Alternative Editorial: A Spectacle of Change
Jamie Reid, ‘Liberty’
What does change look like? It seems an impossible question to answer and banal for tempting a superficial response. Yet in Week 152 of The Shift we can point at a number of events that history may play back to us as turning points, but that we might hardly notice as significant in real time.
For example, as we pull the Weekly Newsletter together, the funeral of Britain’s Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is taking place. It’s a spectacle of grandiosity, military precision and godliness – meaning entirely framed in the language, culture and ritual of the Church of England, of which the Queen is head.
Whatever you think of the Royal Family, there is no escaping that this tells a story of our (local to global) collective past – a time when religion, royalty and institutional glamour ruled. Our ancestors were once held in awe and reverence, willing to curtsy before the stewards of God’s Earth, who made with their power the British Empire.
In the future - possibly quite the near future - they will be part of a wider memory of how common citizens once had a fixed place in society, at the bottom of a strict hierarchy of subjects, dictated simply by how distant in birth they were from the royal family. What an odd way to order society, we might come to think. How random!
This awakening to the dysfunction of that system has already been taking place for decades and the end is not yet in sight. Even so, each recognisable change can be traced back to a tipping point - a moment when going back to the earlier status quo can no longer be imagined.
Watching the funeral procession, with the motley crew of Philip’s next generation, we might think that moment has come. Not because they are any more or less capable than he was (possibly more so) but because the settlement between the royal family and the public has changed irredeemably. With the exception of the Queen herself, no member of the firm escapes the same judgements by the populace as regular celebrities.
Their behaviour, their appearance, their wealth and friendships are all under scrutiny same as any pop star or politician: each is dehumanized and made a legitimate target for our attacks. Within our current political system, their unearned privilege is much more newsworthy than, say, Prince Charles’ interest in and commitment to the environment – an imbalance they themselves collude in.
When 100,000 people complained about the disruption the funeral coverage made to their regular TV schedule –a small number relative to the 11 million who did watch – it made the headlines. Possibly because it was the highest ever and showed growth and a possible trajectory.
Many people imagine automatically that the demise of the royal family would lead to a Presidential system in the UK. But would that be an improvement? Or any sign that we have developed our agency as the wider population? The demise of the old hierarchies would suggest that we are a more egalitarian society. So what are the new institutions might capture that?
Surely progress would take a different shape than the pyramidical one we are still subject to, where the ultimate responsibility and power ends up with an elite? (And if you doubt the elitism of Presidential power, watch the excellent French tv series Baron Noir or watch the wonderful but often excruciating West Wing). Yet a strong response to a triangle – the shape of aristocracy as it spreads its influence across society, leading from the top – must be more than just a flat network, a kind of structure in which there is no authority at all. There is enough evidence that we remain powerless, without traction, when we cannot make decisions that affect us collectively.
Much more promising is a circular structure, where leadership is distributed and there is a flow of deliberation, leading to a kind of integrated authority we all participate in. Sociocracy is a key exemplar of this, but there are other tools – often generated by people in communities, responding to problems in real time – that we would need to keep that system vibrant and progressive. Included in them would be the many forms of peoples’ assemblies, sensemaking, the artificial intelligence used by Pol.is and deep collaboration, all now becoming popular in community organizing.
What cryptocurrency, and quantum thinking, reveals about reality
Another “tipping point” that we may be in the middle of experiencing - but that might only become clear in hindsight - is the extent that we are moving from a fixed idea of money to multiple forms of money with no fixed status. Several reports of how Covid has accelerated the end of cash, for example, is only the tip of the iceberg – the bit we can see. Try to think back – or imagine, for most of us – that moment when credit cards first came along to help us make transactions without notes and coins. No doubt many thought it wouldn’t last.
However today, fear of contagion has outlawed any physical exchange – much to the disadvantage of those without cards or even bank accounts. Of course, this has been slowly happening for years as more and more people have shifted their relationship to money from something apparently material to something virtual – a move in many ways truer to the reality that money is really an idea, and that currency is an agreement to the limitations of that idea.
Beneath the spectacle of cash going out of circulation is ‘the rest of the iceberg’ – the deep questioning around what money really is and how it might be reconceived. What used to be a fixed asset linked directly to the amount of gold deposited in the bank, was liberated by Gordon Brown during the banking crisis into a digital format that didn’t require material guarantee (with Richard Nixon’s detaching of the dollar from the gold standard as the founding act of financial liberalization). Today it is well known that many countries digitally mint money at will, keeping only data accounts of how much is in circulation. What is not known is the impact this will have on global finance down the line.
In this window of opportunity however, multiple new forms of currency have appeared, claiming their own value bases. Cryptocurrencies set their value to a limited amount of “coins” (Bitcoin the most prominent), circulating within a blockchain. Seeds are more like investment banks within a closed circuit: you buy into this discrete economy and watch how your seeds fund startups and social enterprises, generating profit through growth. Countercoins may be more modest in their technology but, as a currency for social capital, they are possibly more radical in their agency.
The demands of the new mindset needed to become part of this new economy-ecology will keep the wider social benefits quite limited to start with. But Covid saw huge acceleration in the value of these currencies vis a vis sterling and dollars. Now the Bank of England is planning to adopt cryptocurrency. Pretty soon – if it hasn’t happened already – someone near you will be spending money you don’t have any access to. Next step, you yourself may have a wallet with multiple currencies, all which give you a new relationship to what we used to think of as money. And it’s likely that each of these will offer you a kind of agency that the old money could not.
The criteria for being in the midst of a tipping point rather than at beginning of it, might be if you can point at a history leading up to this moment where it’s hitting the headlines. In this case, there have been many attempts at creating alternative currencies before technology made their resilience more likely. As long ago as 2007, the Totnes pound was the money you spent to accumulate community wealth – but it was killed alongside the demise of cash.
Meantime the Brixton pound, a similar venture launched a year later, has decided to transform. The age of new currencies is upon us and we hardly noticed it creeping up.
These new currencies will shape our sense of how it’s possible to act in our everyday reality (as every currency, in Yuval Noah Harari’s words, is a kind of collective story and set of relations). On those terms, the recent excitement around quantum computing and what Carlo Ravelli describes as quantum relations also has an interesting backdrop.
Listening to the presentation on his new book Helgoland, Ravelli presents the insight that no object is capable of standing independently for observation – everything exists only in relation to the objects around it. This extends to the observer him or herself – whose gaze alters the observation significantly.
The physical content of the theory has not to do with objects themselves, but the relations between them. You can’t draw a line between the observer and the object; both exist in world of relationships each exerting a power of its own. As Rovelli puts it:
Quantum mechanics is a theory about the physical description of physical systems relative to other systems, and this is a complete description of the world
This idea of infinite new possibilities is also at the heart of “quantum computing” devices, which don’t just operate by means of the binary relationship between 0 and 1, but between 0 and infinitely more possibilities. This is how Amit Katwala describes it:
Take a coin. If you flip it, it can either be heads or tails. But if you spin it – it’s got a chance of landing on heads, and a chance of landing on tails. Until you measure it, by stopping the coin, it can be either. Superposition is like a spinning coin, and it’s one of the things that makes quantum computers so powerful. A qubit allows for uncertainty.
If you ask a normal computer to figure its way out of a maze, it will try every single branch in turn, ruling them all out individually until it finds the right one. A quantum computer can go down every path of the maze at once. It can hold uncertainty in its head.
How relationality shapes politics, and even Big Footy
How is this relevant to a new politics, you might be wondering? It put us in mind immediately of the relational welfare that Hilary Cottam and Participle trialed in the early 00s, described in her book Radical Help. Here she describes how a human being in the care system cannot be helped when treated as a standalone entity, requiring units of attention within a care budget.
The client is already being affected by a web of complex relationships acting upon him or her, and only by offering a new suite of relationships that s/he can control, is there any chance of shifting the life of that person. That’s quantum change. For more on that idea, read Karen O’Brien’s book on You Matter More Than You Think.
To many, this is a profoundly feminine way of knowing and being that is only recently being acknowledged by men as important. But it looks like we will soon be living in a world run by these principles.
Finally, as we are about to draw a line under this newsletter, the uproar around the decision taken by five English football clubs to create a super-league grabs our attention. Not so much the proposal itself which has been in the making for quite some time and follows the development lines of American football. But the response from the wider football community is so clear and confident on the damage this kind of move can do to ‘the game itself’.
Most remarkable maybe is the organised voices of the fans from the self-styled super clubs themselves who are unanimous that this is a ‘greedy and self-interested’ that should not be allowed to go ahead. They make a claim that the football clubs should never have made such a decision without consulting their fans. “We are football” they confidently proclaim and cite the – so far – reluctance of the German clubs to join in, where there is a 50+1% rule that guarantees no commercial investor can buy more than 49% of the shares.
Some of you will remember a similar moment when the Premier League itself was established, breaking the mould of the four divisions that had held the network of local clubs until then. Not a fan’s voice was heard – although the literature has it there was plenty of unrest.
If fans desert their clubs, what is the gain for the billionaire owners looking, once again, to cream off the capital that their passion and loyalty created? One thing seems clear, more and more ‘ordinary’ people are getting used to the sound of their organised voices having some agency – they are not likely to retreat. It turns out that football clubs are dense nests of social, human relationality, not just brands to be squeezed by corporate capital.
All these profound shifts are happening under our very noses and will add up to a very different world of power and agency by the end of this decade. We’ll have to find a new name for The Alternative UK when it all goes mainstream!