Co-founder of GetUp launches podcast on PodcastOne

Another founder of GetUp, Evan Thornley, has moved in a more interesting direction, applying digital technology to the rebuilding of community and belonging in a more direct and primal form, and giving up the idea of capturing the state as a preferred route to social change. GetUp, at the end of the day, was about influencing the state, and not about rebuilding civil society. The Sydney Alliance, at the end of the day, is about influencing the state, and is not about rebuilding civil society. Some progressives can make the leap away from the state, but most can’t. The pull of the state exerts a kind of gravitational power for activists and change-makers, but in the age of digital transformation it is a false hope, a misuse of distributed networks for a re-iteration of past concentrations of power, and a shrinking of our imagination to the ideologically conventional.