Patrick Goddard performs Apocalipstick – like lobbing a Molotov cocktail through the window of England’s green and pleasant land

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Skype conversation between Yuri Pattison and Josh Harris

Pattison: I came across Weliveinpublic, which I think is the first example of live blogging - you filmed in every room of the house and people watched you 24hrs a day.

Harris: It wasn’t that they were watching us, it was that they were getting into the hard drive of our brains and participating in our decision making process. I would get into a fight with my girlfriend and then she would go on social media and they would tell her to tell me to go sleep on the couch – which was out of character for her. People started controlling us.

Pattison: So Social media shifts people’s persona

Harris: Well actually Facebook is just a tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t produce our lives very well. It is going to be more sophisticated than that.

Pattison: What led you to do set up Net Band Command?

Harris: Every part of life is censored and monitored by the system, so instead of having the CIA or the FBI watching us, we do it ourselves.

Pattison: So are you reclaiming the network?

Harris: Well I don’t have any clearance level to watch other people. Someone in Scotland Yard is watching you, but I can produce it better. Scotland yard’s weakness is that its not very interactive. In the world of Net band

Command you can earn high security clearance and you can work in unison to effect change in the world. We are proposing to take over Tate Modern and turn it into a command centre for the world.

Pattison: Are the decisions of Net Band Command fair?

Harris: I just want to do a military action against the Tate Modern. In a virtual government, in any government people do good and bad. At least I have high security clearance.

Pattison: After you finished weliveinpublic what happened?

Harris: I was being hunted by the authorities. I looked not normal. In this post 9/11 society anything that’s fishy gets the fish eye! I was on the run and I can tell you, its pretty cool – for a while then its nice to settle down

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Soheila Sokhanvari on Iran from 1925 -1979
Sokhanvari takes us back to 1925 to tell the story of Modern Iran, a place that underwent a dramatic transformation when the royalty was overthrown and the Shah took power. He was pro-western and passed laws about wearing western clothes. She discusses the role of the British and the Americans in bringing about the revolution in 1979, through their desire for oil and fear of communism from nearby Russia.

Rammy El: The Egyptian Patriarchy
The structure of Egyptian society has always existed with the father at the top and there is a direct synergy with the position of the father and that of the godhead. Every organisational structure in Egypt is based on this patriarchy from the school to the factory to government. ‘Consider Mubarak as your father’ was the slogan. The problem with this is that this system of rule is highly inefficient.
The Egyptian language has many proverbs and sayings:
If you don’t have an elder representative you must seek one
The father is the God of the house.
El sites various ways culture has subverted this:
The novel Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz for which he received publishing bans and death threats told the story about a father who favours one son above the others (they are Satan, Jesus, Moses and Mohamed). He relates how Satan is expelled for standing up to his father.
In Egyptian society father knows best. Any non-conforming person is threatening. They are portrayed as unorthodox and dangerous and Political parties have respect because they’ve been around for a long time, not for their policies.

Throughout the Golden age of Egyptian cinema this patriarchal society has been ridiculed:
El presents a series of films including:

‘School of Trouble makers’ by Ali Salem. 1973
‘The Kids have grown up’ directed by Samir Al Asfory, 1979
‘Between the palaces’ 1954 written by Naguib Mahfouz directed by Hassan El Iman

The Arab Spring occurred because there was a crack in the system that gave people the chance to reflect and ask that maybe father got it wrong. This seismic change was so big as almost impossible to comprehend
What happens when the father is removed?
Because of Social Media patriarchy can not dominate the way it used to and the young do not see stagnation as stability, they are not afraid of change. Extreme personality politics will fall to the side and substance will take control.

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Soheila Sokhanvari on Iran from 1925 -1979
Sokhanvari takes us back to 1925 to tell the story of Modern Iran, a place that underwent a dramatic transformation when the royalty was overthrown and the Shah took power. He was pro-western and passed laws about wearing western clothes. She discusses the role of the British and the Americans in bringing about the revolution in 1979, through their desire for oil and fear of communism from nearby Russia.

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Discussion session with Aaron Bastani and Ray Filar

Question: There is this strange idea where health has become a building block in the neoliberal system – eating well and taking care of yourself. So being unhealthy becomes a radical alternative, even if it is detrimental to the person.

Filar: Yes, if you drop out you don’t win. This is why communities are so important

Question: What do you mean when you talk about abundance?

Bastani: The obvious examples are Spotify or Amazon, organisations that give us access to any book or song. A socialist would say Nationalise them. It could happen to Amazon because they are too big to fail although its highly unlikely. But I am more interested in local solutions like the Boris bikes removing the idea of ‘my’ bike, or ‘my’ car and being more collective.

Question: In terms of mental health issues, the private made public happens all the time on Social media doesn’t it?

Filar: Yes but Facebook is a form of surveillance. This is not to say the kind of communities I envisage could not take place on social media. But in terms of mental health issues, I think it is important that these communities exist in another form. The problems with Social Media is that it has an isolating effect. The question is how you extend solidarity in Social Media?

Question: Does social media stop people demonstrating because they can rent their anger out on the Internet?

Bastani: if you look at the scale of some of the recent mobilisations it is in the 100s and 1000s, and I’m not just not talking about the Arab spring. The technology allows these protests to scale up to massive proportions this is thanks to digital networks.

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Ray Filar: How to stay sane when everything is shit

1. Success as a person = a successful career:

Filar says we define ourselves by the work we do. Politicians have championed hard working families but capitalism relies on the success of the few and the failure of the many.
The suggestion is that the unemployed are not trying hard enough creates a mental health situation.

2 The social imperative to stay sane:
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON
This is the worst slogan for anyone mentally ill.
This individualises pain. We are supposed to cope and if you are not coping you are broken. You have to get treatment. This is a deliberate political strategy – neoliberals want us to be too sick so we cannot object to what they do politically.
450 million people globally have a mental health issues
In the UK one in four adults has a diagnosable mental health condition during the course of a year.
There is the idea with mental health that you are being lazy or you just need to get over it.

3. Refusing to stay sane as a radical action
Filar publishes articles about politics and mental health. There are two types of people  who write to her in response to this: those that say these articles resonate with them and the others who tell her she is brave. This is because writing about mental health can endanger your career. Who is going to want to employ you?
Filar wants to see a change in government policy by embracing mental health. This will hopefully build more mature, caring functional relationships.

4. Solidarity and communities of care
Filar wants to form communities in which it is ok to talk about mental health. It is a form of radicalism when taboo subjects are turned outwards and publicised. Sharing these emotions is to create a community from which social activism can happen.

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Presentation by Aaron Bastani:
Starts by listing the problems:

1. The present economy: Bastani shows a film of the American Republican Paul Kanjorski discussing the electronic run on the banks in 2008. He describes this as an existential threat to the entirety of western civilization.
This he says was the first trigger that awoke many from the apathetic slumber was the economic crisis. How bad was that crisis? It is still here. The solutions that have been introduced are temporary.
2. The long-term crisis in the ecology. The rise in temp 2 degrees C would mean the world JG Ballard describes in ‘Drowned World’ could be a reality.
Bastani discusses Wage Capital Relation – this means that capital eliminates people from the working model thereby diminishing amount of human labour needed.
But capitalists need wealthy time rich customers, and they want low paid workers, which results in ever expanding credit.
3. Political representation – memberships of political parties are in decline across the world. The conservative party had three million members and now has less than 100,000. This, Bastani says undermines the possibility of these organisations having any meaningful influence and means they are sycophantic to the media in order to woo voters.

So what are we looking at in the Future?

Three things he suggest we might see:
The collapse of Europe
That China will dominate the economy of the future
White people are going to be an ethnic minority in the Uk by 2065.
The world will be getting warmer.

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Live blog by Jessica Lack.
Good morning, and welcome to the second in our series of live blogs for Futurecamp, the ten week events series taking place here at Wysing Arts Centre over the summer. You can check out the other Futurecamp events here.

Today’s session asks what the future holds for the global economy and whether economic forecasts can shape the political landscape. Has society become more active or apathetic since the economic crisis? And what, if anything, can we do about the growing intrusions into our private lives through digital and drone technology?

I shall be keeping you updated throughout the afternoon. The event kicks off at noon with talks by Aaron Bastani, activist and founder of Novara Media, and Open Democracy Journalist Ray Filar.

In the meantime you can:

• Check out Aaron Bastani’s online site Novara Media
• Read Ray Filar’s article Mental Health: Why we’re all sick under Neoliberalism
• Leave your questions on the Facebook page and I shall endeavor to introduced them into the discussion at 1:30pm

In light of the recent ruling against three of Al Jazeera’s journalists and their subsequent jail sentences, our thoughts turn to the Middle East. I’m looking forward to hearing Al Jazeera producer Rammy El at 2:30pm on the ramifications of this ruling on free speech and impartial reporting in Egypt. You can get up-to-speed on the latest developments of the Al Jazeera court case here.

The artist Soheila Sokhanvari was nominated for the Catlin Art Prize for her work TPAJAX. She will be discussing Iranian politics from 1920 to the fall of the Shah in 1979 and the impact it had on the culture of Iran.

Artists Yuri Pattison and Josh Harris will be confronting the pervasiveness of digital technology in our everyday lives. Harris is perhaps best known for his weliveinpublic project in which he lived under 24-hour Internet surveillance.

Artist Nicoline Van Harskamp presents Yours in Solidarity, a film about the Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger who died in 1999.

Finally Patrick Goddard performs Apocalipstick at 4:45pm

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The writer Jessica Lack will be providing a live commentary on todays' event Private vs Public: Activism, Economics and Politics Today. Tune into Facebook and Twitter for live updates.

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