Solidarity, Occupation and Action

A Movement of Movements Paradox

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Think For Yourself

9 min readMar 28, 2014

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This is not for historians to fact check or to reexamine through a historical reference lens. This is simply about what is happening right now, in this moment, around the globe, in just a small number of movements. It is a partial response to the question Is a new world really possible?

An Open Letter to the 99%

If you are reading this, or in the case of the author here, writing this, we are inclusively invited to the 99% of society. We have a lot in common, you and I, and yet we are all as unique as we are individual. Research of hundreds of resistance movements shows that no resistance movement in the last 100 years has failed when 3.5 percent of the population participate. Your family, your team, your company, your community, your government, etc. can all see change in environment or outcome with just 3.5% of the collective working towards it. It is as simple as us finding ways to beat π (pi), getting past the elusive tipping point that only needs a lens of clarity to expose and create temporary or lasting change.

Creating a Movement
#waveofaction

Now we here go, from the 99% to the 3.5%. Welcome aboard. ✊

Guaranteed Income For All

If you’re familiar with Dr. Martin Luther King’s ideas, he was all about guaranteed income for all. It’s what got him killed, and it’s as unpopular today as it was then…especially among some greedy people and their BFFs.

Reform is Dead, Revolution Is Now.

“What if you could receive a guaranteed basic yearly income with no strings attached? Didn’t matter how much money you made now, or in the future. Nobody would ask about your job status or how many kids you have. The check would arrive in the mailbox, no matter what.”

Sounds like a far-fetched idea, right? Wrong. Cultural theorist, Lynn Parramore, gives us some insight into different movements that are all working towards this goal…guaranteed income for all. More than 235,000 independent workers are united in one of the fastest growing independent worker unions in the world, Freelancers Union. And there’s hundreds more of these in America, and thousands world wide, all uniting us together by the work that we do. These people have chosen to guarantee their income by taking control of it, and uniting together to create harmony and to maintain empathy. It allows us to perform our duties to society and mother earth in harmony, together, for the common goals we have agreed on. No special interests exist here except those arising in intensity and priority by populous. It is the occupation of jobs.

The fact is, there is a quiet revolution already happening. Self employed workers and small businesses in America are the fastest growing job sector adding numbers (not losing them), while corporations are shedding jobs left and right, somehow predicted by the Fed, all during an effort to continue to enact policies pertaining to special interests that keep jobs from its own citizens. All across the country, people are banding together in town halls again, reforming or creating new unions, in order to collectively work together to provide their community and family what is needed to survive and grow in this changing world.

Let’s find ways to stand up, be counted, and create 200,000+ secure jobs per month through self employment, a small business or cooperative, a union, or through creative and empathetic ways. Participation shows willingness and should be met with respect. Ask around and find how you can get help, a job, tools, or solidarity.

No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.
~Buddha

Creativity as an Occupation

The brilliance behind the @Occupy meme, is that Occupation is at the core of our basic, archaic, sophisticated, social structures. Do you not go off and perform work, or have you worked, or can you work? Can you have an occupation? It’s essential, no matter how big or small our villages and homesteads are, to engage in the activity of work. And, work is at the very core of human creative activity.

There are an infinite amount of job types, jobs, and ways to choose in how you spend your life’s time working. I am thinking of all of the ways I know that the people around me go out and work, or not. It’s a personal choice, and we are in an unprecedented time in history to help society solve the challenge of inequality due to the lack of jobs or consistent income.

The desire for a long-term, healthy economy demands a focus on innovation and allowing people to generate income from their own ideas.

The creative class of the human race is awake and vibrant right now, from artists to musicians to inventors to marketers to engineers to entrepreneurs to writers, to people like you and me. There is a collective energy and vibration that the world’s creative energy is producing, and it is manifested every day in an assortment of ways. Coworking, mass meditations, occupations, global springs, revolutions, education reforms, concerts, dance ins, meaningful actions, political takeovers, paintings, writings, speeches, classes, memes, software, robots, sustainable research teams, impact investments, non profit projects; you name it, that’s enough for me. It is fairly obvious when looked at that ideas are flowing, constantly being vetted, and some are growing rapid adoption while others transform or are snuffed out. The international situation is dire, as usual.

Nothing Has Changed As Everything Is Changing

For creators of all kinds there are newly available tools and age old principles to work with, in order to manifest your visions into mediums you see fit. Be encouraged to do so, to take the risk, to follow your passions. The crowd is us, your neighbors and friends and family members. It’s the people who need to relate with someone else, in ways only you can create in tangible ways. Crowdfund your ideas, crowd source your resources, and collaborate with people who are drawn to you, and vise versa. Ignore the ego.

The Creation of Ideas

There is another movement happening, at the source of where ideas are being manifested into the world. These places are often referred to as startup communities, startup ecosystems, innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators, entrepreneurship programs, pitch contests, reality shows, workshops, chambers of commerce, unions, co-ops, co-working spaces, garages, intentional communities, collectives, board rooms, political rallies, flash actions, projects, software, books, art, music, campaigns, meetups, media, and more.

Many people around the world are in an #OccupyIdeas type of mood, all in an effort to create more sustainable, more acceptable, more conscious ways of creating and sustaining our lives and those around us. Technology is not the goal, it is a means in which to experience life in different ways. Some people have the creative ability to use technology to create our life’s work, just as the painter uses canvas with brush and paints, and yet others use words or food or clothes or jobs or widgets or wines to create their life’s work. Many examples of this have been done, is being done, and will be done in an infinite number of collective ways. The system, if you will, is being rebuilt. And, pure creativity is building it.

In Silicon Valley, by far the most famous example of a startup community gone bust, is experiencing the same pressures that Wall Street did during the initial and ongoing waves from Occupy, and the global community. Inequality, wage differentiation, costs of living, have all been blow out of proportion and exposed like their future selves…big entities and monopolies with a strong hold on ideas and innovation that refuses to meet the true demand of the environment, society, and systems of structure and anti-structure we interact with each day.

These incredible communities of creators are ready, willing and able to help solve the challenges of our time, produce quality for future challenges, employ millions of workers, and help to create a more sustainable world for many of us, in greater effect, by collaborating more openly and candidly about their passions and providing us an opportunity to help them succeed. It is time to evolve society.

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.
~ Howard Thurman

The LA Times has asked the question, Has the Occupy movement come to Silicon Valley?

Hacking Education & Politics

Hacking is not a new word or sound or type of activity, and it embodies the very forces of us being tapped into the flow, into creativity, into work, and into results. So, we hack away at it, whatever it may be. To think about hacking as a practice of disruption, it’s like the painting with more than one dimension…it keeps presenting new dimensions. While replacing the word reform with the word hack, we admit that it is not a fell swoop, a solution, a replacement, an “all said and done” object of new study. It is an idea, to be validated, and possibly to be evolved. As a parent of a child educated at home and abroad through experiential modalities and freedom of choice, the education of ourselves and our children is paramount to the future of any ground work we are currently putting in place. Does it align? Do our policies align? Does the collective align in an autonomous way that allows for us to truly reform education? Taking politics out of education is paramount, whilst supporting it where our money meets our mouth. A plethora of options are available for home and independent educators to collaborate, and we desire and require a more rich tool set, greater visibility into methods and instrumentation, as well as a framework for collaborating while maintaining independence. I am sure as the hacking of politics becomes more clean campaign driven, policies that effect education are evolved into consciousness in more of us, standing together, to educate in our school houses, where they may lie, and provide freedom of the best options for each child.

I look forward to spending more time hearing what others are doing for children, small and aging (like us), and being able to unearth the movements happening within education, like those being taken up by projects like Granny Cloud from Projects for All, as well as projects from folks like Union Square Ventures project named Hacking Education, and the work by just a few people who are truly Hacking Politics.

Of Course, Love is Patient and Love is Kind

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Movement Of Movements

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