The New Citizen Newsletter #16
“Acceleration is one of the most important and least understood of all social forces. “ Alvin Toffler
🥤 Auditing the plastic on our beaches 🗒
Recently, we’ve written about a few different initiatives that remove plastic from beaches and recycle it. This week, they’ve decide to do something else with the trash. More than 1,000 clean-up groups coordinated a mass audit of beach waste from UK to Vietnam. After picking up 200,000 pieces of trash off beach, they identified Coca Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle as the largest contributors to plastic waste.
The groups have shared their findings with politicians in Europe and have publicly asked the companies what they intend to do about all of the waste.
Source: The Guardian.
🌞 Building environmentally friendly websites 💽
As the internet becomes more flashy, it takes more energy to use it. The Low Tech Magazine has decided to completely overhaul its website to be as energy-efficient as possible and to run entirely off solar power. They’ve also published their own guide for how people can build and power their own sustainable web servers.
Low Tech Magazine hopes that more people will choose to host their own data in an environmentally friendly way, rather than relying on inefficient cloud technologies.
Source: Motherboard.
🏙 Plotting a very Belgian coup 🤔
Residents of Brussels are heading to the polls to vote in local elections today, but one collective has very different ideas about how to run their city. Plan B is an initiative that aims to bring radical transparency and fairer representation to their local government. Their programme lays out how they intend to create self-organising neighbourhoods lead by a citizens committee of volunteers that are selected by lot. Kinda like jury duty, but for municipal planning.
Thanks to Xavier Damman for the tip.
🥊 Rethinking citizenship 🚀
This week, we’ve been in London for the annual Battle of Ideas Festival. Lauren Razavi contributed her thoughts on privacy, tech regulation and the accelerating personal data arms race.
Other talks included a great discussion about the need for ideas of citizenship in the 21st century and a somewhat depressing debate about the decline of counter-culture movements.
