The GREAT campaign uses traditional mass media for national branding. What about the potential of new technologies to open things up? History suggests it could go either way; radio regulation re-tuned that medium away from experimental many-to-many communication to became instead the patriotic poshness of Reith's BBC and the main vector for Nazi propaganda. We know only too well that the internet could follow. But right now it offers a deterritorialisation, however transient; a way out of coded identities and rigid hierarchies. Can we read Anti-Oedipus as our manual for social technology, so that it becomes (to adapt Foucault) "an Introduction to Non-Fascist Media"?
In a video for the GREAT campaign the blokey but repellent 'Sir' Paul Smith extols the virtue of high value fashion, including his leather shoes "handmade in Northampton". The roots of Northampton's shoe making lie in the English Civil War - it got the contract to make boots for the New Model Army, who were fighting for a country where no-one would Lord it over anyone else. Perhaps our picture of the future need not be "a boot stamping on a human face - forever" but the footwear of the multitude flying at every screen where a dictator appears.
Background: I was invited by UCL Partners to present at an Innovation Diffusion workshop for NHS London. The paper was subsequently presented to the NHS London Clinical Senate.
As Deleuze & Guattari would say, the NHS is a striated space. The quickest way to add innovative 'smooth spaces' is by combining digital tools and social movements. Slides below, full paper attached: comments welcome.