I have made up a bunch of words (smugosphere, emotacycle, egofodder etc) to try to label phenomena that are easily missed if you don't have the vocabulary (I missed them for decades, until the penny dropped). I am going to make a video for each and - ideally- put them on Twitter. But at the... Continue Reading →
What’s BUGging me today? #MovementPathologies
tl;dr The 'Bottom-Up' Grift (BUG) is the spinning of a line - for profit and/attention - that the true path to utopia is via 'bottom up' activity. This post defines the BUG, explains how to spot it, where it comes from, what to do about it. The Grift Making a career out of saying "we... Continue Reading →
Checklist for before and after A Big Conference.
Recently I wrote an article (Hudson, 2022) [See link here - should get you through to it until November 2nd 2022]. Someone kindly got in touch and asked if there were an accompanying checklist. There wasn’t, but there is now. Or rather, there’s my version – take this below and make your own. On checklists... Continue Reading →
They are supposed to be SOCIAL movements, not personal ones: Of McNulty, metrics and #MeOnly
Warning - incoherent-and-dashed-off-when I-should-be-thinking-and-writing-about-Something-Else rant Measuring "success" of social movements is notoriously difficult. Did a law get passed? Repealed? Did social attitudes change? Over what timescale? Who did what to what effect? Or did things change BACK, or not change (not all social movements are 'progressive'!). And on and on. But sometimes an organisation comes... Continue Reading →
Standard Public Meeting Syndrome and what to do about it.
Public Meetings are disastrously bad at achieving their goals. They are not the only reason that social movement organisations struggle to recruit or retain people, but they are a significant barrier to a Better World (tm). I have been writing and video-making about this forever (well, it feels like that). See here and here. To... Continue Reading →
Getting lost: Turnbull, Flannery, #auspol and #climate – precisely no belling of the cats
This afternoon, with 2300 other punters, I watched a Get Up (1) webinar/discussion between Tim "The Weathermakers" Flannery and Malcolm "I will not lead a party that is not as committed to climate change as I am" Turnbull. Below are some random thoughts/not rising to the level of theses (though I will say that these... Continue Reading →
Sequential Consensual Autophagous Meetings
First I will treat you as ego-fodder. You will sit in rows, or in a circle,and you will listen to me drone on and on about my hobby-horse du jour. I don’t care what you know about the topic. I don’t want to take time away from hearing my own voice to hear your perspectives.... Continue Reading →
Karma does what karma does.
About 15 years ago I went on a training day (it didn’t work – I stayed a douche). It was union steward training. Mostly those days were death by powerpoint, info-deficit tosh. This one thing I am about to describe, though, it stands out. It was a card game/exercise. Each individual was given a card... Continue Reading →
Infiltration and environmental movements – what is to be done? #ExtinctionRebellion #climatebreakdown #spycops
The future is not written, but there are several excruciatingly safe bets about the years ahead. atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane will continue to rise poor people will suffer the resultant impacts of #climatebreakdown hard and first the state will try to suppress social movements which seek to do anything about rendering these... Continue Reading →
Minor rant: Know your audience, tailor accordingly… #climate #activism
Okay, no names, but for god's sake, people who are giving talks on important subjects, often from a position of knowing a lot and/or having moral high ground: THINK WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO. Do NOT give your bog-standard intro-to-issue-x to a self-selected audience that has come out on a cold wet night/travelled to the... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 