writers who would influence me for years to come. Some weekends I'd hitch down to Havant, where my parents were living at the time. The old men at my dad's church would ask, "Any luck, yet?" In their terms, I had suffered a reverse. But it was nothing so simple: more like having one foot on dry land, the other on a dinghy that has started to drift, the gap widening and the need to jump becoming urgent. Or perhaps I had already jumped, it was just taking a while to register. I had fallen through the bottom of the beginnings of a successful career, acquiring a black mark - or, at least, a question mark - against my name, yet I felt freer and more honest than I had in years.

Anyway, there I was, with nothing to guide me but a desire to understand how you could change things about the world, and a need to find an alternative to getting "a proper job".

I got work flogging broadband for NTL, just as it went from geekily early-adopterish to something lots of people were meaning to get. I spent most of my commission on books. After three months, I quit and flew out to China, where I taught English for a few hours a week in an eccentric language school in Xinjiang. In the evenings, I'd sing Bob Marley songs in a local nightclub. In the afternoons, I would write long emails to my friend Mary who was living on a commune in Tennessee, writing a novel about gap year shamanism and Louisiana vampires.

Between the two of us, we began to piece together an improvised philosophy, a response to how our first class education had left us unprepared to resist the realities of the world it spat us into: we'd been taught to deconstruct everything, then left in pieces, like one half of an initiation. No one was offering to do the reconstruction, so we would have to do it for ourselves, along with whoever else we could find who seemed to be heading in the same direction. We'd crossed paths with the University of Openness and the psychogeographer Wilfried hou je Bek. Alastair McIntosh sent me a draft of a 'Spiritual Activism Handbook' he had written. For the first time, I had that sense of convergence which has guided much of what I've done since.

I travelled overland back from China, via Kazakhstan and days of deep conversation with someone whose family had made the journey from nomadic tradition to Soviet rationalism to postmodernity within three generations. Back in London, the first issue of Pick Me Up had just landed in a couple of hundred inboxes - the weekly DIY culture email set up by Charlie Davies after The Face went broke. Mary and I would soon join the gang of editors, but in the mean time we were plotting something called The Vortex Project, a huge half-formed scheme for "a European centre for the non-utopian cultural, political and spiritual imagination." We found an old factory in a village in Normandy and almost bought one end of it, a near miss with asbestos and the gap between our visions and reality.

In January 2005, my strangely shaped personal life gave way and I fell hard. By this stage, I was back in South Yorkshire, working off and on as a radio journalist again. Across the carpark from our newsroom was an ugly building with a curious LED sign over the door. I wandered in there one day that January - I'd just come off shift, couldn't face going home - and found myself in just the kind of den of cheerful lunatics where I feel able to relax.

Access Space was a walk-in learning centre with recycled computers, free software and an ethic of peer-learning, interspersed with long, random conversations over cups of tea. It felt like an embodiment of the ideas of Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society', which I'd discovered the year before. They taught me to build websites - and also that technology could be a focus for sociable, face-to-face activity. If I hadn't been feeling heartbroken that afternoon, perhaps I would have missed the turning which led to the worlds of social technology and radical education which have been such a home to me in the years since.

I threw myself into things that year. Not least, into Pick Me Up. From Charlie and the others I learned an attitude - "Think what you'd do if only you had the money, then figure out how you can do it anyway" - and a way of working that has shaped everything I've done since.

That May, I went out to Sarajevo with some of the other PMU editors to help a group of mad Danish girls steal a concert hall from the local mafia. This was my first brush with the KaosPilots, a cross between a business school, an art college and a guerrilla training camp. I came back inspired and provoked, determined to apply their attitude to my own projects - and had my first shot at doing so, when I invited the G8 justice ministers for a picnic.

Throughout these years, I was always about to go back to university. I guess it seemed like the legitimate way to avoid getting a proper job. Courses I nearly started included an MA in Folklore at Sheffield and an MSc in Culture & Society at the LSE. Instead, I began to find academics who were happy to meet outside their institutions. In particular, I found sustained intellectual guidance in the Monday mornings I would spend with Anthony McCann, demolishing endless coffees at Cafe 22a.

After the Sheffield G8 picnic, I drove a van full of blackclad anarchists up to Scotland for the main summit. I spent that week cutting backwards and forwards between the different groups of activists, trying to understand the gap between the media and politicians' depiction of "good protestors" and "bad protestors" and the spectrum of dissent I saw on the ground. Then, in the middle of that week, the London bombings interrupted everything - and what struck me was the similarities between the treatment of British Muslims after the attacks and the treatment of the G8 protesters. Both groups were divided into moderates (whose leaders were happy to be photographed shaking hands with cabinet ministers) and extremists (a term which blurs together those with radical views and those willing to commit indiscriminate violence). In two months that summer, I wrote the draft of a book about all this and got as far as finding an agent before the project lost shape and I was pulled in other directions.

The other legacy of that summer's activism was the MATILDA centre, a huge old factory on the edge of Sheffield city centre which had been occupied as a crash space for protesters. For the year that followed, it ran as a chaotic, wonderful social centre full of parties, workshops, film nights, art, music and conversation - as well as endless meetings and intermittent factional tensions. For all the latter, it was an inspiring thing to be part of and a practical manifestation of how much people can achieve with no money but a great deal of shared passion.

By the end of 2005, Pick Me Up had thousands of readers. We'd organised mass treasure hunts, dressed as flight attendants and served cups of tea on the Tube, helped people arrange weddings and name their babies, not to mention mooning Rolf Harris from the steps of Trafalgar Square. Wondering what to do next, Charlie had been to teach at the original KaosPilot school in Aarhus. He came back with the idea of starting a school in London.

On Valentine's Day 2006, he and Bryony Henderson brought together thirty of us for the first day of the London School of Art and Business. For the first time, I experienced that palpable sense of possibility when a room full of people look around at each other and see nothing but talent, experience, energy and excitement. Later, I came to see that - with the right way of looking, the right way of opening a space - this experience can happen with almost any group of people. But there was no denying that this was an extraordinary crowd: Ansuman Biswas had flown magic carpets in the cosmonauts training programme, Wayne Hill made the world's most expensive bottle of water (then had it stolen), Antonia Grant was an artist and chef who told stories of the international statesmen she'd cooked for. Even the handful of us who had spent the weekend together, supposedly planning for the day, were unsure exactly what we were here for. My memory is of Charlie proceeding to annoy everyone until the group rebelled and took over the event. It was one of the most subversive and successful pieces of facilitation I have witnessed.

Over the next six months, while my book lost momentum, the school continued to gain it. Each month, we would spend a day together at a different location. (There were school trips, too: a group visited Tablehurst biodynamic farm to learn about cooperatives, while four of us took off for Utrecht to spend a few days teaching at a new KaosPilots school that was just starting up.)

Organisers' duties for the LSAB rotated within the group and I found myself volunteering to organise the third meeting alongside an old friend of Charlie's, Andy Gibson, who would become one of my closest collaborators. It was that day, at the Man & Eve gallery in Kennington, that Paul Miller first proposed the idea which would become School of Everything. I'd met Paul the previous autumn, at a PMU editors' meeting. He was a senior researcher at Demos, the first person I'd met from the policy world, and I remember trapping him in the corner of a pub talking at him about 'Deschooling Society'. By chance, he'd also been hearing about Illich from Charlie Leadbeater, his co-author on The Pro-Am Revolution.

Through Pick Me Up, we'd stumbled into the realisation that the best thing about the internet wasn't spending more and more of our lives in front of screens, but the new possibilities for mobilising networks and making things happen face-to-face, in the real world. (How else would you find likeminded fools with whom to moon Rolf Harris?) Now we were talking about taking this First Life approach to the web and applying it to things like how we organise education.

In September 2006, I finally walked away from newsroom journalism for good. Paul had pitched the School of Everything to Geoff Mulgan at the Young Foundation and he had offered to give us support and some initial research funding to get the project off the ground. As with just about everything I've done, if we'd known what we were getting into, I doubt if any of us would have had the courage. The research money ran out in early 2007, by which stage our initial idea had turned into a business plan for a web startup. We were all broke, I was living on Paul's sofa, the others were wondering whether they really wanted to give up their careers to make this website happen. Somehow, we came through the year of living on air, and in early 2008 we secured £350,000 of investment.

Between 2006 and 2008, School of Everything took up most of my energy, although not always to great effect. I contributed ideas, made a few breakthroughs in how we brought users to the site, had a lot of meetings with interesting organisations which we weren't quite ready to partner with. I learned a lot about pitching a business plan, raising investment and building an organisation. I also learned that starting a company with a group of friends of a very similar age, background and set of skills is a recipe for tension. That we came through with most of our friendships intact and built a site which is still going and still growing is an achievement.

Some time in 2007, I began to notice comments from Paul Kingsnorth on this blog. I'd been reading his articles for years and 'One No, Many Yeses' had been an inspiration when I was trying to write about activism, so it was exciting to find that he was now reading me back. Then, that September, he posted a magnificent rant about why he was quitting journalism and what he wanted to do next. It struck a deep chord with my own disenchantment with the news industry - and I was intrigued his hints about the new publication he wanted to start. I almost wrote to him there and then, but it was another great post he wrote that December which finally prompted me to do so.

That autumn, around the time I turned thirty, I had a series of encounters with people whose writing had deeply influenced me. Work which I had met as words on a page became embodied in the people who had written it and the conversations from which it had grown. It was startling, unnerving, like a picture coming to life. The cumulative effect was of being invited into conversations to which I had previously been a spectator. It was wonderful and daunting, and as I looked at my life, I wondered whether it lived up to these invitations.

Not least of these was the invitation to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where friends and collaborators of Illich held a colloquium to mark the fifth anniversary of his death. It was a magical week of long, deep conversations, friendships which seem to have arrived fully formed. I returned to my life in England - an ambiguous component of an internet startup, learning to speak the language of shareholders and board meetings - unsure how to weave the two worlds together.

The year that followed was an uneasy one. School of Everything was on the rise, the investment deal signed, the full site launched that September at Channel 4 and heralded by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing. At the same time, the strain of living backwards and forwards between Sheffield and London, combined with deeper emotional questions which had gone unexamined in those years, reached breaking point. That autumn was a grim time, as relationships which had meant a great deal to me broke under that strain.

Then 2009 came out of nowhere, an explosion of serendipity. The First Life power of the web was suddenly turbo-charged by Twitter, bringing dozens of new friends and collaborators into my life. The Temporary School of Thought provided an incredible crossing point through which many of these friends passed - and the artists and activists behind it seemed to embody a new spirit, more collaborative and open, less faction-ridden than the squatted social centres I had been part of a few years earlier. The immediate threat of the economic abyss which had opened the previous autumn had passed, but the social cost of the crisis was just becoming apparent, and politicians and civil servants had begun taking seriously ideas which, a year earlier, would have seemed outlandish. I was finding myself in some unexpected conversations and realising that there really were no grown-ups in charge: the world was ramshackle all the way to the top, a sea of muddle with occasional islands of competence.

That January, I met Vinay Gupta, an outrageous figure who would become another of the great collaborators of my life. I also stumbled into Tuttle Club, a kind of Friday morning job club for the self-unemployed, hosted by the inspired Lloyd Davis. Every corner I turned, I seemed to discover new excitements. I wrote a post about how the lessons we had learned from social media could help tackle the social consequences of the economic crisis, which sparked a run of events and projects. In fact, I was starting more projects than it would be possible to finish, and my one regret of the extraordinary year that followed is that I didn't do a better job of handling this.

I had begun to unplug from School of Everything. We had too many leaders and were burning through our funding too fast. Besides, I was restless and ready for something new. As I stepped back, I realised that no one - myself included - was particularly clear what I had actually done as part of SoE. When Tony Hall, one of the teachers on the site and a fellow admirer of Illich, suggested a regular face-to-face meetup, I saw that this could offer room to reflect on the ideas and the vision which I had originally brought to the project. School of Everything: Unplugged became a space of reflection, improvisation and conviviality, a gathering of likeminded souls, and an opportunity to meet people whose ideas had inspired me.

That summer, Paul Kingsnorth and I launched The Dark Mountain Project. This was the culmination of long conversations, over email and in the corners of pubs, since my first email to him eighteen months earlier. We published a manifesto, a wild call for the unravelling of our deep cultural assumptions, for us to meet the global disruption ahead of and around us with imagination and a willingness to let go of much we grew up taking for granted. We expected the call to be heard by writers and artists, but its reach went wider, to musicians and mathematicians, engineers and gardeners, and brought back all kinds of responses and invitations.

Among the projects springing from the first months of that year, I found myself organising a monthly meetup called Space Makers, a convergence of artists, activists, social entrepreneurs, architects, squatters and policy-makers interested in rethinking the spaces in which we live, work and play. Thanks to the growth of our online network and the drive of Julia Shalet, that original meetup spawned an agency through which we could collaborate on practical projects. In October 2009, we announced our first major project, to fill twenty empty shops in Brixton Village indoor market with temporary creative projects and new local businesses. Once again, if we'd known the scale of what we were talking about, I doubt I would have had the courage. We were naive, insufficiently prepared and always on the edge of being overwhelmed, and yet somehow something special happened over the year that followed, something which thousands of people have valued and been part of.

Meanwhile, as Space Makers took off, so did Dark Mountain: at the invitation of Michael Hughes, we organised a three-day festival in Llangollen, a chaotic weekend of talks, debates, workshops, wonderful music and theatre. What made it special was the coming together of people, the conversations that happened around the edges, as well as the moments of magic from the likes of Jay Griffiths and Alastair McIntosh who transcended the unfitting formality of the venue. I would not gladly repeat the hour I spent on stage going head to head with George Monbiot, though perhaps it helped him find his vocation as a prize-fighter. But the value of Dark Mountain has not been in the Punch and Judy debates, but in the deeper, convivial, conspiratorial conversations like the one I filmed with David Abram in September 2010.

Lessons Learned

There's little more dangerous than taking yourself too seriously. Anyone who sets out to "change the world" will make a fool of themselves, so the only wisdom is to go about it foolishly.

Still, "changing the world" seemed like a description which connected the ambitions of the people I went looking for in the years after I abandoned any pretence of getting a "proper job". Activists, artists, inventors, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, designers, politicians and "social innovators" - all of them were out to change the way things worked, in one way or another, some for more considered reasons than others. And I was sceptical about the boundaries between these different roles, suspecting that problems one group were stuck with might already be solved by another. This was the same suspicion which guided Charlie to start a "school of art and business".

Over time, I came to think of the connection between these groups in terms of "bringing new things into social reality". This was how the world changed, not by the repetition of familiar arguments, but by the shifting of the boundaries of what people saw as possible. There was a craft to this, but it was a craft of observation, of working with what the world threw at you. It required the exercise of will, but in relationship with reality, not in stubborn opposition to it.

Looking back from here, clear patterns seem to run through the past eight years. It seldom felt like that at the time. Decisions were shaped by luck, opportunity, gut feeling, and sometimes simply the need to keep busy. There was always an element of vocation, of being tugged in certain directions, but only in the last year or two have I had a strong sense of focus and momentum.

One theme stands out, though, as I look back. Again and again, the lesson I learned was to avoid allowing situations to be defined by the oppositions and boundaries present within them:

* From Alastair McIntosh, I learned that our attempts to bring about change are always in danger of becoming a projection of our own psychological shadows onto those we define as the enemy. Unless we look after our emotional needs and those of our companions, we cannot act effectively.

* In those long breakfasts with Anthony McCann, I learned that when we define ourselves in opposition to something, we tend to find ourselves replicating the behaviours of those we oppose.

* Charlie Davies encouraged me not to be satisfied with creating cool, countercultural alternatives, but to aim to shape tomorrow's mainstream, to come up with things that work for all kinds of people, not just those who look or think like us.

* Vinay Gupta demonstrated that you could teach infrastructure to anarchists and work for the US Department of Defense, without contradiction, if you were willing to publish everything you worked on, think through the possible consequences of your work to the Nth degree and learn from the Open Source community's ability to build means without needing agreement over ends.

* The KaosPilots showed me the power of sitting ambiguously on the edge between business, art and activism - that it was possible to do this without sinking into the mire of "the cultural industries".

* Reading Bruce Sterling, I found a name for this boundary-crossing way of working: he called it "speculative culture".

* The Temporary School of Thought taught me that if people are having fun, they forget to disagree with each other - and I wondered how much of the factionalism I'd seen elsewhere was a result of the means-to-an-end, self-sacrificing culture of many attempts to "change the world".

The World Changes

I didn't recognise it at the time, but the last substantial post I wrote on this blog - in November 2009 - marked a turn away from this line of enquiry:

'Changing the world' has become an anachronism: the world is changing so fast, the best we can do is to become a little more observant, more agile, better able to move with it or to spot the places where a subtle shift may set something on a less-worse course than it was on. And you know, that's OK – because what makes life worth living was never striving for, let alone reaching, utopias. It always has come down to the simple things: being with people you care about, helping each other through, telling stories, piecing together bits of meaning, noticing something for the first time and sharing it with someone, eating together, doing work which meets your own needs and those of the people around you, getting a good night's sleep.

Earlier in that post, I wrote about a sense of crossing a threshold, something like the completion of an apprenticeship. The focus on my own learning, characteristic of my twenties, had given way to greater outward responsibility. There was also the beginning of a personal turning, thinking for the first time about what the responsibilities of family might mean, as I started to see friends and collaborators becoming parents.

I'm still some way off from that, as far as I know, but I'm also aware that I can't go on for many more years living quite as precariously as I have done. When I reposted my guide to "How To Make Something Happen", someone commented on the need for a version that "takes more care of the initiator." I feel that, having pushed myself hard and often survived on the kindness and generosity of friends over these years. The cost to myself has been a cost to those closest to me, in many ways.

I'm still working on becoming more observant, taking time out to slow down and reflect - but lately I've realised that the problem is less my inability to do so, more a side-effect of precariousness. Though there is a need, too, to choose carefully. There are many things I can get excited about and throw myself into, but it's time to focus on those which call most deeply to me, and get better at saying no to the rest. ("You're the kind of person who needs to be careful that you are selfish enough," a friend told me. "Selfish enough that you don't get distracted from what you are here to do.")

The end of this year is also the end of a decade, strictly speaking. Years have existed since the earth began orbiting the sun; decades are an invention of a particular human calendar, but that doesn't mean we can't use them as a vantage point.

There's no seeing the future, but there is every reason to expect that the next decade will be a difficult one for many people, a time of deepening social, economic and ecological crises. In that context, perhaps it is foolish to set intentions which involve making one's own life easier, yet those "simple things" I wrote about last year are remarkably resilient.

So, in the next decade, I intend to make more room in my life for simple things. I intend to spend more time with children. I intend to make a living by the things I'm best at doing, to put my ideas into writing, to be responsible for making space and time for deep conviviality and for kinds of learning neglected by institutions. I intend to spend less time in front of screens, to be more aware of my body and the bodies of those around me. And I intend to make more room for acknowledging in everyday ways the immeasurable value I put on the rich web of friendships by which I feel constantly supported.

I say all of this fully aware that next month will probably see me pitched into some new frenzy of activity. Recent Januaries have resembled being fired out of a cannon, and 2011 looks likely to be a rocky year for everyone. So these are not resolutions to be implemented tomorrow and broken before the month is out. This is more like setting a course, pointing myself loosely in a direction, as I did when I walked away from that job at the BBC.

How it all works out, I'll continue to write about elsewhere - in the new personal blog I started earlier this year, and in the other places signposted on my website.

If you are still reading this, thank you for your persistence, and I hope to see you somewhere along the way.

UNCIVILISED London: Starting Tomorrow!

2010-04-20T11:51:00.005Z

We live in dark, mountainous days...

Some might say that London is UNCIVILISED at the best of times, but we thought it needed some help.

So in the run up to UNCIVILISATION 2010, we're running a season of events around the capital, starting tomorrow night (Weds 21st April) in Kings Cross.

UNCIVILISATION is part music festival, part literary festival, part training camp for an uncertain future. Organised by me and my Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth, it brings together voices like Jay Griffiths, George Monbiot and Alastair McIntosh - along with a new generation of radical thinkers and doers - to explore two big questions:

What do we do after we stop pretending the way of living we grew up with can be made "sustainable"?

And if the stories our society tells itself are part of how we got into this mess, where do we start to find new stories?

The London events will be a taste of the festival itself. Tomorrow's guests include Briony Greenhill (The Blended Lifestyle) and Lottie Child (Street Training), as well as music from Lloyd Davis and others. Come down to the Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Rd, Kings Cross to dip your toe in the waters of UNCIVILISATION. The natives are friendly, we promise...

Full details here:
http://uncivilisation.ning.com/events

PS - watch out for our UNCIVILISED ELECTION party on May 6th - more details soon!

Looking forward to UNCIVILISATION!

2010-04-12T18:52:00.008Z

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly playing at the Dark Mountain Project launch last July

(Photograph by Andy Broomfield)

Organising a festival is rather like playing "fantasy dinner party", where you imagine what it would be like to have Oscar Wilde, Germaine Greer and Christopher Marlowe round for tea. At least, that's how it feels when I realise that I'm getting to put my oldest friend Bill Harbottle's band on stage, hours after I'll be up there myself grilling George Monbiot.

UNCIVILISATION: The Dark Mountain Festival is only seven weeks away now - so it's time to book your tickets, if you haven't already! I'll post more soon about the ideas behind the festival, but for now I just wanted to share my excitement about the combination of people we're bringing together.

There's Alastair McIntosh, whose Soil & Soul is the only book I've ever read that made such a direct impression I immediately sat down and wrote to the author.

And I'm delighted to be putting together Anthony McCann, who I used to hang out with every Monday in Sheffield over breakfasts that often lasted till mid-afternoon, with Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the Hexayurt, who I first met in a squat in London last January.

Lottie Child is an artist who asks deep, simple questions which change the way people look at the world. Briony Greenhill has been searching for a blended lifestyle, with a netbook in one hand and a spade in the other. Both of them have inspired me to ground my thinking in practical questions of how we make lives which work for us as individuals and communities, in a world that faces massive disruption.

Anton Shelupanov is a Russian polymath who rewrites the penal codes of Central Asian countries in his spare time, and his band Bleak make me think of Birthday Party-era Nick Cave. Get Cape Wear Cape Fly is a very nice bloke who got in touch with my Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth after reading his first book, One No, Many Yeses, and has been a friend of this project from the start.

I first met Marmaduke Dando when I was editing the Pick Me Up email zine. He runs Power Down - a zero-electricity club night with wind-up gramophones, candles and totally unplugged music - and he'll be running one for us on the Friday night.

I've never met Jay Griffiths, but I've been a fan of hers for years and she's written a great piece for the first Dark Mountain book, which is being launched at the festival. She's one of a range of writers we've invited to talk about how we find new stories for difficult times.

To be honest, I could go on all day about the wonderful collection of people who'll be joining us in Wales - but the most important thing to say is, I'd like you to be part of it.

UNCIVILISATION is happening in Llangollen, over the bank holiday weekend of 28-30th May. Tickets cost £60 (including camping) and you can buy them here. (The venue itself is indoors, so if the Welsh weather turns against us, it won't be miserable.)

It's the first time Paul and I have done anything like this - although Michael and the team who are running things at the Llangollen end know what they're doing. The idea is to create a space in which the conversations started by the Dark Mountain manifesto can continue face-to-face. Part literary festival, part music festival, part training camp for an uncertain future... It should be a chance to talk honestly about serious questions, but also a lot of fun - with time to catch up with old friends, make new ones and hang out with some people whose books and ideas have inspired and challenged many of us.

Someone described it the other day as "a kind of intellectual Burning Man". That's a lot to live up to, but we're excited about the energy that's gathering around the festival - and I'm certain it'll be a weekend to remember.

Come to our booklaunch on Thursday!

2010-02-22T11:04:00.002Z

COMMONSense is a small book I edited a couple of years ago exploring themes around "the commons" and "common sense". It was an Arts Council-funded project, organised by Access Space, Sheffield.

The wheels of publishing grind slowly, but the collection is now in print and we're having a London launch this Thursday evening at SPACE studios, Mare Street, Hackney. Please come and join us for what should be a fun evening!

Here's what I wrote for the back cover:

"Not so long ago, the only people who talked about "the commons" were historians; today, the language of the commons is central to debates around intellectual property, environmental protection, and resistance to globalisation. These international debates find their echoes here in South Yorkshire - in the activities of Access Space, recycling waste technology and promoting Open Source software, or in Grow Sheffield's efforts to build local food networks and seed city centre wasteland. Can talk of "the commons" help us find common ground between these kinds of projects? Does using the same words mean we've found a common language - or can it disguise different meanings and intentions?"

It's happening 6 till 8pm - and here's a map to help you find SPACE. Nearest transport options are London Fields overground station (two stops from Liverpool Street) or a short bus ride from Bethnal Green tube or Hackney Central overground (254, 106 and D6 run between the two stations).

A Beginner's Guide to Twitter

2010-02-05T16:27:00.006Z

So you just signed up to Twitter - and right now you're totally confused!

One reason is that 95% of what you've read in the newspaper or seen on TV about it is wrong. (Why Journalists Write So Much Rubbish About Twitter is a subject I wrote a whole other post on...)

The tricky thing with Twitter is it's very, very simple - you write 140 characters - and everything that makes it interesting is about using it smartly.

What is Twitter for?

Despite what you've probably read, it's not true that Twitter is about telling people what you had for breakfast. Only stupid people (and celebrities) do that - with the exception of people who are capable of making you laugh by the way they write about their breakfast.

The best way to think about Twitter is to see it as a giant, endless pub conversation. In fact, this is why I love Twitter: it's like having a little part of you that's always down the pub.

This also means it's hard to write about how to use Twitter in a way that doesn't sound stupid. Imagine a User's Guide to Pub Conversation. But here goes...

You could say there are two levels to good conversation: the content of individual statements and the flow of interaction. So let's think about Twitter in those terms.

Content - some types of Tweet

The longer I use Twitter, the more different ways of using those 140 characters I begin to recognise. Here are a few types of message I see a lot on Twitter and which seem to work well (the examples are from my own recent tweets):

- a thought, idea or observation:

I keep thinking we must have hit Peak Leopard Print, then I see more...

- something odd that just happened to you:

Starting the day with a random prog rock conversation with a chap in the Gallery cafe. He told me I looked like Mike Rutherford circa 1969.

- a good quote:

"Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate, in order to confront it truly." John Berger

- a gentle plug for something you're involved in:

Looking forward to running the RIBA/@spacemkrs mapping workshops with @monkeytreepro! http://bit.ly/bY1N65

- a link with enough information that people know why to click on it:

"It may be the most honest attempt at literature we've seen." High praise for @darkmtn from Sharon Astyk - http://bit.ly/drDQAf

There are lots more ways of using 140 characters - we could collect a whole Twitter typology for a future post - but those are enough to be going on with.

Three ways to get more out of Twitter

There are a few basic pieces of shorthand that people use on Twitter which make it much more interesting and useful, but which aren't obvious to the uninitiated.

1. At messages - if you start a tweet with someone's Twitter name (including the @ symbol), that's like addressing your message to them, e.g.:

@marcovanbelle You should meet @lloyddavis one of these days.

Just like in a pub conversation, other people can still overhear what you're saying - and may well join in. (If you really need to whisper, use a Direct Message - though you can only send these to people who are following you.)

Every time someone uses your name in a tweet, their message will appear in your 'Mentions', even if you're not following them. When you're logged in to Twitter, your @name appears in the right hand column, below Home and above Direct Messages. If you click on this, you can see all your Mentions.

(In the example above, the message would also apppear in Lloyd's Mentions, so this is a good way to introduce two people - or to get the attention of someone who's not following you.)

2. Hash tags - add a # to the front of a word and it becomes a 'hashtag'.

People use this to make it easy to find messages relating to a certain event or topic. For example, search for #tuttle and you'll see lots of conversations about the Tuttle club, a weekly coffee morning that brings together lots of the most interesting people using Twitter in London.

Again, this is a good way to start interacting with people you haven't
met/aren't following yet.

3. Retweets - if you like something someone else has posted, post it yourself, adding RT @username to the front. (Sometimes you have to sub down the original to fit 140chars.) This is how things travel virally through Twitter.

(Recently, Twitter have added an automatic version of this, but a lot of us still do it by hand - maybe because this gives you more control, maybe because we're old stick-in-the-muds.)

Flow: interaction is as important as content

Going back to the kinds of message that work, it's as much about interactions and conversations as the individual message. Here's a late night exchange with a couple of people:

[@dougald] Just been complimented on my trousers by woman on night bus. Well, they are very nice trousers, if I say so myself!

[@andybroomfield] @dougald Are they sparkly?

[@dougald] @andybroomfield No, but they have a rusty post-industrial sheen.

[@leashless] @Dougald #needsleatherpants

[@dougald] @leashless Can you please clarify that you're talking pants (US) not pants (GB)? You'll give people nightmares!

[@andybroomfield] @leashless @dougald only if they are leopard skin
#needsleatherpants

[@leashless] @dougald "No. Foucalt wears leather underwear" - anon grad student.

This is all obviously silly nonsense! (It's also riffing off a previous exchange in which I'd been told I needed leather trousers, as well as the whole leopard print thing...) But it's like pub conversation, and besides passing the time, it builds the kind of connections that mean people can call on each other for help in professional situations, on the basis that people are much more willing to help someone they've had fun with...

The general point behind this was summed up for me by Ze Frank, who makes the most fantastic, silly toys and jokes out of the internet, at the end of his TED talk:

If you come home and your spouse, or whoever it is, says "Let's talk" - that, like, chills you to the very core! It's peripheral activities like these that allow people to get together, doing fun things, and actually get to know each other. It is low-threshold, peripheral activities that I think are the key to bringing up some of the bonding social capital that I think we're lacking.

I'm clear from my own experience that using Twitter has led to a huge increase in my "social capital" and that of my friends - though I'm also clear that talking about "social capital" is a bit like writing a User's Guide to Pub Conversation, it's only useful as long as you realise that it's, um, totally missing the point.

So now it's time to get started...

Actually, it's time I went to the offline kind of pub, but if this has been helpful, I suggest the next thing you do is start following (and interacting with) some interesting people.

If you have friends or colleagues who are into Twitter, ask them to recommend people you should follow. (Try using an @ message to ask them...)

Failing that, try using a service like LocaFollow to find people with interests in common, in your area or around the world.

The final word...

Like I say, the thing to remember is it's all a big rambling conversation. People are willing to give help and advice freely, like they would in the pub, and sometimes you get into pub arguments with people you hardly know.

And, of course, no one ever gets the final word, because the conversation just keeps rolling on.

Have fun with it - and let me know how you get on.

(This was originally written as an email to @marcovanbelle. Thanks to @marmadukedando, @jackcabnory, @sctv and @tinich for encouraging me to turn it into a blog post.)

Bringing Together The Conversations

2010-01-31T23:11:00.002Z

It's not often I feel like reposting something across multiple blogs, but the latest piece I've put up on the Dark Mountain blog feels worth flagging up here.

There are two parts to it - the first takes on a question posed to us by Matt Sellwood from the Green Party. He goes along with much of what Paul and I have written, including our attack on environmentalism which perpetuates false hope. But, he asks, how do we avoid the renunciation of false hope becoming "an excuse for having given up on any change being possible at all"? This feels like a question it's time to get stuck into.

Which brings me to the second half of my post - a video dialogue with Vinay Gupta of the Hexayurt Project. Those who've followed what I've been up to over the past year will know that Vinay and I have collaborated on all sorts of stuff - not least, the Institute for Collapsonomics - but this is the first time we've put ourselves in front of the camera for any length of time. The 35 minute discussion ranges around the relationship between villages and cities, taking in John Berger, Alan Garner, Ivan Illich and many other of the writers and thinkers I bang on about - as well as the relationship between culture and technology, the future of science fiction and much more.

So I invite you to head over to the Dark Mountain blog, read the post, watch the video and join in the conversation.

Temporary School Reunion

2010-01-07T02:01:00.005Z

Remember the Temporary School of Thought?

A year ago, an amazing collection of people gathered in a huge squatted townhouse in Mayfair and held a three-week long free university, with classes in everything from welding to maze-making to how to think about infrastructure and the case for and against art school.

If I hadn't gone down to the Temporary School, most of the things I did in 2009 would never have happened.

It was there that I met Vinay, Mike and the rest of the crew that became the Institute for Collapsonomics. Conversations during those weeks led me to start writing Social Media vs the Recession and The Future of Unemployment, and from there to the beginnings of Signpostr and Space Makers. And it was Steph, one of the organisers of the Temporary School, who co-piloted the Treehouse Gallery in Regents Park, where I spent much of last summer.

The Temporary School was a magical time and space - so when I realised, earlier this week, that we'd reached its first anniversary, it seemed like a good idea to organise a Temporary School Reunion.

This has been thrown together very quickly - but then, that was the spirit that made the original Mayfair school work. It's all happening this Saturday - 9 January down in Brixton.

In keeping with the Temporary School spirit, the reunion will make temporary use of an empty space - this time, one of the shops at Brixton Village/Granville Arcade - the indoor market where Julia and I have been running the Space Makers project over the last few months. We'll be in Unit 40, on the back row of the market, kicking off at 11am on Saturday and running until the market closes at 6pm.

The schedule is still coming together - but Vinay will be giving an updated version of his famous Infrastructure for Anarchists talk at 3pm. And I'll be on at 4.30, giving a very long perspective on the crisis of the university, inspired by the later writings of Ivan Illich. If you want to offer a workshop or lead a discussion, leave a comment here - or just turn up before 11am on Saturday morning and we'll find you a slot.

Next door in Units 41/42, there will be public rehearsals of masked improvisation from theatre collective Firstborn, as part of the Space Station festival - with a performance at 4.30. While a few doors down, the Okido Doodle Shop will be running events for kids.

Whether you were part of the Mayfair School, or only read about it in the papers, come along and help us rekindle some of that spirit. Hopefully it will burn as brightly through 2010 as it has over the past twelve months.

Speaking of keeping warm - we recommend you wear warm clothes and, if you can, bring a cushion or a folding seat! Some seating will be provided...

* For more on the history of the Temporary School, check out this post.

* For directions to Brixton Village/Granville Arcade, go here - it's only three minutes from Brixton tube.

A busy end to a busy year

2009-12-01T21:15:00.007Z

I've never known a year in which I was so busy with so many projects as 2009. At times, I've felt like a walking case study in "spreading yourself too thin". But I've also been incredibly lucky in all the remarkable people I've had the opportunity to collaborate with.

As 2010 comes around, I'm going to be thinking seriously about how to achieve a slightly saner balance between work and reflection, dreams and responsibilities, getting things done and spending time with the people who matter to me. In the mean time, though, it's good to be finishing the year with a series of events that reflect the different directions I've been pushing in - and which bring together many of those collaborators.

Please join me for any or all of the following...

Wednesday 2nd December, 7 till 9pm - DIWO at the Dark Mountain private view - HTTP Gallery

For the last six weeks, I've been acting as "guide" to Do It With Others at the Dark Mountain - a collaborative art project organised by Furtherfield.org. Artists, technologists, writers, activists and others were invited to correspond with each other online and offline, producing work in response to the Dark Mountain manifesto.

Come along to HTTP Gallery to see where this led us. The evening will include a live performance, representing the online controversy which was one of the defining moments of the project.

Nearest tube Manor House - more details on finding the gallery here.

Thursday 17th December, 9.30am till 3.30pm - "Innovate to Save" - County Hall, Maidstone, Kent

This is a free one-day conference organised by the Technology, Research and Transformation Team at Kent County Council.

I'll be talking about the rise of the "Why Don't You...?" Web - people using online tools to organise real world activities, rather than to virtualise more areas of life. I'll be drawing on my experience as co-founder of School of Everything and Signpostr, and trying to connect what we've learned from these projects to the challenges facing public services in a time of shrinking budgets. There's an impressive range of other speakers, so I hope I'll have something useful to contribute.

Book for Innovate to Save.

Thursday 17th December, 4pm till 9pm - Space Makers Agency / Brixton Village Christmas Celebration

I'll be rushing back from Maidstone to join the Christmas celebration at Brixton Village indoor market. Space Makers Agency has been working with the market's owners, the local council, existing tenants, artists, activists and entrepreneurs within Brixton to bring a mixture of temporary and long-term occupants into twenty empty shops around the market.

The first wave of new businesses and projects are setting up shop over the next week or two, and we're inviting everyone to come down and welcome them with mulled wine and seasonal entertainment from 4pm on the 17th.

The cafes and restaurants around the market should set your tastebuds watering - while, with late night opening until 9pm, it's a chance to do some Christmas shopping and support both new and existing businesses in the market.

So do join us to welcome the new occupants – and celebrate the past and future of this wonderful 1930s indoor market.

RSVP on the Brixton Village event page on Space Makers Network

Friday 18th December - launch of COMMONSense Apazine - Access Space, Sheffield

UPDATE: LONDON LAUNCH POSTPONED UNTIL 2010

It's taken a while, but the magazine I edited for Access Space last year is finally being published. All kinds of people submitted thoughts, stories and art work exploring the idea of "the commons" and of "common sense".

If you're in Sheffield, come and join us for the launch party from 5.30pm - details here.

Making a living, shaping our lives & muddling through

2009-11-17T01:30:00.003Z

A birthday is a good moment to step back, to reflect on the stage in life that you've reached and how the world looks from here. It's also a time when people are supposed to indulge you, so I'm taking it as an excuse to voice some more personal thoughts than usual. If I'm projecting the ordinary life-dramas of the people I know onto a grander screen than they deserve, then please be kind.

Looking around at my peers, I've had a sense in the last year or two of our crossing a threshold. It's partly a work thing. I have the impression of us leaving behind an "early career" phase, characterised by acquiring skills and experience, during which we were to a large extent interchangeable: we got work by being there and being able to do it, but if we hadn't been there, someone else could have done it equally satisfactorily. Increasingly, this is giving way to work which is commissioned on the basis of our particular abilities and insights.

Clearly, this is a privileged experience – and I recognise how lucky I am to get paid to pursue my passions – but perhaps it also has echoes of older models of a working life. The transition I'm describing feels rather like the completion of an apprenticeship, passing into a stage of life in which one's competence is acknowledged and experience valued.

One effect of becoming less interchangeable is that you have, potentially, greater autonomy. At the simplest level, you may no longer need to locate where the work is in order to get work. I'm certain this is one reason why many of my London friends have begun talking seriously about moving elsewhere, creating our own bases somewhere further from the noise and expense of the capital. In recent months, I've found myself in the middle of several sets of ongoing conversations along these lines.

The changing situation of our working lives is one reason for the new seriousness of these conversations, but life is not all about work. Briony Greenhill – who's been keeping an excellent blog called The Blended Lifestyle – summed up what a few of us had been talking about with the simple question: "How do you want to live?" This opens out into where, with whom, on what terms, at what cost, with what commitments.

For the first time in my life, many of those I experience as my peers are having children. There are people I grew up with in Darlington who have teenagers by now – but, until recently, when a friend announced that they were becoming a parent, it felt like a huge divergence in our lives. Today, I see friends and collaborators whose lives are on similar paths to mine starting families. That's new. So the question of how we want to live also includes the question of what kind of parents we want to be and how (and where and with whom) we want to bring up children.

Before anyone gets excited, I should say that this is still very much an academic question for me! But it seems important enough to start thinking and talking about it now, rather than leave it till it takes on a practical urgency...

How does the possibility of parenthood fit into our lives and the world in which we find ourselves? Again, anything I can say about this comes from the peculiar position of myself and my friends, living the postmodern dream, with our highly-networked, creatively-precarious lives, skittering over the surface of a global city and Twittering our schemes for changing the world, never too far from becoming cartoons of ourselves.

One question I have is whether (and how) these ways of living can survive and adapt to the responsibility of parenthood. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman talks about “liquid modernity”, a style of living in which all relationships and agreements can be dissolved at a moment's notice, a condition best-suited to the young, single and successful. If that is really the essence of the playful, post-structural lives we've been enjoying, is parenthood the point where our sense of living in new ways hits the buffers? Or is there more room for weaving commitment and playfulness, the sense of reality as something to be made and remade with the sense of the lasting effects of our actions and the need to live for things more constant than what feels good right now?

One thing that strikes me is how badly our postmodern myths prepare us for seeing ourselves as mothers and fathers. It's not that we're short of mythic material, fantastic characters from which to borrow a sense of our archetypal selves. But our heroes and heroines seem to inhabit a perpetual adolescence. The Greek, Hindu and Norse myths are family sagas. Even Christianity, which tends to be more screwed up about these things, has an image of a mother and child close to its core. Now, I've been converted in recent times to the way of the graphic novel – the best comic book series have the depth and magic and good old-fashioned drama of a real mythological cycle – but I can't help noticing that none of the characters in 'The Invisibles' has children.

It isn't just our heroes whose adolescence stretches out towards middle age. Something similar has been said of us as a generation. What is often missing in such criticism is the role of our economic experience in shaping our lives. On paper, we may be a more affluent generation than our parents, but break down the numbers and you get a messier story. Even after the impact of the recession, house prices are still twice as high in relation to average income as they were when I was born. More of my generation went to university, but we graduated with loans our parents' never had. (Anya Kamenetz's 'Generation Debt' tells this story in a US context.) On the other hand, the older we got, the cheaper and more spectacular the gadgets became. Swings and roundabouts, I guess... but you can't live in a PlayStation. So another strand underlying the conversations about how we want to live is the difficulty we have imagining how we could provide the kind of security we experienced in the families we grew up in.

Every generation has its difficulties to contend with – and there are plenty of ways in which ours is fortunate. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm interested in looking honestly at the ways in which life is different for us to how it was for our parents, accepting the irreversibility of much of this, and seeing it as an opportunity to find new ways of living together, making things work, muddling through. (I mean, the reason I'm basically hopeful, even with all the social, economic and ecological tsunamis I suspect we'll live through, is that humans are really remarkably good at muddling through.)

Yes, I want to sing the praises of muddling through – because, if we are going to find new ways of living, they can't be utopian blueprints. 'Changing the world' has become an anachronism: the world is changing so fast, the best we can do is to become a little more observant, more agile, better able to move with it or to spot the places where a subtle shift may set something on a less-worse course than it was on. And you know, that's OK – because what makes life worth living was never striving for, let alone reaching, utopias. It always has come down to the simple things: being with people you care about, helping each other through, telling stories, piecing together bits of meaning, noticing something for the first time and sharing it with someone, eating together, doing work which meets your own needs and those of the people around you, getting a good night's sleep. Really, as long as we're here, that stuff is unlikely to be much more lost than it has been in the excesses of recent history.

Hmmm... Don't they say that most people are optimistic about their own future prospects and pessimistic about those of the world in general? It feels like this post is riding a similar see-saw. But it's brought me to the other reason, I guess, why I find myself in conversations about finding some kind of shared base, putting down roots somewhere quieter and more grounded than where I've been living in the recent past. It's that sense – which underpins pretty much everything I've been working on, from Space Makers to the Dark Mountain Project, the Institute for Collapsonomics, Signpostr and even School of Everything – that we could do with tools, habits, ways of thinking which will continue to serve us if and when many of the systems and institutions we've been brought up to rely on turn out to be less reliable than we expected. This isn't about survivalism or some ideal of self-sufficiency, just about doing what we can to loosen our dependence on things we don't understand or control - remembering our (dismembered) ability to meet our own needs.

Well, shake a jar and you see what rattles out! Those seem to be the contents of my head right now: a few marbles rolling away out of sight, perhaps. (What is it they say, better out than in?) But if you followed me this far, I'd love to know where any of this knocks into your thoughts and experiences and attempts to make sense of where things are at.

Also, a few of us are talking about organising some events to open up our "How do you want to live?" conversation - so if you'd like to be part of that, let me know.

Exciting Space Makers news!

2009-10-29T17:25:00.002Z

It's been such a busy few days, it's taken me a while to update this blog with some very exciting Space Makers news.

Last week, we agreed a project with the owners of Brixton Village indoor market (the old Granville arcade). This is an amazing space - a 1930s building, a couple of minutes from Brixton tube - which is already home to all kinds of local businesses and artists studios. Check out this 360deg panorama from Urban 75 to get a sense of why we were so excited when we first went to visit it.

At the moment, there are twenty empty shops in the market - and the owners had approached Lambeth Council to talk about ways of bringing in new occupants. The council introduced them to us - and over a series of conversations, we got them excited about our approach to reusing empty space.

So over the next few months, we'll be finding and supporting a range of projects, businesses and organisations to take on shops in the market. Some will be temporary pop-up projects, some will be permanent. We're looking for ideas at the moment - from local organisations, businesses, artists and others. If you're interested in getting involved, then sign up for our Space Race event, which is a chance to meet our partners and find out about the practicalities of taking on a space:

Tues 10th November, 4.30-9pm - Brixton Village, Coldharbour Lane

We'll be accepting proposals from the 10th onwards and the first wave of occupants will be going into the market soon afterwards. The Brixton project is being led by Julia Shalet, one of our first group of Space Makers Associates - and most of the rest of the gang will be getting involved.

I'm really excited about what we can do with this project. It's a chance to show that the empty shops movement which has sprung up around the UK this year has a role to play in the longer-term future of our local economies. And it's the first of a number of Space Makers Agency projects over the next few months which will build on the conversations and connections made through the Space Makers Network.

Space Makers Agency

2009-09-24T12:23:00.002Z

When we sent out the email inviting people to tonight's Space Makers relaunch at the Young Foundation, it listed me as the "Founder" of the Space Makers Network. "Finder" might have been a more accurate term, because I didn't so much create the network as stumble across it.

Space Makers came about by accident. Back in March, a group of us were due to meet UnLtd (the foundation for social entrepreneurs) to discuss funding possibilities for "alternative third spaces" - defined by Vinay Gupta as "facilities which are neither office nor cafe nor workshop but have elements of all three and more." On the day, the UnLtd representative had to cancel due to illness, but the message didn't reach us until we had already arrived at their offices, so we had the meeting without him.

Ten of us talked about projects we'd been involved with - co-working spaces, hack labs, art spaces, community cafes and take-overs of empty buildings. We also found ourselves talking about the number of high street spaces coming empty because of the recession and the possibilities for reusing these creatively and in ways that would respond to social needs.

It felt like it would be worth continuing the conversation, so Maria from The Hub, Islington asked me to organise a meeting there the following month. Lots more people came to that event - including Gaia Marcus, who volunteered to coordinate what we were now calling the Space Makers Network. Over the months that followed, we met in a variety of spaces around London, reflecting the mixture of worlds coming together in the network - from Space Studios in Hackney to NESTA, the Whitechapel Gallery, and even a set of treehouses in Regents Park.

We've also built relationships with other organisations interested in the creative reuse of empty space and the larger questions this raises - from the Empty Shops Network (with whom we're organising a national conference in Worthing on 19th October) and the Meanwhile Space project, to architecture practices like 00:/ and social innovation centres like The Young Foundation. And, through the online version of the Space Makers Network, we've connected up with individuals and groups around the country who are involved in exciting projects to bring dead space back to life and create collaborative environments for work and play.

Although Space Makers is still very new, my involvement with this area goes back to my experiences as a journalist and a community activist in Sheffield. Much of my time there was spent in the Cultural Industries Quarter - the first of its kind in the UK - which owed its existence to the reuse of empty industrial buildings following the city's economic collapse in the early 1980s. By the time I arrived, twenty years later, the origins of the Showroom and the Leadmill were only preserved in their names - but the DIY culture of making and recycling was still at the heart of the city.

I got involved in projects like Access Space, a walk-in IT centre using recycled computers, and the MATILDA centre, a chaotic year-long takeover by artists and activists of a huge empty building in the middle of the city. Those experiences taught me a huge amount about what can be achieved with enthusiasm and imagination, but also (in the case of MATILDA) about the limits of projects which can't find a way to relate to existing structures and institutions. Both the buzz of the city at that time and the tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches to cultural regeneration were brilliantly captured by Go! Sheffo - a fanzine that read like a love letter to the city.

For me, the spirit of Space Makers is rooted in the spirit of those projects - joined with their lessons about the importance of building relationships between different kinds of organisation (and individuals) which don't always understand each other's ways of doing things.

The need for that attitude today is not just that we're faced with large numbers of empty spaces in need of imaginative reuse - although it's clear that the ghosts of Woolworths will be with us for a good while yet. Beyond the immediate effects of the recession, the events of the past year mean that, whoever is in power after the next election, there will be less money to spend on the kind of cultural and community regeneration projects that we've seen in the past decade. Across the range of activities which government - local and national - supports, the same choice will be faced again and again: do we do the same things we have done before, but fewer and cheaper versions of them? Or do we do things differently?

There is a reason why the ways in which government does things tend to be expensive: it is seldom able to tap the reserves of good will, enthusiasm and deep pragmatism which people draw on when they get together and make things happen for themselves. For all the welcome enthusiasm which government has shown for "slack space" projects this year, those projects which are happening around the country are largely being driven by this kind of bottom-up energy. I can't help thinking that these projects offer a more inspiring starting point for thinking about the future of public services than Ryanair or EasyJet.

Tonight, we're announcing the Space Makers Agency, a parallel organisation to the Space Makers Network, which will collaborate to develop ideas and practical projects to create the kind of collaborative, sociable spaces we've been talking about over the past six months. The agency is still taking shape: we have a group of associates with a wide range of experience and a record of making things happen, and several projects getting underway in the next few weeks, working with local authorities, property owners and local communities. Like the network out of which it has grown, though, its core strength should be the ability to bridge between worlds and to work with the energy that is released when people come together with a determination to make something happen.

Signpostr.com goes live as reality bites for this summer's education leavers

2009-08-31T11:27:00.005Z

Back in the early weeks of this year, I wrote a couple of things about how we could use the internet to help people handle the personal impact of the recession. Those posts generated a lot of conversation and several projects.

Thanks to the huge dedication of my friend Colin Tate, one of those projects has now hit reality. Signpostr is a site aimed at anyone who's not in secure employment - and particularly at those who've left education this summer into the toughest job market in a generation. It was inspired by my proposal for "digital resource-maps for people who have lost access to the market as a source of resources". Resource-mapping remains a key element of the site, but it also offers a place for people to talk honestly about how they're finding the search for work, and to get together and develop projects which make use of their skills in the mean time.

It feels like a long time since I was writing that "What you do when you find yourself with a lot more time and a lot less money on your hands than you’re used to... may be the most important question of 2009." Back then, people were still struggling to get a sense of the shape of the recession. Today, there's much talk of a rapid turnaround in confidence and a return to economic growth. In terms of unemployment, however, the hard times remain ahead for a great number of people. The latest figures show a record fall in the number of people in work, with under-25s particularly badly hit.

And for this year's education leavers, the reality of being out of work is starting to bite - a point made well by Lucy, one of our Signpostr bloggers, who graduated from the University of London this summer:

The summer days have ducked and slipped past us. It is September, and for those graduated this year, it’s a moment of horrible clarity. While failing to have a plan or concrete employment during July and August seems like a usual and fluid state of affairs, facing down a long winter in the same position is a truly unnerving experience. This is the first September in several years to be absent from reading lists and timetabled commitments, and it has arrived.

Hopefully Signpostr will prove useful for Lucy and others in her situation this autumn. We'll be doing our best to help users connect with each other, with potential employers and with other groups and organisations. And we'd like to invite you to sign up and explore it for yourself - and, particularly, to pass on that invitation to anyone you know who's looking for work, has just left or will soon leave education.

School of Everything: Time to Unplug?

2009-08-18T11:46:00.008Z

It's been ages since I've written anything about School of Everything on here. That's a reflection of the direction my life has taken since the start of 2009: I've gone from full time involvement with SoE to spending two days a week there and the other five starting all kinds of new projects. But for the next few weeks (and possibly longer) I'll be going back to basics and hosting School of Everything: Unplugged! on Wednesday mornings (10.30-12.30) at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The only way is up: Paul, Pete and Mary at BedZed in October 2006, the day we started work on School of Everything

There were five of us who started School of Everything - Pete Brownell (aka Greenman), Andy Gibson, Mary Harrington (aka Sebastian Mary), Paul Miller and me. We met through a series of experiments with online/offline culture and DIY education - particularly the Pick Me Up email zine and the London School of Art and Business. (Bryony Hendersen, who helped start LSAB, remembers it as "a playful meeting place for established and emerging artists and businesses to meet, challenge each other and provoke learning systems.")

Individually or collectively, we'd also been involved in things like the University of Openness and the Boxing Club at Limehouse Town Hall, Access Space media lab in Sheffield and the Knowledge Lab events at Lancaster. It was those experiences which inspired School of Everything - along with the ideas of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society and the story of the Free U at Palo Alto.

Over the past three years, the five of us have taken that inspiration and created a website which does some of what Illich envisaged when he wrote about "learning webs" and "peer-matching networks". We raised two rounds of funding from Channel 4, the Young Foundation and some great individuals who believed in us - and won a New Statesman New Media Award, a UK Catalyst Award, and were Honourees in the 2009 Webbys. The site now has over 20,000 members and thousands of people come to it every day, most of whom are looking to learn something new in their local area.

Along the way, I've tried to stay grounded in the culture of self-organised, curiosity-driven learning that School of Everything grew out of. Those roots have been nourished by experiences like the Illich colloquium in Cuernavaca in 2007 and the Temporary School of Thought this January, as well as working with organisations like Personalised Education Now and the Blackden Trust.

That said, the process of building a commercially-sustainable organisation means that the big picture can sometimes disappear from view. This was brought into focus a couple of months ago, by the lively discussions on TechCrunch when we were nominated for the Social Innovation category of their Europa awards. Dejan from aleveo.com asked what was so socially innovative about "aggregation of teacher ads"? At the time, Pete wrote a piece on the company blog which set out the difficult questions we've asked ourselves, as we've tried to balance vision and pragmatism:

School of Everything was founded on extremely lofty goals - we wanted to change the face of education... It is very important to us that our work is more than just a commercial enterprise - but it is just as important to us that it is a commercial enterprise. At the moment we are hard at work building the tools that will allow us to survive as a project... Perhaps we have been too quiet about our big idea, or does it make sense to quietly go about changing things step by step?

There's no easy answer to that, but as the guy with "strategy" in his job title - and standing a little further back than the full-time members of the team - I guess part of my role is to hold that long-term vision. So when one of our photography teachers, Tony Hall, suggested starting a face-to-face meetup in London, it felt like an opportunity to renew our roots in the sociable, playful, improvisational learning culture of Pick Me Up, the LSAB, the University of Openness and the rest.

That's why Tony and I have started School of Everything: Unplugged! on Wednesday mornings in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall. Quite how these meetups will evolve neither of us knows. One inspiration is the simple, open format of Tuttle Club, the weekly meetup Lloyd Davis runs at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. We can talk about free-schooling, deschooling and e-schooling, about our own experiences of teaching and learning, or about anything else that's on our minds. There's free wifi for anyone who wants to bring their work with them, and there's coffee from the RFH cafe - though it's also the kind of place where you can hang out for hours without anyone expecting you to buy something. Various other members of the SoE team will be coming along over the next few weeks, so there will be a chance to talk about what we should do next with the site, as well as getting a makeover for your teaching profile - or advice on how to create one.

This is an experiment. If it works, Tony and I will make it an ongoing event, and we can look at working with others to start meetups at other times of week or in other parts of the country. If it doesn't, that's OK! Whatever happens, going by my experiences to date with School of Everything, I'm confident that we'll learn a lot along the way.

* Directions to the Royal Festival Hall are here. Once inside, we'll be in the foyer area, to the left of the dance floor, from 10.30 till 12.30. I'll take the big orange furry Every Thing along to make us easy to spot - but if you have difficulty finding us, give me a ring on 07810 650213.

Arrr... Come Be A Pirate With Me!

2009-08-04T15:27:00.005Z

Avast, me hearties! In my continuing career as a professional amateur, stumbling through other people's specialisms, I've joined up with The Beekeepers - a remarkable crew who "design games, interpret history and create unique events".

My first voyage with them will be this Sunday, when we're organising Pirate Day - a set of events across London:

Join The Beekeepers and assorted seadogs as we mount expeditions along the dark arteries of London’s past, recovering tarnished treasures buried beneath the City’s streets. Wearing an eye patch and going ‘yarrr’ makes you feel like a pirate, but real pirates also have adventures.

We’re all headed for Treasure Island: a pirate village that’s sprung up, as if by magic, on the banks of the Regent’s Park boating lake. We’ve moored two mighty vessels there: the Queen Bee with its precious cargo full of books containing the world’s knowledge; and the Sea Hawk, with a viewing platform from which you can see London anew. Who’s with us, ye landlubbers?

Come and shiver your timbers with us! Get all the salty details here.

Come to the GlueSniffers summer party!

2009-08-04T11:55:00.007Z

Over the past six months, I've been helping organise a regular London meetup called GlueSniffers, bringing together people from the tech industry and people from the world of development and NGOs. The aim is to build better connections between interesting people on both sides - and to generate new thinking about the questions that have historically been framed in terms of "development", particularly in the light of the internet, mobile and social media technologies.

Tomorrow night, the GlueSniffers gang will be letting our hair down with a summer party at the offices of the Movement Design Bureau in Bermondsey. Please come and join us!

There's more information - including directions - on our Meetup page, here. Please sign up there, so we know you're coming!

Looking for an intern interested in the reuse of empty spaces

2009-07-24T02:05:00.002Z

Do you know someone who wants to get experience in urban design, community development and creative regeneration?

We're looking for someone who is available part- or full-time over the next few weeks to get things moving around the reuse of empty shops and other spaces in Tower Hamlets. This would be a flexible, project-based internship, organised through Space Makers, and working with myself and Elin Ng.

The project would include:

identifying and researching the ownership of empty properties
identifying agents who may have a portfolio of properties they have difficulty in leasing
looking at people who we could get to support our project (e.g. councillors/arts trusts/community business leaders)
co-ordinating proposals for temporary uses of empty properties
looking into how Tower Hamlets council may be guided by guidelines (e.g. LDA guidelines, the Mayor's London plan etc)

We're an unfunded, volunteer-driven organisation, so we would only be able to cover the most basic costs - but you would get to meet and work with a range of people active at a local and national level, finding creative possibilities among the challenges of the recession. You would have the chance to demonstrate your ability to get people together, make things happen and generate tangible results. The project and your role at the heart of it will be well documented online and this should enable you to stand out when looking for employment or applying for courses in related fields.

If you're interested in finding out more, please contact me at writetodougald@gmail.com or on 07810 650213.

Do you have a project for an empty space in Tower Hamlets?

2009-07-24T01:27:00.002Z

Since I wrote about "freecycling" empty high street shops, there's been a lot of activity - some of which is starting to bear fruit. Both online and at our monthly London meetups, the Space Makers Network has brought together people and organisations interested in both practical projects and longer-term thinking about the collaborative reuse of space.

Now, together with Elin Ng and Emily Miller (who's also running the Meanwhile Project), we're looking for proposals for empty shops and spaces around Tower Hamlets. We can't promise that we can match your idea to a space, but we do have a meeting with the local council in ten days time and they've asked us to come with practical proposals for specific projects.

If you're in or near Tower Hamlets and you have a potential project, you can complete an outline proposal using our online questionnaire - or come down to the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green between 6 and 7.30pm next Thursday and talk it over with us.

Projects need to be:

temporary - we're talking about making use of a space for weeks or months, not as a permanent base
capable of being put into action quickly - do you (and people you know) have the time to make your idea a reality in the very near future?

Apart from that, we're open to just about anything - not only art projects, but spaces for work and play, temporary businesses or museums, community projects of all kinds. If we're able to help you take your project further, we'll probably ask you to write up a fuller plan for it. For now, though, just give us a brief outline of what you'd like to do (and why) by completing the online questionnaire.

Once again, we won't be the ones making decisions about whether projects get spaces, but we will take your proposals to the council and do our best to get things happening.

Dark Mountain Project Update

2009-07-23T15:43:00.004Z

So there we were, last Friday night, in a barn in a field beside the Thames to launch the Dark Mountain Manifesto. (Those relying on sat nav to guide them in were foxed by the half mile walk from the nearest road, which added a suitably uncivilised edge to the evening.) Paul talked about how he got fed up with journalism and the environmental movement. I called George Monbiot some rude words. Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Chris T-T and Marmaduke Dando lent us their voices, giving memorable and moving performances. Much good local beer was drunk and a fine night was had all round.

Almost a week on, I'm still posting off copies of the manifesto to our subscribers. (If you haven't received yours yet, apologies.) We've been reviewed by the Morning Star and the RSA's Arts & Ecology blog, whose editor called it "erudite, lyrical and, most of all, apolcalyptic in an almost William Blake-ish kind of way". Slowly, the word spreads outward, and Paul and I will be writing articles for various places over the weeks ahead.

Meanwhile, if you missed the launch, check out Andy Broomfield's beautiful photos. And if you're still wondering what all this Dark Mountain stuff is about, this interview I did with Anab Jain may help.

Dougald Hine talks about the Dark Mountain Project from Anab Jain / Superflux on Vimeo.

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

2009-07-08T10:38:00.006Z

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!

2009-06-19T08:32:00.002Z

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

2009-06-12T04:06:00.002Z

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

2009-06-11T19:30:00.001Z

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?

2009-06-05T10:32:00.005Z

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

2009-06-03T23:45:00.006Z

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

2009-05-28T18:15:00.000Z

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

2009-05-26T12:24:00.003Z

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

2009-05-20T10:17:00.003Z

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)

2009-04-27T19:57:00.007Z

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 was 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!"

2009-04-20T15:55:00.005Z

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'

2009-04-16T14:41:00.005Z

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.

London "Alternative Third Spaces" Meeting

2009-04-06T14:13:00.003Z

Last month, a group of us met at the London offices of UnLtd (the foundation for social entrepreneurs) to talk about alternative third spaces. This Wednesday we're holding a follow-up meeting at the Hub, Islington.

Alternative third spaces are facilities which are neither office nor cafe nor workshop, but have elements of all three and more. This includes co-working spaces, hack labs, arts spaces, social centres, community cafes and similar uses of space. There is a lot of interest and activity around these in London at the moment - and the potential for them to play a significant role in the response to the social consequences of the recession.

This meetup is for people interested in starting such projects, or who are already involved with them, to discuss ideas, funding models and legal structures, and to learn from the success of ventures like the Hub. We hope a network of people involved in alternative third spaces will emerge.

The meeting will take place from 6.30 till 8.00pm, Wednesday 8th April
at The Hub Islington, 5 Torrens Street, London EC1V 1NQ.

Deschooling the Edublogosphere?

2009-03-07T15:39:00.008Z

This post from NZ edublogger Leigh Blackall - which I picked up via Stephen Downes - hails (or at least hopes for) a comeback for Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society', which reminded me that I should blog the video of my Temporary School of Thought talk.

Click To Play

Many thanks to Vinay for filming that! He also blogged an audio recording of the event, which got picked up in a thoughtful post from Andrew J Cernaglia.

In a different key, I've just uploaded an article I wrote last year about Illich's influence on and warnings about the development of personal computing and the internet:

Carl Mitcham laughed when I told him I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. Now in his mid-sixties, Mitcham is a philosopher of technology, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and former director of the Science-Technology-Society Programme at Penn State. He was also, from the late 1980s, a member of Illich's circle of friends and collaborators, the travelling circus which surrounded him from the closure of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca in 1976, until his death in 2002.

What made Mitcham laugh was his recollection of Illich telling him, in exasperation, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought of it was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror.

The story of Illich's influence on the internet and the reasons for his mistrust of it both deserve attention. Together, they present something like a paradox: how did a thinker whose vision of 'learning webs', 'educational networks' and 'convivial tools' inspired key figures in the development of personal computing come, by the late 1990s, to believe in 'the necessity of defending... our senses... against the insistent encroachments of multimedia from cyberspace'?

(Continued)

I just came across another blog that's picked up on Charlie Leadbeater's article on Illich and the DIY State this week, so it does feel like there's an appetite for these ideas at the moment. And if you were looking for more pieces of evidence, I guess you could say that us raising a second round of funding for School of Everything was also a good sign!

'The Future of Unemployment'

2009-02-17T11:42:00.002Z

Slightly belatedly, here's the article I wrote for last week's Agit8 magazine:

What do you do when you find yourself with a lot more time and a lot less money on your hands than you’re used to? That may be the most important question of 2009.

Start with the numbers: worldwide, the UN estimates as many as 51 million people could become unemployed this year. Here in Britain, if the analysts are right, one million people who currently have jobs won’t do in twelve months’ time. What happens next for those people will shape the kind of society we live in, over the next decade and beyond.

I want to think about some of the ways this situation could play out. In particular, I’m interested in whether the things we’ve learned from social media over the last few years can play a role in lessening the hardship of this recession and shaping the world which comes out the other side.

(Continued...)

Hacking The Recession - TOMORROW!

2009-02-12T12:53:00.004Z

If you're in London and free tomorrow, come down to the Hacking the Recession day at Birkbeck College - one of the projects that's spun out of the conversations I've been blogging about over the last few weeks. People with geek skills are particularly welcome, but they're letting non-coders like me come too.

To get a clearer idea of what to expect, I interviewed Mamading Ceesay, the brains behind the event.

DH: What do you want out of the day?

MC: We want to inspire people to come up with creative solutions to not only surviving, but thriving during the recession - that improves outcomes not only for individuals and their families, but entire communities. These solutions should not be based on needing state or local authority action but rather on ordinary people coming together and collaborating in similar ways to that enabled by the likes of Wikipedia and Pledgebank.

DH: And what about people who come along?

MC: It's about ensuring that there are options for you and the people you care about to lead purposeful, meaningful lives, even in a time of mass unemployment when there may be no jobs available.

DH: So what would success look like?

MC: Any of the following would be a really successful outcome, I think:

Working code that implements an idea that helps people deal with the impact of the recession.
Documentation of a potential solution for recession-caused issues, that provides enough information for a team to implement it.
A presentation/pitch that could be used to persuade funders and other kinds of supporters to back the implementation of a solution.

DH: Have you got some examples of the kind of thing you have in mind?

MC: Well, think about the kind of tools you use for jobs around the house. If there's a lot less money around, then there's less opportunity for people to have their own drills and so on. However, if there is some sort of tool library/directory system, you can find out who in your area has tools that you can borrow to get a much needed piece of DIY done. When you borrow a tool, it's recorded in the system as is the return of the tool. This enables more effective sharing and pooling of resources in a community that can no longer rely on money and the market for getting things done.

Another example - people being able to barter their time and skills with each other using a system combining the web and SMS. This would make it easier for a community to survive and thrive with much less money. It also helps people to be gainfully employed without a salaried job.

Hacking The Recession is happening tomorrow - Friday 13th February - at Room 540, Birkbeck College, WC1E 7HX. (Entrance off Torrington Square.)

For more details, contact Mamading.

Clay Shirky at the LSE

2009-02-06T17:28:00.005Z

Clay Shirky may be right that a loose collection of bloggers can't replace a newsroom full of journalists, but London's social reporters did a pretty good job of covering his visit this week. David Wilcox has a great write-up of his Tuesday night talk at the LSE, which I was there for, while Michael Mahemoff posted detailed notes from the ICA on Wednesday.

It was Shirky's change of mind on the democratic potential of the web which made headlines. "We are not ready for massive legitimating moves of unstructured participation across the larger issues," he told the LSE audience. "That’s the first time I’ve said that in public."

The key example he returned to during the discussion was change.gov - the Obama administration's official transition website, which asked people to vote on what should be his first priority in office. The issue that came out on top was the legalisation of marijuana.

Andy Gibson from Sociability points out that this doesn't actually prove anything about how people behave in a context of collaborative decision-making, since the site only gave them an opportunity to get attention. An exercise without any consequences isn't much of a guide to how people will act in a more serious situation. "If you want to know how people behave in power, look at how we run our organisations, our communities, our families, our relationships."

Meanwhile, JP Rangaswami - who was at the ICA talk - muses about whether choice over the allocation of our taxes might be the way to get beyond the limits of voting systems. That would certainly be one way to add that necessary seriousness. (And if it sounds unrealistic, check out the history of Porto Alegre's participative budget - and the UK government's plans for local participatory budgets in the near future.)

Interesting discussions - and a reminder of why I'm glad to work with such bright people as Andy and JP on School of Everything. But I wanted to pick out four other ideas which Shirky touched on, which relate to my recent posts about social media and the recession.

The sudden shift in role for new technologies in a time of crisis: For example, the London tube bombings took camera phones and video-sharing sites from "that's interesting" (or not, according to your opinion), to "this is a critical tool that we must have."

If this can happen as a result of a one-off event, what about longer historical moments of crisis, such as the one we're living through? "The global financial crisis we're in the middle of means that the speed and depth of adoption of some of these tools is going to surprise us - because we're in a situation where none of the old things work."

The complex relationship between money and motivation: Someone asked a question about how you pay the rent, if you devote yourself to a collaborative project. In response, Shirky brought up Edward Deci's experiment into the relationship between external reward and intrinsic motivation.

Deci set two groups of students the task of solving a kind of puzzle. One group were paid per puzzle solved, the other group weren't paid at all. After telling them that they had completed the task, he left each group in the room and observed their behaviour over the next few minutes. He found that those who hadn't been paid continued playing with the puzzles - whereas those who were paid tended not to. Conclusion: being paid to do something can actually reduce the intrinsic reward you might otherwise have found in the activity. Or, as Shirky put it:

The link between solving the grocery shortage problem and doing what you have to do isn't, in fact, linear - and there are places where money actually worsens the transaction. If you have a nice date, it's acceptable to send flowers the next day, it is not acceptable to send the amount of money the flowers would have cost!

It seems to me that, if - as I wrote last week - we need to get beyond the binary of employed/unemployed, the subtle relationship between intrinsically-rewarding activity and financially reward which Deci's experiment highlighted is worth bearing in mind.

The possibilities of the "cognitive surplus": I'm cheating slightly here, since Shirky didn't really talk about "cognitive surplus" on Tuesday - though he did when I saw him last year at Demos (here's the podcast). The basic idea is that major social changes can liberate a lot of time and energy, which initially gets channelled into an addictive activity which at least keeps people docile. According to Shirky, this happened in the early Industrial Revolution with gin, and again in the 20th century with television. After the gin era, the same energy was channelled more fruitfully into the social reform of the 19th century, the age of public libraries and self-improvement societies. So what comes after the TV era...?

Now, I'm not comfortable with the kind of treating-people-as-resources thinking which a phrase like "cognitive surplus" represents. But it's certainly true that one of the stereotypes of unemployment is of someone sitting at home in front of the TV all day. If there are suddenly a lot more people who are used to working full time and now need something else to do, how could we make it easier to use that extra time and energy in other ways?

The main characteristic of emerging models is their diversity: Shirky was talking specifically about making money. "This isn't a transition from Business Model A to Business Model B, it's a transition from Business Model A to Business Models B to Z."

To me, the emphasis on not trying to find a single replacement model applies similarly to the traditional concept of the "job" - I'm convinced that less of us will have "jobs" in future, but that that doesn't have to mean that more of us are "unemployed", in the sense of having nothing to do and being unable to support ourselves. It also applies (as we've been discussing in the comments on last week's post) to the kinds of spaces for learning, making, collaborating, hanging out and starting new projects which I wrote about: a national, one-size-fits-all programme to create such spaces would be a disaster.

I realise that's a lot of ground skimmed over quite quickly. I'm writing more about some of this for Monday's issue of Agit8, and I look forward to carrying on the conversation - here, there and elsewhere.

You can listen to the podcast of Clay Shirky's LSE talk here.

A moment of pragmatism?

2009-02-03T16:41:00.003Z

I'm heading off to LSE in a few minutes, where Clay Shirky is speaking tonight. Journalism.co.uk has an interesting interview with him today - the following passage jumped out, in relation to my recent posts:

Significant changes often come at times of crisis, like the current financial downturn, adds Shirky, who says we are entering a two-three year period which could shape society for decades.

"In a crisis people lay their hands on what works without regard to how they've done it the past," he says. Often seen as informal changes, significant technological shifts quickly become part of the established political landscape, he says.

Shirky hopes that specifically British issues will get raised at tonight's debate. "When this stuff charges in the US the questions are 'what are the kids doing?' and 'what is it going to do to companies?' In the UK it is 'what is it going to do for the government and social exclusion?'

Two ideas there that resonate with the conversations I've been involved in over the last couple of weeks. Firstly, that the UK already stands out for applying ideas from the social web to solving social problems. (That doesn't mean we've done it brilliantly, just that it seems to be more of a focus of people's thinking and activity in the British startup scene.)

The second one is the idea that a major crisis can generate a moment of pragmatism - a point at which new ideas and approaches may suddenly get taken seriously, with lasting consequences. I don't know about anyone else, but I've been aware of a pragmatic openness to radical ideas lately, from a surprising range of directions.

Social Media vs the Recession - an update

2009-02-01T17:27:00.006Z

Thanks to everyone who made it to Bethnal Green on Thursday to talk about social media responses to the recession - and to those who couldn't come, but asked to be kept in touch. Trying to summarise all the threads of discussion would make for a long post, but three plans came out of the evening:

(1) To host a larger conversation about social media and the recession, somewhere other than on this blog! This will include gathering information and sharing stories about the ways people are using existing tools and networks (or building new ones), as well as about the kind of "real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media". We're going to launch a group blog to do this and are looking for guest posts from various perspectives. We're also looking for co-hosts for a larger meetup where we can carry on this conversation face-to-face!

(2) To build a simple site which people can use to map resources, not just for the unemployed, but for anyone who finds themselves more cash poor and/or time rich than they're used to being. As a first step, Colin, Vinay and I are experimenting with building a prototype over the next couple of weeks.

(3) To organise a Hacking the Recession day on Friday 13th February, as part of JISC's Developer Happiness Days. Mamading is organising this and has posted some more information here.

I look forward to more interesting conversations about all this in the week ahead! If you're in London and coming to GlueSniffers on Monday or Clay Shirky/NetSquared on Tuesday, let's talk about it there.

UPDATE: GlueSniffers meetup postponed till next Monday (9th) due to snow

Social Media vs the Recession?

2009-01-28T01:20:00.007Z

I've spent a lot of time lately talking to people about the economic crisis, how it's starting to play out in people's lives - and what the things we've learned from social media over the last few years might contribute, in regards to lessening the hardship and shaping the world that comes out the other side. Following from those conversations, it feels like it's time to start sketching some of this out in a meaningful way.

Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs:

practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)

emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don't have a job?)

directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)

With a huge wave of unemployment breaking on the system, public services are likely to be overwhelmed - and yet need to be more responsive than under normal economic circumstances:

"Time is of the essence. The newly unemployed are not usually a focus of government policy because most will find work quickly. This is not true in a recession... Decisive government action now will prevent a temporary slide in employment becoming a permanent slump." Charles Leadbeater & others, 'Attacking the Recession', NESTA

During last week's new media breakfast at the Foreign Office, I was struck by a remark from a UKTI official: if this recession is to be different to previous recessions, he said, our industry has a crucial role to play in that. I guess he may have had in mind the way Finland's tech industry pulled it out of a deep recession in the 1990s, but it also set me thinking about the way the internet has been changing society at large.

Arguably the biggest thing that has changed in countries like the UK since there was last a major recession is that most people are networked by the internet and have some experience of its potential for self-organisation (whether through a myriad of internet dating sites, or through group social interactions such as Facebook, Meetup, Bebo, MySpace, and others - all carry the potential to connect people, both in the virtual and in the physical space). There has never been a major surge in unemployment in a context where these ways of "organising without organisations" were available.

As my School of Everything co-founder Paul Miller has written, London's tech scene is distinctive for the increasing focus on applying these technologies to huge social issues - rather than throwing sheep! Agility and the ability to mobilise and gather momentum quickly are characteristics of social media and online self-organisation, in ways that government, NGOs and large corporations regard with a healthy envy.

So, with that, the conversations I've been having keep coming back to this central question: is there a way we can constructively mobilise to respond to this situation in the days and weeks ahead?

Some ideas on what this might look like

One principle to keep in mind: access to tools and provision should not be limited to the unemployed. It is possible to design tools and offer services which are open to all, but have particular value to those with more time and less money. However, if these are walled off as exclusively for that group, this is stigmatising - and, more important, will stifle creativity by artificially restricting the range of possible interactions and connections. (This valuable approach towards open access is something I experienced first-hand over several years hanging out at Access Space in Sheffield, the UK's longest-running internet learning centre, where I as a (then) BBC journalist found myself learning to build my own website alongside guys who in some cases had been on the dole for much of their adult lives, and for whom the centre offered a route to starting a business, getting a skilled job, or getting funding for their creative activities.)

What follows is not a particularly structured list, though there are a few themes. The basic idea is that we're talking about digital resource-maps for people who have lost access to the market as a source of resources, with an aim to be an enablement tool for all levels of the participant community:

Information sharing for dealing with practical consequences of redundancy or job insecurity. You can see this happening already on a site like the Sheffield Forum.

Indexes of local resources of use to the newly-unemployed - including educational and training opportunities - built up in a user-generated style.

Tools for reducing the cost of living. These already exist - LiftShare, Freecycle, etc. - so it's a question of more effective access and whether there are quick ways to signpost people towards these, or link together existing services better.

An identification of skills, not just for potential employers but so people can find each other and organise, both around each other and emergent initiatives that grow in a fertile, socially-networked context.

If the aim is to avoid this recession creating a new tranche of long-term unemployed (as happened in the 1980s), then softening the distinction between the employed and unemployed is vital. In social media, we've already seen considerable softening of the line between producer and consumer in all kinds of areas, and there must be lessons to draw from this in how we view any large-scale initiative.

As I see it, such a softening would involve not only the kind of online tools and spaces suggested above, but the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media. Examples of such spaces already exist:

Media labs on the model of Access Space or the Brasilian Pontos de Cultura programme, which has applied this approach on a national scale

Fab Labs for manufacturing, as already exist from Iceland to Afghanistan

studio spaces like TenantSpin, the micro-TV station in Liverpool based in a flat in a towerblock - and like many other examples in the world of Community Media

Again, if these spaces are to work, access to them should be open, not restricted to the unemployed. (If, as some are predicting, we see the return of the three day week, the value of spaces like this open to all becomes even more obvious!) In order for this to work, such spaces would need to be organised with the understanding that hanging out can be as valuable as more visibly productive activities - both because of the resilience that comes from building social connections, and because of the potential for information sharing and the sparking of new projects. There would also be a need for incubator spaces for projects that emerge from these spaces and are ready to move to the next level.

What next?

These are some ideas that have come out of conversations with Vinay, Colin, Kalam, David, Mamading, Mike, Josef and others over the last couple of weeks. I'm keen to broaden those conversations, because I'm sure we can build on and better these ideas. I'm also keen to get some action going on - so a group of us are getting together at the School of Everything offices in Bethnal Green tomorrow night (Thursday 29th) to work on a first version of a site. Get in touch if you'd like to contribute!

Plugging tomorrow's talk

2009-01-20T19:47:00.003Z

Quick plug for my next talk at the wonderful Temporary School of Thought. If you're in London and free tomorrow (Weds) at 5pm, come down to 39A Clarges Mews, where I'll be thinking out loud about 'Economic Chemotherapy'.

Erm... as in, cheap treatments for cancer? Nope. As in "What if we tried looking at economic growth as something unhealthy?"

Why would anyone want to do that? Well, some people say we need to because of climate change. Other people say we're going to have to because of Peak Oil. But what really interests me is the possibility that there might be deeper reasons, to do with the way we look at the world.

Is this going to be one of your abstract philosophical ramblings with lots of footnotes that have no relevance to the real world? Um... I hope not. I do want to talk a bit about the history of questioning growth and some of the different ideas that are out there, but that's only the background. The real action comes when we start talking about ways of thriving when the economy is shrinking. (And whatever you think about the desirability of growth, that sounds pretty relevant right now, doesn't it?) I've got several suggestions, but I'm hoping other people will have too.

OK, you've convinced me. When's this all happening, again? 5pm, Weds 21/01/09 at 39A Clarges Mews, off Curzon Street, Mayfair, London, which is about two minutes walk from Green Park tube.

And what if I've, like, got a proper job so I can't go hanging out in posh squats at five o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon? Fear not - video and podcasts will be available in due course. (Though you won't find heckling me half as satisfying.)

Within a few hours of arriving, I have been given a juggling lesson and an invitation to labyrinth building... and attended a talk on anarchy (the besuited lecturer was recording the talk for his files — apparently, even anarchists keep records). Sunday Times, 18/01/09

Celebrate the OUTauguration!

2009-01-18T17:42:00.003Z

A conversation at last Wednesday's SI Camp meet-up prompted me to start a Facebook group dedicated to celebrating this week's OUTauguration - the much-anticipated departure of the 43rd President of the United States.

Obviously lots of people will be celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama - but, while I'm cautiously optimistic, I can't help thinking we should reserve judgement. The departure of George W Bush, on the other hand, is beyond doubt a positive moment in world history and calls for a party! So join the group, invite your friends and let's dance together on Dubya's grave!

(Should we need a tune to dance to, what could be more appropriate than grindcore outfit Reptiljan's Outauguration of the Chimp Zombie...?)

Temporary School of Thought - a round-up

2009-01-18T15:41:00.004Z

I've had a lot of people coming here over the last few days to read about the Temporary School of Thought in Mayfair. I'm hugely inspired by what the organisers there have achieved - not least because of the contrast to the introspective factionalism of the squatted social centres I used to hang out in a few years ago. So I thought I'd do a round up of some of the great blog posts, podcasts and pictures documenting what they've achieved over the last couple of weeks.

The Temporary School's curriculum has been impressively eclectic, with hands on workshops in everything from welding to treehouse-building to portrait photography. A number of the talks from the more ideas-based strand of its activities are now available online in various forms, including my talk on Deschooling Everything:

Vinay Gupta on Infrastructure for Anarchists - audio / lecture notes

Vinay Gupta on Avoiding Capitalism for the Next 4 Billion - audio / lecture notes

Dougald Hine on Deschooling Everything - audio (5 mins of chat before it starts)

Ben on Virtual Reality and the Immersive Ideal - audio

Mike Bennett on Setting up the Post-Capitalist Enterprise - audio

Vinay Gupta on Biometrics for Freedom - audio

I'll blog the video of my talk as soon as it's edited. Meanwhile, as a balance to the newspaper headlines, here are some more thoughtful accounts of the Temporary School and responses to it from around the blogosphere:

Londonist writes "What do you do with five floors of long-abandoned Mayfair luxury, complete with hand painted Chinese wallpaper and a warren of servants' quarters? Tidy the place up, for starters. Then launch your own school."

(You) Enoch has pictures which convey the full the grandeur of the place - while there are more images here.

Travels with my Teenager has a nice account of her visit, concluding: "This is real education. I just wish my daughter didn't have to spend so long at school."

Lloyd Davies tells how he ended up at the Temporary School as a result of The Tuttle Club - and has a video of the juggling workshop.

Dan Gould puts the Temporary School in the context of School of Everything and The School of Life (which I must go and check out soon...).

Badger on Fire went down for the Virtual Utopias session and ended up offering to run a Super 8 movie-making workshop.

Ligress focuses on the wider context of squatting and the number of empty properties in London and beyond - as well as the French book binding workshop.

Dave Bones reflects on how the Temporary School and squatters in general deal with the mainstream media. (For what it's worth, I agree with him about working with journalists rather than excluding them, though I understand why people are cautious about this.)

Speaking of the mainstream media, I was amused to discover TSoT had made The Washington Post! [Registration required.]

Contemporary art review site Axis has a rather snotty write-up from Josie Faure Walker, who - in true postmodernist style - seems to have difficulty remembering whether she's being ironic or not.

Finally, one of my favourite pieces is from the (difficult to link to) The More I [...] Blog:
Worth observing about these schools is how much better than universities they are at promoting learning. Universities, these days – all thinkpods and co-ordinated swivel-chairs, in drab contrast to the joyfully cobbled-together Temporary School of Thought – all look much the same. The tube posters advertising higher education here in London echo this, be they intense and corporate, stressing the exact probability of a career after graduation, or trying desperately to be down-with-it. There just isn't enough be-tweeded, elbow-patched, avuncular rambling in those classrooms; nothing, in short, to hark back to a time before league tables.

Instead, learning is miserably positioned as a means to an end. Compare, for instance, the respective websites for a leading university and the School of Life. The latter encourages a thorough flurry of clicks from the get-go, with the welcome accompaniment of intellectual whimsy. Most importantly, perhaps, it assumes a base level of scholarly curiosity. You don't get that with the university – instead, what comes across is a one-track treadmill; a site segregated immediately into department and subject, before you even get any proper sense of what the institution stands for. [see entry for Tuesday, 13 January 2009]

The organisers are finalising the programme for week 3 - and I'm back there on Wednesday at 5pm with a session on Economic Chemotherapy. (I'll be thinking out loud about the possibilities for reversing economic growth, why this might be desireable and how we could thrive in such a scenario.) Beyond that, who knows? I'm hoping the Temporary School is a sign of a renaissance of improvised, informal learning spaces across London and beyond in 2009. The London Free School folks are already organising a weekender for 20-22nd February. And there are plenty more under-used spaces around the city that could be put to use.

*UPDATE*

Jim pointed me towards his blog, The Posh Squatter, which has some great stories from the heart of the Temporary School. I particularly liked his account of the day the house's former owners, a down-at-heel aristocratic family, come round to visit:

When they left, they took my number so they could find out how we get on when the building's owners take us back to court. They wished us luck and wondered "Is there any chance you might get to keep it?"

Meanwhile, messenger-zine Moving Target has a great write-up of Jim's talk about his experiences as a bike messenger, No Fixed Ideas. It's a great example of the mixture of worlds that come into contact with each other in a temporary space like this.

Hold the front page!

2009-01-10T00:51:00.009Z

Gosh... That's been quite a week! And not over yet, by a long shot.

For starters, it's not often one of my talks gets a plug on the front page of the London Lite...

From column 4: 'The squat's website, temporaryschool.org lists sessions including "labyrinth building with Steph" tomorrow followed by "deschooling society".' Guess I'd better get on with writing that talk, then!

The Temporary School of Thought also featured in Friday's Guardian, while Vinay's video of it has been picked up by the Evening Standard. Check it out:

Congratulations to the organisers on successfully getting the court case adjourned! Another two weeks in the building is going to be huge, if the amount of exciting stuff that's gone on in the past few days is anything to go by. I know they have mixed feelings about all this media interest - and particularly the focus on the property value, which is a bit of a distraction - but as an ex-journalist, I've got to say the coverage is really about as positive as I've ever seen for a story about a squat, once you get past the headlines. And most of the comments on the Standard site are very positive.

Speaking of comments, thanks for all the thoughtful responses to my questions about meditation. I'll take some time to think about them and come back to the subject. (I'm feeling a lot clearer about the "radio in your head" stuff after the Meditation & Magic session at TSoT the other night - thanks, Bad Swami!)

Had a brilliant time this morning at the Tuttle Club. It was my first time at this regular Friday gathering, which you get to by turning up at the back door of the ICA. Met some fascinating people and had three hours of back-to-back great conversation. For example, I spent ages chatting to Chris Unitt who runs the Created in Birmingham blog - exactly the kind of thing I wish had existed for the Creative Industries Quarter in Sheffield in my days there. (Oh, and if you find Melanie Phillips as unpleasant as I do, please vote for Created in Birmingham in the 2008 Weblog Awards - they've just overtaken her in the running for Best UK Blog, but it's a close run thing!)

Finally, I couldn't put the week to bed without mentioning the amazing morris men and women who swarmed through School of Everything over the last few days! We started out responding to the news stories about the gloomy prognosis for this most English of traditions - but soon discovered that reports of its death had been greatly exaggerated. The energy, enthusiasm and sense of fun that Claire and I found in the response to our little campaign made it one of my favourite weeks since School of Everything launched.

Right, time to start writing that talk. If you're in London and free, then I hope to see you at 5pm tomorrow at 39A Clarges Mews, off Curzon Street, Mayfair. There may be some surprises. (For those out of town/busy/lazy, video will be available next week.)

Listening to the radio in your head

2009-01-06T23:32:00.004Z

Some of my blogging friends are pretty serious about their meditation - I'm thinking of Nick and Dan, in particular - whereas I am a complete beginner. Our office is round the corner from London's Buddhist Village and Pete, our Chief Technology Officer, has been encouraging other members of the School of Everything team to come along with him to lunchtime meditation a couple of days a week. Today was my second time - and I definitely have a long way to go.

The first time I went, I was quite nervous beforehand, but really enjoyed it. Today was harder - I struggled to focus, even for a few moments, partly because I kept thinking about something the teacher had said at the beginning of the session. The meditation we were doing was the Mindfulness of Breathing, and he was talking about avoiding thinking about one thing whilst doing another. "For example," he said, "I try not to listen to the radio while I'm washing the dishes, because then my mind would be elsewhere."

I grew up in a home where the radio was nearly always on and the habit stuck. A housemate in my early 20s, when I was less well domesticated, once famously ended a rant to another housemate about my misdeeds with "...and he listens to Radio 4 in the bath!" I even had a career as a radio journalist for a while (you can hear the evidence on the Internet Archive...). And, where I can happily live without TV, I've always thought of radio as mind-expanding.

Then I remembered a metaphor I used to use during my summers selling books door-to-door as a student. It was the toughest job most of us would ever do, not least in terms of the mental and emotional strain, and I learned a lot about mental self-discipline along the way. Training other students for their first summer knocking doors, I used to encourage them to tune in to the radio in their heads and listen to the things they were saying to themselves all day. "There are things you say to yourself," I told them, "which if anyone else said to you, you'd probably punch them."

The trouble is, I was remembering all this instead of concentrating on my breathing, which doesn't say a great deal for my mental self-discipline these days. But it did all make me more curious about developing mindfulness - and I'd be interested to hear more from those of you who have more experience of meditation. I'm so used to my mind being full of words and ideas and a constant stream of connections, much of the time very enjoyably so, that I find it a real challenge to get out of my head, as it were. Also, I'm curious about where the limits to mindfulness might lie - is it really better to wash up mindfully than to do it absent-mindedly while listening to Melvin Bragg talk about Charles Darwin?

What I do know is that I could definitely benefit from becoming more mindful, so I'll be persisting with the lunchtime sessions. And I'm looking forward to Vinay's workshop on Meditation and Magic tomorrow at the Temporary School of Thought.

"The world wasn't made to be bettered..." Discuss.

2009-01-05T22:19:00.006Z

Whenever I catch myself pronouncing in self-important tones on the state of the world - in other words, about three times a week - I should really go back and re-read this passage from one of Herman Hesse's pamphlets:

Friends, we must learn to desist from judging whether the world is good or bad, and we must forgo the strange pretension that it is up to us to better it.

The world has often been denounced as bad, because the denouncer had slept badly or had too much to eat. The world has often been praised as a paradise, because the praiser had just kissed a girl.

The world wasn't made to be bettered. Nor were you made to be bettered. You were made to be yourselves.

That's from Zarathustra's Return, first published anonymously in 1919, when "world betterment" was apparently something of a buzzword. I found it in a collection of his anti-war writings, 'If This War Goes On', picked up from a bookswap in a backpackers hostel years ago. Since then, two copies of the book have slipped through my fingers, but I just discovered that you can download the full text via this site - together with those of thirteen of Hesse's other works.

What's struck me lately is how difficult and/or irrelevant it seems to talk about the changes currently going on in terms of things getting better or worse. Today, for example, Ran Prieur reposted an article suggesting "the only way to save the economy is to stop printing money and allow defaults on all the bad debts. Of course the owners of debt will never agree to that, and the big money economy will crash and burn. I'm not sure that's a bad thing."

Meanwhile, my colleague Paul had a nice piece on the Guardian's PDA blog, talking about how the internet industry is changing:

My prediction for 2009 is that startups that matter will matter more. By 'matter', I mean the ones which have an explicit goal to improve the world whether that's socially or environmentally... The outlook for 2009 if you're trying to change the world is pretty good. If you're trying to get people to throw virtual sheep at each other, it's going to be a lot tougher than 2008.

I'm closer to Hesse when it comes to talk of "improving the world", but I do think that we're living in a time that is full of possibilities, and where precisely the events which are presented as the end of the world as we know it can open up a space for hope.

Back (and looking forwards)

2009-01-04T19:17:00.006Z

Gosh, is it 2009 already? As you might have noticed, this blog went a bit Trappist for the last few months. I've been busy with School of Everything, as well as editing magazines and generally dealing with life stuff. But I'm back - and looking forward to a year which I suspect will be less about changing the world, more about keeping up with the speed at which the world is changing...

If so, yesterday was a good start. I spent a fascinating evening hanging out with Josef Davies-Coates, a one-man serendipity machine and digital Johnny Appleseed (planting world-changing videos and PDFs from his portable hard drive), and Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the Hexayurt, who advises the Pentagon and anarchist squatters alike on how to build autonomous, open source infrastructures. (Last night was inspiring on plenty of levels - not least, it inspired me to make more use of my Twitter, since that was how our meet-up came about.)

Vinay's blogged a bit more about our conversation. If you're in London and free on Wednesday afternoon, I highly recommend coming down to the workshops he's running at the Temporary School of Thought, a week-long Free School event at the most palatial squat I've ever visited. (Think gilded mirrors, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper and a Sound of Music staircase, then add dry rot and a gang of enthusiastic artists and activists.) I'll be there on Wednesday - and also on Saturday afternoon, when I'm giving a talk about Ivan Illich and 'Deschooling Society'. (There's a full timetable here.)

Plenty of other exciting things coming up - not least, the publication of Collaborative Cultures: COMMONSense, which I gather should be out later this month. (Oh, and if you read Spanish, there's an interview with me in the New Media section of this Mexican magazine.)

Call for submissions - COMMONSense

2008-09-17T15:23:00.005Z

*** We've now extended the deadline for submissions till 17th October - so there's still time to contribute... ***

I fear this blog is starting to gather dust. Sorry about that! It has been a busy and exciting time - not least with the official launch of School of Everything and us getting boingboinged!

On the off-chance that anyone has been missing my ramblings, you might want to check out the post I wrote for the Everything blog last week - How I stopped worrying and learned to love the market!

Meanwhile, I'm editing a little magazine for Access Space in Sheffield - and looking for contributions from around the world on the theme of COMMONSense. Here's the details - do pass them on, as appropriate:

Collaborative Cultures // COMMONSense

A call for submissions

Access Space in Sheffield is seeking contributions for a magazine to be published this autumn. The issue will reflect a theme which connects the activities of Access Space to the wider world.

The theme of the issue is COMMONSense. Not so long ago, the only people who talked about "the commons" were historians; today, the language of the commons is central to debates around intellectual property, environmental protection, and resistance to globalisation. These international debates find their echoes here in South Yorkshire - in the activities of Access Space, recycling waste technology and promoting Open Source software, or in Grow Sheffield's efforts to build local food networks and seed city centre wasteland. Can talk of "the commons" help us find common ground between these kinds of projects? Does using the same words mean we've found a common language - or can it disguise different meanings and intentions?

We're looking for pieces of COMMONSense: prose (stories, thoughts, book reviews, bibliographies...), poetry, songs, pieces of code, photographs, cartoons, drawings, graphics or anything else you can think of. These might approach the theme in relation to green issues, land ownership, social relations, the internet, the music industry, copyright, software, or anything else that makes sense to you.

The format of the magazine means that each contribution will take up a single A5 page. With that in mind, we're looking for the following:

* written texts of up to 200 words
* or poems of up to 20 lines
* or black and white drawings, cartoons, photos or other graphics

Images should be at least 300 dpi and in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format.
Texts should be in TXT, ODT or DOC format.
We ask that your contributions be made available to us under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/ ) The magazine will be freely accessable from the web.
Although we cannot pay for contributions, there will be a limited print edition and each contributor will receive a free copy.

The deadline for submissions is 26 September 2008 [EXTENDED TO 17 OCTOBER 2008]
Please send your contribution by email to collaborativecultures@googlemail.com
Attachments should be no more than 6 Mb.

The magazine will be edited by Dougald Hine and the creative direction will be by artist Anne-Marie Culhane.

It will be launched at Access Space during the Off The Shelf literary festival on 24 October 2008

Contact us at collaborativecultures@googlemail.com

www.access-space.org/ccs

Commonsense

Heretical thoughts...

2008-07-31T17:13:00.003Z

When you read a story like this, does it give you hope - or does it make your heart sink?

A liquid fuel made from plants that is chemically identical to crude oil but which does not contribute to climate change when it is burned or, unlike other biofuels, need agricultural land to produce sounds too good to be true. But a company in San Diego claims to have developed exactly that – a sustainable version of oil it calls "green crude"...

For the purposes of argument, let's suspend scepticism about journalistic hype - and imagine that a technical breakthrough could allow us to continue living today's lifestyles at a "sustainable" level of CO2 emissions.

Frankly, such a prospect makes my heart sink - in a way which could only confirm the worst suspicions held by the likes of Spiked Online about the Green movement and its hidden agendas. There's a kind of truth in those suspicions: environmentalism that justifies itself in terms of scientific necessity is often underpinned by deeper convictions about the unsatisfactoriness of our ways of living.

It would be better if more of us were clear about such convictions. If we don't make the argument, we will find ourselves hostages to a version of "sustainability" which insists on attempting to sustain our current way of living at all costs. Among those costs may be:

The cost of going down in flames, because it turns out that this way of living couldn't be sustained - when we might have found other ways of living.
In the event that serious action at national and international level does achieve massive emissions reductions, the cost to our freedom of state-controlled attempts to maximise economic productivity within ecological limits.
Finally, in the unlikely event that a technical breakthrough saves the day, the cost of the lesson not learned. Even if we could "fix" climate change, without a change to our approach to our surroundings and our activities, we would sooner or later hit up against an even more intractable problem.

Is the answer to stop talking about climate change - and talk instead about the deeper political and ethical problems with our ways of living?

Print on Demand Conundrum

2008-05-11T15:25:00.003Z

So here's a question. In the name of research, I spend a lot of time either reading articles online or printing them out to read offline. Since I spend too much of my life staring at screens, I'd rather read them offline - but stapled-together printouts aren't a great format, either, particularly for longer articles. This afternoon, I thought: what if I could use a print-on-demand service to have whole sets of articles bound as one-off books for my use?

Now, the copyright status of these articles varies, but all have been freely published online - often in PDF or on sites which offer a "Print" version with most of the non-text content stripped out. So they have been made available for me to print a personal copy. If I compile a PDF of a dozen articles and order a single copy of it from a print-on-demand service, bound as a paperback, it doesn't feel like I'd be crossing a line in terms of my use of the material. But I suspect the print-on-demand provider wouldn't see it as acceptable use of their service.

Any thoughts, anyone?

Scientific, Post-Modern Secular Materialism...

2008-04-14T14:39:00.002Z

(Thanks to Tom!)

Three Bodies Boiled for the Price of Two

2008-04-07T15:12:00.004Z

In any place and time, the customs surrounding death say a lot about people's shared beliefs. Do I mean 'beliefs'? What I have in mind is not the consciously-chosen or stubbornly-clung-to position which that word may suggest. Rather, these customs reveal the deeper fabric of assumptions, usually taken for granted, which make up our understanding of reality.

What prompted this thought was a report in yesterday's Independent on Sunday that the British government is "considering radical solutions for disposing of the dead":

With options shrinking, the Government has turned its attention to the possibility of "boiling" bodies down to a handful of dust.

What I found most revealing was a comment from the company promoting this technique. Sandy Sullivan, managing director of Water Resomation Ltd, told the paper:

Cremation takes up to two hours to dispose of one body. We think we can do it in two hours, but we are telling people we can do it in three hours. Anything better than that will be a bonus – it would amount to three for the price of two.

What times we live in.

Money for Everything

2008-04-02T14:27:00.003Z

A year ago, School of Everything was still basically a group of friends kicking an idea around. Today, we took an important step closer to making that idea a reality, as we announced that we've succeeded in raising the angel investment we've been looking for. As Paul (who's led our fundraising) says, it's been quite an adventure:

There are all kinds of funny stories associated with our hunt for the right investors. 10 Downing Street, wearing the wrong kind of trousers, facebook stalking and a tank just for starters. I can’t begin to tell you how much we’ve learned. The overall lesson for me though is that if you have a good idea, a good team and can show you’re serious about making the idea reality, there’s no shortage of people willing to back you.

We're all really excited, not just about the money, but about the people and organisations who have chosen to invest. It feels like we've found a group of backers who share the values behind what we're doing. JP Rangaswami, one of our investors and our new chairman, writes:

Since 1987, the only stakes I’ve held have been in the companies I worked for, and they’ve been acquired while I worked for them. That’s been a Rule for me.

Rules, however, are proven by exception. And I’ve made an exception.

School of Everything...

I have a passion for education, in many forms and shapes. One of my goals in life has always been to set up a school, from scratch...

I met the founders many months ago, and they have a passion about them, an excitement about them, an excitement that bodes well for the future.

The other investors are Esther Dyson, Rocco Pelligrenelli, and the educational wing of UK broadcaster Channel 4 - as well as the Young Foundation, who've supported us from the earliest stages.

I never planned on being an entrepreneur. I was writing a book about my own and other people's attempts to change the world - or at least avoid getting a proper job. Then one of those attempts took on a life of its own. I still can't quite take it seriously when I see myself listed as a "Chief Strategy Officer" - but I'm convinced that School of Everything matters and that I've got an important part to play in making it happen.

Now we have to get on with spreading the word and developing the community of people learning and teaching through the site.

Recommended Listening

2008-03-26T19:31:00.003Z

Somebody I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog is Dean Bavington, one of the friends I made in Mexico at last December's Illich colloquium. It was an amazing week, bringing together a bunch of thinkers from around the world who are working in Illich's tradition, as well as a mixture of Mexican students, activists and friends of the man himself.

With such a gathering, there's always the potential for people to be talking at crossed purposes or over each other's heads, but the one talk which really seemed to cross the barriers of language and culture was Dean's. When he spoke of the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, he drew on all his academic discipline and insight, but he did so to tell the story of the place where he grew up and its people. As he spoke, he passed a cod jigger out into the audience, so that each of us could feel the cold weight of the object at the centre of his story.

I wish I could hand that weight to you - or even pass on a recording which caught a little of the atmosphere in the room that evening. Failing that, though, I was delighted to get an email from Dean a couple of weeks ago alerting me to a programme David Cayley had made with him for CBC, in which he tells much of the story. You can get a podcast of it here.

The interview, done several months before the colloquium, doesn't quite reach the emotional depth of the story as I heard it in Cuernavaca - but it is a great piece of radio, nonetheless. And it reminded me how much I look forward to getting to hang out with Dean again some time soon.

Worse than Patriotism

2008-03-20T19:26:00.005Z

On today's anniversary, I want to share a passage which I read around the time of the invasion of Iraq and which has stayed with me over the five years since. I don't agree with it all or claim that it is all relevant, but at its heart is a distinction which pinpoints what made Tony Blair's justification of the war so repulsive. What makes this more striking is that the book from which it is taken was first published in 1960:

Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for 'their country' they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their country's cause was just; but it was still their country's cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds - wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine - I become insufferable. The pretence that when England's cause is just we are on England's side - as some neutral Don Quixote might be - for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it.

The author is CS Lewis, the book 'The Four Loves'. I am not sure that I can resign myself to the necessity of war or patriotism, but I suspect that Lewis is right when he says that what has replaced patriotism is worse. In the case of Iraq, Britain did not need to defend itself, but nor was the decision to join the invasion made without self-interest. The pious justifications were, indeed, insufferable.

School of Everywhere!

2008-03-05T17:06:00.004Z

I've been really grateful for all the enthusiasm from regular readers for my work on School of Everything - the internet startup I started with friends in late 2006. If this blog has gone a bit quiet lately, it is because things are really getting busy over there. And today we've got some news: schoolofeverything.com is now officially global!

Until yesterday, you could only show up on the map if you were based in the UK - but last night, my colleague Paul Miller presented at the NY Tech Meetup. To coincide with this, we were able to open up the site to teachers around the world. Already, we have teachers in New York, Montreal, Berlin and San Francisco (hi, Nick!).

There's still loads we want to do to finetune things and make the site truly global, but we know there are already people connecting with each other and meeting up as a result of using it. And we've got work underway to take us closer to the vision that drove us to start this:

Our current education system was designed in the industrial revolution to prepare people for factory work. The world has changed a lot since then - and the time has come to rethink education from the bottom to the top.

At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you 'should' learn but with what you're interested in. So we're building a tool to help anyone in the world learn what they want, when, where and in a way which suits them. Putting people in touch with each other, not with institutions.

This isn't about e-learning. There are lots of great online tools, but not much beats being in a room with someone who wants to teach you the thing you want to learn...

Read the rest here.

The most helpful thing for us at the moment is to have people using the site and telling us what would make it more useful for them. So if you know anyone with skills or knowledge that they would enjoy passing on, whether as a paid teacher or just for the love of it, do tell them what we're up to. And keep sending me your thoughts and ideas for directions we might go or people and projects with similar values.

I will try to get back to some regular blogging soon - and Anirudh, I'm aware I owe you a post about liberalism.

An Embarrassment of Gap Year Blogs

2008-02-29T15:00:00.004Z

The stories of Max Gogarty and Mark Boyle (aka "Saoirse") prompted the thought how lucky I am that blogs weren't around when I was a gap year teenager.

In case you've missed their misadventures, Max is the son of a British travel journalist and got a high profile gig blogging for the Guardian, whose editorial staff failed to notice that his first post was embarrasing and bound to be ripped to shreds by their sharp-minded and sharp-clawed readers. Here's a taste:

Hello. I'm Max Gogarty. I'm 19 and live on top of a hill in north London.

At the minute, I'm working in a restaurant with a bunch of lovely, funny people; writing a play; writing bits for Skins; spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans, and drinking my way to a financially blighted two-month trip to India and Thailand. Clichéd I know, but clichés are there for a reason.

I'm kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It's India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited. But shitting myself. And I just know that when I step off that plane and into the maelstrom of Mumbai - well, actually, I don't know how I'll react...

You get the picture.

Saoirse is a bit older and set off with good intentions and considerable media coverage on a walk from Bristol to India, which he would complete without the use of money. As reported on the Today programme this morning, his "pilgrimage" ground to a halt at Calais, because he couldn't speak French. His Freeconomy project has its heart in the right place, but my sympathy wore thin when I got to bits like this:

All I can say is that the decision I make will be the one I believe will be of the best service to humanity in my very humble opinion.

I'm just glad blogs hadn't been invented when I was eighteen. I only got my first hotmail account two months after setting off on a chaotic gap year of busking and hitching around Europe. I made it from Norway to Turkey and back, with plenty of adventures along the way, and came back with no shortage of stories. (Like Saoirse, I benefited greatly from the kindness of strangers, which grew my faith in human nature.) I was, however, a terribly serious sort of teenager and had a long way to go to make sense of myself. Throughout my travels, I would tell people about the book I planned on writing. When I arrived at university, however, my beatnik affectations were subject to enough mockery to persuade me to shelve this project for a while.

Actually, my inspiration was less Kerouac, more the English literature of tramping. Laurie Lee's 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning' and George Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London', both classics of the genre, benefit from being emotion recollected in tranquillity. For there is nothing like being in medias res to make one lose perspective. Had either author documented their ups and downs blow by blow, with media attention and comments at the bottom, I suspect - even with their undoubted talents - they would have been punished for it.

As for me, I don't regret the year I spent bumming around Europe, but I'm glad the intermittent and self-absorbed diaries I brought back remain deeply buried in my parents' loft. Not that any blog I wrote would have been likely to attract the attention Max and Saoirse have received - but at least I've saved all that material to make use of some day with a little more self-awareness and a whole lot of hindsight.

openDemocracy article

2008-02-28T11:46:00.003Z

Not much time for blogging at the moment, but I do have an article on openDemocracy. This was prompted by a British government proposal (reported in the Guardian) to make it compulsory for parents of school-age children to provide broadband access in the home.

The government's schools minister, Jim Knight, argues that this is no different to the expectation that families provide pupils with a school-uniform, pencil-case and gym-kit. Yet such comparisons serve only to highlight the unprecedented nature of the proposed requirement. When governments begin to oblige people to instal a communications technology in their own homes, this raises serious questions about the role of the state...

You can read the full article here.

Is Obama "Blair 2.0"?

2008-02-17T23:27:00.005Z

Paul's comment on last week's Anarchists for Obama? post really got me thinking. I'd quoted a fairly lengthy chunk from one of Ran's posts about Obama, in which he imagines how the different presidential candidates might react to a major economic crisis. Paul responded:

For me it sums up the whole curious enigma of Obama: how everyone invests their hopes in him and sees what he wants to see. [Ran] actually has no idea what Obama would do in such a situation; neither do any of us. Neither, probably, does Obama. But he knows what he hopes for.

In this sense, Obamania reminds me of the attitude to Tony Blair circa 1996. Hard to credit it now but we invested extremely high hopes in him too. And look what happened.

Interesting that Clinton supporters keep complaining that Obama has 'no policies.' They don't understand that no-one cares; no-one wants 'policies'. They want hope after a period of darkness and Obama offers it because people have decided he is the right vessel for their expectations at this moment in time.

Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, there certainly seem to be parallels between the Obama phenomenon and what we saw in 1997. A charismatic, youthful leader captures the mood of a significant part of the public, promising a fresh start after an unpopular and discredited regime, while offering very little in terms of specifics. Blair famously managed to leave just about everyone who met him in the run up to the election convinced that he stood for their particular cause, while committing himself to almost nothing.

So, is Obama simply Blair 2.0?

I want to hold that (admittedly scary) thought, and go back to Ran's posts, because the passage I quoted before was slightly unfair. From a British perspective, right now, it's hard to imagine getting that excited about a politician - and when Ran admits that American politics is pretty 'cult-like', I'm guessing he recognises how that applies to him. But the following passage catches both the cult-like element and something more nuanced:

Barack Obama's candidacy is the kind of opportunity that only comes along once or twice a century. He has honesty, courage, intelligence, charisma, and great political instincts, but most important, he shows a willingness and ability to channel bottom-up energy, to challenge the people to act, and to serve as a focus for public passion, where the Clintons would go in the back room and flush it down the toilet. It doesn't matter where he is on the issues! That's gearhead thinking. When you look on the level of human spirit, Obama represents our only chance to renew America without passing through really horrific violence.

Admittedly, it's not much of a chance. Even if he manages to overcome the ruthlessness of the Clintons, and then not get assassinated, we can't just sit back and expect him to take care of us. That's the kind of thinking that ruined America in the first place, and Clinton supporters are trying to keep it going, answering Obama's "Yes we can" with "Yes she can." We're going to have to organize boycotts and strikes and local currencies and secession movements and illegal mutual aid networks and mass physical actions that are tactical and not merely symbolic. We'll have one, or four, or maybe eight years with Obama in office, and we should think of him not as a leader but as a weapon, a lever big enough to move the country. And the elite are going to have to stand down, to allow painful moderate changes instead of violent big ones. In the last hours before the French Revolution, the lawmakers relented and passed a bunch of huge reforms, but by the time anyone found out, it was too late -- they were already burning the chateaus.

Leaving aside the hyperbole, where here's where I think Ran is on the right track: the most important question we can ask about our politicians today and tomorrow is how far they are prepared to hold open the space for bottom-up alternatives. There are various complications to this:

The whole 'bottom-up' idea may be at risk of becoming diluted to the point where that language loses its meaning - not least through the hype around Web 2.0.
In policy-think, 'bottom-up alternatives' can easily translate as 'doing things on the cheap'. Governments, by default as much as by design, are likely to pervert bottom-up initiatives by seeing them as a way to outsource the cost while retaining control (in the name of "setting standards", etc).
Judging politicians by their willingness to hold open the space for genuine bottom-up alternatives may or may not map coherently onto our existing frames of reference ("left" and "right", "liberal", "conservative", etc). In particular - and this is a topic I want to return to in a future post - 'liberalism', in all its varying senses, may turn out to be less of a friend to the bottom-up approach than some of us expect.
It may or may not be possible to make meaningful judgements about how candidates will actually behave in office. (Paul gives the pessimistic take on this when he says that none of us - up to and possibly including the man himself - have any idea how Obama would behave in the scenario Ran imagines.)

Two thoughts on all of this, for now, before I go to bed!

There is every chance of Obama turning out to be Blair 2.0 - but there seems to be a difference in the hopes being invested in him. Ran may not be the most representative voice, but the significance of the "yes we can" slogan which he points to is larger. Part of Obama's appeal does seem to be connected to a bottom-up message, however deep or shallow that turns out to be. By contrast, whatever hopes were invested in Blair in 1997, people already knew that he was a control freak - we had watched him establish an iron grip over the Labour party over the previous three years. Inside and outside the party, the hope was that the ends would justify the means. Blair's message was "trust me", not "trust yourselves".

Secondly, a thought on the question of whether it is possible to make meaningful judgements about how a candidate will behave in office - particularly, whether they will hold open the space for bottom-up alternatives or allow them to be crushed (or crush them directly). It seems to me that we make judgements like this about people we meet in our daily lives - friends, colleagues, dates... - and most of us trust our own judgement to be more right than wrong. My guess is we can make similar judgements about candidates for office, but that this gets less reliable the greater the distance from our lives. In other words, Obama notwithstanding, I hold out more hope for the chances of electing candidates at a local level who we can trust to hold open that space - and less hope for the more remote layers of government, where politics is more bound up with the operations of the media.

Richard Sennett & the Art of Dating

2008-02-17T21:53:00.003Z

Nick sent me this nice little article on 'The Art of Being Present', specifically with reference to dating! Rather improbably, it reminded me of a lunchtime seminar I went to the other week with Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE and someone whose books have intrigued me for years.

His latest book, just out, is 'The Craftsman', and he spoke about both craft skills and craft as an attitude to relationships. One of his most striking points was that perfectionism is the sign of a bad craftsman. A good craftsman is capable of letting go - both in the sense of losing himself in his work, and in the sense of knowing when to stop, being able to recognise the point beyond which more time spent on a piece of work will be counterproductive.

Moving to the sphere of relationships, he talked about two different attitudes to parenting, advocated by two different eighteenth century figures. Rousseau presented an ideal model of how children should be brought up. Madame D'Epinay saw this as a dangerous step - and instead connected parenting to craft, emphasising the importance of not being a perfectionist. Only when the parent is willing to be 'good enough', rather than needing to be 'right', does the child have room for autonomy. Like a bad craftsman, a perfectionist parent doesn't know when to let go.

The same basic wisdom, without the historical footnotes, comes through in the article by Matt:

Even now, staying present is something I have to practice; It is an art form, and like many activities, it is something I do well at when I accept that I am not perfect at it.

He gives the example of catching himself thinking about what to say next, instead of listening to the person he's with - 'the antithesis of being present'.

To get back to being present in this context, I remind myself that sometimes I do not have perfect responses. I remind myself that it is fine that I am an occasional dork. It is a part of me, and I dig it. The person I'm interacting with can take it or leave it. Ironically, losing the need for a perfect response often yields great responses: By accepting my quirk - too much interest in attracting someone, or some result - I find myself no longer trying to impress. Trying is the antithesis of being present.

Though I'm no longer in the dating game, I find it very helpful to be reminded of this stuff - and of my own counterproductive tendencies. I also find it helpful to have those tendencies set in the kind of historical context Sennett offers. If we struggle to stay present, it's partly because modern society has privileged the doomed attempt at perfection over the attitude of the craftsman. (A lesson I first began to learn from Anthony.)

The Low-tech Early Warning System

2008-02-14T18:14:00.003Z

This is a fascinating example of how oral traditions carry practical knowledge about how to live safely in a particular place. Researchers studying the level of fatalities in tsunamis report that they are far higher in areas where the population is made up of recent migrants, compared to those with longstanding traditional communities:

It became apparent that oral traditions were going back 500 years ... The stories contained information about how to recognize when a tsunami was about to come, such as falling sea levels, and told how people should take action.

Read the whole article here - and the press release from UC Santa Cruz on which it's based.

(Hat tip to Tom.)

Anarchists for Obama?

2008-02-14T17:31:00.004Z

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Kingsnorth posted his interior monologue about Barack Obama:

Wow, this is really quite exciting. I wonder if he could be the next JFK?

Hang on: JFK started the Vietnam war.

And then he got assassinated.

Say what you like though, the guy has charisma.

And he does have a nice smile. And he used to write poetry and smoke weed, so he can't be all bad.

I wonder what his policies are.

I really hate Hillary Clinton; vile little plastic goldfish. I hope she loses.

I really hate myself for being taken in by this admittedly impressive PR.

Imagine Obama in the White House though. Wouldn't that be something?

Why do people keep calling him 'black? He's mixed race, but no one calls him 'white'?

Humans have an apparently limitless need to believe in leaders who will liberate them from the drudgery of reality. Idiots.

It's quite exciting though.

Then this week Ran Prieur - someone I'd have assumed to be even more opted out of electoral politics than Paul - has made a series of fascinating posts about why he's campaigning for Obama. This really got my attention. (I'm posting a big chunk, because Ran hasn't given this post a permalink yet):

By January 2009, when the next president takes office, it will be obvious that we are in a Greater Depression. Tens of millions of Americans will be angry and desperate and uncomfortably awakened and confused. People will be losing their homes, their incomes, their ability to buy food and fuel and health care. And giant predators, from banks and corporations to foreign property owners to Blackwater, will be trying to exploit the crisis for selfish gain.

Now imagine that you are part of an organized movement that's technically against the law. Maybe a few hundred people have occupied an abandoned suburb and you are tearing down houses and making gardens. Or some farmers are refusing to leave land that the banks claim to own, and they've blockaded the roads with tractors and pulled out their hunting rifles. Or some truck drivers have gridlocked a major port to protest fuel prices. Or the people in one poor neighborhood have run out of food, and they march to the Whole Foods in a rich neighborhood and take what they need. Or half a million people march to protest the Iraq war, and because they don't have jobs or health insurance to lose, they don't go home, but occupy the center of a major city for days.

Now, what would President McCain do? He would send in the fucking military and smoke your ass, and if you weren't killed, you would be shipped to a "detention facility," and never heard from again.

What would President Clinton do? She would talk to all her big donors and neocon advisers, and do whatever they told her to do. And then she would talk to all her pollsters and spinners and focus groupers, and go on TV and say whatever bullshit they told her to say. We could do worse, but we could also do much better, because the elite will be too removed from reality to make good decisions, and her words would be so different from her actions that people would just get more cynical and angry.

What would President Obama do? I could be wrong, but I think he would go in person and listen to you, ask you what you needed and how he could help. Then he would go back to the big money people, and explain your position to them, and ask them what they needed. Then he would work out a compromise, and he would go on TV and explain the whole situation and how he resolved it and why. Nobody would be completely happy, but we would avoid a big disaster and gain in understanding.

The main thing we would understand is that we are powerful, that we can illegally threaten the status quo and win concessions. Tactical organized mass actions would break out all over. It would be anarchy! And I mean that in mostly a good way. One way or another, energy from below will take apart the system and build a new one, because that's the end of all empires. I really can't see the future clearly enough to be more specific. But with Clinton or especially McCain, it would be a much worse kind of anarchy.

Explaining Everything

2008-02-01T13:56:00.000Z

You can spend months looking for a really simple way to explain something, and then one day the answer just pops into your head. It happened to us last week in the School of Everything office. We've been through dozens of versions of the About pages for the site, explaining it from different angles, and then Paul and Kris had an idea.

Here's the result:

There's lots of other exciting stuff happening for School of Everything - and there'll be more news over the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, if you (or anyone you know) has something they could teach, it's definitely time to create a profile on the site!

Civilization!*

2008-01-24T11:44:00.001Z

* Some restrictions apply

(Hat tip to Aaron at Villageblog)

Where Things Get Lost Alphabetically...

2008-01-18T12:43:00.000Z

Spotted at last night's Soirée Micronomique. (More over at the School of Everything blog.)

Why Don't You (Just Stop Reading This Blog and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead)?

2008-01-18T11:41:00.000Z

Following all the discussion of how to spend less time with technology, I've been thinking about the contrast between attitudes to TV in my childhood and attitudes to the internet today. Lots more to say about this, but for now I'm just glad to have tracked down a clip of 'Why Don't You?'

For non-Brits, this was a programme shown in the school holidays by the BBC, the full title of which was 'Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?'

I don't know what other influences it had, but 'Why Don't You?' was certainly a reference point for us at Pick Me Up - and, for that matter, at School of Everything.

Anyone else got any memories of it?

Tom Hodgkinson on Unplugging

2008-01-15T14:49:00.000Z

I've already blogged about one piece from Tom Hodgkinson today - but several people have sent me the article about Facebook he wrote for yesterday's Guardian. There have been plenty of conspiracy theories doing the rounds about Facebook. Personally, I think the CIA and neo-con connections, brought up again in Tom's article, are exaggerated.

The thing about capitalism is that you can explain a lot of what goes on without reference to conspiracies, by virtue of the desire of people who already have money to use it to make more of the same. At least, that's what I would have said a few months ago. Actually, having come through the process of raising funding for School of Everything, it's fair to say that - particularly with early-stage startups - there are investors who make decisions based on their values and their desire to change the world, rather than simply the returns on offer. Is that a bad thing? You might say it depends on the values in question.

One of the things we decided when we founded School of Everything was that we didn't want to encourage people to spend more time sat at computers. Our focus has always been on using the internet in smart ways, so as to spend more time doing interesting stuff in the real world.

Conspiracies aside, I think Tom puts his finger on a genuine difference of vision between those who see a future in which humans have transcended nature and those who are profoundly troubled by this vision. I'm certainly in the latter camp - and the final paragraph of his article does a wonderful job of summing up the positive reasons why:

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking.

The Criminalisation of Uncommodified Food

2008-01-15T12:39:00.000Z

People often mistake me for a vegetarian. (Maybe it's the beard?) I'm not, but thinking about where our food - and in particular our meat - comes from is something which brings home to me how sick the world is right now. In particular, the juxtaposition of factory farming, in all its obscenity, with the criminalisation of older and more respectful ways of rearing and killing animals.

This short piece from Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, is the kind of thing I have in mind:

Yesterday morning we had a knock at the door from our local environmental health officer. He had come round to tell us that according to a law that was brought in two years ago, what we had done with our pigs—that is to say, have them killed at home— was illegal. You are not allowed to kill and eat your own pigs. The law says that you have to take them to the slaughterhouse. This is, they say, so they can be checked by the slaughterhouse for disease. We argued that it is surely more humane to have them killed at home, because the pig does not suffer the stress of being bundled into a van and then lined up on the racks in an unfamiliar place and killed. He actually agreed that meat that has been killed at home, stress-free, tastes better than meat that has gone through the abattoir. So that is why our meat tasted so good: because it was killed at home. But that is illegal now.

One of the friends I gained through the Illich colloquium in Cuernavaca is Dean Bavington. I've already mentioned his powerful presentation on the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery. At the core of Dean's argument is the distinction between treating fish as food and treating it as a commodity.

Certain processes, certain laws, even certain well-intentioned environmental measures, only become thinkable* once you have stopped thinking about things that you can actually experience (taste, smell, touch...) and started treating the world as made up of interchangeable units and mathematical patterns.

* For 'become thinkable', I almost wrote 'make sense' - but the issue here is precisely the absence of 'sense'.

Don't blame the Arctic Monkeys

2008-01-10T14:08:00.001Z

Another very interesting comment from Dan on my post about the sixties. He suggests that there's a 'law of crowds' involved:

both culturally and knowledge-wise, the world has becoming increasingly crowded, and increasingly connected.

In terms of learning and knowledge, this has meant that (and I can't remember where I heard this quote, but I paraphrase) it was last possible to be a generalist at the turn of the 20th century. Now you're either a tiny ant helping maintain the academic hive (walking in journal stacks *really* brings this home to me!) or you're accepting the loss of meaning and pissing about with symbology.

I have to confess to being quite sceptical about the idea that the sum of human knowledge is increasing exponentially. The size of academic journal stacks has a lot to do with a particular way of framing learning as the production of knowledge, where "knowledge" has become a commodity. (As I've been arguing, this goes a long way back into the history of the university.)

Even if we accept that knowledge is something which can be meaningfully counted - and I don't - it would seem clear that vast amounts of knowledge have been destroyed in the last few centuries. The loss of languages, and therefore of much of the local ways of seeing and the stories which went with them, is only one of the more obvious examples.

In my own case, I find it humbling to think about how illiterate I am when walking in the countryside, compared to my ancestors of only two or three generations back. I can give you my take on the differing trajectories of Keats' nightingale and Shelley's skylark, but I couldn't tell the song of one from the other.

There's another point which comes through from Dan's post:

Culturally, the same problem exists. There's a loss of belief in the whole point of creating culture because there's just so much of the stuff: archaeological layers, vast fields stretching as far as the eye can see. One can imagine how the Arctic Monkeys might think picking up titles from old movies and music from old artists was just the way the game's done now. I hate the word, but, um, its all pastiche, and that's maybe OK.

Having said that, in the realm of the acoustic guitar singer-songwriter, I'd never think there'd be anything able to move me much again, but then I saw the Channel 4 funded film Once, and now have the music, and by God its wonderful.

The anxiety over the sheer amount of culture easily becomes entangled with the anxiety for constant, radical innovation, generally recognised as a feature of the arts in western societies since the Romantic era. Again with the scepticism, I don't see why something should have to be new to be great - so it's good to hear Dan's example of being moved by something that isn't necessarily pushing at any boundaries.

My observation that the sixties have an unusual hold on our imagination is not intended to damn the unimaginativeness of the Arctic Monkeys, or anyone else. Rather, I'm interested in whether this is evidence for the significance of the years between 1958 and 1974 as a historical moment, the like of which we haven't seen since. Perhaps there's no great need to look for evidence. The claim is hardly controversial - but I'm curious about the conflicting accounts of that moment, and some of the less explored possibilities underlying them.

Have we ever really left the sixties?

2008-01-08T23:22:00.000Z

I've been reading Arthur Marwick's The Sixties: an enormous, fascinating, one volume cultural history. For most of his career, Marwick was Professor of History at the Open University, itself a product of that decade (which, by his generous definition, stretched from 1958 to 1974). His book argues, convincingly, that those years saw a lasting cultural revolution.

There is another story to be told about the significance of that revolution, but what is striking is the sense that we are still living in the sixties. This is a suggestion I've come across in all sorts of places recently. A recent issue of Newsweek, dedicated to 1968: The Year That Changed Everything, claimed that "all of us, young and old, are stuck in the '60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against."

Meanwhile, at Radio 3's Free Thinking festival, the film director Mike Figgis argued that our culture is stagnating because modern technologies of film and sound recording have preserved too well the icons of the era, beginning in the late fifties, in which they first reached their zenith. Rock stars, film makers and fashion designers today are all, according to Figgis, too aware of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix for their own good. (You can listen to his lecture here.)

There's something in this, though again I don't think it's the whole story. But I do keep coming across more examples of the long reach of Marwick's long decade. I knew, for example, that The Smiths' albums which I discovered as a teenager were full of deliberate echoes of the films of the British New Wave. What made me sit up, though, half way through watching Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), was when Arthur Seaton tells himself, "Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not." I could have told you that the Arctic Monkeys owed their line-up (two guitars, bass and drums) to the sixties, but I hadn't realised it was where they got their album titles.

So, have we ever really left the sixties?

Roald Dahl on Television

2008-01-07T15:11:00.001Z

Following the last few posts, I've been thinking about the similarities and differences between the way we relate to television and the internet - and the way that both technologies have been represented. Along the way, I discovered this wonderful piece of doggerel of Roald Dahl's from 1964:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set -
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.

In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.

Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink --
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?

IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!

There's lots more of it.

(From another site, I discovered that it's actually a song sung by the Oompa-Lumpas in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'.)

Education as "being us-and-no-one-else"

2008-01-03T01:03:00.000Z

I've been writing about giving up television, but it's really a rather easy example for me, since I'm seldom tempted to watch more than a couple of hours a week. (Spending less time online is more of a challenge.)

My friend Anthony has been more of a TV watcher - though he could always give you a fascinating critical analysis of whatever he'd been watching, just in case you thought his brain switched off as the box switched on. Anyway, he posted the other day that he's unplugged his TV and is getting back to reading and writing, instead. Long may it last, because I'd love to see more of his thinking in print.

He's just republished, on his blog, some notes on the term 'tradition'. Reading these, I came across a passage on education which relates to some of my thinking-out-loud last month, about what an alternative to learning as 'knowledge production' (or teaching as 'information transmission') might look like:

Speaking as an educator, I find that approaching education as information transmission, protection, and/or preservation can easily lead me to ignore the richness of educational encounter, the personal, present, affectual dimensions of how education can work. Education in face-to-face contexts can be understood to be predominantly about being with, about living 'withness', about the attitudes of the people in the room, about the respect or lack of it within the interactions. When education or 'tradition' are understood as entity-transfer of some sort, it is very hard to even have discussions about respect, attitude, presence, or, dare I say it, gentleness. It's all too easy to default to those attitudes that facilitate the most efficient transaction of resources, those attitudes that allow us to distance ourselves from being us-and-no-one-else and instead allow us to play the roles of 'providers' in an exchange relationship (if you're lucky).

Do read the rest of his post - there's a lot of food for thought in it.

TV (Ancient Roman-style)

2007-12-26T14:17:00.000Z

Where is the TV in your house?

Following my latest post about technology and askesis, a comment from Anirudh got me thinking about this. When it comes to giving up particular technologies or habits, will-power isn't always very helpful. For instance, having decided to reduce your TV habit, you can rely on your strength of will - or you can unplug the TV set and move it to the spare room. In my experience, the second method is more effective.

Though I can't find the reference, I'm sure Christopher Hitchens advises aspiring contrarians to give a bookshelf that pride of place in their living quarters commonly afforded to the TV. Visiting Alastair McIntosh a few years ago, I remember him referring to the wood stove in his front room as "our television".

There is certainly something mesmeric about an open fire: the way it holds the eye, becomes the focal point of a room. The word focus itself originally refers to the hearth, which held a central position in the Roman household, both physically and spiritually. (The journey from this meaning to its modern, technical usage probably deserves more thought.) The hearth was associated with the lares, the household gods, who had their own shrine, the lararium, around which the household would gather daily.

Thinking about all this, I came across the picture (below) of the lararium in the House of the Vetti at Pompey. To my eye, it does look rather like a precedent for the magic box around which families gather in the modern household - and whose observances are stepped up on high days and holy days.

On which note, Happy Christmas!

Ten Steps To Giving Up Email

2007-12-21T14:41:00.001Z

I mentioned the other day that, returning from Cuernavaca with the concepts of askesis and otium on my mind, I seemed to keep bumping into friends who were choosing to give things up or trying to spend less time with technology and get back to their bodies. Well, here's an example.

Saul Albert is an extremely smart guy, someone I've been crossing paths with for years, and whose understanding of computers is in a different league to mine. He's an artist and technologist, and (among much else) co-founder of The People Speak which develops 'Tools For The World To Take Over Itself'.

He's also just given up email.

In the spirit of Pick Me Up, he's written a ten step plan of how he's going about this. Here's a taste:

I’m going to talk to all the people I’m collaborating and communicating with via email, and work out together how we can continue this relationship without email.

I’m going to unsubscribe from all my mailing lists (while making sure I can follow them via RSS).

I’m going to tell all my friends and family about this experiment, and make sure they know how to contact me...

You can read the rest over on his blog, along with his reasons for quitting. What struck me was the tenth step of his plan:

Finally, I’m going to organise my time in a way that suits me. This is what I’m most excited about. The thought of time without email, or worrying about email accumulating is really enticing. This will include regularly being in places where I can meet people (by arrangement or randomly) - having certain times of the day for calls and voicemail, and having other parts of the day for work - but just work, as in doing things I need to do - rather than simply shovelling the top off the growing email pile.

This is precisely what askesis should mean: not self-denial, but a deliberate decision to make room for people and things that matter to us.

Cancel First World Debt!

2007-12-20T18:40:00.000Z

UnLtdWorld is a new social networking site which aims to bring together people who want to "generate social impact" - in other words, change the world. I've met Alberto, who's running it, and I was impressed by his experience and the way he's approaching the project.

So this morning I sat down to create my profile on their Beta site, when I came to two questions which temporarily stumped me:

What issue most concerns you in the world?

What single issue would you change to make the world a better place?

They are entirely appropriate questions for the site, just not ones that I'm very good at answering.

In the end, I decided that what most concerns me is 'the loss of the sense of timeliness'. And the single change I would make would be to 'cancel first world debt'.

I didn't notice until afterwards, but these answers pinpoint two of the three things I would like to write about, at that distant period in my life when I finally have the time to write something more coherent than a blog. They are also connected: the effect of being in debt shapes your experience of and relationship to time. And, since the cultural and economic shifts of the 1960s, debt has become the primary mechanism of social control that keeps us bound to our untimely way of living. But that's a long story...

What prompted me to blog about this was that, having been thinking about the cancellation of debt, I stumbled across this article (via Ran):

Laws that periodically canceled debts, freed Israelite debt-servants, and returned lands to their traditional holders have confused Biblical students for centuries. They have long been virtually ignored by historians on the ground that, to modern eyes, they would seem to wreak economic havoc.

Recent discoveries of Bronze Age Near Eastern royal proclamations dating from 2400 to 1600 BCE leave no doubt that these edicts were implemented. During the Babylonian period they grew more elaborate and detailed, capped by Ammisaduqa’s Edict of 1646 BCE. Now that these edicts are understood, the Biblical laws no longer stand alone as utopian or other-worldly ideals; they take their place in a 2,000-year continuum of periodic and regular economic renewal based on freedom from debt-servitude and from the loss of access to self-support on the land...

Rome was the first society not to cancel its debts. And we all know what happened to it. Classical historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Diodorus attributed Rome’s decline and fall to the fact that creditors got the entire economy in their debt, expropriated the land and public domain, and strangled the economy.

The author is Michael Hudson, an economist at the University of Missouri, and there's a lot more on his website. I'm very glad to have found it, because I've wondered for a long time whether the Jubilee laws of the Old Testament were more than wishful thinking, and - despite coming from a family of theologians - noone was able to tell me.

Fax Machines and the Invention of the Wheel

2007-12-19T17:11:00.000Z

It's great to see Tim posting again on I Will Rush No More, one of my favourite blogs. For me, there's a definite connection between his practise of slowing down and the tradition of otium that I've been writing about. What I admire is Tim's talent for placing his reflections in medias res, reporting a conversation with a neighbour while clearing snow off his drive, or over breakfast with a friend:

I ask: "When do you think it all changed, all this speeding up stuff?"

He says: "Easy; it changed the day fax machines became available for the home-office. Then you never got away from it and it also created an expectation of urgency where you had to deal with it right away and get back to the sender."

In a comment on Tim's post, John Xenakis writes:

The fax machine? Naah. It began with the Xerox machine. No, I mean the Univac machine. Wait, no, I mean the telephone. The telegraph. The Pony Express. The carrier pigeon. The tom-tom.

Oh hell, it began when they invented the wheel.

I suppose John has a point, in that it can be worth pushing further back, recognising the extent to which the latest and most obvious source of aggravation may be less new than it seems. Often, it turns out to be an intensification of a pre-existing tendency (as I've been arguing about managerialism in the university).

One direction this can lead is to the sort of radical critique of "civilization" offered by Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan or Ran Prieur. It was Tim who first put me on to Ran's writings, while one of Ran's posts yesterday gives a nice example of how counterproductive rushing can be. He's quoting an email someone sent him about Alan G. Carter's The Programmers Stone:

"Alan Garter [sic] tried to find a reason why some programmers are 10-25 times more productive than others. He stumbled across the answer, and made a team of super-programmers. Then the rest of the organization turned on his team! His theory is that people are literally addicted to stress. Stress releases dopamine in the brain, which gives a the stressee a good buzz. When two people accustomed to different levels of stress meet, they often don't like each other because one is getting overly stressed and the other isn't getting their dopamine hit. Stress also shuts off what he calls juxtapositional thinking, a holistic, comparative mode of thinking."

Basically there are two kinds of thinking and you need both, but under stress you're limited to thinking that is narrowly focused, methodical, and not at all intuitive. And to have a productive/unstressed programming team, you first need an unstressed organization around them. Clearly this goes way beyond programming. This whole civilization is driven by stress, and has been for thousands of years.

(This reminds me, in passing, of a post a while back from JP Rangaswami, a friend of School of Everything, about the different types of laziness.)

But back to John's comment. If we have to trace the tendency to futile acceleration back from the fax machine, via the telegraph, all the way to the invention of the wheel, doesn't this just lead to paralysis? How on earth can you and me escape? ("History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.")

In Illich's thinking, I can find two possible ways out from this paralysis. The first is the idea of thresholds. Particularly in his earlier work, Illich stresses the idea that technologies have a threshold beyond which they become counterproductive. So rather than the vertiginous regression that leads back from the fax machine to the wheel, we could seek to discern the point at which this happened. That's more or less what Tim and his friend seem to be doing in their conversation - though we might want to push the threshold further back.

Dean Bavington, who I met in Cuernavaca, gave an outstanding presentation on the technological threshold in the Newfoundland cod fishery. He illustrated this by passing around the audience a 'cod jigger', the fearsome piece of equipment which he believes represents the crossing of that particular threshold. Prior to the introduction of the jigger, cod could only be caught if they were hungry enough to take the bait; from that point on, fishing increasingly became the indiscriminate scooping up of biomass, until catastrophic collapse led to the closure of the fishery in 1992.

The second possible way out is by shifting attention from the technology itself to the qualities of relationships. What kinds of relationship does a particular technology tend to foster among those who use it and those around them? Does it tend to encourage instrumental attitudes, seeing other people or things as a resource, a means to an end or a source of exchange value? Does it decrease the amount of time and space the user has for those around them?

If we pay attention to questions like these, we may choose to go on using a particular technology, despite its general tendencies, because we see the possibility - with care - of using it in other ways. Or, as I suggested the other day, we may choose askesis - voluntary renunciation, temporary or permanent, of a particular technology, habit, or whatever - so as to allow room for otium, for time spent on the things that matter to us and with the people who matter to us.

This is where I see Anthony's thinking about gentleness leading - and it takes us back to where we are, clearing snow or talking over breakfast.

The Problem with the Gentlemanly University

2007-12-17T18:53:00.000Z

Dan (whose relaunched blog, Covered in Bees, is worth checking out) commented on Friday's oversized post with a link to an elegantly barbed piece from the Times Higher. The author is the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, his target the much reviled Research Assessment Exercise to which academic departments in the UK are now subject. Blackburn has an angry kind of fun with the RAE, imagining how it might have processed the greats of philosophy:

In amongst the 4* management-speak encomia for team building and research environments we also find with gratitude that "the sub-panel is aware that research of high quality is very often carried out by individual scholars". Phew! A close call then for Plato, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and all the rest! They just squeak in, although whether in their own time they would have done so at the 1*, 2*, 3*, or 4* level might puzzle us to say... Like creative art, as often as not great and even good philosophy only slowly creates the sensibilities by which it gets recognized.

The hopeful part of me wonders whether the sheer lunacy of today's managerialism could have the effect of bringing down the whole knowledge factory?

I suggested the other day that earlier models of the university were already fundamentally "business-like" - in that a turn had already taken place away from the ancient assumption that learning requires otium (leisure), towards a model of learning as the "production of knowledge". However, their gentlemanly style of business left many of their inhabitants room to pursue something closer to the style of learning for which I care.

So, what was the problem? Well, my theory (which I'm making up as I go along - bear with me!) is that these institutions also played a critical role in producing the world as we find it - including the ways of thinking which lead to managerialism. (For example, the assumption that reality can be adequately/meaningfully/usefully treated as made up of resources, whose unique and specific qualities are wholly subordinate to their mathematical representation, or exchange value.)

If managerialism is not a barbarian invader, but the absurd heir to centuries of respectable thinking, this has implications for those who would defend learning against it.

The hope I referred to is this: there are many of us who, a generation or two ago, might have holed up comfortably in academia and who are now either sitting inside the university, feeling increasing discomfort - or already outside and improvising space for learning, thinking, reading and writing as best we can. These two groups form a pool in which I think I can make out a potential for new ways of organising learning. These may have some of the qualities I celebrate, without being bound to institutions which are antithetical to those qualities. Significantly, this pool includes people who do not share the kind of critique of the university per se which I have been trying to make.

In support of all this wishful thinking, I offer a passage from the theologian Prof Richard H Roberts which has been rattling around my head for three years now:

Given present conditions, I believe that the future survival of fundamental truth-seeking, the production of knowledge and genuinely 'owned' university teaching, together understood as part and parcel of the total way of life, may well only be assured through cultural migration, and the creation of new, subversive and marginal institutional embodiments.

Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences p.xi

'Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread' and all that... I realise I may be slashing about with a broadsword where what's required is a scalpel. Please, if you know any good surgeons trying to perform such an operation, point me towards them.

Newsflash: Capitalism Defeated!

2007-12-17T18:15:00.000Z

You'd think this story (from Latin American news agency, Prenza Latina) might have got more coverage, really:

MEXICO FORUM DEFEATS CAPITALISM

It's a headline worthy of William Boot, the accidental hero of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which is my current bedtime reading.

Why the only true schooling is a vacation (or "What I didn't do in my holidays")

2007-12-14T14:43:00.000Z

It has been a week already since I got back from Mexico. I returned with all kinds of things to post about and no great desire to get posting.

Among the pleasures of the Illich colloquium, one was the almost total withdrawal from electronic communication. My reluctance to begin reporting back is partly a reluctance to complete my reintegration to the technological matrix, and partly a sense that the experiences and conversations at Cuernavaca took place not only in a different time zone, but in a different sort of time. Whilst there, they made perfect sense, but a process of careful and unrushed translation is needed, or they are in danger of becoming nonsense. (Leastways, that's my excuse for having been so inarticulate when people asked me how my trip went...)

The pleasure of withdrawing from technology would have been no surprise to Illich. One of the consistent strands in his work is a call to askesis, the discipline of freely chosen renunciation. The purpose of such renunciation is not self-punishment, nor does it imply a judgement on those who don't choose to join us in renouncing a particular habit, activity or technology. Rather, it is a way of making room for the pleasures of otium (of which, more in a moment).

All this, though, is foreign to us. When 'asceticism' is referred to today, it generally signifies a (probably perverse) religious practice. It suggests masochism - or, at least, that hatred of the body which the secular often regard as an essential feature of the religious. It is worth highlighting, then, that in Illich's writing, this aspect of asceticism is not simply downplayed, but explicitly countered. In a 1989 proposal for a five year course aimed at recovering 'the perceptions of self and other which led to the formation of ascetical disciplines,' he writes:

I will place the body rather than the mind at the center of my lectures, not because I can distinguish the two, but because I need a term, the term "body" to engage the student's interest in the traditional habits that cultivate personal centers which they might never have adverted to, such as the heart, the eyes, the limbs, the stomach, the flesh, the ears and the spirit.

'Ascetical habits' once stood in balance with 'critical habits' in the western tradition of learning, but were marginalised from 'the foundation of the University in the late Middle Ages'. Though he doesn't spell it out, I suspect Illich saw a direct connection between this and the disembodiment of knowledge characteristic of modern science. (An idea which deserves fleshing out in a post of its own.)

For now, back to the pleasures of otium, for which askesis makes room. In Latin, otium is leisure, peace and quiet, freedom from responsibility: something looked forward to in retirement or time off from worldly duties. It is the term used by Augustine to describe his calling to a life of study and contemplation, and it characterises the atmosphere required for learning in the monastic tradition. The connection is ancient: the Greek for otium is schole, from which we get 'school'. (And according to Strong's Greek Dictionary, schole is 'a vacation from physical work' and scholazo is 'to take a holiday', so the truest form of schooling really is a vacation!)

The opposite of otium is negotium, literally nec-otium, 'no-leisure'. This is business, occupation or employment - but also pains, trouble and difficulty. Such affairs may not be ultimately escapable. (For Augustine, the calling to otium is in tension with the negotium of ecclesiastical responsibilities.) Yet the value of escape, temporary or permanent, is not in doubt - and it is seen as essential for the pursuit of learning.

All this is of interest to those of us who enjoy the dance of words and ideas to the rhythm of history. The more practically minded may find it 'otiose' in the modern sense: idle, useless and a waste of time. (Mind you, those changed connotations do offer a striking measure of how values have shifted.) Yet there may be meat here for those of us who would negotiate the world of education today.

Both personally and on behalf of School of Everything, I am keen to take part in conversations about the future of the university and of higher learning in general. I share the opinion of those who see in the current crisis of Higher Education, not merely a need to defend the older professional model against managerialism (or to mourn its passing), but the hopeful possibility of new, marginal spaces in which we can explore other ways of organising learning. So I was intrigued, earlier this year, when I heard about the EduFactory project to explore the 'Conflicts and transformations of the university'.

Yet, not for the first time, I found myself disappointed by the conversation that ensued (through the medium of an unfortunately unarchived email list). A great volume of words was produced, theoretically dense, often leading to bad-tempered exchanges, yet suggesting also a great deal of intelligence and good intentions. It was perplexing. My friend Anthony, who has the advantage over me of being a certified academic, lost patience, told the list what he thought and went elsewhere. Essentially, he told them they were suffering from collective verbal diaorrhea, and he wasn't wrong, but what I hadn't located until I sat down to write this was the source of their incontinence.

Bearing in mind the concepts of otium and negotium, the problem may be seen from the name of the project, or from the prospectus for its second round (which began last month):

The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showed that, despite the many differences between universities and countries, it is possible to identify a global trend and common experiences in the world of the university. These stem from the pervasiveness of the market and the processes of corporatisation that universities in many parts of the world are undergoing. But they also involve the struggles and movements that have contested academic borders as well as wider power structures, claiming the free circulation of knowledge and practicing alternative forms of knowledge production.

For the radicals of the edu-factory list, just as much as their supposed enemies, the university is conceived of as a factory for 'knowledge production'. No wonder they are so industrious in the manufacture of neologisms, or such Stakhanovites in their output of emails!

Government ministers often see universities (or, to be more precise, Oxford and Cambridge) as feudal anachronisms, holding out against good, rational, business management. The truth is stranger. The very roots of the modern university, as early as the 13th century, are in the turn away from otium as the proper atmosphere for study, towards worldy negotium. So the contemporary crisis is rather more like that of an old family business, run for generations on gentlemanly terms, which finds itself suddenly under new ownership and having its assets stripped.

After going on for eight centuries, most inhabitants of the university can barely imagine it as anything other than a factory for the production of knowledge. Yet the grounds for such imagination are just what study-as-otium can offer. Illich, again:

I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to inquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

And, in another essay, 'The Cultivation of Conspiracy':

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

Is there any hope for learning as a quest, rather than a production line? For these strange concepts of askesis and otium? 'The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century,' Illich wrote, 'is something profoundly different from any previously known.'

I find hope in the company of those I met in Cuernavaca, but also in a series of encounters since I returned with some of the smartest, most technologically adept people I know. One is giving up sending email from his thirtieth birthday. Another will spend ten days over Christmas and New Year in a silent retreat. The third claimed to have spent the past few months 'shitting myself into a twelve inch screen' and to want reminding that she has a body. The possibilities are there.

Anyway, the great thing about otium is that you don't have to wait for the fulfilment of a grand project to enjoy it. You can start by switching off your computer, turning off your phone, stretching your work-cramped body and deciding to dedicate the weekend ahead to meditative idleness - which is just what I plan to do now.

Adios!

2007-11-29T00:32:00.000Z

In less than twelve hours time, I will be on my way to Mexico! I don't know how much internet access I'll have - or want to have - over the next week. But I'm sure I'll report back on the gathering in Cuernavaca before long.

The Peter Pan Guide to Turning Thirty

2007-11-23T20:20:00.000Z

All week, people have been asking me how it feels to be 30. My first answer was, "Much the same as 29, only it's a bit harder for people to patronise you on account of your youth!" (As James Wallbank pointed out, though, it's easier for them to say, "At your age, you really should have grown out of...")

Then I started to notice the difference. Perhaps it's all the other things going on around my life, but there's a sharpened sense that this is it: I'm never going to be a grown up, so it's time to get serious! (Or, as Andy put it to me, "We've avoided growing up for long enough, and now the rules have changed!")

With this, I was reminded of a passage from John Berger, which is ostensibly about the relationship between a painter and his subject, but which catches something larger about what might be called vocation:

How did you become what you visibly are? asks the painter.

I am as I am. I'm waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child.

What for?

For you, if you abandon everything else.

For how long?

For as long as it takes.

There are other things in life.

Find them and be more normal.

And if I don't

I'll give you what I've given nobody else, but it's worthless, it's simply the answer to your useless question.

Useless?

I am as I am.

No promise more than that?

None. I can wait for ever.

I'd like a normal life.

Live it and don't count on me.

And if I do count on you?

Forget everything and in me you'll find -- me!

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: more usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.

John Berger, Steps Towards A Small Theory Of The Visible

(I'll be back in a day or two, when I have more time, to take up some of the threads from people's responses to recent posts. For now, though, thanks for turning my monologue into a conversation! It's far more sociable that way.)

To be AND not to be

2007-11-20T15:19:00.000Z

As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be.

The last phrase of that passage, from Illich's reflection on 'The Eloquence of Silence', makes me sit bolt upright whenever I reach it. Let me try to explain.

'To be, or not to be?' That is the question with which we are familiar. The figure of Hamlet, like that of his creator, stands at the back of what (in the long sense) is called modern English literature. 'Modernity' is a slippery concept, but there is a certain peculiar way of thinking about the world which became dominant among the powerful and 'forward-thinking' in western Europe from the 17th century onwards.

One of the peculiarities of this way of thinking is a tendency to insist on 'either/or' answers. (Anthony - who would probably steer me away from historical narrative here - talks about 'the elimination of uncertainty' as a key characteristic of the 'dynamics of enclosure' which he critiques.) This 'either/or' tendency is itself a characteristic of a desire for once-and-for-all solutions.

One of the things which is lost, as this way of thinking becomes dominant, is the sense of timeliness. The assumption that different, seemingly opposite, things may be right at different moments gives way, for example, to the attempt to identify timeless, universal Rights. (Paradoxically, the superiority of these tends to be bound up with the non-timeless assumption that the present is necessarily superior in wisdom to the past. This, however, is a very different kind of time to that experienced by those immersed in the sense of timeliness.)

Much of this is sensed in Shakespeare, anticipated and handled with careful ambiguity. (Hamlet himself observes that 'the times are out of joint'.) Harold Bloom made the bold claim that Shakespeare 'invented the human as we know it'. In a different key, it might be said that Hamlet seems the prototype of the modern individual, the subject who feels obliged to contain a universe within his self - to reach 'either/or' answers.

So, when Illich ends his list of the properties of silence with its 'times to be and not to be', I hear an echo arcing back over the centuries, or outwards from those centres of power where Hamlet-like leaders strut and fret, to the vernacular world in which Illich was at home. In Shakespeare's England, this world was still close enough at hand to feed in and out of his writing - soon afterwards, the gap between the vernacular understandings of reality and those common among the intellectual, political and literary elites would extend to a point where, finally, high culture could rediscover 'the folk' as (more often than not) an exotic object of fascination and condescension.

The Gospel According to Lego

2007-11-19T22:06:00.000Z

Genesis 2v19-20: "He brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, every bird of the sky, and every animal of the field. But no suitable helper was found for the man."

My sister, for her sins, is an RE teacher. (That's Religious Education, a subject all schools in the UK are obliged to teach.) Her attempts to keep her pupils' attention brought to my attention the revelation that is The Brick Testament.

The section on St Paul's Instructions on Marriage is particularly... instructive, shall we say. Though possibly not suitable for school. (Or church, for that matter.)

Gettin' On Planes

2007-11-19T21:24:00.000Z

Rather like Mr T, I have an aversion to getting on planes. Not an actual phobia, although I never much enjoyed the experience: all the boredom of a childhood car journey, sandwiched between two halves of a rollercoaster ride...

But eighteen months ago, I decided to give up flying - more or less. As you've doubtless heard a million times, as an ordinary citizen, not flying is pretty much the biggest difference you can make to your carbon footprint. (And don't get me started on carbon offsetting...)

I say "more or less". I realised a while ago that it would be hard to get through the process of setting up the School of Everything without taking some flights for work purposes. It's not exactly taking EasyJet to Prague for a boozy weekend, but I'm not comfortable with the amount of "necessary" flying required for business-as-usual - whether in business or academia.

But then today, for the first time since I quit, I found myself really feeling the need to fly somewhere. What's responsible for my fall from the wagon? This:

Ivan Illich passed away in December 2002. Five years after his death, a group of friends and readers are convoking other friends and readers around the world to meet in Cuernavaca. There, more than thirty years ago, thanks to the fruitful milieu provided by the Centro Intercultural de Documantación (CIDOC) headed by Valentina Borremans, he launched a critical debate on the major institutions of industrial society and the underlying public certainties supporting them... We want to call friends and readers of Ivan to gather on Mexican soil, the country where he lived so long.

The gathering is only ten days away. I have just written to the organisers, to check that it will be possible to take part. Assuming it is, and assuming I can find a way to pay for the flight, I'll be there.

P2P Breakfast

2007-11-19T12:07:00.000Z

To Islington, this morning, for a Hub Breakfast with Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He's a very impressive guy, from a high-level corporate background (but with a Marxist heart beating somewhere in there), who's both drawing together information on the range of peer-to-peer projects in different fields and attempting to create a narrative of how P2P production could displace capitalism-as-we-know-it.

He's very alert to the potential critiques of this - in particular, the difference between P2P knowledge production and applying the same approach to production of material goods. My favourite soundbite was this: "Today, we act as if material resources were infinite and immaterial resources [i.e. music, writing, software] were finite, when really it's the other way round!" (Easy to say, hard to change, of course.)

As I said to him afterwards, for someone who likens the movement he's involved in to 19th century socialism, he seems very optimistic. (He replied, reasonably enough, that the labour movement did much to improve the quality of life - and he's not a utopian.)

What did strike me was a certain slippage which is, perhaps, inevitable when offering narratives of successive economic eras. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, Michel said, so P2P production will (possibly) replace capitalism "because it's better". But to what kind of "good" does this "better" refer? Economic or ethical? In fact, this kind of narrative tends to collapse the distinction. But surely we can imagine a situation in which one way of living is economically better, while ethically worse?

When challenged on his optimism, Michel said that, of course, it is possible the human race will commit collective suicide, but it seems unlikely that people will choose to do so if there are other options available. If I am (relatively speaking) a pessimist, it is because of a suspicion that our demise may come about, not as an act of suicide, but as the kind of unintended overdose to which addicts are prone.

(I'm actually a rather hopeful kind of pessimist, but I don't place my hope in narratives of progress.)

The Philosophy of "As If"

2007-11-16T15:17:00.000Z

Having been an enthusiastic participant in the Yahoo! Groups Alan Garner list for several years, I was delighted to discover that a similar list existed, dedicated to the work of Ivan Illich. It looks to have become rather quiet, but I'm enjoying working my way through the archives, with the intention of introducing myself and (assuming the locals are friendly!) inviting along some of the people I've met in the past year who've expressed an interest in developing a conversation about Illich's ideas and influence.

Anyway, in the context of a discussion about the roles of the individual and the state in social change, I came across this great paragraph:

I have been wrestling for a long time with context vs individual responsibility. I have concluded it is not either-or, but both that matter. Yes, of course, we must each take personal responsibility for our own situations. We must pull a Vaihinger "as-if". The only alternative is madness and depression and curling up into little shivering balls of protoplasm. At the very same time, holding two contradictory ideas all at once, context is all. Sort of a C. Wright Mills sociological imagination riff. Context is all, yet we must act as if we are in total control of everything. So, we must together work to change context, work to make the world better for all, work to drag a kicking and screaming bad tempered world together into the commons of the god of all. At the same time we must, at the individual level, work with each person and ourselves to take individual control of as much of our lives as we can grab and self-direct within the context in which we exist.

The poster's name is Dan, and what he says reminds me of conversations I've had with a different Dan. I wasn't familiar with Hans Vaihinger, the philosopher mentioned, but the importance of "as if" resonates strongly with my own experience and the approach to reality to which it has led me.

Returning...

2007-11-16T14:16:00.000Z

I hadn't planned to take a break from this blog, but one week stretched into another until I found I had stepped back from it (which was no bad thing). It has been a busy time! All kinds of things came to a head at once, as if to meet the deadline of my 30th birthday. Well, the day is upon me, and it seems a happy moment to return.

My main news is that I now have a place to live in London, after spending much of the past year living on Paul's sofa. I've been lucky to have such a tolerant business partner, but it is a huge relief to have a real bed - and to be reunited with my books! (And I'm sure the only person who's more relieved than me is Paul...) In practice, I will be spending about the same amount of my time in London (around 80% of it) as I have been doing for the past few months. But it will be good to have somewhere for Hannah to stay, so that she can visit me some weekends, instead of me returning to Sheffield.

Meanwhile, things have been moving fast in other areas of my life - including the School of Everything, where much is happening behind the scenes. (More news soon, in other words.) Through that, and through generally following my nose, I have met some amazing people recently. And, as I cross the threshold of this new decade, I'm feeling very lucky with my life.

So, this blog. Time out gave me the chance to pay attention to those blogs I read and enjoy, to think about what I've learned from them and from the experience of keeping my own. Writing matters to me: along with reading, spending time with people I care about, and growing stuff, it is one of the things I intend to do with myself for as long as I have any say in the matter. And for the immediate future, what writing time I get will continue to go into this blog.

My plan right now is to vary the rhythm a bit, to post more often, to be more active in directing people towards things that have caught my attention, and to let go of the habit of needing to turn every thought into an essay! Any other suggestions are very welcome.

I'll also be making an occasional radio programme for Sheffield Live, which is meant to be an extension of this blog. Hopefully it will be a chance to go deeper into those preoccupations which keep surfacing here, but fit awkwardly in the limits of a few paragraphs. It should also be a bit of fun.

The plan is for each programme to take a different question which I've been asked and use it as an excuse to talk to some interesting people. I'm starting with the question that gave this blog its name, asked years ago by a relative: "Isn't it time you got a proper job...?"

(Again, suggestions for other questions I should tackle would be great!)

In Defence of Sweeping Statements & Anecdotal Evidence

2007-10-10T22:14:00.000Z

Still thinking about Berger, I came across an interesting post from a reader who has just discovered him. Kevin Breathnach writes:

John Berger writes beautifully. Of that, there is no doubting. But he writes out of fashion, form and age. These are not essays like any I'm familiar with. At their worst, they resemble the writings of a class-conscious mind-body-spirit author; at their best, they are the work of the what Berger himself, referring to Giorgio Bassani, names the half-poet, half-historian. But poets are granted an artistic license we would not want within our historians grasp. Hold Everything Dear brims with sweeping statements and anecdotal evidence.

I responded in his comments thread, at slightly greater length than seems polite. But since I haven't had time to post anything here for a couple of days, I thought I'd reproduce my response here.

First, a quote from Mike Dibb's account of his collaboration with Berger (on a famous 1970s TV series):

Although Ways of Seeing may appear to be a succession of statements, these statements are really questions. When John speaks in conversation his sentences often end with an interrogative. "No?" he says, inviting a response, not automatic assent.

The same, I think, applies to those sweeping statements Kevin refers to. They are not made (as is conventional) from an assumed position of universal authority. (The convention of hedging one's statements in cautious terms is not a relinquishing of such authority, but a polite way of retaining it.) Rather, Berger is constantly aware of his thinking and writing as a work in progress, made from a specific, physical location, and based on what can be seen from there. (In the case of 'Hold Everything Dear', several of the essays were written from occupied Palestine and this shapes them.)

How is this different to the most strident sort of universalism? Only (I think) in that the statements truly are intended as questions. Other, contradictory statements may be made from elsewhere - and the assumption is that this should lead to a conversation, rather than a conflict over who is right. (Clearly, in the one-way medium of a book, this must be taken on trust - though accounts of his many collaborations appear to bear it out.)

Secondly, concerning the reliance on "anecdotal evidence", this is not a weakness but fundamental to his method. Berger's writing returns again and again to the theme of "incommensurability" - the claim that things cannot be measured satisfactorily against each other, except in certain limited domains, without losing what matters. The inadmissibility of "anecdotal evidence" is a tenet of a worldview in which everything that matters is capable of being reduced to statistical representation (in terms of money, or in terms of SI units) - a worldview whose limitations he seeks to challenge. But if we baulk at this, it may at least be entered in his defence that he describes himself first and foremost as a storyteller.

The first episode of that TV series ended with Berger addressing his audience: "Consider what I say," he told them, "but be sceptical..."

Stilted Conversations

2007-10-07T22:24:00.000Z

The event was a screening of Pasolini's 'La Rabbia', but the lights above the entrance to the Curzon cinema spelt out the main attraction: JOHN BERGER IN CONVERSATION. Inside the foyer, the weight of expectation was uncomfortable. For many of us, this was a rare - perhaps a once-only - chance to be in the same room as someone whose life and work had mattered to us deeply. In such situations, the asymmetry between reader and writer always reminds me of a teenage crush.

He looked uncomfortable, too - escorted by the organisers, seated on a stage, enduring our applause. There are writers who seem to relish these occasions, the literary festival or the staged conversation, as if it is payment in fame for the loneliness of their trade. These are not, generally, my kind of writer.

And yet he looked very much himself. Unimpressed with the sound of his own voice, answering slowly as if all his thoughts were work in progress rather than polished objects, and politely declining to answer where he felt he had nothing to add, which was often. It was good to hear him speak. Yet there was little flow to the conversation, the questions or comments from the audience, the host's rephrasing and Berger's response or lack of it. There seemed on many sides a desire for something more or other.

His most animated response was to a questioner who wanted the film to have been more explicitly a call to action (of a dogmatically socialist sort?). His response was to defend the room for imagination and less explicitly political work, yet there was a greater sense of a shared energy between him and the questioner than when others asked about Pasolini's technique or the film's place in the history of cinema.

I should mention his voice. It was not a surprise to me, because I have heard or watched a number of interviews with him, but it is still strange. After thirty-some years in France, he no longer speaks like an Englishman, but with foreign cadences. (He says that nearly all the contemporary poetry which has mattered to him he has read in translation. Now, at this end of a long life, he speaks his native language as if translating himself.)

The other extraordinary thing is his age. There is no way that anyone who didn't know would guess that he is eighty. Physically, he could be twenty years younger, and even then his vigour would be remarkable. (Having been with my elderly grandmother a few days earlier, I struggle to reconcile the fact that they were born in the same year.)

It was a strange evening, too short, but lengthening it would not have helped much. How would I organise it differently? A different venue, for a start, and a different format - one in which the fact that we were gathered around this man and his work was acknowledged, but also the possibility that this shared focus meant we had much to learn from each other. I am sure there were many people present who I would have gained from meeting. What if we had been gathered into smaller groups, to talk with each other, with John joining each group for a while, then moving on to the next?

That's only a thought. There was another meeting the next night, organised by the Institute for Race Relations and held at the London School of Economics. Perhaps it came closer to my idea of how a writer like Berger could be "in conversation" with his readers. I don't know, because the organisers informed me that they had run out of places - and, on the night, I wasn't feeling up to gatecrashing.

Has anyone else had the same experience of the awkwardness of these kind of events? Is it inevitable? Is there, I wonder, something unhealthy about the intensity of the relationship some of us develop with a writer like Berger? Have you been at events which worked better? Or am I being unrealistic? Let me know.

(Berger's essay on La Rabbia is published in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. A version of it is available online here.)