The many faces of Gaia, the Brexit Party’s bottom-up policy project and the connections in between. To be continued….

Note on connection to wider research

This is part of the meta-analysis of the “universe of concepts around Collective Intelligence”. There are certain patterns in this set of concepts which seem to link left and right politics. In this vein, in discussion with my supervisor Prof Roger Burrows, we developed the idea that my conceptual mapping could help us navigate the “cognitive slippage” between left and right populism. This is noted in my general PhD blurb. Going further, I am thinking about how to make this “left-right cognitive slippage” very clear and grounded, and how to make the conceptual maps into easy-to-use tools, that could actually be useful to people wanting to navigate our current political landscape. To this end, I am researching and hoping to learn some data visualisation tools which may help the research become intuitively usable.

References:

“Blood and “Culture. Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right”
Seminal piece from The Corner House signposting “Gaian Sociobiology” and the little known story of how – back in 1997 – the Ecologist magazine’s editorial team left following political differences with the magazine’s founder, Edward Goldsmith, over ethnicity and gender issues. The entire editorial team left to set up The Corner House.

Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron (2014). “The Californian Ideology”.
Another seminal piece on the left-right political slipperiness of eco-tech utopianism spawning both hippie communes and Silicon Valley, and “simultaneously advocating the New Left utopia of the electronic agora and the New Right’s vision of the electronic marketplace.”

Curtis, Adam (2011). “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” TV Series. BBC programme information: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011lvb9
Episode 1 “Love and Power”: https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353
Episode 2 “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”: https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799352
Episode 3 The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey: link not found

Whose Utopia? American Ecofascism Since the 1880s

Question Time – TV Current Affairs Debate Programme (30/05/2019)
The Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas was the first UK politician to put citizen’s assemblies prominently on the table as a possible Brexit solution. However, on a recent episode of a longstanding current affairs debate programme, the only politicians to raise participatory approaches were from right-wing parties: citizen’s assemblies by the Conservative Party MP Rory Stewart; and bottom-up party policy making by the Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips.

Where democracy goes to die: how Nigel Farage copied Italy’s digital populists
By Paolo Gerbaudo in the New Statesmen magazine (21/05/2019)