“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”-Buckminster Fuller

The key problem is the failure of progressives to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis. This fluid process is preeminently political. It requires translating a strategic perspective into a tactical program that takes advantage of the opportunities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the present moment to construct a critical mass for progressive change from diverse class and social forces.
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WHAT is citydrift?…citydrift is a replicable meta-event that is constructed to allow art (culture?) to meet (aggregate) and discuss itself in the act of observing itself. It has a structure that attempts to model the node and spoke connectivity of the social network, the terror cell, or the digital economy. The ethos, the geist of this structure is that…

“No one knows everything (everyone), but everyone knows something (someone)”

…it is horizontal, massively parallel, unstable, tentative, clumsy, resilient, and…provisional.

 (Who cares?)

I seem to…for now.

For 72 hours in July, near a smallish cultural building in Detroit, some people will meet and start walking in the nighttime, wake up the following day and then bring (some) things to that building, and then the next day they will discuss what they think they did (or did not) find. Some people will learn things about themselves, and what it is to be alive, and how NOT THINKING about their career, their art, their future for a brief period may actually show them a new and possibly interesting pathway into that future. Many of those same people will also meet other people that they never knew before the evening, and through those meetings find some strange connections that had existed, but that had not yet been recognized. They will laugh; exchange addresses and telephone numbers, and then some will go home and re-imagine their lives, most, however, will not…

Peter Hopkins, June 2013