38 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. for - mass movements - how they fail - The Ecologist

      Summary - A good article exploring why mass movements fail, work for a journalist who has spent years writing about such movements. - In a nutshell, his observations are that modern history shows that leaderless movements are destined to fail because (social) nature abhors a vacuum.

  2. Jan 2024
    1. What is more lacking, however, are approaches to transformation that can be applied in and adapted to multiple (and necessarily unique) contexts

      for - key insight - movement of movements - What's missing - transformation catalyst - indyweb / Indranet

      • What is more lacking, however,
      • are approaches to transformation
      • that can be applied in and adapted to
      • multiple (and necessarily unique) contexts
      • to provide a framework for building such action strategies.
      • Here I would introduce the concepts of transformation catalysts
      • who build effective, purposeful transformation systems
      • using three general processes of
        • connecting,
        • cohering, and
        • amplifying.
  3. Dec 2023
    1. If I might attempt a sweeping generali-zation about the general course of hu-man history in the eighteen years thathave followed the War, I would describeit as a series of £lounderings, violent ill-directed mass movements, slack driftinghere and convulsive action there.

      How much did these movements inform @Hoffer1951 (2002)?

      Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Perennial Classics, 2002. https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915

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  4. Nov 2023
    1. here is the human 00:50:39 journey the big arrows indicate the way that it in fact developed in history the small errors indicate that of the seven point seven billion of us on the planet people are moving in every direction 00:50:52 from each of those phases and some in each of those phases want to hang on to those phases are not move that's what those great black circles are the little black circles our people who want to 00:51:04 just hang on to what they've got and not move but others are on the move and what's more they're on the move in every possible direction
      • for: cultural evolution - diverse movements, cultural transition - diverse movements

      • summary

        • Bill Reese and Rubin Nelson believe that the dynamic / relational quadrant of indigenous culture is the most viable futures
  5. Oct 2023
    1. times of constitutional reform, changes in power between political parties, or revolutionary periods
    2. women's movements have historically advanced their interests by taking advantage of certain political opportunities.
    3. discursive struggle, which involves shaping and controlling political discourse concerning women to influence public policy.
    4. There is tension between feminist movements and political parties, as some movements prefer to maintain autonomy from parties in order to achieve their goals.
    5. feminists did not have a political party to support them, which limited their influence on policies like abortion laws.
    6. success of feminist movements working with left-wing parties varies,
    7. Women are located both externally and internally within institutions, influencing their actions and goals. Other research on Third World women's movements shows their impact on state policies and context.
  6. Apr 2023
    1. He even offeredgrim warnings about children’s bowel movements, stressing the absolute needfor regularity. Regularity should not be achieved, however, at the expense ofdensity or compactness in the, ahem, product, for ‘People that are very loosehave seldom strong thoughts or strong bodies’ (p. 22, original emphasis).

      Locke stressed the need for regular bowel movements in children in his book Some Thoughts Concerning Education and presupposed a link between the looseness of one's stool and the weakness of their bodies. This seemed to be a moralism rather than a question of general health and eating habits which continued into even my own childhood.

  7. Mar 2023
  8. Feb 2023
    1. Ranters, a radical working-class antinomian movement that twogenerations before had openly preached the abolition of privateproperty and existing sexual morality.

      potential influence on pirates?

    1. The Ranters were one of a number of dissenting groups that emerged around the time of the Commonwealth of England (1649–1660). They were largely common people,[1] and the movement was widespread throughout England, though they were not organised and had no leader.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranters

      See also The Antinomian Controversy<br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomian_Controversy

      The Antinomian Controversy, also known as the Free Grace Controversy, was a religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.

  9. Jan 2023
    1. But the blanketcondemnation of Enlightenment thought is in its own way rather odd,when one considers that this was perhaps the first historically knownintellectual movement organized largely by women, outside of officialinstitutions like universities, with the express aim of undermining allexisting structures of authority.

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  10. Dec 2022
    1. to the success of Christianity’s victory over paganism, which hadtraditionally championed the pursuit of happiness and denouncedpain as evil. The triumph of suffering over pleasure had its mostextreme expression in the early monasteries.

      People clung to the promise of salvation. The idea that the more you suffered here on earth, the better your time would be in the afterlife was a potent shield against the desperate realities of everyday life in the fifth and sixth centuries. This doctrine was central

      Relationship to Eric Hoffer's thesis in The True Believer and mass movements' "hope for the future" even if the hope is for one's afterlife? This sort of hope can be seen in both Islam and Christianity

  11. Oct 2021
    1. White finds reason for optimism: the end of protest inaugurates a new era of social change.

      Beginning, Middle, End

      Micah White wrote of the end: The End of Protest.

      Micah White is the award-winning activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.

      Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart.

      I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mast frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but ratter in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

      Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Régis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a course of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.”

      (Pages 26-27)

    1. social evolution

      A Theory of Change

      How did we get here?

      Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

      It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

      Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

  12. Jul 2021
  13. May 2021
    1. “Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”

      A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.

      This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.

      This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?

      This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture

  14. Apr 2021
    1. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, educators train medical students in slow looking to hone their observational skills, but as West notes, it’s not just about noticing small physical details that might inform a diagnosis.

      I'm reminded of the research implied by Arthur Conan Doyle's writing about Sherlock Holmes. We hear about the time and effort spent studying the smallest things, but we don't see it, instead we see the mythical application of it at the "right" times to solve cases in spectacular fashion.

      No one focuses on the time spent studying and learning and instead we mythologize the effects at the other end.

      Another example of this is the fêting of Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem, while simultaneously ignoring the decades of work he poured into studying and solving it not to mention the work of thousands before him to help give him a platform on which to see things differently.

    2. At Slow Art Day events, museums generally ask visitors to look at five objects for 10 minutes each — enough time, often, to keep them looking a little longer. But the practice varies. Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard University and a proponent of slow art, has her students look at an individual artwork for three hours. “Approach it as if you were a visitor from another planet with no prior knowledge of the configuration or content of earthly art,” she tells them.

      Why isn't there a slow reading movement that does this with books? What would that look like? What might it accomplish?

    3. This year’s Slow Art Day — April 10 — comes at a time when museums find themselves in vastly different circumstances.

      Idea: Implement a slow web week for the IndieWeb, perhaps to coincide with the summit at the end of the week.

      People eschew reading material from social media and only consume from websites and personal blogs for a week. The tough part is how to implement actually doing this. Many people would have a tough time finding interesting reading material in a short time. What are good discovery endpoints for that? WordPress.com's reader? Perhaps support from feed reader community?

    4. Studies suggest that the average museumgoer looks at an artwork for less than 30 seconds. And with crowds that seem to push you from one piece to the next, overwhelmingly large exhibitions, and a dismal lack of seating options, museum spaces sometimes seem to encourage this “more is more” ethos. But on “Slow Art Day” every April, museums around the world offer programming that guides visitors in looking more patiently.

      What design changes might be instituted to help slow down one's consumption of art?

  15. Oct 2020
  16. Sep 2020
  17. Mar 2020
    1. More information

      In the document "1.2: Creative Commons Today", under the section "Creative Commons: The Movement", I suggest to add, along with other open movements, a mention to Free and Open Source Hardware. The Wikipedia article "Open-source hardware" (CC BY-SA) is quite complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware

      Open Harware is a really relevant movement, with includes fantastic projects like RepRap, DIY Book Scanner, and others. And it is fully aligned with the values of Creative Commons and free culture.

  18. Jan 2020
  19. Jun 2019
    1. We attend to the how of research by thinking-with various walking projects from WalkingLab (www.walkinglab.org) and beyond. We use the idea of the walk score as a catalyst for movement. Influenced by the tradition of Fluxus event score

      These ideas harken back to Guy Debord's "derives" and other artistic "happenings"--also 60s era movements. What's up with the back to the past thing? Also, I checked out the WalkingLab.org website and found the projects, events, and publications interesting. It all feels overly ableist to me, but I didn't delve deeply.

  20. Dec 2018
    1. movements, among other things, are attempts to intervene in the public sphere through collective, coordinated action. A social movement is both a type of (counter)public itself and a claim made to a public that a wrong should be righted or a change should be made.13 Regardless of whether movements are attempt-ing to change people’s minds, a set of policies, or even a government, they strive to reach and intervene in public life, which is centered on the public sphere of their time.

      a solid definition of what a movement is

  21. Nov 2018
    1. Digital connectivity reshapes how movements connect, organize, and evolve during their lifespan.
    2. My goal in this book was above all to develop theories and to present a conceptual analysis of what digital technologies mean for how social move-ments, power and society interact, rather than provide a complete empirical descriptive account of any one movement.
  22. Mar 2016