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Netroots UK: day of workshops at TUC Congress House London 8 January 2011

Dave Winer the American software developer and entrepreneur noted that one weblogger is worth ten non-weblogging voters. This was a few years ago; what price today for our Tweeters and facebook mobilisers in the climate of social unrest with the return of street politics. The Labour Party has not been slow to recognise the possibilities; with netroots UK and the slogan ‘building the progressive grassroots online’ the Party brought hundreds of  young e-activists off the streets to spend a Saturday indoors at the Trade Union Congress House. We know why. Whilst formal politics seems unable to answer the questions that contemporary society is asking, the e-activist has paradoxically acquired high currency in contemporary electoral politics. Arguably the national political consciousness is no longer being shaped by the traditional media but by self-produced social media and the blogosphere.

Political valorisation of new media is not new and neither is its assimilation into formal political process. However most of the activists attending came uninitiated or unaware of the roots of netroots, an import from mid-nineties US electoral campaigns. ‘Netroots’ was coined by a former environmental activist Jerome Armstrong to challenge  “old-school politics with a new kind of popular political movement that combines the grassroots, labour unions and big donors to effect a broad change in the political landscape, returning power to the edges” through using a lot of new web-based tools. In 2003 Armstrong used his myDD platform (my Direct Democracy) for the now notorious Howard Dean campaign for the DNC (Democratic National Congress) Chair. Language games were a key part of myDD, with phrases such as deploying a ‘map changer attitude’ to contest the  ‘battleground mentality’ of orthodox politics.
“The battleground mentality plays to the Republican strong hand. The Republicans realise exactly which races are the battlegrounds, and focus all of their resources in kind, on the same races… they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new media, machine politics and database inventories that give them superior voter targeting capabilities.
In contrast, the mapchanger attitude utilizes the tens of thousands of grassroots activists in every state and congressional district. The power of people becomes the strongest resource and gives the national Party the ability to pour resources into those states or districts that become surprisingly contested.”
But map-changing was never about game-changing; not only was it firmly rooted in electoral politics in its current state but moreover its thinking (articulated through books like Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics) eschewed any association with other forms of political agency. Colin Greer in opendemocracy.org described all this as the being the ‘politics of calm’, not about political ideals but purely about winning elections, gaining power. As a consequence “rather than risk being marginalised for taking a strong stance against the right, progressives now espouse “safe” positions in order to appease what they believe (in the face of evidence) to be the majority of Americans. They define this imaginary mainstream public by its disdain for radical views and direct action, and retreat from both in the vain hope that such caution will bring political reward.”

All this is a far cry from the manifestations of protest culture we are witnessing in London and across Europe – street protest, police kettling, university occupations, the storming of Millbank.  But if there was an underlying awareness of such contradictions at netroots – with a new generational divide based on the funky new things like twitter, and the usual networks versus institutions… the response was to try to talk up the sexiness of ‘traditional’ politics.  At the same time this came with an element of apology for bringing the e-activists off the streets through a series of open invitations.
“Come in and take over” said Simon Weller, the National Organiser for ASLEF the train drivers union, explaining how most union meetings were extremely open to participation and horizontally run. Another Labour unionist asked how he could appeal to people who don’t vote, and are scared by the word ‘comrade’.  With such broad based appeasement, the apprehensions of appropriation within the twitter camp were not so much misplaced but too predictably defined.
@PennyRed Laurie Penny We’re listening politely whilst appointed arbiters of the centre-left mow the grassroots into a neat, acceptable bourgeois lawn.

Outside of the plenary sessions, the drive of the Labour party machine mellowed; the workshops did a different kind of talking through insight into practicalities. Simon Collister of wearesocial.net led the way in the workshop on working with social media with the decisive observation that in order to self-organise to achieve change we no longer needed large infrastructures. Why? Because the social web is built around individuals, not organisations.  All one needed to start a campaign was shared visions, shared goals to work together online. The way is simple:
1 establish your presence in online space and tap into networks with pre-existing ‘ad-value’ to what you want to achieve
2 embrace disruption
Ad-value is a strange choice of words but it is regrettably close to the truth, Collister suggested. “The social media consisted of  pseudo-public spaces where our presence is tolerated as long as we are not interfering with the creation of ad value”. Its not as in your face as in the streets but its ubiquitous as in Facebook, google, so forth.
So the recipe: use tools that that people are already using and embrace disruption.  Yet there are contradictions in this often lost in the activism but it is something we are resigned to: by using platforms like Facebook, google, Twitter, that is the tools that people are already using, we not only reinforce our dependence on such platforms, we co-produce them and yet hand over the intimate details of our private lives to private monopolies.
Andrew Walker of tweetminster prefaced with a confession – tweetminster merely aggregates political data. Of the 93 Labour MPs on Twitter, for example, 60 tweeted during the last labour conference and you can download the data here. tweetminster argues that whilst corporations like Samsung, nike are tuned in to mining social media, politics is still on the broadcast model. With politics, traditional models of campaigning are shoehorned into new media as an extension of the broadcast model. An alternative approach would be the ongoing mining of opinion, through online activity, twitter surges, and then to build the politics around what people are thinking. “If you have mined the data, then so you can say I have 10,000 who… to back up your own gut feelings”.
tweetminster advocates a move away from top-down but confesses “we havent got the new politics as yet but, when it arrives the new politics means engaging with real people.  The public will tell you what we need, so mine the data and traffic and resonate with their own values!”
There are 2 possible visions here, one of the social web as making of a new quasi-service sector, endlessly interpretive, the other of the new politics, a conceptually consensual invisible hand of political process.  The problem is that both seek to mine and manipulate the status quo, not change it. “Tap into the networks and the political solutions will appear as low hanging fruit”. But somehow this points to a dangerous seamlessness between e-commerce, e-democracy and e-activism.
Activist Chris Coltrane of @UKuncut enthused about the organisational possibilities of social media. Confessing to several hundred tweets and re-tweets a day, he explained how with twitter, he could harness 400 followers within an hour. Recounting his memories of activism before social media, of 50 person demos all waving placards with a lingering sense of futility, he asked “what was the point?”
But along came the game-changer: social media. “Now if you have an interesting protest, its 50 people PLUS the internet PLUS the media. All this meant @UKuncut could shut down 3 vodafone offices at the same time. And its all non-hierarchical, we just set a time, set a date, gave infrastructure… its all horizontal people can unite thanks to social media its that empowerment that gets people excited”. @Ukuncut has cut deep into public consciousness with very little resources and worked across the generation gap; even Polly Toynbee of the Guardian who went far into detailing the effects of the proposed budget cuts on the average working family, tapped into the energy of unrest and discord with her experiences at Topshop with UKuncut. Her New Years resolution? Start using twitter.
The problem in all this is what is being disguised by the hype; nascent media always feels horizontal but the pyramidal structures either lurk below or return.

“The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliché, where familiar rhetorical vehicles – decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots – create a ceaseless buzz,” wrote Gary Wolf in Wired.  It’s the continuous buzz that’s integral to Twitter culture. Follow it over time and a certain typology of communication emerges; there is the blurring of the private with the public along with a volume of echoing through RTs (retweeting) – self-affirmations within tribal formations. Ukuncut has 14,376 followers, whilst individual participants of @Ukuncut may have over a thousand.  All this can be used to heighten focus at particular time and place through a twitter surge but it can be a hard job keeping the flow going when not much is happening. However one can stitch together a narrative from the flow, the buzz.
rosebiggin: If you don’t eat enough meat to get into heaven, you go to Burgatory.
chris_coltrane Chris Coltrane  Avoiding a few million quid in tax. #Jerseying
aaronjohnpeters Aaron Peters  In a global village a leak is a tidal wave.
But the key to Chris Coltrane’s presentation lay in the conjunction of the words  ‘if’ and ‘interesting’. And what if you are not? And what if what you are interested in is not interesting to the media? How does one configure a political space in such situations?
Not surprisingly mentions of facebook and twitter quietly disappear in the workshops on the ‘hyperlocal’.  Luke Bozier, the Managing Director of MyCllr.com who worked for Tony Blair, rolled out the stats. 69%of households broadband access, 50%of those less than 44 years old replied to a blog, 16% of web users contacted a politician directly through the web,  20% admitted signing a petition. Bozier proclaimed MyCllr.com could “revolutionise the relationship between us and our political representatives”. We wonder how this fits with a Blairite doctrine of leadership..
Nick Micinski from the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum (MRCF) in West London coordinating their Digital Activism Project, suggested at a local day-to- day level, social media instead of augmenting real life was perceived to be replacing real life. ‘Alchemy comes from the one to one, having a coffee’. His blog report on netroots is insightful.
But nonetheless the truism that emerges is apparent:  in the age of austerity the only surplus left to the people is information, the so-called cognitive surplus.  We have an abundance of it and we now have the tools to utilise the surplus to allow it to allow us to self organise. There is no other choice.

Over the course of netrootsUK two things emerge: firstly, that the intense processes of assimilation of such tools into current political processes is well advanced and, yet at the same time there is a widening gulf in language and potentialities for the practice of politics through such tools. Together the contradiction is that of being able to see the other but an inability to move for fear of losing power. Critically the trend is that the gulf between the two is widening but there isn’t the tipping point as yet to force a different way of thinking onto the political structures. If that was the case we might have had a different range of workshops, one perhaps a working group for new political structures or systems – the new grassroots.  Progressive political change is a 2 way street but netroots had a one way plan, speed-dating incompatible currents. As a consequence it could never dive far from the surface, always keeping in touching range with old sureties. To conclude MP Stella Creasy kept the focus on formal politics with a compelling appeal to ‘be part of the process’ as it’s the only way to exercise political power. She acknowledged that a third of the most active community campaigners did not exercise their vote but asserted “the only way to make a difference is through party activism”.  It’s a belief, an assertion which is true yet blind to the reality of things. The stats states 75% of those below the age of 21 do not vote, and that only 1.8% of the population influences the vote outcome. For the majority, voting as a way of engaging the political process has become pointless or, as one questioner put it “the engaged have disengaged”. Thus a more pointed question would be to ask what are possibilities, here and now, for political agency for such people, who now are the majority. If the answer is none, in a later conversation, tweeter and student activist with UKuncut, Aaron Peters touched on what technology can offer: “Democratic representation in the future is about co-production; having your interests represented may no longer be the issue”. If that’s the case do we need party politics? I asked. “Parties fail because of their internal structure. Technology now makes it too easy to create self-produce political representation”. Treading past the low-lying fruit, these are debates we plan to continue elsewhere, over, above and outside of these walls.

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