SWARMWISE - The Tactical Manual to Changing the World by Rick Falkvinge

Author:Rick Falkvinge [Falkvinge, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EMPOWERING LIKE CRAZY FOR FUN AND PROFIT

The tricky part can be to establish a meritocracy in an environment where people aren’t used to it. Again, this can be established through leadership — using the principle of teaching by example, and allowing others to learn through observation. In a swarm, people will copy the behavior of those with a perceived influence. As the swarm’s founder, you have the highest amount of initial such influence.

I solved this by establishing the already-mentioned three-pirate rule immediately, which was later set in stone as a core organizational principle in the Swedish Pirate Party. As I explained it then, people didn’t need to ask permission, and the concept went beyond that: they were specifically banned from doing so. Their own judgment was the best available in the organization for their own social context, and they were required to use that judgment rather than aspiring to hide behind somebody else’s greenlighting.

Asking permission, after all, is asking somebody else to take responsibility — no, accountability — for your actions. But the person asked is in a worse position to make an informed decision, and so may need to gather data to be comfortable with taking on this accountability. This creates delays and fosters insecurity in the organization.

The key insight here is that even the largest and most rigorous processes can screw up monumentally, to the point where the rest of the world asks out loud what they were thinking. To take a concrete example, one of Sweden’s largest labor unions did a large-scale campaign with the slogan “Work gives you freedom.” This was a multimillion-euro project by one of the largest organizations in the country.

Of course, the billboards came back down again and ads went off the air in the blink of an eye as soon as somebody pointed out the slight…lack of propriety…in the labor union using the same slogan as the Auschwitz extermination camp had used in World War II.

Another very honorable mention concerns the huge hospital landlord Locum, which is a Latin name meaning “place” or “location”. In the Christmas ads of 2001, they decided to advertise big. Their logo looks like this:

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