The multitude movement limited by the pace of cultural change and of general understanding of open movements

Since the start of the #occupy movement, whenever I had the chance to engage in a deeper conversation about the movement with active members, with journalists, or simply with people passing by the  #occupy Montreal camp, where I was very active, I tried to put the movement in the broader context of what we call the multitude constructive revolution. To my surprise, almost everyone was clueless and probably saw in me signs of insanity, because I was speaking a language they were not familiar with. Only a very few surprised me, being able to absorb very quickly the information I was trying to convey, agreeing with most of it. Those individuals had one thing in common, they were very close to the software world. They understood the influence of the new technology in shifting the balance of power towards individuals and their communities.      

Rebranding the #occupy movement

What do we hear when we listen to the forgotten U.S. nation-wide End the Fed movement in 2008, which sparked the TeaParty movement, or to the so-called Twitter revolution in 2009 in the Republic of Moldova, or to the 2009-2010 Green Revolution in Iran, or to the Arab Spring, or to the 15-M movement in Spain, and now to Occupy Wall Street and to Occupy Everywhere? We hear a desire for change. Not any change, people want a PROFOUND structural change.

The multitude is now awakened thanks to the new media. We are now conscious of our situation and we are starting to imagine a better world. Moreover, the multitude becomes increasingly aware of the potential of the new democratic digital technology. As we experiment with it in various creative ways we grow confident, we grow empowered, we get this feeling that change IS indeed possible and that WE can make it happen.

How fragile is the system?

Let's imagine a scenario and try to assess how fast the multitude could demolish the system. Hypothetically speaking, the act of personal bankruptcy can one day become an act of rebellion and spread like a wildfire throughout the world. What would be the consequences? How possible is this?

What keeps people that are in debt up to their eyeballs from declaring personal bankruptcy?

New Economy, New Wealth

This presentation by Arthur Brock is really nicely done. It pretty much summarizes everything. Send it to your friends who think you're crazy...   : )

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

By AllOfUs

Takeover - MULTITUDE rise up!

America is on an accelerated path towards tyranny. How do you get from freedom to tyranny? Naomi Wolf thinks it can be done in only 10 steps.

At this moment, many US states are introducing legislation to break down labor unions and to establish a chain of command from the federal and state governmental level to the local level. The attacks on unions are NOT about capitalism vs socialism. Depart from this mentally disabling dichotomy! Think outside of the box! The goal of the elite is to dissolve social structure, to diminish our capability to organize against the establishment. Unions are powerful social organizations which can catalyze massive opposition against tyrannical measures. You might be against labor and socialist ideas, but you must recognize the role of unions in enabling popular descent. Learn from Egypt and Tunisia. We need to fight the tyrants who dress in red AND blue and keep us divided over sterile political ideologies. The Democrat and the Republican parties are the two faces of the same fiat "Federal" Reserve coin.

MULTITUDE build an infrastructure for mass movements, organize, plan and TAKE ACTION!

By AllOfUs

The Wind of Change

Listen to The Wind of Change, narrated by Tibi

See the section The Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

What's the best path towards a better world?

Every time I meet new people they ask me about the Multitude Project. After giving them updates about the movement and our activities they almost inevitably bring up the problem of social change. Is real change possible? Is it worth the fight? Is every system equally corruptible?

How to initiate real, positive social change? This question has followed me for years. I think I have an answer, and I would dearly like to get your opinion on it.

My solution is to offer people value, for themselves, their families, as well as for their communities. If the process through which they must go in order to acquire this value goes against the established order we have a wining formula for positive social change. 


More and more individuals and groups will be naturally drawn towards the new alternatives, simply because they constitute value for them. As the new order (established by a system of new alternatives) becomes increasingly populated, the old order gradually becomes abandoned. The weight of society gradually and naturally shifts from the old society to the new. This is what I call a CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION. There are many instances of such revolutions in human history, for example the Industrial Revolution. I contrast this with the type of radical and sudden change that characterized the Bolshevik Revolution, where one order was demolished first, to be replaced by a new, untested one. A constructive revolution is in essence a metamorphosis process. It is a gradual shift in human resources from an old set of processes to a new one, one that can provide more (hopefully in a more sustainable manner) for the same effort. 


At this moment, everyone involved in the multitude movement, either knowingly or not, is working hard to propose and to build alternatives that are based on a different paradigm, and which constitute a real source of value for every individual, and particularly for the creative and hard working ones among us. In more concrete terms, I am referring to those individuals who created and are involved in maintaining and improving the Internet; democratic and p2p infrastructures for communication, for massive collaboration and coordination; affordable tools for data analysis, automation, decision-making, etc. This includes these individuals who gave us Linux, Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Twitter, alternative currencies (see Cyclos), peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, the infrastructure for networks of local and sustainable food production and distribution, Connexion, personal energy production, value networks... 

These people embracing the values embedded within the Multitude Movement are not agitators driven by some abstract cause. They are working hard to provide people with whatever they need RIGHT NOW to insure their survival: education, affordable energy, new forms of transportation, of communication, etc. 

What I am proposing are new institutions! 

Human beings are malleable, they have a tremendous ability to adapt to changing conditions and circumstances. I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania and I spent my first 14 years witnessing first-hand how institutions change and how people change with them. Institutions reinforce social patterns and shape relations between individuals in society. 

People inherently respond to institutions by adaptation. The state may induce a nationalistic mentality and corporations induce a corporate mentality. An institution is not a building. It is a process by which a set of constraints and incentives shapes human relations and interactions, and forges culture. By changing these constraints/incentives people will also change, re-adapt to the new environment. The alternatives we propose help establish a different set of constraints/incentives. We hope that enough people will adopt them to become mainstream, thus changing our entire culture. There are enough individuals out there who are naturally compatible with the system we propose to spark the fire... In fact the fire is already burning and growing.


Are YOU involved in the creation, improvement, maintenance of democratic and popular systems which allow peer-to-peer exchange of any sort? Then YOU ARE PART OF THE MULTITUDE MOVEMENT. 

Please visit our homepage, you might find yourself at home there.

By t!b!