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ECOTECTURE:
What inspired the PlaNetwork Conference?
ELIZABETH THOMPSON: The idea evolved
from our founding group - Erik Davis, David Ulansey, myself and
Jim. We had an interest in producing an event that looked at the
philosophical / cultural / spiritual implications of the emergence
of the World Wide Web at this moment in time. In discussingthis
idea, the intuition was clear that if there was some significance
to the timing of its emergence, it had to be connected to saving
the planet. We recognized immediately the importance of creating
a forum to communicate this intuition and hoped that in doing so
we could function as a catalyst forconretizing the connection for
others.
ECOTECTURE: When was that?
ET: 1998.
ECOTECTURE: So this has been in the
works for a couple of years?
JIM FOURNIER: Yes: We held an event
in the summer of 1999, where we invited about 50 people to the Presidio
to discuss these ideas. We thought we would hold the Conference
then, but we weren't ready and the idea wasn't ready. Y2K was still
on the horizon, and a lot of internet people were distracted with
that. During that first year, from 1998 to 1999, we would try to
describe the idea to people both on the technology and ecology sides,
and were more apt to get some blank stares (than we are now.) Now,
almost everyone we describe it to at least sees that there should
be an issue there, even if they don't fully understand.
ET: The impetus behind the July, 1999
gathering, in addition to rolling out some of our ideas and getting
a sense for who might be interested in our work from the environmental
community, was to discuss the possibility of creating a network
of environmental and ecologically focused websites in a new way.
The way in which they are organized right now is either on environmentally
focussed portal sites or web rings. We gathered about 50 people
for a large conversation about the possibilities for a different
model that would take what already exists to another level.
It was an interesting gathering. Web masters from a lot of different,
mostly local, environmental organizations were there. It was very
valuable for us in terms of our current project because it allowed
us to get an intimate look at the environmental activist community's
concerns about the use of the web. We have seen a tremendous acceleration
of the use of the web by the global activist community... The embracing
of these digital technologies just in the last year has been incredible.
JF: This Conference will have even
more of a grass-roots, activists tone to it because the 1999 gathering
was before (the) Seattle and Washington (World Trade Organization
Protests). The role of technology in those events was so important.
I heard a program on the radio yesterday that said that the level
of technology the Washington organizers had in their paint-peeling,
old, dilapidated warehouse headquarters... that it was just packed
with computers, satellite feeds and all of this stuff... very young
people, very savvy with the technology. The police apparently said
that this was the best organized demonstration they had ever seen,
and D.C. is a town that has seen a lot of demonstrations.
The information technology is really allowing people to organize
quickly. Some members of the press have been saying, "Why now? These
(environmental issues) have been present for a long time." The Web
is now serving as a vehicle for global, grass-roots communication
which really brings a sense of the rest of the world to people which
goes around the mainstream broadcast media.
Both the awareness of the global situation and tools for acting
on it are being rapidly accelerated by information technology.
ET: Yesterday, I also heard an interview
on the radio where someone was talking about the police reaction
to the way in which the protest had been organized. The model that
the activists use is a completely decentralized one. This is the
same model as the World Wide Web. The networking model of the Web
is finding explicit expression in these massive convergences of
activists.
The fact that the police could not go to the one person in charge,
the leading maverick figure around whom everyone was organizing,
was really throwing them off. Everyone had a voice in the decision
making process. It was a consensus oriented process. The way in
which people are using these tools is informing the models for action.
It's really pretty cool.
ECOTECTURE: Do you remember the Liberation
News Service? In the 1960's it was the news service for the underground
newspapers. When you mentioned getting around the mainstream media
or having all the information filtered through some corporate sieve...
the Liberation News Service was the antidote.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, for example, there were
riots in virtually every city in the United States. For the most
part, if you were watching television, you didn't know about what
was going on in the other cities. You knew what was going on in
your city because it looked like Vietnam. There was smoke coming
up everywhere. But you didn't know what was going on in the other
cities. The only way I knew was because I was working on an underground
paper in D.C. at the time, and the Liberation News Service kept
us informed.
What you are talking about is analogous to that, but, obviously,
what you are talking about is much more wide-spread.
JF: It may also be a metaphor for what
is going on within this country and globally. We are continually
told by the centralized media that everybody in the culture thinks
things are one way, and we may know that within our little circle
of friends that we don't agree with that, but we feel like we are
just out on the fringe and the rest of the mainstream world is over
there.
So there are several levels of knowing. One is to know that you
know, the next is to know that everybody else knows too, then there
is a third level where you all know that you all know. When you
get to that third level of knowing that the emperor has no clothes,
the jig is up. But, until you get that point, even if you have a
pretty good sense that everybody else knows, you can't really act,
you don't really have that power.
I think these distributed information technologies are bringing
(knowledge) at all three levels. The more the media is centralized
in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations... it is as if they
are raising the bar... and they can keep building the dam higher.
At a certain point where it really can't be raised any more, there
may be a tremendous tension to knock it over. I think that is what
happened in Eastern Europe. They kept ratcheting up the level of
control until finally it got to a level of absurdity where no one
would participate. It seemed as if it collapsed and changed out
of no where.
While I think that analogy is only good up to a point, I think
that we have been seeing an acceleration of the (idea of) the market
as God and efficiency and economics as the only things that count.
Yet, increasingly (we are) being told that there isn't enough money
do any of the ecological, social or humanistic things that everybody
feels are critical to life. Yet the profit levels keep going up
for the few.
I have no idea what this actually going to lead to. But I think
what we are seeing now in D.C. and Seattle and the use of these
new information technology tools and the connections (being made)
between peasants in the third world and the labor unions in this
country and environmentalists... these factions that, in the past,
we have been told are each other's enemies... joining forces...
it is very exciting.
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ECOTECTURE:
What would you like to see come out of the Conference, specifically?
ET: There are a lot of different answers
(to that). We have talked a lot about activism and the Web, but
that is just one piece of our programming pie. We have people coming
who are working in the hard core sciences, high tech industry, architecture
and design, social theory - artists are a major presense - there
is a panel called "surfing the global brain."
Our challenge, and what has been of most interest for me, is to
see what happens when we gather all of these people in the same
place - we can't predict the outcomes. Our intention has been to
create a dynamic forum where people from distinctly different backgrounds,
who, we can assume, are very concerned with the state of the planet,
can meet and inspire each other. I am approached all the time by
people who look at our program and ask, "What is this? Is it a professional
conference, an activist conference, a high tech conference, what
is it?" I find this amazing, no alarming - it is as if we have forgotten
that true cultural community arises from the mixing of disparate
hearts and minds.
It is my hope that planetwork will foster some interesting, accidental
collisions of different perspectives. This is how interesting ideas
are born. I suppose, in effect, we are creating a kind of temporary
town square. I am always most interested in creating these kinds
of living cultural organisms
The web, for all the hype about it's facilitation ofcommunity,
actually encourages people to further specialize and therefore control
the kind of interaction with others they choose to participate in.
The control aspect of this is alarming to me as one can choose to
communicate only with narrowly focused groups of people who are
exactly like themselves in a certain way. Planetwork gathers people
who might not normally find themselves in the same place. The outcome
cannot be predicted, but I find the challenge very exciting.
JF: I have the same sense that the most
important thing we are doing is to create a forum for a very eclectic
mix of people that wouldn't normally meet each other to interact,
and we really can't know what will come out of that. It is really
important not to know, but to just put a lot of energy into trying
to create the conditions for that unknown synthesis and, possibly,
magic, to happen.
Personally I have thoughts and ideas about what could come out
of that. As an organizer I try to put those in the background. But
I think it is worth mentioning them.
One thing that could come out of the kind of mix of people with
very different backgrounds and skills would be collaborative syntheses
(of) putting together different skill sets to make some of the things
that I think need to happen. I get the sense that the people doing
scientific work are often frustrated because it is so hard to get
the ear of politicians who just have their fingers up to see which
way the wind is blowing and aren't paying attention to the reality
on the ground and the public (that) is just being fed the mass media
pabulum. In order to take this information that, in many cases,
is coming off large computers (systems) and modeling systems that
are pretty esoteric and removed from even the Web, and bring that
out to the public in a form that could be easily grasped and digested
requires the skills of people who are artists, graphic designers,
web people, or in some cases even people with entrepreneurial and
business skills. So, one of my personal hopes is that by bringing
together this very heterogeneous group of people there may be contacts
that are formed, or even collaborative projects that don't exist
now.
I also have in mind a consortium proposal that friends of mine
and I developed for a pair of web sites called Planet Monitor and
Earth Model. The idea is that they would have a doctor-patient relationship
between them where Earth Model looks like a globe sitting in an
operating room equipped with readouts so if you are from the press
you can go there and immediately get information about critical
conditions. If you wanted to click on the earth you could zoom in
and get all kinds of different data sets that you could view on
a standard format. If we could get the format standardized, people
would probably start writing to it. The idea would be to try to
get the ball rolling on a consortium that many different scientific,
political and NGO groups could pull information from and put information
back into. All the members of the consortium would equally participate.
I have no idea if something like that would come out of this conference.
But I suspect that there are all kinds of people coming who have
similar ideas up their sleeves. We may find when they start bumping
into one another that a lot of people have thought of more or less
the same thing at the same time. This has happened throughout history.
I think it is happening even more now. These flows may converge
and real synergy may happen when they get together.
ECOTECTURE: When I think of a Conference
like this, I think of a bunch of speakers speaking to a bunch of
people. You have a bunch or presenters that you have specifically
picked out of the six billion people or so on the planet and said,
"OK., we think that it would be neat if these people got together
in the same room because of the synergy that they have in there."
Is there space and time set aside so that sort of interaction can
happen, or is it a little bit more chaotic than that? In what way
have you provided for that interaction?
ET: We have had lot of discussion about
how to create a form that reflects in some ways the content besides
the model of chaos (laughs). To facilitate an interactive experience
for people who are attending the conference - and I want to emphasize
the fact that the people who register to attend these types of events
are just as interesting, if not more so, that the presenters - we
will have a room designated for people to present their own web
sites so others can learn about the work they are doing, the digital
tools they are using, as well as create a space for further, and
more intitmate interaction between speakers and attendees.
Then there is the "Online Conference."
JF: We are just announcing the Online
Conference this week, as so much work has gone into creating the
face to face to Conference. But in parallel with that we have been
working on a web site where we will be putting up all of the sessions,
if not in perfectly real time, then very close to it. Then everything
can be available not just at the Conference, but on an ongoing basis.
We will be partnering with other web sites that are hosting events
that are somehow parallel to this. For instance, the Utne
Cafe is hosting a discussion forum for us, and they will be
part of the Online Conference, as will be some of the other discussion
forums. ecoTECTURE magazine will put up parallel information.
Right now the Online Conference is a page within the www.planetworkers.org
site but it will soon be whole new, separate site, called PlaNetworkers.net.
We are encouraging people from around the world who can't be there
live to put up content, so it is really a two way street where we
are using a face to face conference to try to catalyze as much activity
(as possible) on the web around the issue of ecology in May, 2000.
The real objective of the event is to bring the issues of the environment
to the Web.
To that end, for the people who are registered face to face, we
also have a data base where they can go in and put up information
about themselves and share with other people who attend and that
will also be extended to people who won't be able to attend. People
will be able to search the database with key work searches, depending
on their interests.
ET: We hope to begin discussions around
certain topics prior to the conference.
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