I’m looking for people to invite to one or more brainstorm sessions to help figure out how we might use tech to recruit and commit the numbers needed for the nonviolent civil resistance, hence morally courageous, strategies first pioneered by Gandhi and later by King et al) to succeed. Here’s why: (One minute read:)
Historically, as the research of Chenoweth, Zunes, et al have clearly shown (https://bit.ly/echenoweth), the strategy of nonviolent civil resistance (NVCR) has been twice as effective as violent strategies for virtually all major advances in the battles for human rights, labor rights, civil rights, preventing or stopping wars, overthrowing fascist governments, preventing fascist coups, etc for the past 125 years. While electoral strategy (voting) has also been essential, electoral strategy itself has almost always been insufficient (see e.g. how we really passed all the NewDeal legislation). Moreover, the research shows that only 3.5% of the general public has to be mobilized for NVCR strategies to achieve such system-changing successes, often as little as 2-2.5%. So in the little time we have left to save what is savable of Mother Nature and democracy, and to rapidly reverse our grotesque level of wealth inequality, to end corporatocracy, etc., the key question is how can we use technology to enable nonviolent civil resistance-based campaigns to recruit and commit this 2.5-3.5% of the general public to volunteer for the truly morally courageous actions such as sitins, strikes, nonviolent direct actions, harmful-tech turnoffs (eg National FaceBook Turnoff week/month) necessary to win the most important battles of “this most critical moment in the history of our species” (Carl Sagan), in other words, morally courageous nonviolent actions well beyond petitioning, p2p texting, emailing and calling MOCs, voting (of course still essential, but totally insufficient), non-generous donating, etc.? And if we succeed, since this is the tool that would make all the most urgent and important system changes possible, might this new tool be the highest best ethical use of technology?