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On this page, you will find videos, summaries and transcripts of Designing the Revolution, chapter 5, by Roger Hallam.
Videos
Summary
Part 1
Part 1. Introduction and Background
Roger Hallam shares his insights on designing a revolution in his fifth talk. This plan differs from previous talks wherein he doesn't aim to excite, incite or incriminate, but to carefully consider the design aspects of a potential revolution. The revolution, as Hallam sees it, might not be something we necessarily want, but it could be inevitable. In this context, he argues, it is our responsibility to design it proactively.
Part 2. Merging Theoretical and Practical Approaches
Hallam underscores the importance of design in the potential revolution, balancing emotion and rhetoric. He envisions a systematic way of bringing together different elements in order to enhance the chances of achieving a post-social outcome. His approach is akin to that used in the Nygma project in World War II; it is a combination of intellectual problem-solving and emotional drive.
Part 3. Some Predictions and Expectations for the Future
Hallam lays out his thoughts on the possible scenarios of the approaching revolution. It could be good or bad, amazing, or disastrous. He argues that there is a great deal of agency involved in steering the revolution towards a good or bad outcome, the challenge being itโs a fluid situation. He also defines a revolutionary episode as involving the change of the regime, not just a change in government, possibly leading to massive social and cultural shifts.
Part 4. Anticipating the Scope of the Talk Series
Hallam plans to deliver around 40 talks on this topic, a task he acknowledges may be ambitious. He will draw on the works of a variety of experts, combining their theories and experiences into a new whole. He also envisages the talks to touch upon other side-topics and case studies as needed.
Part 5. Establishing the Basic Principles and Design Approach
Hallam aims to guide the listener around the central concept of complexity. Probabilities and probing are key ideas here. The process involves collecting data, formulating a hypothesis, testing it, obtaining feedback and adjusting it accordingly.
Part 6. Explanation of Exaption, Praxis, and Paradigm Shift
Hallam introduces the notions of exaption, praxis, and paradigm shift to his proposed approach. Exaption speaks to the borrowing of a method from one field and using it in another. Praxis refers to the integration of theoretical and practical knowledge in decision-making processes. As for the paradigm shift, this involves creating a new way of viewing and understanding phenomena.
Part 7. Personal Experience and Design Efficacy
Hallam recounts his personal experiences with design for the past 35 years, starting with his involvement in establishing Radical Roots, an organization supporting co-operatives, to his prediction of mass civil disobedience and ultimately the emergence of Extinction Rebellion. He explains that through his research and data-driven outlook, he has been able to generate accurate predictions about social change.
Part 8. Applying Design Strategy in Environmental Campaigns
Hallam shares his experience of designing environmental campaigns like Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil. After COVID-19 had decimated the climate movement, Hallam used a strategy involving 200 people to plan the largest climate campaign in the UK in 2021. This led to a high name recognition rate and greatly influenced the demand for insulation. He carried the lessons learnt from these successful campaigns to launch similar operations worldwide.
Part 9. Replicating Success through Standardised Design
To effectively replicate the success of these campaigns in different Western democracies, Hallam and his team systematised their design experiences and created a standardised design model. It was based on empirical evidence and best practices from the last 50 to 100 years on how to bring about social change. These campaigns then became the biggest climate campaigns in their respective countries.
Part 10. Empirical Design and Covert Aims
Hallam elaborates on his firm belief in revolution being inevitable due to empirical evidence. Even though this might sound ambitious, he argues itโs rooted in hard data and not personal ego or emotional manipulation. His design strategies are geared towards achieving these โinevitableโ revolutionary episodes.
Part 11. The Struggle with Established Approaches
Despite successful prototypes, traditional environmental organisations have been unwilling to adopt Hallamโs strategies, demonstrating a resistance to change and a bias against methods outside their cultural experience. This has led to a failure to replicate successful strategies. As a response, Hallam believes in the necessity of establishing new campaigns and social formations like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil.
Part 12. Call to Action for Future Revolutionaries
Finally, Hallam urges listeners to not only consider his strategies, but learn, fund and apply them. Despite their fear for the future, he encourages people to have faith in empirical design, which has already produced success. There's an enormous responsibility to take action in light of the climate crisis, rather than awaiting disaster. He ends the talk on the note of discussing what future talks will cover.
Part 2
Part 1: Introduction & Future Podcast Plans
Roger Hallam introduces his Talk 5 Part 2 podcast, Designing the Revolution. He discusses his plans for future episodes and explains the importance of preparing for a revolution that he believes is inevitable. He concedes that revolutions are typically unpleasant and often fail, clarifying that these podcasts are not supporting or discouraging revolutions. The main goal is to promote readiness and preparation for the coming changes.
Part 2: New Ideas for Revolution
Hallam discusses new ideas related to revolution preparation, mentioning concepts like proximity, sociability, deliberation, and sortition. He explains that despite the predictable pattern of past revolutions, history doesn't always repeat itself, and human groups have the capacity to create novel ways of organizing.
Part 3: Future Podcast Topics
Hallam gives an overview of the topics he plans to cover in future podcasts, highlighting the complexities of revolutionary social processes. The initial episodes will focus on small-scale organizing, followed by more detailed case studies of specific revolutionary movements. Hallamโs podcasts aim to offer practical, concrete strategies rather than abstract theories.
Part 4: Importance of Small-Scale Organizing
In this section, Hallam underscores the importance of small-scale organizing in a revolution. He stresses understanding the intricacies of group dynamics and enabling people to liberate themselves. He challenges listeners to become disciplined and hardworking in preparing for revolution.
Part 5: Future Revolutionary Scenarios
Hallam discusses three possible future scenarios for revolution: a linear sequence of legislative changes, a sudden upheaval triggered by a crisis, and a surprise, unpredictable event. He sees the latter two as more likely given the current societal context.
Part 6: Transitioning into Post-Revolution Society
In the final part, Hallam briefly mentions that toward the end of the podcast series, they will discuss the transition into a post-revolutionary society. While the majority of the podcast series is focused on the processes leading to and including a revolution, it is crucial to also consider what happens after.
Full transcript
This transcript was generated using AI, edited by humans to make it more readable.
Part 1
Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)
This is Roger Hallam. You're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is talk five, part one.
So what's the plan? Okay, so yes, we're going to look at the plan. The first thing to say is this is not going to be a whole series of high-pitched rhetoric, excitable, you know, screamy, bring down the government type stuff, in case you haven't noticed. We're going to be looking in a serious, considered, design-orientated way at what a revolution will involve.
And I might add that sort of shouting down the phone from a prison cell about bringing down government seems probably not a good idea. It might be a bit tricky. So the other thing to say is, I don't know about you, but you're probably thinking revolutions are pretty difficult, problematic things anyway. And in a perfect world, we wouldn't be having a revolution. We'd be having a nice sit down and people would be sensible and we could make all the transformations we would like. So it's not like we want this to happen necessarily. It's more like it's going to happen. And insomuch as it's going to happen, we've got a responsibility to proactively design it. So that's where we're up to, isn't it?
So design is the central word in all of this. Design is not everything, as I've just said. There's different approaches. Emotion is enormously important. Rhetoric is enormously important. But what we're going to be doing here is thinking systematically how we go about bringing all the elements together in a conscious way to maximise the probabilities of a post-social outcome. That's a bit of a long-winded way of saying it.
So it's a little bit like I think you used this nudge earlier about the Enigma project in World War II. These brainy guys got together and worked out the codes of the German communications. And arguably that's what won World War II. Of course, it wasn't what won World War II. It was also millions of people giving their lives in a gritty, emotional, full-on, indescribably unpleasant way. So these two things go together. So let's just summarise where we're up to before we get on to talking about the planet.
So number one, this revolutionary episode is inevitable. It's coming, whether we like it or not. That's what I've spent the last two or three talks talking about.
Number two, it could be good or bad. It could be amazing. It could be a total, utter, unbelievable disaster. It's not going to necessarily be one or the other.
Number three, there is an enormous amount of agency involved in making it either good or bad. It's a fluid situation. In other words, it's completely open to the influence of proactive design, how we actually make it work. That's what this series of talks is about.
And fourth, lastly, we're giving some sort of good-enough-to-go definition. A revolutionary episode, at a minimum, involves the change of the regime. It doesn't involve just to change the government. It doesn't mean getting rid of the state. It means changing the regime that inhabits the state, whether that's an autocracy or a democracy or some 21st century democracy that we're going to be looking at. And potentially, and arguably necessarily, it will involve a massive amount of social and cultural change, which covers a multitude of things, as you can imagine.
Okay. So, what are we envisaging here? What I'm envisaging is to do something like 40 talks, may well be more. That sounds horrendously ambitious, as I'm telling you this, but that's what I've got down here. That's what I've been working on. There's an enormous amount of other things to do. So, it's going to be a bit of a journey. I don't know whether I'm actually going to get through them all. But that's my plan at the moment.
And needless to say, I'm going to be standing on the shoulders of lots of different giants. I'm not going to be claiming some enormous originality. I think my contribution, for what it's worth, is to sympathise, to bring together a lot of different traditions, literatures, points of view, experiences, and work them together into a new whole, which arguably is going to be something exciting and new. But we'll see as we go along. That's the project.
And needless to say, if you feel you can do better, absolutely brilliant. You know, off you go. You go and do some podcasts. This is a process of collective creation, as you might say. So, you want to take some of what I've said, cut it up, criticise it, make a video out of it, you know, translate it into languages. Feel free. You don't need just permission. It's an open source project.
And lastly, I suspect I'm going to do one or two tangential talks as I'm going to talk to them. So, I've got a fairly rigid idea that I'm going to be following, you know, a nice rational plan. But every now and again, I'm going to go off on a tangent and look at a particular case study, do something a bit more personal, speculative, or even, dare I say, rhetorical, just to give a little bit of spice to the whole process and to try and, you know, move around our brain cells a little bit, let's put it like that.
And, you know, Les and I are thinking, yeah, maybe I'm going to do some interviews with people that know things better than I do. Maybe go on a tour, maybe do a book, you know, whatever. We'll see how all that progresses. All right. So, what I want to do, you know, what's the plan? I want to briefly cover the basic principles and approach that I'm going to take. And in the second part of the talk, I'm going to actually run through what talks I'm going to do.
So, as you've probably noticed by now, the starting point of this is this concept of complexity. And complexity means things are sort of complicated, but they're not so complicated that you can't actually make sort of general predictions and general designs. So, the key sort of words here are probing and probability. You probe the complex sort of system that you're looking at. It's not like a car engine. You can't work it out exactly, but it's not chaos. It's not like you don't have a clue. It's like you probe it, you get data, and out of that, you make probabilistic designs.
In other words, you don't know whether they're definitely going to work, but you maximize the probability. So, this is difficult for a lot of people to get around because we live in this culture where something can't be understood or it definitely can't be totally understood. Now, it's neither of those two things. So, a little way of an example, a few years ago, I was very involved in projects where people, communities put up their own candidates in elections, and there was this guy who did it really successfully. And I said to him, well, you know, this is really good. I think we could roll this out. We can work out what are the key elements in this project, turn them into a sort of training course with some mentoring, and people would go off and replicate it around the country. And this person who, I think she was doing complexity as part of, she was a lecturer, and she said, no, no, no, it's far too complex. You can't replicate it. And I thought, no, that's rubbish. You know, you can replicate, you just can't replicate it in the sense of replicating a currency, right? You can replicate it with a probabilistic approach that it can be replicated all around the UK. And arguably, that was right. So, you can see like this is difficult, and I'm going to keep reminding you about this because something I want to get into your head, this is what we're dealing with here. As opposed to this mechanical, you know, cultural default that we've learned this story that the world's split between black and white, you know, it's either you're with me or against me, it's all or nothing, you know, the set categories, blah, blah, this sort of fixed thinking, which doesn't involve much cognitive effort, it's quite reassuring, the pretense of certainty, all this sort of stuff, right? And of course, a lot of left-wing thought is in that sort of tradition. And this is one of the things I'm going to argue is one of the reasons, you know, the left generally has not been successful because of this rigidity, and a lot of it comes back to Marx, you know, he made amazing contributions, whether you agree with him or not, you know, in terms of what he was saying, but he was very much part of that 19th century scientific enlightenment, you know, Newtonian tradition, where society is a machine, the human being is a machine, we work out how that machine works, and we do X, Y, and Z, and out comes the solution. It's a sort of vulgar mechanistic orientation, and the ghost of that, as it were, pervades a lot of progressive or left-thinking today, whether people realize it or not. So I'm trying to make that juxtaposition explicit. We're not doing that. We're doing it complexively. So what does this design thing actually concretely involve? You know, how do you operationalize it? Well, this is well-established, I think some people call it design engineering, which is you collect data, right? You get as much information as you can, you come up with a hypothesis, as you might call it, or an idea, a plan, an initial design, a prototype, and you go out and test it. And the idea, of course, is that it's full of holes, it won't quite work, or whatever, so you get feedback on it, and then you iterate, and you keep iterating, and each iteration, in other words, you do it again, get more feedback, and you gradually improve it, or maybe, you know, it's totally hopeless, and you drop it and move on to something else, or it works really well, of course. But the key phrases here are optimized, right? You're not involved in getting some ultimate solution. You don't solve the problem. You simply optimize the outputs of the system. So the people I work with, we use this word all the time, you know, optimize, or more humbly, we say it's, you know, the best suboptimal outcome. In other words, every outcome is going to be suboptimal, right? It's a question of what's the least worth. So that's the approach. And then there's another sort of layer of thinking about this, which is encompassed in this phrase, praxis. So where praxis comes from is this idea that's always theory, okay? So I use this phrase like naive empiricism. So what that means is you just look at the data, and you pretend that it's objective. Well, in a sense, it is objective, but your interpretation of it is certainly not objective. In other words, as soon as you look at data, the very process of understanding data involves interpretive bias, as it were. In other words, you have a theory about how the world works, you have a theory about right and wrong. And what theory is, what we need to do is to make that explicit. This isn't a bad thing, because as I said, you know, you can't get rid of it anyway, unless you have this naive empiricism sort of approach. So what praxis is saying is accept there is a theory. And in fact, the theory is really important. And bringing a new theory into your practice can enable you to change that practice and look at the empirical information, the data, in a new way. And that opens up all sorts of potential. So what praxis means is this interaction, this alternation between a theoretical approach, going out into the real world, practicing it, get feedback from that, altering the theory or dropping the theory, and then replicating that. So this to and fro, this sort of fusion, in a sense, between theory and practice, that's what praxis is. One example of praxis is the work of Paolo Freire, who wrote a book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which you may know about, always a good book to read. And I don't know if he came up with the phrase, but he certainly used it a lot. So he's an example, right? He was, you know, he was a Marxist intellectual guy, but he didn't spend all his time, you know, sitting around writing articles for magazines or stuck in a lecture theatre. He was out with the poor of Brazil, I think it was, doing literacy courses, and through these literacy courses, designing a process through which people co-created their reality, and through that became radicalized and moved towards social and collective action. And that's a classic example of this praxis approach, which is part of a more generic idea, which came from Gromsky, the Italian guy you probably know about, and his notion of the organic intellectual. So again, the idea is, you know, the intellectual is not someone who sits apart from the social space, from social struggle, from the messiness of real life, but is actually embedded in it in an organic sense and experiences it. So dare I say it, you know, I'm an intellectual, which doesn't mean I'm better than anyone else or anything, just for the record, but I spend an enormous amount of my time thinking about things and designing things, but I'm not sitting there, you know, in front of my computer in my flat, I'm on the front line, here I am stuck in prison. That's good for me, because, you know, it gives me a profoundly emotional and intellectual education, finding out about things I never thought I would, putting my ideas into practice, you know, how does this actually feel, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so you can see how this works, right? It's like, super exciting, as far as I'm concerned, because it avoids that false dichotomy between saying, oh, you're theoretical, you're a practical guy. No, no, no, right? We're bringing these things together. We're going to be smart about it. Okay, so the fourth thing then is this obvious approach is to use exaption, which I think I pronounced that right. So this is, you know, this is quite fun, really. What exaption means, I saw a YouTube video by this famous complexity theorist guy. So the original idea was, I think it's part of evolutionary theory. So something that, you know, is quite difficult to understand is how you have these big jumps in evolution. For instance, you know, you have animals on the ground, how do they evolve into flying? You know, pretty complicated. Anyway, as it turns out, if I've got this right, there was a lot of animals have feathers, feathers had this function to keep the animals warm, which is all well and good. But at the same time, they basically got longer and if the animal jumped, it would enable them to fly a little bit. And then for evolution, you've got this like jump of using feathers to enable these animals to fly. And so you've got flights, you have this exaption of one phenomenon, which had one function into a different system to provide a different function. So it didn't all just start off, you know, incrementally, you have this whole sort of bunch of ideas or designs, and they were just transferred whole, as it were, into another system. So this is what we did with Extinction Rebellion, I would argue, was we exacted sales theory from sort of the capitalistic system into a revolutionary system, a radical system, and combine the two together. So the revolutionary theory, you know, rebellion against British government over the climate crisis, and all the rest of it. And we brought into that his whole way of actually getting people to do things, which was based upon sales theory. Sales theory, obviously, is, you know, at the heart or part of this whole capitalistic system. So traditionally, people would go, no, that's capitalism, we don't want anything to do with that. And we're saying, no, no, no, that's really dumb, right? In the capitalist world, there's a whole bunch of different things, contradictory elements, things which we could take and exact into our system and make more vigorous. And arguably, that's what gave this Extinction Rebellion phenomenon its genius, as it were, was it brought all these disparate elements together from something quite new. And dare I say, this is, you know, what many commentators have said about Marx, like, the genius of Marx was that he brought together English political economy, German idealism, French utopian socialism. So these were all separate little themes, as you might say, in the 19th century. They either completely ignored each other or hated each other. What Marx did was bring them together and fuse them into something entirely new and systematic, right? So that's what we're about, right? That's what we need to do. And of course, this is what over and over again, is not done in progressive, creative, less sort of circles. So another example of this is, you know, I was involved with a bunch of other people doing a design for the first rent strike in London for several decades, I think it was. So I did this design, you know, I exacted various ways of canvassing, what have you, from sales theory and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it was successful. Thousands of people went on rent strike. There was a successful resolution to it. Myself and the guy that I worked with on it, we wrote a nice bucket, we explained how to do it. And I put this in there, you know, it's going to get replicated. I went off to do other research because I was doing my PhD research at King's College at the time. And this, you know, my friend, I left in basically the following year to sort of do it again. And all these, you know, different people moved into the group. And they, you know, dogmatic, far left people, they had an idea about how the world works. They had an idea about how things should be done. And if you weren't doing it like that, then, you know, you're outcast and you got chucked out of the group. And needless to say, nothing happened. Not even a single door was knocked on, dare I say. And, you know, the miserable story is that, as far as I'm aware, several years later, there still hasn't been a rent strike in London. So I will comment further on what I think about that. Okay, so the thing then is, this is a little bit more sort of vague, I suppose, but I'm going to say it, which is creating on an even bigger level, a sort of new way of seeing. So one way of talking about this is a new paradigm, which is a terrible phrase, because it's been used, you know, what does it mean? But formally speaking, a new paradigm, as I see it means like a system of theories, like a whole bunch of theories that brought together into some sort of coherent whole, which may or may not, you know, actually make sense, you know, sometimes make sense for 100 or 200 years, and then it gradually becomes more and more like dysfunctional, and then this new paradigm comes along. So this is precisely really what we're going to be looking at in this, in this, we're going to talk to is a new paradigm. So we talk quite a lot about this mechanistic view of the human. And what we're, this new paradigm that we're going to introduce is, is going to be moving beyond this mechanical, you know, accountant, calculator, construction of the human, beyond sort of material, atomistic, individualistic view to this notion of social space, where what we focus our design in is the construction of that space, and these organic links, the culture, the procedures, the rituals, the norms that exist within people, and it's the design of that, which creates this complexity of social connection. So you can say like, this is quite different, and it spurns a whole bunch of theories out of this new paradigm, as you might say. So an example here is, is, as I'm sure you know, like, you know, 200 years ago, there was a big revolution in France, and there was this big, you know, slogan, liberty, equality, fraternity. And what's sort of slightly amusing about it is, is liberty and equality, you know, got this massive boost, everyone's heard about them, but the fraternity there, sort of got lost. And the reason for this, arguably, is because liberty and and equality are quite mathematical concepts. It's like you can nail them down into a mechanistic system. So they fitted into the general paradigm of mechanistic Newtonian view of humanity. And so they become privileged, and for the next, you know, 100, 200 years, they've been the main show. While fraternity, it's just a little bit embarrassing, because it's like, what's that, you know, you know, people getting on with each other, you can't really reduce it, because by definition, it's not supposed to be reducible, right? It's about the complexity of the human connection, sociability, as we're going to call it, with a bit more of a modern phrase. So arguably, this is one of the reasons why the left has been, you know, massively unsuccessful in terms of getting popular appeal across the generation across, you know, majority of populations, because there's this general sensibility or feeling that it's just cold, it's mechanistic, you know, it's a factory design of humanity, paradoxically, rather than this warm, connected fraternity element. So we're not, we're not gonna, we're gonna not going to be doing that. Okay. So a last example here is a paradigm is, is this materialistic view of the world. So this is, look, there's the world, it's material, it's essentialist, it is what it is, you know, don't argue. And then there's this new paradigm, which sort of like deconstructs the notion of the material. This can be done in two ways. Like, first of all, people say, well, you know, show me something material. They say, well, here's a chair, you know, a chair is a chair is a chair. Well, not exactly, because a chair is relates to a function, or a function isn't something essentially material, right? It's a social construct. It's a meaning, you know, why call it a chair, we could just say, it's a whole bunch of pieces of wood, right? You know, why, why call it a chair? And if you're going to call it a bunch of pieces of wood, well, why call it wood, you know, it could be just a whole bunch of, of, of atoms. So it's not at all obvious what a material thing is in that sense. And then the second form of deconstruction, as it were, is, is in the sort of Newtonian period, there was this idea that atoms were the smallest items in the universe. And, you know, maybe they were, but it turned out they weren't. So there was, in this Newtonian sort of paradigm, there's this essentialism, which is, basically, everyone's made up of atoms. Okay, so that's great headset. It turned out that physics moved on. And that's not true, because as we all know, atoms are made up of, you know, smaller bits and pieces, and they're made up of smaller bits and pieces. So it goes on, you know, infinitely, potentially, and all gets quite complicated. So the whole paradigm of some essential material world has been lost. And, and so we're looking at a new paradigm of constructing things, you know, in a different way. Okay, so lastly, just before I finish this talk, I want to say a little bit about my own record, which, you know, I'm a little bit nervous about, because I don't want to be sound too big headed. On the other hand, you know, we're dealing with something enormously important here. And false modesty has to go out the window as well, as far as I'm concerned. So what I'm trying to say here is, if you use these processes, they can be enormously powerful, these design principles, not because I'm telling you or because I make them up, right? They're well established, a lot of people use them. And they're fantastically powerful, and create really strong predictions, again, not absolute predictions, but the ability to see clearly, as clearly as we can how social systems work, how you can reorganize them, and what's going to happen in the future. So this is something I've been working on for 35 years, I started my activism when I was about 13, 14, 1980s. And what I quickly became interested in is participatory design, as I called it at the time. So I worked out that, you know, fairly early on, it's how people relate to each other and the systems and rules that people, the systems and rules that people are subject to, to predict whether things turn out to be a mess and collapse, or whether they become sustainable. So in my early 20s, I helped found an organization called Radical Roots, which was, existed a set of workers cooperatives and housing cooperatives. And up to that time, there was a voluntaristic culture, particularly in anarchist circles, which is what I was mainly connected with, which was, you know, we can do stuff we don't want to do, we don't want to do it, no one tells us what to do. And then three or four of us said, right, you know, rightful, well and good, but it's not going to create anything that's going to actually, you know, impact on society and provide a basis for activists, radicals to begin housing and work and all the rest of it. So we evolved this new design, which involved, you know, what we call organized mutual aid, where people came together, and they had to be properly trained, they had to send representatives to a gathering once every quarter. And once they fulfilled these obligations, as it were, then they became eligible for loans, and they could buy the house, settle their community and what have you. And that this created a solidity and sustainability. I'm very proud to say that this organization still exists, you know, 25, 30 years later. Now, no one's pretending it's perfect, and there's a whole bunch of parts of the design that were a bit tricky and didn't quite work, but it shows like the direction of travel. And, you know, I went off to do organic farming for about 20 years. And when I came back to sort of design of political processes, I talked to, on the basis of my research at King's College, I had a good chat to a Guardian journalist about two years before Extinction Rebellion, and I said to him, look, I predict there's going to be, you know, massive civil disobedience in the Western world within two years. And I didn't just pull that out of the hat, I wasn't just trying to be, you know, impressive or whatever. It came out of a systematic study of how social change works, and the data that existed, and of course, the objective horrendousness of the climate crisis. And two years later, you know, we had Extinction Rebellion. And the Guardian journalist obviously thought I was a bit bonkers at the time. And then afterwards, he said, oh, you know, you're right. And I'm saying, yeah, well, I'm right, because, you know, that's my job. I'm in the business of making probabilistic predictions about the future on the basis of systematic study of the data. So when Extinction Rebellion came along, I said, you know, in Christmas 2018, I said, if 10,000 people go to London, they stay there for a whole week or two, engaging in civil disobedience, bringing the centre of London to a standstill, then we will get a substantial response from the political establishment and create cultural change. And people are saying, well, no, you know, civil disobedience, this public aren't going to do that, blah, blah, blah, and all sorts of, you know, objections. But they, you know, they didn't know what they were talking about, dare I say, because they hadn't systematically studied the literature like I had engaged in five years of research on it. And surprise, surprise, you know, in April of that year, Extinction Rebellion exploded into the public sphere and became the biggest global influencer on climate in 2019. Okay, so in 2021, after COVID, I was involved in initiating Insulate Britain. And the idea then just coming out of COVID was, you know, the climate movement had been decimated because no one could do anything because of the pandemic and what have you. So then I sat down, literally a piece of paper and went, okay, so what can 200 people do to create the biggest climate campaign in the UK in 2021? So what I designed and then, you know, elaborated with other people was a demand to insulate Britain involving 100, 200 people sitting on the biggest, most busiest motorway in the UK. And again, this design, you know, did what it said on the tin, it became the biggest climate campaign of the year. 80% name recognition and a massive influence on putting insulation on there as one of the biggest environmental demands from being nowhere and such like. And that led to the credibility, financing, organisational solidity that enabled Just Stop Oil to become the biggest climate campaign in the UK in 2022, this year. That's just finishing. So this, as you can see, is a sort of pattern, right? There was Extinction Rebellion, there was Insulate Britain, there's Just Stop Oil. And then around the Insulate Britain time, what I did was systematise the best practice of the last three to four years of design experience, you know, bringing in the last 50, 100 years of literatures on the subject to bring about social change. And we created a standardised version of replicating this in other Western democracies. And I remember sitting in the meeting with five or six sort of miserable young people going, yeah, last generation, you can do it, you know, the name and a bunch of people who were in Australia, and then in Germany, and in Italy, and then, you know, eight or nine Western democracies. And within 12 months, most of those campaigns have become the biggest climate campaigns in decades, or ever, in their countries, because they followed this design, which was empirically robust. So, you know, sitting here at Christmas 2022, and last generation in Germany is now, you know, massive operation, it's just raised half a million euros, and it's got hundreds of people involved, took over XR, you know, quite a while ago, 1500 artists have supported it, you know, it's booming along, it's on the national news, it's demand, you know, quite possibly be accepted. So all of that originates in this ongoing iterative design process I've been outlining for you, which is enormously exciting, right, because, you know, when I'm trying to get people to give money, this is what I say is, you know, if I've just been involved in designing Extinction Rebellion, you know, as people rather, you know, say, oh, it was just a one off, you know, anyone can do a one off, and they're totally right, you can just be lucky. But if you don't go and design, you know, the biggest climate campaigns in 2021, in, say, Britain, and then just deploy, and you have this massive success with the A22 projects, well, that's a different kettle of fish, you have to then accept the empirical reality that these guys are basically cracked the code, which doesn't mean, you know, there's any guarantees, right, as I said, this is always probabilistic, but it's super impressive, if the truth be known. And this is why you should be listening to these 3040 talks, because they're going to give you the detail and the devil's in the detail. So it's on the basis of that record, that I've investigated this hypothesis that a revolution, revolutionary episodes are now inevitable, at least in Western democracies in the next 10, 12 years. And, you know, if I was going to be falsely modest, I'll say, well, you know, this is something I think probably could happen. But I'm not, I'm being ruthlessly honest with myself and with you by saying no, it is actually inevitable. It's a done deal for the reasons I've outlined in the previous talk. In other words, it's nothing to do with me or my ego or whatever. It's to do with being ruthlessly empirical, like to look at the data, look at the probabilistic elements to it, do the maths, and go whether I like it or not, this is going to happen. In other words, to put what the reality is, in front of what you might like to see. And you might think, yeah, it's pretty easy to do. But it's not, it's actually enormously difficult. In fact, no one does it very well, unless you systematically apply your attention over a large period of time to doing it. And I'll just leave you with this sort of example of how difficult it is. As I've said, I was at King's College, and as you may know, I was involved in a seminal campaign that I designed, which involved demanding that the college divested from fossil fuels, myself and several other students, through paint over the Gothic Central Hall causing around 10,000 pounds worth of damage. And then I went on hunger strike for two weeks. All this was designed, pre-organized, I knew what I was doing. And I knew that I was going to win. Intellectually, I mean, emotionally, I was, you know, didn't want to be so presumptuous. But my cold intellect, as it were, I knew that this was going to break through as certain as I could be. Now lots of other activists were going, you know, it's a terrible idea, it won't work. That's because, you know, dare I say, I didn't really know what they were talking about. And it was successful, for the reasons, you know, that I'd worked out. Now, what's interesting, and, you know, super depressing in a way, but completely predictable as well, is lots of people in environmental movement go, oh, you know, that's fantastic, da da da da, and went to see the director at Greenpeace, and, you know, 350 org, and all these people. And they were going, yeah, great idea. And then I was going, like, so, you know, time to replicate, guys. You know, you know, recruit lots of people in all the universities around the Western world, go out, make a demand, go on hunger strike. You know, we're not talking about anything super traumatic here, about 14 days, no one's going to drop dead. You know, it's a symbolic exercise. And probabilistically speaking, you're, you know, 10,000 times more likely to get success than what you've done over the last 30 years, you know, doing performative joining committees, all this sort of stuff. What happened, absolutely nothing, like it wasn't replicated, bit like the, the Lorenz strike wasn't replicated at all. Because people in what you might call the environmentalist herd space, a subject, because they're human beings to this enormous bias, which says, if it's not within my cultural experience, I don't believe it's going to work, even though there's empirical support for it. So they thought it was great, but they couldn't conceive of doing it themselves. It sounds completely irrational. But this is how human beings work is, if something's, you know, you're embedded in a system for 20 or 30 years, like the director of Greenpeace, you're just not going to be able to bring yourself to do something that makes sense, even though it makes sense, which is, you know, we'll be talking about this quite a lot, which is why it's essential to settle new campaigns, social formations, such as XR or JSO or the A22. Because it's only by making this fresh start with this ruthless, vigorous empiricism, that you're going to actually be able to design something that's actually functional to the, you know, total and utter crisis that we face. So needless to say, there's an enormous amount of responsibility to do it. So that's my case. Go and tell your mates and your friends, you know, they're shitting themselves about what's going to be happening in the future and say, this guy's real, he's done his stuff, he's not God, you know, he's just another guy. But at the end of the day, you know, you've got to go with what looks like it works. So let's listen to what he's got to say and the other people that he works with and get in touch with him and, you know, get some training, get some funding and actually get on with the job because you don't want to just sit around waiting to die, do you? And on that cheerful note, I think I'll finish and, yeah, the next part of the talk I'll talk about more concretely about what the talks are going to involve. Okay, thanks so much.
Part 2
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This is Roger Hallam and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is Talk 5 Part 2, so what's the ban? All right, so in the first part of this talk I went through the general design principles and in this part I'm going to go through the talks and also explain how I'm going to do the rest of the podcast in a little bit more detail. So just to see where we're up to, as I think you've hopefully put it in your heads by now, this revolution is coming one way or another. It's not an act of faith, it's not an ideological projection, it's a physical reality. But you're probably thinking, you're probably right to think, well that's all well and good but there's no guarantee it's going to have a good outcome. In fact you'd probably be quite within your rights to say it's probably going to end really badly because, let's face it, a lot of revolutions do and it's not that likely to succeed because these things generally fail. So I just want to confess at this point that, just for the record, I'm not particularly keen on revolutions either from an observational point of view. They don't seem to work out, they seem to be extremely unpleasant, let's put it like that, a lot of the time. So I want to be clear that for these podcasts I'm not saying in a perfect world revolutions should be happening or shouldn't. I'm pretty agnostic about it to be honest. But given it is coming, we need to prepare for it and that's basically where we're coming from. I definitely have a really clear agenda and I'm sure you listening to this do as well in terms of, okay if it's coming, you've got a responsibility to prepare for it and to try and make it a semi-decent sort of affair. So that leads on to this idea, have we actually got any new ideas here? If you look at the revolutions of the last two or three years, they have a rather depressingly predictable pattern and it would be a reasonable thing to say. You haven't got any great ideas up our sleeves, it's just going to follow the old pattern. Well the good news of course is that history doesn't totally repeat itself and new things do happen. And yes, we do have a few new cards in our pack as it were. So since the Second World War and definitely since 1989, there's been a lot of research on the way that humans take, human groups, societies, political science. So we're not where we were 50, 60, 100 years ago, we've got a few new ideas. I'm just going to briefly go through these just to sort of give you a taste of what might be coming down the line. So if you don't totally get what I'm saying here, then don't worry about it. I'm going to be going through it in loads more detail. But I'm going to throw a few cards on the table as it were. So the first one is proximity, which is if we are going to design revolutionary episodes, we need to design them so that all the bits connect together quickly in time and space, so that we can control the process and the process actually leads to some positive revolutionary output. So we need to look closely at the micro design, which I'm going to talk more about. Secondly, and relatedly, we need to think about what I'm going to call sociability. Now we could call it a bunch of other things, but this is probably the central concept of the next 2030 podcasts. I mean, it's a bunch of other ideas coming in, but this is definitely a central one. And this is the idea that we want to deconstruct this whole notion of the political as lots of atomized computers, i.e. human brains making decisions without any heart, without any connection, without any desire for social recognition and such like, which is all nonsense, as we've already discussed. And what we are going to be looking at is the micro design of this sociability, how you bring people together. So you create the bedrock, as it were, the soil out of which grows the new social norms, social institutions. In other words, we're definitely looking at some deep transformation of cultural and social ways that society operates. So a third idea is deliberation, which is probably a little bit more familiar, which is this whole notion that views do come together when they're given the time and space to deliberate, meaning people say where they're up to, what they think, then they hear what other people think and feel. And through a process of give and take, as it were, they come to some resolution, not just a technical resolution, but a level of emotional productivity which builds the social fabric of society. And the fourth one, people don't know what it means, but it's a fairly simple idea, and that's sortition. So this is the idea that we remove or design out the corruption of the political sphere by giving power to people on the basis of chance selected by lot, as it's traditionally called. So instead of the political powers that be being able to influence who's given power, i.e. in a representative democracy, through spending money and pre-selecting candidates and then corrupting people once they're in power, you basically end up with this deeply revolutionary notion of selecting ordinary people, you know, caterers, window cleaners, decorators, whatever, ordinary people, through a process of arbitrary selection, as you might say, by chance. So you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, well that all sounds pretty interesting, but how does this all fit together, what does it really mean, all good questions, and I will be going into quite a lot of detail about it. But I'm hoping to give you a little flavour that there's a few new things coming down the line, right, and humanity is capable of dreaming up new ways of organising itself, and having the imagination that we like to think we have, and we do. So as a little example here, before Extinction Rebellion came along, the way social movements were organised, the way political parties were organised, was very much a sort of set deal. You sort of knew how it was, and they had their pros and cons, and obviously there were more cons than pros. But to show how historical developments work, Extinction Rebellion rebelled, not just against the governments of the climate crisis, but also against a certain culture and process that had been followed in social and progressive movements for the previous 30, 50 years. And part of this was learning from the United States, the mechanisms of creating Gandhian civil disobedience, which had some sort of cultural depth, it wasn't just a tactic, it was a way of being without sounding too dramatic about it. It had a certain culture, it had trainings and such like. And secondly, you know, connecting a little bit with this idea of deliberation, it was updating the notion of how people make decisions. And this was drawing, to an extent, in my view anyway, from German social philosophy since World War II, people like Habermas and such like, and this notion that it's the process of people coming together politically, both internally in XR and between XR and a political opponent, that determines pro-social outcomes. And there's a whole bunch of ideas around that. So you can see, you know, obviously in a perfect and contingent sort of way, Extinction Rebellion was developing something new, and without putting too fine a point on it, what we're going to be discussing here is a sort of XR 2.0, I know that's a bit of a horrible phrase, but something along those lines. So, to summarise then, there is help at hand. It's not all doom and gloom. And, yeah. So, let's move on to look at this in a bit more detail. All right. So, won't be a second. Oh, sorry. Sorry, just on the phone. Okay. So, what's the next thing I'm going to talk about is the podcasts. So, one of the difficulties about doing a linear progression, as it were, of podcasts is with very complicated social processes that we're going to discuss, there's no obvious linear process. It's like things loop back up on each other and circle back, and they're all intermixed, and they all affect each other. So, you're going to have to bear with me a little bit, because I'm just going to jump in, do a bunch of podcasts, and if you're thinking, yeah, I don't really understand how all this fits together, that's because I can't really do it all at once, and you're just going to have to bear with me. And I remember some famous lecturer who discussed Marx's Capital, and he sort of made the same point that, you know, arguably Capital is this great book that Karl Marx wrote, and no, I haven't read it. But what he said about it was, Marx just starts off, and for the first few chapters, you don't really know how it all fits together, because it's so complicated. And it's only once you've got into a few chapters, you sort of start getting your head around it. So, that's my excuse, as you might say. All right, so let's make another key point, which is it's sort of tempting, and I think an expectation will be that I'm just going to do some standard, you know, revolution, promotion, bunch of podcasts. I'm going to go through, you know, what the program is, what we want to achieve, then how we're going to achieve it. That's not what I'm going to do, partially because we've got a few new cards in the pack. And the cards in the pack basically are brought together under this notion of micro-design. So we've already talked about this idea of design of the social space, that the key space of agency is not the individual, the isolated individual, nor is it sort of macro-analysis, the process of capitalism at some top level. It's the space where people interact, you know, 10 or 20 people in a room, a small group. And that design has massive implications from the cultural and thus political resilience of the revolutionary project. So a sort of classic example here is a while ago I heard Owen Jones. He's a great guy, you know, very progressive, left-wing, knows what he wants. And he gave this sort of rhetorical spiel saying, we have to go out and talk to people and tell them about socialism. And I think he mentioned Cornwall or something. You know, we need to go to Cornwall and talk to people and mobilize them, you know. Which is all well and good, of course, but totally meaningless because for starters, the fundamental design principle is not that you talk to people, but you enable people to talk, which is quite a different kettle of fish. And having made that sort of structural design point, then how you enable people to speak covers a whole multitude of things, which are massively influential on whether they feel empowered to move into some sort of, you know, activism role, let's say. So that's one reason why we're going to start off with a whole bunch of work on the nuts and bolts of small-scale organizing. And a sort of related idea about why this is a good idea is without sounding too sort of patronizing, everybody listening to this has to be disciplined in the mundanities of organizing ordinary people. This is not, we're not engaging here in some top-level castles in the air, day after revolution, we'll just make everything happen. That's all bollocks, with all due respect. Right, what we need to do is to become disciplined and mature enough and hardworking enough, and I can't stress that word enough, hardworking, in order to profoundly understand, not just superficially, but profoundly understand how people take in groups and how we can enable people to liberate themselves as is the, you know, major two-century project that we're part of. So an example here is the Freedom Riders, no, Freedom Summit, rather, in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. So the idea was all these college kids, white college kids from the northern states were going to go down, I think about 5,000 of them, to Mississippi, if I remember the state rightly, and enable people to get registered for voting. And when they interviewed people, they said, look, you know, we just want you to stuff envelopes for three months, would you still do it? Which is obviously a catch question, because if you said, no, no, no, I want to do frontline glorious stuff, they said, well, obviously this person's got too much of an ego or whatever, and they want you to take them on. And this relates to a sort of broader point about traditionally what work gets done by who in social change and revolutionary change. And it shouldn't come as any surprise, of course, which is that traditionally it's women that do these basic jobs, the pastoral work, the small-scale organizing, the stuffing the envelopes, as they used to say. And without that women's work, without the work of the guys in the back room, everything else is just not going to happen. So you've got Martin Luther King going off, you know, doing undeniably great stuff, but behind him, you had all these women in churches doing all the support stuff. So I'm not saying this just in order to sound politically correct. I'm saying with absolute seriousness that this is what we need to focus on, because if we don't, it just doesn't work. It's as simple as that. So what are we going to be looking at in the first series of podcasts, then, is his whole bunch of talks centered around the process of mobilizing people, the process of organizing nonviolent direct action, forms of peaceful disruption, the framing around that, and the overall organization principles. Okay, so what talks am I looking at here? We're looking at a bunch of podcasts around the issues of how to mobilize people, how to organize nonviolent direct action, peaceful disruption, around designing the framing for those activities, the media work, and how to bring all that together in some sort of overall organizational structure that has a particular leadership culture and suchlike. So this is the first part of this podcast series, this bunch of talks around the basics of small-scale organizing, and I'll split each subject into a discussion around the theory, the principles that we're going to apply, and then the practice, and show how the theory and the practice sort of fuses together. This is not a matter of just trundling in there and making it up as you go along. We're going to have some design principles, and then we're going to look at concrete, practical ways of micro-organizing people. So there's going to be nothing sort of abstract here, okay? You know, I'm not going to say that the particular micro-designs I'm going to suggest are the be-all, end-all, but you're going to have a really clear idea. You know, as a joke goes, you're going to know where to put the biscuits on the table with your mobilization meeting. It's that sort of level of detail. Okay, so how does this translate then into obviously a broader project on a micro level of social disruption, social collapse, revolutionary upsurgences, and all the rest of it? So the proposition is going to be that this grounding, this creation of a dynamo, as I'm going to call it, of mobilization, action, and organization, provides what you might call an army, a nonviolent army, of agitators. And then that can be applied to three different scenarios. The first scenario is what I would call the American Civil Rights Movement model, a sequence, a linear sequence, of civil resistance episodes, nonviolence episodes, which results in a series of legislative changes. But as we've been saying from the beginning of these talks, in the present context, in this pre-revolutionary context, what's more likely to happen, or at least what we need to be open towards, is to expect there to be openings where we can proactively design whirlwind events, where suddenly, you know, from one week to the next, suddenly thousands of people go into the street because of some major 9-11-esque ecological crisis or social crisis which is inevitably coming along. And thirdly, we need to prepare for the very high likelihood that something will come out of nowhere and the revolutionaries in classic historical style will have no input whatsoever because they're too busy trying to work things out and being in their little herd. But something comes out of nowhere and then you have to chase the tail of it and try and culture it and structure it so that it produces a pro-social outcome. So this process of creating mobilisation actions, framing, organisation, gives us openings into those three scenarios. Now, those three scenarios, you know, it might just be one, it might be several of them, but that's the opening, that's the door, the three doors, as it were, that open into this macro world, in other words, the top-level design of what the hell is this revolution going to look like and what are we trying to do and how are we going to make it work. So the second series of podcasts will talk more in detail about two case studies. One is A22, so this is a network of civil resistance projects on the climate crisis around Western democracies, including some of the biggest climate crisis campaigns such as Last Generation in Germany, ones in Italy, France and various other places. And all these projects are broadly based upon the best practice of the last three or four years, which has been enacted through Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, which of course on themselves have stood on the shoulders of giants. So it's like a continuing, iterative, dialogical process of working out what works best. So we're going to look at that because it's going to be quite interesting and also looking at how international cooperation and coordination works. Then we're going to look at the Humanity Project, a project that at the time of me speaking to you is only sort of half formed, but this is the project of transitioning from what you might call a classical non-violence climate crisis sort of project into something that's a lot more holistic. It includes elements of standing elections, cultural activities, changing the culture, forms of assembly, citizens' assemblies, people's assemblies and of course civil resistance. And this gives us a more concretised gateway into what the transformation of a political regime actually looks like. So that leads us on to this very messy, interactive process of the actual revolution itself, in other words this revolutionary episode. And the most important thing here is going to be to understand this is not a black and white situation. It's not clear when a revolution starts and it's certainly not clear when a revolution ends. In other words what happens is a melee of different forms of resistance, different forms of parallel institutions, different forms of coalition building and to be perfectly honest it's super messy. So I'm going to attempt to sort of just march into that space, give it some structure, at least so we can understand some of the principles and some of the priorities and of course some of the designs that enable us to transfer what could be total chaos into something that looks excitingly pro-social, democratic and something we can be proud of. And then lastly, and only lastly, we'll look at the programme. By the time we look at the programme and do podcasts on the programme, the revolutionary programme, what should be happening, where, when and how, we'll have done it, it'll be like the icing on the cake as it were, of this whole build-up of looking at the microprocessors and then this whole environment of power and confrontation through which the programme is produced. And the programme itself of course feeds into that process of consolidating people power. So it's all a big backwards and forwards situation if the truth be known. Okay, so the last few podcasts will deal with the post-revolutionary situation in general terms. So most of what these podcasts are about is the process up to and including the revolutionary period. But I think it's important to take a little bit of an overview on some of the massive conundrums, critical conundrums of the last two or three hundred years and arguably the last two or three thousand years. Because I'm sure, you know, you're sitting there making a very valid observation that the problems of humanity are very deep. It's not just a matter of having a revolution and everything trundle along okay again. There's fundamental problems with the way in which we relate to the material world in order to provide for ourselves, namely economic activity and more specifically of course with this, you know, generic culture of capitalistic extraction and exploitation which has its roots in broader cultural and social phenomenon that go back thousands of years. So please tell your friends and dare I say, you know, if you've got a bit of money spare you can contribute to my Patreon account. Because although I have all my meals made for me in this cell I'm in I do need to pay the mortgage and all the rest of it. So you can throw me a bit of cash that would be great. But equally important is if you think this is sort of interesting and dare I say it is tell those other three or four people that you know about it and they can listen to it too. That's it. I'll see you next time.
