The World Losers Want

Posted by Candidia Cruikshanks, CEO of Wealth Bondage

The World We Want? I suspect not, Sweetie. Money talks, bullshit walks. How much money you raised for "social change"? Why change the game when it's is working so well? I got no complaints. You losers crack me up. Who gives a shit what world you want?  Work hard, make a few hundred million, then you can be a philanthropist and say what world you want and make it happen. Otherwise sit down and shut up. If I want your opinion, I will ask for it, like never.

Comments

[Gerry]

I hate to break it to you Candy, but the World We Want is about skills and the ability to organize people with skills to do things. You can't stop us. You can try, but it won't work.

[Tutor]

I think you are right about the organizing part. Many with many versus the few who would rule through wealth bondage.

[Albert Ruesga]

Trippy vid. I think the right term is "hakak." Very Liquid Sky.

I dunno. People with skills doing things. Sounds like an ant colony. Or something an earnest folk singer might sing about.

[Tutor]

Metrics, meter, metronomes. What does it take, Albert?

[fleep to live]

hey albert tick talk

[Rachel Tension]

I'm with Albert on this one. I imagine a big lesbian with a wounded look shuffling up to the microphone with a twelve-string guitar:

People with skeels
Organizing
No no, not compromising!
Doing skillful things
To make the world we want.

I mean it's sickening.

[Tutor]

Metrics, professionalism, expertise, a clerisy, everything nice and tidy?

[Albert Ruesga]

There's a Minimalist Scene Room in paradise, but I imagine the place is mostly overgrown and there are old pizza boxes strewn about. (Anchovy pizza, flipper.) Nature intrudes. The authorities can't erase the graffiti quickly enough. The mathematicians drink rye and howl at the moon.

Wait, this sounds like the Dumpster. Never mind.

[Tutor]

Philanthropy is top down. What can we do from the bottom up? And who funds that whole thought process and action-stance? Who is trying to build a movement, not just ameliorate ills, or make progress along a metric as a societal tune-up? I don't see how funders will get interested unless ordinary people just get out there and make things happen, however futile. There has to be activity on the ground that funders could support. From an Omidyar.net perspective or blogging perspective, it seems we should be asking what can we do to get more active and engaged not only online but in local spaces or specific projects where our limited efforts and funds might have an impact.

Mixing these online networks with traditional funder/community foundation networks is something you could do, Albert, or risk, or help us figure out. We could attempt that in the name of The World We Want, or some other pretext. I know that you have had versions of that dream for years and years, and may have it still. I am sure you do, and that your wisdom and experience would be invaluable in figuring out how it might be done.

[Gerry]

A group of funders could do a lot by funding a few leadership incubators. We have long talked about the way conservatives funded their movement, particularly when it was small. We don't want to emulate their tactics, but they could at least fund some organizations to support the future leaders of the movement.

The movement can build itself, but it is slower because of the lack of resources. If funders would go to the bottom and see who is there and what they are doing, they would have a better handle on who and what to fund.

[Tutor]

I agree, Gerry. At a practical level, we could cross or connect several networks: Peter's, Tracy Gary's, Community Foundations, Omidyar.net, and other online groups to create a fertile hybrid. The online people are disconnected from action and ar e often naive an arrogant. They act as if no one had discussed civil society or political theory until 1999. The established philanthropy networks are o so dull and decorous. They feel threated by the cacaphony on the net. Yet if we can bring these groups into conversation much good could come out of it in unexpected, or self-organizing, ways. I think we are close to this being a live possibility, for example through The World We Want, Inspired Legacies, The Harwood Institute, Omidayar, and other points of intersection.

[Albert Ruesga]

I was trying, once again unsuccessfully, to be funny, to add light to the dungeon of flipcharts and convened stakeholders :o)

Of course what you and Gerry say is true.

[Cackety Dishwitz]

Rachel, honey, I was going to post this:

Not everyone plucking a twelve string guitar is a lesbian, Rachel. For instance, Joni Mitchell is just a bad mother.

But I won't. It's cruel to follow unfunny with unfunny. Especially on a faltering blog.

[Tutor]

Thank you, Mr. Dishwitz.