On this day, July 2nd, 2008, the news brings to our attention some fresh approaches to collective action, peace movements in Nepal, email tips, and more.

• “Imaginary friends who live in my typewriter” and “the inverted Matrix.”
• The World Bank walks us through collective action against corruption.
• Tips for successful action-prompted emails.
• Diversity and collective action in Nepal (lengthy but interesting).
• And finally, a different approach to acting collectively.

-Filed in News

On this day, June 17th, 2008, the news brings to our attention super-young organizers, thoughts on Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, a look at how to take action, suggestions on how to blog from the road, and much, much more.

• The third in a three-part series on Public Participation Theory
• What would Trotsky read? The left decide to get into organizing… book clubs.
• Even more of the same on how Americans are [politically] using the Internet
• Need to blog from the road? Here’s a way to do it.
• The youth, social justice, and thinking outside of the box.
• The All-Powerful Drudge and the art of the Internet boycott.
• Wiki-what? Britannica pulls stick out of their…
• A conservative considers Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty
• And finally, Mr. Shirky and the leveraging of the network for social action.

-Filed in News

I just returned from serving as a staff member at the Maine Youth Leadership conference , where around 100 tenth grade “ambassadors” from every public and private high school in the state gathered to participate in a 4-day leadership seminar. At one of the sessions, young participants engaged in an activity called “The Game of Life,” an exercise which is constructed to get kids who live in an otherwise economically and racially homogeneous state to consider factors like, class, and privilege, in the context of “success.” Each student is assigned an identity or series of identities (i.e. Caucasian, African American, lower, middle, and upper class, etc.) and during the 30 minute activity, in which they are simply told “to succeed,” they travel to different stations that represent education, employment, town halls (for marriage licenses), shopping centers, and mortgage lenders. The attendants at each station, reading code on the participants’ name tags (the meaning of which is unknown to the kids), treat them in accordance with pre-suppositions of institutional racism/sexism/classism.

This led to happiness and bitterness, organized crime and organized labor among the sophomores.

According to the exercise’s facilitator, this was the first year that students who had withdrawn from the game because of their frustration with being sent away from services based on various biases, revolted. One student, separated from success, had sat out (or “committed suicide,” as he put it) until he thought to ask if it was OK for him to rob the stations so that he could compete with the other, more well-to-do participants. Told that the facilitators could not tell him what to or not to do, he improvised, rallying other frustrated and disenfranchised players and they put together protests and strikes. Even more interestingly, whenever the organizer would pick up some money from a philanthropic participant who related with the cause, he would leave his union members, spend the money, and build a new union to start again. Regardless of his reputation after several organizing swindles, he continued to attract disenfranchised participants time and time again.

Perhaps next year we can incorporate into the activity some connective-modernity — Flash mobs/denial-of-service attacks anyone?

-Filed in Uncategorized