In the 8th chapter of the podcast Designing the Revolution, Roger Hallam discusses the importance of proximity in organising. On this page, you will find the original video, a summary and a full written transcript.

Summary #

Part 1: Introduction to Designing the Revolution: Proximity #

Roger Hallam emphasizes that organising is key to a successful revolution. He will focus on details such as designing meetings and mobilizing people.

Part 2: Understanding Proximity in Organizing #

Hallam explains that understanding how organization works is the foundation for executing a revolutionary project. He introduces the concept of proximity, explaining that it refers to how close events or elements are to each other in time, space, or emotionally, which could effectively draw attention and mobilize people.

Part 3: Meeting Design for Mobilization #

Hallam offers examples of meeting designs intended to encourage mobilization and commitment in attendees. He contrasts a successful meeting design – where attendees feel welcomed, engaged with each other, and leave feeling empowered – with a poorly designed meeting where attendees feel disconnected and detached.

Part 4: Importance of Proximity in Meeting Design #

Maintaining the proximity between attendees is an essential factor that can influence the empowerment they feel and their likelihood to participate in subsequent activities or meetings. The use of visual, emotional, and spatial proximity is illustrated by successful meeting designs.

Part 5: Follow-up after Meetings #

It's vital to maintain the proximity after the meetings. This can be done through actions such as emails, telephone calls, and reminders which can engage and remind attendees about subsequent meetings or actions.

Part 6: Action Design by Maintaining Proximity #

The concept of proximity also plays a significant role in the design of actions. The actions should not be too far apart in time, and they should involve the same people.

Part 7: Proximity in the Context of Revolution #

In the broader context of revolution, actions must be decided upon quickly and executed rapidly to prevent participants from losing interest. Ultimately, the principle of proximity applies to both organizing meetings and designing actions.

Part 8: Designing the Post-Meeting Actions #

Hallam emphasizes the importance of the actions taken after the meeting, maintaining proximity through follow-up emails, phone calls, and reminders of subsequent meetings or actions, among other things. The design of actions should keep these encounters close in time, with the same attendees. Hallam recommends setting reminders of the second meeting during the first meeting, in the form of printed schedules, email reminders, and SMS alerts on the day of the event. All these elements help the attendees feel included and eager for the subsequent meeting.

Part 9: Reviewing Common Errors in Meeting Designs #

Hallam discusses common mistakes in meeting designs. Most meetings fail in their design, as activists often overlook the importance of proximity design and its elements. Hallam suggests developing a checklist to help ensure every detail considered essential in the execution of a productive meeting is not forgotten.

Part 10: Proximity in Action Design #

Hallam introduces designing actions around the principle of proximity. Conventionally, actions include getting on the street for leafleting, demonstrations, or civil resistance. The timeline of actions should be condensed within one month from the first meeting; taking too long can lead people to lose interest. Furthermore, the quick execution of decisions is crucial in creating a revolutionary context.

Part 11: Eyes on Revolutionary Proximity. #

Hallam concludes by suggesting that in a revolutionary context, when crowds are deciding to act, it becomes even more crucial to consider proximity and act quickly. Traditional nonviolent demonstrations are organized; however, in spontaneous crowd situations, maintaining proximity could be challenged. Hallam maintains that effective revolution design will be vital in such circumstances.

Full transcript #

This transcript was generated using AI.

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This is Roger Hallam, and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is talk eight, Proximity. Okay, so we're finally going to be getting on to the ins and outs of organizing. I'm going to be focusing on the next few talks on designing meetings, mobilizing people, and such like. I'm going to be sticking to my guns of doing this in so much as some of you may be thinking, yeah, this is all very well, but we want to know about the program of the revolution, how the revolution is going to work, etc., etc. And the reason I'm not going on to that straight away is, well, there's a few reasons. One of them is that by looking at how organization works, we can get a grounding on how we're going to go about this project. In other words, this is the bread and butter stuff. And in some ways, people might not think it's that exciting. You know, it's not about running around in the streets and all the rest of it. But there's no point running around in the streets, as you might say, unless you know how to organize properly. And it's a disciplined activity. It's a craft. It's an art. It's a science, whatever you want to say. And you've got to be good at it, because if you're not good at that, then the whole revolution thing falls apart. So bear with me, and we're going to dive into it in some detail. And in actual fact, I would say, well, this is what I do. So I would say this one time, it's extremely exciting, because it gives you an idea of how you're going to build this new society once the revolutions have happened. And that will become more clear as you get through the next few talks. All right, so let's plow into it and see how we get on. So there's lots of places to start, obviously. And I'm just starting with proximity, because it's a point in this whole subject, and we'll gradually expand upon it. If you're wondering what proximity means, then it's just one of those technical words for things that are close together. So that could be time, something happening now, and then something else happening in five minutes rather than five or ten days' time. Proximity in terms of space, something happening here in this cell, in this jail with me, rather than happening in another jail or another country. And then this emotional proximity, which is a little bit more sort of vague, but it means that there's some connection between two things, two people, because of some emotional content, something that arouses attention, as you might say. Okay, so we sort of know already that proximity is a good thing because of the attention issue that we talked about in the last session. That if you're going to mobilize people, then you've got to get their attention. You get their attention by doing things close together. All right, that's the sort of basic idea. What we're going to look at is the meeting design in this talk. The meeting, in a way, according to this general philosophy action that I'm describing, is the central phenomenon. We're not focusing on the individual and what they think and they don't think and how you influence the individual. We're not talking about the macro situation, how you change society and such like. We've talked about this. What we're looking at is social space, and a key social space in terms of collective action, of course, is the meeting, i.e., people coming together and talking about stuff with a view to doing action. Okay, so we're going to look at that in some detail. Now, one of the exciting things about all of this is it doesn't take more time or money. If you're an activist, you probably know that one of the biggest problems is there's not many of you, there's not much time, and dare I say, there's not much money flowing around. Being good at design and being good at proximity design in particular is nothing to do with how much money you've got or how much time you've got. It's got everything to do with actually remembering how to do it, which is good, and that's what I'm going to be running through. And, of course, just drawing upon this idea of iterations, you don't have to design a meeting which stays like that forever. You do one meeting, you iterate, and then you improve and improve the proximity design. So, incidentally, everything I'm going to go through in this session and the next few sessions is not set in stone. There's lots of improvements, and the whole plan, of course, is you learn what the design principles are, and you can go away and design things that are better than me or the groups of people that I work with. That's all good. So, lastly, before we get into the heart of the matter, yes, this is part of this wider project of mobilization, i.e., people going from, I don't really care, I don't really know, I don't really want to take action to, yes, I'm going to go on a demonstration or I'm going to do civil disobedience. It's this process of what's called mobilization. Some people call it recruitment. You know, lots of different things, but this is the process we're talking about, and all of this exists in this broader organizational structure, which we'll be coming on to discussing in more detail, and we're building up this bigger picture of this organizational model. All right, so let's get on to some real stuff. At last, getting on to something real. Okay. So, as I think I've mentioned, I got a prize when I was doing my PhD research for doing research on meeting structure and how we design meetings because I had this hunch that meetings were a key element of either, you know, destroying people's commitment, as you're probably familiar, or actually increasing people's commitment. So, it's an interesting subject to work out what sort of meeting empowers people, what sort of meeting disempowers people. So, let me go through this meeting that I designed for a rent strike. The purpose was a rent strike. It doesn't really matter, particularly what the purpose of it was, of course. So, what I suggest you do, I just thought about this a few minutes ago to have a bit of audience participation. I'm going to run through the design, and then you can stop the podcast, and you can note down four or five things about that design, which increased proximity, brought people closer together. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to run through, not necessarily exhaustively, but a number of elements of that design, which increased proximity, and therefore increased the likelihood that people would go on to the next stage of mobilization. All right, so let's go through. So, with this rent strike meeting, the first meeting of the rent strike, and being publicized, people came through the door. They knew what they were going to, you know, be finding out about. So, at the door, someone welcomed them into the room. They engaged in a bit of small talk. They said, thanks so much for coming, asked, you know, a few details, where they were from and what have you. And then they took them to a table. The tables were distributed throughout the room, and usually there was someone else at the table, and they were facing each other. There were some biscuits, my famous biscuits were on the table, so they got a little munch of stuff. And after, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, the meeting started. There were about 30 people in the room on about six tables, about five or six people facing each other. And there was a five, 10-minute introduction about the rent strike situation, the situation with the terrible rent levels that people were suffering. And then there was what's called a breakout group, where people in those groups, five or six people around their table, discuss their situation with the rent, their tenancy situation, what they felt about it emotionally, what have you. And then there was another five to 10-minute talk about the proposals to a rent strike, and what the aim should be, you know, should it be a 10% reduction in rent, and such like 20%. Then there was another 10, 15 minutes of discussion in the breakout group, and there was some feedback on it, and there was some discussion and agreement on what the aim of the campaign would be. I think it was a 10%, 20%. No, no, it wasn't actually. I think it was a 40% reduction in rent. These people soon radicalized. Anyway, and then there was a breakout group about who would do what, and agreement on the next steps, going canvassing and such like. A few people stood up and fused about the whole project, and then people went off afterwards to the pub to discuss what a great meeting it was, or not as the case may be. So you can stop the podcast now if you want, and just think of three or four proximity design elements in that design. Alternatively, of course, I can just tell you what they are. Okay, right, so this is not rocket science, is it? Proximity, number one, coming through the door. You don't come through the door and suddenly go, oh, my God, there's no one I know here. You know, I'm scared. I'm not connected. There's no emotional proximity with anyone. No, some guy comes in to you. He's cheerful, asks you a few questions, a little bit of small talk. You feel immediately welcomed. So there's this emotional and physical proximity as soon as you walk through the door. So I like to say to people that meeting is a bit like a party. You know, you go to a party, and if you're someone like me, you go to a party and no one talks to you. After a minute or two, you're feeling a little bit like on the verge of suicide because no one's really interested. God knows why you wanted to come to this in the first place and all the rest of it. Well, someone comes up and says, hi, Roger, you know, I've heard that you're some mad guy. Then, you know, after a little bit of a discussion, it's a bit like, oh, this is pretty good. And, you know, I'm introduced to someone. In other words, this is what you call the hosting function in a social space. Okay, secondly, you go to the table. You're actually sitting opposite someone. This is, you know, key physical proximity design. You're not in rows or facing the same way. Because you're opposite someone, you're likely to get into a bit of small talk again. You get more embedded into the idea this is a bit more like a party. You know, the person knows of where your tenancy block is. You get into, you know, discussion about how long you've been in the area. Blah, blah, blah. This is facilitated by some biscuits. This is all starting to look pretty, you know, pretty comfortable. It's not scary at all. These people have never been to a political meeting before. But the proximity of bringing people together physically and emotionally is cool. Then there's an introduction. The introduction doesn't go on for a long time. People don't get bored. They come into a breakout group. Again, the communication is primarily close because in breakout group people are discussing. There's lots of time for people to speak. People are engaging in the active speech. They're relating to each other. Again, the thing flows along. But there's not, you know, a big half-hour lecture on the proposals. People are breaking out again in their groups, you know, ditto. They're becoming more connected to each other. The physical proximity is still there. Finally, people stand up and infuse about what's happening because they're getting excited about it. They're feeling comfortable in the meeting. It's a bit like, yeah, we're a team. We're going to do something. And then, you know, to finish off the proximity design, they go off to the pub. So it's not like we're going to go to the pub, you know, next Saturday. It's like let's go to the pub now. And then people are sitting next to each other in the pub. They know each other. They're talking more about their social lives. Fantastic. Everyone loves it. Okay. Which everyone did, incidentally. So I think I've gone through the rough design on this in a previous talk. And if you remember, I did a bunch of different ways of assessing people, interviews, questionnaires. I noted how many people came to the next meeting. I think if I remember rightly, 30 people came to this meeting. Twenty-eight of the people came back to the next meeting. So if you know anything about organizing, if you have a public meeting and 30 people turn up and 28 people come to the next meeting, that's pretty amazingly good. Okay. So it's got a long story short, 80% empowerment in terms of the feedback. Okay. So let's look at the next meeting. So a fortnight later, there was a meeting. I think it was on education cuts, but it was a similar, very similar meeting in the sense that it was at the same university in London. In fact, a few of the similar people went to both meetings, same culture, broadly a similar sort of issue of general interest, of course, to the students and the people in the area. So there was lots of things that were the same. However, the actual design of the meeting itself is very different. So it was what I would call a conventional left-wing meeting. So there were four people. They got up sequentially. So there was an hour of talking, 15 minutes each. They were saying, you know, reasonably interesting things as far as I was concerned. And then there was 20 minutes of questions. There was a Q&A. I think it was, if I remember rightly, there was four or five questions, but there was only three people asking the questions. I'm pretty sure they're all blokes. You're probably getting a sense of what sort of meeting this was like. People looking at their mobile phones. They left quickly after the meeting. There was no carry on about, you know, carry over. No one went to the pub. And if I remember rightly, I think eight people turned up to the next meeting. And there was 20% empowerment. So, you know, without blowing my own trumpet, you can see how this was a pretty clear piece of social research. You know, the context were really similar. But the result of the design, the design was clearly the causal factor in giving 80% empowerment versus 20% empowerment. Okay. So in terms of proximity, there were a lot of bad things about that meeting. Lack of proximity. People were sitting in rows so they couldn't see each other. So although they were physically close together, they weren't like emotionally close or humanly close, if you see what I mean, because they weren't looking at each other. You know, you had to turn to talk to someone. You couldn't, you know, people in rows. Everyone was basically facing one way. And you may be familiar that this is, you know, one of the downsides of conventional education. Everyone's sitting in rows, blah, blah, blah. Okay. There was very little time for questions. People weren't talking with each other. The questions just led to the same sort of what you might call over-empowered blokes getting up to ask nerdy type questions. Someone like me, as you might say. So most of the people weren't interested in those questions. So there wasn't emotional proximity. They weren't initiating anything themselves. Afterwards, there was no follow-on to consolidate any social proximity, emotional proximity between the people. All of this is massively significant. That's why they didn't feel empowered. That's why hardly anyone came to the following meeting. And to cut a long story short, this is why mobilization of so many campaigns is rubbish, to be blunt. So that's my claim. All right. So, so far, so good. Let's look at another design. And I'm going to be, you know, don't panic if you can't remember all these different elements. That's fine. We're going to be coming back to our meeting design over and over again, and we're going to be building up our analysis of how to do the design well. And, of course, you know, there's different ways of doing these things. This isn't black and white. You know, sometimes there's different elements that are useful in different ways and such like. Okay. So this organization that I'm part of, as I'm sure many of you know, is Just Stop Oil. And it has a meeting design which is pretty similar to the previous campaign in Slate Britain, which built upon meetings from Extinction Rebellion and even before that. And the general idea, these are called ORA talks, are responsibilities in this time. And these are meetings where you and about 5,000 to 10,000 leaflets in the streets or free doors. So people are coming. They don't know each other, but they have some proximity because they're from the same area, of course. And it's a physical meeting. You know, it's going to be in a meeting house or a community center. And the whole idea is people are given a talk about the horrors of the climate emergency. More often than not, of course, people are shocked. People might get quite emotional about it. You know, moms might be, you know, crying about, oh, my God, I didn't realize this was going to happen to my kid. So there's an immediate intensity in the subject matter, as you might say. But there's a bunch of elements which directly relate to proximity. And I'm going to go through them. And in the next session or two, we're going to be talking about sociability. So there's a lot of things going on. So I think this is the, you know, end of the matter. So let's just run through broadly how these sort of meetings were designed and critically what happened afterwards. Okay. So first of all, there's an introduction. Friendship is coming to the talk. People walking through the door, giving information about it. Sometimes people are in a sort of arc. Sometimes they're around tables. Then there's the main person gives the talk. And the first thing they say when they give the talk and the person on the introduction does this as well, they say, this is the first of two meetings. This is the first of two meetings. There's a meeting happening tonight. And then we're meeting again next week at the same time in this space next Tuesday. So you're coming to this meeting and then come to the meeting in a week's time. Okay. And then they started going through their talk. They talked personally about themselves a little bit, about the climate crisis, why civil disobedience works. And then they would provide what's called a pathway to action, which is, okay, so this is what we're going to do. We're going to have another meeting. And then we're going to do civil disobedience or go leafleting and various other pathways. Then two to three people would get up from different, ideally from different cultural or demographical backgrounds, different ages and such like. And they would give a five-minute testimony on how they didn't really know anything about the climate. And then they did. And then they went to civil disobedience. And, you know, it was doable and what have you. Then there was breakout groups and people have questions, how they feel about the talk. And then which of the pathways of action that they are going to agree to, you know, give a donation, go and do leafleting next Thursday. And come to the next meeting and such like. Okay. And then afterwards, people go to the pub. And, yeah, let's just stop there. And I'll do the after the meeting stuff. So you're probably getting the idea here. Yeah, it's hosted. People come through the door. They're made to feel welcome. During the talk itself, it's not just an academic talk. Critically, there's a pathway to action. So there's some clear proximity between what happens in this meeting, what happens in the next meeting. The meeting, the talk, the first thing in the talk is there's going to be another meeting. This is the first of two meetings. So this is what's called meta-framing of the meeting. So instead of people thinking this, the category they are in is a meeting, they don't. The category that they're in is the first of two meetings. You can see how that works. So in the theory section, which you heard a session or two ago, I talked about categories. You might think categories, incidentally, aren't such a big deal. They are a massive deal, right? People think in categories. And if you think something is something, then you think something is not something else. So you have to proactively create this cognitive idea in people's heads that there's two things that are going on here. But it's the same category. There's two meetings. This is the first of two meetings. Okay. Then we've got the testimonies. You can see how that works. That's emotional proximity. It's like someone like me telling me their journey. So there's this proximity element of they're doing it, I can do it, and such like. Then you've got the breakout groups similar to the French strike meeting. Similar idea. People together. They're engaging in the act of speech. There's no nauseatingly boring Q&A where various blokes of certain ages like me get up and ask intellectual questions. People are socializing, as you might say. And there's that proximity. There's a group of eight people, which is the optimal number, maybe six to eight people in a breakout group. And there's a clear list of things that they've got to talk about. And they're making choices about the pathway to action. In other words, what's going to happen afterwards. So there's this proximity between what's happening in this meeting and what's happening in the next meeting. Okay. So let's, you know, we're going to talk about this in more detail. Hopefully getting a flavor of how a cool design works. All right. So the name of the game here, of course, is, as I've just said, is this is not about a meeting. This is about a process and creating this proximity between the meeting and what happens next. So for the sake of argument, this is the design that comes next is within 24 hours, the people receive an email. They receive a telephone call. During the meeting, they're given a piece of paper with the times and places of the leafleting and the next meeting. So they can stick that on the fridge. They've got a physical thing and what have you. And on the day of the next meeting, they get text in the morning to remind them. So what you've got here is a whole bunch of stimuli, as you might say, to remind people and engage in them. So the proximity of the first meeting to the second meeting is not a big distance, either psychologically or in terms of time. And it's easy for them to remember because it's the same time, same place. Okay. Okay. So someone's arrived to do something technical in my cell. So I'll come back in a few minutes. Okay. See you in a minute. All right. So what I was just going through is the after meeting situation. So there's various things happening. They're getting a telephone call quite quickly the following day. They're getting the information through e-mail. They've already got the piece of paper in the meeting itself. They've got the text on the day of the next meeting. And I think one thing I didn't mention was the same person who was in the breakout group gives them the ring. So you've got that emotional proximity in the sense that someone who you already know is giving you a call. Okay. So you've got spatial proximity. You know, it's the same place. The meeting is the time proximity. Things are happening quite quickly and the emotional proximity. So that looks all pretty straightforward, doesn't it? And as I said, one of the exciting things about this is it doesn't take money. You know, it doesn't take loads of resources. In fact, it didn't take any. However, I should say that I've done almost 200 meetings over the last three years. And I know this sounds dramatic, but I would say 95% of the meetings that I've gone to are what I would call suboptimal. In other words, they haven't ticked all the boxes. You know, some meetings are really bad. And some meetings, they're pretty good, but it's very rare that it's a 10 out of 10 situation, if you see what I mean. And I'm quite curious about why this happens. And I think it happens because we're not used to thinking in detail about micro design. People in activist culture, in left-wing culture, whatever you want to call it, they just have this broad view of things. Let's have a meeting. Cool. Meetings are really good. No, it's like, no, you've got to think about 20 different elements. And my advice would be, and I've talked to various people about, you need to have a tick box system. I know it sounds a bit whatever, but you're not going to remember everything unless you've got a tick box system. You know, have you got someone to welcome people at the door? Have you got your free testimony people? Have you got the chairs in circles for the breakout groups? You know, there's about 20 things there. Make a list and you've got it on a sheet of A4. You're organizing the meeting and you just tick them off, you know, job done. All right. So as I said, don't panic. You know, we're not, this is not now or never. We're going to be looking at meetings quite a bit. But you've got a flavor of what the job involves, as you might say. So before I finish this session, I'm just going to give you a little flavor as well of action design. We're going to be looking at action design in a lot more detail. But I'm just going to give you a few little pointers on how proximity is important in terms of actions. So by actions, by the way, in case you're not quite sure, that means actually getting out onto the street, you know, doing leafleting, doing a demonstration, doing civil disobedience, civil resistance, you know, right up to the day of the revolution type stuff. So I'll give you two situations here. The first one is what you might call conventional civil disobedience campaigns. So you've noticed that this first meeting is very much part of an ongoing start of a long process, hopefully not too long from a proximity point of view. But people come to the meeting, they go to a follow-up meeting, they might go to a nonviolent direct action training meeting, and then they go on the road to sympathize somewhat. So the first principle obviously from a proximity point of view is that these meetings should be fairly close together. They should involve the same people. People should be able to socialize around them as we'll come on and discuss in the next session. And as a general rule of thumb, it shouldn't take more than a month. In other words, if someone gets a leaflet through the door to them engaging in civil disobedience, it takes place in a month. Obviously, it can't be too quick because people will feel pressured. On the other hand, if you say to people, look, we're going to have a civil disobedience campaign in four months' time, whether people say or not, what they'll be thinking is, oh, let me know when it's happening. And by the time it's happening, of course, 101 other things have attracted their attention in terms of their commitments, and they're going to go, oh, no, no, I've forgotten about the climate, blah, blah, blah, and they're not going to turn up. So you can see the general principle here in terms of creating a nonviolence campaign is it has to be pretty fast and furious, as they say. All right, so the second little direction of flow is about the actual design within an action. Now, many actions, of course, civil disobedience, you sort of know what's happening. Everyone's going there. They've had their training. They know where the road is. They've seen the road. They get arrested, all well and good. But, of course, as we will come on to discuss, in a revolutionary context, it's a little bit different. This whole MBDA business is a good foundation, and that's why we're going through these sessions to discuss about nonviolence design. But when the moment of the revolution comes, as you might say, it's very much a situation of crowds deciding to do X rather than Y. And so let's just look at the following situation. I think about a month before I was put in prison, there was a cost of living demonstration in London. And I don't want to sort of start discussing all the politics of it that much, but as you can probably expect, it was one of these A to B march situations. It was a coalition, lots of different groups, and they got to Trafalgar Square, which if you're outside the UK, this is a traditional place to have demonstrations and rallies and what have you. And I'm sure you're pretty familiar with the routine. There were various left-wing great and good type people doing their speeches, a bit like the education meeting, very passionate, no audience participation. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, with the just-stop oil people, they decided that they were going to do some symbolic civil disobedience, or potentially anyway. And it might be quite amusing to say that I think one of the communist groups decided to do it as well. So all good. And they trundled off down the road to do their bit of civil disobedience. Now, it immediately occurred to me, this is bad design, because you count, there's no proximity. The people doing the civil disobedience are separate. In fact, you know, they're about half a mile away. They don't know what's happening. They can't see the people sitting in the road. That's assuming that was the deal. So how could we redesign this? So again, I'm not saying this is the end of the matter, but there's probably three elements where you could turn what was a conventional demonstration that no one gets it done about to something that's going to be potentially on the front pages of the national press, simply through proximity design. Again, there's no absolute guarantees, but you're sort of getting into the ballpark of what you need to do. So this is what the design could be. First of all, you train the stewards, 20 or 30 stewards, let's say. Stewards, by the way, are enormously important. The revolution is going to be successful or not on the basis of stewarding. So stewarding, in case you're not aware of what that is, is these are the people that, you know, on the demonstration, liaise with the police and make sure, you know, the cars aren't going to drive into you and tell you where to go and, you know, answer questions. They're sort of the guys on the ground. So what I would have the stewards do is to lead those GSO people, just the POIL people and any other people that were intending to do a show of disobedience, have them walk around Trafalgar Square while these talks were going on. And so you've got proximity, physical proximity within, like, you know, 50 metres of people watching the talk. The speakers, you'd have people, you know, marching around the square so that you've got the attention. Secondly, I'd have the people with a leaflet, you know, leafleting and talking to the people in the square and saying, in 10 minutes, we're all going to go and sit in the road. You see all those people walking around the square? They're going to sit in the road because we're fed up with the cost of living crisis and going on boring marches. And then maybe just before the march, just the POIL people down the road, they would actually walk through the crowd. So you'd walk through the crowd and hand out leaflets and say, we're going to go and sit in the road, you know, in five minutes, do you want to come and join us? And then what you might call a critical mass of people would sit in the road. And, you know, other things being equal, no total guarantee, but you get to a little tipping point where 10, 20, 30% of the crowd goes, heard enough speeches, I'm going to do something slightly fun, go and sit in the road. Once you've sat in the road, you've got the proximity element of you're all together, you know, you're, you know, next to each other sitting in the road. You've got the adrenaline going on, it's sort of fun. And all the journalists are taking pictures of you and off you go. Now, you know, there's loads of other things to say about that, what happens next. But you can see with a purely with a design head on, proximity design head on, you can create something out of nothing, as you might say. And there's a whole bunch of related designs that have been done historically. I don't want to start talking about action design in a big way. But in case you think this is all a bit abstract, it's not at all. This is how the world changes. So, for instance, in Turrier Square, you know, a lot of people think everyone got up in the morning and said, I'm going to Turrier Square, you know, a bit like a computer or something. No, no, no. It's like people, you know, went through the working class suburbs of Cairo. You know, they're shouting, what have you. And people join the demonstration because of the proximity design that you're there, you know, five meters away. There's all these people a bit like you or the working class people in Cairo. You know, they're going to go to Turrier Square. So you gather people up a bit like a pied piper sort of scenario. And this was critical, right? You know, if they tried to get into Turrier Square, 10,000 people, they wouldn't have got there. But because they had 50,000, 60,000, whatever it was, then it passed the tipping point. They got into Turrier Square. And that's the primary reason why this revolution in Egypt happened in 2012. Obviously, there's more to it than that, but you can see the point. All right. So just to finish off on, I'll just develop this notion of proximity a little bit wider because you might not quite have worked this one out. But there is what you might call psychological and cultural proximity. This is a little bit like emotional proximity. It's not time and space. It's more like how your attention is drawn to other people because there's some connection between them. And a classic example of this is what's called people like me. So a lot of people, for instance, when they're organizing a campaign, they'll have some university lecturer doing these lectures around Bristol on pollution, let's say. And, of course, this is because they've got this information fetish. Who's best at the information? It's the lecturers because they know what they're talking about. But, of course, not many people are like lecturers. And the bigger causal factor is not what the people say, although obviously that is important. It's who the people are who are saying it. And what you need if you're going to go around the working class suburbs of Bristol, let's say, is you want working class people to do the talks. You know, no disrespect to lecturers. Maybe they do the first one or two talks and then they need to train people to go and do the talks themselves. So you've got this person's like me. I'm going to listen to them. I'm going to believe what they say because they're like me. That's how human nature works, dare I say it. So you remember on the last session I gave a little slightly simplistic summary of this direction of travel of the Bolsheviks before the Russian Revolution. So there was three stages. There was, you know, three or four guys in Switzerland who were total nerdy intellectuals, didn't want to talk to anyone. So they got zero out of ten on the proximity design situation. And then Lenin and his mates, you know, in St. Petersburg, they were doing propagandization or whatever it's called, propagandizing. So this was getting people, you know, to study the great texts of Marxism, you know, massively unsuccessful. Who wants to do that? There's no cultural proximity between, you know, reading Das Kapital and me providing food for my children. So not very, you know, two out of ten on proximity. And then they discovered, you know, this idea of agitation, which was, OK, so let's actually look at what is important to these workers. In other words, there's a cultural proximity between what you're saying and what they are doing or how they see the world. So then you have a strike on, you know, labor conditions, for instance. And that's when you get the takeoff because you've got this cultural proximity between the activists, the revolutionaries, as it were, and the average worker. So you can see the direction of trouble here. And we're going to be talking about this a lot more and developing it. And my final comment, of course, is yet to reiterate this point that what I'm trying to do here is not tell you, you know, about a specific micro design. What I'm trying to do is say, look, guys, these are the principles where you need to be intelligent about this. You need to sit down with your piece of paper and do a design and iterate on it and do a better design than me or just a poet or anyone. And you do that by actually proactively and consciously doing design and then asking people about it and doing research on it and improving it over a number of weeks and months and possibly years, of course. OK, well, association time has just happened, so I'm going out to get a bit of fresh air. Thank you very much for listening to me. And I'll speak to you again soon. Bye.