On this day, March 22 2012, exactly 10 years ago, the then new organisation 350.org, held a flash mob on a university campus in Canada to try to drum up interest in its divestment from fossil fuels activities.
On March 22nd, approximately 30 students met on campus at 1pm with their ipods ready. At 1:10, we pressed play simultaneously and followed the instructions on the 14 minute long mp3. The energy was high, and curious onlookers were already starting to gather. THREE, TWO, ONE, START! The voice told us about the horrors of climate change while we participated in a giant shoulder massage train. Later we caused a stir in a high-traffic area on campus with 2 minutes to high five as many non-participants as possible. http://350.org/flash-mobs-and-mysterious-mp3s-tools-raise-climate-awareness-yes-please/
This was not a big or important event. And I mention it because it’s 10 years ago and flash mobs are so over. And 350.org has had a fairly typical story of late in that it tried to expand too quickly and has had to pull its horns in. And it continues to have the same problems that all the big green organisations have around black and ethnic minority representation. And this has been going on since – well this has been spoken of – the late 80s, early 90s. And of course it’s been going on even longer than that.
Meanwhile, about flash mobs: Repertoires get old fast, but they continue to be used after they have lost their novelty value because people struggled to innovate understandably and you want to sweat your assets. In some ways. NGOs and civil society organisations are under the same forces as big industrial outfits you have skill sets repertoires things that feel and are “right” and you keep doing them. And that isn’t automatically a bad thing. You know, you wouldn’t want to have surgery from a surgical team that had given up on hand-washing, because that was an old thing. Some things are really, really worth keeping. But at the same time, you wouldn’t want the surgery from a surgeon who hadn’t learned anything from his failures, or an anaesthetist or nurses who hadn’t kept up with the latest research. And we’re still using techniques which were proven to be less effective than more recent ones. Now, the analogy of the human body in a society is an old one. And the analogy I’m telling around in a medical innovation and social movement, innovation is not perfect. That’s because it’s an analogy, a metaphor. See the 1931 Robert Frost essay about this….
“All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself”
But I am digressing…