Organized Power

Also see related subpage(s), including Organized Power/Notes.

ABSTRACT

Our Humanity: Civilizations throughout history are nearly always dominated by a tiny number of elites. Sometimes a society’s elites rule with relative benevolence, or at least refrain from causing too much harm. At other times, sociopathic individuals take control and lead entire civilizations into ruin.

Our Crisis: Empires rise and fall; tyrants come and go. But only in the past few generations have humans achieved the capacity to destroy ourselves, along with virtually every other living thing on our planet. What hasn’t changed is our behavior. The tiny elite who currently dominate most of humanity are once again leading us all to ruin. And we can’t seem to stop following.

Our Response: We can chart our own course if we choose to. Acting together, we can identify, comprehend and coherently respond to the mounting crises we face. One stepping-stone to reaching this goal is to harness powerful new technologies to communicate, coordinate and collaborate with each other. Then act together.

Organized Power dedicates itself to the task of acting with ordinary working people to harness collaborative technologies, and turn the dysfunctional power pyramid upside down.

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Organized Power is a civic engagement and community organizing project spearheaded by a small group of community activists in Portland, Oregon. The project’s primary organizers are drawn from current PortlandWiki contributors and others active in the Portland community. The project’s organizing focus is to connect individuals and groups living in particular communities with each other, and to also connect these intra-connected communities with one another.

Civic wikis play a central role in Organized Power’s community-building strategy. As the city wiki for Portland, PortlandWiki is a great example of a civic wiki. In addition to acting as a “knowledge commons” for a given community, a civic wiki can act as that community’s networking hub by linking together individuals and organizations who share common interests.

Organized Power also focuses on identifying free or freely available technology products that individuals and groups within a given community can use to assist them with their organizing goals and community building efforts. In this context, Organized Power acts as a technology consultant and service provider to deploy carefully selected collaborative technologies, and to train people how to use them. The overarching goal is to assist people within the community in making use of these technologies for the purpose of bringing people together to meet, plan, communicate, collaborate, get things done and enjoy each other’s company.

Civic Wikis and the Community

... our minds are accustomed to think about something, about a problem ... our personal desires, fulfilments, sorrow, anxiety and so on ... ‘thinking about’. We are (inquiring into) thinking itself ... not about something ... but thinking together. ... Please see the difference: thinking together does not mean that you agree or disagree, accept or reject, defend or offend, but together find out if it is possible by thinking together we can act together ...
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti

One of wiki’s least understood features is the potential the wiki platform offers for deep collaboration, or what the great psychological philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti called “thinking together.” In the context of a civic wiki, deep collaboration often emerges through the collective participation of a core group of contributors. As pages are created, information gathered and presented, photos, drawings, videos, sound files and other media are plugged into various articles, the wiki’s “personality” starts to take shape.

Unlike the hierarchical structures -- political, economic, social -- that govern a neighborhood, city or town, a wiki can offer people living there a chance to participate in building a community resource and knowledge commons. Contributors can build upon what others have already contributed. As people freely interact with each other in this way, a participatory culture may begin to emerge. Spontaneous organization starts happening, and a valuable community resource comes into being.

Dysfunctional Communities

Organized Power organizes around the fundamental understanding that the predominant social structures that currently govern society are largely outdated. Many of them are rapidly transitioning from functional to dysfunctional forces. Topping the list of functional-to-dysfunctional social institutions are:

• media
• financial
• political
• educational
• economic
• security

Personal and Economic Security

Personal and economic security generally tops the list of concerns for most people in any given community. Any disruption in the ability to maintain adequate personal and economic security has immediate and often dire consequences. Organized Power puts primary organizing focus on strengthening the ability of ordinary people to adequately provide for themselves, and for communities to transition towards healthier and more community-centric social and economic modes of operation.

Among ordinary working people, organized workers (those belonging to independent labor unions) are generally best positioned to maintain a certain measure of control over their personal economies. Dr. Martin Luther King remains the primary thought leader and spiritual guiding light in recognizing ordinary working people as having the greatest potential to lead social transformation. Like King, Organized Power views working people as embodying the greatest potential for driving social change.

Holistic Community

Organized Power recognizes that strong, community-based networks are key to successfully migrating away from the rapidly deteriorating social structures that currently prevail. Healthy and participatory community-based information flows are key to transitioning towards the creation of healthier, more holistic communities. The increasing failure of legacy institutions to respond to the primary interests of ordinary people places greater responsibility on people within individual communities to create new institutional frameworks.

Similar to feudal societies, industrial social organization is characterized by hierarchical “pyramids” with control concentrated in the hands of a tiny, highly organized group at the top of the pyramid. These few at the top exercise authority over a fragmented, confused and highly disorganized base. Individuals inhabiting the middle of the pyramid are generally better organized and more privileged than those at its base. They serve as a buffer between the highly organized elite and the divided and conquered base.

In Europe and North America, the industrial model of social organization has steadily declined for decades. In the United States, the decline arguably accelerated with the first of the “oil shocks” of the 1970s. Recent developments in resource depletion, environmental degradation and financial collapse strongly indicate that the economic models and institutions charged with maintaining order in these areas are in crisis. They apparently have lost the ability to function coherently and effectively.

As old-order industrial institutions continue their decline, new arrangements will rise to replace them. Most of the incumbent institutional frameworks -- government, business, financial, religious and so on -- appear as if they are morphing into social arrangements that bear a strong resemblance to those that dominated pre-industrial feudalism. While it’s difficult to ascribe the precise motivations harbored by any of these legacy institutions, at least two characteristics clearly stand out: movements towards even greater and more rigid hierarchy, and extreme resource consolidation.

Knowledge Sharing

It’s essential to keep potential pitfalls top of mind while attempting to build any body of knowledge. Each precious nugget of human knowledge drowns in a vast ocean of human ignorance. Polluting this “ignorance ocean” are massive quantities of toxic noise -- misinformation, disinformation, lies, propaganda and the like. These toxic pollutants often coalesce into quickly moving currents that disturb, degrade and ultimately destroy all fragmentary bits of knowledge they sweep up. In this sense, every bit of so-called knowledge -- however legitimate -- is subject to finding itself corrupted into just another murmur of toxic noise or ripple of ignorance.

“How-To-Do-It”: Knowledge As Humanity’s Central Prosthesis

In his essay, “The Animal in the Dark Tower,” Ran Prieur (Superweed, Civilization Will Eat Itself) asserts that drawing a “line in our heads” separating Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) into pre- and post-civilized states is the wrong place to make that conceptual demarcation. Instead Prieur suggests that we draw that imaginary line between humans and all other living beings “not in the sense that we are more ‘highly’ evolved, but that we have evolved to some strange place off to the side, isolated and dangerous.”

The path that takes us to this “strange place” that Prieur characterizes as “isolated and dangerous” is “our reliance on culturally-transmitted technique: knowledge of how-to-do-it that is no longer dependent on nature, on having a place in the web of life, but on nurture, on abstract mental models learned from other humans.” This reliance on “knowledge of how-to-do-it” is, of course, the central thesis of Rogue Primate, the pathbreaking treatise on human domestication by Canadian naturalist John Livingston, whose protégée, fellow naturalist and former student Louise Fabiani calls “one of Canada’s greatest thinkers.” This fragile membrane -- the countless ideologies, dogmas, concepts and thought forms mediating all human perception -- is what Livingston calls our “prosthetic being.”