I like the idea of swarm formations, and inquiring into what a wise and healthy swarm would look like. Your idea of a knowledge workers union is super promising to me. In the chapter I wrote for Project Censored on the constructive media movement, we talk about how the the root of all the crises we face is the crisis of imagination. Outdated methods of traditional activism is familiar, so we stick to it. To reimagine better systems (especially in a technological sense) is not just boring, but hard. Collaboration is hard. Creativity is messy. As Jung says, "thinking is hard, that's why most people judge." We're also not talking to each other in real ways, especially across our differences. I've been to so many protests where we're all gathered there for a "cause," yet there are zero efforts to build community with each other while we're shouting and screaming together. When the protest ends, we turn the other way and go home. How isolating.

Also, there's the component of clearly defining our end goal, which activists choose something super idealistic and unrealistic (like "just stop oil" or "defund the police") or they only see the end goal in the context of their self-serving needs vs. the community. Once again I'd like to call in bell hooks, who kept noticing how an ethic of love remained missing in activism and progressive movements.

Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist one form of domination can be systematically supporting another…. (with) many of us motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us.