Names Not Numbers

If like me you were born in the mid to late 60’s, then as a kid you will have been as addicted as I was to Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. He seemed so VERY cool to me then and still does. I’ve been back to the wonderful Portmeirion since then many times on holiday – and we will all have seen the pottery. But how many remember his famous scream across the sands throughout the series: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”. Robert and I will be back in Portmeirion in early February for Julia Hobsbawm and Editorial Intelligence’s ‘We Are Names Not Numbers‘ symposium and plan to recreate various The Prisoner scenes over a few beers on the dunes.

This two-day symposium on individuality in a mass age plans to bring together the thought leadership of Davos with the intimacy of TED and the fun of the best gatherings. Elements will be broadcast on the internet and FT.com and a record of the contributions published in 2009. Speakers include Simon Schama, Lord Currie, Rt. Hon Douglas Alexander MP, Trevor Phillips, to multi-media contributions from Martha Lane Fox and Zac Goldsmith to a hand-picked group of senior figures from across business, media, politics, the voluntary sector, and culture and the arts. Another speaker will be Richard Reeves, the new head of Demos with whom Robert and I hope to develop a Demos pamphlet on Citizen Renaissance issues.

The central questions we want to answer through the course of this include:

• Are we just numbers or do names matter?
• Does the individual consumer call the shots these days, or the political, media or business entity?
• How does ‘individualism’ fit with the need for collective action?
• Do we mean Hobbesian or Aristotelian individualism? Is individuation perhaps a better concept?
• Communication is key to the way human societies evolve values and norms. But can we still talk about mass communication in a world where the individual is king?
• In an age of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and YouTube is it the individual consumer who calls the shots these days, or the political, media or business entity?
• And how do institutions traditionally reliant on mass markets – either political or commercial – adapt to cope with the new age of names, rather than numbers?

We will collectively pose and answer such questions through examining business, political, creative and individual responses to key challenges such as environmental and social wellbeing, citizenship and the digital revolution.

Maybe we can see if McGoohan will come to the symposium. In an interview in 1977 about what The Prisoner meant for him, McGoohan had this to say: “I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we’re gonna take good care of this planet shortly… We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche… As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed……We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people’s villages, but we are all prisoners.”

Of course much of this echoes what we are saying in Citizen Renaissance about consumerism versus citizenship but in the book Robert and I argue that actually we don’t all have to be prisoners. We all have the power as individuals to assert our right to question the crazy way things are run today. The way we rush around faster and faster chasing the tail of economic growth while eating the guts out of our one and only planet and getting no happier in the process. I think we all have a right, and indeed a responsibility, as citizens to question the current paucity of debate in politics about values and about the nature of and attainment of ‘good lives’.

We need to stand up and speak as names and then assert our collective citizen power in numbers.