On Jan 2, 2013 5:12 AM, "André Rebentisch" <[email protected]> wrote: > > Am 02.01.2013 08:54, schrieb Shava Nerad: > > Reasons people told you you never should try, you'd never have access > to power. Reasons that power as currently exercised never seemed > attractive. > > Mostly falsified. >
No arguments. Although a lot of it I find is an aversion to "sausagemaking," if you know the idiom. Also, I remember a conversation with a friend in Oregon at a science fiction convention years ago. I was working on the Dean campaign and some friends were reacting as though I had plague, even though my online activity had always been very political (but non-profit/NGO). I was saying to him, "Here is a collection of brilliant systems thinking socialized geeks who love nothing b better than to try to out-think world-building history simulations that can span thousands of pages over decades, but they won't take up the reins of their own democracy. Wtf? Don't they see their own potential?" And my friend, a grizzled disabled Vietnam vet, averred that *that* was precisely why most of the brightest ones didn't get involved - because they were afraid they might change *everything* and then they'd be stuck like me the rest of their lives, seeing what they could do. Wise guy. Although, my experience has been, most people can always find a sufficient reason to become disenchanted and fall away. Slack seems stronger by far than engagement. Overcoming the "sickness unto death" - slack, despair, apathy, internal strife and miscommunication in organizing - now if we could code against *that* we would be unstoppable. I know how to catalyze systems thinking in a few hours. How to teach a teenager how to plan a social action project with a sustainable team in 15h or less (with a pretty good record of success in long-term leadership development among students). But I can't set kids up to navigate every manifestation of the inevitable entropy social change projects experience from within -- personally from burnout, from group dynamics, from the many forms of outside pressures. Drama llama - loss of comfort zone - not a hobby any more. Perseverance isn't big in an attention economy. How do we code it in? Support ourselves and each other, while maintaining reasonable effective discipline and efficiency? Organizing has traditionally been "closed source" tech - handed down from teacher to protege, apostolic succession. Partly it's because organizers are in perpetual motion. They rarely slow down to write. Much of technique is a living document - volatile, as old techniques become stale or develop countermeasures, or new media emerge. But a lot is simply partisanship: if I document my tips and techniques, my opposition can not only use the same but develop strategies against me. Never mind that it's likely that it's in the public interest in a democracy that all these strategies be fully transparent and available to all for use and as media crit. Perhaps a first step toward a LARP culture for civic engagement is publishing the rulebook - or a better architectural framework for the community to contribute, build, and refine the rulebook for the biggest LARP in the world? SN
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