There are, of course, the various national Left organizations that endorsed the protests that occurred the day after Obama announced he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan such as the United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Peace Action, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Pledge of Resistance, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and World Can’t Wait. They supported the actions by sending out emails to the activists on their lists. This is not a particularly creative or innovative way to use online technologies. The American Left is still firmly positioned in Web 1.0. We’ve not seen evidence that encouraging these organizations to behave differently, embracing some 2.0 upgrades, for example, would make a difference. They are almost without exception dramatically underfunded, and they have a mindset mired in one-to-many communications.

One of the problems limiting national organizations is that they don’t usually think in terms of encouraging collaboration at the local “grassroots” level, letting their local chapters work with other organizations’ local chapters within their communities. Such relationships would provide an ability for local chapters and activists to create and initiate their own projects tailored to the circumstances and needs of the community. They could be provided with funding, technical support or other resources. Such results do occur, but haphazardly instead of as part of a larger strategy. The use of new technologies to integrate local chapters of different national organizations is almost nonexistent, other than mentions on one another’s websites.

There are the aggregator websites, like Democraticunderground.org, which provide a place to congregate, converse, post content and share opinions. These sites have not been built to serve as tools for organization, though some of the blogs have crossed that line. Whereas Talkingpointsmemo.com is pretty much pure centrist story posting, Dailykos.com offers powerful organizing trajectories in addition to opinion sharing. Powerful voices there rise to the top, voices expressing unique interpretations of the political landscape and offering effective calls to action. Nevertheless, Dailykos is seen as a support site for the Democratic Party, not a Left venue.

Counterpunch.org, Alternet.org, Truthout.org, Commondreams.org, Buzzflash.com and Truthdig.com, are curator sites displaying and archiving news from a Left perspective and don’t push specific activist interventions or lobby for particular actions. TheNation.com, Motherjones.com, Progressive.org, and Inthesetimes.org, the independent political media, also are not action creation and execution forces on the Left. Click here for an overview of these types of publications and websites.

Perhaps inspired by Glenn Beck’s success last September in getting tens of thousands on the D.C. mall, in November, the popular webcast and radio producers, the young Turks at theyoungturks.com called for health care demonstrations in L.A., N.Y. and Atlanta at the offices of CNN. Turnout was small, but it was an interesting experiment. Other than the large immigrant rights demonstrations, has another video, cable or mainstream TV vehicle used its platform to get activists onto the streets? This is again, a one-to-many communication, hardly 2.0, but it sets an interesting precedent if the origin of the action emerges out of, for example, social networking tools.

Candidate Obama’s campaign, of course, used 2.0 tools with maestro-like finesse, empowering local organizers in ways unheard of by providing access to real-time information on campaign supporters which could be used in support of focused projects or to orchestrate local events. The Left has nothing like those kinds of resources or a central message. What might the Left take from the Obama campaign that the Left can use?

Facebook seems to be central to almost all the horizontal, spontaneous demonstrations occurring around the country. Responses to Prop 8 and then the Israeli-Gaza protests were integrally tied to Facebook use, which helped to bring out activists from all demographics. The radicals of the 1960s finally awakened to social media. It feels likely that new organizing tools or techniques are going to emerge in a context of Facebook or Twitter integration. We’re still watching for a large, Twitter-inspired/directed protest to occur in the U.S. as occurred in Dresden, Germany earlier in February where twitter was used successfully to thwart a planned neo-Nazi march.

Though there is a seamless integration between individuals within local organizations posting Iraq War demonstrations to one of 40 networks across the country with all that content appearing in a single spot (pjep.org home page), with over 1500 organizations accessing information about the accumulation, what could enhance this process of individuals within local organizations feeling empowered by awareness of the larger whole?

Please share your thoughts with us regarding the Left, social media, new organizing technologies and effective new strategies and interventions. What exactly do you see happening? How will these technologies be utilized?

-Marcia Bernsten & Andrew Lehman

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any effort into trying keep up with the actions proliferating around the country.

With PJEP, keeping up has been relatively easy. Our 1500 participating organizations post actions to their state network websites themselves or send the actions to us to post for them. We have keep a running tally of Dec 1 and Dec 2 Afghanistan escalation protest actions. I email WCW and National Assembly my running totals. WCW then posts that tally on their national website. We’re also finding WCW events on their website that we didn’t know about. A.N.S.W.E.R. hasn’t responded to emails offering them information, except for a Washington state chapter that we work with.

As the list of local protests grows we send it out to local activists in the various states. This seems to be encouraging the creation of new events. As of 8 am (today, Dec 1) we are following almost 70 protests across the country.

We observe the momentum. We share the information. We see increases in momentum and action.

This has been an interesting experience. I’ve been monitoring the use of Facebook and Twitter as a communication device for the coming demonstrations, it has become clear that Facebook and Twitter offer no opportunity to monitor or experience an integration of related events across the country. By contrast, PJEP has had 50-state coverage since early July, 2009. This is the first time our breadth of operations has been able to magnify our members’ goals and actions into a clear contribution to a national movement. The networks are fulfilling one of the goals we set out to accomplish as we envisioned what PJEP could be.

Sitting on the beach, with an eye always on the ocean, you see a wave, run out into the water, position yourself and let it carry you toward your goal. Rarely are waves so big that you can see them from far away. Usually, you need to linger at least waist deep in the surf.

We are in a unique situation, what with the slow-motion toppling of our hierarchical society, to be observing a tidal wave of change approach the beach. The usual activist interventions don’t apply. To catch this wave requires an understanding of the change in societal currents, the shift from patrifocal to matrifocal paradigms and the profound effect that communication technologies are having upon this changing seascape.

It’s as if the moon had not risen for 6,000 years and only now has appeared above the clouds. Currents have shifted, currents making it far easier to catch a wave. Whereas until recently the actions of the Left have had only limited effect on the well organized and highly monetized Right, shifts in currents are providing opportunities for the Left to start riding the big one and to make its vision known.

For the Left to be able to articulate a vision for society that society can embrace, in contrast to the vision articulated by the Right, the Left needs to speak the language of youth. Youth talk tech. For youth, it’s not even tech, it’s just their lives. Text-messaging is life. IMing is life. Social networking and twitter is life. These youth tools are collapsing a 6,000-year-old scaffolding erected to keep power in the hands of the few. A tidal wave of change approaches, characterized by surges in transparency, diversity and horizontal communication carried forward on a current of moon-propelled matrifocal social structure. Our very biology is changing as the macho male and docile female are overwhelmed by the changing seascape that is our time.

Right now, the correct tools are tech tools integrated with messages to take specific actions. The Obama campaign integrated new tech with community organizing to create the hybrid that will be an organizing paradigm for years to come. What will change will be that the organizing impetus will emerge from regular users, using the technologies to accomplish specific goals. Remove the charismatic leader from the equation and you have countless waves of change competing, creating unique actions, forming brief ad hoc social networking alliances, achieving very specific goals.

It’s time the Left started using Obama’s youth tools. In terms of process, the Left has become conservative. The Obama Democrats, by using powerful democratizing youth tools, has become the Left.

In a way similar to how Gorbachev was the transition to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Obama will be the transitional leader making possible the arrival of the new wave, the wave of highly integrated citizen involvement, organized anarchy, horizontal society, a global community of peers.

The Left has got its feet wet. It’s time to swim.

What happened between Monday and Friday of last week happened over many months earlier in this century. On Monday, the elites realized that by creating financial vehicles whose sole purpose was to generate exponential wealth, they had manufactured a mythology that had crashed. By Friday a run on 3.4 trillion dollars of money market funds had begun, the equivalent to the savings deposits withdrawal dynamic that occurred in the 1930s. The Government decided to do what governments do – shield the interests of private institutions – to protect the corporations whose behaviors were destroying savings.

The integration of the financial world has exponentially decreased the time that the crises of confidence had spread across the planet. It is now understood that with no transparency, regulation or accountability the elites had created fictitious wealth and hid the location of fiction in the system.

It is time we, the left/progressive movement, integrate in response.

My Space and Facebook-like tools will become the avenues of popular uprising with countless ideas emerging from angry people who demand change. Through these new social networking technologies, populations are becoming horizontally integrated across the world. Powerful ideas/actions will emerge among the working population, ideas that will be date-based with a single focus that require no negotiation, coalitions, or managing bodies. This will occur in the same way that word of the toppling of the corporatist cornucopia mythology ran rampant through the financial community last week,.

We are entering the age of integrated anarchy.

If the American Left is to have a profound influence over the next few years it will be through its ability to articulate our priorities, communicate and cooperate through these social networking vehicles.

I urge you to sign up for Facebook, and then SNAPAP. SNAPAP is a Social Networking and Political Action page available through the Peace Justice and Environment Project network. Already almost 1000 peace, justice and environmental organizations are integrated into a single left/progressive social networking, political action environment now operational in 32 states. Visit PJEP.org to view the national hub. ICJPE.org was the founding network in this network of political action networks now integrated to include social networking.

Go to ICJPE.org and set up your SNAPAP page. If you’re not under 25 it will not be an intuitive process. Be patient. Contact Marcia or me for personal guidance.

Make yourself conversant with the language of transformation. Online tools to empower the powerless exist. The era of deep and lasting change is here.

At present, with the Right in America having so successfully brought things backward eighty years or more, what with the dramatic increase of stratification and corporate control, it seems like the Left is seeking to go backward to the 1970s when there was some obvious forward movement. Right backward. Left forward. However far back the Right succeeds in pushing back conventions, the Left keeps seeking to place its weight on the teeter-totter in a way that changes the center of gravity, forcing the center to move in the Left’s direction, forward in time.

This competition is a might confusing because our societal convention has time marching from left to right as we read from left to right. With this metaphor, imagine the Right Wing on the left side of the teeter-totter and the Left Wing on the right. With this switch in orientation, time flows in the direction of our political nomenclature.

Arguments over strategy and tactics, where on the teeter-totter we should push, has a lot to do with resource control, age, demographics, proximity to power, talents and friends. For the young radical with few resources, the best place to push down is on those locations on the board farthest from the center. When all you have is your person, few connections to the center and no resources that can be threatened, leverage that weight to the farthest point possible. There is where a young person will have the most effect.

Contrast that radical with an older activist who has connections to politicians, connections that provide occasional conversations with a representative and the opportunity to be present at events where elected officials can be approached. For that activist, pushing down near the center, nearer the fulcrum, seems intuitive. These activists seek to leverage their access to power to engage in conversation, which is an opportunity unavailable to youth. The older activist could move farther out from the center, where their weight could have more of an effect, but then they could lose their connection to elected officials and the potential influence that connection affords.

Where activists choose to put their weight has to do with where they feel comfortable on this moving platform, their personality, their access to wealth and their access to free time. Each seeks a place that provides leverage with the variables that accompany his or her station in life. Clearly, if every moderate/progressive moved toward their leverage-left extreme, the center would lean quickly in the direction of where the weight is.

That is not what is happening today. Instead, a vast number of people are inching their way in the Left’s direction, moving the center in the direction of change. There is an understanding that the corporate elite so successfully threw their weight to the extreme edge of the right side of the teeter-totter that the gilded age arrived with no announcement or suggestion that things had changed. Controlling media has that benefit. It’s now slowly becoming clear to the status quo that the war, the redistribution of wealth and the de-democratization of society are closely related.

Forces greasing the teeter-totter platform compelling this slide in the direction of change are the web and communications technology. We are witnessing society on a subtle yet pervasive slide in a left direction as individuals experience themselves empowered by the transparent, communication-enhancing, diversity-inducing features of the web. Weight makes a difference when exerting change. So does friction. By making it effortless to slide to the left, technology is encouraging change.

The greased board is inclining in the left direction.

The steeper the incline, the faster the center will slide.

The first sign of change is the slight blush of green in the grasses brown and yellow from the winter. As the thaw drifts downward, flowers rise and the change becomes visible in colors. By then the bushes are responding and the first buds and leaves are manifesting hip high. As winter vacates the deeper dirt, the trees finally show the spring has come.

Spring begins at toe level, moves ankle high and grows higher, changing to the waist, then shoulders, and finally past the point that we can reach.

To view where change will come from, note where the thaw is. To observe the future, feel for where creative forces are established and growing. We may not be able to see the thaw, but we can feel its effects.

The American Left is interconnected in ways that it has never been before with almost 30 national organizations able to quickly communicate with local members and receive feedback from their experiences in the field. It is the equivalent of 30 huge oak trees with roots extending, intersecting and influencing a wide group of people. For these organizations, it is still early April. Though the sap is moving, there is little evidence of leaves.

Local Left organizations are budding as their roots warm. These bushes, closer to the ground, are influenced more quickly than the trees. There are literally thousands of them. Still, members of these groups are mostly over 50 years old. They are not participating in the activities of the grasses.

In the way that spring begins with the lowest and moves quickly higher with the thaw, political change begins with the youngest, moves to the older and influences more ancient institutions established over time. Though the trees and bushes of our political landscape reveal interconnections far healthier than has been the case in the past, it is the grasses that reveal an astonishing webbing of interconnections leading to more than just seasonal change. What the young are doing that we older activists are dimly aware of is establishing massive, online, horizontal linking relationships, thereby forming the foundations for future change.

Neoteny is the process by which the features of the youngest or earliest stages of ontogeny or growth are manifested in the later stages of evolutionary descendants. We are observing features of the seamless communication of the cellular structure of a single human being manifesting in the behaviors of young humans communicating across the planet through social networking, new more sophisticated cell phones and the web.

It’s as if the prairies were returning with root structures that have no end. If wisdom comes with interconnection and relationship, then the grassroots will guide us.

As is often the case when a volunteer organization is brand new, if there is no authority to make the above decisions, the website designer will guess/estimate what the needs of the organization will be. I have an agenda, so I do more than guess/estimate. I seed the organization with my own beliefs: transparency, diversity, horizontal communication.

I have observed that this design can lead to conflict, which is a bit ironic because the websites I design for organizations have conflict resolution principles built into their operations. For example, whenever possible, I seek to make available on a site the information generated by the organization, such as meeting minutes, listserve records and opportunities to note support by users for different projects. When agreements are made or support is noted, I seek to make the information public. Observing bridges being built encourages their use and the building of more bridges. I design websites for people to note what they have in common and experience their connections.

When the conflict emerges, it is usually because organization founders have looked at the website as an instrument that distributes information from a central summit, whereas what I’ve designed the website to do is horizontally distribute power or control. This distribution can be annoying to activists with an agenda different from my own. I make my agenda clear from the beginning: transparency, diversity, horizontal communication.

In the preceding entry, I described the challenge of designing a website that would encourage the creation and distribution of information on reducing the carbon footprint of inhabitants of a community of about 60,000, Evanston, IL. In 10 committees, 130 citizens with little central authority are seeking strategies to achieve this goal. As the website designer, I find myself designing an organizational structure that encourages a strategy that the website can execute. This task entails estimating staffing needs with job descriptions, budget, hypothetical goals, important constituencies, allies, fundraising sources, etc. In other words, if a brand new organization is not clear on how it will achieve its goals, I have to create a plan to design a website that can reflect the priorities and help achieve the goals of the organization. You need a business plan to start a business. You need an organization plan to build a website.

In the case of the Evanston project, there is no conflict. I have an agenda, but that agenda is primarily to educate interested parties on the alternatives to conventional organizational structure while outlining web design options.

It was a different experience working with the founders of National Assembly.

In December of ‘07, the central organizers of what would be called National Assembly brought together a group of activists to be the coordinating committee or conference planning committee for a national peace conference in Cleveland in June. Marcia and I were brought in as the web design and communications people and placed on the coordinating committee. We put up a website seeded with our usual degree of transparency and horizontal communications features. Then we discovered that “transparency, hierarchy, and diversity” mean very different things to different activists. The meaning of these words to a union activist coming of age in the 1940s is very different from the meaning to someone whose reference is the web.

Once Marcia and I realized that we had been brought in to follow instructions, not to consult or to take initiatives, then it was easier to proceed. The founders of the organization wanted the website as an instrument to engage in one-to-many communications. The founders were unfamiliar with our web-centric interpretation of the meaning of “transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.” Once it was clear that our perspective was perceived to be a barrier to the founders’ organizational goals and ran counter to the philosophy that consensus was for the founders to decide, we withdrew from the coordinating committee to simply execute directions.

Designing websites is designing structure. If an organizational structure is not yet evident, it has to be discerned. It is discerned by observing the character of the relationships within the organization and designing the website to reflect those relationships. In the context of Left organizing, I have a specific agenda. If the structure required or demanded by the group I am working with suggests less transparency, diversity or horizontal communication than I wish to see, negotiations begin. Sometimes I achieve my goals. Sometimes I do not. Always I learn something about structure and transformation.

When conducting business, talking to clients and meeting with prospective clients, I don’t pay attention to their internal psychodynamics. Still, I’m frequently astonished at the unique ways that clients think. My job involves guiding clients to achieve an overview of their project, business or business plan in order to translate it into a website navigation structure that provides both introduction and detail. Together we discover the right category names, sequence them and provide a cogent pathway for a visitor to walk. I marvel at the challenges this task presents to certain ways of thinking.

Compel a person to think both big picture and narratively when that person is used to thinking detail and/or associatively, and you can hear the gears grind as if they’ve never driven shift. With time, we finalize a plan, the staff creates a website and the client is happy. Working with people to put their best face forward, I see one of their best faces. I get a front row view of people’s dreams.

Evenings and weekends, I’m in a different world.

I find few small business people or entrepreneurs in political activism. No shop owners. Few business owners. Activists don’t dream in the way a person starting a business dreams. Activists yearn. They display little expectation that their desires will be achieved.

I sense that partly what compels an activist to engage in battles they rarely expect to win is an experience of certainty of loss. In other words, in the lives of activists is the sorrow they seek to address. In the heart of the activist is grief not grieved. There is a paradox here.

As activists, we seek to observe and experience in the society around us a transition to a more caring culture. We work hard to achieve this next step in the evolution of how humans treat humans. Yet, in our own lives, we are often stuck where we’ve felt personally aggrieved. We might be stuck in fury, stuck in sadness or just be stuck avoiding fear. Stuck, we seek unstuck by becoming activists. Only as activists, we often don’t expect to experience the change we seek.

Grieving, accepting the loss, forgiving …. one of two things might happen.

We might withdraw from being an activist, going into an endeavor with what seems like a more achievable dream, like the clients I see almost every day.

We might learn to love the fight. We might become activists that can see the changes as the changes happen. Leftists have difficulty seeing the change they seek. Their eyes are veiled.

Grieving might lighten up the Left.

A qualification for a good metaphor is that it be familiar. As the web becomes ubiquitous, it offers benefits as an explanatory principle for highly complex horizontal systems producing positive, unexpected outcomes.

Malthus was a 19th century philosopher/mathematician who posited that in an environment with limited resources, increases of populations within that environment will reveal patterns as the populations grow and then decline. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ran with a related theme as he hypothesized that an “invisible hand” would compel human populations to behave in predictable patterns that would manifest in an increase in productivity in a competitive environment, resulting in better goods at cheaper costs. Darwin translated these principles into his theory of natural selection. It is often thought that Spencer’s interpretation of this first of Darwin’s three theories of evolution, his theory of natural selection, was what inspired Spencer to coin the term “survival of the fittest”. Not exactly. Darwin was inspired by Smith’s theoretical treatise on early British capitalism and how the fittest survive.

Social Darwinism has been used as an excuse for laissez-faire capitalism. Our model for the origin of species is our capitalist economy. Not the other way around.

A theory is a useful metaphor or a story. The metaphors we use evolve with time, as our understanding of our experience deepens. We are so enamored of a good story–or theory–that we become convinced the story is the thing it was designed to represent. The Internet is not the brain. Natural selection is not how species evolve. Not even Darwin thought that to be the case. He went on to devise two more theories of evolution to explain what natural selection did not satisfactorily make clear.

I’ve talked to Leftists deeply confused about the metaphor and what the metaphor represents. Presupposing natural selection to be true, they unconsciously subscribe to the origin myth of capitalist society. Capitalists claim an “uncontrolled” economy reflects the way the natural world behaves. The Left argues humans are different and should break with the natural world. I would suggest it’s time to start looking for an alternative origin myth. The story we’ve been working with is a theory encouraged by those that profit from its propagation.

Noting the evolution of the metaphors we’ve created to explain ourselves, it’s clear we’re forced to rely upon what seems familiar. Consider that as our metaphors become more complex, reflecting our broadening and deepening experience, our stories or theories will more efficiently inform.

Perhaps the best metaphor for explaining how our brain works, or for that matter what we as human beings might actually be, might be the world we come from, not a machine. This would take some attention to detail, exploring the many useful theories of evolution that already exist. Perhaps our planet is too large to be familiar. Maybe we have to hold our stories in a single phrase. Still, I would suggest retiring “survival of the fittest.” “All connected” feels right to me.

Then there are the folks emphasizing the big picture calculating present position within long term goals. Others concentrate on the communication that they are engaged in, the conversation they are having and the bridge they are building in the moment. This distinction is subtle and possibly non existent.

The century-and-a-half argument between nature and nurture–genetics or the environment–has to do with a defective perspective that they are two different things. Recent developments in evolutionary developmental biology have opened the eyes of proponents of both polarities. How life unfolds from before conception has to do with the influence of the environment on a genetic template programmed to take into consideration environmental influences. Imagine a world-exploring vehicle that changes its appearance, even the fuel it uses, as it passes through different landscapes–a vehicle designed to invent new looks and tastes as it makes its way across a planet. Is it the environment or the designer that has more to do with the way this vehicle looks and acts?

Like the academic conservatives that focus on nature or genetics as the foundation for any perspective we should have, Left political activists hone in on content and more specifically the mission of their particular organization or group when planning how to create social and political change. Focusing on content or specific issues, we neglect the big picture. It is a frequent feature of the Left that unity feels less important than achieving a particular constituency’s goals. Placing content before process keeps this disunity intact.

Paying attention to process relieves activists of their differences, providing an opportunity for participants to feel part of the process, part of something larger than themselves. Whereas content proponents focus on why, process adherents are more concerned with how. Both are integral to moving forward.

Strategy on the Left often focuses on mission, allies, targets, strategy and tactics. Process is often confused with strategy. Process is about that big picture but with an integral addition. Focus on process is commitment to relationship. What we’re really talking about is noting the importance of encouraging quality relationships while engaged in the process of achieving goals. It is about noting the value of what is happening right now, in the present, and honoring that present. Experiencing the moment we are in as the most important moment. This awareness is the element of process that is overlooked.

Looking to future strategizing to achieve big picture goals of social and political change can be balanced by being in the present and respecting our allies as we journey across this strange new world, experiencing things we’ve never experienced before.

Consider making this discovery while on the journey. Big picture and present moment are the same.