Let's use Your Freedom to chuck out the Digital Economy Act

Nick Clegg is angling for some much-needed goodwill from the left with his announcement this morning that the public will be able to nominate 'unecessary laws' that they want to see repealed. The Deputy Prime Minister is crowdsourcing people's ideas for the repeal or reform of legislation in three key areas:

* Laws that have eroded civil liberties.

* Regulations that stifle the way charities and businesses work.

* Laws that are not required and which are likely to see law-abiding citizens criminalised.

The Your Freedom website allows the public to suggest changes to invasive laws and 'rate' those which they would like the government to consider for repeal or reform in the upcoming Freedom Bill, which will be unveiled in the autumn.

Depending on which suggestions make it into the Bill, this may well herald a whole new way of forming policy, as well as allowing Clegg to put on a solemn voice and inform us that "Today is the launch of Your Freedom," rather like a civil servant auditioning for the role of deranged desert prophet. The Your Freedom initiative isn't precisely direct digital democracy - the government has no obligation to consider any of the suggestions, which, according to the Telegraph, will be 'sifted' before any assessment is made - but it's a start.

There's really only one way for civil liberties campaigners to respond to such an unprecedented display of faith in digital politics: with a lobby to reform the antediluvian Digital Economy Act, removing the sections of the bill which threaten internet users with summary disconnection for engaging in free filesharing. This morning, a group of Open Rights Group Supporters and opponents of the Digital Economy Bill, led by Katie Sutton, convenor of the Stop Disconnection Demonstration in March, put together the following statement:

The Digital Economy Act (DEA) is an insult to British citizens, and the government should consider its repeal in the upcoming freedom bill as a matter of urgency. The DEA was rushed through at the tail-end of the last Parliament in an undemocratic manner, allowing the owners of copyrighted content such as music and film (rights holders) to demand that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) cut someone's Internet connection if they suspect that they have downloaded copyrighted content.
Rights holders only need to prove that the wrongdoing occurred using the Internet connection they wish to be cut, not that the persons affected are guilty. This leaves account holders responsible for the actions of anyone using their connection, whether legitimately or by piggybacking without permission.
In this digital age, an internet connection is essential for simple tasks like banking, paying bills and jobhunting, and as a result, taking away a connection used by several people as punishment for the actions of an individual who may not even be known to them is fundamentally wrong.
Simply put, the Act imposes disproportionate, collective punishment, does not follow the principle of innocent until proven guilty and contravenes the Magna Carta, which in 1215 stated that, as a basic human right, no person may be punished without a fair trial.
The Digital Economy Act is a massive insult to our civil liberties and should be repealed in its entirety, subjectto the less objectionable clauses being redrafted and discussed democratically in the Houses of Parliament to pave the way for a proper digital economy which does not punish innocent people.

If the Liberal Democrats are looking for 'bad laws', they should look no further than the Digital Economy Act, which was forced through during the wash-up despite huge opposition from a digital grassroots movement of internet users, civil rights protestors and allies within Westminster. The Act could be construed in any of the three available categories, as a threat to civil liberties (in 2009, EU amendment 138/46 declared that access to the internet is a fundamental human right), as a threat to businesses and charities (many sections of the music, film and other UK creative industries depend on filesharing to support their business model and disseminate ideas) and as an unecessary law that threatens to criminalise the seven million law-abiding British internet users who are currently regular filesharers.

It's only a pity that the Liberal Democrats, who voiced their opposition to the Digital Economy Bill in March, couldn't be bothered to turn up to vote against this regressive, draconian law in significant numbers during the parliamentary wash-up. Still, better late than never: for those of us who care about digital rights, the patronisingly-titled Your Freedom site is a brilliant opportunity to make our voices heard.

What you can do: rate and comment on any or all of the following suggestions, uploaded to the Your Freedom website by concerned citizens, to repeal aspects of the Digital Economy Act. It's telling that within hours of the site going live, a number of suggestions to reform the Act have already been put forward, alongside some sillier ideas for what the government should throw out ('The EU In General' is my favourite so far). I've selected what seem to be the most comprehensive and well-supported proposals, referring to specific clauses of the Act that need to be repealed. All of them deserve your rating and comments:

1.[link coming soon] - an official proposal put together by the Open Rights Group in consultation with human rights lawyers and digital freedom activists. If you only vote for one idea, make it this one.

2. Save Britain's Digital Economy By Repealing The Digital Economy Act

3. Repeal the Digital Economy Act 2010

You'll need to login or register at the Your Freedom website, but the process takes a few seconds and does not require you to give out sensitive information. New Statesman is not officially backing this campaign, but I certainly am, and if you believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, you should be, too.

We are the fifth estate [cross-post from New Statesman]

Apologies for being scant in cross-posting and monitoring comments - I'm currently trying to work three jobs whilst living out of a suitcase and healing a broken heart, and it's all got a bit melodramatic. I'll be blogging about the budget tonight, once I can work out something more coherent to write than 'fuck', 800 times over. Anyone else feel like they've been kicked in the soul? Yeah, me too.

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Remember hard copy? Your kids might not. This week it emerged that newspaper sales are plummeting in Britain, with only 33% of the population now claiming to be regular readers of analogue news. As more and more of us cherry-pick our media online, drawing little distinction between the mainstream press and the popular blogosphere, industry insiders are beginning to panic, predicting the violent death of quality commentary and investigative journalism at the multiferous hands of the internet.

On several baffling occasions in recent months, I have found myself at snooty media events where hosts introduce me and my colleagues as gingerly as ‘bloggers’, rather as if we were the grinning emissaries of a rogue state, ambassadors from a territory of violent cultural change which the authorities might soon see fit to brutally suppress but which, for now, must be appeased with canapés and party invitations. Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.

This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne. Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. Whilst the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between 'bloggers' and 'journalists', people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream. Many influential writers now work across both camps, such as author, blogger and digital activist Cory Doctorow, who observed that the blogosphere need not threaten paid comment journalism:

“Commercially speaking, newspapers can make enough money from advertising to pay reasonable rates for opinion,” said Doctorow. “I know of at least one that does, and that's my site, BoingBoing, which reaches millions of readers every month. By operating efficiently, we can more than match the fees paid by the New York Times, for example, which always pays peanuts for op-eds because the glory of being published in the NYT is meant to be its own reward.

"After you take away the adverts, the personals, the filler and the pieces hacked together from press releases, the average paper contains about fifteen column inches of decent investigative journalism and commentary,” said Doctorow. “And the internet is more than capable of financing fifteen column inches a day.”

What the blogosphere threatens is not the survival of comment journalism itself: it threatens the monopoly of the media elite, holding the self-important fourth estate to a higher standard than bourgeois columnists and editors find comfortable. We are, in effect, a fifth estate, scrutinising the mainstream media and challenging its assumptions.

Last month, when Danny Dyer appeared to advise a reader of Zoo magazine to cut his girlfriend's face, the feminist arm of the fifth estate responded angrily, prompted a retraction and apology from Zoo and successfully organised a donation drive to raised more money for women’s refuge charities than the discredited Dyer’s violently misogynist film Pimp made in its first week of release. That’s the type of power that scares the wits out of the dinosaurs in analogue media.

Every day, the British blogosphere becomes less amateurish and more relevant. This weekend the popular forum Liberal Conspiracy will host Blog Nation, an event bringing together bloggers, journalists and politicians on the left to determine how the internet can build progressive campaigns to fight public sector cuts. “We have a strong community that can do activism and provide niche information that escapes mainstream newspapers,” said Liberal Conspiracy editor Sunny Hundal. “We want to use the net to get the left to think more about strategy and action - and get people to work together, better!”

The long-term effect of the internet on human cultural production may not be ascertained in my lifetime. Certainly the baby boomers who currently control most major news outlets will not live to see what change may come. "Where we end up in five years isn't where we are today," said Doctorow. " We're not headed towards a period of technological stability where we'll know what our media will look like, we're headed for more technological change.”

Doctorow is right to suggest that we are living through what Marx and Engels might term a “permanent technological revolution”. This weekend, in an incisive essay in The Guardian, John Naughton observed that being a consumer of media and journalism during the radical transformation of today's communications environment is a little

"like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us.”

One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair. The internet is a many-to-many medium, and those who write and comment here are not media insiders, nor are we the mob. We are something altogether new.

We are the fifth estate, and we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards more a honest, democratic model of commentary - alongside a lot of porn and some pictures of amusing cats. The media revolution is ongoing. Whatever comes next, the bloggers' battle-cry must be the permanent technological revolution.



Cory Doctorow's new novel about gaming and digital organisation, For The Win, is published by Harper Voyager. You can register here for this Saturday's Blog Nation

This is very interesting.

I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don't want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

But if you're stil parrotting the line that voting doesn't make a difference and politicians are all the same - implying that you've never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain's policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn't have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one. No, really.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. The concept is simple: if you don't see the point of using your vote yourself, as is the case for many Disaffected Yoofs, then you can sign up to recieve notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch on Monday, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers, many of whom appear to be more than caps-happy flamewar faff-merchants, and several of whom have already pledged to donate their unused votes to people in developing countries whose livelihoods, homes and families have been imperilled by the decisions of British governments.

The scheme seems to be surprisingly thought through, with manifestos and focus groups in each of the target countries and an open-source system based on the efforts of volunteers to co-ordinate the proxy votes on election day. I spoke to the Give Your Vote campaigns organiser, May Abdalla, who is evangelical about creating a climate of global democratic involvement in an age where politics is disconnected from the reality of young people's lives:

"The internet means we can conceptualise communities that aren't just geographical, and start imagining democracy that isn't just limited to within borders," she said. "Young people understand that our 'neighborhood' is now global, but the campaign is aimed at everyone who feels passionately that people should be allowed to be part of the decisions that affect them. And we're not the first to have this idea. During the US election, people started questioning the breadth of US influence; when we see so many so-called international organisations dominated by a few countries, whilst at the same time 'democracy' is held up as something so valuable that our country will fight for another nation to get it, we have to question how there can be real responsibilty in their actions if those they affect can't hold them to account."

"Give Your Vote is the mobilising of a transnational civil society through new media," Abdalla explained. "People in Ghana and Bangladesh have respnded so well to the idea that they can represent themselves, rather than acting through an NGO that has its own objectives or requirements. The internet has a capacity to be used as a democratising force - because we can allow that diversity of opinions without the need for gatekeepers and be active in that process."

All very sweet and utopian. But aren't they worried about being slung in jail for electoral fraud? "It's entirely legal, because we are not forcing anyone to vote in a particular way - jut encouraging them to allow others to use their vote as a platform," explained Abdalla. "Anyway, David Cameron tells us who to vote for all the time."

Most media outlets I've spoken to have dismissed Give Your Vote as a deranged student movement, and that, more than anything, is what excites me about the scheme. As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies. Orthodoxies like geography as the sole organising force for solidarity and fellow feeling. Orthodoxies like the inalienable right of the West to operate for its own profit or pride in the third world without being held to account by citizens of developing countries. Orthodoxies like East and West - them and us - rich and poor.

I will not be taking part directly, because I'm already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead. But if you're not planning to vote yourself, I absolutely encourage you to sign up to the Give Your Vote scheme. If you can't be arsed to tick one box once every five years to hold your government to account, you now no longer have the option of whinging that it won't make any difference, because if even a few hundred votes can be cast by proxy in this election by people in countries affected by British policymaking, that will send an important message about international solidarity. I say this as a British patriot - yes, I'm on the left, and I'm a patriot and I'm proud, a patriot who believes in no borders. I love the British, and I also love my planet, and I believe that global thinking and global policymaking are the only paradigms that will count in a world that is increasingly connected, facing more and more problems that cross international borders, and approaching the singularity threshold. I believe in an international struggle for the liberation of workers, of women, of the disposessed. And lots of other young people believe in it, too.

The Give Your Vote scheme is exciting because it's a whole new way of thinking about politics and online democracy, and that's frightening for the old people who are currently sitting on all the power and all the money in this country. It's frightening enough that this time round, Give Your Vote's impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Most of the people reading this blog only have rights today because someone, tens or hundreds of years ago, had the crazy idea that we deserved them, and was prepared to be dismissed as crazy and hounded as a dangerous freak because of that powerful, paradigm-bended idea. Someone always has to do it first. And maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those first times.

Three cheers for the internet! (plus a small public service announcement)

Sorry that this is yet another linkdump, guys. Meds withdrawal and general winter craziness have meant I've been finding it difficult to write anything at all this week, and I've had to concentrate on the things I'm being paid to write, which are taking me me twice as long as they normally do. I'm not getting anything properly down until the small hours, and it feels like pulling a thick, heavy rope out of my forehead inch by inch. I'm stressed, and my sleeping patterns are shot, but hopefully I'll be able to return to devoting proper time to this blog before Christmas.

Meanwhile, an article about internet politics that I've been sitting on for a while has just been published by Prospect. I'm really pleased with it, even though something odd has happened to bits of the syntax between my outbox and the Prospect homepage. I love the magazine, have been reading it since I was at school, and am dead chuffed to have my ideas featured on their website. It's like an early non-denominational Winterval gift.

Even though I'm finding it difficult to juggle everything at the moment, it's really nice to think that since I started this blog my writing has grown up to the extent that it's now my real job, rather than just a hobby. Sure, I'm not making piles of money, but I'm paying my rent, and keeping busy enough that sometimes I have to prioritise freelance article gigs over what I really want to write. I miss being able to post something original here two or three times a week, though, and I'd like to get back to that soon.

Oh - and one more thing. Penny Red will be hosting the next Carnival of Feminists on the 23rd, so if you have any recommendations for feminist blog posts I should link to, please post them in the comments! Thanks ;)

Can't Stop the Blog

This article was published on the Huffington Post on Tuesday; I wanted to leave a few days before cross-posting to keep the previous post at the top of this blog. Hope you enjoy it!

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The people of Britain understand the political potential of the internet like nobody else in the West. We have a ferocious craving for democratic involvement, in part because we have been denied it for so long within our democracy, and electronic engagement offers us a voice where our own government does not.

The unique circumstances in which the United States was created has led to the overwhelming impression that the North American government, whatever its flaws, is of the people and by the people. In Britain, by contrast, government is still an arm of the elite, operating by mandate of the crown. Last week, 'The Unspoken Constitution', a document drawn up by Westminster insiders and journalists to expose our country's painful lack of a just and concrete political settlement, was published and disseminated online - just like nearly every dissenting element of British political thought. It is because we do not feel that we own a stake in our own democracy that the internet holds an unique fascination for the British as a nation.

This week, the power of the internet over the British political imagination spread its infectious energy to the world. First, there was Trafigura. When the London law firm Carter-Ruck obtained an order to ban the Guardian newspaper from reporting on Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste , millions of internet users fought to keep the information public - and won.*Trafigura and *Carterruck became trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, bloggers across the world published their own research into the cover-up, and Carter-Ruck found itself unable to contain the spread of information. The firm has withdrawn the gagging order, and international attention has been drawn to social and environmental abuses which might otherwise have slipped under the radar.

Then on Thursday Jan Moir, a columnist for ultra right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail, published an hatefully homophobic article claiming that popstar Stephen Gateley's sudden death from a congenital heart condition could not have been "natural", despite the coroner's ruling - because Gateley was civilly partnered to another man. The tweetosphere and blogosphere mobilised in disgust at Moir's column, again forcing a reaction from both the media elite and the international community, with retailers such as Nestle and Marks and Spencer withdrawing their advertising from the newspaper to distance themselves from Moir's intolerance. The Press Complaints Commission received 21,000 complaints about the article in a single weekend - more than it usually receives in five years. As blogger Iain Dale tweeted on Thursday: "Jan Moir's career has died of perfectly natural causes."

The latest instalment of the Welsh-American webcomic 'bunny', entitled 'Can't Stop the Blog', sums up the situation perfectly, with two suited figures under attack by giant blue birds that resemble the Twitter logo. For British users of the incongruously named site, the sudden sense of power in a progressive online consensus is thrilling.

Despite or, perhaps, because of our lust for freedom of collective expression, Britain boasts some of the strictest libel laws in the world. Trafigura was not the first international company to attempt to exploit this fact to its advantage, nor will it be the last. The state has good reason to tremble at the possibility of its populace being allowed to share opinions at speed. When the last earth-shattering communications revolution, the printing press, finally achieved widespread uptake in the 17th century, the explosion of handbills, newsheets, satire and subversive literature helped to catalyse a decade of bloody civil war. In a very real sense, moveable type set in motion the dire and righteous machinery whose trajectory ended, on a cold January morning in 1649, with the killing of a king.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said that '“What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.” The internet has had the equivalent impact of the advent of atomic warfare on the world of ideas, making individual thinkers part of a chain reaction whose power can be immediate and devastating. Marshall McLuhan observed in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy that "societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication". The British are desperate to see our creakily ancient institutions – newspapers and political parties dominated by wealthy Oxbridge graduates and a parliamentary system where official communication between the two houses is still overseen by the hereditary figure of Black Rod – reshaped by the internet.

Slowly, that reshaping is beginning to happen. Last year, Britain watched in awe as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated the power of the internet to effect change, and activists of all stripes have determined to learn from the campaign: advisers on internet strategy for Obama/Biden ’08 are still swamped by requests to speak at seminars and conferences in the UK. Moreover, the boldness of online commentators and independent auditors this year has inspired British media institutions, particularly the Guardian group and the Daily Telegraph, to embrace for the first time in decades the duty of keeping the government and law enforcement honest.

The process is achingly slow. Twitter user Leon Green commented that “When Twitter campaigns lead to people voting 1 way or another then I'll be excited. It's just off starting blocks till then.” But a groundswell of online grumblers is gradually changing the shape of British politics.

We have always been a nation of grumblers, gossipers and whiners. Thirty centuries of being invaded by nearly everyone, ruled over by bloodthirsty fops in stupid tights and incessantly rained on will do that to you. Now that Britain has the highest percentage of internet users in the world, with 79.8% of the country's population connected, we finally have a chance to turn our national pastime of whinging into a focused endeavour. October 2009 may well go down in history as the month when Whitehall and the world learned not to underestimate the power of several million Brits grumbling as one.

Reasons To Be Cheerful!

I've done it again. Despite forcing myself to spend at least a part of each day doing this 'relaxing' thing (in practice, mostly analysing the cackhanded post-human theorising of lots and lots of Battlestar Galactica and wanting to be as cool as Starbuck) I've worked my normally robust immune system down to the shell and am now holed up in bed shivering, feeling sorry for myself and drifting in and out of fever dreams in which a giant robot with the head of Nick Griffin chases me through central Brighton.

This morning, I was in Westminster to do an interview. The mood in parliament has ceased to be panic-stricken and is now subdued, depressed. The Election Results That Must Not Be Named and string of resignations have left the place stunned, and even the infamously costly tropical trees in the foyer look like they're expecting a chainsaw at any moment. So I've decided to remind myself and everyone patient enough to have read this far that not everything is utter pants. There are, in fact, some reasons to be cheerful.

1. Firstly and most importantly: justice, of a kind, for the Saro-Wiwa claimants against Shell. The oil company has agreed to pay millions of dollars of compensation to the families of nine environmental protestors executed by Nigerian troops in 1995, which dreadfully cynical anti-business Penny Red readers might interpret as a sign that there was sufficient evidence to prove that Shell had arranged for those men and women to be murdered and many others injured and mutilated. The case has been ongoing for over fourteen years, and many did not expect it to make it to the courts in New York, such were the obstacles thrown in its way. And although no verdict was reached, this really is a stunningly important precedent for international business law, reminding corporate giants that it's just not okay to shit all over people's lives because they happen to be poor and live somewhere rural. One year ago I sat in on a meeting in which Baroness Shruti Vadera scorned the idea of any international corporate justice system; today that noble goal just got a whole lot more achievable.

2. Yes, almost a million people voted for the BNP, and yes, that does make me bloody ashamed to be British. But it was only a tiny increase on their proportion of the vote in 2004, and look, look, right: today Nick Griffin got egged by anti-fascists outside the Commons, where, if you'll recall, he still doesn't actually have a seat. The racist scumbag was forced to abandon a press conference after the brave lads and lasses from Unite Against Fascism turned up with hearts full of hope and hands full of poultry produce. Nice one.

3.No, really. Watch the video. The BBC newsreader is loving it. Especially when he fumbles delicately over describing the 'er, thickset men...security, I think, is the word...that escort Nick Griffin wherever he goes. Yes, gosh, there are an awful lot of cameras here now, and you can see the eggs...' Gods bless Auntie Beeb.

4. Not everybody has slammed their laptop shut in disgust, and the blogosphere is doing us proud in these dark days. Great new initiatives include the Asian Women's Carnival, the second round of which is up today and makes for fascinating reading. Compass, too, are doing sterling work drawing our attention back to the important stuff: read Salma Yaqoob's cross-post to the Guardian on the New Left, and Carola Becker's clarion call to remind us why welfare reform is still a crucial campaigning topic - even if the Labour party are by now so ashamed of the plans that they've forced them off the schedule for the party conference in September.

5. Look. We live in a world where a sickly neonate leftist hack can pop across the road to the corner shop and buy a magical painkiller that simultaneously gets rid of the horrid aches and pains and stops her falling asleep; where said poorly journalista can munch on said painkiller in front of a high-speed internet portal allowing her access to more current information than she could ever possibly digest at the click of a button; where fresh tomato soup, soothing episodic science fiction and fan heaters can be had even on a startup writer's measly half-salary. We are living in the future. That really makes me happy.

6. No, look, isn't the future great? A hundred years ago I might have died of this flu. Now I'm enjoying a lovely half-day off work, work which incidentally I'm allowed to do because here and now young women are allowed to earn a wage, contribute to the world of media and citizenship, have some control over their reproductive capacity, enjoy sex, travel and education, and generally have options that aren't marriage, church and early death in childbirth. The future is stunningly fantastic. Also, they make computers the size of paperbacks. Apologies, I tend to get a little techno-utopian when I'm feverish.

That's as much as I can think of for now. Please comment and add your own reasons to be cheerful. Tell me about what you last enjoyed eating. Post funny pictures of cats who can't spell. Youtube yourself singing the shitty English lyrics to The Internationale whilst tearing up BNP pamphlets. Anything.

LeftNewMedia: let a thousand flowers bloom...

Last night: the first meeting of what, after a little bit of squabbling, has been titled the LeftNewMedia forum. In attendance: some techie types, several folks who have the esteem of being Famous On The Internet, John MacDonnell MP, who is famous in real life, and my rather bewildered housemate, who actually has a life. StroppyBird was there, as was Dave Osler, a representative of thoughcowardsflinch, and several other quasi-hacks with a laptop, time on their hands and a sense of public justice. The topic under discussion: how do we use the netroots to achieve objectives within the British Left?

The Obama campaign, it was proposed, has put the British Left to shame in terms of its use of the internet to harness liberal energy. And at first that seems to be incontestibly the case. The way that the campaign tapped into local energy, targeted resources and raised a rustling shitload of cash for the cause can only be seen as an unprecedented triumph for the international Left as it adjusts to the new technological order. For more technical details of just how this was done, go read Crashing The Gate, visit the MoveOn site, and be inspired.

This meeting, convened by John MacDonnell's babyfaced flunky Owen Jones, took the Obama campaign as its yardstick and key ideal. Our objective was no less than to use the internet to unite the progressive left.

Um.

Have you met the progressive left? Its representatives at the initial meeting took ten solid minutes of recrimination just to decide when and where we were meeting next. The British left are good at many things, but we can't find absolute ideological common ground with both hands and a torch. Just look at the abortion rights movement: indubitably a progressive campaign, and also ostensibly a single-issue campaign, but put two pro-choice activists in a room and I guarantee you'll find points of contention as well as articles of common ground. You will never get the British progressive left to agree. Let me repeat that: there is not, now, and never will be any such thing as a British progressive left consensus. And nor should there be.

The semiotic nature of the left is very different from that of the right. By definition, we are about a multiplicity of ideals and platforms. We can think in subtle and progressive tones, we can consider different causes and outcomes simultaneously, we are contentious, and we are clever. And that's why the world wide websphere is a natural home for our efforts:

Look again at the abortion rights movement. A myriad of different positions, one for every activist and thinker and ally involved, but let an *objective* come up upon which we can roughly agree - stopping Mad Nads' initiative to lower the time limit, for example - and look how we mobilise. The hundreds-strong protest outside parliament when the Bill hit the table in May, and the energy that accompanied it, was garnered online; thousands of internet activists wrote to their MPs using E-letters, we blogged, we talked, we organised. All we needed - all the left ever need - was a practical objective. And look at us mobilise.

And that's what the Obama campaign had. It had a very practical, comprehensible and time-specific goal: to get Barack Hussein Obama elected president on the 4th of November this year.

Now look, in a different way, at the trans-allied protest outside the Stonewall awards this month. That protest, the largest trans demo in UK history, was organised entirely online. The internet allows minority groups, like transpeople and their allies, to find each other, to share ideas and to raise debate. The point of the Global Village isn't to create one big ideological blanket for everyone to scurry under (a Global Longhouse, if you will) - the point is to let a thousand flowers bloom. To allow a multiplicity of tiny groups to coagulate and enable them to link up and unite behing causes when they need to.

At the meeting there was much talk of how the BNP website is the most-visited party political website in the country. With predictable disgust at the message, the medium of the BNP's online avatar was praised for its comprehensiveness, its soundbites, its clarity of message, its simplicity. Can we make left-leaning sites as effective in the same way?

No, we bloody well can't. The reason that the BNP website is simple is because the BNP is a simple idea. They're not about taking a considered ideological position. They have a few soundbites, and that's it - their soundbites are forcible because soundbites are all they have. Their message and objectives - hating immigrants, being proud to be British, feeling angry at the Damn Liberals - are fairly clear-cut, and either you swallow them or you don't. The BNP have been successful at organising online, but we do not want to emulate the BNP's online scheme, and even if we did there's no way we could apply it to the British left. We are better than that. We are cleverer than that. We can think in shades of grey. The strength of the right is that its message is simplistic and requires little actual thought. The strength of the left is that ours isn't. Our strength is in our numbers and our diversity.

And that is why the internet might have designed as a special playground just for us. All we need to do is abandon the notion of creating any kind of 'consensus'. Why the hell do we need consensus? We're the British left. We're never going to agree. You may as well go herding cats. When we have practical objectives to organise and gather behind - keeping out the Tories, fighting the far right, holding our own parties to account, supporting or opposing government bills, setting up community projects, organising protests - we are formidable, and we are very, very fast. And this week, we proved it.

The instant that the BNP membership list got out online this week, there was no stopping the anti-fascist hacktivists. Whine and stamp though Griffin might, within minutes the list was all over the world in millions of inboxes. Within hours Wikileaks had it, and some clever techies in their bedrooms had set up a tool to search the list by name and postcode and another tool mashing the list with GoogleMaps.

Without the online left, that list would never have become news, would never have reopened the debate around the far right in this country. We are powerful. We have at our disposal a great deal of talented people: techies, geeks, bedroom pyjama nerds, writers, bloggers, graphic designers, political canvassers and campaigners, directors, humorists. Obama's campaign remains an inspiration, but we're not doing too badly over here, and we'll only do better as the stakes are raised and we learn to own our syncretic differences. The future of radical politics is a geek in zir bedroom with a cup of coffee, a pile of manifestos and and internet connection.

LeftNewMedia aims to build a dynamic coalition of left-wing techies, computer geeks, writers, internet users, bloggers, activists and other interested parties with the aim of forging specific online campaigns. I encourage you all to come to the next meeting, at which we will set down details of our first campaign, and which will be in Central London on the 15th of December at 8pm, further details TBA. For those who can't make it, I'll be writing it up here.