You wouldn’t normally think of writing a collective book in the park, but then would you expect young people to spend our time either being in the park or writing books, when we’ve got the “walled gardens” of Westfield and Facebook to play in?
A few posts ago, I mentioned I was planning to write a chapter for the sequel to Radical Future. I expected to be able to blog my thoughts and discussions to help flesh out a narrative, which I did….initially.
But helping broker the relationships, skills and motivations between people from different cities across Europe to develop a transnational cooperative, the “doing” got in the way of the “thinking”!
So on a sunny Saturday morning, a merry band of militant optimists (@davidbarrie) gathered in an #easteasteastlondon (not #thateastlondon) flat. From citizenship to counterpower, new oppressions to community organising, via post-austerity soberness to student culture.
It was difficult to know whether the laughs and screams of children on the swings were about the jokes they were telling each other, or the delusional grandeur of our aspirations, but we shared some humbling soundbites from “we choose to be changed because we lack the means to change” to “I tell jokes to drunk people in the dark” to prove we wouldn’t be as trendy as the Cool Britannia generation…and some lessons to challenge us when writing the book, that you could argue could each be individual discussions in their own right (#radicalfuture barcamp anyone?)
1. Make more explicit what we mean by “we”
…to describe what’s common across people of our generation and what’s specific to people in particular social contexts or environments
2. Use personal stories to describe the way we live our lives
…even if the solutions need to be connected with everything about our generation
3. Make arguments connect
…between the different chapters looking for the creative tensions that can spark off new ideas
4. Ensuring that even if we’re a lost generation, that we’ll make sure our children’s won’t be
Ensure our children’s generation can challenge us with their counterpower (@poldyn) because we need to realise we will make mistakes.
5. Understanding why it all went wrong, when we had the perfect conditions to make it right
Explore why the onslaught of the recession coupled with the threat of climate change wouldn’t accelerate the movement towards a zero-growth economy.
6. Distinguishing public services from public goods
…so that all of us feel ownership over the issues and the solutions and that we can separate the institutions from the social goods they produce.
