Here is a quick recap since it's been a while I've written here (I've written a bit on my blog in n-1.cc though).
When the spanish protest camps made their decision to shift focus from camps to assemblies in each neighbourhood, back in June, I started going to my local commission meetings. It was a brilliant experience, to sit with other spaniards and see what we actually wanted to implement from our experience of the camp. I took part in the culture group and talked about participative art, and how you can use flashmobs and quite innocent actions to get people involved, or at least questioning things. We organised a cabaret where we brought together lots of local people for a memorable performance in our local square. This was in Sant Andreu del Palomar. I've since moved to the city centre, so am too far away, but I have about 4 different assemblies to choose from here, and getting energy to get stuck in a bit more.
Sant Andreu in Barcelona is an area with small streets and old and beautiful mediterranean houses a bit like Gracia, but without the drunken tourists. It was a bastion of resistance to franco, and before then, one day in 36 it was the area where thousands of rifles were siezed by local anarchists - contributing massively to their short but inspiring time of self organised local democracy. One assembly participant said the soldiers there had left their bullets in a different warehouse across the yard so they couldn't shoot them! Another described the taking of plaza catalunya back then, as told by grandparents - that the fascist soldiers were expecting the civil guard to be on their side, but they weren't - and they didn't have a chance, and he showed me which way everyone had gone. Back to this century - we then organised an end-of-summer "university" with the Universitat Indignada, which led to me talking about Transition Initiatives together with Antonio Scotti of Barcelona en Transició to a full square, and showing In Transition. Somehow there were also 3 other Peak Oil related talks, one of which was Martí Olivella, doing the rounds with his own version of Transition - applied in his case to politics. Soon after, we started an urban garden project with a lot of enthusiasm from pretty much everyone who passed: someone asked - "when do you meet? Every Monday?" "I don't know it's our first time, but okay!" and they are still at it...
With all the other members of Barcelona en Transicio, this cultural revolution that was the 15-m protest movement emerging from the squares, really got us energised, as people were now asking real questions, not just about the economy but about the earth, and family and the future. I just got the news the other day that 400 people have signed up, in a village out in the countryside, to support a politically oriented version of the Transition Towns recipe, pioneered by one of the speakers at our Uni Indignada: Marti Olivella, and an enormous stretch of land once used by Coca Cola is now to be proposed as a project to the local city council for food growing projects, and of course there is Calafou - the post-capitalist experimental factory space outside Barcelona, by the fantastic Montserrat Mountains. In Calafou, there is a hackerspace and a brewery project, as well as many smaller workshop spaces and living spaces - all closely linked with local assemblies so as to provide an alternative system in which to start to inhabit, and slowly stop being so dependent on what are now very fragile and unequal societies.
The hackerspace for now is inhabited by Lorea developers, the creators and maintainers of the 15-M's own ELGG based social network (but federated, secure, private, collaborative, and task/collab oriented) - N-1.cc.
Of course I played a lot of gigs for fundraisers, and got out a lot of old chilean Nueva Trova songs that I'd not played for years, but somehow fit the times again....
Now that the Occupy movement has joined in this incredible form of protest and reinvention that began for us back in May, things are really starting to change on a global level. I expect the governments and powers that be might even make some token concessions at this point, to try and get everyone christmas shopping.
The occupy movement has inspired a huge amount of creative, projects that work across disciplines in modern culture creating international IRC networks, teamspeak meetings, physical journeys or meetings. Some of these projects and initiatives start to build a symbiotic rather than parasitic kind of technological and social system around us. Now we are dominated by algorithms that determine all the decisions for us.
And then, there's the urgent problems around. Who am I to say anything, but this is meant to be a global movement for democracy so here is my suggestion: http://pastebin.com/xz6kZ3HS
It's a plan for a way to do a global people's meeting, like a giant physical and virtual assembly where we all, the people of this earth, as a one off, meet, and decide once and for all the future of the planet and what we are going to do about it. Think of it as a people's Bretton Woods, without the bickering. There are lots of smaller regional initiatives going on, but it's hard to organise larger get togethers, but we can start to think of distributed ways for it to happen, although I first thought of it as a time constrained thing, where we were all at it simultaneously.
Here is the piratepad where we're working on more of it. Feel free to contact me and join in. One of the things about it is that it needs skills that are already there around us, and abilities that are pretty widespread already. I really hope something like this can happen.
If there was such a global meeting, I would take my non-crazy robot idea there. (see next post!)
When the spanish protest camps made their decision to shift focus from camps to assemblies in each neighbourhood, back in June, I started going to my local commission meetings. It was a brilliant experience, to sit with other spaniards and see what we actually wanted to implement from our experience of the camp. I took part in the culture group and talked about participative art, and how you can use flashmobs and quite innocent actions to get people involved, or at least questioning things. We organised a cabaret where we brought together lots of local people for a memorable performance in our local square. This was in Sant Andreu del Palomar. I've since moved to the city centre, so am too far away, but I have about 4 different assemblies to choose from here, and getting energy to get stuck in a bit more.
Sant Andreu in Barcelona is an area with small streets and old and beautiful mediterranean houses a bit like Gracia, but without the drunken tourists. It was a bastion of resistance to franco, and before then, one day in 36 it was the area where thousands of rifles were siezed by local anarchists - contributing massively to their short but inspiring time of self organised local democracy. One assembly participant said the soldiers there had left their bullets in a different warehouse across the yard so they couldn't shoot them! Another described the taking of plaza catalunya back then, as told by grandparents - that the fascist soldiers were expecting the civil guard to be on their side, but they weren't - and they didn't have a chance, and he showed me which way everyone had gone. Back to this century - we then organised an end-of-summer "university" with the Universitat Indignada, which led to me talking about Transition Initiatives together with Antonio Scotti of Barcelona en Transició to a full square, and showing In Transition. Somehow there were also 3 other Peak Oil related talks, one of which was Martí Olivella, doing the rounds with his own version of Transition - applied in his case to politics. Soon after, we started an urban garden project with a lot of enthusiasm from pretty much everyone who passed: someone asked - "when do you meet? Every Monday?" "I don't know it's our first time, but okay!" and they are still at it...
With all the other members of Barcelona en Transicio, this cultural revolution that was the 15-m protest movement emerging from the squares, really got us energised, as people were now asking real questions, not just about the economy but about the earth, and family and the future. I just got the news the other day that 400 people have signed up, in a village out in the countryside, to support a politically oriented version of the Transition Towns recipe, pioneered by one of the speakers at our Uni Indignada: Marti Olivella, and an enormous stretch of land once used by Coca Cola is now to be proposed as a project to the local city council for food growing projects, and of course there is Calafou - the post-capitalist experimental factory space outside Barcelona, by the fantastic Montserrat Mountains. In Calafou, there is a hackerspace and a brewery project, as well as many smaller workshop spaces and living spaces - all closely linked with local assemblies so as to provide an alternative system in which to start to inhabit, and slowly stop being so dependent on what are now very fragile and unequal societies.
The hackerspace for now is inhabited by Lorea developers, the creators and maintainers of the 15-M's own ELGG based social network (but federated, secure, private, collaborative, and task/collab oriented) - N-1.cc.
Of course I played a lot of gigs for fundraisers, and got out a lot of old chilean Nueva Trova songs that I'd not played for years, but somehow fit the times again....
Now that the Occupy movement has joined in this incredible form of protest and reinvention that began for us back in May, things are really starting to change on a global level. I expect the governments and powers that be might even make some token concessions at this point, to try and get everyone christmas shopping.
The occupy movement has inspired a huge amount of creative, projects that work across disciplines in modern culture creating international IRC networks, teamspeak meetings, physical journeys or meetings. Some of these projects and initiatives start to build a symbiotic rather than parasitic kind of technological and social system around us. Now we are dominated by algorithms that determine all the decisions for us.
And then, there's the urgent problems around. Who am I to say anything, but this is meant to be a global movement for democracy so here is my suggestion: http://pastebin.com/xz6kZ3HS
It's a plan for a way to do a global people's meeting, like a giant physical and virtual assembly where we all, the people of this earth, as a one off, meet, and decide once and for all the future of the planet and what we are going to do about it. Think of it as a people's Bretton Woods, without the bickering. There are lots of smaller regional initiatives going on, but it's hard to organise larger get togethers, but we can start to think of distributed ways for it to happen, although I first thought of it as a time constrained thing, where we were all at it simultaneously.
Here is the piratepad where we're working on more of it. Feel free to contact me and join in. One of the things about it is that it needs skills that are already there around us, and abilities that are pretty widespread already. I really hope something like this can happen.
If there was such a global meeting, I would take my non-crazy robot idea there. (see next post!)
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