Alternative Editorial: Find The Energy

All images supplied by NESTA FutureFeast

This week I was invited to talk on the subject of Imagining Future Democracy to a group of civil society innovators, foundations and funders, and government representatives - curated by the National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). In what I’ve come to understand as typical NESTA style, it was a beautifully crafted and irresistible invite: a dinner in a recently rescued vintage cinema in Hackney. 

Designed to the hilt by Garrett Stringer and Glider Global it was always going to be an all-senses experience. From the evocation of the ‘agora’ – the people that a democracy implies – with faces and banners in the auditorium, watching us eating on the stage. Through the locally produced street food we had to use ‘our vote’ to select. To the discombobulating effect of NYX Electronic Drone choir bringing the grief and drama of our present-day challenges into the space. 

The danger with such gatherings is that we all enjoy ourselves too much. The networking opportunities were great – every person present was a potential collaborator. Although the usual relationship killer – competition for the funders’ attention – was also a factor in our dynamics. Even so, we were undoubtedly a mini-fractal for change. Fully coherent and, in being so, somewhat untypical of the wider world we all want to serve. 

The first speaker Philip Faigle, Special Projects Editor for Zeit Online (Germany’s biggest news website) and project lead for My Country Talks did well to bring dysfunctional politics – which we conventionally see as the container of our democracy - into the room. Philip introduced a phone app that invites anyone to register themselves, making their political views explicit. 

The app then offers them a match - not with someone who agrees but someone who strongly disagrees with their views, so that they can meet and have a chat. He calls it a Tinder for Politics. Feedback from these meetings show a high degree of increased tolerance, even a transcendence of differences. 

Brilliant idea! Yet something in me always quivers when I see how much attention we give to disagreements that were manufactured by political parties in the first place. Who would have thought - even 5 years ago - that a major community divide existed between Remainers and Leavers, for example? Or between climate activists and climate deniers? Surely everyone wants to live healthily according to scientific recommendations? 

Instead, we spend so much precious time undoing the divisions sown by political parties to give them electoral advantages over each other.

When it comes to democracy, the problem lies in voters over-identifying with the divisive framing of issues--with the issues specially chosen to exacerbate the divide--offered by party politics. Is there some way to re-orient democracy around frames and issues not inherently divisive? How can democracy become a means by which we come together, rather than the vehicle for us to find infinite ways to compete? 

Here are the bullet points of the deliberately provocative talk I gave to the ‘usual suspects’ (including ourselves) gathered at Nesta.

FRAME

·      Any Reimagining of a ‘future democracy’ begins with the understanding that we are not the answer

·      When we think about democracy, there are three groups implied: 

a) the people who are seeking change and asking big questions - US 

b) the intersectional groups outside this room who share values but not discourse 

c) the rest. 

The rest are the vast majority.

·      Only 2% of people are members of political parties. When I asked why, in research for a paper called Is the Party Over? in 2017, the answers could be summed up in two words: “not relevant”. So the first thing we have to do is uncouple the inquiry into democracy from the cultures and structures of party politics. Or maybe even from an idea of power that is too abstract.

·      Then ask ourselves where does the energy – especially new bursts of energy – for collective participation appear? Not only in civil society, but in the broader society where everyone lives?

WHAT WE ARE SEEING

·      When we begin to look at the 98% we remember that we have been in a revolution for over 20 years. Since the birth of the internet, billions of people have been participating in a global experiment – for good or bad. We connect with each other and the information we need to inquire into whatever motivates us. We express and perform our views, reactions, interactions. We map our networks, mobilising and organising ourselves.

·      How has this revolution revealed itself to us? At the heart of any new idea of democracy is a different concept of the human being. We are not homo economicus, primarily material, rationally-calculating and physical: but bio-psycho-spiritual-emotional beings. We seek status, autonomy, control. But also belonging, meaning, purpose and achievement. And joy.

·      In this revolution, what has thrived is the games community, music and sport, emotion of all kinds on Facebook, Instagram: any media that gives us connection, or the illusion of connection with people like ourselves. And then we seize on the tools we build on that – learning opportunities that give us agency.

·      This has given rise to hundreds of thousands of initiatives that deliver on these needs, at multiple levels. From innumerable self-development initiatives, to community projects to global networks of all kinds.

·       After three years of looking, as The Alternative UK, we are convinced that the solutions to our crises – personal, social and global - are already out there. But we lack the means to move into a more systemic alliance, a shared project that would give all this combined energy somewhere to land. A container within which the emerging eco-system of projects could move into relationship. 

·      That is why we focus on local communities. These can be places where the energy and ingenuity of people can find each other and build relationship in real time. Not as an end in itself – but as the container for the greater cosmo-local system we can now see arising. It is here that a new idea of democracy can be born - in the spaces where people turn up of their own accord, because they created them. 

HOW THAT TRANSLATES

·      So do we – the usual suspects in this room – just get out of the way? Surely we can’t just leave emergence to chance (it could go a number of ways at any given time)? Of course the answer is no. Our job is to pay attention, notice where the energy is, create the conditions for it to grow; to participate as ourselves, bringing our gifts to the party. Often those gifts will be at a big-picture level, facilitating new theories of change, connecting creativity to resources. Most often it will be to facilitate: ensuring listening and inclusion while the energy leaps forward. Other times it will simply be witnessing. 

·      We’ll see that wherever people gather in numbers, and if meaningful relationship is enabled through the tools and practices of deliberation, they will quickly want to start creating fairer ways of working, better modes of participation and decision-making systems that stretch across the whole. This is the democratic principle in action.

·      Here are two quick examples. Extinction Rebellion is an uprising to raise awareness of the climate emergency. With extraordinary resonance and huge take up, it shifted the dial on awareness of climate emergency from 52% to 84% in the capital over two weeks. Although it operates on self-organising (sociocratic) principles, its method of intervention was uprising and protest. Faced with the challenge of how to germinate XR in local communities, we introduced the Future Democracy Hub - offering tools and practices of engagement with people on their own local terms, from empathy circles to neighbourhood forums and talk-shops. When this assiduous job of bringing diversity into relationship has begun, People’s Assemblies and Citizens Assemblies are introduced to harness the collective will. Increasingly XR describes itself as a democracy movement.

·      Our own Citizen Action Networks, currently building in Plymouth, Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent, began with a series of collaboratories which focused on bringing together people below the political divide, on ‘friendly’ terms. This wasn’t about addressing the (politically framed) divides or solving the problems arising from these, but to build community on its own terms – in order to generate belonging, meaning and purpose. Using locally-sourced arts and play-forms, the co-labs bring people of all kinds – including the ‘usual suspects’ - into generous emotional resonance. Then they can enable an inquiry into the kind of future they would all look forward to. Once a vision and concrete projects are identified, this local group works to connect the ideas with cosmo-local resources already available, developed over decades, to start building customised and appropriate “soft” infrastructures (to network food, energy, information, urban and suburban resources). Today these CANs have gathering spaces, learning clubs, festival committees, food and energy hubs, local neighbourhood forums. Each of the CANs are now building digital networks for better connection and participation which would include polling, decision-making and leadership elections.

·      While CANs are currently arising outside of formal politics, they could be seen as democratically-run units of a new kind of politics. They could result in an architecture of democratic practices that don’t require politicians at the national level at all (see Brett Hennig’s book on sortition). Or, as has already begun to happen, CANs can seed genuinely community connected independent politicians, who are prepared to work together and take over local councils in the name of local people (not national-level, ideologically-defined parties). Originating in Frome, there are now 21 Flatpack Democracy style councils, bringing completely new ways of working to cosmo-local politics. Their rationale might be expressed as: if government can’t act effectively in our collective interests, we’re doing it anyway.

·      So even as we – gathered here - are always ready to lead, bringing our own resources to enable the urgent conversations, it’s time to shift our own form of agency. Let’s stop inviting people into our tents and complaining when not enough of them turn up.  Let’s do more of visiting their tents, bringing whatever gifts we have to nurture their energy as it arises naturally. Whether its food markets or football clubs, democracy is like a muscle that gets exercised when people want to get things done. Learning how to listen to each other, get over problems and make decisions becomes a way of being in community together. When all these different sources of energy begin to connect up across a town, city or region – as CANs - the capacity for collaboration will already be there. In contrast, when we try to connect everyone up digitally without bringing them into relationship first - through the organising of their own energies – we remain emotionally vulnerable to being manipulated by outside interests (the “political technologists” we know from recent referenda and elections). 

We are not the first to say a much wider reach is crucial for the success of civil society. But the answer is not reaching further to bring more people under our already existing umbrellas. It generally doesn’t work. 

Instead, if we offer what we’ve learnt until now, to new communities we don’t yet understand; and if we allow new patterns of relationship to emerge – we will make our communities stronger. Rather than organise others, our job is to bring our attention, our resources and – through participating in our own localities - our bodies into service of a much bigger system of networked localities. Only that way will communities have ownership of their own assets – cultural and material - and a kind of belonging that creates resilience.