Liberating Spaces

On May 15, something extraordinary started in Spain. On that day, a network of Spanish citizens under the banner Democracia real YA! (Real democracy, now!) called for demonstrations all around Spain to protest against a corrupt political system, with its epicenter in Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. This has ignited the powder of indignation accumulated during these last years against political and economic elites that use their positions for their private benefit, being the bailout of the bankers the maximum expression of this alliance of the crooks. As in other places, the Internet has played a key role in the mobilisation of citizen for expressing their rights. On Twitter, people are using hashtags #spanishrevolution #notenemosmiedo #nolesvotes #acampadasol #acampadabcn…to tell, express, protest, coordinate, call for more and more action. On Facebook, the page of the campaign Democracia real YA has already more than 225,000 likes, and a petition to ask the Junta Electoral Central (Board of elections, regulating and supervising good proceedings during elections) to revoke a decision to ban any demonstrations during Saturday, “reflection day”, has at this moment 165,000 petitioners.

In February this year, in one of my posts I said:

In well-established democracies these technological changes may facilitate revolt against the privileges of the political class – from the pettty corruption of letting the taxpayer pay a hotel room in a private trip to the big commissions attached to public procurement contracts -, and the manipulation of state structures for the benefit of the few, those with money and position to influence, sometimes even determine, how we are governed – above all the financiers, who with arrogance move money, take money as they please.

This is the citizens’ revolution. Those who enjoy democratic citizenship use it to stop the crooks, the corrupt, the greedy profiting from the loopholes that an imperfect system – as it always will be – offers them for their private gain.

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Yesterday I did some digital reporting. For nearly two weeks, I’ve been collaborating with TweetyHall & FutureGov in preparation for the UK elections in May. His founder, Dominic Campbell, asked me if I could attend the first conference of local councilors in the UK C’llr10 organized by the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) last Thursday. So armed with my iPhone and a Kodak digital camera I tweeted about it, took some pictures and recorded some interviews with councilors about their use of the web in their work.

I am very critical with the party system. I think it is based on bureaucratic and opaque principles that are not much adapted to the informational and social transformation of the last decades. When I arrived, I saw all these councilors, most of them in suit and tie, that looked, in my eyes, like political bureaucrats, just managers of mid-size organizations. This image was confirmed by the speeches in the plenary: Caroline Spelman, tory shadow secretary for local government, Julia Goldsworthy, lib-dems shadow secretary for local government and John Denham, the current secretary for local government. Nothing new under the sun, and lots of “ours is great, yours is awful” discourse.

Yet, during the day and through getting into small conversation with some of the councilors my perspective changed. There are good people in local politics doing very important stuff. Communities should thank these people for their work, for most of them feel it in their hearts, and do it for vocation. My last personal tweet after the conference was:
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The title of this post seems counter-intuitive. Common sense tells us that battling successfully against the consequences of the financial crisis, capitalism is more alive than ever, thriving in India and China, making states tremble on their foundations. Yet I dare to say that, against this common sense and in line with Marxists, anarchists, socialists of all kinds and other anti-system movements, capitalism as we know it, i.e a socio-economic system based on the ownership and accumulation of capital, is showing its last moments of life. Yet I don’t affirm its decease for the reasons that these other ideological movements assume i.e. capitalism is failing, but because thanks to both its success and its deficiencies, it’s letting way to a new system that, like capitalism itself and contrary to communism or I would even say (paradoxically) anarchism, doesn’t need to be imposed for its popular acceptance, for it feeds from a characteristic that makes us human. In capitalism it was greed, in compartism it’s generosity.
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“naked on the dance floor (@bnox)”…”love your geeks! (Tom Steinberg)”…”I deal with governments that are actually evil (@edyson)”…”why aren’t more journalists being arrested in Europe? where is the civil courage? (Julian Assange)”…”yes, but I am afraid it will be in English (@j_zim)”…”@jonworth @tom_Watson lets do it (@marietjed66) “…all this was said in the Personal Democracy Forum Europe 2009 (the first!).

It was a good conference. Speakers were carefully selected and they mostly performed very well. For two days, 20 and 21 November a group of wonks, techies, party members, marketeers, Internet analysts and other species gathered together in Jean Nouvel‘s Torre Agbar (or it was Renzo Piano‘s? ) in Barcelona.

During these two days, the guys of CivicoLive streamed the audio of all talks and Q&A (which you can find here). The twitter hashtag #pdfeu was crazily singing ideas, proposals and daring statements about what was being said (and asked, particularly by Mr. Committee of the Regions). The buzz in and around the nicely designed (and rather dysfunctional) tower was intense. Though Spanish media seemed not to have realised, for although the conference was happening in Barcelona, it has been mostly reported only in foreign newspapers and televisions (friends and family are still wondered if I really was in a conference or in a long and dark party somewhere along the coast) (Gemma Urgell’s quick analysis on this lack of vision by Spanish journalists (or editors) (catalan)).

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