RESPONSE TO THE CONSULTATION ON THE DERRY CITY AND STRABANE DISTRICT COUNCIL ARTS AND CULTURE STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Two fledgling ideas by Dave Duggan, dramatist and novelist, June 2017, written as aspirations.

Maker's Money (MM) is targeted investment in entry level artists of all ages, by Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC), so they can make art. This ensures the benefit of arts and culture to individuals, while ensuring maximum community benefit, value for money and public support. It assists the future recognition of the artists, their work and its value. It enables artists to begin careers as practitioners in the district council area. The investment delivers equality, strengthens the economy, contributes to the growth of the artistic workforce (a vital element in the creative sector), enhances the tourism offer and heartens us all, thus improving health and wellbeing.

Like all investments, it is not without risk. Making this investment in a confident manner, however, will enable artists, in particular new ones, to respond actively and make work across all artistic forms. Application and reporting can be minimal and not arduously administrative for the artist as sole trader. The investment programme should be considered as long-term. Details would require working up, but, in outline, could include:

- An investment period of five years, 2017/8-2022/3;

- an investment pot of £5, 000 per year, allocated as £2, 500 each for two individual artists per year, no artist being eligible for two Maker's Money investments;

- the total investment to be £25, 000 over five years, at which time it would be reviewed;

- application is a one page statement of what the artist intends to make in the Derry and Strabane District Council area, supported by a brief cv of work previously made. Receipts to confirm the investment has been received into the artist's bank account, in staged payments, are the only written reporting required;

- the individual investment to be made in stages: £1, 000 on signing up; another £1, 000 on a successful six-month review interview and the final £500 at a successful conclusion, all within 18 months. Definitions as to what constitutes ‘success’ to be agreed and contracted at the time of the award.

The programme budget of £25, 000 over five years can be allocated as part of the Council’s overall budget in allocation models as used by Invest NI and the Strategic Investment Board. Consideration can also be given to funds secured by the National Crime Agency in the form of 'assets recovered'. This investment programme would not replace SIAP funding offered by The Arts Council (ACNI).

In enabling artists to buy time to make work using this investment, the vision is to offer artists an equal opportunity to achieve their aspirations and ambitions, while tackling social exclusion of artists in a manner that tackles wider exclusions in society by new, imaginative works and acts. The theme of cultural togetherness is made manifest when a society confidently invests in makers who use their imagination and skills to make the work they wish to make. These artists contribute to their own and society's wellbeing through rich cultural expression, rooted in this place and reaching far beyond it. 

See also http://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-response-to-consultation-on-dcal.html

THE WRITING DISTRICT (TWD) is a designation and a programme by Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC) that enables expression and storying through imaginative writing from adults across the district. TWD asserts that the act of writing in all its forms is a defining characteristic of the district, creating healthy citizens, a wealth of written stories and texts with social and historical benefits and contributing to the tourism offer by making the region a fascinating place, where visitors can see and experience artistic production through writing.

TWD is about writing, not writers, in the first instance. Writing in the work-place, at leisure settings, in families, in social and religious groups, on buses, in taxis, bars and cafés, at the park, the sports field and the gym, at festivals of jazz, film, Christmas and Halloween. TWD animates the district with writing.

People in the district, like people all over the world, have stories to tell. TWD creates opportunities for those stories to be written. People in the district have expressions to make. TWD creates opportunities for those expressions to be written.

The written works, sometimes very short, become public, as the person writing decides, via blogs, twitter accounts, emails, pages in the district's newspapers and magazines, dedicated sheets, pamphlets and billboards, readings, books, recordings, websites and all other platforms imaginable.

The principle outcome is a vibrant and lively district with texts and stories, poems and lyrics, sketches and scenes, memories and speculations written by people in the district, shared by people in the district and beyond, so that the district becomes known by its writing. It becomes The Writing District.

Another outcome of TWD is that a small number of people may wish to enter the writing industry. TWD would assist with information, advice, mentoring and pathways into the industry, across all forms, so that those people may become writers in formal and industrial senses.

A one year pilot programme and associated projects for TWD takes place in 2018. On review and adjustment, the designation and activities are rolled out for five years, then reviewed once more.

©Dave Duggan, June 2017

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

TERESA MAY DREAMED THIS

Teresa May dreamed it would come to this. With the foresight of the truly fretful politician, she invoked the mythic links between Toryism and Unionism in her speech on the day she became leader of her party and the unelected prime minister of her country. She avowed, in that waking dream, that she was both conservative and unionist. Now, following a near-defeat in her first election in charge, she relies on those links to hold on to power.

She is assailed on all sides. Even her allies in the right-wing tabloids tentatively sound out Boris Johnson's intentions. Colleagues deny any credible leadership challenge is building and yet, voices query the deal she has brokered with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland. It is difficult to put a good gloss on such a desperate scrabble to hold on to power, which increasingly looks like nothing more than a cack-handed attempt to make up the numbers.

She is also assailed by an opposition buoyed up by their near-victory. Jeremy Corbyn, the perpetual dissenter, led a leftward swing in London and elsewhere that surprised some and heartened many.

Pollsters currently compute the gap between the two parties with slide-rule micrometers.

Arrangements between the Conservatives (Tories) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are on a ‘confidence and supply' basis. Another such deal, between Fianna Fáil and the Fine Gael government in the Republic of Ireland, is tottering under the weight of the appointment of a judge to the Court of Appeal.

What exactly will be supplied by the DUP is far from clear and how much confidence any member of the Conservative Party, not to mind a general subject of the Kingdom, can have in such a deal is still open to question. What is clear is that differences between the parties on so-called ‘social issues’, such as abortion, equal marriage and gay rights, will be difficult to reconcile. A number of Tories fear that moves made under David Cameron, their leader prior to Teresa May, to perceptively liberalise the party brand, thus modernising it, will be set back by associating it with a party founded by fundamentalist Christians and which is currently beset by scandal, notably in relation to a renewable energy scheme that is costing millions to the Northern Ireland public purse. There are also awkward relationships and connections with boards and chief executives in community organisations evidently linked to loyalist paramilitaries. The sight of DUP MPs parading in full regalia in this summer’s Orange parades, alongside bands with displays of loyalist associations, could knock back the confidence in any deal, regardless of what is beign supplied.

One of the most significant casualties in the electoral gamble called by Teresa May and her now side-lined advisors, Ross and Hill, is the authority of the right-wing tabloid press, such as The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express. The readership numbers of those tabloids remain high but fewer and fewer people appear to have faith in their proclamations. How do you believe in readership numbers of newspapers frequently given away as a free-sheet at domestic airports?

Spare your concern and pity for the sidelined advisors. Sufficient information has entered the public domain, as part of their ritual scapegoating, to make clear that they are simply the personification of the Tory ideology that monetises and privatises every human function, including social care of the infirm, the needy and the elderly, by hoovering their assets into the market-place. Margaret Thatcher invited subjects into the property market many years ago with the promise that, as home owners, they would be rich, or, if not rich, then, at least, they would be able to pretend they were sovereign players in the market and not simply in debt to the mortgage-dealers.

What will be come of the dreams of Teresa May? Three conjectures then:

Firstly, The Democratic Unionist Party will strain under the pressures to be powerful in both London and Belfast. It will fare better in the Irish city than in the English one, where it is privately reviled by members of the party with which it concluded the one billion pound deal.

Secondly, Teresa May will vacate the role of party leader, ideally by a process of consent, but that will depend on how soon the UK is tipped into another election (pencil the 19^th of October into your diary). If the election comes quicker, she will be ousted by it.

Thirdly, Boris Johnson will not become leader, no matter how shrilly the headline writers and editorialists in The Daily Mail bleat. He is too firmly associated with the hard Brexit ideology, with its unfounded assertions of stability and strength that became the quicksand that mired Teresa May.

Will the lives of people be improved by any of this? Will the rapacious forces of casino-capitalism, avid for currency speculation, property capture and resource exploitation, be changed a jot?

Perhaps the tentative stirrings generated by Jeremy and the Corbynistas, fresh from their wow-fest gig at Glastonbury, will produce a fruitful outcome – a victory in the coming election – thereby putting the chequebook in the hand of the bearded sexagenarian, who sang The Internationale on the night of his election as Labour Party leader and who now strolls in the warmth of a London summer, resplendent in his modest white linen jacket, on his way to sup a cappuccino in the shade.

For both May and Corbyn the old saw that it is ‘events, dear boy, events’, as offered by a previous Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, that blow politicians and their dreams off course still resonates. The conflagration at the tower block in Ladbroke Grove, one of the poorer parts of the Borough of Kensington, set a blaze under the crushing inequalities that characterise life in London and all metropolises. It turned Teresa May’s dreams of power into nightmares of human tragedy and loss.

Ronda, June 2017

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

Are digital technologies making politics impossible?

BEYOND THE DIGITAL

An edited version of a failed entry for the 2017 Nine Dots Prize. https://ninedotsprize.org

The winner of the prize is James Williams.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/inaugural-100000-nine-dots-prize-winner-chosen-from-more-than-700-worldwide-entries

Are digital technologies making politics impossible?

Yes. No. Maybe, but only if the multitude of citizens let that be the case.

Current political macro-narratives converge through short-termism – asphyxiating rather than life-giving – into a globalisation that fails to deliver progress in the lives of citizens. This can be faced down by a multiplicity of micro-narratives integrating digital technologies into an eminently possible politics in the long-term service of equality among citizens.

The power needed for this endeavour – for when politics is redesigned, the primary tool is power – will develop from a burgeoning discourse of dissent, based in a thorough-going critique of the binary-bias of digital and other technologies, both contemporary and historic, thus making for an eminently possible politics.

These are language matters, both the question and the answers and the arguments they generate. An historical grounding tracks the Cartesian worldview into contemporary politics, where the reliance on a simple 1/0, on-off view, is wholly inadequate to a possible politics in times of great complexity and accelerating change.

Common understandings vary and change over time and place as to what digital technologies are. A narrow view focuses on social media and computer technologies, including current ones such as facebook, on-line search engines, Instagram, snapchat and twitter. New ones are imminent. To answer this question, such a narrow view will be broadened into elements beyond social media as manifestations of digital technologies and into areas of human endeavour where binary philosophies bring the digits 1/0 to bear and challenge politics daily.

A discourse of dissent enables an approach to making politics possible and progressively successful, served by digital technologies, rather than in thrall to them.

Are digital technologies making politics impossible? Yes.

A binary orientation, an on/off paradigm, impinges on all fields of human activity, thus all aspects of politics. For example, the rate of corporation tax is an on/off switch governments use to seduce global capital to come to rest as on/off marks on digital machines. The Ireland/Apple story is a telling example of digital technologies making fiscal governance impossible. Though all countries use the binary on/off tax rate switch as a vital political tool, it is an ironic instance of the hypocrisy at the heart of current financial practices. Citizens witness the shimmying of electronic impulses on machines as money and wonder at the actual meaning of wealth. Already the binary 'corporate tax rate switch' is trumpeted as a foundation of Trumpconomics, where the market is the driver and continues to value goods and financial instruments sellable on a short-term basis and little else. At the heart of this economic activity are new consumer digital technologies, data-laden, distracting, wisdom-deficient and generated by the drive to monetise everything.

To bet/to fold is another binary choice. Digital technologies enable an explosion in gambling in seemingly virtual money, echoing John Maynard Keynes:

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

Problems created by ourselves, not by digital technologies, are rooted in the market/government binary, where global business corporations erode the authority of social power structures in dealing with problems such as climate change controversies and the increasing insecurity citizens experience in the enterprise/speculation binary of casino-capitalism.

For an instance of digital technologies making politics impossible, consider the alleged hacking by Russian agents that affected the US Presidential election. All the key words of power, govern and truth are invoked, such that the outcome of a very close election is influenced by a digital technology action that maims the wishes of the voting public, rendering politics impossible. Impossible, yes, while still occurring. Politics are changing and remarkable consistencies persist. The Trump/May era eerily echoes the Reagan/Thatcher era.

In the field of digital technologies, we experience an acceleration of the presence of machines (smart (?) fridges) and processes in all aspects of our lives. We witness a convergence of devices, driven by consumption/entertainment, rather than debate/fairness, affirming spectacle rather than experience, such that citizens' sense of power and control is diminished.

Power does not reside in states alone. It resides in corporations, that are fluid and convergent, hierarchical and rapacious, driven by short-termism and financial profit. Corporations own the digital technologies, developed in close conjunction with the militaries in the Great Powers: USA, Russia, China and Europe, with Israel, Pakistan and North Korea as attendant players in research, development, sales and deployment. International relations themselves are presented in binary fashion, offering macro-narratives of great powers paired off against each other. The on/off political technology switch approach once again makes politics impossible.

This runs deeper than software and connectedness. It is a hardware matter, wired into the way the world works, long before the current acceleration of digital technologies based on the binary number system.

The world is hard-wired into binaries, based on body/mind, as critiqued by Daniel C. Dennett:

the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.

The world is working through the latest stage in the Future Shock described by Alvin Toffler. The next stage may be more cataclysmic, as the rate of change accelerates and the lead-time for new technologies tightens. Built-in obsolescence is a daily reality, not a social science myth, since speculation rather than enterprise, as described by Keynes, became applicable to retail and all market activities.

It also now applies to the social order and to the way politics is outpaced by digital technologies. It affects us at species level, in reproductive science, and thus in our gender identity, creating new challenges to our efforts to explain the world to ourselves. These are language problems. We do not have the words yet and, what words we have, we struggle to string together cogently.

Politics is the binary technology we use when we address matters that impoverish us. Perhaps the greatest binary, the zero-sum 1/0 that most bedevils us, is haves/haves not, as an accelerating experience of inequality makes politics impossible.

The most chilling digital on/off, is the thesis of political technology that asserts that science and technology will solve all problems, including political ones, using a commitment to limitless economic growth while exploiting natural resources. Wolfgang Streeck writes

Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified material wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society,....

It's all 1s and 0s and the sums do not add up. Ones and zeros do not enumerate the complexity citizens experience and yet digital technologies permeate all aspects of their lives. And make politics impossible.

The world is disabled from responding to the challenges of climate change. Scientists dispute scientific results and become climate change deniers. The environmental catastrophe poisoning the planet rests upon the 1/0 digits of economic growth and climate change and their connectedness. Simple binaries, bound together by data not wisdom, compromise our capacity to control personal information and protect our private lives. The sense pervades us that we are under the control of anonymous digital powers, which, though seemingly varied, are actually convergent. These powers do not rely on direct violence. They wield extensive and intensive pressure that ultimately force individual's lives into a monetised disconnectedness.

Yes, digital technologies make politics impossible.

Are digital technologies making politics impossible? No.

When Alvin Toffler was asked why he wrote Future Shock in 1970 he said he felt that the US government was blind to large technological and social changes. These changes included a sexual/biological revolution (the birth control pill); globalisation at a human level (commercial jet travel); the information tsunami rolling out (television universalised). He said:

….. change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people.

This disorientation leads to the experience of impossibility in politics.

Yet politics continues, and, as it were, what we experience today, is simply politics as is (the case). It is not digital technologies making politics impossible. No. It is us.

Are digital technologies making politics impossible? Maybe, but only if the multitude of citizens, let that be the case.

BBC Panorama journalist, Declan Lawn said:

The problem is that we are getting worse at going against the dominant consensus. Fewer and fewer of us are anti-authoritarian enough and difficult enough to go with our gut and challenge the narrative. These days journalists are not rewarded for being difficult. A culture does not exist in which a journalist can render an alternative narrative without being dismissed as a loonie leftie or an alt-right conspiracy theorist.

This is a plea for a discourse of dissent.

It was ever thus, where change and uncertainty are the given order, amplified in today's circumstances of faux news, such as appears on the website Waterford Whispers News (WWN), where spoofing and dissenting ring together, in a digital world that makes beneficial politics possible. Maybe.

I argue that false news can be a manifestation of dissent. Referring to news as 'fake' now presumes that all news before the digital era was 'true'. We are not naïve enough to accept that.

The digital behemoth Amazon wonders how many of its on-line customer reviews of books/films/products are fake. Perhaps this is the next thrust forward in human development, whereby our imaginations are emboldened to dissent from knowledge/facts/truth presented to us by such corporations, residing in the binary form: we know/you don't.

The automatic link between digital technologies and progress needs to face the 'hang on a minute' moment of stern critical address, from a discourse of dissent, which develops multiplicities rather than binaries, such as Tory/Labour, China/USA, 1/0. The 'hang on a minute' discourse can be applied, as a critical language tool, for instance, in financial affairs, to ask the question how might the word 'profit' be re-launched to include below the line costs, public and environmental costs when private enterprise speculates its way to profits. It can also test faux news.

The pace bursts Alvin Toffler's speedometer, as change proceeds with ferocious acceleration, constantly outstripping citizens' capacity for thought and action. Thus the difficulty digital technologies pose to politics.

Might history offer us some hope. At the end of the Second World War, a number of cosmopolitan institutions emerged; the IMF, UN, World Bank and the start of the EU, which, though massively flawed, brought a leavening of humane values into world affairs.

Can we, with full awareness of the ironies involved as Brexit comes to pass, invoke the EU Maastrict Treaty concept of 'subsidiarity', whereby power devolves to levels close to where their impacts are, in an urge for proximity? Not easy. Consider another digital behemoth, Google, and the efforts by Duck Duck Go to push against it by offering a less invasive search engine. Not easy. Can we seek possibilities in multitudes, such as the push-back by people in India when Facebook attempted to 'be' the internet there?

We need more such multitudes, people who share the fact of their existence and close aspirations of well-being for themselves and loved ones. The term 'multitude' has a history reaching back to antiquity, but took off as a political concept when it was espoused by the likes of Machiavelli and Spinoza. A multitude does not enter into a social contract with a sovereign political elite, rather that contract is itself a multiplicity in perpetual negotiation, always in the direction of power disseminating, and that includes digital technologies, which are material and social-practice sites of corporate power. This is much more than share-holder democracy. It is a post-digital political technology such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination.

We are beyond chaos theories here. We are on carousels rather than seesaws; in perpetual motion rather than in the binary balance, which offers an elite 1 and the rest 0.

It is never the fault of technologies. It is our ownership and use of them.

A multitude of sources – Éluard, Rilke, EM Cioran, Derek Mahon, Patrick White, Octavio Paz and many others – are cited for multiple versions of the lines:

There is another world,

And this is it.

The answer to the question of digital technologies and a possible politics rests in our hands.

Conclusions. Beyond 1/0 and onto irrational multiples.

Now is the time to move on from the binary system. Like number systems of the past, it has out run its usefulness. It is inadequate to the philosophical, political and digital challenges of the day. The problems we face are ill-defined, thus we are less than clear what the question really is, with even less an idea of what the solution might look like. These are days of the primacy of process, with all the uncertainties that brings. We can relish them and move past the urge for security offered by binaries. They are chimera, readily manipulated by oligarchs. We can change our relationship with digital technologies, from a posture of thrall to an agency of use.

For politics to be possible now and into the future, a leavening of dissent needs to be present. We need citizens who say 'hang on a minute' and just plain 'no' when proposals are presented. The automatic assumption of congruence between betterment (progress) and digital technologies is a binary fallacy. Be it 5G, 6G, 7G or beyond, telecommunications, other digital technologies and politics, are best served by citizens asking “hang on a minute. Who benefits?”

We can imagine our way past 1s and 0s, such as Government/Market. When it comes to broadband for rural areas “the market will only take you so far, it then falls to government”, according to an OfCom spokesperson. Other binaries need re-enumerated: urban/rural; private loss/public cost; governors/governed. Make your own list.

It is not simply digits. It is all numbers, rational and irrational. It is language. New.

Beyond the digital.

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