Rufus Pollock: Emerging Movement with Alternative Approach to Social Change

This post is a collection of quotes from Rufus Pollock in an interview with The New School at Commonweal in March 2022. I recommend listing to the interview at this link. Rufus Pollock founded the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004 and Life Itself in 2016. There are 8 quotes listed below chronologically. License: CC BY 3.0

1. "For those people, probably who don't know about Life Itself, we're a network community committed to practical action for a radically wiser and weller world. We create hard to do research. We engage in advocacy to pioneer a wiser, weller culture." (3:00)

2. "In a nutshell, what we're suggesting is a new social change ecosystem is emerging. And its centered on a radical, alternative approach to social change, one that's simultaneously, we call it PIE: paradigmatic, integrated and engaged." (6:16)

3. "To me, mapping I think is crucial to social conscious emergence of this group and its greatly more coherent, more connected, more visible to itself... " (10:40)

4. "Some organizations are focused on ecology, some on politics, some on wellbeing and spirituality." (16:43)

5. "We'd love to extend the directory of organizations... There's sort of additional visualization analysis we would like to do. There's adding people who are really crucial to this ecosystem and not just to organizations... Even a map of the ecosystem of ecosystems." (17:02)

6. "I think more and more people are sensing that there is something really not working... whether we look at the climate crisis, whether we look at inequality, whether we look at simply the function of democracy... There's a real sense that something's not working." (21:11)

7. "I think the underlying question is, how do we build a critical mass, e.g. 5-10% self-consciously supporting paradigmatic change? ...How is mapping related to this?" (39:52)

8. "Most of our abilities to scale human cooperation in history are coming from religious or cultural institutions. Ways of being and seeing the world rather than from technology or structures that we've legally created." (1:24:00)