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.