Defragmenting our selves
Some years ago Jack Welch, the chairman of General Electric, came up with the idea of ‘boundaryless organisation’. He wanted to eliminate both internal and external boundaries, turning the corporation into a network with no defined edge. On the face of it this sounds like an idea a radical political group might come up with….
Someone put me in touch with the person behind this excellent Ending Activism blog. I am working my way through it at the moment – it has some interviews with people about why they got involved in activism and why they left. I think what is rarely stated in the interview answers, but that is…
So this is me starting on a series of posts I’ve been planning for a while on the sustainability of political organising, something I’m interested in after seeing a couple of periods of political activity die away leaving not very much behind. I met Judith Ryser recently at some thing. She has been involved in…
Most people will have noticed in the news recently that conflicts between miners and management at the Lonmin-owned Marikana mine in South Africa led to the police shooting dead 34 people. If you really want to you can watch some footage of it. Some observers say that the miners were herded into a barbed wire…
Post by Nachopolis, a Spanish exile in London: The financial crisis seems to be moving towards new territories. Please read Unrest drags Spain towards buried unpleasant truths. Its a good introduction on how the crisis may eventually lead to serious security problems in Spain – and open up a new landscape in the development of…
Developing a comment from a couple of weeks ago, there’s been a lot of talk among some people recently of the world being ruled by psychopaths. There’s even a facebook group called ‘Psychopaths Rule The World‘ which has an unfortunate tendency to get into conspiracy theories. On the face of it is a plausible explanation…
Publish What You Pay (PWYP) is an organisation that campaigns for resource extraction companies to publish all royalties and other payments made in the countries in which they work. It is largely focussed on companies working in poorer countries where corruption is less subtle than we are used to and where governments often secretly negotiate…
If you google ‘dignity at work’ you get a bunch of websites against bullying and harassment in the workplace. But I have met plenty of people who are not bullied or harassed in the workplace who still give the impression their work, roles or treatment at work are not dignified. There are a lot of…
I picked up Lovink’s book Networks without a cause quite by chance in the library the other day and discovered him talking about ‘organised networks’. Most participatory platforms emphasize a model of weak links (think ‘friends of friends’) that attract a community just to ‘hang out’, conveniently for the corporations that exploit our social relationships….
Today I spent the day researching and documenting the involvement of multinational mining corporations with horrendous paramilitary groups in Colombia. I noted that, while the facts are known, each incident in which a company is involved in death threats and murder is written off as a ‘mistake’. And yet it keeps happening. On the street…