Disruptive Proactivity

The last post ended abruptly and somewhat unedited when I read clay Shirky’s new book and it changed and connected various things that I had previously not.

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest, and the associated website WiserEarth.org, talks about how all NGOs are at some level connected, and on some level don’t contradict each other. Child Poverty is related to Health which is related to Air Pollution which is related to Global Climate which is related to Indigenous Peoples which is related to… You can get from any one to any other.

Cognitive Surplus is mostly a guided instructional tour on the potential of what could happen if 99% of TV watching didn’t change, but 1% did. The entire of wikipedia has taken the cognitive load that is spent in the US, in one weekend, watching adverts on TV. That has a profound scope for changing things without much effort.

One of the groups I spent time with is various environmental groups. Its amazing how much is done by so few; and how widening that gap and gaining the interest of disparate groups will do. And one of the things the internet brings you is different point of view in a way that previously would have been impossible. Acting with support of others and networks, 2 people (full disclosure: one is a friend) have effectively, currently temporarily but hopefully permanently (consultation is still open) stopped all peat digging in Salford: http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=618

But if everything is connected, then that begs the question what joins these ideas, and is there somewhere that these connections discussed? And it turns out, that there is. The Long Now Foundation has a long running seminar series – “the slow conference” in the words of Paul Saffo, it just has a big intermission between each speaker. And over the last few years, the seminars, all of which are available online, has served as a shining example of something that might only be possible in a communication based society. http://www.longnow.org/seminars

I saw this earlier this week: http://infovegan.com/2010/06/24/why-developers-are-so-important/ Just as the cost of a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables is nearly 10x the cost of a conventional diet the cost of a high-fact, low-opinion information diet is too costly for most of society. Developers, as the new gatekeepers of information, can change those economics by not only building better tools for people to process that information, but by making it easier to become data literate.

The thing that surprised me most from this budget is that the BBC calculated the financial cost to me of last week’s budget is £3 per year (excluding the VAT rise). Given the high cost that those who will be hit harder will pay, there is interesting potential for engagement here. Last time, there wasn’t the communication networks to make this voice heard: http://deeplyflawedbuttrying.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/single-parenthood-and-victimhood.

One big difference is not that those connections can be made – they always could – but they can now be made by far more people. Shirky references the South Korean protests about beef imports, and how a significant proportion of the protestors were teenage girls who read about it on a boy- band fansite. The UK Government is currently asking for input on it’s budget plans which would cut a lot of spending on the young, and spend more on the elderly. Partially based on the fact that the elderly vote, and school/college/university student can’t/don’t. But maybe they don’t need to. Completely coincidentally, the labour party is running a leadership election, and is letting anyone under 27 join for £1. The labour party has a membership of 200,000. I’m pretty sure that there are internet forums which have a young UK readership higher than that.

If Ed Balls wasn’t so far behind, I’m sure Guido would be pushing his readership to be members and vote appropriately: http://order-order.com/2010/06/26/saturday-seven-up-37/

The UK government is asking for people’s opinions on things; what happens when they start to be provided,not just in the form of feedback into your freedom, but other service that use that as the start, not the end…

While you think of that, for now, I’m off to find a gin cart…

Update: Tom Watson reports that the labour membership has grown by 25,000 since the election and 1 in 3 are under 30. There’s roughly 10% of an increase in the party. And Ed Miliband wants votes at 16, almost all of whom will be affected by current cuts. Assuming that the next election is in 2015, if that happened, everyone in secondary school now would have a vote then, and they would have all grown up with the networked tools everyone else is figuring out how to use – to them, they’re not “new tools”, they’re just tools, and they’ve not been indoctrinated into the conventions of political games. They may also have the biggest motivations for long term education and opportunity. Do school cuts, or discussions of university funding, look a bit different now?