Following on from the recent post on evaporative cooling, this excerpt from Suzanne Staggenborg’s “Social Movements“  has new resonance

While individual movements maintain themselves in various forms, periods of intense protest activity by multiple movements do not last forever. Cycles of protest decline because they eventually ‘produce counter-movements, violence, and political backlash, new repressive strategies, and thence demobilization’. Tarrow identifies three sets of processes involved in the decline of protest cycles.

(1) Activists simply become exhausted, but not all activists drop out at an equal rate. Those who are more extreme in their beliefs, and less likely to compromise with authorities, are most likely to remain active despite exhaustion. Moderates are more likely to scale back their participation, and as they do the movement may become more polarized between those who are willing to compromise and those who are not.

(2) Splits between moderates and radicals lead to two tendencies. On the one hand, radicals may become more violent in their behaviour while, on the other hand, moderates turn to more institutionalized actions.

(3) Governmental authorities selectively repress some movement actions and facilitate others. When governments encourage the actions of moderates and repress those of radicals, they are likely to push the latter to further extremism while shrinking the movement as moderates turn to institutionalized action.
Page 45-6

So, how to keep the radicals – posturing and preening and persisting in zombie repertoires – in productive dialogue/tension with the sell-outs and lunchouts and part-timers.
Not to frame it in unhelpful terms or anything…

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a brilliant mix of cheap knob gags and the Big Questions.

Here’s the latest below.

theodicy[i-theodicy]

Now that I’ve suspended my project to collect anecdotes of horribleness from allegedly public meetings, I need a new obsession.  I could do worse than the nature (or absence!) of learning in social movements.

I am about* to unleash a framework about activist skills and knowledge onto the world.  In the meantime, this quote leapt out at me.

In earlier writing that Budd has done on social movement learning, he has said that learning happens in the context of social movements in at least three ways:

in intentional or organized ways by members of a movement;

in informal ways because simply being part of a social movement causes one to learn so much;

and because social movements create environments because of the actions that they take that stimulates learning by those who in fact are not part of the social movements at all. (2006, 2009).

 

Hall, Budd L (2009)A River of Life: Learning and Environmental Social Movements in Interface: a journal for and about social movements vol 1 (1): 46-78

Hall, Budd L (2006) Social Movement Learning: Theorizing a Canadian Tradition in Tara Fenwick, Tom Nesbit and Bruce Spencer, Contexts of Adult Education Toronto: TEP

* “About” is a slippery word. I have been “about” to get this project afloat for months, nay, years.

There’s that scene in “Starship Troopers” where the space marines look over the  wall of their flimsy stockade and coming to towards them are thousands upon thousands of “bugs.”

Not that this is what I thought about at all when I read this highly entertaining and thought-provoking post about (online) social networks.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.

Evaporative Cooling is a dynamic that can apply to both real world and online communities but the affordances of the Internet make it particularly susceptible to Evaporative Cooling.

In a phrase – if your entry costs are low, and you don’t figure out how to keep the muppets and the lunchouts and the free-riders and the parasites from taking over, they will take over.

Interesting- useful -  to talk with people who still have it – who still need to have it.

[Does Vader impression "The Enlightenment assumptions are strong in this one."]

I hope, of course, I am wrong, but I don’t see our little island being saved from the messes it created.  I don’t see our children thanking us for having been born.

More later.

Forgive the brevity, nursing a bit of a hangover.  Mrs Towers drily amused.

One bleary memory from last night, before the beer monster was uncaged, is hearing “After the Goldrush” for the first time in, well, decades.

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst thru the sky.
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.
Thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.

Following the guest post from Mrs Towers, and the map-less compass, I got this from a wise friend

I started a comment on Mrs T’s guest post and abandoned it – couldn’t find the right tone. In essence what I was going to say was that I too had been thinking ‘enough!’. On 2 levels – 1)don’t put yourself through it any more and 2) there’s the beginnings of a rut forming on the blog (no offence meant)

And I wrote back

[i-:)]

even i felt the lemon had been squeezed dry and all i was achieving was anecdote collecting…

more posts about between the meetings coming up…

Other than the horrendous use of an emoticon, what have we got?

Well, I am more interested in how people are (not) drawn in, how their existing skills are acknowledged, harnessed, extended.  I am more interested in how we get stuff done.  So, upcoming posts will be about how we reflect usefully, how we learn from our mistakes and successes.  Watch this space.

After all, wouldn’t want to get stuck in an anti-smugosphere smugosphere of my own, would I?

Via a DT reader, this article below. The whole of which is worth close-reading.

99% Spring: New radical alliances for a new era
By Joshua Kahn Russell Harmony Goldberg

excerpt-

Our friend Matt Smucker with Beyond the Choir puts it this way in “A Practical Guide to Co-option“:

Remember that Occupy Wall Street kicked off with a well timed call-to-action, a ripe target, some planning, and a lot of crazy luck. As a result, OWS has understandably had more of a culture of mobilizing than of organizing. It’s been a little like a group of folks who don’t know about farming who arrive at a farm at harvest time. There’s delicious food everywhere, and all they have to do is pick, pluck, and gather it. And eat it! “Wow,” one of them exclaims, “farming is awesome! Why would we waste our time cultivating the soil? This food is delicious! I want to eat it all the time! This is working very well. We should just keep doing this — all the time!”

(The reference in the title is to this rather amazing article by Leavergirl.)

So, what’s with this obsession with ego? I’m forever wailing about ego-fodder (since you ask “the audience at any public event (big or small) which has not been structured by the organisers to provoke the highest possible amount of participation, engagement and mingling.”). I’m forever banging on about the damage that a “sage on the stage” can do to the enthusiasm of people, and the “stickiness” of their social movement organisation. Sometimes I even take a pop at surgeons or pilots.

I, I… I

Why? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. It’s because I know just how much damage an out-of-control ego can do – to its host, but more importantly to those people in the immediate vicinity. And – believe it or not – I have mine on a leash a bit. It has taken a long time, a lot of fuck-ups and scarred/destroyed friendships/acquaintanceships etc. That’s not a bid for approbation. I just had to do some remedial defuckwitisation** of myself. And it’s not as if I’m exactly done, either. Still a work in progress.

So, I focus on the damage egos cause to social movement organisations/patients/passengers for two reasons.
a) it’s a real problem, and I don’t see many other people writing about it (maybe I am not looking in the right places?
b) it’s therapeutic, or rather, (I hope) prophylactic. I fear my rottweiler-staffie cross slipping those surly bonds and savaging the nearest flesh it can get its jaws into. Probably mine in the first instance, but it wouldn’t be satiated there.

Footnotes
* Yes, that there is intentional irony
** But then again, I am not claiming to be the biggest fuckwit who ever lived*** because that would be like the thing you get where alcoholics at AA compete for the Most Degradation Endured/Inflicted,
*** No, that’s the turd-in-human-form who lived chez Towers for a year

Via Sharon Ede, writing over at Post-Growth

This guy (26 years old??!!) absolutely nails it.  The whole piece is brilliant. This leapt out for me;

Based on my experience, what I learned was that the global system of infinite growth attracts men and woman of a certain… level of understanding, a certain type of person who will be attracted to the ideals of the current economic measurement that coordinates the global psychology of things, and a type of person who externalizes themselves and detaches from connection, and so whole heartedly believes in their reality, their perception of things, that they project their fears out onto everyone else – and their ego becomes the driver, blindly leading them down a path of self-destruction. And they are people of high intellectual prowess, but unfortunately have yet to develop the deep wisdom that we all possess within us as human beings. And we call these people CEO, and Prime Minister.