Today's load of old nonsense...

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...courtesy of the Centre for Local Economic Studies & New Start:

We’re in a systemic crisis of human and environmental capital. This is the moment that things are going to get re-organised and radically transformed. Our generation will see the biggest transformation since the corporate firm was born 200 years ago. We will see that same magnitude of change as we fundamentally shift how we, as humans, organise ourselves. This transformation will take place whether we like it or not, the economic conditions are there. We’re going to need to rebuild most of the institutional infrastructure of the UK. Some of it because there’s no other viable way of keeping it going, while other institutional infrastructure – like education – is being actively challenged by changes in business model, by value extractable. We’re in a remarkable place that’s changing the nature of being, of who you are and how you have to behave. Whether you call it the Big Society or the Good Society, the idea that civic society is going to become more self-organising will happen. We’re on the verge of new tipping point around that. Whether it’s about setting up a co-op to buy energy that creates a whole new market relationship with providers or about DIY-producing our own furniture, this is the new behaviour of society and it will fundamentally change the nature of production, the relationship between consumers and producers, and the nature of investments. We are in a great restructuring, a great transformation. Technology, culture and human consciousness – how we exist in the world – are changing.

I'm not even going to try to get underneath what this is all about - every trendy community, greenie, social enterprise cliché is crammed into a hundred words of so. Let me just pick out one sentence of astonishing wiffle:

We’re in a remarkable place that’s changing the nature of being, of who you are and how you have to behave.

Now please tell me that I'm going to grow long har, wear a kaftan, live in a yurt and listen to the Grateful Dead? This sort of hippy nonsense went out with that generation I thought! The capacity to string senseless platitudes together to make a pleasing sound was fine when it was just a few teenagers sitting in muddy fields but when a 'repsected' academic body - a veritable think-tank promotes it, I start to wonder.

This 'fundamental shift', the re-organisation and 'radical transformation' - all just meaningless mumbo-jumbo designed to impress the gullible. The 'speaker', one Indy Johar, provides not substantiation for his trendy polemic, there is not challenge, just the spouting of what might be described (and was by my wife) and "the words of a naive but articulate 15-year-old.

CLES really should do better.

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