everything is made of jam

I am, however, out of “eye” Buttons at the moment.

There is a limited (25 of them) print available in the Bunny store. I won’t have this particular print for the Thing (in fact, it’s a bit of a fund-raiser for the event) , but I will have a different design, possibly on the same theme.

The postcards are still work in progress, as the paper stock I have really isn’t suitable to send them. Might release them as mini-prints instead while I’m working out how to make them worth the money.

And now I have to get back to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. Like maybe sleeping.

Some postcards I’m preparing for the Bunny store, probably going to be a set of five. Prices unknown (suggestions welcome).

Also trying out a new colouring technique.

“Chasing”

“Moonlaser”

“Snail”

“Indie”

I was doodling around today and came up with this. I have nothing much to say about it sadly.

And a wallpaper version (1024×768) can be found here.

Right, back into hiding.

I posted this over at Whitechapel in a thread that was initially about Anonymous. I’ve just copypasted it here as is rather than try to reframe it for the blog. I think it needs expanding back into the original point, but it does sum up some of my feelings about organisation without really delving into them

In a nutshell my feelings are this : Big Ideas are great, Government is ok, greater local autonomy and delegation to true experts could do wonders for our institutions.

Just look at what the Obama campaign has  managed to do with The Big Idea and local autonomy. And Al Qa’ida come to think of it if you replace the agenda of Unyeilding Hope with one of Fundamentalist Supremacy. (no, I’m not saying the Obama campaign is terrorism, for fucks sake)

I’m more of the opinion that there are many tasks that people can perform as ad hoc collaborative groups and do a better job at it than top down government. [here]

Maybe, but you can’t escape the fact that someone or something (and I’m starting to think it’s more Something than Someone) has to provide the impetus to solve the task in the first place. Add to this the fact that people aren’t telepathic and can’t see the whole picture, so we need some way of organising the component elements together in order to get them to work. Unless we want to focus purely on small problems.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a The Big Idea is the lynchpin to literally everything. I can’t back this up with any writings from important educated people unfortunately, but I can explain a little about what I mean. I’ll apologise now, but it’s all probably really obvious stuff and I’ve probably missed something important somewhere along the line.

Let’s say we have a problem of getting people from Point A to Point B, it needs to be safe and it needs to be relatively comfortable. We have these things that can fly. What shall we do? The Big Idea is “Safe Air Travel”.

The manufacturers build the planes, mechanics fix the planes, the pilots fly the planes, the air-traffic controllers organise the planes and stop them crashing into each other. Somehow, the whole thing works and we’ve solved international travel all of a sudden. And there isn’t one big voice in the sky saying “do this”. But there are the head people of Airbus, Boeing, American Airlines, British Airways, the British Aviation Authority, the Federal Aviation Authority… and so on all playing their part in making sure The Big Idea works.

It’s evident that each level of Government, or - let’s face it - an Organisation sees a different pieces of the puzzle, or at least the issues at different distances. Central Government cannot deal with - say - the replacement of a broken park bench, and likewise a Town Council can’t (or rather don’t need to) see the overall picture of how many park benches there are in the country and how it relates to - say - health.

The Obama campaign is a decent example of why leadership - especially virtual leadership in the form of The Big Idea - is important. A great deal of the work was done by groups that acted more-or-less independently from each other, but they all used the same language, same iconography, same tools in order to get the job done. They all had their own small organisational structures as well. How the smaller organisations interacted with the gestalt is probably rather different to how the Republicans ran their campaign. A degree of freedom for the small group to deal with the unique issues that it faced in order to get The Big Idea sorted. As a result, I don’t think there was any deviation from the Big Idea, and that’s what made it work so well.

I feel there’s been an increasing tendency to white-wash low level government and to assume the only democratic voice we have is a General Election vote, when you can just as easily sit in on town council meetings, petition local MPs, meet with focus groups and get little things done that way. …assuming that US politics is even remotely analogous to UK politics (…UK politics is just awkward, irritating and somehow functions despite being composed entirely of middle-aged men shouting at each other).

It is like the smaller issues and our unique situation does not exist, and we want a say in what the Big Idea is rather than how the Big Idea will be solved.