l
Democrat) and who are equally not going to support the racist British
National Party (BNP). The million face mosaic would be dedicated to
everybody who is planning to vote for or stand as independent
candidates and candidates from currently marginalised parties that are
environmentally, socially, financially and economically harmonious and
that promote democracy, justice and peace.
This would be a
variant on the relatively recent development of the cybermosaic, first
pioneered by Alex Tew with the Million Dollar Homepage (
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com ) and then adapted for other purposes, such as in the Million Campaign Homepage (
http://www.millioncampaignhomepage.net ). There is a Wikipedia entry on the short history of the cybermosaic form here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CybermosaicThe
proposal for this cybermosaic could be based on a similar system: each
person who wishes for positive change could send in a photograph with a
nominal donation, eg £1/£10 per person. Effectively, they would then
become a socially ethical shareholder of the site as a whole and could
be given voting rights on what the total amount gained would be used
for. Along with that ethical shareholdership, each person would
effectively own 1 pixel of the 1 million pixels of the site as a whole.
If each person contributed £1 and the site were composed of 1 million
pixels, that would garner a total of £1 million. A certain amount would
need to be given to those who design, orchestrate and administer the
site as a salary for their work. The remainder could be put into a fund
which could run microfinance/microcredit schemes that benefit local
communities and the wider world and which provide genuine,
non-exploitative, sustainable employment. In effect, it could be used
to help launch a kind of British equivalent of the Bangladeshi Grameen
Bank set up by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. This could then fund
small, sustainab
le grass-roots projects that could be decided and voted
on by the ethical shareholders in the site. Those projects could be
everything from worker co-operative cafes to a sustainable/renewable
Shakespeare Centre in central London dedicated to 21st century
Renaissance drama, theatre, linguistics, and so on, all with solar
power, hemp bags, green roofs, et cetera. Beyond (wo)manpower and
resources, the sky, as well as our imaginations, are our limit.
http://www.grameen-info.org/http://shakespeare.mit.edu/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinancehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicrocreditInitially
it might be best to put together a small team of people to run this
project as soon as possible and get cracking on it. Since it was Tigana
Too's idea, and if she is interested, she could be in charge of the
aesthetics of the site. Somebody would be needed to orchestrate the
site in terms of web design, while somebody else would be needed to
receive emails, and another person might be needed for publicity. There
is obviously no fixed number of people but a small team working over
the internet and in communication through social networking sites and
Skype etc. would be able to put the site together. Out of the money
received, they would obviously receive a proportion as a salary for the
work involved. There are obviously all sorts of other decisions that
could be made: the site could be made as a one-off, or it could be
created on the basis of yearly contributions. Obviously those decisions
could be democratically decided by the team and the people who become
ethical shareholders of the site as a whole.
As well as the
cybermosaics listed above, campaign groups such as Amnesty
International have also used the million faces technique as part of
existing campaigns. What would work particularly well in this instance,
if it could be created, would be a system where each pixel can be
clicked on and expanded, leading to the photograph or website/weblog of
the person who bought the pixel in question.
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=Amnesty%20million%20faces&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wiThe
idea being put forward is one of the unorthodox and creative tactics
and strategies that we in the real opposition in Britain have been
working on (often unpaid, and often very fruitlessly indeed) to counter
the catastrophe in our political system, a system which is unreformed
(and based on a neanderthal first-past-the-post model) and increasingly
unrepresentative.
We are heavily indebted to the Political
Compass team in expanding our consciousness of political positions and
policy platforms both by parties and by individuals. They have created
a visionary new way of exploring politics by adding an extra polarity
of Authoritarian-Libertarian to the traditional Left-Right distinction
that emerged in the French Revolutionary period and which was
championed in Britain in the writings of Woking's favourite literary
son H.G.Wells. Their analysis has helped us understand the catastrophe
that has occured and understand how we can collectively extricate
ourselves from this mess. The main Political Compass website can be
found here:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._WellsThe main Political Compass analysis of contemporary British politics can be found here:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/extremeright
The
four-way structure of the Political Compass analysis shows graphically
and clearly what a tragedy and catastrophe has occured not only in
British politics but also in global political systems, particularly
over the past thirty to forty year period with the domination of the
deregulated model of economic, social and political organisation
variously described as neoliberalism, globalisation, the Washington
Consensus, and so on. That
period effectively ended with the collapse of the largely illusory
derivatives-based turbo economy in August 2007, and was a thirty to
forty year period that placed the planet in ever greater peril as a
result of unsustainable, reckless, short-termist plundering of
resources for ever more rapacious short-term private profit.
That
three to four decade long process has witnessed the widespread
domination of Right wing governments and policies, and in particular
Authoritarian-Right policies and positions. In Britain, as the
Political Compass analysis shows starkly, the period after May 1979 has
seen the entrenchment of a Thatcherite model which is fundamentally
Authoritarian-Right. New Labour has been, effectively, and
with merely
a few exceptions in terms of policy, the extension of that Thatcherite
system to its absolute ends. This has been a profound tragedy for
democracy: we are repeatedly informed that our choice is between a New
Labour system and a supposed Conservative opposition which are offering
fundamentally the same essence though garbed in marginally different
garments. The so-called 'third party', the Liberal Democrats, offer a
fundamentally Right alternative, with a slightly modified social policy
and a more heightened concern for civil liberties. Yet nothing changes
the fundamental point that our basic choice is not a choice at all. For
anybody on the Left of the political spectrum, and in particular those
on the Libertarian Left, this period of time has been agonising,
repressive, depressing, stultifying, tyrannical and coercive. Those of
us who believe in fundamental alternatives have been starved of the
oxygen of publicity. The result has been collapsing voting numbers and
collapsing public confidence and trust in the entire parliamentary
system. Unfortunately, in such circumstances of crisis, racist
organisations such as the British National Party have been allowed to
opportunistically offer certain social policies that are attractive to
the marginalised and the under-privileged, though all with the bitter
pill of a xenophobic racism thrown into the mix.
The New
Labour Policy Watch by Rob Wall also shines an illuminating light upon
the tragedy that has occured by examining in forensic detail the way in
which the 1997 New Labour manifesto was not enacted in reality; instead
of it the Authoritarian-Right Thatcherite model was pushed, ad absurdum
and ad nauseam, despite repeated protestations from the population that
it was not the direction in which we wished to travel:
http://www.labourpolicywatch.co.uk/There
are, therefore, entire strata of society today whose wishes, hopes,
dreams, ideas, expectations, aspirations, thoughts, suggestions,
recommendations, wisdom, experience, judgment, and brainwaves are not
being incorporated into decision-making, policy-making, or the way in
which our taxation is apportioned. The only possible peaceful solution
to such a malaise is fundamental reform and a total transition in our
political system. We have a million million million ideas on how to
organise our affairs in a way which is more harmonious and sustainable,
and it is time that we had the chance to do so. In a time of
environmental crisis, we owe it to our descendents to pull the rabbits
out of the hats.
The visionary nature of the new analysis is
inspirational: the four way system of the Political Compass research in
some senses replicates in political analysis the double helix structure
of DNA explored and discovered by scientists from Miescher to Franklin,
Crick to Watson. In some ways it can also be seen to replicate the
patterns in an ancient system such as the Chinese I Ching, which is
based on yin and
yang lines as well as changing yin and yang lines in a
network of codes that helps shed light upon changes in public life and
in the dynamic processes that underwrite those changes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNAhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_ChingTogether, using social networking sites and cybermosaics, we can remix our politics - for the commons good.
http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/http://creativecommons.org/What do you think?
Below is a picture of Shakespeare's bookshop, 5th arrondisement, LEFT BANK, Paris.
