Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: politics

Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Monday, August 15, 2011

Cameron, circumstances and priests

Image via WikipediaOne of the points of my previous post on how riots spread is Monkey See, Monkey Do.

Or to put it less simply, we are less rational than we would like to think - we act like those around us and as allowed, persuaded, nudged or otherwise cajoled to do by the circumstances in which we find ourselves (the behaviour of other folk being a very key part of those circumstances).

Now, even our nice Mr Cameron (remember the one, when he first became Tory leader, when he seemed more interested in what is right rather than what is Right), knew that.

As HM Opposition are all of a dither to point out, Cameron himself proclaimed "there are connections between circumstances and behaviour" five years ago...

Damn right. Primed with the right conditions, given the right circumstances - you too are at great risk of behaving in a very irrational way. Once again, I point you at Mark Earl's excellent Herd for more on this.

This is really important because once we understand this is what drives behaviour, then we can start on the business of ascribing blame for that behaviour and (rather more importantly) doing something about it.

It's why I am getting increasingly annoyed at the misdirection the Government PR machine is employed in. First every talking head spouted 'criminality' to focus our attention on the outcome. Now that is being replaced by 'moral collapse'. Both make us focus on the outcome. Which is convenient because it's hard to pin the blame on the Government for outcomes. Circumstances and conditions? Now there some Governmental blame can be laid.

So, I had best demonstrate what can turn even good people bad - to act irrationally - if the conditions are set for them. I best show how it's more the context and circumstances to blame and less the moral fibre of the people concerned...

Take for example the study at Princeton Theological Seminary quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's often-bought-but-rarely-looted Tipping Point.

In the story he tells, each student priest is asked "to prepare a short talk on a given Biblical theme, then walk over to a nearby building to present it."
Along the way to the presentation each student comes across a man slumped head down, eyes closed, and clearly in some distress.
Obviously being good God-fearing folk (with no doubt all the parental support our dear leader would desire) they stop and help, don't they?

Wouldn't you?

Well. The researchers included three variables: background of the subject - whether they had entered seminary as a way of helping people or not, (2) which parable they were to prepare - several were given the Good Samaritan... and (3) a time context, saying either that they were running several minutes late and should hurry up, or that they were early and had some time to spare.

Guess what?

The only thing that impacted how likely our trainee priests were to stop and help our hapless fallen guy was how late they thought they were running.

In other words whether you were planning to help folk as a vocation, and whether or not you had just been hard at it thinking about the Good Samaritan, mattered little. Their attitudes and feelings were instantly over-ridden by subtle clues in the environment - in this case being told whether they were running late or not.

I can't claim to be any better than any of those flawed priests-to-be. I can't claim to be able to resist temptation to act irrationally if the conditions are right - if the circumstances so nudged me. You see, I'm human too. So is David Cameron if the stories of the Bullingdon Club are to be believed.

The good news is I do think there is something your rational selves can do to avoid those contexts.

My guess is many of us would loot in the right (wrong) circumstances. But I'm also pretty sure most of us would employ our rational moments to guide us away from those circumstances.

And that's where the Government - and others bent on behaviour modifying must focus, too.
We can rationally decide to join together with good things in mind - and we can support each other - be good monkeys to be seen and copied, too.

That's how the brooms came out - en masse - for the twitter clean up. We can use social media to find folk thinking positively, too and coordinate and cooperate with them.

Call it rational if you like...

Friday, July 08, 2011

The end of The Age of Being Told What To Do

Image via Flickr - and free to share anywhere!

The end of one of Britain's oldest newspapers marks the end of the Age of Being Told What To Do.
British politician's must be privately sighing with relief (or more likely laughing themselves dizzy). Because this spells out if not the end of the power of press barons, a very significant reduction in it.
The News of the World is one of NewsCorps. Part of the vast Murdoch media empire. It is an empire which has given the Murdochs huge power. They have used it to threaten, cajole, instal and topple Governments. They backed one party or another - and went on witch hunts and mud-slinging exercises to attack those who they did not annoint. Through this they have seeked to control how we are governed.
Successive generations of Britain's leaders have cow-towed to this power. It's been embarrassing to see them cringe before Rupert and Co.
Now politicians are waking to the realisation that Murdoch's media power has gone - and that learning has to impact every press baron remaining on the planet.
The rapid and angry response of the people took down the News of the World - destroying the brand. And that response was only able to grow, aggregate and self-organise to impressive effect because of the social tools now at our disposal - the social media. We didn't need to be told how to think, or what to do.
A community of purpose organised and created change, fast. The web lowers the cost of group forming. But the important bit is that these aren't any old groups. These are groups of people with shared purposes: Communities.
And communities lower the cost of getting things done.
No longer is the power at the centre - it is at the edge.
We, the edge, the self-organised, have achieved what Governments could not - we have brought the press barons to heel.
Of course there will be emergent clusters and clumps of influence, flocks to be turned in the peer to peer world where influence now resides. We don't all have equal influence - power if you like - all of the time. But it is us, the edge that will do the flock turning.
Messages are no longer done to us, but done by us - or at the very least with our considered consent. We will share what we choose to share - and that is the only way in which information will flow in this space. We will no longer be told what to think by a huge source of power at the centre - we will influence each other.
But before the politicians raise a glass of champagne to the demise of the media baron, they must also note that their fate remains in the hands of exactly the same forces. They may believe they are the power at the centre but unless they take rapid steps to open up to the people they represent - and relinquish the control that dominates the current model - they will go the way of the News of the World and of the press barons.

Monday, March 29, 2010

I bumped into David Cameron in Starbucks - and talked Twitter

I bumped into David Cameron this morning - Tory Party leader and the man who would become Prime Minister in the UK should his party win the general election in May.

Actually, he slipped past me in the queue at Starbucks at St Pancras railway station. He went straight to a table without buying anything - and that set my sense of fair play twitching.

Turns out a colleague/assistant was doing the queueing for him, which I guess is fair enough?
I sat at the table next to him. At this point I thought he was just some young exec who looked a bit like David Cameron (I'd not met him before).

But when he opened his mouth to talk with said assistant the voice and content of their conversation was a heavy hint.

So I turned to him and asked: "You look familiar. Should I know you?"

He smiled. "Perhaps"

I raised an eyebrow, inviting clarification.

"I'm David Cameron, leader of The Conservative Party."

So. I shook his hand. Wished him luck. But told him I wouldn't be supporting him all the way.

I asked if I could take a snap (to tweet) and also whether he was using Twitter himself.

I told him I'd heard what he'd said about Twitter while being interview by Absolute Radio.
And he explained he didn't use it.

Politicians, he said, needed to think about what they said, before they said it.

He worried that those who tweeted all the time were sharing a stream of consciousness.

I said politicians ought not think too hard before they speak, they should tweet their stream of consciousness. I'd prefer the direct honesty.

And I cited John Prescott (@johnprescott) - and how for years the media had painted him as a bumbling fool - but Twitter enabled him to go direct to the public - to disintermediate the media - revealing the passionate and intelligent man Prescott actually is, rather than the charicature you see in the press.

Cameron did concede that Prescott is a very clever man - but also pointed out that the 140characters of Twitter were a blessed limitation on Prescott's tendency to verbosity. A fair point.

I don't suppose Cameron will start tweeting any time soon. Which is a shame.

Because I prefer my politicians to tell me what they honestly think and as directly as possibly. I want them to admit their human face, warts and all - rather than a mediated, bland/sanitised version of themselves.

Twitter enables that way better than any amount of 'press' ever can.

I only wish more politicians of all parties would give it a go. We may end up knowing who and what we're expected to vote for. And that would be a pleasant first.

UPDATE: Jonathan Macdonald shared an image that captures me sat on the next table to Cameron - just before I was sure who he was and started bending his ear. Watchers watching the watchers :-) View it larger here.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

2020 vision

I know. I'm meant to review the last decade or predict what'll happen in the next year around this time.

Thing is, I'm not going to follow the rules, because for the years following 2009 it simply wouldn't be appropriate to follow rules which may have applied up to this point.

We're in for a big change: Where the noughties were a decade of discovery, the teens will be a decade of realisation. And not discovery of new tech. The future isn't digital; it is self-organised.

The noughties were when we discovered our self-organising power - little by little. And new models started to emerge.

But we are embarking on 10 years in which people all over the globe will realise the self-organising power now at their fingertips - and start turning that realisation into the world they want; niche by niche.

Which means everything you know is up for grabs. Everything.

Everything that is organised or mediated can and will be disrupted by this.

That's pretty much every aspect of society, then. (image courtesy Life Archive on google)

As the realisation dawns, you can be certain no one will be talking about 'social media' anymore. They will just get on with using the best ever set of tools and platforms to communicate: With each other, find each other, form groups, act.

They won't wait to be directed. They will simply come together and debug their world. Niche by niche. The edge in action.

Which is bad news for those who would organise and those who would mediate.

It's not just traditional media, advertising, marketing etc that's going to be replaced. Even the 'new media' stuff that relies on central organisation is threatened. Traditional search (for example) is already being replaced for many by collaborative filtering.

Ubiquitous, always-on computing will arrive as the enabler. Digital social tools which allow us to express meta data beyond silos (including language) will emerge to enable all of us to find all of us when we need each other most. Those tools and platforms which fulfil those roles most successfully will be those with the best chance of commercial success.

And by 2020 we will have the tech and the will to make communities of purpose the primary form of organisation: adhoc self-forming groups brought together to collaborate - driven by common purpose.

The self-organised future will begin taking shape, new structures for education, law, government - all the aparatus of the state - will emerge. And as they do the state itself, as a formalised centrally-controlled collective based on geography, will submerge.

This new form of organisation will over-ride more traditional methods primarily because it provides a more effective tool for the allocation of increasingly scarce resources. But also because people like doing stuff together. It's a better fit with the reality of our social selves.

Lowest common denominator models will disappear wherever communities of purpose can self-organise (which is pretty much everywhere and anytime).

One example? Mass party politics will decline. New democracy will formulate in open systems - with collaboration delivering a better fit, niche by niche,

In repeatedly failing to understand the cross-border collaboration of 'their' people, our national leaders remind us of the failure of lowest common denominator politics and broad and assumed national interests.

The issue of global warming may prove a key catalyst. We gave our leaders the chance to sort things out with their big, broad, one-size fits all policies (they found that none did).

In a decade of realisation we move beyond being passive consumers in all aspects of our lives - government policy included.

We won't sit back and wait for the centre's solution. Instead we quietly and determinedly get on with wikifixing our world - collaborating across borders, ignoring the fictional silos the nation state has imagined and attempted to impose.

The impact of the edge on the centre has the potential to be cataclysmic. If change from without happens faster than change from within, something will tear. Fundamental organisational change is hard to imagine as a gentle process.

Judging when to cede control will be a key skill for leaders of all organisations in the coming years. Protecting the vulnerable, another.

My daughter has just finished her first term of traditional schooling. I have to wonder if she will complete her education (what a curious pre-network phrase...) within a similar lowest-common-denominator structure. And if she doesn't - then how does the morph from old to new happen? With a meeting of a parents collective and nods of assent - or with teachers manning the barricades?

There is much to consider; much I (and we) could strive to predict.

Instead, in the words of BBC Childrens TV long gone (and with more than a nod to Clay Shirky's Gin-swilling tales of newly industrial London), Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Start inventing the self-organised future - niche by niche - with someone you care about, today.

By 2020 a person's worth will be valued by what they share, not what they keep. That may be the most significant shift of all.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Little bits of politics

The euro election results coming in today reveal yet another inconvenient truth for the old world of mass: a record low turn-out.

Roughly 6/10* elligable Europeans care so little about the policies and the messages of ALL political parties that they decided not to vote at all.

I wonder how many may have made the journey to the polling booths if they had known there would be an alternative box to tick? One that read:

The current system sucks. I want a new one - one that's relevant to me.

Those elected today can hardly claim a mandate. We're starting to ask what constitutes legitimate government? How low must a turn-out be before the result is considered void?

And yet everyone has an opinion about how they would like the world about them to be. The turn-out for that all-day every-day election is pretty much 100%. Current models aren't capturing how much we care.

The old mass broadcast model of democracy is being challenged just as all forms of mediation are, by the power of the network.

Our electoral system is devised to match a world of mass; of lowest common denominator; focus on the hit end of the long tail.

The Us Now movie raises some of the issues. But it doesn't challenge the basic assumption that we should be governed by massing us into geographic groupings.

Perhaps we choose not to be grouped in that way any more? Perhaps the global communities of purpose that emerge, when we get our hands on the tools of digital self-organisation, change politics and the concept of nation states as much as they challenge traditional media and traditional business models?

Perhaps self forming, adhoc, communities of purpose will become the new way in which groups are gathered to be governed and to govern themselves?

If you had to start from scratch with an electoral system today, knowing what we know now about the power of the network - and the power it gives us all, would we start from where traditional politics has delivered us?

Do you trust the judgement of everyone who gets to vote?

If our lords and masters at the centre don't deign to consider the impact of the network, I have a funny feeling we'll just end up working around them...

*Updated at 10:35am on official turn-out figures.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

UK Budget: chancellor cries for help!

UK Chancellor Alistair Darling had a coded message in his budget speech yesterday. The tagcloud of his 100 most used words in it showed the single most used word was HELP! (cloud via TimesOnline)

Friday, March 14, 2008

Disaggregated Government, here we come

I saw Alex Butler speak yesterday; the Director of Transformational Strategy at the UK Government's Cabinet Office (cool title, btw)

She's facing an uphill battle - as anyone who is attempting to tackle the silo'd mentality of any organisation will attest. Her gig is to try to put the 'citizen' (read consumer for the rest of us) first - not the producers of the information (familiar difficulties in media, too).

Her problem is that each Government department wants to dissemminate its 'information' from its centre, out to the edge that is the citizenry. The result is something like (and it appears very hard to audit) 1500 government web sites.

And famously you may need to contact something like 40 government offices if you suffer a sudden bereavement. Not really putting the citizen first.

So the Directgov.co.uk site is an attempt to address this.

Alex says she understands the need for two-way flows of conversation, says government is learning from the success of e-petitions (that people actually want to take part in the legislative process) and is even considering the thorny issue of letting go of control - by offering government stuff as widgets and sources for mash-ups. Alex referred to NetMums (not a government site), revealing an understanding that local mums know best about services locally. Edge is best.

And at the end of this process you might conclude there will be no need for directgov.co.uk.
For example, if you want to go abroad; sure you need to know about passports and visas and whether or not your dog can come with you etc etc etc - all those government agency things... but you also need to know where you can book flights, hotels, car hire etc.

That government information is best deployed where it is of most use - eg when we're going through the 'consumer journey' of booking our travel.

So allowing government 'information' to be set free to be re-used by other relevant widgets/sites will mean the distribution is no longer controlled by the centre. And in citing NetMums Alex seems to understand that even the control of content is not always best performed from the centre.

Heartening. Makes me wonder what changes will be wrought to the machinery of government as a result. Disaggregated government here we come.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Safety Last: The network means common sense will eventually prevail

Try to do something too corporately, too completey, too centrally-controlled and you often end up creating the opposite effect. Perhaps this is because you are running contrary to common sense - the networked intelligence of us all.

Two examples occurred to me recently.

1) My daughter had been over-sucking her thumb. It ended up red raw and as she picked at it in the car on the way to nursery, it started bleeding, just a little. I asked at nursery if they'd put a plaster on for her. "Can't do that," I'm told. "In case of allergies". Health & (f**king) Safety madness. "Should I take her home instead then?"

Result: Open wounds, open to infection? Is this risk smaller than the allergy one?

2) Bonfire parties. November 5 is coming soon so that means fireworks in the UK. Years ago I recall almost everyone in the small town where I grew up trudging up to the 'Sand Hills' where the scouts would organise a firework display and bonfire. Roundtables, scouts, local rugby clubs etc etc organised events for years. But they seem to be dieing out. The reason - cost of meeting all the increasingly ludicrous health and safety rules - and the challenge of getting insurance. Result: a BOOM in home (completely unregulated, inexpert) displays. Every supermarket has racks of explosives pushed at customers as they come through the door.
All the rules were about reducing risk - but the result has been to wildly increase the risk.

Trust. We trust our nurseries to care for our children, with common sense. Externally applied rules prevent this.
We trust our community organisations to put on a good firework show, consider our safety, and provide a communal event. With common sense. Externally applied (centrally-derived) rules prevent this.

The network wants more and can deliver more. Common sense was once allowed to prevail. It is the natural state of humans. Now rules from the centre seek to over rule it.

The network will disrupt this. Common sense will re-establish itself as the edge-in model of distributed intelligence it always was. The centralised rule makers have to become part of the network or they will simply be replaced.

Legislators would do well to pay attention.