Political Turbulence co-author Peter John will keynote at a research workshop co-organized by King’s College London, City University London, and the University of Swansea on 3 June 2016. The workshop is entitled “‘I Will if You Will, Too’: Conditional Commitment in Collective Action”, and further details are available in the call for papers (.docx)
This one day workshop convenes academics, activists and political practitioners investigating the potential and consequences of new—social and technological—participatory designs. The main focus of the meeting will be on conditional commitment, a theoretical and practical solution to the perennial collective action problem that the attainment of a collective good by otherwise autonomous individuals is most likely to happen when everyone knows that everyone else will also act. As a collective action is proposed, conditional commitments to act are made. The action only takes place once a critical mass of commitments are made. Conditional commitment represents a new digital syndicalism—citizens, organising outside the walls of the state, challenging political power via digitalised collective aggregation.
