So, what about Politics? - #SWAP
3 November - 4 November 2017
#SWAP: Day 1
Friday 3/11, 10:00 - 18:30. Free entrance!
Registration recommended through this form.
Moderator:Bram Crevits
09:45 - Doors Open/Registration
10:15 - 12:30
- Welcome speech by Yves Bernard, iMAL director
- Keynote 1 by Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation, BE)
How can the commons change society, the economy, and democracy? - Saya Sauliere (Medialab-Prado/ParticipaLab, ES)
Understanding participation in Decide Madrid, an e-participation platform - Sanna Gothbi (DigidemLab, SE)
Digidem Lab -- bringing together hackers and activists for social change - Emmanuele Braga (Macao, IT)
Macao and its Commoncoin: the question of value - Lieza Dessein (Smart, BE)
Technology geared towards solidarity, #platformcoop
- Q&A
Panel/Debate
12:30 - 13:30
- Lunch break
13:30 - 16:15
- Keynote 2 by Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) & Alex Foti
Precariat and new models of governance - Lauren Lapidge (Unmonastery, GR)
Unmonastery: new technologies and radical action, or how to forge utopian steel - Virgile Deville (democracy.earth, FR)
Democracy.earth : Democracy for the internet era - Mònica Garriga Miret (Decidim.org, ES)
Decidim.org A digital common’s infrastructure for participatory democracy
- Xavier Damman (Opencollective, US/BE)
Open Collective, reducing the friction for citizens to create associations and sustain themselves - Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Commoning the Network: Cultural Producers as Co-Creators of Cultural Commons in Medellin, Colombia - Panayotis Antoniadis (Nethood, GR)
Community networks and DIY networking: utopias, artistic representations, and activism
- Q&A
Panel/Debate
16:15 - 16:30
- Coffee Break
16:30 - 18:30
- David Gómez (ES)
Teixidora.net Weaving networks for coral narratives - David Potocnik (SI/ES)
So, how about hackbases? The case of Totalism.org - Khushboo Balwani (Civic Innovation Network, BE)
Reversing the silicon valley model: making collaboration the new norm in the city.
- Arianna Mazzeo (ES)
Barcelona. A Case-study of co-production of public goods with smart citizens - Barrett Brown (US)
Pursuanceproject.org: Impactful, agile, secure civic collaboration based on "proceduralism of agreement."
- Q&A
Panel/Debate
About the speakers
Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation)
How can the commons change society, the economy, and democracy?
The P2P Foundation believes that a commons-centric transition is necessary both because mutualization can drastically reduce the human footprint and because the self-organization of the commons is the only true source of democracy in the present elective oligarchy. In this presentation, we will show, based on a recent study in Ghent, how we can envisage new institutional structures, based on public-commons partnerships, the introduction of a 'contributive democracy' and the commonification of public services, but also a political strategy that can expand the weight of the commons in our societies and make it the 'new normal'.
About the speaker
Michel Bauwens is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel is also research director of CommonsTransition.org a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics. He has (co-)published various books and reports in english, dutch and french, such as (with Vasilis Kostakis), ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and last spring, has crafted a Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent in Belgium, after a similar project for Ecuador in 2014.
> http://commonstransition.org/commons-transition-plan-city-ghent/
> https://p2pfoundation.net/
Saya Sauliere (MediaLab-Prado/Participa Lab)
Understanding participation in Decide Madrid, an e-participation platform
Understanding how citizens participate online in Decide Madrid is a key step to design tailor-made strategies to improve e-participation. Decide Madrid is an ‘open government platform’. Our research mixes data analysis, social network analysis, digital research with qualitative methodologies. It helps us to understand patterns in citizen participation and interests.
About the speaker
BA of Sociology and Anthropology (University of Paris VIII – France) and Master in Development Studies (University of East Anglia). I worked in South America, especially in Ecuador, supporting participatory budgeting and planning process for a decade. Living in Madrid for the last 7 years, currently working in a research project of MediaLab Prado on Participatory Communities (online and offline) in Decide Madrid, the e-participation platform developed by Madrid City Hall. Before I was coordinating digital projects in the advocacy department of Oxfam Intermón, working with Data, Social Media and Digital Activism.
> https://decide.madrid.es/
> http://medialab-prado.es/participa-lab
Sanna Gothbi (Digidem Lab)
Digidem Lab: Bringing together hackers and activists for social change
Strengthening social movements and democratic participation with digital technology
Digidem Lab from Gothenburg presents its work for digital participatory democracy. Digidem Lab is a new space in Gothenburg, Sweden, where young people come together to develop tech products for participation, as well as promoting and building on existing tools. They work in cooperation with social movements and bring together young activists, developers, designers and anyone who believes another world is possible.
"We live in a turbulent time, where many countries in Europe face the long term effects of austerity, the rising threat of right wing populism and a lack of or deteriorating trust in political process or impact. But in places like Iceland and Spain this trend has partly been countered thanks to collaboration between social movements and the civic tech community, by creating new forms of direct democratic participation with digital tools."
How can we change the political landscape by a more extensive engagement in new technology for participation and how do we best collaborate between hackers and social movements?
About the speaker
Sanna Ghotbi is an activist for refugee's rights, environmental issues and an elected representative for the feminist party in the local council of Gothenburg. She is active in the municipalist movement, and is working for Digidem Lab to advance deliberative democracy at the city level in Sweden.
Emanuele Braga (Macao Center)
Macao and its Commoncoin: the question of value
The Milano-based Macao center is a self-organised Center for Art and Research. It has released its own community cryptocurrency, the Commoncoin. Governance of the Commoncoin project is decided by consensus of a general assembly. At the end of every month, all members of the Center’s assembly receive an equal basic income in Euro generated by the income of the activities of the organization. Emanuele writes, “In a plausible future in which algorithms might control our economical, relational and spatial behavior, it will be a challenge to find a way to question these systems without creating a democratic deficit as a collateral effect. As automation begins to replace more of the work once performed by humans, how will it be possible to keep purchasing power? In the past, wealth was redistributed through salary, and the salary was the focal point of the workers’ struggles and the union’s demands. But what happens when income is no longer the central issue? What new models of struggle and organization can we imagine?”
About the speaker
Emanuele is co-founder of the Macao center, an artist, researcher and activist. In addition to his work at Macao, he co-founded the dance and theatre company Balletto Civile (2003), the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), as well as Landscape Choreography (2012), an art platform questioning the role of the body under capitalism. His research focuses on models of cultural production, processes of social transformation, political economy, labor rights and the institution of the commons.
Lieza Dessein (Smart)
Technology geared towards solidarity, #platformcoop
SMart is a cooperative that enables workers to develop their professional activities autonomously under the protection and security of the employee status. SMart offers financial management and accounting tools, insurance, legal advice, training sessions, workspaces and network opportunities. To be able to scale and operate in a decentralized way SMart created an online platform. On the platform members can independently invoice their clients, declare work and preregister expense notes. SMart is a shared company operating since 1998 and counting over 80.000 members. The Belgian structure converted into a coop in January 2017. It is currently counting over 13.000 stakeholders. SMart is constantly looking into ways to ensure the needs of its members are met and to enhance transparency in its way of operating.
About the speaker
Over the years, Lieza Dessein acquired expertise in professional development, the management of atypical workspaces and the impact of digitalization on the work environment. She is in charge of the development of the creative hub Brussel Art Factory (BAF), a workplace for creative entrepreneurs. The creative hubs of SMart are part of the European Creative Hubs Network developed by the British Council. For BAF, Lieza is serving on the steering committee for the creation and definition of this network. Lieza Dessein is also advocating for a fairer digital economy and represent Smart in the platform.coop movement that is promoting democratic and inclusive business models applied to digital companies.
Geert Lovink (Institute ofNetwork Cultures) & Alex Foti
Precariat and new models of governance
In this duo presentation Geert Lovink (Amsterdam) and Alex Foti (Milan) discuss their recent work on strong ties and organized networks in the light of Foti's theory of the precariat. What’s the possible role of social movements and political parties in this era of right-wing populism and nationalism? Who are the inspiring actors these days and how do social movements come into being today? Antifa networks? Urban movements such as in Barcelona? How can neoliberal hegemony be broken? Is there something like European revolutionary subject now that the labour/social democratic tradition is all but collapsing? And what role is internet playing, presuming we cannot simply copy-paste alt.right memes and fake news into the European context?
About the speakers
Alex Foti is an editor, essayist and activist based in Milano. He was among the founders of ChainWorkers and EuroMayDay, early instances of the self-organization of precarious workers in Europe. Trained in economics, sociology, and history at Bocconi, the New School and Columbia, he has written several articles and books, including Anarchy in the EU (2009) and General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction (2017).
Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing and the future of art criticism. He also teaches at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students..
Lauren Lapidge (Unmonastery)
Unmonastery: new technologies and radical action, or how to forge utopian steel (still!)
This talk is a brief introduction to the unMonastery, its organisational model, its aspirations and the question that ultimately drives it: how to enhance our capacity for self efficiency, sustainability and resilience in the future. Unmonastery re-imagines monastic principles in the contemporary moment combined with the design pattern of the hackerspace to create an interface for people to interact and work together in addressing concerns both on the local and global scale. Believing that a synthesis of urban and regional survival strategies can potentially provide an alternative meaningful life, our current embodiment has temporarily planted itself in a mountainous villages in rural Greece. We will talk about our experience of developing a DIY networking toolkit for location based collective awareness alongside our usual immorality of learning how to live together. With crisis being portrayed as a natural feature of the Greek landscape we would like to discuss how the dynamically emerging collectives and self organised networks are showing practical responses above and beyond the mainstream political narrative. In simple words how grassroots organising and autonomous structures spread a glimpse of hope towards forbidden utopias.
About the speaker
Lauren Lapidge is an artist, researcher and organiser. She is a member of the unmonastery, a place based social innovation model that is rethinking monasticism and hackerspaces to prototype a network of places across Europe. Her practice explores how emerging technologies interact with current social and political significances. She participates various projects relating to the commons, cooperativism, alternative currencies, p2p technologies and solidarity structures in Athens where she lives.
Virgille Deville (Democracy.earth)
Democracy Earth Foundation, working on the building blocks of a decentralized democracy
The Democracy Earth Foundation (DEF) is a Y Combinator-backed non-profit that has been advocating about the importance building new models for democratic governance that enable humanity to collaborate and address global issues in transparency. DEF has been working on a paper and an open source software project that provide for the building blocks of blockchain powered liquid democracy. In this session we will elaborate on the challenge for civic tech to build upon decentralized protocols and the importance of building new models for democratic governance that operate at the right scale of governance in the Internet age.
About the speaker
Graduated from Sciences Po Paris and HEC Montréal, Virgile is a civic tech entrepreneur. He started several initiatives that revolve around citizen participation through technology. He is the co-founder of Open Source Politics (OSP), a startup that implements open source civic tech software for public institutions. Last year OSP worked on over 20 online and offline consultation projects with different level of administration from the city of Paris to the French Digital Agency. He also represents Democracy Earth in Europe, an NGO that studies how we can use blockchain technologies to implement liquid democracy and explore new form of governance. Lastly, he is also co-funded Open Democracy Now, a collective that organises hackathons to build open source software for open government. Between 2016 and 2017, 7 hackathons were organized gathering a lively community of 400 people and 30 projects.
Mònica Garriga Miret (Decidim.org)
Decidim.org: A digital common’s infrastructure for participatory democracy
decidim.barcelona is the Barcelona City Council digital participatory platform for building a more democratic city. It aims to acting as both a portal and infrastructure for the participatory processes promoted by the City Council and those started by citizens and associations. Being free software, any person or institution can use, install and configure Decidim, for this reason, other municipalities are already following the lead of Barcelona, working together to improve the tool. Decidim is a democratic and participatory project. The #Metadecidim community - made up by users, developers, researchers, experts and citizens - meets monthly to design, collaboratively, new functionalities for the platform. Metadecidim is an open community, anyone can join to build this project together.
About the speaker
Mònica Garriga Miret specialised in Communication and Multi-platform and Transmedia with the aim to looking into ways of using journalism/communication for the audiences to generate change themselves. She is currently developing Teixidora.net -an initiative to track, document and connect techno-social activity in the area of Barcelona- and is also contributing to Decidim -the free open-source participatory democracy platform for cities and organizations. She co-designed, developed and implemented the CitizenSqKm project and Km2Ciutat, a research into the use of mobile and GIS technologies to foster transformation through education, local government and citizen participation. She was a partner at media140 with projects and events, spanning science, media and technology across the globe. And worked as a foreign correspondent in South East Asia, Australia and the South Pacific (1999-2011).
> https://monicagarriga.net
> https://decidim.org/
Xavier Damman (OpenCollective)
Government as a platform. Unleashing the talent of citizens to build the things that they want
decidim.barcelona is the Barcelona City Council digital participatory platform for building a more democratic city. It aims to acting as both a portal and infrastructure for the participatory processes promoted by the City Council and those started by citizens and associations. Being free software, any person or institution can use, install and configure Decidim, for this reason, other municipalities are already following the lead of Barcelona, working together to improve the tool. Decidim is a democratic and participatory project. The #Metadecidim community - made up by users, developers, researchers, experts and citizens - meets monthly to design, collaboratively, new functionalities for the platform. Metadecidim is an open community, anyone can join to build this project together.
About the speaker
Xavier is an entrepreneur. After founding Storify.com in San Francisco, a storytelling platform used by most top news organizations around the world to highlight what people share on social networks (now in the hands of Adobe), he moved to NYC to start Open Collective with Pia Mancini (DemocracyOS/Partido de la red) and Aseem Sood (Google/Dropbox). The goal is to enable people to create collectives that operate in full transparency and that can raise money for their activities without having to worry about the cumbersome process of creating and maintaining a 20th century legal entity. Open Collective is today the largest platform for open source communities around the world to raise money and sustain themselves and it is rapidly evolving into other types of mission driven collectives.
Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh)
Commoning the Network: Cultural Producers as Co-Creators of Cultural Commons in Medellin, Colombia
The paper looks at a network of cultural producers and grassroots art spaces in Medellin, Colombia focusing on their creation of cultural values in the city – and apparently of cultural commons. The paper is based on an ongoing ethnographic research initiated in 2015 where initial data has shown an emerging network of cultural producers in Medellin who are merging together traditional Colombian cultural values (buen vivir, buen conocer) with new media art ethos (Do-It-With-Others, free libre knowledge, open source, peer-to-peer learning) as well as decolonizing and autonomous forms of knowledge production. The data has also demonstrated their clear interest in co-creating ‘cultural commons’. Following this line of inquiry, the paper looks at collaborative creative practices as paradigms of a new ontology of knowledge through action and sociality, which transforms the way art producers co-create, partake and make use of the products of their creation. Within this context, creativity, and subsequent knowledge formation is looked as forms of social interaction rather than the outcomes of social activities or otherwise as a collective becoming; a commoning. The paper also proposes an ethnographic research on-its-making where participants are peer-ethnographers using collaborative tools to engage with the fieldwork practices and writing-up of the ethnographic text.
About the speaker
Penny Travlou is a Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory, University of Edinburgh. Her research is interdisciplinary, focusing on theories of space and place, the politics of public space, digital culture, distributed networks, 'the commons' and ethnography. She is currently in the Research Team of the British Council/Newton Fund project "Medellín Urban Innovation" (MUI) as well as working in EU COST Action CA16121, "From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy". Penny is also a research team member of the P2P Foundation and a member of the Alliance of the Commons in Greece. She co-founded Options FoodLab, a food-related social enterprise and community for refugees' integration in Athens. Since 2015, she has been actively involved in the Athens Subsumption/Metaxication Inc. performance art collective looking at urban issues of gentrification, precarious labour, tourist landscapes and commons.
> http://www.subsumption.space/blog
> http://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/architecture-landscape-architecture/penny-travlou
Panayotis Antoniadis (NetHood.org)
Community networks and DIY networking: utopias, artistic representations, and activism
The idea of an Internet built "by the people for the people" has stimulated the imagination and narratives, and led to various technological and political initiatives already from the early days. Today, this utopian vision is more and more supported and the efforts to achieve it are intensified at multiple levels, because of the increasing and threatening power of the Internet global corporations. This power and its detrimental effects, on the one hand helps to communities to engage in the co-creation of viable alternatives, but also gives rise to certain misconceptions that could lead to self-defeating strategies of resistance like the blockchain hype and the so-called decentralized Internet. In this talk I will make a historical overview of community and DIY networking, including both artistic and activist perspectives, and reflect on possible strategies for future steps toward effective research and action in this area, with a focus on the social and political dimensions.
About the speaker
Panayotis Antoniadis is the co-founder of the Zurich-based nonprofit organization NetHood. He has an interdisciplinary profile with background on the design and implementation of distributed systems (Computer Science Department, University of Crete), Ph.D. on the economics of peer-to-peer networks (Athens University of Economics and Business), post-doc on policies for the federation of shared virtualized infrastructures (UPMC Sorbonne Universites), and interdisciplinary research on the role of ICTs for bridging the digital with the physical space in cities (ETH Zurich). Today Panayotis is trying to combine research and action in different areas of self-organization including community networks and DIY networking, complementary currencies, cooperative housing, and grassroots education.
David Gómez (Teixidora.net)
Teixidora: Weaving networks for coral narratives
Teixidora.net is a digital platform -working in the local commons and technosocial domains in Barcelona- for collaborative live-writing in community events based on community mapping, engagement and participation. It aims to connect distributed knowledge generated by a community with the relationships among participants at events and with the subjects or discussions. The purpose is to produce collective narratives, follow what happens and weave relationships by sharing knowledge. Teixidora.net is based on several applications and devices, it combines Etherpad (a web-based collaborative real-time editor) with a Semantic MediaWiki (an extension of the popular open-source MediaWiki application developed by Wikipedia Foundation), and microblogging platforms, Quitter and Twitter.
About the speaker
David Gomez Fontanills is a member of Free Knowledge Institute, leading the coordination of the transition programme for commons-oriented initiatives, La Comunificadora, and is currently producing Teixidora.net, an initiative to track, document and connect techno-social activity in the area of Barcelona. He is also an assistant teacher in the Multimedia Degree at UOC, since 2000.
As a member of the collective TAG Taller d'Intangibles, since 1996, he has promoted networked participatory projects, such as HKP, about technological appropriation and other artistic activities and texts on net.art, online collaboration and creative appropriation of artifacts. He also promoted PliegOs.net self-publishing initiative.
Since 2007 he has worked on several semantic wiki platforms for education, culture and science such as Viquilletra, wiki EOI and Experimenta_wiki. He promotes free knowledge with Amical Wikimedia and Wikimedia Spain, and in 2013 with a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation he launched the wikiArS initiative to encourage participation of art schools in Wikipedia . He has a degree in Fine Arts (University of Barcelona) and Master in Knowledge Society (Open University of Barcelona, UOC).
> https://www.teixidora.net
> http://enlloc.net
David Potocnik (totalism.org)
So, how about hackbases? The case of cyberhippietotalism
As others, hackers (technologists, theorists, artists, ...), the supposed vanguard, too labour in bullshit jobs to subsist. In majority, their lives are subsumed by the logic of current neoliberal capitalist societies, and actually further those agendas. Arising from their fund-politics entanglement, the current institutional types (startups, non-governmental or academic organisations, as well as current hackerspaces) are insufficient to change that for the many. The already limited coverage (as per their limited replicability/scalability) these vehicles offer, in addition, often seems to be in systemic danger proportionally to how much their work is transformative. Hackbases however, might be the critically missing, replicable, resilient subsistence and work infrastructure model, to enable general full-time lives of integral political and technical practice. These live-in hack/theory/art spaces are experimenting with, developing, and currently offering new foundations for an insurgence - to shift the negative trend of how technology is redefining societies and natures.
About the speaker
David Potočnik, b.1986, Slovenia. Critical technologist and practitioner. Studied Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Since 2009 working on middlemachine, an unreleased fragment ideation-execution-publication engine, in the context of CHT/Totalism hackbase in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain [http://totalism.org]. Recently released E2H collaborative content system [http://e2h.middlemachine.com], and launching the Totalist cooperative [http://coop.totalism.org]. Splitting time between the Lanzarote base, and different European capitals [http://totalism.org/maps]. Researching full work automation, post-capitalism, representation systems, hypermedia, supply chains, and the Anthropocene. I am convinced the forces of technology will only be used sensibly when we change the current structure and the dynamics of power over it.
Khushboo Balwani (Civic Innovation Network)
Reversing the silicon valley model: making collaboration the new norm in the city.
Since the early days of the digital revolution in the 70s, Silicon Valley has been considered the global hotspot for technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. However the foundation of the model is based on competition, egos and disconnection from real challenges. Will following the same model in Europe be a good strategy? At civic innovation network, we are convinced collaboration is the key to solve today’s complex challenges and to thrive in the future. We need to expand collaborations in new ways today and among all the stakeholders of the city. How should we work with existing institutions or corporations? How should different impactful projects collaborate in the city to become resilient? We are exploring strategies for engaging different audiences to build Brussels of tomorrow. CIN is a collaborative platform, based in Brussels, that reinforces urban resilience through impact joint ventures (co-created missions with systemic impact). The platform was born in 2016 with the desire to connect the transition actors/projects in Brussels to collaborate and mutualise their resources around urban missions that make them and the city more resilient.
About the speaker
Khushboo Balwani is a designer, strategist and activist, working on how collaborative methodologies can solve social challenges, in India and in Europe. In 2012, she wrote a thesis, entitled “Future of work in sustainable living”, as part of her MA studies in Design Strategy at Politecnico di Milano. Since 2013 she has been OuiShare Brussels connector and has been engaged locally in mapping the community, researching case studies, fostering collaborations and strengthening the collaborative economy movement. She is cofounder of the Civic Innovation Network in Brussels.
> https://civicinnovation.network
Arianna Mazzeo (Desis Lab)
DESIS LAB Barcelona. A Case-study of co-production of public goods with smart citizens
Barcelona's today's challenges to more high quality, realistic and sustainable public services, is the result of a commitment between the Municipality and local stakeholders, as DESIS LAB is, citizens, to work collaborating to bringing in the expertise of people and their role as a citizen-led smart cities. What can design do to enable smart citizens capability and co-design better services in co-production?
About the speaker
Professor of Design for Social and Digital Innovation at Elisava Design School and Engineering, Arianna is Leader of DESIS Lab ELISAVA-DESIS Network. She is also Director of the Masterlab in Service Design for Place and Community Building, dedicated to the transition from old to new design education scenarios and training professors, practitionners, designers, artists, makers interesting in researching through creativity and design. She is also curator-maker of creative formats for festivals ( Open Design Festival Capetown, South Africa; Armenia Art Fair-Design Conversations), collaborating with museums outreach programs( V&A Digital Design Weekend), Fablabs network and emergent design and performing arts hubs (Marseille Living lab) to foster multi-disciplinarity, peer to peer learning and collaboration. She had worked in Cameroon, Turkey, Armenia and South Africa for Local Govern on civic-coproduction programs for the future creative scenario of community building, participation, and collaboration and civic commons- community building using creativity format as platform of social and digital innovation. She works and collaborates regularly with UNIFEM, UNESCO, EESC-European Economic and Social Committee, United Nations, Victoria and Albert Museum, Xschool, GSMA, Open Design Festival Cape Town, and European Network of Culture and Creativity.
> http://www.elisava.net/
> http://www.desisnetwork.org/
Barrett Brown (Pursuanceproject.org)
Pursuanceproject.org: Impactful, agile, secure civic collaboration based on "proceduralism of agreement."
As large sections of the West see continued political and institutional breakdowns, with the resulting vacuum of authority being increasingly filled by far-right nationalists, it's becoming more plain that a period of dangerous conflict may follow. As a critic both of the institutions that have lost their credibility as well as the authoritarian movements that are stepping into the breach, Barrett Brown has spent nearly a decade planning a framework by which those who back open and free societies can organize themselves into a formidable third force, capable of confronting criminalized institutions and winning real gains. Working on the premise that the most important fact of the 21st century is that anyone can collaborate with anyone else for the first time in history, Brown and his team will soon be launching the Pursuance System as a means of harnessing individuals from around the planet into a new sort of polity, governed via "process democracy" and possessing aspects of both unions and political parties. In his presentation, Brown will explain why Pursuance is necessary, how it will work, and why it may be expected to perpetually grow even as it becomes more refined, all without suffering the ills common to large institutions of the past.
About the speaker
Barrett Brown is a writer and anarchist activist. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Guardian, The Intercept, Huffington Post, New York Press, Skeptic, The Daily Beast, al-Jazeera, and dozens of other outlets. In 2009 he founded Project PM, a distributed think-tank, which was later re-purposed to oversee a crowd-sourced investigation into the private espionage industry and the intelligence community at large via e-mails stolen from federal contractors and other sources. In 2011 and 2012 he worked with Anonymous on campaigns involving the Tunisian revolution, government misconduct, and other issues. In mid-2012 he was arrested and later sentenced to four years in federal prison on charges stemming from his investigations and work with Anonymous. While imprisoned, he won the National Magazine Award for his column, The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison. Upon his release in late 2016 he began work on the Pursuance System, a platform for mass civic engagement and coordinated opposition. His third book, a memoir/manifesto, will be released in 2018 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. He may be reached at BarrettBrown@protonmail.com.
Symposium
Day 1 (lectures): FRI Nov 3, 10:00-18:30
Day 2 (workshops): SAT Nov 4, 10:00-17:30
Location: iMAL, Brussels
Tags
An archive : 1999-2010-2019
This page is an archive of the iMAL website that operated between 2010 and 2019. It compiles activities and projects made since 1999.
For our most recent news and activities, please check our new website at https://imal.org