First Light of Dawn

In times of crisis: make the radical, common sense.

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In times of crisis: make the radical, common sense.

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Do you feel it too?

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100% sure something is deeply wrong.

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Is it just me?

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Read the Narrative Brief 1.1 for more info.

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Trump shock? (video reached 1.3 Million views on Facebook)

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#AuroraProject Narrative Brief 1.1

This is the visualization of 90.000 tweets on #FeesMustFall Social Movement.

Capitalism? What capitalism? A system is crumbling the world over, but in South Africa few know it by name

In 2016 when Time magazine published an article stating that American capitalism was in  “great crisis” the explicit intention was to save it.  It seemed in “the richest and most market-oriented country in the world” rethinking a system, that the Harvard Institute of Politics found little over half the population 18 and over actually support, is not an option.

Less than a year on, dissatisfaction with capitalism continues to grow. A survey by the American Culture and Faith Institute found that  37% of American adults overall report preferring socialism to capitalism. That rises to 54% amongst liberals, but is as high as 23% even amongst conservatives

Globally, there are similar signs that faith in capitalism is crumbling, and the number of people questioning the system is reaching epidemic proportions. The following findings are from a YouGov seven-nation poll:

There is an almost universal belief that the world's biggest businesses have cheated and polluted their way to success, with barely 10% of respondents in all seven countries surveyed thinking big businesses are 'clean’.

Respondents in all seven of the nations surveyed agreed that the poor get poorer in capitalist economies.

In the following economies that have been successful by capitalist standards, Britain, Brazil, Germany and America, parents do not expect their children to be richer, safer and healthier.

Negativity is most pronounced in America than in any other of the six countries surveyed. Their deep pessimism about the future is combined with suspicion about big businesses’ ethics and strong support for protectionism.

That the above poll was commissioned by right wing think tank the Legatum Institute is telling in itself: despite its claim - rightfully - that “global prosperity is at its highest point in the past decade” (we also know that global GDP has grown around 630% since 1980) the poll shows that the link between wealth and satisfaction seems to be almost the reverse of what you’d expect– as the world is getting richer on aggregate, so aggregate dissatisfaction is growing.

The narrative challenge here is that a critique of capitalism is often discussed in relation to socialism, which is reductive and backward looking. The essential point is not how warm people may feel about socialism, but that an astonishingly vast number of people are questioning capitalism.

What’s more, though the sickness of capitalism is experienced in every way, people often do not name capitalism as the cause of their malaise. Analysis of 700K tweets that mention South Africa’s Fees Must Fall movement reveal that while the conversation was intersectional (in other words connecting many different forms of oppression from economic to racial) capitalism was scarcely directly mentioned in those discussions or in the public debate across South African mainstream media.

Today in South Africa, the trending hashtag is no longer #FeesMustFall but #ZumaMustFall, speaking to the disapproval with how president Zuma is conducting affairs of state. Even this conversation provides no critique of the underlying system that entrenches inequality, leads to corporate capture of the state and suggests the real revolution is still to come: #CapitalismMustFall.

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Aurora Listening Model

A Listening by Federico Zuvire Cruz on Scribd

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If Trump was a map, where are you standing?

Imagine that you start watching one-of-those post apocalyptic movies. The world is being destroyed, right? Nothing new. But wait! There is no hero here. No ex-CIA agent, no ‘chosen one’, no batman or superman, no brave white male is coming to save us all (maybe, even, this time they are the evil ones).

#Au ‘FirstLightsOfDawn’ Episode 1: What is this place? First Iteration: Finding the hero.

Suddenly we’ve got 60 million tweets on Trump’s Election, maybe one of the biggest global conversations on wtf is this place? When we started looking at that data set, we felt we were entering into Mordor, that’s why we baptized this monster ‘the political cartography of hate’, so much grief, so much despair. The consolidation of post-truth, the lies that shape this fake world, the concentration of news, the ‘window’ to the world on facebook hands, the cynical, awful face of capitalism: the re-rise of a global fascism.

But wait, let’s not stare at the US-centric narrative. Once we started to walk through these hate-lands, we began to notice that in the peripheries, there were other voices, they were not in the spots of ‘light’, media wasn’t talking about them, but they were not few, their subtle voice was everywhere, they were talking about the future.

When everything seems lost, this scene when the bad evil racist multibillionaire steals the ring and his alter-orcs celebrate, an anonymous massive force punch their face.

And then we see them, thousands and thousands of them, taking the streets, taking the schools, taking the airports, shouting out and loud: RESIST! You know, this is the moment when Enya sings and the trumpets sound loud.

Saturday’s Women’s March got global, 600 “sister” marches took place in 57 countries to protest far-right populism.

Are they the possibility of hope in this awful movie? The camera zooms-out, we can see that this is happening everywhere (where everywhere is bigger than LA or NY, a real extreme long shot), we can hear a global collective consciousness that is emerging, that is interconnected and is evolving. We can see that aurora for a few seconds before the lights turn off again.

This is where #AuroraProject is born, in the deepest hours of night, when hope seems lost. Lost in this endless space of possibilities (internet), we know we need a tool to navigate. We are sure that our heroes are out there, somewhere, but how to start looking for them?

We have a guess. To understand the collective voice that will change the fate of the world, we need to start speaking another language. We cannot use the old and boring binary thinking of left vs right, of capitalism vs communism. We need to articulate our first words in the language of change.

That’s why we have built a compass: the ‘Aurora Listening Model’. We know we are searching for those unseen heroes, but as they are hidden in plain view, we need to reveal their voice, sometimes as a painted crack on the wall ‘are you on the other side?’, for those who are right-there, resisting and fighting and creating those beautiful alternatives, but sometimes as a mirror glued on the same wall, ‘could you be there?’ for those who are already changing things but are not self-aware that they are actually the heroes of this movie, maybe even for those almost-theres who are about to swallow the red AND the blue pill, have you thought what would happen if we deny the binary election of storytelling? We need to write new narratives.