To help me write a chapter for the Re-generation book, the second book in our Radical Future collective’s series, I started blogging about how we needed to reclaim disruption, taking inspiration from cities like Tirana, Bogota and Porto Alegre who used institutional or social crises to deliberately accelerate creative disruption.
I asked how we could use the crisis we face to take back the strategic use of creative disruption, not to disrupt people’s lives but to disrupt the systems that perpetrate inequalities? How does our generation use creative techniques to put the spotlight on the gaps in society, open up people’s imagination to new possibilities and empower positive deviants to influence new ways of living?
You can read the chapter in Re-generation where I provide some clues (and there are many other chapters in there which are far better written than mine!) on this, but perhaps the best example is United Estonia, a story told by@distantsignals on the Edgeryders website.
“In Spring 2010 a populist movement entered the Estonian political scene. It was called United Estonia and it promised change, justice and land for everyone. The members of the movement were mostly actors from the theatre NO99 known for its rather modern forms of expression and social criticism. For six weeks the movement fueled the media circus and kept analysts and politicians speculating whether the new force will win the next elections due in 10 months.”
United Estonia started exposing some widespread methods of spin of Estonian parties in series of critical Youtube videos called “Voting schools” which you can see below, based on real experiences of coalition negotiations. If only citizenship education was like this!
