hello there! i don't mean to be negative, so i'll say it in advance: it's my personal point of view
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Graziano Milano <[email protected]>wrote: > We, Italians, like to experiment, so we have our own Michael Moore who has > already gone a step or two further, he launched a political movement, the > Five-Star Movement. His name is Beppe Grillo and he is a comedian with the > sixth mostÂvisited blog in the world, with 6.5million unique users per > month: > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/comedy/8362260/Beppe-Grillo-interview.html# > http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/ > > As a candidate to next Milan mayor election the local meetup of the > Five-Star Movement has chosen in an 'online primary' a 20 years old > University student, Mattia Calise. He won't win but he will get in as a > Councilor probably with one or two others from the Movement, and he will > have thousands advising and supporting him all the way. > > To get all our countries back we need to get in there with our people and > our agenda, no more Democratic or Republican, Labour or Tory, Left or Right, > as Grillo says "we are above". > > > Beppe Grillo is an experiment, yes. But possibly of something different. probabily BG represents an experiment in crowdsourced politics and consensus. and i don't know if this is entirely positive. if you look at the research documents produced by Casaleggio Associates http://www.casaleggio.it/ they speak about really mischievous things: they really are interested in how power schemes can leverage wide audiences using networked mechanisms. And in having people working for free, moved by some packaged ideals, emotional involvement and, possibly led by some guru-like figure that is actually a product itself, becoming the embodied medium of a precise strategy. It is a lot like companies going "green": it's not for the world or for the people, it's that they make more money out of it. now: obviously this shifting back and forth between social and profit is not entirely "bad" (and let's define "bad", it's not so simple or straightforward), but one thing that it is for sure is not-transparent. and BG's "movement" is exactly like that: not-transparent. you see enormous amounts of resources employed in his strategy, and none of it is clear in source, purpose, or long-term strategy. from my point of view: we don't need these heroes. They're not a solution. what we need is people taking their future into their own hands, through knowledge and awareness. wonderful things happen when they do. the whole problem here is "representational democracy": it is a tool, for a few people. and the change towards network-based consensus is becoming a different tool for the same thing: political parties are changing, taking different forms, using crowdsourcing instead of propaganda as the source of their consensus. It is happening and will happen a lot more really soon: citizenship is moving to digital domains. But for now this process is opaque, just like the one that sees companies going green and social: if you look under the surface you will find people whose job is to have 50 Facebook profiles, 30 twitter IDs, 40 blog accounts, and paid bloggers, influencers, opinion-leaders, trolls. All of them are enacting strategies that other people don't know about. This is exactly the research domain of Casaleggio Associates, the people that make BG's blog possible. conflict, as always, is a thing that moves: a conflict takes place in a certain space/time, and then it becomes something else. Power finds it ways and encapsulates those spaces, making them become encoded, part of the staus-quo. When this happens (and it will, always, happen, because people make it happen.. leaders will emerge, and that is a "profession") conflict moves to another space/time, using different forms of expression. initiatives like BG's blog are no more "conflictual": they express a different form of power. A nicer one, maybe (for now?), which is more aware of the environment and employing an idea of "dedication to the cause" which is better than bankers buying out the strategies of political parties; but it also looks a lot like the things that happen at corporate parties, the ones that are use to build a sense of belonging in the people working there. current struggles in north africa and in student movements are already usng digital media and networks in ways which are really different: fast, shifting, emergent, constantly moving, changing forms of expression, identities and approaches. ciao! xDxD.vs.xDxD
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