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Rebekah Berndt's avatar

Serbia has a history of “leaderless” protest movements—I put leaderless in quotes, because as you note, it is leaderless *by design,* and obviously people have put a lot of thought into that design. The current movement is undoubtedly built on the bones of Otpor, the student-led movement that overthrew Milosevic 25 years ago.

The original architects of that movement have since become consultants and trainers for various activist groups around the world, and there have been several attempts to seed Otpor-style movements in other countries—Extinction Rebellion is a notable example—none seem to have had the success that Otpor did.

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Joy Green's avatar

This is fascinating on many levels..

First thanks for highlighting the events in Serbia, so important to have some attention on this! My instinctive resonance is with the Arab Spring, so I hope it works out better and that there is enough underlying structure to ‘catch enough water after the flood recedes’ as that seemed to be the systemic difficulty there. It’s difficult to transition your society from a ‘limited access order’ to an ‘open access order’ at the best of times, let alone now, as it requires deep reconfiguration of your institutions, as you mention. And right now the world’s biggest OAO is heading rapidly in the opposite direction! It's very hard to rebuild your first horizon on the fly… although given the conditions of the Great De-rangement everyone is having to do it one way or another at the moment… and we need a wholesale reappraisal really of what other options we have away from the narrow binary of LAO / OAO. I always found the Kurds in Rojava to be an extraordinary and hopeful example but it is so extraordinary it wears a near-permanent invisibility cloak…

Really interesting metaphor with the Upside Down.. I was just thinking yesterday that so much feels like the level below invading the level above, or inverting the relationship… from the internet eating IRL, to what is happening in the US which could be characterised as the corporation eating the government (and is even characterised that way by the neo-reactionaries)

But is it an invasion upwards, or are we descending into it? My sense is it feels more like the latter… we are in a fairly advanced rot process now, the bones are starting to show, the shadow/degenerative yin is very strong and has attracted degenerative yang.. (and on cue, war preparations are intensifying..) And if so, reforming the institutions isn’t really going to work now, the task is more salvage and then heading to new territory…

Which comes to the point about prefigurative culture.. The West is really in a bind here I think, because the West is already a strongly prefigurative culture and has been for some time, unfortunately this has been mostly happening unconsciously, and as a result, mostly darkly. I mean this in the ‘dreaming into the field’ sense.. Which we kind of know without knowing, even referring to Hollywood as the dream factory (!..) This is a subtle subject (that I am not expert in) and not a straightforward matter but suffice to say, attention is very important, mass attention produces mass amplification.. And of course the internet has turned this into serious attentional jiu-jitsu that works at a level much deeper than lakoff framing… (The internet itself is a tragedy, it had the potential to be the noosphere but that’s a whole other tangent!) I would say that this is an area that progressives really need to get more skilled at, and also everyone who is interested in working with our higher potentials, this is, as Ghandi would say, about BEING the change and being very aware of attention, where and how it is directed at all levels…

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