After 17 weeks of lock-down, the UK took its first steps outside – some less tentative than others with the (now familiar) absence of clarity about the rules. While the government has made it obligatory for customers (not staff) to wear masks in shops – with a £100 fine for refuseniks – they have no mechanisms for enforcing the rules. As a result Sainsbury and Asda seem at ease flouting the law.

At the same time, the government seems less clear about wearing masks in offices or on public transport where people are more likely to be up close and personal. In fact, you can be unmasked anywhere that it is deemed ‘impractical’ – including theatres, concert halls and cinemas. Impractical to wear a face mask that might save lives while you are watching a film? Popcorn seems to have a higher priority.

In the meantime, social media plays this confusion back to us as polarised opinion between those who consider masks a badge of honour and those that consider them a sign of oppression. As is too common in the world of politics, freedom is portrayed as either selfish or selfless: anything in between is ‘woolly’.

Meantime, the more philosophical or psychologically inquiring amongst us feel only frustrated—since the evidence is that we all operate along the continuum between the two at different times, for different reasons.

While these kinds of binary distinctions – black and white, night and day, left and right – are a useful tool for getting our instant bearings on a situation, they cause problems if they become separate domains of activity. Or if they are competing ways of seeing – each rendering the other as inimical. Yet so much of our public life is experienced this way. We are for or against an idea, and by extension, all those people associated with that position.

This is not so much a matter of preference. It’s more a deep tiredness with the waste of our human resources to make progress during these challenging times. Is it true that we are not able - as people living side by side in towns and cities, nations and worlds – to move towards each other with a desire to improve both the place we live, and our shared prospects of flourishing?

Are we still rigidly divided on the old terms – class, culture, age, gender – or are there new ways of being and acting together, particularly amongst the RegenA, that prove otherwise? And if so, how much of our failing system is still fit for purpose?

AUK has always taken the position that we don’t need a revolution, because we have been in the midst of a revolution for the past 20 years since the birth of the internet. The unprecedented democratisation of information, the ability to connect and mobilise locally and globally and the innumerable platforms for reflexivity (we’re all watching each other, and ourselves, perform now)—these gave rise to innumerable and rapidly developing ideas of personal and collective agency.

While we don’t have an acceptable form of global governance yet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms do, at least, point at people becoming visible and moving into relationship, however unsatisfying until now (not least for social media users’ vulnerability to manipulation). The old institutions’ inability to reflect or hold these changes adequately is showing up in the frustration and anger we witness today.

Unelected operators like Cambridge Analytica or Dominic Cummings scheme to harness these epochal tools for the strategic gain of their political paymasters – witness their electioneering ways. But imagine a politics that commits itself to paying full attention to the era of people power? A politics facilitated and self-organised via these same digital tools, so that our burgeoning agency is directly linked to the flourishing of the planet, directly experienced in the communities where we live and participate?

In the past 17 weeks of pandemic, we have been in a swirl of Zoom rooms populated by people committed to audacious visions of radical change. Not only ‘people like us’ who have been working on stuff for decades, but newly determined people from every walk of life.

Take the people we met in our recent Local Trust virtual co-labs (nurses to naval personnel). Or those we are collaborating with in Perspectiva (containing both sensemakers and sensualists). Or those from the Future Democracy Hub (who encompass community transformers to dynamic facilitators) … There is so much energy and insight. But can it add up to anything coherent that makes a difference to the crisis we woke up to during Covid?

Perhaps one of the most ambitious and game changing possibilities has been occurring within the SDG Transformations Forum, led by Steve Waddell. After working assiduously for four years on integrating multiple perspectives on new economics and what they call ‘next economies’, the TF upped a gear during lock down.

As many are clear, it won’t be enough for us to ‘bounce back’ to business as usual: that way lies the continued destruction of the planet. That’s a story of our powerlessness in the face of our past mistakes.

But given the urgency of our multiple crises it’s not enough either, to bounce forward from the present: improving our situation incrementally without whole-system transformation. While a Green New Deal) will be vital for creating jobs, it won’t be enough to address inequality.

Where there is persistent inequality there will always be poverty and political vulnerability to manipulation. Can we not get past the spectacle of people voting for the very people who have, through the emotional harnessing of their needs, always instrumentalised them?

Instead, given the incredible resources of imagination, ingenuity, innovation and popular will for change around the world we should be aiming to ‘bounce beyond’ the current system altogether. Create a new era logic of direct connection between people power and planetary flourishing. All over the world, much more attention must be paid to developing individual and collective agency. Advancing the cosmo-local means of production of food, energy, technology.

Or housebuilding in a way that everyone in the community is participates. We will find not only new livelihoods in this, but also belonging, meaning and purpose in meeting the challenge.

Sounds like a nice dream, you might say. Yet Bounce Beyond (BB) has developed a strategy to get there. It’s not based on theory alone, but on a plan of action that pulls on all the fractals of good work already appearing around the world. Using the tools and methods of transformation practice BB proposes to work with different forms of ‘next economies’ – circular, doughnut, regenerative, well-being – to find active coherence.

They have identified six forms of deep system work: narrative, finance, governance, evaluation, innovation. In addition, they can see four forms of active intervention – protest movements, entrepreneurs, collaborators (co-ops and commoners) and ‘for benefit’ corporations – that can complement rather than cancel out each-others’ actions.

Finally BB identifies three new forms of scaling that don’t rely upon on current political distributions of power. More about this in this week’s blog on Bounce Beyond.

While not everyone is actively thinking about next economies, the sense that we all need a good upgrade of knowledge and skills, to make us fit for a new era of challenges, is common. This is not simply about the fair distribution of good education – although this remains important . This is a whole system imperative.

We ALL need to recognise the new circumstances we are in – for good and bad – and seek new ways to build capacity for the kind of transformative action that BB is pointing at. Whether we are talking about Tomas Bjorkman’s plan for a national bildung programme or Audrey Tang’s vision for global citizen participation, it’s time to innovate ourselves.

Dreaming of a new future is a good start, but each of us must become response-able for delivering that future. Seeing that initiates more solidarity and brings deeper life satisfaction. That’s when the real fun begins.

Alternative Editorial: Time For An Upgrade