2007-02-21T21:05:00.001Z

THE WORLDWIDE MILLION CAMPAIGN HOMEPAGE NETWORK:

1. VISION

(Image: "Broadway Boogie Woogie" by Piet Mondrian)

The Million Campaign Homepage network was born in 2006 with the UK Million Campaign Homepage. This is a website composed of 1,000,000 pixels available for free in 25 by 25 pixel blocks to 1600 organisations and individuals furthering social and environmental harmony inside and from the UK. It has been organised by Matthew Edwards and the MCH's sister site Small Fish Online.

(Video: Brian Eno - 77 Million Paintings interview)

Our long-term plan is for a worldwide network of Million Campaign Homepages run by cyber-governesses, cyber-governors, and cyber-crews in a number of different countries. The aim is to create a network or federation of sites where each one operates as autonomously as possible. The only rules are that all pixels must be allocated for free to organisations and individuals furthering social and environmental harmony, and working for social and planetary service instead of private profit. Beyond that, we want as much variety as possible - each site should reflect the vision, research, ideas, and creativity of its architects, and the particular conditions and atmosphere of the locations in which they are operating. The idea is that without flying anywhere, an internet surfer could travel from one country to another, exploring conurbation after conurbation of not-for-profit activity, making lasting global connections.

In terms of funding, the Million Campaign Homepage network is emphatically not-for-profit. Our plan is for each site to be funded by donations from ethical sources, to be organised by each cyber-governess, governor, or crew. For the UK, we are currently looking for donations to help us cover our labour and resource costs. We have been working on a purely voluntary basis since August 2006. Our long-term plan is to create a London office, rather than simply operating from bedrooms, which will allow us to profoundly improve the quality and scope of our work. Any surplus donation money will be placed into a co-operative bank account and used to pay for domain space for other MCH sites around the world.

(Video: David Suzuki's "If YOU were Prime Minister" Tour)

We have been working on the UK site since August 2006. At this stage, we now have a Canadian site under the cyber-governorship of Alex Ramon in British Columbia, who runs Alternative Energy News and Peak Oil News. His email address is mchcanada@gmail.com.

(Image: "War President" by Joe at American Leftist)

Our plan for the USA is to create a network of one MCH site per state. We now have an Oregon site up and running, orchestrated by Duane Poncy of Elohi Gadugi and the Rainy Nights Press amongst many other projects. We will also soon have a Nevada site in place, to be run by Kate Whitman of Hemp for Fuel and Industrial Hemp for Fuel and Farming. We are currently looking for cyber-governesses, governors and crews for the remaining 48 states of the USA. Our US email address is mchusa@gmail.com.

(Image: "Flag" by Jasper Johns)

For potential cyber-governesses, cyber-governors, and cyber-crews worldwide, the email address is millioncampaign@gmail.com.

(Image: "Squared Circle Mosaic" by Jim Bumgardner)

2. INSPIRATIONS

(Link: 1951 Festival of Britain posters)
(Link: 1951 Festival of Britain archive)

There are many inspirations for the Million Campaign Homepage network, and multiple examples where people have made a positive difference to the world in furthering the 'fifteen giants': provision of bread and water, the co-operative commonwealth, democracy, education, sustainable energy, envronmental harmony, equity, health, justice, fair labour relations, ecolonomics (or ecological economics), liberty, an open media, an open or borderless society, and peace. These are all underpinned by the basic principle of 'less is more'.

What follows is arbitrary and personal. We are always open to hearing about other examples, present, past and future - please email millioncampaign@gmail.com.

Instead of the downwards vicious spirals of destruction and depletion, it is possible - and imperative - to find creative ways of creating upwards or virtuous spirals. Far too much of our contemporary discourse is about how bad things are. This is largely because our public space - whether physical space, media, parliaments, or world government institutions - are far too privatised. For us to evolve and prosper, we need to share as much information as possible on how negative situations can, are and will be transformed. The creativity of the global commons is of incredible potential.

One of the most inspiring examples of how a project can make a profound difference by patient grassroots action over the long-term is the microcredit Grameen Bank, which "provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral." Its founder Prof Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank itself were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

(Video: Charlie Rose interview with Prof. Muhammad Yunus)

For far too long Britain has been labouring under a hungover collective trance from Empire, which ended at the latest in the war crimes of Suez in 1956. Today, this collective trance ensures a certain arrogance often dominates, and an inability to learn from other cultures - particularly those, like Bangladeshis, who were once part of the Empire and were often denigrated as 'inferior races'. Today, given the level of personal and state debt in the UK, and the tensions that exist in society as a whole, a Grameen-style microcredit system for grassroots projects would be very useful indeed. Given that affluenza and over-consumption in the 'developed world' has a likely causal link to environmental disasters and depletion that cause most damage in the 'developing world', the old imperial failure to listen and learn is now doubly pernicious. We only have to imagine the possible ramifications from a change to the Gulf Stream - in the most extreme case, its reversal - to see how quickly this ingrained imperial idea of superiority could collapse. Economic prosperity must be the result of long-term environmental sustainability. If it is not, it is a short-term illusion.

(Video: Vandana Shiva - "Planting the Seeds for Change: Women's Struggle Against Corporate Control of Biodiversity", UCTV)

The global environmental-labour movement which showed itself most strongly in the WTO protests in Seattle, USA, in 1999 also gave us a glimpse of a fairer and more harmonious world. Instead of a narrow and elitist globalisation supporting vested interests and artificial hierarchies, such a movement allowed us a vision of a more fair, glocalised world, where people think globally and act locally.

The creative and co-operative use of technology is very important here. The internet can be used to link together progressive forces - the development of the Indymedia model has been an example of how a decentralised global network can change consciousness, in this case by growing a grassroots alternative media to the vast oligopolistic corporate media empires which control political, economic and social debate in a uniformly narrow fashion. Indymedia is to media what Wikipedia is to the encyclopaedia, what Philosopedia is to philosophy, and what the World Social Forum is to democracy.

(Video: Robert Fisk, "The Conquest of the Middle East")

An open media is vital (with rigorous editorial standards), for the oligopolisation and monopolisation of media narrows discourse and creates rigid narratives policed by taboos. In the UK a profound mainstream media reformation is urgently required. An organisation such as Medialens points us in a better future direction, as does the work of genuine journalists such as Robert Fisk and John Pilger. Fisk uses the Israeli journalist Amira Haas's definition of the vocation as having the courage and tenacity to "interrogate the centres of power". An unindependent media which subordinates itself to centres of power rather than interrogating them is no media at all.

(Video: "Montessori (3-6) for the Early Childhood Years")

A great deal of the essence that underpins Indymedia or Wikipedia or Philosopedia or the Million Campaign Homepage network are outlined by the visionary Ivan Illich. His educational views, and those of Maria Montessori are more relevant than ever: in the era of global warming and peak oil we desperately need as much creativity, innovation, experimentation and free-thinking as possible. An ever narrower education system which confuses process with product will create micro-generations unable to deal with the environmental and social problems they may face - problems that have recurred over and over again in history in different places, as outlined in Jared Diamond's Collapse. As R Buckminster Fuller noted, there is enough for all of us on Spaceship Earth - but only if we work out how to share it rather than fight over hoarding it. Mahatma Gandhi's succint formulation of there being enough resources for need, but not greed, has never been bettered.

(Video: Jared Diamond - "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", UCTV)

If we educate the forthcoming generations by giving them inflexible instructions on how to use tools that are no longer useful today, let alone in their future lives; and then police those instructions with institutionalised fear, we are failing in our responsibilities. Instead, we need to remove fear of experimentation and allow them the space and time to develop their own creativity and to make their own tools. As Maria Montessori argued, the only limit for their liberty is the collective interest. Up to that point, they must be allowed to play and to dream and to create as their own visions guide them.

(Video: Marshall McLuhan on YouTube)

Marshall McLuhan's educational perspectives were light years ahead of their time, as was his historical writing. The original vision of the Open University of Jennie Lee and Michael Young is also very inspiring, since it synthesised the equitable idea of further education for all citizens regardless of background or social status with the idea of progressive use of technology. Its roots went back as far as the memo written in 1926 by the educationalist and historian J C Stobart who, while working for the infant BBC, urged the creation of a 'wireless university'. Another example of how education can be made dynamic instead of static is the Bauhaus in Germany.

(Video: The Dessau Bauhaus by Frederic Compain)

As well as writing the 1945 Labour Party manifesto and jointly creating the Open University, Michael Young was also responsible for the creation of the Institute for Community Studies (now the Young Foundation), the Consumers Association, Which? Magazine, the National Consumer Council, Language Line, and the School for Social Enterprise. Allen Lane is another inspiration: the original ethos of Penguin Books was to bring quality publications to as wide an audience as possible. His work lives on today in the form of the Allen Lane Foundation.

FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG TO PROJECT BERNERS-LEE: THE 21ST CENTURY PRINTING PRESS

(Video: Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality)

The internet opens up possibilities for the creation of alternative currency systems to complement alternative operating systems and the creative commons, which transforms narrow mercantile copyright into dynamic communitarian copyleft. One of the most interesting examples of alternative currency systems that I recall from when I was younger was the LETS system. It never quite seemed to get off the ground in my local area but there was something profound at work there. While the Fuggers were one of the great banking families of European history, perhaps Ryan Fugger of the Ripple Project may become a doyen of a future booming alternative currency movement: there is an interview of his with the Small World Podcast here.

(Image: Fuller's Dymaxion Designs)

(Video: Buckminster Fuller World Game Anticipatory)

In my A-Levels in 1996 I received a 'Q' grade on my Economics essay paper. One of my answers was an attempt, without any knowledge whatsoever, to outline a scheme to turn Britain into a giant geodesic dome in order to permanently conquer seasonal unemployment. A recent trip to the Eden Project in St.Austell in Cornwall reassured me that despite the damning grade, without any proper knowledge, with no consciousness of the notion of sacred geometry, and with no ability to sensibly cost-benefit the project, some small part of my subconscious mind was being drawn to the right lines. The geodesic domes at the Eden Project are Buckminster Fuller writ large, and it is a magnificent development. A synthesis of the worlds of the Flintstones and the Jetsons, with a little Yogi Bear thrown in for good measure, it points us in a fascinating future direction.

(Delia Derbyshire - "Pot Au Feu")

Another inspiration is the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, created in 1958, which nurtured paradigm shifts in the use of technology to create music. This was recently commemorated in the programme Alchemists of Sound. It is a tragedy that in the UK today our corporate media celebrates 'celebrity' inanity while an incredibly creative figure like Delia Derbyshire is forgotten - marginalised in life for being an outrageously intelligent woman, marginalised after death for being an outrageously intelligent woman. Another person who guided us in the right direction despite this kind of marginalisation was Rachel Carson. Just as a man was winning the Nobel Prize for creating DDT as a 'pesticide', so Carson was doing the more important work of pointing out how aerial chemical bombardment destroys the intricate web of life that is the natural ecosystem. The battle is still on to ensure that we pass a world to our descendents that contains birdsong.

(Morihei Ueshiba video)

Another key inspiration has been Aikido, the martial art of non-violence. I am too lazy to become a proficient Aikidoka, but reading the Art of Peace transformed my view of life. As (O-Sensei) Morihei Ueshiba said, he was not teaching us how to move our feet, but how to be non-violent. It is a daily training. I studied Japanese in Fukuoka from 1999-2000. Ueshiba's vision of peace, which went deeper after the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, is urgently needed. He urged multilateral nuclear disarmament. Without it, as Prof. Stephen Hawking says, life on this planet is under grave threat. The entire nuclear abolitionist movement, both worldwide and in the UK, is an enormous inspiration. Its history is outlined by current CND chair Kate Hudson in CND: Now More Than Ever.

(Video: John Pilger - "Truth Game")

Following the scientist Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts, we have to doff our caps to Sir David Attenborough's exhaustive work, which has helped us see the natural world with fresh eyes. He also helped give us the paradigm shift of black and white vision to colour, which is an analogue of the process of flat earth thinking to spherical globe thinking, when he introduced colour television after becoming BBC2 Controller in 1965. Once again, the mixture of humanistic use of technology and adherance to natural principles is explosive in its potential.

Finally, one of the main inspirations for the initial idea of the Million Campaign Homepage was the wonderful Urban75 created by Mike Slocombe in Brixton, south London, which woke me up from my dogmatic slumbers and made me think differently about technology, politics, society, grassroots democracy, the potential of Do-It-Together culture, how to take photographs (athough sadly in that case without any discernable improvement in my photography), and a whole host of other considerations. In a time when free speech has been under mutliple assaults in the UK, Urban75's bulletin boards have for years provided a space where ideas from the sublime to the ridiculous could be voiced, information flowed and networks grown - a very healthy safety valve in troubled times.

(Video: Noam Chomsky on human destiny)

(Video: Arundhati Roy)

Glocalisation means global consciousness working within local frameworks. As the world is an interconnected web, so the whole works best when each part is working best.

The recent UNICEF report which draws attention to appallingly low standards in the condition of young people in Britain is yet another wake-up call. Perhaps the current blackout on a genuine audit of our history in the UK holds us back from achieving more in terms of social and environmental progression. The tacit consensus of "No Empire please, we're British" creates a cycle of insecurity and arrogance which all too often leads to a fortress mentality and isolationism, closed-minded short-termist daily routines, and inability to shift paradigms.

Auditing and compensating the mistakes of the past are as important as accepting the achievements of the past: we cannot have had the important advance of the abolition of slavery, for instance, without the slave trade in the first place. It is the phenomenal success of the Industrial Revolution, one of whose major centres was Britain, which has paradoxically led us to affluenza, carbon emissions, global warming, obesity, narcotic abuse, and a thousand other problems.

(Image: Clifton Suspension Bridge)

However, throwing the baby out with the bathwater is no good either. We need to celebrate each other, celebrate our ingenuity, celebrate the genuine achievements of our past, and engineer our future, like a kingdom - or, indeed, republic - of Isambard Brunels. There are many signs that we are on the cusp of an Anti-Industrial Revolution of staggering intelligence, innovation, and ingenuity. Every step of the way, perspiration will be needed in even greater degree than inspiration. With both, we can rocket forward.

Of course, the final inspiration in life is our ancestors, friends, families, and parents, without whom we are nothing, and to whom we owe everything.

And to the mercurial Shiva Jones of Small Fish Online. We met at a Peace Not War gig in east London on the anniversary of the London bombings of July 7th 2005.

The plan to create the Million Campaign Homepages was quickly hatched. After an initially poor idea of charging for each pixel was on the table, we heeded the advice of Guy Taylor of Globalise Resistance, took it off the table, and decided to give the pixels away free.

The rest, as they don't say, is herstory.

(Video: Martin Luther King Jr. - "I Have a Dream")

(Video: Michael Albert on Parecon)

(Video: "Harlem Renaissance")

(Link: 1951 Festival of Britain Skylon at the Hut Project)

(Video: Sex Pistols - "God Save the Queen" live)

(Video: Eden Project, Cornwall, March 2005)

- Matthew Edwards
Tel 07810 822639 (UK)
Tel +44 7810 822639 (int'l)
millioncampaign@gmail.com