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.

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.

for - Great Transition Initiative - GTI - GTI - How to de-silo movements

title - How to De-Silo Movements author - Jerry Brecher date - Jan 2024

for - global movement - global citizen's movement - GCM - glocal citizen's movement - movement of movements - rapid whole system change - blessed unrest - Tipping Point Festival - TPF - Indyweb - Indranet - polycrisis - metacrisis

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

• 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

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.

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

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

How much of the 1935 Stakhanovite movement was propaganda vs. reality and how much of it used the ideas of scientific management from the late 1800s/early 1900s?

potential influence on pirates?

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism

Some Theoretical Insights

by Charisse Burden-Stelly

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.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

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.

a solid definition of what a movement is

Great resource for art theory, art movements, and biographies of artists.