Our theme for this year is…..

The genius of the below speech is that it reflects the feelings of anyone who lived during times of crisis and felt powerless.

Even if you don’t have all the answers, it is never good enough to sit back and just accept that this is the way the world works and I am powerless to affect it, especially when it is you who is getting f$ckd over.

If you want to control a population, you cloud them with fear and a sense of powerlessness. Regardless of the fact that you do not hold a position of power, the best way to let your ‘betters’ know that you are still there and wont be letting them away with their plan is to just get MAD!

It is what the Irish people DID NOT DO during the recent take over of the country, and it proved essentially that we, the people who fought a foreign invader for generation after generation, have become a nation of administrators and consumers with no back bone.

So that is what we are going to do here at the New Realist. We are going to get MAD!

Wrong ‘Person of the Year’. Wrong Social Network.

This week, TIME Magazine have named Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, their Person of the Year.

Jillian York, writing for Alazeera, considers it a ‘dubious honour’ for many valid reasons. There are the obvious and long running privacy concerns, and the problems that the ‘real name’ policy when signing up has for activists around the world.

And the obvious large large-trunked mammal in the room is Mr Julian Assange and his pesky Wikileaks crew, who continue to spoil the party for a lot of the ‘great’ institutions in the world with its inconvenient habit of leaking the truth.

“Assange is undoubtedly the man of the moment, and in a sense, the whole year; though WikiLeaks’ latest release of Embassy cables has attracted a swarm of media attention, earlier releases of the Iraqi Collateral Murder video and the Afghan war logs made a huge public impact.”

So onto Mr Zuckerberg. He received the accolade for

• “Connecting more than half a billion people” – Yes half a billion people do use his product. But this is not to suggest that 500 million people are communicating with each other in a meaningful way, working effectively or somehow joined symbiotically now that they have a Facebook account.
• “Mapping the social relations among them” - Is this such a big deal? Really?
• “Creating a new system of exchanging information ” – Members share photos. Send emails. Market their businesses. WordPress, MySpace and every other social networking, information exchange service out there do the same thing. Often better.
• “Changing how we live our lives” – This is a real stretch. You could argue the internet has changed the way we live our lives. Facebook is just another management tool that uses the true revolution that was the internet to build its own private marketplace. You could argue maybe that its addictive nature and social core has brought more people online, but then it is no different to online gaming and the way it has changed the lives of gaming enthusiasts.

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Great to see a revolutionary movement being led by an attractive, pleasant, uncontroversial person such as Rachel Botsman. She could actually do more damage to the traditional capitalist model than Julian Assange, Che Guevara or Naomi Watts could ever do, and the C.I.A cant touch her.

She is making a resources led society hip, and that is no mean feat. It is always better to build rather than to destroy. People, especially today, work better with encouragement and positivity than with criticism and negativity.

P.S. Anyone have a copy of this book to share with me?

Vimeo wont embed for some reason so check out this video first = WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Earth Song: Part Three

Earth Song is “9 days of  camping in a beautiful secluded location working with music and teachings from around the world”. I’ve been there twice and this is my report. Check our Parts One and Two for the story so far.

So what is it about this experience I feel is so important for the average citizen out there?

Everybody, especially today, needs to experience what it feels like to live as part of a real human community in respect of the earth in order to appreciate it.

This is absolutely necessary for both the individual and humanity as a whole in our age for 2 reasons

(1) Necessity

Our way of life is currently at war with the earth’s grand natural systems. Our contemporary means of providing for ourselves are destroying the very basis of the reality on which we rely. As a process within the system, our actions are bringing about a serious imbalance following years of stasis and prosperity.

The system could very well fail, all be it temporarily. It will recover and take on a new shape, but the odds are that, as a species, we won’t survive to experience this renewal. This is not a dramatic sound-bite. It is not an apocalyptic revelation. It is as real as the sun, the moon and the stars.

It is happening right here, right now, and we are all compliant. We are the producers and the consumers. We are the electorate and the decision makers. We wake every morning and we make a choice as to how we wish to relate to or affect the world around us. Whether we believe these things or not (indeed whether we care or not), they are the truth.

Wikileaks reveals the game at hand

We are a week into the latest round of Wikileaks revelations now and the results have been dramatic and revealing to say the least.

Revealing in that the voters (and in the case of authoritarian regimes – the citizens) have received an important insight into the diplomacy behind the rhetoric that they are fed from the political pulpit daily.

The Guardian are reporting that Wikileaks has fundamentally ‘altered the way we see the world in a week’. Is it any less corrupt, non-transparent or downright dangerous as we imagined? Not really.

We know these guys and gals are spinning, we know there is a game going on behind the scenes that our betters have decided we the electorate should not be a party to.  But at least now, in the case of America, we know. At last we get to see the real game at hand and how it is played out from day to day.

Wikileaks.org and Wikileaks.com are down, but you can get their side of the story on numerous other wikileaks sites including this one. ”The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret”.

One of the ‘Economists’ phantom writers have given us a decent run down of the story so far (dated Dec 2nd)  and the Guardian have been on board from the start so you can get their most recent reports here.

Personally I think it is mostly all good. My reaction to the major arguments / opinions are below.

Earth Song – Part Two

Earth Song is “9 days of  camping in a beautiful secluded location working with music and teachings from around the world”. I’ve been there twice and this is me report. You can find Part One of this short series of posts here.

The experience of living on the land was one of the more important and effective aspects of this event for me personally.

Being out in the open, rising at dawn and going to rest at dusk, being exposed to (and often at the mercy of) the elements, feeling connected to my surroundings and doing everything over a number of days within that context.

There is a certain kind of poetry and romance to it, obviously, especially for anybody fascinated and inspired by the natural world.  But that is not all.

We are very cushioned from the natural world in our daily lives. Our culture raises us to believe that we are separate from the earth, independent from her. We are spoon fed by this culture, and encouraged not to think about where our ‘stuff’ comes from, or indeed where it goes when the next batch of ‘stuff’ comes along. There is a terrible fantasy in that idea, a dangerous lack of realism.

Current Sh€t Sandwich €xplained

Sometimes live can become very confusing and you feel that you have no control over the life your betters have marked out for you.

The relationship between the individual and the economic and political system to which they belong is always complex, especially when you belong to a system as global and unequal as ours today.

Take the current economic meltdown of the Celtic Tiger. It is as if we are all basic snap players and are daunted by the logistics and mechanics of the world poker tournament in Vegas.

Its a great analogy not simply because the market culture that circumscribes everything we do has always been one giant gambling tournament. We hear talk about economic science and are  overwhelmed by terms such as derivatives, but really it is merely a complex game invented by people to create more wealth faster.

So its great to get an honest to God ‘Dummies Guide to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger’. It aint pretty. But it is also not above us to comprehend it or question the current reaction to it.

Check out the videos below and start getting angry!