Elevate doesn’t end with a full stop; it ends with action. There are a million things you can do to join the fight for revolution, democracy and L.O.V.E.. Here, in no particular order, are just a few, inspired by the festival:
- Read Encryption Works by Micah Lee to learn how, er, encryption works.
- Watch the Elevate 2014 political discourses and interviews on the Elevate Vimeo channel.
- Watch David DeGraw talk about The Economics of Revolution.
- Check out Ello, a social network (and now Public Benefit Corporation) where your data is not a commodity for sale.
- Join Diaspora, the distributed social network that is controlled by you.
- Use open standards – open document formats, for example – rather than locked in proprietary formats. Example 1: Stop saving your documents in Microsoft’s .doc format; use instead the open .odt format. Example 2: Use email, rather than Facebook messaging.
- If you run a democratic organisation, check out Loomio as a way of managing your discussions, proposals and decisions online.
- If you don’t run a democratic organisation, set one up!
- Read Shoshana Zuboff’s article Dark Google in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
- Graffiti, skating, parkour, adbusting, videos, poetry, science, teaching pre-school. Whatever it is you do; make it creative-response.
- Watch Let Fury Have The Hour, or read How the Creative Response of Artists and Activists Can Transform the World by Antonino D’Ambrosio.
- Buy a fair computer mouse from Nager IT.
- Get heavy with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
- Watch (and support) Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
- Use Cryptocat to encrypt your chat conversations online.
- Write a poem without worrying about your spelling or your punctuation or even it rhyming. Watch Deanna Rodger and Ursula Rucker for inspiration.
- Burn your Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Don’t buy into surveillance capitalism; you’re the commodity…
- …unless you have, like Bradley Garrett, a message of creative-response that will change the conversation. In which case, broadcast that message – but when the broadcast is over, burn your social media account without mercy.
- Join over a million supporters and petition against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations before it’s too late.
- If you’re still confused, then read What is TTIP? And six reasons why the answer should scare you.
- Contribute to Wikimedia, the foundation that supports Wikipedia. They depend on user donations to pay for the maintenance of the fifth biggest website on the internet.
- Even better, contribute to Wikipedia and become an editor.
- Get involved with your local Community Supported Agriculture project or La Via Campesina.
- Read The Circle, by Dave Eggers, a novel set in a dystopian near future where a social media company reaches its tentacles into everything from wearable technology to drones and democracy. Sounds familiar?
- Join a CryptoParty and learn how to use basic cryptography tools. Welcome to everyone regardless of age, gender or knowledge.
- If you’re an activist who needs to protect their email communication, leave Hotmail, leave Gmail and join RiseUp.
- Watch the documentary Google and the World Brain (2013).
- Read Julian Assange’s book When Google Met WikiLeaks.
- Watch Crisis of Civilisation or Grasp the Nettle, directed by Dean Puckett, and contribute to his new film about the Sengwer.
- Share this book – it’s free!
- L.O.V.E. Yourself.
Finally: Join us at Elevate 2015 | 22-26 October 2015 | Graz, Austria.