Organising an in person discussion group against social and political isolation for Sydney, Australia

Apes together strong

VERY important edit: The date is now the 18th of December 2022. All other details remain the same.

TLDR: There will be an in-person discussion group in Sydney, Australia on the 11th of December, 2022- to discuss social isolation. If, like most people in the world, you can’t make Sydney, it would be cool if you’d organize one in your area.

For a while now I’ve been talking about rising social isolation. I’ve been saying things like:

1. Online interaction is no substitute for in person interaction. In person interaction has both personal benefits and political possibilities that interaction mediated through a screen doesn’t have.

2. We need to talk to people like fellows we value, to seek common understanding. To stop maneuvering to win conversations and clout and relate person to person. Although this is possible online, it is more difficult. We need to bond and mingle- that could be about politics but it doesn’t have to be. In an atomized society, forming something as apolitical as an informal basketball team can be a good.

3. Machine learning created content is about to start flooding the internet in the next three years or so. That will make online space even more difficult to use for positive political purposes. We need an exodus offline.

4. Atomized social life, and a spectacular sphere of politics where events and scandals are constantly happening but nothing ever changes for the better are two sides of the one coin. Without the power of real, in person, social movements and unions, politics becomes: “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” As individual dust particles, we are blown about by the wind. We swirl around and around and accomplish nothing.

5. Even when people break out of social isolation, it’s often in groups of two or three. From the point of view of forming mass movements, social-molecularism is only slightly better than social-atomism.

6. We need to start conceptualizing this as a hybrid problem - call it, social-political isolation- and make steps to address it in the offline world.

7. Going to the real world after talking to thousands of people online can, in some ways, feel like a demotion. It can feel like there’s no way that what you do in small groups can possibly be as influential as talking to thousands of people. But that is an illusion. Speaking to an online audience can be meaningful and is worth doing, but if it remains solely in the circuit of the online, then no matter how many times the sparks go back and forth among the circuits they will fizzle. Not just political meaning, but even personal meaning is lost if things remain solely online because they lack the kind of collectivity that can imprint ideas permanently into reality.

8. Now seems like a pretty good time to take on these problems. Twitter, which a lot of leftwingers, including maybe myself, used as a substitute for real action, is in a free-fall.

However, I feel I’ve been a hypocrite. I’m blessed with many friends and I spend plenty of time talking to them in real life, but rarely in groups. And when I do spend time hanging out with others in groups, they’re often groups organized by other people.

That’s why I’m organizing a discussion group against social and political isolation. Our first meeting will be a straight discussion group, but after the initial meeting my idea is that we would transition into being a reading group.

My location is Sydney Australia.

The time and place will be: the 11th of December, 2022 at the Forest Lodge Hotel, Forest Lodge.

If you can’t make it to Sydney, I would encourage you to look into setting up a discussion group- even if it’s only yourself and another person- in your area. However if that’s impossible, I would be happy to have Skype attendees for the Sydney meetup. This might sound like it undermines the whole purpose, but I think that if a meeting is grounded by having in person-attendees as well as Skype attendees, it takes on a different flavor. Indeed I would say that Skype interaction is in many ways more like in person interaction than most interaction online.

If you setup your own discussion group, please tell me! You’d really make my day. You’re welcome to attend the Sydney group by Skype, then setup a discussion group in your own area.

To be clear, I don’t expect any miracles to come out of this. This is not a silver bullet through which we will find, much less instantiate, the cure for social and political isolation, but there are still many good reasons to do this, just like it’s everyone’s common duty to help build up a levy of sandbags against a flood, even if their individual contribution won’t mean much.

Perhaps this is a trite thing to say, but even if nothing comes of it politically there is value in gathering people together to bond- and I’d be thrilled to meet my readers.

Any questions, requests to participate via Skype etc.- put them in the comments!