97% Owned – Director’s Cut

97% Owned – Director’s Cut

Off the back of my recent post on Transition Money, this excellent new short film, 97% Owned, explains the privatised, debt-based money system we currently use. The one that allows UK banks to simply create around £200,000,000,000 (£200bn) a year and use it as they see fit - without any oversight - to shape the economy and control politics, causing crises, creating inflation and pushing house prices out of reach. Most of us work for money, but these people are magicking it up and then using it to pay others to do whatever they please. How is this different from legalised slavery? And we are the slaves. There are alternatives, and yet we continue accepting this system scam, largely because we have been tricked to believe that economics is complicated and *yawn* boring! And yes, I have to admit, what could be more boring than being able to create money from thin air..? Watch and enjoy :) (a full feature-length version of 97% Owned is also available)
My foreword for “The Future We Deserve” – out now

My foreword for “The Future We Deserve” – out now

Untitled piece by Maria Elvorith (from the cover of TheFWD)
The Future We Deserve, a collaborative book project edited by Vinay Gupta, Cat Lupton and Noah Raford, is available today. It can be read in full, downloaded or bought in hard copy here. I contributed one of the one hundred short essays that make up the book as well as the below foreword (the same length as each essay!), which explores the unique nature of the project : -- “Five hundred words on the theme of the title”. A simple brief, but having just read the first proof of The Future We Deserve, that simple brief has conjured forth a wonderful mélange of foresight, insight, powerful fiction and playful speculation. From cyber-monasteries to socialism, from taking ‘phlight’ to the importance of introspection, the contributors have taken those four titular words and run with them in myriad directions. Indeed, some even appear to have run at them. I expected an abundance of different takes on “future”, but “deserve” is challenged, “we” is questioned, and even “the” doesn’t get off scot-free! In the face of the dauntingly poor track record of futurism, this book adopts a radically different approach, and not just in terms of the diversity of authors. Remembering the Chinese proverb that “when men speak of the future, the Gods laugh”, it perhaps seeks to humbly laugh along with them, embracing a healthy diversity of disparate and even opposed visions, ideas and plans – the useful attitude that the postmodern theorist Ewa Ziarek termed ‘dissensus’. In grappling with an uncertain future, this exploration of many paths may be only appropriate, reflecting nature’s own evolution, which never seeks to reach consensus on the ideal life-form, but simply creates, creates, creates. Such dissensus also underlies the Transition movement, with communities exploring diverse paths towards preparedness for likely future scenarios, even where the detail of any threats may remain unclear. Trying to agree on one grand unified story of the future is a waste of energy because whatever we may decide upon, reality surely has other plans. It may be possible (and useful) to discern trends, but the specifics will always elude us. Accordingly, resilient approaches are those which make sense across a wide range of possible futures. They are humility in action, and they keep our eyes open. So let us explore dissensus – explore our various curious projects, inspirations and stories – secure in the understanding that while some of them will thrive and others die, our task is not to foresee the future, but rather to enable it. I wrote in The Transition Timeline that we will certainly get the future we deserve. As one contributor puts it herein, let’s work for a future worth deserving. And who can know which obscure passion, vocation or tale might turn out in retrospect to have provided a defining contribution to our collective future? The Future We Deserve is a ground-breaking collection of candidates, and while reading it I find myself always wondering whether some of them may be fated to shape our world, and whether the future collaborators may find each other through these pages. I hope to see many more books like it, for it feels like fertile ground.
-- The Future We Deserve - front cover The book is dedicated to Maria Elvorith (1982-2010), cover artist, contributor and pure soul. May our future be as beautiful as you.
Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

David Buckland, text Amy Balkin, ‘Going to hell on a handcart.’, Ice Art

"Untitled, 2010" was written by artist Maria Elvorith for The Future We Deserve, a book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve, set for publication in January 2012.

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“The war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed in it.” ~ Diane Di Prima
With each day we move towards a necessary revolution. Resource depletion, mass species extinction and the risk of runaway climate change highlight the great flaws in our current worldview and the society it has built. It is in this nebulous inner realm of intuition and story that a revolution quietly gathers strength. And it is in this realm that art has a unique power. Its intrinsic nature allows it not only to powerfully mirror ‘the now’, but to inspire and demonstrate a vision of where we can go from here. However, if society is not engaged with these pressing issues or actively debating the absurdity of the current system, then most artists won’t be either. It has taken a painfully long time for the predominant western civilisation to begin to acknowledge the devastating consequences of its current systems. Perhaps then it is no wonder that a lot of the artwork produced in the 21st century comments on excess, commoditisation, self-immortalisation and isolation. Artists are a part of society, and once they are aware of or involved in a debate, they will inevitably create works that communicate this understanding, whether through content, creation or presentation. But to ask an artist to respond to something that they have little or no understanding of – or interest in – invariably produces work which is contrived and short lived.
Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’, Oil on canvas, 1937. Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’, Oil on canvas, 1937
The greatest and most striking artworks tend to emerge instead from the expression of a tension within the artist, usually without a planned agenda. Take for example Picasso’s Guernica[1], painted almost immediately after the devastating casual bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and famous for its depiction of the horrors of war. When asked to explain the symbolical references in the painting, Picasso would often refuse: "...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are." [2] And herein lies our Catch-22. The urgency with which we need to respond to these issues calls for the inspiration that artists carry with them, which could help to move the debate forward into actualisation. Dr. Gerald Bast describes this well: "The true beauty of art lies in its ability to move us intellectually, motivate us to follow new paths, shape awareness and character, demonstrate interconnectedness and teach us to employ all the things that surround us in a conscious manner. The achievement of social effectiveness can neither be the aim or the purpose of art. Nonetheless art has a social influence, either in the sense of change, or in the spirit of affirmation and conservation." [3] Yet unless artists themselves are genuinely intimately involved in the exploration, and can escape from the commoditisation of the arts sufficiently to find their true voice, then the need for their distinctive contribution may go unmet. In a sense, the future we deserve is inevitable – we will reap what we sow. But if artists can be released from their bind, then their ability to unite our hearts, minds and imagination could catalyse the creation of a future we all hope for. -- References [1] http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp [2] http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/guernica_nav/gnav_level_1/5meaning_guerfrm.html [3] U-n-f-o-l-d: A cultural response to climate change, exhibition catalogue, 2010, Springer-Verlag/Wein
My new heroes

My new heroes

I recently heard an interviewer ask someone who their heroes are, and was struck by the lack of names that came up when I asked myself the same question (although Dr. James Hansen now springs to mind...) But now I think I have one, having discovered the brave story of Robin Bank (AKA Enric Duran). He is a Catalan activist who spent the two years to 2008 taking out loans totalling nearly half a million euros, and then donated all of the money to various social movements working to build alternatives to our unequal and suicidal economic-political system. His video message revealing what he had done and explaining his motives is posted above. I consider it one of the most inspiring stories of insight and resultant action that I have yet heard.
Revolution – RapNews #7, feat. Bono

Revolution – RapNews #7, feat. Bono

Robert Foster's brilliant Rap News makes it onto Dark Optimism for the second time, with a comment on recent events featuring the likes of Hugo Chavez, Glenn Beck, Bono ("Tell China to end first world debt") and John Pilger, as well as footage from the ongoing American revolution. Well worth a watch, as is this interview, where Noam Chomsky dismantles Jeremy Paxman's worldview to his face. Edit - 28/04/11 - And here's a sincere call for American revolution, from Adbusters.