Community

The new prob­lems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our inge­nu­ity and our care­ful, cre­ative con­sid­er­a­tion. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get mean­ing­fully involved.

Why is this?

I think there is a col­lec­tive feel­ing that these prob­lems are too big for any of us to make a real dif­fer­ence. We doubt our abil­ity to influ­ence impor­tant mat­ters when there are well-connected lob­by­ists, busi­nesses with billion-dollar bud­gets and polit­i­cal par­ties firmly wed­ded to their own notions. And these doubts seem per­fectly warrented.

There is a great para­gragh in Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, about what keeps us from being polit­i­cally active:

Very few peo­ple are going to have the time or the energy or the com­mit­ment to carry out the con­stant bat­tle that’s required to get out­side of the [main­stream media]. The easy thing to do you know — you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day, you’re not going to spend the evening car­ry­ing on a research project, so you turn on the tube and say its prob­a­bly right, or you look at the head­lines in the paper and then you watch the sports or some­thing. That’s basi­cally the way the sys­tem of indoc­tri­na­tion works. Sure the other stuff is there, but you’re going to have to work to find it.

This is the chal­lenge we face. Even if your beef is not with the media, you don’t have the time or the energy for it (what­ever that ”it” is for each of us) at the end of the day. We take care of our fam­i­lies, feed our cat, mow the lawn and then there’s not much left over. So, our hard-won uni­ver­sity degrees in Geo-Chemistry or Post-Feminist Neo­col­lo­nial­ism stare down at us from the wall, while we avoid eye-contact and look for a new episode of the Fam­ily Guy.

But the tide is turn­ing my friends

Indi­vid­u­als (as com­mit­ted, edu­cated and inter­ested as they were) have found the sys­tem stacked against them for hun­dreds of years. It had to do with the chal­lenges of orga­niz­ing. It was the basis of Marx’s opti­mism (‘If ONLY we could orga­nize!’) and every major world leader benifited from the fact that they couldn’t. Orga­niz­ing was very hard.

Back in the day

Con­sider how hard it was to even share a news­pa­per arti­cle with a friend:

1. You had to get your own copy of the news­pa­per and cut the arti­cle out with scissors
2. Then, find an envelope
3. Then, copy out your friend’s address
4. And then get a stamp and go out­side to find a place where you can send the letter

It wasn’t THAT hard, but it was hard enough that you prob­a­bly wouldn’t bother. What WAS hard was form­ing a group. You would need to get the word out some­how (maybe by let­ter again) and have a place to meet. It took a con­sid­er­able amount of time and effort and at least a lit­tle fund­ing. The inter­net has removed a lot of these barriers.

The major chal­le­nege to mass-participation for hun­dreds of years has been the dif­fi­cul­ties involved in orga­niz­ing. I recently fin­ished Clay Shirky’s hugely-underrated Here Comes Every­body,which asks the ques­tion: ”what hap­pens when peo­ple are given the tools to do things together, with­out need­ing tra­di­tional orga­ni­za­tional struc­tures?” (The mail­ing a let­ter exam­ple above is adapted from his book).

Today we can group together almost effort­lessly; we can orga­nize and coor­di­nate asyn­chro­nously, in muli­ple groups at the same time –with­out geo­graph­i­cal or finan­cial constraints.

So today it’s mostly a ques­tion of lead­er­ship. If your vision is strong enough, if your idea is impor­tant enough, a lot of us can and will hap­pily join you.

You have the power!

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