beyondclicktivism

By Tim Hardy

(The public gallery of Camden Town Hall during tonight’s meeting after police refused to let the public into the building.)

With the exception of Fox, who took the opportunity to spread lies about protesters attacking their reporters, the mainstream media was silent about a major news story breaking on Sunday night, the refusal to leave Wisconsin state Capitol building by hundreds of activists who decided they were ready to face arrest for an act of non-violent civil disobedience.

Students watching at the UCL Occupation took heart from the courage and undaunted spirit shown in the jerky mobile phone footage streamed over the internet of those who took to the first floor at Wisconsin and refused to leave when the deadline fell, staying to face arrest for what they believed in.

Over a million people worldwide watched these brave women and men standing up to another corrupt politician who is using the financial downturn caused by his rich friends as an excuse to deny workers their rights.

A decision was made this afternoon, to leave the UCL Occupation for the anti-cuts space and to mark the exit by joining hundreds of protesters at Mornington Crescent to march to Camden Town Council to plead with Labour to take a stand and refuse to impose coalition cuts.

As I marched with them, a union member tried to explain to me that the unions were the answer, they just needed to get more radical leadership.

“We’re not waiting for you,” I told him. “By all means join us but nobody is waiting for you to take the lead. Look at the student movement. Look at UK Uncut. Look at Sukey. We don’t need you although we don’t necessarily disagree with you. You’re welcome to march beside us when you’re finally ready.” Wisconsin has shown the power of unions but we have not seen it here yet.

Again and again across the UK, a pattern is being repeated of local government denying the public access to their town halls where decisions are being made that will devastate their lives. Tonight was no exception.

It was a public meeting but we were banned from coming in. However, by following a councillor who was too scared to brave the crowds, I found a back door and was able to sneak in and tweet reports from inside a hall in which the public was almost entirely excluded.

It was painful to witness Labour’s spineless failure to take a stand.

Again and again the cuts were referred to as a tsunami, as though they were a force of nature that could not be resisted not the result of a man-made system of systemic inequality.

(Sign in anti-cuts space.)

The anti-cuts movement is a river of dissent into which many streams flow, enriching each other. We may flow alongside the unions on 26 March but we refuse to be contained within a movement of organised labour that too often seems as spineless as the party with which they are historically tied.

Like the ideas behind UK Uncut, this is something that is bigger than Britain. “We were recently invited to a Paris summit organised by edu-factory to unite resistance to the marketisation of education across Europe,” one member of the UCL Occupation explained to me today. ”There were people from around the world, including representatives from Canada and Peru. It was agreed by all that March 24th, 25th and 26th would be days of action across the world to coincide with the march for the alternative in London.”

Today Royal Holloway served a legal warning on the occupiers of the anticuts space at 2 Gower Street / 11 Bedford Street warning them to leave the building by 7.30pm or legal action will be taken. Whether they move or stay is irrelevant.

The spirit of this movement does not depend on the accidents of geography. Just as the Really Free School remains the Really Free School wherever it finds itself – the wing of a former palace, the town house of a pointless celebrity, a run-down and empty pub – so too will the anti-cuts movement continue irrespective of how long this particular space stays open.

Just as the ability to stream footage from a single activists phone to millions shows how irrelevant a media more interested in entertaining than informing is becoming, so too does the willingness of citizens to face arrest for what they believe in highlight the moral cowardice of socialist politicians who refuse to take a stand.

Camden Town Hall tonight cannot be what democracy looks like. My faith for the future lies in the student movement, the anti-cuts movement and the spirit of Wisconsin.

By Tim Hardy

(Image by Miriam Christensen. Source: Mark Poster (2001) in Debating Civil Society: On the Fear for Civic Decline and Hope for the Internet Alternative, by Peter Ester and Henk Vinken,International Sociology, vol. 18, no. 4. )

The effects of the internet, says Mark Poster

are more like those of Germany than those of hammers: the effect of Germany upon the people within it is not to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effect of hammers is not to make people hammers… but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the internet as a hammer, we fail to discern the way it is like Germany.

In an Economist debate with Evgeny Morozov, John Palfrey states:

The optimistic premise is that we can bend the arc of the internet towards democracy. It is not the technology itself, but the way we use it and build it, that matters. The way that skilful activists are using the internet and digital media today, especially mobile technologies, favours those who are seeking to express themselves and to organise their peers, not those who are seeking to close down debate and to prevent crowds from gathering in the streets.

Virtual architectures, like physical ones, shape discourse although the possibility of subversion is always present. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse warned of the danger of automation in that a technical elite might simply reproduce the status quo through the tools they build. When we build online platforms, we need to remember this: we are not making hammers but engaged in virtual nation-building.

Too often online debate degenerates into hate speech with the worst abusers usually the first to hide behind hypocritical claims to “freedom of speech” as they attack those who genuinely defend such freedoms.

Real world debate is little better. David Cameron’s insincerity when he claimed he wanted an end to “Punch and Judy politics” is painfully clear from the way in which this bully handles Prime Minister’s Questions, using casual transphobia and other ad hominem attacks to humiliate those who disagree with him. Perhaps our online structures for discussion have already reproduced the status quo. It is undeniable that they often resemble the bucks-locking-antlers aggression that passes for political debate in parliament.

Marketing has a role to play in this too. I find Morozov tiresome because he has many brilliant ideas yet squanders them by courting controversy, presumably to generate publicity and drive book sales. Discourse, particularly online, is tainted by advertising. Micah M. White of Adbusters goes as far as to express deep cynicism about online activism because he fears that the structures of marketing are too deeply embedded.

Clicktivism is the pollution of activism with the logic of consumerism. Activism is debased with advertising and computer science. What defines clicktivism is an obsession with metrics. Each link clicked and email opened is meticulously monitored. Subject lines are A/B tested and talking points focus-grouped. Clicktivists dilute their messages for mass appeal and make calls to action that are easy, insignificant and impotent. Their sole campaign objective is to inflate participation percentages, not to overthrow the status quo. In the end, social change is marketed like a brand of toilet paper.

The fundamental problem with this technocratic approach is that metrics value only what is measurable. Clicktivism neglects the vital, immeasurable inner events and personal epiphanies that great social ruptures are actually made of. The history of revolutions attests that upheaval is always improbable, unpredictable and risky.

This is, however, a cynicism that identifies a problem without looking for solutions.

One needs only to watch this nauseating video about marketing to see the kind of ways in which the web is infected by the industry for the manufacture of artificial desire.

What would the late, great Bill Hicks have said to this?

Hicks is extremely funny but no poster boy for calm discussion.

Compare all this to the gentler consensus model of debate where assent is won through sincere, respectful conversation involving all participants and not by the biggest thug enforcing their will on the group. Now ask yourself if we can do better online. I think we can.

If we can build structures into the internet that guide participants into less antagonistic discourse then we can help build a stronger, more inclusive, civil society worldwide.

After 26 March, Beyond Clicktivism will be looking at ways in which to create platforms for online discussion that more closely resemble the consensus decision-making process. Thinkers, non-technical and otherwise, are all invited.

By Tim Hardy

In central London today, the Uncut Heroes continued their fight for the real heroes in this struggle, the public sector workers who are being punished for the folly and greed of the banks.

Natwest on Regent Street crumbled before our eyes. Our first foe vanquished without a fight, the team made their way to Portman Square, occupied Natwest and – had a quick nap.

Fully recharged, the heroes leapt into their NoCutsMobile and made their way to join their colleagues in the struggle at a teach in at Lloyds on Oxford Street, pausing en route to shut down a branch of Vodafone (too easy!), before joining forces and making their way together to Marylebone Natwest to finish the lesson.

Although our sneering chancellor would like to claim bad weather is responsible for the recent, appalling economic figures – too arrogant to believe that it might be his party’s reckless, ideological experiment that is wrecking any recovery – not even the miserable British rain could daunt the spirit of our superheroes.

Elsewhere in London, Camden Natwest was turned into a day centre for children. In Islington, a branch of RBS was turned into a laundrette. All around the UK, dozens of actions closed around 40 banks in creative and entertaining ways, with Lewes Uncut going as far as to re-enact the swing riots.

Overseas, with news that in Wisconsin, hundreds of police have joined protesters, our sisters and brothers in US Uncut have been taking the struggle to the streets all over the States with a victory for US Uncut DC who shut down Bank of America.

Glenn Beck must think there’s a conspiracy,  An International Justice League of Radicals. At least he hasn’t called us Nazis – yet.

The enemy vanquished for the day, our heroes melted back into the shadows but they will be back to fight again.

Those with the broadest shoulders are slipping off their load and leaving it to the most vulnerable in society to pay for the folly and the greed of the banks.

Until reality meets the rhetoric of “we’re all in this together” we will never sleep.

By Tim Hardy

(Image by Jono_Warren.)

Many on the parliamentary left have given up. That is their privilege and our loss.

It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed, to replace these dangerous feelings by self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that all change is for the worse, so that one should simply accept the state capitalist order with its inherent inequities and oppression as the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is underway to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it is what they do feel, and that if somehow they do not adopt this set of values then they are strange relics of a terrible era that has fortunately passed away.

(Noam Chomsky, cited Radical Priorities, 1981)

Despair has led many to betray the causes that once motivated them. Their cynicism about solidarity always gives it away. It is always important to act locally, but if you cannot think globally then you end up just another apologist for a system of inequality that condemns billions to starve.

As the spokespeople for the bankers in the cabinet are so quick to remind us, if we tax the rich here, they’ll go elsewhere. These are the same rich who use their wealth to keep families hungry worldwide just so that they personally can over-eat. These are the same rich who are happy to profit from death as long as those killed are in countries far, far away from the happy havens in which they lead their enchanted lives.

Parochialism is defeatism. The problems we face are global. We have to be internationalist or our politics is meaningless.

Around the world, the internet is waking people up.

So called democratic governments for too long have talked the language of freedom then resigned themselves to a grubby realpolitik that permits the sale of arms to tyrants. Britain sold snipers’ rifles to Libya. Do we wash our hands of that knowledge the minute the weapons leave our borders? There must be no safe haven for murderous dictators and no more claims that profits take precedence over the human costs of international business.

While most around the world are watching in horror as civilians are massacred by brutal thugs in the Middle East, our British Prime Minister is instead on tour, not to congratulate those who have won their freedom from tyranny, but to pimp the British arms trade. What better spokesman for capitalist realism can you imagine than a man who refuses to apologise for the blood money he represents, stating fatuously “it is perfectly logical and sensible that there should be a trade in defence.”

A distaste for solidarity can arise from humility. What it takes to occupy a high-street bank is nothing compared to the courage it takes to stand up to snipers and soldiers with machine guns but it is intellectual cowardice to think that socialism stops at a nation’s borders. This is the same kind of fallacy of privilege that makes people feel guilty about standing up for oppressed groups if they personally are not oppressed. Such thinking needs to end.

UK Uncut may not be standing up to bullets. Our front line may be merely the slick, sick, gleaming face of corporate capitalism; our actions, playful, theatrical and witty – but our goals are deadly serious. We are but one part of the worldwide resistance to a common enemy, a corporatism that Benito Mussolini would have recognised as fascism, a resistance that is growing day by day.

Over the last week, the international ambitions of our grassroots movement have continued to bloom with the rise of US Uncut, Canada Uncut, Quebec Uncut, NL Uncut and other affiliate groups around the world. Within the UK, links between different anti-cuts groups are growing stronger. The students on dayx4 temporarily occupied Barclays in solidarity during their protests. These links can only continue to strengthen, the number of new groups will continue to grow. You cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

Worldwide, people have had enough. Our movements here may be playful and theatrical but they are profoundly linked to movements elsewhere in the world where people are dying in the name of principles our governments take in vain. Our privilege should not shame us into inaction. Around the world people are waking up to the fact that is up to us, not those who claim to lead us, to put an end to duplicity and hypocrisy and make the espoused values of Western democracy real.

Join us tomorrow in the UK for another day of action as the mild-mannered British citizens unveil their secret superhero identities and fight off the villainous bankers.

Join us tomorrow in the US to show that the spirit of Wisconsin is only the beginning.

Join us tomorrow around the world to show that the people have had enough.

This fight is international and it has only just begun.

By Steven Maclean

(Image by Richard Engel)

When Gil Scott-Heron sang ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘, he was right. Al Jazeera may have beamed incredible images of massive demonstrating crowds live around the world, but this was just the tip of the iceberg: the physical manifestation of a revolution which had taken place in minds brought together by social media.

In relatively free societies social media might so far have been more about reuniting with old friends and poking than starting revolutions, but when you have no freedom of speech and the threat of torture for dissent, memes struggle to propagate. They require an environment of connectivity, interactivity and openness; the core principles of social media’s founding fathers.

In 2008, having had little success three years earlier as a leading organiser of the political movement ‘Kefaya’, or ‘Enough’, 30-year-old civil engineer Ahmed Maher was taking his cause for human rights in Egypt to the blogosphere. Mr Maher and his friends set up a Facebook group which they used to call for a nationwide labour strike. Bad weather conspired against demos across the country but in Mahalla, a violent police response brought attention to the first major conflict over labour in years.

Facebook again proved to be a valuable organisational tool two years later when Wael Ghonim – a 31-year-old Google marketing executive – helped Maher set up another group: We Are All Khalid Said. Named after a young man beaten to death by the Egyptian police, they used it to spread democratic principles and dissect the spin of official media.

Being able to whisper dissent over the internet was like being freed from the charade in The Emperor’s New Clothes, where punishment for speaking out against the lie is a beating and imprisonment rather than the label of stupidity. As more Egyptians realised they weren’t the only one who thought their oppressive despot looked ridiculous, they began to realise their strength and organise for greater dissent. Its too early to say the rest is history, because the ripples generated by those early protests are still expanding across the Arab world and astounding even the people who helped give rise to them.

In a recent interview co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone confirmed that in 2009 president Obama had asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so that student protestors could organise, such was its importance to them as a tool. He also recalled a story about James Buck, a photojournalism student of UC Berkeley who went to Egypt in 2008 to photograph protests. He kept missing them, but was advised by Egyptian friends to use Twitter to stay informed, as they did. Buck took their advice, used Twitter to attend protests, and was eventually arrested by Egyptian police. They threw him in the back of a car but didn’t take his phone from him. Scared, he tweeted a single word; ‘arrested’. His friends back home in California were ‘following’ him, called the college dean, a lawyer, and the consulate. Just hours later he tweeted another single word; ‘freed’.

It’s significant that while the Egyptian authorities quickly shut down the Internet – acknowledging that it’s cost to them far outweighed it’s usefulness, while being a vital tool for revolutionaries – television was used relentlessly in an attempt to cajole public opinion. But even that couldn’t stop the Twitterati. Stone and his colleagues worked with Google to develop a system so people could use their phones to dial local numbers and speak their tweets, which could be relayed into cyberspace.

Gil Scott-Heron’s lyrics imply television’s ability to marginalise the will of its audience while serving the agendas of those who control it, and the need for participation rather than voyeurism in political movements. While the seeds of middle east revolution were sewn in Tweets and Facebook groups where the authoritative voice is only one among millions, the region’s national television channels ignored the shift in zeitgeist taking place.

Television can inform public opinion and set agendas, but its lack of interactivity and its bias towards the ruling elite disenfranchises the average viewer, making it a better tool for manipulation than empowerment. For dictators looking to spread propaganda and distract or frighten populations into apathy, television is a powerful ally. But if you want to enlighten the masses and motivate them into direct action for change, your weapons of choice are Twitter and Facebook.

Guest post by Steven Maclean. Original at Dreaming Genius.

By Tim Hardy

Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) are going to take part in the TUC march for the alternative in protest against government cuts. The demonstration is taking place on 26 March 2011 in London.

“Disabled people are facing continuing attacks against their lives, living standards and basic human rights to live independently from almost every conceivable quarter and it is time for us to fight back against these cuts,” they explain.

“These savage spending cuts damage not only our lives, but our public services, and threaten economic recovery. They’re dangerous, unfair and unnecessary.

Disabled people are going to march to tell the government we demand ‘Rights not Charity’ and to show we are not easy victims of their cuts even though they may think we are.”

Follow plans for the day via the facebook event page or via twitter.

Latentexistence has written powerfully of the ways in which people can campaign online. For those who physically cannot make the protest in spite of the TUC access and disability arrangements but would like to make their presence felt, DPAC and Beyond Clicktivism are working together to bring you a way of doing so. Let’s light up a map of the UK online in solidarity with the protesters on 26 March and show our elected representatives quite how many people oppose their unnecessary, ideological reforms.

More details will be announced over the next two weeks so follow either or both sites to keep up to date. Volunteers interested in helping with coding and setting up a website are very welcome. Please get in touch with either myself or DPAC to offer your assistance.

By Latentexistence

As a political activist who is chronically sick I have found it extremely frustrating to be undergoing a severe relapse at a time when I want nothing more than to be out protesting. I want to stand up and be counted but at the moment I can barely stand up at all.

But have I really been deprived of a voice? Has my chance to change things been lost because of my illness? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no. In fact, I think I personally have had more influence through the internet than I would have had out on the streets.

Activism on the internet is not just about adding your email address to petitions, or clicking “Like” on Facebook. Petitions have their place, but tend to carry less weight than letters and debate, which is where the real power of the internet lies.

The key areas where the internet can change things are in raising awareness, driving debate and creating influence. With millions of people using social networks, raising awareness is much easier than in the physical world. Current issues come up in daily conversation online and on social networks your friends get to see what you are talking about, even if they don’t follow the whole conversation.

The nature of the internet is such that with a bit of luck a good blog article or youtube video can “go viral” and end up in front of hundreds of thousands of people who would not otherwise be aware of the issues. Although I was taken by surprise when this has happened to me in the past it is good to know that I had some impact even though I could not go out on the streets myself.

Social networks are a great leveler. Journalists, TV presenters, CEOs, celebrities and politicians all use social networks. It is easy, even commonplace, to have a discussion involving someone influential and to either become more informed by them or to inform and influence them yourself. I have witnessed a party affiliation change after a discussion with Ed Milliband via twitter and I have seen MPs decide to sign Early Day Motions after constituents contacted them through the same medium. I have seen journalists write about issues and bring them to a wider audience after they became aware of them through social media.

Websites like They Work For You and What Do They Know make it easy to keep tabs on what your elected representatives are doing at all levels of government. Sites such as Write To Them give an effortless way to send your thoughts to politicians, sending your missives by email where it is an option, or by fax where it is not. The Tweetminster website can put you in touch with your MP via twitter. Form letters are not so effective, but thoughtful discussion through these methods can make a difference.

Clifford Singer has said that social media has transformed protest. He talked about how social media has been used to unite activist groups and organise real-world actions,  and he was correct to say that protest has been transformed. I am not arguing that everyone should cease protesting immediately or that they should move back from the streets to the internet. Far from it.

I believe that changing opinion requires the use of every available method of protest. But here’s the thing: if you want to change opinions and like me, you can’t go out to protest, the internet isn’t such a bad place to be.

Guest post by Steven Sumpter, known online as @latentexistence. A longer version of this article originally appeared here.

By Tim Hardy

Imagine a game for two players. Each in turn picks a number between 1 and 9 and you cannot pick a number that has already been chosen. The winner is the first to pick three numbers that add up exactly to 15.

Does that sound complicated? Well it’s not. Young children pick it up instantly.

Still confused? You just need to look at it differently.

If you could see a visual representation of the game, how it works would become obvious.

Formally, this is the same game as noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) even though the experience of playing it may be different. It’s an interesting thought experiment by games designer Marc LeBlanc.

How long does it take to learn how to play noughts and crosses? Not long. Definitely far less time than it takes to understand the rules described in the first paragraph above.

The lesson for us here is that complicated systems can be explained easily if we find a different way of representing them. So why is this important right now?

On May 5th 2011, we finally get to choose how we elect our MPs in the UK.

The challenge is that few understand what the choice is about yet explaining how the Alternative Vote (AV) works and why it is a better system than First Past the Post (FPTP) usually sends people to sleep.

Those who profit from the current unfair system hope to scare people with ugly and dishonest campaigns like the following.

(Image via YesInMay.)

They hope that dangerously misleading advertising like this might fool enough people into voting to protect the corrupt present system, a system that gives jobs for life to politicians in safe seats which makes them complacent and indifferent to those that they are supposed to represent and a system that continues to marginalise and exclude principled voices like those of Green Party candidates from parliament.

Let’s use our wits to fight this.

The right are always going on about “competition”, let’s steal their thunder and announce one!

This is a challenge to all artists, performers, indy game designers, musicians, comedians, bloggers and writers. Your goal is to find a fun and interesting way of representing the advantages of the Alternative Vote system so that even a child could understand. Your entry can be a video, an essay, an image, a web-based game, a play, a poem, a piece of performance art. The only limit is your imagination.

Upload a record of your work to the web somewhere and add a link to it in the comments box below. The deadline is midnight Friday 18 March Sunday 17 April and the person who submits the most interesting entry will win the choice of either a copy of Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses or a copy of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World; the runner-up gets the remaining book.

The prize will be announced before after the TUC March for the Alternative on the 26th. I will try to find further special prizes to reward people whose work also promotes this demonstration in an original manner. Any other prizes that people are willing to donate will be gratefully distributed.

This is an age of cognitive surplus. We can take advantage of the free tools the internet provides and put to shame those who cannot think beyond dishonest scare tactics. Our creativity and generosity can drive reform. One small step at a time, together we can build a better world.

[Updated with new date: 15 March 2011]

By Maeve McKeown

On the 24th November 2010, a group of students protesting about the proposed changes to higher education entered University College London’s (UCL) Jeremy Bentham Room. Someone asked, “Do we want to occupy?” And so it began… a two and a half week occupation of one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

At our first meeting we decided on our list of demands and the process that would drive the occupation. That process is consensus-decision making.

Typically at large meetings, decisions are made by voting. If you are in the losing group, you simply have to accept that you lost and move on.

Consensus decision-making, by contrast, is non-hierarchical and inclusive. Typically, the group will sit in a circle formation, with a facilitator or two. Everyone who wants to speak, gets to speak.

Decisions are made by the whole group. Anyone can make a proposal. A proposal can only pass if it is agreed to by everyone. This was rarely a problem: whenever there was a disagreement we talked it through until the proposal was sufficiently amended so that everyone agreed.

The role of facilitator is to make sure everyone who wants to speak gets their turn. The participants use hand signals to show how they feel about what is happening in the meeting.

We designated working groups for particular topics – media, tech, events, outreach, process, escalation, demands, security and kitchen. Anyone could join any working group, or leave a working group at any time. While working groups worked autonomously, if there was an important decision to be made they had to bring it to a General Meeting to get consensus.

This organisational model worked for several reasons.

People joined working groups depending on their skills. It meant that everyone was using their skills effectively and to the utmost.

The general meetings provided an open forum for working groups to test their ideas but also for people who weren’t involved in those groups to have a say about what they were doing.

By getting consensus on decisions rather than voting, it meant we were all co-authors of the group’s actions. Nobody felt hard-done-by and no individuals could be blamed if something went wrong.

Everyone could have their say. It wasn’t about “experts” giving their opinions, or the usual suspects dominating debates; it gave the opportunity to those who wouldn’t normally speak to feel included and listened to.

Rather than stating your opinion on something and sticking to it, to open dialogue allowed people to listen, learn, change their mind, be persuaded and to persuade. The consensus decision-making model encourages open-mindedness.

Finally – no leaders! Because anyone could speak, make a proposal, facilitate a meeting, join a working group, suggest an idea, reject an idea, call a meeting, make an agenda or change the agenda, there were no leaders. Everyone was an equal part; at least, what you put in, you got out.

The process does have its drawbacks. Meetings could go on forever! At times people got frustrated with the model, and facilitating meetings could be draining and unrewarding. Facilitators also faced the problem of people being sneaky and trying to abuse the process.

Power relations could be an issue. Those in the process group who had control over the agenda, how meetings working, and facilitated meetings, could be perceived as having more power than others. This was also a problem for the media working group who controlled external communications.

Because a working group could be set up any time on anything, sometimes there seemed to be hundreds of them. This lack of coordination was important in terms of anonymity in the face of UCL management – they couldn’t pin anything on anyone. But it was frustrating when you needed to talk to someone in a working group and you didn’t know who was in the group/where they were.

Finally, while the aim of the consensus model is to be inclusive and non-hierarchical, at times the discussions did come to be dominated by the same faces (and they were usually male).

While consensus cannot overcome the power relations of unequal societies, it is much better at doing this than traditional hierarchical models of meetings. The open discussions were fascinating and challenging. I frequently found myself changing my mind on issues based on what others had said, or discovering new ways of looking at things. The model really encourages you to see things from another’s perspective, to listen respectfully and respond honestly.

It can be a drawn-out process but ultimately I think it’s worth it. Consensus decision-making is truly democratic and avoids the dreaded tyranny of the majority. And despite the issues I raised with the model, the occupation’s success resided on the fact that we could bring all these issues up and discuss them openly; or at least set up a working group to deal with them! Best of all, consensus decision-making makes potentially boring meetings fun!

Guest post by Maeve McKeown. A longer version of this post will appear shortly at Student Theory.

Beyond Clicktivism plans to invite people to help build new tools for on-line discussion that operate in a way closer to the consensus model. Please watch this space for future developments if you would like to get involved.

By Tim Hardy

No wonder people have had enough of the main parties.

Labour’s response to the cuts so far has been lacklustre at best. One would be forgiven for thinking they’re secretly in support and just hoping the Tories do the dirty work for them. In today’s Independent, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown shows a commendable awareness of the dangers to the status quo around the world, but his response combines an old man’s ignorance of the internet with fear mongering and ends with a call to force the unemployed into work, a policy that even the Conservatives would be wary of promoting.

No young person anywhere should go more than three months without the offer (and duty) of taking a job.

Without a commitment to better working conditions and stronger rights for workers in the UK, this is just an invitation to employers to exploit the workforce even more and will lead to more young people being forced into degrading, poorly paid and soul-destroying jobs.

Mr Brown always loved to bang the terror drum to scare people into thinking that his authoritarian responses were the only way. He slyly characterises internet communications as “the messages articulated by fanatics” ignoring the fact that the increased communication and availability of information enabled by the internet challenges the ignorance in which extremism breeds. Reform can be peaceful and is desperately needed – both in authoritarian regimes and here.

The young have been hit particularly hard but this is not a generational issue. Inequality affects us all. One has to worry that Gordon Brown’s real concern is that this inequality will lead to the privileged few, with whom Labour have become as cosy as the Conservatives, having to give up on a few of their treats.

The only fanatics I can see right now are those in the cabinet being aided by their apologists on the opposition benches.

I think this beautiful and witty song by Adynkrah tells us more about the spirit of dissent and disillusionment expressed and shared online by the young and millions of others than any number of words from a former Prime Minister in a newspaper.

This oligarchy has to end. Politicians need to remember that they work for us. The internet is a place where our songs of freedom can flourish. Our challenge now is to carry that message into the real world.