Global Justice Movement: Meta-Mapping the Emergence: Difference between revisions

In association with The Future We Deserve.

A meeting of minds and bodies somewhere in NW London:

Interdependence Day Meta-mapping Session on the possibility of emergent coherence in the 'Global Justice Movement'.

4th June 2011, 10am to 7pm.

About ten minutes into part two of Vinay Gupta's recent talk at Winchester School of Art, he says, urging his audience to focus their efforts on trying to build solutions to the world's many problems: "Until we have a solution, I don't know what I would compel people to do even if I was made dictator of the world".

This meeting is an exploration of what it would mean to have a solution. Some of the questions we are interested in are:

- Is it a good idea to try to create a coherent plan? Or is planning obsolete - are we now in the age of socio-political impro?

- What kind of solution can we create? What is the relationship between a small group of thinkers, who can achieve a certain degree of consensus and focused, coherent thought, and a global movement that is partly defined through its commitment to equity and leaderlessness?

- What kind of new organisational, communicative & conceptual tools do we have and do we need?

The format will combine a degree of structure with an openness to procedural evolution as the day progresses. It will be initially based around an attempt to model the interdependent problems and challenges facing us today, and the solutions currently available. For example (just the problems):

- Environmental crises; global toxification, loss of biodiversity and stability, climate change.

- Political crises; ongoing repression and authoritarianism, failure of representative democracy, inability to deal with new complex problems.

- Social crises; distrust, alienation, violence, corruption, animosity, mental illness, distraction, addictions of all kinds.

- Economic crises; obsolescence of fiat banking system, deleterious underlying growth paradigm, global debt problems.

- Humanitarian crises; poverty, famine, starvation, disease.

- Cultural crises; death of coherent world-narratives, co-optation of art, failure of religion, linguistic devaluation.

- Communicational crises; privacy, corporate ownership of mainstream media, breakdown in shared global paradigms.

- Resource crises; water, oil, topsoil, food, rare earth metals, silver, coltan, phosphorous.

- Technological crises; nuclear, biotech, robotic, military threats and dangers.

- Education, health, law, transport, and everything else.

Evaluating the available solutions will reveal potential points of convergence and cooperation, and will also reveal where solutions are lacking, enabling the creation of a global 'to-do' list.

By attempting to model all these things, the meta-levels of the meeting will be activated - a rolling analysis of what communicative and organisational tools are available or lacking to address these issues, and the first steps towards creating a meta-map of how we might organise ourselves into global ideational and organisational coherence.

Backround reading:

http://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/world-game

http://www.opendemocracy.net/keith-kahn-harris/naming-movement

http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/6555903174/building-a-modular-thought-tank

http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/6666939678/sorry-were-doing-what-now

http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/mycelium-wisdom/

http://trac.adhocracy.de/

http://globalswadeshi.ning.com/forum/topics/2097821:Topic:521?page=2&commentId=2097821%3AComment%3A18632&x=1#2097821Comment18632

http://decisionlab.org.uk/

http://www.gtinitiative.org/

http://www.greatturningtimes.org/

http://www.joannamacy.net/thegreatturning.html