Hey! You've found the corner where we're putting together Issue 1 of New Public Thinking - Reflections on 2011. You're welcome to take a look around and pitch in with correcting any typos/etc you spot, but we'd appreciate keeping things fairly quiet for now - so please don't Tweet/link to this. A final version of the book will be published in mid-Feb 2012, using PediaPress, and versions of the articles will be posted on the NPT site at that point.
Thanks!
Dougald & Keith
Thank you[edit | edit source]
This book began as a conversation over lunch. Within three months it had been written, edited and published. Thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
On Vinay Gupta's advice, we used a corner the Appropedia wiki and used it to edit the contributions people had sent us. Appropedia exists to be the Wikipedia for appropriate technology: a place where a community of thinkers and doers are documenting and sharing knowledge about important, practical stuff. We're grateful to them for letting us hide out in one of their darker corners.
Then we used PediaPress to turn those wiki pages into a typeset, Print-On-Demand book. The main purpose of PediaPress is to make it easy to create printed books from the material on Wikipedia and similar sites. But that also means you can use it to print anything you want, if you have the text on a MediaWiki site. You don't get a whole lot of control over the formatting, so there are a few quirks here and there, but it's an astonishingly simple way to produce a decently-printed book with no overheads whatsoever.
Everyone involved gave their time for free - and we won't make any money from the sales of this book. That's not because we're conscientious objectors to money, although we do like the motto of the old Pick Me Up email zine: 'Think what you'd do if only you had the money, then figure out how you could do it anyway.'
The Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road, London generously agreed to host our launch, despite us having no budget. Thanks to Shelagh, Peter, Rose and Rachel for making that happen.
You'll see lots more notes about the sources of the text, etc. That's a PediaPress thing. Basically, though, the terms of the CC license mean you're free to share and remix our words. If you want to reprint them in a newspaper, magazine or anything like that, please get in touch with us to talk about it.
You can join in the conversation at the New Public Thinking website. We're always open to contributors, so let us know if you'd like to write for us. We'll also be posting articles from the book on the site, so you'll be able to talk to their authors and pick up on any loose threads you found.
www.newpublicthinking.org | @NewPubThink
Editorial: First life[edit | edit source]
A year ago, the two of us were total strangers. Neither of us had even heard of the other. Nor had we heard of many of the contributors to this book.
The fact that we are now collaborating together and with the rest of the people who contributed to this book is one small instance of the extraordinary flourishing and expansion of networks which marked 2011. For us and for many others, this was a year in which new contacts were made in new ways, in which strangers turned quickly into friends and collaborators. A year in which people reached out.
The technological base for this expansion is not new. Children born the same year as the World Wide Web are now out of their teens, and there is a sense of the technology itself coming of age. The significance of the interconnections it makes possible has led us to speak of 'the network' as the defining social and political phenomenon of our time.
In the past year, the new social forms which ride the network made their entrance on the stage of history. Their manifestations may be profoundly hopeful or, at times, alarming; but the wave of networked disruption which broke across the world has swept away the idea that these technologies are only about throwing sheep at one another, or hiding away in Second Life.
Yet despite its overwhelming extension, the grain of our networked reality still seems elusive: on a human scale, it remains puzzlingly insubstantial. Much of the activity that makes up the network seems too loose and haphazard to be significant, by the standards of the world in which we grew up. It runs on serendipity and near-randomness. It extends simultaneously in contradictory directions.
This book is both a reflection on the puzzling nature of the network and a modest example of what it looks like in practice. The ease with which reading an article can lead into making contact and beginning a conversation, the lightness with which an idea in a conversation can be floated as a project, the swiftness with which others can join their efforts behind a project, the freedom with which tools built for other purposes can be put to use for one's own: these are among the factors that made possible the collaboration now before your eyes.
It seems relevant, too, that we recognised in each other - and in many of our co-conspirators here - the lineaments of an unclassifiable career: loose and serendipitous as the network, precarious but meaningful, led by curiosity and often illegible to institutions.
The spirit of improvisation which is the life of the network is all the more striking because it has arisen at the end of an unprecedented age of orchestration. (Think of the resemblance between the unified movements of an orchestral violin section and the coordination of physical effort in the industrial-era factory, or the way that the conductor on his podium echoes the stance of that era's political leaders.) The network is breeding new forms of politics and new forms of work, and though their shape remains far from clear, the practice of improvisation may offer clues.
A further puzzling feature of life in the network is the lightness with which we let things go. We hold on to the people who matter to us, aware of our interdependence, but are quick to loosen our grip on ideas or projects that don't fly. Again, this has been reflected in our personal experience of 2011: each of us floated projects which came to nothing, and have tried to learn not to hold on too tight, recognising how often the essence of a project will return in a new form, somewhere down the road. A similar principle applies to the rhythms of networked protest that we are witnessing: a new meme surfaces, surges with life for a while, and then the momentum moves elsewhere. Both personally and more broadly, this letting go is not without pain and frustration, but it seems likely that it is an essential skill for navigating this new reality.
The mysterious qualities of networked reality and the force with which it now interacts with hard political, economic and social realities has led us to embrace Pamela McLean's description of it as 'the Invisible Revolution'. Three further senses of this invisibility leave their footprints in the pieces published here.
First, as McLean suggests, the puzzle of how to make sense of the transformations now underway becomes clearer when one compares it to the Industrial Revolution. In that earlier period of great change, you could imagine someone pointing to a steam engine and asking: 'What on earth is that?' Today, it is hard to think of a similarly totemic object which embodies the technological and social changes we are living through. Pointing to a laptop or an iPhone is not that helpful, nor does the Twitter home page get you closer. As McLean puts it: 'What defines the Invisible Revolution is that key elements of the changes we are living through are impossible to point to; and yet, if you are experiencing them, they become more real than the realities that you can see.'
A second line of invisibility cuts through those pieces which touch most directly on the global events of 2011. Most dramatically, in Smári McCarthy's account of life as part of the network of western 'hacktivists' providing tech support to the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. When young people set up camp in the public spaces of Madrid, New York or London and drew comparisons to Tahrir Square, critics called the comparison immature: proof that they don't know how lucky they are. In response, we can argue - as Paul Mason has - that, in democracies and dictatorships alike, unrest has grown out of a generation who find themselves poorer than their parents, in societies marked by widening economic inequality. But what McCarthy tells us is how integrated he and his colleagues have become in the bloody reality of countries like Syria: the Telecomix activists providing infrastructure support to the Syrian opposition are in a not dissimilar position, he suggests, to the drone pilots flying remote-controlled missions over Afghanistan, and are vulnerable to the same levels of stress and burnout.
For some of us, then, the reality of life in 2011 has been of an invisible but brutally real frontline which runs from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and its events, as Eleanor Saitta writes, 'only a rehearsal, a tiny taste of what will likely be decades of chaos.' Others, such as Vinay Gupta, are less enthusiastic about the way in which lines have been drawn. 'I will think of this as the year in which all of my fears about network-centric radicalism came to pass,' he writes, 'and in which the need for coherent modern governance moved from being an important task for the future into being a crushingly urgent need in the present.'
The coexistence of these voices within an ongoing conversation, and not simply as opponents scoring points off each other, was the hope behind the launch of New Public Thinking a year ago. Our desire was to leave behind the sterile, combative framing of issues which still characterises the old media: not to replace this with a cosy consensus or a party line, but to take the risk of doing our thinking in public, rather than defending carefully prepared positions. To worry less about proving ourselves right; to be more willing to follow new threads, to surprise ourselves and to change our minds.
There is something here - in this spirit of improvisation, of puzzling through the world as we find it, rather than fitting it into black-and-white oppositions - that resonates with the new styles of protest and activism, but also of creativity and collaboration, characteristic of those riding the network. And this suggests a final thread of revolutionary invisibility; because there have been moments when it felt like this spirit owed more to the imagined world of Grant Morrison's comic book series, The Invisibles, than to the handbooks inherited from radical theorists and organisers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Morrison's story of magical anarchists begins firmly in the classic mode of good-versus-evil; but to follow it to the end is to be initiated into a more fluid and playful mode of engaging with power, in which every moment brings another turn in perspective, and the figure who seemed your worst enemy a moment ago is the one whose unexpected help may make all the difference now. There is a kind of postmodernism here which is not the clever defeatism we were taught at university. Comic books are not political theory, but there is something in the agility of attitude, the playful pragmatism, the sense of agency and even the dress sense of the networked generation of activists which has more in common with an Invisibles cell than with the political cadres of previous generations.
If it sounds as though we are placing a lot of hope on the way people are using networked technologies - for ends far different from those for which they were designed - then this is not least because it seems to be one of the few directions from which hope is coming. There are plenty of reasons to believe the world is darkening. For all its moments of euphoria, 2011 left many of us with uncomfortable questions: about the gaps in our lives, in our societies, in our attempts to change the world or to make sense of the changes already going on within it.
This book began, three months ago, as a conversation over lunch. That became an open invitation to reflect on the events of the past year, in our own lives, on a local or a global scale. An invitation that travelled along the threads of a network built up from conversations, over Twitter and around campfires, in squatted social centres and hacklabs, but also in thinktank seminars and the pages of the old media.
We have been surprised by the range and depth of the responses that came back. They are not essays written at leisure, but despatches from the middle of events which are still unfolding. They have an urgency and immediacy that embodies the continuous present of the network. Taken together, an outline begins to emerge of the changes taking place around us and our attempts to make sense of them.
Editing this book has given us fresh energy for the New Public Thinking project. We find ourselves already thinking of the voices missing from these pages, people we would like to publish in future, online or in further books. So we hold out the possibility that this is the first in a series, without holding on to this more tightly than is needed.
Dougald Hine & Keith Kahn-Harris, London, February 2012
Contributors[edit | edit source]
Anna Björkman (@bjorkmananna) was born eclectic. This may explain why she works in international cooperation and peace building, while having a funny relationship to the whole 'development' thing.
Tessy Britton (@TessyBritton) is a social designer obsessed with communities, humans, knowledge building & tangible stuff. Jam and Jerusalem meets IDEO.
Andy Broomfield (@andybroomfield) explores links between online and offline, develops web presences for social organizations, and photo documents the projects and events around London.
Laura Burns (@lauraburns400) is a poet and storyteller exploring the importance of re-enchanting and imagining ourselves and the world around us differently.
Neil Cantwell (@dissolvingpath) has studied philosophy and music. He has an ongoing status as Foreign Research Fellow at Shuchiin University, Kyoto.
Keri Facer (@kerileef) is a researcher and educator, currently exploring how the education institutions we've inherited can be redesigned as real public spaces.
Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is entangled in improvisation, collaboration, and psychology. Most of his time is spent playing, teaching and writing about them.
Andy Gibson (@gandy) starts businesses that aim to make money whilst also changing the world. Because clearly just starting businesses that make money is far too easy.
Jeppe Graugaard (@jgraugaard) is currently researching grassroots innovations for his PhD. He recounts this journey and other stories on patternwhichconnects.com.
Vinay Gupta (@leashless) is the inventor of the Hexayurt.
Dougald Hine (@dougald) spends his time writing, hosting conversations and creating organizations. He set up New Public Thinking after getting cross at the BBC.
Keith Kahn-Harris (@KeithKahnHarris) isn't sure what he does anymore but some of the time he is a writer, sociologist, salonist and educator.
Pat Kane (@theplayethic) is a musician, writer, consultant & activist. He is the author of The Play Ethic (2004) & his forthcoming book is Radical Animal. He is also one half of Scottish 80s pop group Hue & Cry.
Smari McCarthy (@smarimc) is an information activist who spends his time building technical, political and social infrastructure, through code, law & prose.
Bridget McKenzie (@bridgetmck) is a cultural learning consultant, founder director of Flow, writer of The Learning Planet, photographer and home schooler.
Pamela McLean (@pamela_mclean) used to be a primary school teacher. She became passionate about the internet and set up Dadamac to help connect people in the UK and Africa around the new possibilities for learning that it offers.
Noah Raford (@nraford) lives in Dubai, works for the government, thinks about the future, and does what he can to make it happen. He dreams of the stars but fights in the ditch and has a PhD from MIT.
Eleanor Saitta (@Dymaxion) breaks things for a living; mostly computers, sometimes countries. She is a painter, writer, hacker, designer, and nomadic barbarian.
Mike Small (@bellacaledonia) is an activist, writer & publisher originally from Aberdeen. He is a social ecologist, Scottish socialist and republican.
Nick Stewart (@nickstew_art) is a contemporary artist who would like to see art being a quality of life as much as stuff in galleries and museums.
Morten Svenstrup is a cellist and composer with an MA in art and cultural studies on time, music and society.
Andrew Taggart (@andrewjtaggart) is a philosophical counselor at home in New York City. He can be reached at andrewjtaggart.com.
Chris T-T (@christt) is a writer, songwriter and recording artist. Since 1999 he has made eight albums and currently writes on the arts for The Morning Star.
Emily Wilkinson (@mindfulmaps) is an artist-navigator exploring creative learning, wellbeing and community. Often found wandering between nature and the city.