Life Changing (2nd ed). Coming March ’16!

Philosophy at the foot of Mt. Blank. Photo courtesy of Con Georgiou

News flash! A revised edition of Life Changing: A Philosophical Guide will be available soon. This is a sharper, clearer, and more satisfying version of the first. I decided to revise the book to bring it into line with the content of another manuscript I am preparing for publication on hacker innovation culture. Software programs have versions – why not books?

Life Changing is based on a workshop I ran at the University of Sydney between 2007 and 2013, called ‘Philosophy for Change’. Many good things in my life have emerged from it, including Coalition of the Willing and the many exciting projects that followed from that film.

I’d like to thank the readers of this blog and the 500+ people who have purchased a copy of Life Changing since it came out in 2012. I couldn’t have written this new edition without your comments and support. I had to publish something that was done but not perfect, and learn to use it and understand it, before I could write the new and improved version.

I plan to make the 2nd ed. nice and cheap, so that people who bought a copy of the original book don’t feel too ripped off. I trust that readers will see value in it. In 2016, Life Changing is more relevant than ever. I wrote this book for people who are looking for change. It is not a manifesto. It is a handbook for personal transformation. It is philosophy for change.

More updates are on the way. Until then: don’t change – keep changing.

Maker democracy: Roberto Unger, progressive politics, and collaborative experimentation

It is Maker Day. You catch the ziptrain into the city. As the conburbs flash by, you browse the Maker Day app on your phone. Maker Day has only been around a couple of years. The Democrats got it started in 2020, after they seized the White House back from the Republican Party. The idea was to redress unemployment by cutting the working week to 4 days and making the 5th day Maker Day. This bold initiative has already paid off in a number of ways, not least by giving the unemployed something to do on Fridays.

Maker Day makes social innovation a community exercise. It gives ordinary citizens the power to collaboratively redesign social and political institutions. Some say it has revitalised the nation.

Outside the Maker Day pavilion, crowds of people are testing robots and drones. MAKE HISTORY says the sign above the door. You weave inside, looking for your crew. They are usually in the Library, but a Kidpreneur workshop is in session there and they are not to be seen. You study the grid on the giant whiteboard in the Community Hall, trying to decide what events to attend. For the last couple of Maker Days, you’ve helped a group of lawyers, urban planners, and community activists design a corporate-community partnership framework for organisations working to revitalise urban space. But this project is in prototyping mode, gathering data for a public review. You prefer to work at the coalface. As you MakerID says, you are an Ideator.

Today, you decide, you’ll pitch in with the Home Care Sharing XChange. Unless something else grabs your attention first. Maker Day kicks off Open Space style to ensure that there are always new projects on the table. People propose ideas for hacking institutions, and if an idea is popular, working groups are formed about it. Today’s open space sessions include some totally off-the-wall ideas, including: ‘Virtual Reality Gaming and Palliative Care: The Final Quest’ and ‘F*@k the Police: Urban Crime and Total Surveillance Solutions’. The great thing about Maker Day is that projects are experimental, so the wilder, the better. The aim is to generate institutional alternatives – as many as possible. Only a fraction of the ideas will be implemented. But who cares? The point is to have fun and be creative, and to work with people on disrupting the political imagination.

Maker Day is where the future happens. This is creative democracy in action.

2045 United Federation Report on the Great Transition: The Culture of Transition

The following passages are taken from the 2045 United Federation report on the Great Transition. This report, released on the eve of the East-West Realignment and founding of the United Federation in December 2045, was the first comprehensive account of the shift in social and economic relations that swept the world between 2015 and 2040, a period known as the Great Transition. The paragraphs are taken from Part 3 of the report, which deals with the role of sharing and social innovation in the Great Transition. For the complete report, see Realignment Mandate 12337 (released by authority of UF Secretary-General Tirrab Hassan 04/04/75).

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2045 United Federation Report on the Great Transition

Part 3: The Culture of Transition

Parts 1 and 2 of this report have outlined the policy and strategic planning work that underlay the Great Transition. We have described the vision shifts in energy and carbon policy that enabled the rapid development and roll out of carbon negative infrastructure, and the social policy associated with the transition to a Totally Mobilized Agenda, including the adoption of civil agency and ‘zero unemployment’ schemes, massive federal and state investment in sustainable cities, and the expansion of the social enterprise sector as a viable hub for commercial investment. We have seen how these policy and planning shifts contributed, between 2015 and 2040, to the re-engineering of the international economy and the creation of a global carbon negative environment.

Part 3 of the report looks at the social and cultural changes associated with the Great Transition. We leave aside the oppositional and countervailing views expressed in parts of the online and corporate media in this period. These views, and the reasons why they lost purchase on the public imagination through the 20-teens, are discussed in Part 4 of the report (see also Appendix 2: Dangerous Liaisons: Big Oil Inside the Beltway). Part 3 seeks to explain the widespread and well-documented shifts in social and creative culture that gathered steam in the 20-teens and fuelled the forces of Transition. We are particularly concerned to understand the role of ‘open source culture’ in this period and how it contributed to new historical framings and existential orientations.

Swarms and norms: refiguring the multitude

A few years ago, I published an essay in the journal Radical Philosophy titled, ‘Refiguring the multitude: from exodus to the production of norms’ (2005). It was about swarms, though I didn’t know it at the time. The publication was a coup for me. I was a struggling contract academic, vying for attention. Radical Philosophy was an ‘up there’ journal in political philosophy circles, edgy but respectable. My paper was one of the first academic responses to Multitude (2004), Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s sequel to their best-selling book, Empire (1999).

The essay was a bit of dog’s breakfast. But the crux of the argument resonates today. I have pasted some paragraphs below. If you are into Deleuze and social movements, this one is for you.

Re-reading ‘Refiguring the multitude’ for the first time in years, I am struck by how much of this material has become part of my mental DNA. I didn’t realise at the time, but ‘Refiguring the multitude’ was crucial to my intellectual development. Multitude certainly resonates with the high-tech world of 2013. Empire and Multitude are books you should have on your shelf, whatever part of the political spectrum you inhabit. They are books about globalization. Hardt and Negri are essentially right. Of course, they are wrong in important respects too.

The paragraphs from ‘Refiguring the multitude’ that I’ve pasted below are the crux of a line of thought that I started developing in 2002 or 2003. It was a response to the failure of the anti-globalization movement that got started in the 1990s. I was looking for a theoretical trajectory that would enable me to continue on the line of flight that I’d experienced at the height of this movement (1999-2001), this time reflecting on how swarms and social movements could contribute to creating something, in the first case, a new set of norms.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how I stepped from this argument to write Coalition of the Willing.

Five books that shaped my thinking

My thoughts are shaped more by life than books. The world is a book that we read implicitly. If the problems of the world do not engage us and inspire a response, a book will do nothing for us.

The following books have played an important role in guiding my work in the past decade. I have read many good books in this time, but these five stand out. The common factor is that they inspired me to break with ideas that I had become comfortable with and seek out new lines of inquiry. As Thoreau said: ‘A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting’.

1. Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Harvard University Press, 2001)

I read Empire in 2001, in the final year of my doctoral research. I was writing on the relationship between Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, two of the most important European thinkers of the 20th century (some years later I published a book on this topic, Foucault’s Heidegger). Meanwhile, I was following the progress of the anti-globalization protests that erupted about the world after the Battle in Seattle in November 1999, participating where I could. Empire provided me with a theoretical perspective on these events that shaped my research output between 2002 and 2008 and fed directly into the script for Coalition of the Willing.

Hardt and Negri’s argument in Empire is that neo-liberal economic globalization should not be understood as a kind of imperialism (where a hegemonic power invades other countries to capture their resources), but a new form of empire that tolerates no external limit and seeks to incorporate all life within its order. This empire employs the internet to organize the global multitude into a productive force; yet as it does so, it enables the multitude to form swarm-like pockets of resistance that coalesce across borders to challenge the status quo. Hardt and Negri propose that the multitude will eventually realize its collective power and establish a new political order based in the productivity of the commons.

‘We are capable of incredible things’: Tim Rayner interviewed by Frederick Malouf on Bondi FM

I spoke with the indomitable Frederick Malouf on Bondi FM a few weeks back about philosophy, trust, collaboration and the meaning of life. I’ve transcribed some choice snippets below. You can listen to the whole interview here: Interview – Bondi Locals @ Bondi 88FM.

Swarm Wall Street: why an anti-political movement is the most important political force on the planet

This was originally posted on the Coalition blog on 10 October, 2011.

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Why are people occupying Wall Street? The US political elite and mainstream media don’t know what to make of it. ‘Anti-capitalist and unAmerican’, says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, echoing the sentiments of the conservative left and political right. The mainstream commentariat, when it dares to peer closer, paints an unflattering picture of disaffected, disorganized youth, milling about Liberty Square without a shower or a set of policy demands to level at the administration.

Meanwhile the occupation grows day by day.

If camp in Manhattan makes the doyens of the status quo feel nervous, the explosion of Occupy Together events across the US last weekend will have sent anxiety levels through the roof. There were ‘Occupy’ camps in 70 cities across the nation last weekend. More events are planned for the coming days and weeks in the US and other countries.

Political leaders must be wondering what is going on. (‘Who are these kids? Would they vote for me?’) To be fair, it is difficult to say exactly what the the protesters want. They have no single message or identity. They represent, they say, the 99% who are excluded by the standing political and economic system. They say that the top 1% of the US population owns 40% of the wealth. The way the movement has accelerated seems to follow the pattern set in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world earlier this year: a contingent of dissidents occupy public space; footage of their mistreatment by police is spread via Facebook and Twitter; this consolidates the sense of injustice and inequality that inspired their actions in the first place.

Last week, the movement crossed a threshold. A localized set of swarm events evolved into a distributed swarm network.

Foucault and social media: the call of the crowd

This is the final instalment in a three-part series on social media and ‘subjectivation’ (Michel Foucault’s term for the self-construction of identity). Part one discusses how the open commons ideal of social media creates a ‘virtual Panopticon’ effect that impacts on the psychology of users. I argue that the awareness of being watched and implicitly judged by the material we post online (including likes, shares, and comments) leads us to unconsciously aspire to please and/or impress a certain crowd, and to select content accordingly.

Part two deepens the analysis by reflecting on author Peggy Orenstein’s experience of Twitter. Orenstein’s awareness of the crowd spurred her to work even harder to craft a positive identity. This reflects a common response on the part of social media prosumers. Users who are able to channel and utilize the anxiety produced by the virtual Panopticon seize on the positive aspects of their identity and amplify them to the nth degree. This is what I call ‘creative self-affirmation’.

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Forget Farmville and World of Warcraft. Creative self-affirmation is the most popular game online. We play this game whenever we select material to share with friends or craft messages to frame our posts. The name of the game is to present oneself, via one’s tweets, posts, likes, comments, and shares, in the light in which one aspires to be viewed. This essentially amounts to affirming the things that one loves in such a way that the love one brings to the world is reflected in one’s online activity. The rules of the game are simple: [1] share only what you love or what resonates with you; [2] pay attention to the feedback you receive from the crowd and modify your posts accordingly; [3] don’t stray too far from the truth. Be creative but don’t be phoney.

This last point is crucial. It is easy to fabricate an identity online. We do this when we create avatars on SecondLife or player characters in World of Warcraft. We create fictional personas drawn from our dreams and imaginings – personas that may have little or no connection with our real world self. Creative self-affirmation is different. Instead of fabricating an identity, it involves creatively affirming key aspects of your person – those aspects that you consider valuable, virtuous and beautiful – while editing out your weaknesses and deficiencies.

Creative self-affirmation is an artistic activity, it is true. But like all great art, it has as much to do with truth as with fiction. It starts with your sense of who you really are. If your posts, tweets, comments, shares, and likes do not reflect who you really are (or who you believe yourself to be, at least), you are playing the game incorrectly. The point is to affirm your singular potential. You need to seize on your inner awesome and put it before the crowd.

Back to the 60s: the power of collective imagination

Human beings have always forged their self-identities from the way that their tribe or community produces and exchanges goods. In industrial societies, people derived their sense of self-identity from their relationship to industrial labour and the social class system that was built upon it. With the rise of post-industrial societies at the end of the twentieth century, the economic system changed, and our way of creating ourselves changed too. Today, people forge their sense of self-identity and personal well-being from the products that they buy and consume. ‘I shop therefore I am’ is the mantra of twenty-first century consumer culture.

Shopping, today, is more than just a way of life. Shopping has become a means of self-creation. The discerning consumer knows that what’s important is not simply that you buy, it’s what you buy. We define ourselves with brands that reflect our personal lifestyle choices: Apple, Virgin, G-Star, Harley Davidson, etc. We kit ourselves out in tribal colours: Gucci, Converse, Adidas, Paul Smith, Yves Saint Laurent. Products are how post-industrial consumers express their personal style and identity. Products are how we tell the world who we are, or aspire to be, at least.

Studies show that brand consciousness is increasingly driving the way that people purchase and consume in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere in the developing world. This reflects a culture shift from traditionally-oriented collectivist societies to capitalist societies based in the values of self-actualization and individual expression. A similar shift took place in Western societies in the nineteen sixties at the twilight of the industrial age. The sixties countercultural revolutionaries rejected the mass-market society of their parents’ generation for a new ethos of individual self-expression. From the beats to the hippies, young people insisted on their right to determine their own identities and to freely decide their styles of life.

Web 2.0 and climate change: an interview with Lucie Crise

On April 1, 2010, Lucie Crise, a journalist for the French magazine Rue 89, wrote to me with the following questions about Coalition of the Willing. Answers were provided in writing. Francophones can read the published interview at Rue89.

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– What do you see as the problem with the current politics of global warming?

Global warming not only presents us with a major ecological crisis but a global political crisis as well. It is clear from the failure of the Copenhagen talks that the international system of states is inadequate to enable a response to the challenge of global warming. Many people blame political leaders for the failure of the talks. But the problem is not the leaders (many of whom seem to be genuinely concerned to respond to global warming). The problem is the system of competing states, the inter-national system, which was born with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and which has come the define “the political” generally. The global capitalist system that we know today has grown up through competition and negotiation between states, facilitated by international law. But because the international system in premised on competition, it makes it difficult for coalitions of states to band together to address common problems. And that’s how things stand today.

Global warming calls for a new political ecology. This problem is like nothing the human race has faced before: it is global in scope and potentially cataclysmic in its effects. And the political system of competing states that we have at the moment prevents us from even responding to the problem. Our only hope is to transform the political. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds: the infrastructure that will enable this transformation is already in place and the process is underway. “Coalition of the Willing” is not so much a new idea for tackling global warming as it is an attempt to focus attention on how new internet technologies are already transforming the way that people all over the world understand themselves as empowered political agents. I think that in the next few years we will see global climate action networks start to play an increasingly powerful role in world affairs, as people come to appreciate the impotence of the international state system for tackling global warming. The way ahead lies in global grassroots action, coordinated through online platforms for participation. If we continue with politics as usual, there is no future.