People
Micah White

About Micah White ... If there’s gonna be a revolution ... Esquire honors Micah White, naming him one of the 37 most influential under 35 year olds alive today.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

If there’s gonna be a revolution...

Esquire honors Micah White, naming him one of the 37 most influential under 35 year olds alive today.

Esquire honors Micah White, naming him one of the 37 most influential under 35 year olds alive today. Here's their interview on the end of protest: “I’m not satisfied anymore with just the standard repertoire of activism. We have to really rethink the foundation of activism. And that’s what I’m trying to do.

“The protest tactics that we’ve developed—the repertoire of tactics that we’ve developed—like, marching and these kinds of things, are designed to influence liberal democracy. They were designed to influence people—like, elected representatives—who had to listen to their constituents. But the breakdown of that paradigm happened on February 15, 2003, when the whole world had an anti-war march and President George Bush said, ‘I don’t listen to focus groups.’ He said that, basically, by saying that, he basically said, ‘It doesn’t matter if you mass a million, billion, six billion people or whatever. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.’

Hey you! Let's seed the world with a new protest paradigm—click here and pledge to read Micah's new book THE END OF PROTEST.

“My thinking is moving away from protest. Instead, I’m more interested now with the power of social mobilization. The power of, basically, getting large numbers of people to change their behaviors, to depattern themselves, to actually get the facts collectively in order to tackle global challenges.

“I think where it’s going now, it’s much more towards the Five Star in Italy, where they do things like getting people elected or, like, running very complicated organizations that are able to manage global problems. One of the things that’s happening is that we’re seeing these global problems that everyone faces, like Ebola, and that social movements might be the answer to those kind of problems, too. Right? Because they mobilize large numbers of people. They get large number of people to do highly synchronized actions together.

A sincere thank you to Miami University, the University of Puget Sound, Columbus College of Art and Design, and Antioch College for organizing Micah White guest lectures in 2014.

Want to ensoul your campus? Wish to understand the future of social movements? Tap here to bring Micah White to your city, university or private event in 2015. Act now—Micah's schedule fills up quickly!

“I was a sophomore in college at Swarthmore on 9/11. And that was, like, the inflection point. And that was the point, too, that I kind of, like, really changed my approach to activism and tried to directly influence, like a lot of people, the war. I started to see the power of the Internet to allow for global action at the same time. Like, on February 15, 2003, we had, like, a global synchronized action on every continent on earth. Which I think would’ve been impossible prior to the Internet and stuff like that.

“Arab Spring is absolutely crucial. And it was absolutely crucial for my own development because I have lived in Egypt for nine months in, like, you know, 2005 or 2006. My wife’s father is a former ambassador to Egypt. I remember staying at the embassy and seeing, like, how many police officers Mubarak would employ to, like, keep order in his society. I mean, I remember seeing that and I remember thinking, at the time, like, “Wow. A revolution would be impossible here with all these police officers.” Like, they would have dozens and dozens and dozens of police officers everywhere. Then, lo and behold, a revolution happened in Tahir Square. That opened my eyes.

“I’m at the library and I’m reading all these books about revolution. Is there a pattern that always happens? And there is. De Tocqueville is who observed that that revolution often just functions to strengthen state power. I think that that’s why the movement towards kind of, you know, horizontalist, Internet-enabled, populist movements is a way to not repeat that pattern.

Invest in social change creation.

Become a patron of our mission to rethink the paradigms of protest.

“The total cost of Occupy was probably under, like, $500. It’s ridiculous. It’s like a force multiplier. That is allowing history to be changed very rapidly.

“If there’s gonna be a revolution, it’ll happen non-violently. I think it’ll be a very peaceful kind of. It’ll be more like an awakening, you know?”

Micah White PhD, 32, is an activist and former Adbusters editor who saw the protests of Tahrir Square and launched the Occupy Wall Street movement—and the wealth-gap debate that’s raged ever since—with a letter that began “All right you 90,000 redeemers, rebels, and radicals out there . . .” He’s since opened Boutique Activist Consultancy. (Motto: “We Win Lost Causes.”)

References:
THE ESQUIRE REGISTER: 37 PEOPLE UNDER 35 WHO ARE RESHAPING THE WORLD: Esquire profiles Micah White
9 NOTES ON THE FUTURE OF REVOLUTION: Esquire interviews Micah White
THE AGE OF EXUBERANCE: Esquire integrates Micah White into the millennial storyline Social movement creation for a new era of democracy. Boutique Activist Consultancy provides discreet service to political mavericks, emergent movements and people's parties. We win lost causes.
Micah White's Newsletter by Micah White, PhD
PO Box 71 Nehalem, OR 97131 USA
Sent to peterbnyc@gmail.com — Unsubscribe
Delivered by
TinyLetter

Gmail Peter Burgess
Metrics on top of what you are doing
Peter Burgess
Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 10:36 AM
To: Micah White PhD

Dear Micah

Your story resonates with me. There is incredible dysfunction in way society and the economy is managed, as there has been throughout history. But that is no reason for accepting the status quo, when something way better is possible.

I helped install a mainframe computer in 1967. It had 4K of memory and was big enough to occupy a pretty large room ... raised floor ... observation windows into the main office ... 500 HP of air conditioning, etc. Fast forward to now and a smart phone has 4G or 40G of memory ... a million or 10 million times more power ... if not more!

So why is society and the economy more or less delivering the same today that it achieved nearly 50 years ago?

I argue that when you change the way the game is scored, you change the way the game is played. Conventional accounting is very powerful and used at the core of every corporate management information system so that corporate profit performance can be maximized and stock value maximized ... but conventional accounting ignores all the issues external to the corporate entity and the impacts there are on people and planet.

I have developed an architecture for metrics that are better suited to the 21st century ... I call it Multi Dimension Impact Accounting (MDIA) ... and a new description of Capitalism that puts the prevailing financial capitalism in perspective.

In my experience, without metrics it is difficult to get traction and keep a good process going. Imagine what the Super Bowl would be like if nobody kept score!

This short essay describes something of what this is all about. I would love to get your input / feedback on what I have described:
http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/MDIA/TVM-Short-Introduction-to-7D-Capitalism-and-MDIA-141212a.pdf

With best wishes for 2015 and the future

Peter
____________
Peter Burgess
TrueValueMetrics ... Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society
Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
http://www.truevaluemetrics.org
linkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterburgess1/
twitter: @truevaluemetric @peterbnyc
mobile: 212 744 6469 landline 570 431 4385
email: peterbnyc@gmail.com
skype: peterburgessnyc

'Micah White PhD'