THE #IRLREVOLUTION MEETS BRIAN ENO AND FRIENDS
An intriguing intro, we’re sure you’ll agree. And we certainly experienced one of the most intriguing, inspiring and thought provoking days on this roller coaster ride of a revolution a couple of weeks ago, hunkered down in Brian Eno’s studio.
But we weren’t there specifically to see Brian (though he was the most wonderful host. Made a great cup of tea). We were there to join a conversation with an incredible bunch of folk on how to use art, creativity and the wealth of experience and influence we have around us to MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
This is the group known as Hard Art….
HARD ART
A think tank of 150 (ish) artists, activists, technology leaders, economists and scientists prompting discussions about climate and social justice. The collective includes artists Jeremy Deller, Cornelia Parker, Gavin Turk and Clare Patey, as well as musician Brian Eno, film-maker Danny Boyle and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Stickler.
To find out more, head over to Hard Art’s website
But this conversation wasn’t about climate change. Or art. Hard or not. This was a conversation about big tech, and exactly what we, the voices with a platform of creative influence might be doing to stop its insidious impact on the next generation.
There were three amazing, thought provoking speakers, Ian Russell, founder of the Molly Rose Foundation, Shoshana Zuboff, author and social psychologist and Tanya O’Carroll, human rights advisor and strategist.
And a room of remarkable folk from all walks of life to listen to them, and think with them. Entrepreneurs, creatives, activists, political and legal specialists and campaigners.
And us.
Here’s what we heard:
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Ian spoke in a frank and heartfelt fashion about the aftermath of the death of his daughter, Molly Russell aged 14 in November 2017. He walked through, harrowing step by harrowing step, the horrendous journey to try and understand exactly what experiences his daughter had had at the hands of big tech in the months before she died. He spoke honestly about his beautiful, curious, bright and caring daughter. A girl with no signs of mental ill health and not particularly heavily involved with social media. He spoke of the refusal by each of the big tech companies, one by one, to share with him the content his daughter had been exposed to, and his shock upon finally seeing the steady stream of self-harm and depressive content ‘that bright red, so often bright red content’ t.at Molly had been subjected to. He spoke of the exhausting fight to get a response, any response from all of the platforms profiting from his daughter’s misery, and the moment four months after her death when whatsapp without warning simply closed her account, and ‘Molly left the family group’.
Ian had started by explaining that he’d always lived his life with the ambition to engineer change in the world for good.
Which is what he is now doing, with the Molly Rose Foundation. The aim of the Molly Rose Foundation is suicide prevention, targeted towards young people under the age of 25.
To find out more, have a look here The Molly Rose Foundation
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Soshana Zuboff, an incredible American social psychologist, philosopher and professor is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Speaking painfully eloquently, she unpacked, piece by piece the journey we have taken to where we are today, with every wall now a screen, every wall ‘made of glass’ and our every actions surveilled for data, surveilled for profit . She traced the roots of today’s ‘information civilization’, with each individual represented by and mediated by digital information, to a sleepwalking democracy where difficult issues have never been confronted. A democratic void filled rapidly by the corporations profiting from surveilance capitalism. An astonishing and powerful speaker, please Follow this link to find out more.
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Tanya O’Carroll is a provocative campaigner who demanded we drive real change. She laid out the sheer strength, economically, politically and socially of the tech organisations whose agendas are entirely in pursuit of monetising misery, and that if we are to genuinely reshape our future, we need to address the problem from a number of angles. She spoke of the Amnesty International study which created ‘dummy’ TikTok account, and saw, within an hour, multiple videos targeted at that young girl glorifying, promoting and normalising self harm and suicide. Read more about that here.
She put three strong options on the table to start the march towards a more balanced relationship with tech.
1) A ban on surveillance advertising
2) A limit on all addictive features, such as autoplay and infinite scroll
3) We should break open big tech, allowing other businesses to build social networks designed to do good, using the phenomenal volume of global data that big tech has amassed from its users without their knowledge or informed consent
Many of these actions are in discussion across the European Parliament and within various governments. To read more about the work Tanya is doing, have a look here.
We’ve so much more to say about what we discussed, the ideas that sprouted, the people we met and the community that’s forming around this mission. But we’ll save that for another day.
In the meantime, if you agree with us (and the Hard Art crew) that every UK teenager deserves a space to socialise IRL, then don’t forget to spread the gospel.
SHARE THIS BLOG amongst your whatsapp groups, your networks, indeed anyone you feel cares about our teenagers.
FOLLOW US on instagram.
ADD YOUR VOICE by tagging us in with #IRLrevolution whenever you spot anyone else talking about this issue.
Help us build this army. Because every extra person who joins the fight to give teenagers somewhere to socialise in real life helps our voice to be heard and our impact to be felt.
Vive the # IRL REVOLUTION!
