Notes from Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe

I’ve just posted the report (slides here, and embedded above) from our climate-action strategy workshop Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe, held on November 18-19, 2021 in Leiden, the Netherlands.

The goal of the workshop was to determine if, how, and to what degree the cultural sector (very broadly defined) can contribute meaningfully to the social, economic, and environmental transformations required by the climate emergency.

The word “culture” gets thrown around a lot in climate policy circles, and many of us, as cultural professionals, are outraged by the climate emergency and want to take action. But what can the cultural sector actually do for the climate fight?

Some clear themes emerged through our two-day workshop and the weeks of thinking and dialogue that followed. I’ll list a few below as a preview, as one does, but the depth and complexity of the ideas (and more) really come to life through the words of the participants themselves, as shown in the report.

  1. The Big Frikin’ Wall — With a nod to the remarkable Kathy Sierra, much of the cultural sector seems afflicted by, metaphorically speaking, a Big Frikin’ Wall that stands between the world of safe, established practice and the world of urgent work that needs to be done. Working through, around, or over this wall will require a combination of strategic thinking, bold and enlightened management, well placed incentives. If we do not work through the Big Frikin’ Wall we are not likely to make significant progress on the climate emergency, as a sector or as a society. (See slide 38)

  2. Local, bottom-up approaches — The importance of local, bottom-up action was a persistent theme throughout the workshop. Participants emphasized that they felt many organizations wanted to be more involved in campaigning, movement-making, and local action but don’t know how to start. Training in these techniques might be a smart investment for the sector. (See slide 56)

  3. The role of culture — Participants offered a variety of opinions about the role of culture in society. Is “culture” a social good? A tool that serves power? An expression of identity? An entertainment medium? A tourist industry? A human right? The term culture is used in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways, even within the same sentence. A shared understanding of what we mean by “culture” would help us have more productive discussions about how to use it as a tool for positive change. (See slide 70)

  4. Digitality — It is hard to imagine how we will win the climate fight without an enlightened and strategic use of digital platforms; and it is easy to imagine losing the climate fight if digital is ignored (or worse, subverted). But a concept of digitality — what it means to live in a society that is infused with digital — is notably absent from the cultural strategies emerging from initiatives such as the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus. The cultural sector must develop a concept of digitality to match its ambitions for participating in climate action or effecting social change. (See slide 69)
    - - Note that I’ll be speaking about a new concept of digitality at Computers in Libraries and the MuseumNext Green Summit this month.

  5. The need for solidarity — Workshop participant Tom Pravda, Co-founder of Avaaz, asserted that the social problems caused by the climate crisis may prove to be more of a problem than the climate crisis itself. “We need to be working in ways to build human solidarity — a sense that we are in this together,” stated Tom. “Only by cooperating are we going to be able to tackle this problem.” (See slide 17)

I am happy to say that a number of clear, actionable initiatives arose directly from this workshop, including a sector-wide training initiative, a proposal for Horizon Europe funding, and a radical “incentive prize” competition. These, in addition to the remarkable work already being done by workshop participants.

Concept development is underway for these new initiatives, and I’m also working to organize a follow-up meeting in Europe and similar workshops in the Americas, where the cultural-sector issues are different but the will to make a difference is likely to be the same.

Finally, as I’m writing this I’m aware that the COP26 conference in Glasgow was taking place as we were planning this workshop, and the IPCC’s grim sixth climate report was issued 2 days ago as I was finalizing the report. Meanwhile, the world is still afflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia has invaded Ukraine. If we believe that the cultural sector, however defined, has the potential to inspire and educate people, build solidarity, and transform lives for the better then there’s a lot of work to do.

Many thanks to everyone who participated (listed on slide 6), including our supporters and GoFundMe contributors who pitched in to defray travel and lodging expenses for participants. And of course many thanks to my co-conveners Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 European City of Science, and Harry Verwayen, Director of the Europeana Foundation, who stepped boldly into the void to help make this workshop a success.

The embers of dead empires

Kenya Digital News (video /YouTube)

Kenyan U.N. Ambassador Martin Kimani’s remarks to the U.N. Security Council following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.

Today, across the border of every single African country, live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural and linguistic bonds.

At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.

Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.

We chose to follow the rules of the Organisation of African Unity and the United Nations charter, not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.

We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them?

However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.

We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious or cultural factors. We reject it again today.

Kenya registers its strong concern and opposition to the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. We further strongly condemn the trend in the last few decades of powerful states, including members of this Security Council, breaching international law with little regard.

Multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. It has been assaulted today as it as it has been by other powerful states in the recent past.

We call on all members to rally behind the Secretary-General in asking him to rally us all to the standard that defends multilateralism. We also call on him to bring his good offices to bear to help the concerned parties resolve this situation by peaceful means.

Let me conclude, Mr. President, by reaffirming Kenya's respect for the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
Kenyan U.N. ambassador compares Ukraine's plight to colonial legacy in Africa, National Public Radio (video, transcript), 22 February 2022.
“Anything can happen, and it happens really, really quickly.”
— Skier Mikaela Shiffrin, from “A Bump in the Road: In a stunner, Shiffrin skis out in the defense of her giant slalom gold” by Dave Sheinin, Washington Post (print version, page D1), 7 February 2022

Keynote with Meta Knol: The Messy Stuff Wins

How to Create a City of Science, a keynote by Meta Knol & me for the KM World 2021 conference back in November, is about the development of the digital/physical concept for the Leiden 2022 European City of Science initiative, which Meta directs.

Aside from the revelation of her team’s astonishing, 365-days of community-owned and community-led programming, two key moments from Meta’s remarks really stand out for me.

The messy stuff wins

At 18:44, Meta talks about her realization (sparked by some research and thinking I did in response to this tweet) that the messy stuff — content and engagement that is authentic, original, and intuitive — wins out over the steady and predictable “fixed formats” often preferred by traditional organizations.

I didn't expect it to, but it's really true: the messy stuff wins. The most authentic. The most original. The kinds of communications where people would just let go of control and build on trust… To allow spontaneous, original ideas to win from the fixed formats. To make sure that you don’t let the rational get in the way of the intuitive. These are really hard things if you are so much stuck in your pathways. So we had to open up, which also meant that we had to exceed our own expectations for what we wanted to make. And certainly we had to let go of the expectations of others. So: The messy stuff wins. Let go of control.

Let go of the frameworks you learned in school

The other moment that sticks out for me comes at 21:10 where Meta talks about abandoning the traditional frameworks of target groups and “pre-fixed media strategies.”

I said to my team, let’s abandon the whole set of criteria of thinking about target groups and pre-fixed media strategies: What we will do is we will focus on specific interests of people. If you are interested in the stars or astronomy I don’t care if you are a 10-year old girl or a Nobel prize winner. Or if we do an activity on kidneys, and your brother has a kidney disease, then I'm sure you will be interested – and you will be no matter where you were born, in which area, what your income is, what level your education is. So that’s the interesting part, if you really focus on these topics that people are interested in intrinsically then you can just let go of all the frameworks that you learned in school about target groups.

The Leiden 2022 European City of Science formally opens in a public webcast at 2pm CET Saturday.

Not about the cheese

“Have you seen a man in his 60s have a full temper tantrum because we don’t have the expensive imported cheese he wants?” said the employee, Anna Luna, who described the mood at the store, in Minnesota, as “angry, confused and fearful.” “You’re looking at someone and thinking, ‘I don’t think this is about the cheese.’”
From A Nation on Hold Wants to Speak With a Manager, by Sarah Lyall. New York Times, 1 January 2022

Most of us are forgetting that from the beginning of our life we are approaching death. Life is absurd. But you can fill it with ideas. With enthusiasm. You can fill your life with joy.

Mountaineer Reinhold Messner, contemplating the meaning of Nimsdai Purja's ascent of Earth's 14 8,000 meter peaks in 7 months. From the film 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible (2121). Messner was the first to ascend all 14 8,000 meter peaks (and he did so without supplemental oxygen), a feat which took him 16 years.

Only 45% f---ked

“I’ve been coming from mountain to mountain, and sometimes you feel like you’re actually fucked. But when you say you are fucked you are only 45% fucked.”
Mountaineer Nimsdai Purja ("Nim"), telling it like it is to climbers at K2 basecamp while trying to convince them to attempt the summit despite risks, setbacks, and low morale. From the film 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible (2121) which documents Nim & team's astonishing ascent of all 14 of Earth's 8,000 meter peaks in seven months. Nim and team made the summit two days later and paved the way for 24 other climbers to summit as well.

I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?)

I just posted a new essay, I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers, subtitled “Can museums save the world'?

It’s an un-edited, pre-publication draft of a piece for for Seize the Moment: Rethinking the Museum (Marsha Semmel, Ken Yellis, Avi Decter, ed.) to be published in early 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield. It is also an expansion of a short piece I wrote with the same title for Ten Perspectives on the Future of Digital Culture, a 2018 publication commemorating the 10th anniversary of Europeana.

The basic idea of the essay is to use a very modest, first-person time-travel narrative as a way to speak bluntly about what I see as the cultural sector’s reticence to get much involved in climate action and social justice.

In one passage I find myself standing at my office window looking out at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution in the days, months, and years following 9-11 (a very real memory for me and one that has shaped much of my work over the last 20 years).

How would these three, august institutions help us understand what had happened to us as a nation? What would they do to help us chart our way forward in this complex and dangerous world?

As I stared into my beer, I couldn’t think of a single thing that any of these institutions, or even museums in general, had done to help Americans think clearer thoughts or make better decisions after 9/11. It wasn’t a museum’s job, or so we thought. Just hunker down, entertain the guests, conserve the collections and don’t rock the boat. So we lost our minds and went to war for 20 years without even an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.

More at I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?).

* * * On a related note, in November, 2021 I’m organizing a workshop and strategy charrette to try and do something to jumpstart real action from the cultural sector. We need help funding travel for participants. Please give us a hand!

GoFundMe: Help Send Climate Activists To The Hague
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-send-climate-activists-to-the-hague

Image credits: Remix of ‘The Boyfriend’ by Alžbeta Halušková. CC BY-SA. Source material: Za frajerom | Hanula, Jozef. Slovak National Gallery. Public domain. Creator: Alžbeta Halušková. Date: 2018. Country: Slovakia. CC BY-SA

Climate action workshop November 18-19 in The Hague

I’m bootstrapping a climate action workshop for museums and cultural-sector organizations, November 18-19 in The Hague, Netherlands.

The goal of this workshop is to determine if, how, and to what degree the cultural sector (broadly defined) can contribute meaningfully to the social, economic, and environmental transformation of Europe and the rest of the world.

On the agenda are the following questions:

  • What are the goals of current efforts to catalyze change in cultural organizations?

  • What is the relevance of the New European Bauhaus, European Green Deal, and pandemic recovery initiatives?

  • What is their “track record” and future potential regarding civic impact and societal change.

  • What is the role of digital, “digitality” (the fact of living in a digital society), and the digital public sphere in all of this?

  • And what can we do, now, to move the needle regarding climate change and social justice?

We’re certainly not the first people to take a look at this question, but with the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference happening in Glasgow; recent/ongoing terrible news about the climate emergency; rising calls for museums and other cultural organizations to take a stand on social justice issues; and the announcement of the New European Bauhaus initiative and the ongoing European Green Deal and pandemic recovery initiatives (all of which call on “culture” to play an active role in the transformation of Europe) this seems like a good moment to gather a diverse set of cultural professionals and activists to see if we can find a new vision for the cultural sector.

We’re raising funds through GoFundMe to help defray the cost of travel for participants, and we have two great non-profits providing space and logistical support (and moral support too).

Watch this space for details and let me know if you have questions or would like to be involved.

Gone

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“Among the eight Hawaiian birds officially declared extinct Wednesday are the prismatic Maui ’akepa and Moloka’i creeper, and curve-beaked Kaua’i ʻakialoa and nukupu’u. Also gone is the Kaua’i ’o’o, whose haunting, flutelike mating call was last heard three decades ago.”
Ivory-billed woodpecker officially declared extinct, along with 22 other species, by Dino Grandoni. Washington Post, 29 September 2021.

It's on us

Robert Kagan’s gut-wrenching essay in the Washington Post on Sunday about the crisis in American democracy (see below) reminded me of this 2018 piece by Zeynep Tufekci in the MIT Technology Review, How social media Took us from Tahir Square to Donald Trump.

At the end, Tufekci argues that while corporate social media and Russian election interference were a horrible influence on democratic processes, Russian trolls didn’t get us to where we are by themselves.

But we didn’t get where we are simply because of digital technologies. The Russian government may have used online platforms to remotely meddle in US elections, but Russia did not create the conditions of social distrust, weak institutions, and detached elites that made the US vulnerable to that kind of meddling.

Russia did not make the US (and its allies) initiate and then terribly mishandle a major war in the Middle East, the after-effects of which—among them the current refugee crisis—are still wreaking havoc, and for which practically nobody has been held responsible. Russia did not create the 2008 financial collapse: that happened through corrupt practices that greatly enriched financial institutions, after which all the culpable parties walked away unscathed, often even richer, while millions of Americans lost their jobs and were unable to replace them with equally good ones.

Russia did not instigate the moves that have reduced Americans’ trust in health authorities, environmental agencies, and other regulators. Russia did not create the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying firms that employ ex-politicians at handsome salaries. Russia did not defund higher education in the United States. Russia did not create the global network of tax havens in which big corporations and the rich can pile up enormous wealth while basic government services get cut.

These are the fault lines along which a few memes can play an outsize role. And not just Russian memes: whatever Russia may have done, domestic actors in the United States and Western Europe have been eager, and much bigger, participants in using digital platforms to spread viral misinformation.

Even the free-for-all environment in which these digital platforms have operated for so long can be seen as a symptom of the broader problem, a world in which the powerful have few restraints on their actions while everyone else gets squeezed. Real wages in the US and Europe are stuck and have been for decades while corporate profits have stayed high and taxes on the rich have fallen. Young people juggle multiple, often mediocre jobs, yet find it increasingly hard to take the traditional wealth-building step of buying their own home—unless they already come from privilege and inherit large sums.

If digital connectivity provided the spark, it ignited because the kindling was already everywhere. The way forward is not to cultivate nostalgia for the old-world information gatekeepers or for the idealism of the Arab Spring. It’s to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our societal safeguards should function in the 21st century—not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. This responsibility isn’t on Russia, or solely on Facebook or Google or Twitter. It’s on us.

Set for chaos

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“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence nave been delusional. …

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory with whatever means necessary. …

The stage is thus being set for chaos.
The Opinions Essay / Opinion: Our constitutional crisis is already here, by contributing columnist Robert Kagan. Washington Post, September 26, 2021.

From a 6,000 word piece in Sunday’s Washington Post. I was glad to see this published — a very unusual (the Post’s editors seemed to barely knew where to put it), comprehensive, and forceful “long read” that attempts to make sense of this dangerous moment in America. The sense of doom, of the walls closing in on us from every direction (political, cultural, educational, economic) feels very true to me.

A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it. We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. …

Today’s arguments…will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy. Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it.

The dizzying career of Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles, whose low-budget 1971 phenomenon, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” — an X-rated film about a Black revolutionary’s survival on the run — proved a milestone of independent and African American cinema, died Sept. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Over a six-decade career, Mr. Van Peebles continually reinvented himself: as an Air Force officer, a San Francisco cable-car gripman (operator), a self-taught film auteur, a novelist in English and French, a Tony Award-nominated playwright and composer, an Emmy Award-winning TV writer, a spoken-word artist and, for a spell in the 1980s, the only Black floor trader on the American Stock Exchange.
Melvin Van Peebles, fiercely independent filmmaker, dies at 89, by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, September 22, 2021. Image is the poster for Peebles' 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Image credit: Employee(s) of Cinemation Industries, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Other things

“In giving us a glimpse of financial freedom, 2020 also robbed us of pretenses and excuses. If we are not doing a global vaccine plan, it is not for lack of funds. It is because indifference, or selfish calculation — vaccinate America first — or real technical obstacles prevent us from ‘actually’ doing it. It turns out that budget constraints, in all their artificiality, had spared us from facing the all-too-limited willingness and capacity for collective action. Now if you hear someone arguing that we cannot afford to bring billions of people out of poverty or we cannot afford to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, we know how to respond: Either you are invoking technological obstacles, in which case we need a suitably scaled, Warp Speed-style program to overcome them, or it is simply a matter of priorities. There are other things you would rather do.”
What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021

A sting in the tail

This failure [to develop a global vaccination program] is all the more glaring for another lesson that the pandemic revealed: Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.

The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that “anything we can actually do, we can afford.” The sheer scale of the action was intoxicating. … If money was a mere technicality, what else could be done? Action on social justice, climate change, the Green New Deal, all seemed within reach.

[But] Keynes’s bon mot has a sting in its tail: We can afford anything we can actually do. The problem is agreeing on what to do and how to do it.”

What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021