Humans associated with The World Transformed wrote a report on transformative political education amongst the left in the United Kingdom and, potentially, abroad (I didn’t read the full report).
The authors advocate that the goal of radical educators should not simply to advanced immediate goals (such as building state power or growing unions) but to construct an alternative narrative of political hegemony. What might this look like for us?
Among other things:
A recognition that the internet is the result of decades of labour that have been co-opted by tech firms who, to a great extent, unilaterally decide the terms of internet dissemination and availability
The content producers of the internet (users like us) are among the chief sources of value in the internet
And more …
I am starting to think that it would be advantageous for some of us to attend TWT 2023, to help further radical political education. That said, I don’t know what such a session at TWT 2023 would entail that might be of use to the participants.
My guess is that connecting crises of the internet with various other crises is potentially useful for those activists chiefly concerned with an area or 2 of political struggle.
Any thoughts on what might be useful for a broad audience of socialists?
And thanks to you for the report, which has been filed into the read at Christmas pile
I actually do think that pitching a TWT session would be useful. I am a twice-attendee and once-volunteer and there was nothing across any of these three fests which covered interwebs. There were also no people really who could speak to it - not a criticism, but one need only look at the difficulties in getting people to do things at the specific goddamn Union set up to engage tech workers to understand that we all have a bad rep for engaging with the wider left. This in my eyes is probably a combination of burnout, time, and will.
I wonder if we could come up with something of a useful pitch in the coming months that we could wing over to them. It to be honest could fit within the bucket of Content Marketing (I know, I’m sorry) and teach people, for example, how to treat tech at protests in order to protect their fellow humans, with the forward action of engaging with locus further in order be kept in the loop about this sort of thing.
