LET'S SHAKE(speare) UP BRITISH POLITICS: MILLION PIXELS, MILLION FACES, MILLION MICROFINANCE/MICROCREDIT POUNDS, MILLION + VOTES

TIGANA'S PROPOSAL FOR A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT AND FOR GENUINE SUSTAINABLE GRASSROOTS EMPLOYMENT: SMALL TEAM AND CONTRIBUTIONS REQUIRED

from the Facebook group 1,000,000 PEOPLE TO VOTE AGAINST NEW LABOUR, CONSERVATIVES, LIB DEMS + BNP

Many many many millions of thanks to Canadian artist extraordinaire TIGANA for coming up with a splendid idea: a million face website for all those people who are not going to support the dominant right-wing 'consensus' in Britain held by the three mainstream parties (New Labour/Conservative/Libera

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/Cybermosaic

The 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/Microfinance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit

Initially 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=wi

The 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._Wells

The 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/DNA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

Together, 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.