<nettime> 10th anniversary of Democracy Village

[Siraj Izhar | publiclife <s-i@publiclife.org>]

July 20th was the tenth anniversary of the eviction of the tent city 
Democracy Village at Parliament Square. But on its significance I had 
meant to write something earlier but it proved difficult with local BLM 
related meetings in July.
But here it is for anyone interested in that tent occupation experiment:
http://amplife.org/blog/tentXx

"It is futile to analyse Democracy Village in terms of sharp 
revolutionary agendas that some had set out because no one agenda could 
have fitted its time. With its rag-tag mix of activists and the 
homeless, many ex-servicemen returning from war, the village lived on 
the solidarity bound by its everyday. Life in a traffic island consumed 
the revolution, so life /became/ the revolution.
...."

The key point I make is that it marked the transition point from a world 
of activism based on an immediacy of offline relationsto the new social 
media based activism that we saw with Occupy in 2011. It was as if we 
had gone from Caliban to Ariel if we went with all the platform hype.
But going through my archives in this pandemic time I am trying to 
reconcile the now with the then ten years ago. The 81 days of Democracy 
Village coincided almost perfectly with the London lockdown (+/- 1 month).

In my nomadic life, I have been involved over 2 years with voluntary PAR 
(Participatory Action Research) work in the East End; stranded the last 
few months the focus has been on how Covid-19 is affecting the 
community. But first we lost half the research team of 25 because they 
have no internet access with public libraries closed and can not afford 
the equipment. The researchers are based within community not academia; 
they reflect the material conditions of community life that even today 
lives without the internet in significant sections. The knowledge base 
on community relations they produce for the research is based on that; 
and that has been even more distorted or silenced. Covid-19 has really 
showed up the digital divide in low income families even in 21st century 
Europe.
I would be very interested in connecting with researchers with parallel 
community experiences in other cities.
What really concerns me is the question of activist agency in post 
Covid-19 'new normal' political practices in community and what future 
paradigms we project without making the mistakes of the past decade. How 
we recover the ground of our own lost materiality and autonomy to live 
more equitably with the 'virtual-industrial complex' in the coming years 
with an increasing austerity.

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