The Free Range Network is a ‘dysorganization’ of activists and researchers… What does that mean?
‘Dys’-organization literally means “we have no interest in creating an organized structure for our work”. We are not interested in forming a group as, in our view, that would create obstacles to achieving our aims. This page outlines this idea as a more general political and social agenda – and how it is tied innately to change in the world around us.
Download an A2 PDF poster version of this page, developed for the EFree Range Exhibition.
What we are interested in is sharing our skills and resources, in order to address the economic and political contradictions within technological society that obstruct real, physical change.
It’s this latter objective which, over the last thirty years, sometimes makes our approach rather controversial.
Today ‘mainstream’ public movements have, like the political parties of most nation states, been captured by the Neoliberal economic dialogue. With pressure groups, however, that economic dialogue is further compartmentalized around the structures of lobbying and marketing that define how these debates take place in the mass media.
Mainstream campaign groups have become trapped, unable to act against the modern ‘suicide cult’ of economic growth because they cannot elucidate the ideas at the heart of the opposing contention – of ecological limits, lifestyle change, and, as the most direct route to achieving that, economic degrowth and adopting a more natural lifestyle. One of the main reasons for that is their need to utilize a large amount of resources to keep their organizations functioning – making them dependent on revenues or sponsorship from the very same affluent individuals, corporations, or governments, whose essential purpose is to maintain this destructive system.
The Free Range Network are a ‘network’ because that enables co-operation without the need to maintain an organization. By lending our individual resources to the Network, we create the capacity to undertake work in common. At the same time, this gives us freedom as individuals to work on the issues which drive our own interest and creativity.
This is the question we see asked in the media every day – with a variety of answers depending upon the political persuasion of those making the point. This question is also a trap, since it replicates the individualist conception of society and social change – excluding the idea of collective action to achieve fundamental change.
True change is not ‘a physical thing’: Change is a difference in human consciousness, the understanding of which creates physical change in the way humans act towards each other and the world around them – and which creates physical change as this change in consciousness redefines our relationship to ‘the things’ attached to our lives.
Putting that another way: The everyday consumer process of imposed or mindless consumption continues to be ‘mindless’ even if those products are ‘green’ or ‘ethical’; changing a brand or supplier might have a marginal physical impact, but does not question the reasons or motivations for why we consume in the first place, giving us the option to avoid those impacts totally; and thus, the ephemeral consumer choices we are offered do not create the kind of fundamental change that benefits us as conscious, living beings.
Change happens when we realize that we are able to do something, or we are convinced that what we have been doing is wrong and must do things differently. But for this change to happen the idea has to precede the deed; and the deed must be practical if it is to manifest as real, physical change.
You could, for example, create major changes to your life by doing nothing, if ‘doing nothing’ broke you out of the cycle of harmful actions within which you were trapped. Unfortunately, as this usually means not consuming or undertaking expensive activities, the media or public policy rarely focus on this option except as a means of selling alternative forms of consumption (e.g., buying electric cars instead of fossil-fuelled ones, rather than doing without private transport altogether by reducing the need to travel or using public transport – primarily by adopting a lifestyle which made those alternative options far easier).
The difficulty is that so much of the change that is talked of today is built around ‘things’ – either: Building them or building something to replace them; or buying them or buying something to replace them; and even ‘green’ ideas have largely become a construction or consumption agenda, rather than minimizing our use of resources by changing our lifestyle.
Rarely do we ever see an argument about ‘not having’ growth or development, and instead dismantling systems or technologies which are creating problems in the world today.
That’s because, irrespective of whether you're a right-wing capitalist or a left-wing trade unionist: The only conception of change in society is built around the production, acquisition or possession of ‘stuff’ – and doing so at an ever-faster rate. The only measure that governments have to measure improvement is ‘growth’ – expressed as throwing more money at a problem, or arguing we need ‘more’ or ‘bigger’ actions to solve the problem, rather than changing the way that policy is enacted to cease or scale-back human actions that create negative consequences.
In a world which primarily values material or economic goods, unless we change the fundamental metrics used to value human existence, society will only measure change in terms of a change in ‘stuff’, and/or striving to ‘have more’ of it, rather than focusing on a broader set of measures based around health, well-being, and ecological and social quality.
Those values change when we as individuals start to change our personal values, and then express this change in perspective politically and economically; accepting that the simplest solutions may be ‘less’, or even more simply, to ‘do nothing’ because we no longer value those activities.
What the latest research around ecological limits tells us is that the ‘stuff-based’ model for a happy life is deeply flawed; the whole thing, not just the elements within it. Consequently encapsulating change as a consumption or development agenda fails to address the root causes of the ‘crisis of consumption’ – which is why meaningful change cannot be achieved today.
Even the green movement has been caught up in this vacuous debate. Instead of arguing for changes in the level of overall consumption, the green movement generally lobbies for ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ consumption – despite the evidence that shows this will not create sufficient change to address the problems they are concerned about.
Change has to be a process of consciousness; a process of accessing the objective information on the state of the world around us, and then finding ways to express that new understanding through change in our own lives – and where our desire for change is obstructed or prohibited, working collectively to circumvent those obstacles.
Change happens when people act differently: not ‘think’; not ‘lobby’; not ‘petition’; but physically ‘do’ the alternatives. The greatest strength the current system has to overwhelm demands for change is making people believe that ‘representative’ politics can deliver fundamental change – when in fact any change must only be cosmetic in order to preserve the core values of the current economic process.
The strength of collective action for radical change is that ‘change’ can be more wide-ranging, interconnected, and thus more permanent, when arising organically from people’s own choice and actions.
The Free Range Network and the Free Range Activism Website exists to communicate the skills and information – which build to create a broader understanding of the modern world – required for people to define their own solutions; and from that process of personal radical action, to create more widespread change from the grassroots.
How we do that depends on the context:
Fundamentally then, the Free Range Network aims to create ‘change’ not directly, but through enabling others to express their own desire for change using the information or materials which we supply to them. We do not enforce what the nature of that change is; our aim is to supply the means whereby people are able to express themselves to demand change, or better still, to directly create those changes within their own lives.