I've been struggling to find time to blog, and struggling to find time to respond to all the fascinating emails I get. Then tonight, as I was replying to an email, I found myself writing something that felt like a blog post. Maybe I should try combining the two more often?

What follows is a response to an email from JB, someone I've met a couple of times in serendipitous circumstances. Now, he writes with a question that sparks all kinds of thoughts and connections for me: "I wonder what it would mean to create a serendipity space in the city?" Here is my reply.

I love serendipity.

That's what I loved about Twitter in the first few months of 2009, which was my golden period with it - it seemed like a serendipity engine that accelerated the rate of fascinating random encounters I was having in First Life.

When I was eighteen, I set off around Europe for ten months, busking and hitchhiking. I sometimes think people should be sent hitchhiking as a kind of National Service, so that they learn about the kindness of strangers, and the joy of serendipity. So many people go a long way into life, without having much experience of throwing themselves on to chance, instead of trying to control things. Sooner or later, chance catches up with us all, of course, which is why people often become sadder and kinder with age. 

But I would like to live in a world where more people had the experience of embracing chance. I sometimes think we should have Family Improvisation clinics, as well as Family Planning clinics.

A lot of the stuff we did with the Pick Me Up email magazine was about making it easier for strangers to talk to each other in public. One time, Charlie Davies (who started PMU) had a dream that there were air stewards and stewardesses on the tube. So he got three friends together, they made costumes, and they went out one morning giving out cups of tea and performing safety instructions in the carriages. They said at first it felt like performance art, but as the morning went on they were spending more and more of the time just getting into interesting conversations with people.

Is it easier to talk to someone in a costume (a clown, a policeman) than someone whose clothes are inscrutable, or studiedly normal? Once upon a time, you could tell what someone did by their clothes. Did that make the streets more legible? Was that part of the kind of lively public spaces Richard Sennett writes about in 'The Fall of Public Man'? We have forgotten how to talk to each other without this requiring intimacy, he says. Once upon a time, audiences didn't sit in silence, and shopping involved interactions with people to find out or negotiate the price, rather than scanning barcodes.

Slavoj Zizek says somewhere that our liberal Western concept of human rights boils down to the right to be left alone. Something similar applies to technologies. How many of our technologies are technologies of isolation? 

Brian Eno says somewhere that he can't listen to music through headphones, because music doesn't make sense without a space in which he is hearing it. Headphones are a technology of isolation. What if we set out to design technologies of entanglement, instead?

Ivan Illich says somewhere that one of the weirdest things about modern life is how many of the words that are addressed to us come from people we will never meet. Until not long ago, we were spoken to by people who were there in the flesh. Very quickly, we have become used to living in a world where we are constantly spoken to by people to whom we cannot speak back.

Richard Sennett (him again) defines a "workshop" as a productive environment in which power is handled face-to-face. It is not that there is no hierarchy, but that there is no faceless power. 

I've found myself talking to people about conversational tools, lately. Twitter is a conversational tool, to me. Blogs and email, not so much, because they come in paragraphs. And through Twitter, my life has become entangled with all kinds of wonderful people, many of whom I go on to meet in the flesh.

So, I wonder, in answer to your question, could we create conversational tools for serendipity in cities? (And wouldn't these be very much like Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality'?) 

The People Speak's Talkaoke table is a conversational tool, and so is the Mindapples Tree. Here it is at Brixton Village, when we were working there with Space Makers a couple of years ago:

How could we play with public space to make more of these? 

My friend Pamela once told me she'd like to create Safe Smiling Zones - where people have permission to smile at strangers - and paint them onto the pavement.

What else could we do?

 

In my first post today, I wrote about the puzzle of working out what I actually meant when I announced that I wanted to “start a new university”.

Something that became clear to me only this week is that there are at least five different elements which I’ve been grouping together under the heading of the University Project. Up to now, I’d not made a clear distinction between these, and the result was pretty confusing — for myself, and probably for others.

All of these elements are good, possible and by no means unconnected — but they don’t necessarily belong within the same timeframe.

Also, this is only a personal list. Among the gang that has gathered around the project over the past six months, there are already other manifestations taking shape. Perhaps these are all applications, and the project itself is a platform on which we’re building them? I don’t know; we’re working this out as we go along.

For now, here are the five elements which I’ve recognised — each of them, a reason why I'm committed to this project.

1. The Big Picture: Something Is Happening

There’s something important coming together around networked technologies and new sociable collaboration spaces, that’s beginning to feel plausible as an alternative home for the spirit of the university. And it’s happening just as long-term strains within existing institutions, together with the acute effects of economic crisis, are prompting many people to look for such an alternative.

There’s a role to be played here, making sense of what is emerging, telling stories and making connections. If a major disruption of our existing institutional forms is under way, then this is also a good time for a deeper enquiry into the promise at the heart of the university, the social good for which it has provided a home, and the ways in which this is (or isn’t) made available to people through both existing institutions and emerging alternatives.

2. The Opportunity: Hub Westminster

There is the potential of a high-profile platform for this emerging culture, in the shape of Hub Westminster.

This is an ambitious new collaboration space, opening next month, and aiming to be a home for London's "changemakers”. If you’ve seen John Geraci’s blog posts about the coming disruption of higher education, it’s exactly the kind of space he’s talking about. It’s also right on the doorstep of the British political establishment.

I first met Indy Johar, whose team are behind Hub Westminster, when the pair of us were brought in by Demos on their Edgeless University project, where I first suggested that higher education was facing a “Napster moment”.

When I wrote six months ago that I’d had “a serious offer of space and resources to set up a new kind of university in central London,” it was the offer of using this space that I had in mind. I’m grateful to Indy, Alice and the rest of the gang for inviting me to get involved in bringing the space to life, and for encouraging the idea of the University Project making use of its capacity at evenings and weekends as a home for our work.

Quite how this works in practice is something we’ll figure out as we go along. As a starting point, we’re hosting a ‘Universities: Past & Future’ weekend from 14-16 October. The aim is to offer a platform to the whole range of emerging projects and experiments, as well as recognising the long history of the invention and reinvention of institutions for the cultivation of knowledge. Because, on our own, the task of “creating a new kind of university” is absurdly ambitious — but if we recognise that a new kind of university is emerging, from a hundred places at once, then hopefully we can contribute to that process.

3. The Dream: A Thinkery

In the longer term, I’m personally interested in creating some kind of “thinkery”: “a home for a certain kind of learning,” as I wrote before, “led by curiosity, grounded in friendship, engaged with the world, but resisting its pressures, open to surprise, and never simply a means to an end.”

I think of Illich’s description of the origins of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in a one-room shack overlooking the Caribbean, where four friends sought to create:

a place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun "nos-otros" would truthfully refer back to the four of "us", and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigour that would keep us far from the "we" that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline: we as "sociologists", "economists" and so forth.

There’s inspiration, too, in the Blackden Trust, where Alan and Griselda Garner have created a home for serious academic thinking, grounded in a deep relationship to place.

Whatever form this dream of mine eventually takes, it will doubtless be as different from either of these as they are from each other. Somewhere like Hub Westminster is not a natural home for it, though; it’s likely to be quieter and smaller in scale. And it may well be five or ten years, or longer, before I’m in a place to bring it about. But it’s good to name this now, because it’s part of the orientation that I bring to the University Project, and the reason it draws me.

4. The Network: An Invisible College

There’s another strand which has come into focus within the group that formed around the University Project over the past six months. Many of us are conscious of belonging to a kind of “Invisible College” of friends and collaborators — and are interested in exploring ways of making this more legible, so as to support lighter and more informal ways of pursuing intellectual enquiries, and to provide entry points to networks which can seem elusive at best, exclusive at worst.

There is an idea of a guild-like structure, with nomadic elements, which seems to resonate with a lot of people. Also of seeking to define ourselves around enquiries: in other words, by what we are curious about, rather than what we are authorities on. Other elements include developing social customs which make it easier for people to become connected to these networks, and to make requests and invitations to other members.

Out of these conversations, I wrote a very rough draft of a model for how such a structure could work. This is a long way short of being ready for publication, but I’ll happily share it for comments with anyone who is interested. I’ll also have an opportunity to explore the idea of new kinds of guild as my contribution to The Resilients project — about which I’ll write more in a future post.

5. A Course: The Masters in Reality Administration

I spend a lot of my life giving talks and lectures, putting together reading lists, helping people think about their own projects and ideas, and developing my own thinking in sustained dialogue with particular collaborators — essentially, many of the features of an academic existence, without the institutional structure. So, what if I offered people a more sustained way to sign up to learn the things I have to teach?

So far, it’s a thought-experiment, something I’ve been playing with for a year or so. It has a working title - the Masters in Reality Administration! - and I’ve written various drafts of what it would cover and how it might be structured. I see it as sitting in the terrain Bruce Sterling terms “speculative culture”: an initiation into the art of making things happen, grounded in serious intellectual reflection, in an environment where many of the roles and identities which separated “thinking” and “doing” have become obsolete.

I also sketched out a three-part structure, which could map to the three years of a conventional degree: an “unlearning” phase, focused on cultivating the capacity for “second thoughts”, becoming aware of our assumptions, and acquiring a toolkit of ways of thinking about the world; a phase dedicated to “finding your thing”, focusing on what you’re most alive to, finding others who share this focus and learning how to become a useful contributor and build your own skills and knowledge; and a phase dedicated to “building a life”, focusing on how to combine “your thing” with the practical realities of life beyond the end of this period of study.

I’ve no idea when or how this sketch might translate into reality, but it strikes me that there are plenty of other people who — individually, or in collaboration — could offer fascinating alternatives to an institutional course.

And, as one small move in this direction, I’m working with Vinay Gupta and Barbora Patkova on short courses for the KaosPilots and Schumacher College over the next few months.

Pulling things together

So those are five levels at which I’m interested in exploring and developing new ways of doing some of the things which universities have done.

They’re not the sum of what the University Project is or will be — and some of them may end up having little to do with it — but they do represent a map of the interests which have led me to talk about “starting a university”, and they suggest possibilities for where this could go over the years ahead.

Meanwhile, others have already brought their own strands into the mix, some of which will make up the University Project’s activities at Hub Westminster, some may find homes elsewhere.

Together, we’ll be telling the story of our plans and ideas, over on the new University Project blog — which means I can let this go back to being my personal blog, where I write about stray thoughts and upcoming events.

Speaking of which, please do join us if you can for the Universities: Past & Future weekend at Hub Westminster, London, 14-16 October, where we can continue this conversation in person.

 

(Thanks to Ben Vickers, Keith Kahn-Harris, Keri Facer, Alex Fradera, Rhett Gayle, David Jennings, Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Johnny Hopkins, Eleanor Saitta, Vinay Gupta, Anna Bjorkman, Tessy Britton, Dana Ahdab, Deljana Iossifova, Charlie Davies, Clodagh Miskelly, Ann Light, David Kernohan, Nick Stewart, Alison Powell, Adrian Hon, Andy Gibson, Fred Garnett, Weezie Yancey-Siegel, Edmund Harris, Andrew Taggart, Pippa Buchanan, Jeremy Till, Pat Kane, Mike Neary, Juliette Kristensen, David Gauntlett, Tom Stafford, Anthony McCann, Steve Lawson, Ansuman Biswas and many others for contributing in one way or another to the conversations around the University Project over the past six months.)

I wrote earlier about what happened after I announced that I wanted "to start a university". The next post will go into more detail about what the University Project means to me, and the practical forms it might take.

First, though, I sent my mum the slides and script from my TEDx London talk last week, and she wrote back that "it seemed like as clear a description of your activities, inspirations and plans as I have taken in up to now." (Perhaps it'll even make it easier for her to answer, when people ask what I do...)

Anyway, based on her response, I'm posting the talk here, too. (There should be a video of it before too long.)

In our last term at university, a friend of mine had a conversation with her tutor.

“Ten years ago,” he told her, “I would have insisted you stay on and do a doctorate. The way things are going now, just get your First and get out of here.”

My life has been shaped by the company of a kind of “university in exile”, made up of people who would most likely have gone into academia a generation or two ago, but who saw what was happening to our higher education system and took their chances elsewhere.

Throughout my twenties, I kept coming across other members of this invisible college. I learned more in their company than I had in my time at university, because we were led by our own curiosity and passion, and because the networked technologies available to us made it easy to find each other and to get access to the materials we needed.

Today, I want to tell you about what we learned, the projects we ended up creating, and the gamble to which it has led me — that the promise at the heart of the university is about to be reborn in a DIY revolution, much of which will come from outside of existing institutions.

It is a gamble – because none of us know what is coming next. We’re living in deeply unpredictable times, as institutional, financial and ecological crises unfold before us, while networked technologies rewrite the social rules for how they play out.

Let’s start, though, with the promise at the heart of the university — that there should be places within society which are dedicated to the cultivation of knowledge, places available to all kinds of people for a time during their lives, and where those with a particular vocation may dedicate themselves to it in an ongoing way.

Now, this is rather old-fashioned language — but I use it deliberately, because one of the places where I think we go wrong as we talk about how technology changes society is that we underestimate how little people actually change, from century to century. Radical changes often come when we find a new way to make room for something old, something which has been pushed aside for a time, but which meets our deep needs.

The university has become all things to all people — an economic engine, a gatekeeper to high-status jobs — and it’s original promise is in danger of being lost. Yet that promise may be finding new homes, elsewhere.

I graduated ten years ago and started a career as a BBC journalist — exactly the kind of high-status job university was supposed to be a springboard into — but I dropped out after a year. The gap between outward success and an internal sense of lostness was too strong to ignore.

I started to come across others in a similar position, looking for a meaningful route through life and finding the careers service had nothing to offer us. Instead, we stumbled into projects like the University of Openness — a wiki where anyone could start their own research project.

Or the Pick Me Up email magazine, written by its readers, which came out every Friday afternoon — with the aim of inspiring you to do something more interesting than check your inbox on a Friday afternoon.

The first rule of Pick Me Up was you couldn’t be a journalist, reporting on someone else’s story; you had to get involved in making something happen, then tell the story from the inside. The second rule was, you couldn’t tell the story in a way that would make people feel, “I wish I could do that” – you had to tell the story in a way that made them feel, “I could do that.”

It could be big or small. Everything from the guys who installed a street piano outside their house, to five mad Danish girls from the KaosPilots – a kind of cross between an art school and a business school – who mobilised hundreds of young Bosnians to reclaim a bombed out concert hall in Sarajevo.

Being part of Pick Me Up was an initiation into the craft of starting projects and making things happen. And among all the playfulness, the most serious projects we started were experiments in creating new kinds of learning space.

There was the London School of Art and Business, inspired by the KaosPilots – and School of Everything, a website that makes it really easy to find someone near you who wants to learn something you want to teach.

By now, what had started as DIY experiments had grown into something that people were taking seriously.

School of Everything became an internet startup, with investors and tens of thousands of members. We won awards and got written about in the papers.

We didn’t get it all right. There was a revolutionary passion at the heart of School of Everything, but we allowed ourselves to get off-track — to build something investable, rather than listen to our guts. 

The part we got wrong was that we built a system for making transactions — an “eBay for learning” as Cory Doctorow described it — when we knew from our own experience that learning is not a commodity to be exchanged. It’s something that happens between people, over time, within relationships. 

But here’s what we got right. We knew that the real power of the internet was not about spending more of our lives in front of screens. When universities were busy building campuses in Second Life, we were out there talking about First Life — about the way the web makes it easier to find each other, to get together and make things happen in the flesh. And that wasn’t as obvious five years ago as it is now that we live in a world where everything from a birthday party to an insurrection gets organised over social media.

The next thing that happened was that a bunch of young artists and activists took over a huge mansion in Mayfair and opened something called the Temporary School of Thought, a three week long “free university” that became an extraordinary crossing point between worlds.

Admittedly, that wasn’t exactly how the newspapers described it!

But when they invited me to give a talk there, I found myself reconnecting to the spirit of the projects I’d been involved with before I’d become an accidental internet entrepreneur.

Around then, I began to step back from School of Everything, and I started a meet-up group inspired by the idea of making good use of empty space…

The first wave of the economic crisis was biting, and people were wondering what to do with all these empty shops and offices. 

We wanted to connect that to longer-term changes in the ways we were working and learning, to the new sociable collaboration spaces that were opening up, and to how we create sustainable local economies for the future.

And because we were hosting that conversation — face to face, and online — we started to get approached by local authorities and property owners who wanted to understand this DIY approach to making space.

So out of the meetup came a company, Space Makers Agency, whose first project was to transform twenty empty shops in an indoor market in Brixton into a rolling festival of temporary creative and community projects, makers, artists and new independent local businesses.  Two years on, we’ve left, but the market is still there and thriving – in fact, it’s at full capacity for the first time since 1979.

From there Space Makers has gone on to work around London and around the UK — I just got back from Penrith last night, where our latest project is getting underway.

Now, it might seem like what we’re doing with Space Makers doesn’t have that much to do with the future of the university. But there’s a thread here – a DIY spirit and a culture of reflection on deep social questions – which runs through Pick Me Up, the Temporary School, the University of Openness and all those other projects. All of it grounded in the existence of this pool of itinerant thinkers and doers, who chose to take their chances outside of existing institutions. There’s something happening, and my bet is that we’re just at the beginning.

The person who crystallised this for me lately is another internet entrepreneur — someone who’s similarly inspired by the power of technology to bring people together in the real world — John Geraci, the co-founder of outside.in.

He argues that, over the next decade, we’ll see the coworking spaces and incubators, hacker and maker spaces, fab labs and media labs and all the other kinds of new sociable productive collaborative spaces mature into a real alternative to the university as we know it.

Now, since I started Space Makers, I’ve found myself in some interesting conversations about particular spaces and how to bring them to life.

One of the most interesting came in January this year, with the architect and social innovator Indy Johar. Indy and I had met a couple of years ago, when we were brought together by the thinktank Demos as the outsiders on a project called The Edgeless University. We’d listened to a lot of higher education insiders talking pretty complacently about the future of their institutions, and we’d found ourselves agreeing about how much disruption could be in store in the years ahead.

So we’d made sure to keep in touch, and I knew that Indy had plans for a new kind of collaboration space in London.

And now that was about to become a reality.

This is the vision of the Hub Westminster – 12,000 sq ft of converted offices, a block away from Trafalgar Square, a massive new collaboration space for people and projects to create social change.

The night Indy told me about it, I found myself saying, “I think the way to make this amazing is if all the people at the heart of it can use it to do the thing they most want to do next.”

“What do you most want to do next?” he asked me.

“I want to start a university!” I said. 

It’s one of those mad things that come out of my mouth before I stop to think, and I’ve spent most of this year being daunted by the scale of it. But I’ve also discovered that the reinvention of the university is starting from a hundred places at once - people all over the UK and all over the world are starting experiments to create new pockets and pathways for the cultivation of knowledge.

And so here’s my pledge — next month, as part of the launch of Hub Westminster, we’ll host a weekend of conversations and encounters, a festival of universities, past and future. And we’ll go on making the space available as a meeting point between these experiments.

Because if Geraci is right – and I think there’s good reason to believe he is – then it seems to me there’s a need for deep cultural reflection into the fundamental questions about the university, about the social good it offers, and how that can be made available to people our institutions fail to reach. So join us next month as we go further into the process of reimagining and reinventing the university.

It’s six months since I wrote here that I wanted “to start a university”.

Go around talking like this and you quickly discover how much hunger there is for something which people have looked for and found too rarely within the university as we know it.

You also get asked what, exactly, you mean. It seems to me now that one reason for making such a wild statement is to find that out: to discover what it means, through the conversations it leads you into.

“Of course, you won’t be allowed to call it a university,” several people pointed out. And I found myself saying that I was less interested in what name we could legally use for whatever form this eventually took, than in staking a claim to the legacy of the university. This was the wager: that the spirit of enquiry and community of learning which make up the idea of the university might find a more convivial home today in new and seemingly marginal places, than in those institutions which bear its name. (This is not to deny that wonderful things go on in places within those institutions.)

“What makes the thing you’re talking about a university?” others asked. And that question opened directly into a larger enquiry: “What makes anything a university?”

That’s part of what we’ll be exploring at the Universities: Past & Future weekend which a group of us are hosting at the new Hub Westminster in London, 14-16 October. This is the first public event to come out of the University Project (as my co-conspirator Ben Vickers named the group of old and new friends that gathered around that blog post).

I’ll post more shortly about the project itself. Meanwhile, for anyone who’s been following this blog — and wondering about the rest of those seven requests for help — here’s a little more context on what’s been going on over the past six months.

Where this came from

There’s a more personal level at which I’ve been trying to make sense of what I mean by all this. Why am I even talking about such an epic project, when I already have responsibilities as director of Space Makers Agency and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project — not to mention trying to find time for writing, and maybe even a personal life?

It goes back to that epic post I wrote last New Year. Reflecting on what I’d learned in the eight years since I ditched my career at the BBC, I found myself looking the same distance ahead, which takes me to the other side of 40. What could I start working on in 2011, that I could imagine still having at the heart of my life then?

The answer came from the pattern I saw when I looked back: one way and another, I’d kept returning to the attempt to create a home for a certain kind of learning, led by curiosity, grounded in friendship, engaged with the world, but resisting its pressures, open to surprise, and never simply a means to an end. What if I could place that more consciously at the centre of my work in the years ahead?

And no sooner had that question formed, than a series of serendipitous invitations and interconnections began to open up, the momentum of which led to that declaration about starting a university.

What happened next

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog since then. I never did post the remaining five of those requests for help; they related to the future of the other projects I’m involved in, and how these coexist with the new focus of the university. I had second thoughts about sharing those questions with the world, and instead I’ve been working through them more quietly, with friends and collaborators.

Along the way, I’ve become clearer about the connections — the extent to which the University Project grows out of the other things I’ve been working on. Not least, as I talked about at last week’s TEDx London, the contribution of the “space hacking” culture to the emergence of new homes for the spirit of the university.

There’s another reason why I haven’t posted much since that original blog. I’ve been struggling to define the University Project with any consistency. Every time I gave a talk about it or tried to explain it to someone, different elements came into focus, while others seemed to disappear from view.

I had a breakthrough with this a few days ago, when I saw that there are actually a whole set of distinct elements which I’d been grouping together under the heading of the project. So in my next post, I’ll explain how these break down — hopefully resulting in a clearer picture of what we’re working on.

Meanwhile, there’s more information about the Universities: Past & Future event (London, 14-16 October) on our wiki — please add yourself to the People section, and add links to the Projects and Reading sections. You can also follow @UnivProject on Twitter.

I think in patterns, more than in straight lines. My mind wanders.

My friend Tim says these patterns are like mandalas, the concentric diagrams which mirror the inner and outer worlds in Indian religions. Maybe they’re also like the patterns in a carpet.

I’ve been thinking a bit about weaving and stitching. The rhapsodoi of ancient Greece were wandering poet-singers, practitioners of an oral tradition of improvisation. Literally, a rhapsode is ‘one who stitches together songs’, with the suggestion of working from the materials to hand (rather than creating ex nihilo, or designing from a blank slate), and of mending, making good what appears to be broken. To improvise a story, Keith Johnstone says, the trick is to be like someone walking backwards, not worrying about what’s coming next, but alert to the moment when you can weave in a thread from earlier.

If I thought in straight lines, I suppose writing would come more easily. It doesn’t. It’s always a struggle, trying to draw a thread of meaning through the needle’s eye of the alphabet. When it works, nothing feels more satisfying; when it doesn’t, meaning itself seems to fray and lose substance.

I’ve been wandering around for the past five weeks, hanging out with some amazing people — above all, the marvellous gang of Ivan Illich’s friends and co-conspirators — slowing down, sharing ideas, giving improvised talks, noticing things I don’t have time to notice when I’m in London having five meetings a day.

Two nights ago, as my mind turned for home, I realised that I had a series of recordings and writings that it was time to put online. It was only as I began editing and set these pieces alongside one another that I saw how much of the pattern they map out.

It was a strange feeling, looking at them, because they reflect more of the heart of my work than I’ve generally shared outside of late night conversations. I told a friend, “It’s as if everything else I’ve been doing was a smokescreen for this stuff.” Or else I could say that the rest of it — Space Makers, School of Everything, Dark Mountain, The University Project — consists of attempts to translate these thoughts and stories into practice.

Well, that’s how it looks right now. The pattern will probably look different when viewed from back in London. Anyway, here are the pieces of it:

Remember the Future? is the essay I wrote for Dark Mountain: Issue 2, which explores the strange disappearance of “The Future”, the connections between improvisation and the myths of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the possibility of finding hope in losing control.

It’s Wrong To Wish On Space Hardware is a short talk (audio and transcript) in which I begin to apply this pattern of Prometheus and Epimetheus to explain the power and the failure of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth narrative. Is the answer to the mess we’re in really to use more technology to become further alienated from the level of our sensory experience?

The Return of the Vernacular is a recording of a conversation with Sajay Samuel, one of Illich’s friends and students, in which we explore Illich’s concept of “the vernacular” in the light of Sajay’s work on the intellectual roots of modern quantitative rationality and my ideas about “remembering the future”.

Coming To Our (Animal) Senses is a dialogue with David Abram, also published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2, in which we pursue the mathematisation of reality further, and explore the sense of grief which comes with returning to our bodies and recognising the situation in which we find ourselves. (This is based on the conversation we filmed in Oxford last September, but reworked into a written text, and including material that was missing from that video.)

One further piece I have put online today stands at something of a distance from these four. An interview with Tristan Russell, published this month in Umelec magazine, it took place in Prague last August. Although the ground it covers intersects with the other pieces, I’m conscious of a difference in tone. In part, this can be attributed to a different kind of encounter — where the other dialogues were free conversations, this was more of a journalistic interview. But it also reflects a turn in my work which began shortly after that.

At root, it was a turning away from the kind of combative public discourse which I’d had a taste of in my head-to-head session with George Monbiot at last year’s Dark Mountain festival. Whatever the merits of such contests of arguments, I came away clear that this was not my way of speaking or being in the world, that I didn't like the person I would become if I went further down this route, and that I had to find another mode of thinking in public.

That began to crystallise with a thought that came in response to Dave Pollard’s blog post about Dark Mountain: “Perhaps it’s only by a withdrawal from today’s political questions that we can do the thinking which will leave us with a politics for the day after tomorrow?” Around the same time, I started to take more chances with improvisation, turning up to events with no plan for what I would talk about, and allowing myself to say whatever seemed to be needed.

It seems significant that the set of pieces I’ve shared today all began as spoken words — even ‘Remember the Future?’ is a reworking of an improvised talk which I gave at the Landscape/Mindscape weekend at Laurieston Hall last October. Perhaps spoken language has more room for the wandering patterns in which I think than the austere linearity of the written word?

I don’t know. I’m still working out how I combine all of this, the stories which end up as words on paper, the stories that end up bringing people together to make things happen. Every time I think I’ve got it worked out, something unexpected comes along.

But it feels good to have been able to stitch this much together tonight.

"If I could see any purpose in life as to why I should go on existing — and I see this in everyone when they are working, when they are selfless in their selfishness — it is that they are trying to bring about the future."

Alan Garner

The return of ideas

There is a passage I keep coming back to in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. He is talking about what today’s policy-makers would call “innovation”, the process by which new things — products and practices, institutions and enterprises — enter social reality.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Polanyi observes, this process was closely bound up with intellectual curiosity and discovery. Thinkers were very often doers, pioneers of new kinds of factory, bank or school. It was the age of Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham. And it was an age which came to an end:

Since the 1840s projectors in business were simply promoters of definite ventures, not any more the alleged discoverers of new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risks, and other elements of human enterprise. Henceforth businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank.

I come back to this, because it seems to me that we are living through the beginning of another such age. Today, more than at any time since the early Victorian era, to think seriously about social questions is to be drawn into projects to bring about the future.

To start with Polanyi’s example, I lose track of all the projects towards the creation of new kinds of currency and exchange which pass through my inbox, but I am sure that a few of them will be of real significance; and they certainly reflect a renewed practical inquiry into the nature of money. The same goes in education, urbanism, publishing or any of the dozen other worlds in which I take an interest.

Why this should be so becomes clearer as an increasing number of mainstream voices acknowledge what some of us have been arguing for years: that we are not living through a cyclical recession, but a structural crisis with multiple causes, in which a return to business as usual is not an option. (See, for example, two excellent articles from the past fortnight by the economics editors of Newsnight and the Guardian: Paul Mason on the situation of the Eurozone, and Larry Elliot on the triple crunch.)

When the things which are supposed to work break down, the commonest response is denial, and we will see plenty more of that before this crisis has played out. Yet among the more thoughtful and independent-minded individuals within institutions and organisations, there is another response: a search for what still works, and an openness to possibilities which a few years ago would have been written off as wild, or academic.

In a time of great uncertainty, ideas are back, and this means — among other things — that the life of those of us who are driven by intellectual curiosity takes a different shape.

Industrious procrastination - or new habits for old vocations?

“I’ve always put life before writing,” John Berger tells his mother’s ghost, in the opening story of ‘Here is where we meet’. (“Don’t boast,” is her reply.)

I am writing through clenched teeth here. I look at the men of my grandfathers’ generation whose work has inspired mine — Ivan Illich, Alan Garner, Berger himself — and I envy them being born into quieter times. That seems madness, for they were young during a global war, faced the new threat of nuclear annihilation, and emerged as public voices among the hopes and disillusions of the 1960s. But their lives could centre around the writing of books, because that was the appropriate vehicle for a restless mind, given to the play of ideas and the telling of stories.

Over the past couple of years, when people ask me to describe what I do, I’ve sometimes said: I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books. Lately, I’ve realised, it’s worse than that: the same kind of vocation which drew the writers I admire to their desks, and which drives me when I make it to mine, demands action today as well as words.

The result — for me, at least — is chaos and sleepless nights; the headaches of putting an ill-suited brain through the world of spreadsheets and tax office forms, as the founder of a series of companies and organisations; an economic precariousness which would, at least, be familiar to previous generations of writers and thinkers; and a series of projects which have gained attention as instances of something larger and still only part-articulated, a loose movement of new ways of working and making things work. (Perhaps the closest there has been to an articulation of it is the Compendium for the Civic Economy, published last month by NESTA and CABE, and produced by my friends at 00:/.)

Let me be clear: it is not that writing is impossible or unimportant, but that it happens in the early hours of the morning, or in snatched escapes from the action. To organise life around it, however desirable this often seems, would be incompatible with the things which demand to be written. Those other demands on our time are not just distractions or industrious forms of procrastination, but manifestations of the same work of remembering the future which is at the heart of what I write.

All of this is, among other things, a way of putting off the answer to the question I’ve been asked plenty of times over the past four months: whatever happened to the last five days? To recap, I returned from Brussels in March with a bright idea: faced with a spread of new opportunities and growing projects for which I’ve been responsible, I would ask the internet (or at least my online neighbours) for help. Seven requests in seven days, that was the plan. I’ll post again shortly about what happened next and where the missing five days got to. But sometimes a subject has to be approached indirectly, and before I could get back to those remaining requests, I needed to make sense of how it is I find myself tangled and stretched in these seemingly different directions, to give a pull on the thread which links them up.

So today is Day Two of my #7in7 project, in which I'm asking the internet to help me (and the projects I'm involved in) with seven challenges for the year ahead. After yesterday's request for help in finding a literary agent, I've had several promising introductions - and some very interesting conversations. A big thank you to everyone who helped, not least those who spread the word via Twitter!

So yes, I want to start a university.

I'm serious about this. As I said in The University in Transition, I think there’s a moment of opportunity right now to do something exciting and important - to salvage what was good from the wreckage of our higher education systems, and to reground it in less damaged and damaging assumptions than those which too often characterised our institutions.

After years of being part of experimental projects - not to mention the experience of School of Everything - I’m ready to do something more ambitious. Yesterday, I had a serious offer of the space and resources to set up a new kind of university in central London.

I’ll be able to say more in the next few weeks about our thinking and the form the project will take, but I can tell you that it comes out of two years of conversations and will embody the ideas and values many of you have seen me speak and write about.

So here's today's challenge: I'd like to talk to the best people in the world to make a project like this as amazing as it could be. Over the next few months, I want to set up meetings with people whose experiences I can learn from.

I'm thinking of those who have been experimenting on the edges or connecting the networks - but also people who have worked at the heart of existing institutions and organisations, while sharing my desire to create better spaces of learning, teaching and research, better-adapted to the networked age, but also more grounded in our human relationships to face the deep challenges of the times in which we find ourselves.

I'm deeply excited about this project. I expect it to be at the heart of my work in the next few years. If you share my excitement, then I'd be grateful for any introductions you can make.

You can contact me at dougaldhine@gmail.com.

(And if you're wondering how I intend to combine this with my other interests and responsibilities, then hopefully the next few posts will help to answer that question.)

This post is the first in a series. It’s an experiment, in which I’ll be asking the internet for help with seven things in seven days - as I work out how to help all the projects I’m involved with to make it happen over the next few years. For some background, see yesterday’s post about Help and Happiness - and if you want to know more about who I am and what I do, check out my personal website.

I have exciting news: last week, I wrote four and a half chapters of a book. It arrived out of nowhere, demanding to be written - a response to current events, but also a reflection on my own experiences over the past few years.

Now, I want your help to get it into print.

Let me tell you a bit more about it. It’s called ‘First Life’ and it’s about how technology is disrupting politics-as-we-know-it - and why those of us who spent the past few years talking about this stuff mostly got it wrong.

Here’s a bit more of a summary:

“History is never finished: the danger is not to write about events while they are still ongoing, but to write about them as if they were not.”

In the early weeks of 2011, a wave of unrest which had been building for years broke across the Arab world. At the same moment, cities in Britain and the United States saw protests of a kind not known for a generation or more. All of this seemed to be animated and narrated by the new ways in which people were connecting and organising through social media. The revolution had a hashtag.

First Life is about how networked technologies are disrupting politics-as-we-know-it. If these tools are changing the world, it is because they reveal already existing tensions that could previously be ignored by the powerful.

It’s also a personal story from the strange borderlands between technology, policy and activism: a world in which anarchist hackers find themselves advising government ministers and millionaire angel investors put their money into projects run by people whose long-term goal is the end of capitalism.

It’s not an academic study or a political pamphlet, it’s a book full of ideas told through stories, something I believe can reach a broader audience.

Now, I’ve done the crowd-funding and self-publishing thing before with Dark Mountain - and it’s working again right now for Issue 2. (And how many self-published pamphlets get a lead review in the New Statesman?) But this feels like the kind of project which needs the heft of an old-school publisher behind it.

So here’s what I need help with today: I’d like to talk to a literary agent who knows the industry inside out and can help make this happen.

If you know the right person, maybe you could send them this post - and put us in touch?

This post is a kind of follow-up to What I Learned (2003-10). It’s also the background for the next few posts, in which I’ll be asking for help with seven things I’m working on right now. Whether or not you’re able to help directly, I hope it will be an interesting experiment.

Last week, my friend Cassie posted on Facebook, “Is it wrong or weird to say I feel very happy today?”

It was the rather gloomy French playwright Henry de Montherlant who insisted that “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” For many of us, it may be truer to say we are less accustomed to name our happiness than our other emotions. (My mum says she once asked my dad how she would know if he was happy. “How would I know if I was happy?” he replied.)

So, in a spirit of appreciative enquiry, and following Cassie’s example, I want to say that there hasn’t been a day now in some time on which I haven’t stopped for a moment to reflect on how happy (and lucky) I feel with my life. Last week, as I was working on the new issue of Dark Mountain from my laptop in a beautiful art deco café in Brussels, I suddenly remembered being twenty-one and announcing to a friend at university that I had worked out what I wanted to do when I grew up. “I’m going to start a magazine which I can edit from a cafe in any city in the world!” Judging by her expression, this sounded like just the kind of unrealistic dream that showed I was not in danger of growing up any time soon; but ten years after we graduated, I seem to have stumbled into the life that I was looking for.

I sometimes talk about the virtue of walking backwards. It’s an idea I got from Keith Johnstone’s writings on improvisation, which have taught me a great deal about how to live well. It is also - as I talk about in Remember the Future? - an idea that has deep mythic roots: Prometheus, the man who steals fire from the gods, is named ‘forethought’, in the sense of ‘foresight’; he has a brother, less remembered, Epimetheus, whose name means ‘afterthought’ or ‘hindsight’, the fool who walks backwards, and who accepts the gift of Pandora from the gods, and with her the famous jar that brought all the evils of mankind into the world. (That ‘Pandora’ means ‘all-giver’ may hint at an older, less misogynistic version of the story.) In modernity, for which Prometheus was an iconic figure, the classic version of Epimetheus is surely Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, blown backwards on the wind of time, always able to see what is broken but unable to do anything about it. In the closing chapter of Deschooling Society, however, Ivan Illich proposed a retelling in which the tragedy of Epimetheus becomes a hopeful prophecy, a reintegration of past and future.

I often talk about my “career” as something that has happened to me by accident. This is not a conceit: the best way I can describe how I ended up doing all this stuff is that I have been walking backwards, frequently lost in reflection on my own past and the vast collective past into which it disappears, never knowing where I would find myself next. Lately, I have had a sense that this process of walking backwards is beginning to bring something into view: a shape connecting the breadth of interests which might for a while have looked (and felt) as though I were spreading myself too thin. Andrew Taggart wrote a very generous blog post recently, in which he talked about his impressions of my work, describing me as a ‘Neoplatonist’ living by ‘the principle of plenitude’:

When you look at his website, you’re immediately struck by the range and diversity of his projects, plans, and ideas. At first blush, the experience is rather overwhelming. And yet you soon realize that his life is not a cabinet of curiosities or a hoarder’s dingy apartment. You finally see that it’s governed by a novel understanding of education, public spiritedness, and friendship, all of which are expressed in a near-infinite plurality of projects, start-ups, institutions, and ideas.

The coherence which Andrew seems to see in my work is something that I recognise intuitively, but is only coming into focus as I begin to gain some steadiness in my life, after two years that have felt like some kind of epic luge ride. The chance to escape to Brussels for ten days a month is giving me some of that balance I’ve been looking for, the schole whose importance I’ve written about more often than practiced. (If I were two hours' train journey from London in England, people would still treat me as being on call; there, I can hide behind the conceptual fog which falls over the Channel. I am Abroad and get left alone.) Among other things, it offers the stillness in which to recognise some of the costs of that luge-like existence: those friendships which I didn’t look after well enough, those places where the rough edges of projects did damage which deserves more acknowledgement than I gave. These are things I want to attend to, where I can.

Meanwhile, I am deeply excited about the projects and possibilities opening ahead of me, but if I am going to do the best I can with them, I need your help. Maybe not you specifically, but someone you know, or someone one of us knows. I’ve been riding the amazing networks which something as simple as Twitter makes possible for long enough that I’ve got a lot of faith these days in its ability to help us solve each other’s problems - in fact, I can’t imagine how different my life would be right now without all the help I’ve received in this way from so many people over the past two years.

So, as I walk backwards into the next stage of this thing I’d hardly call a “career”, I will be making a series of posts asking for your help in the projects I’m working on or have responsibilities for. Maybe you’ll be able to help with one of them, maybe you won’t, and maybe help will come in a form or from a direction completely other to what I thought I was asking for.

Whatever else, I hope I’ll be able to share some stories about my work that make interesting reading in their own right - and I’ll be sure to follow up and tell you what comes out of this experiment.

I'm doing a couple of talks in London this week, exploring some of the ideas I've been working on lately. 

The first one is tomorrow afternoon, 3.30pm at the Really Free School (now at the Black Horse on Rathbone Place). The title comes from a tweet by my long-time co-conspirator Andy Gibson: 'It's not how big your society is, it's what you do with it!'

Here's the summary I just sent to the Free School guys:

I want to talk about how the Tories stole our ideas - and how we steal them back. For one reason and another, I’ve spent the past few years wandering around the strange borderlands between technology, policy and activism. It’s time to tell more of that story - the role that collaborative technologies played in the origins of the Big Society rhetoric, and the role they can play in creating a society in which we really are “all in this together.”

I'm following this up on Thursday night with a talk at the anticutsspace in Bedford Square (8pm), under the title 'First Life':

For a long time, people talked about the internet as if it was about virtualising more and more areas of our lives. In 2004, I got involved in editing a DIY email zine called Pick Me Up. Our Friday afternoon emails were meant to inspire you to do something more interesting than check your email on a Friday afternoon. Together, we stumbled into the possibility that the best thing about the web wasn’t what happened in front of a screen, but the ways we could use it to organise face-to-face, in the real world, in First Life.

Following that possibility has led me to creating projects like School of Everything, Space Makers and the Dark Mountain Project. I’m currently writing about the borderlands between technology, policy and activism, so I’d like to share some of the stories and ideas I’m writing about - and think about their implications for resistance and for creating a society in which we really are “all in this together.”

If you can't make it, I'll take my Zoom H4 along, so there should be decent audio of both talks.