Today in the Why We Fail category: Required reading.

I’m constantly enthralled by the intersections between activism and technology. Mostly with the appropriate use of technology within activism. I’m also interested in the flip-side, the strange, sometimes horrifying decisions and their consequences made in the progressive movement. So I’m heading out right away to pick up a copy of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without Organizations (which also has its companion blog).

Shirky works on open source collaborative applications that you may already be using. People opposed to reflecting on the futility of a lot of tactics going on in a number of social, environmental and political movements out there (hello you anti-war crowd who have yet to stop a single war) should consider the actions used to bring about actual change, such as Shirky’s oft used example, the Passenger Bill of Rights.

At the website for Harvard’s Berkman Center, Clay discusses the themes in his book, focusing on protest culture and the difference between institutional (what Code Pink does) Vs. ad hoc modes (what the WTO protests in Seattle did which shut that meeting down), and the lack of strategies combining singular acts of protest with ongoing movements.

The lack of ongoing strategy or a focus on tangible, achievable goals continues to wound progressive movements. Shirky’s analysis is well worth hearing out by anyone involved in organizing.

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