Alternative Editorial: The Whole Territory
Charles Jencks' cells of life in snow at Jupiter Artland, Bonnington House, Edinburgh
This will be the last editorial of 2023 and also the last of a particular phase, even era, of The Alternative Global (AG). From 2024 - year 4 of our designated crucial decade for the survival of the human species - the offices of AG are moving from London to Edinburgh. Readers of the newsletter might barely notice the shift: but anyone actively 'building a new system that makes the old one obsolete' - such as our 900 co-creators - will feel the reconstellation of our work impact theirs, as we move to establishing a presence (to adapt the words of Kenneth White) on Scottish ground.
When we first started The Alternative UK with the question 'if politics is broken, what's the alternative?' pre-Brexit London was an appropriate physical location (six years is a long time in the global life of a city). Not only as the home of Westminster - so called Mother of Parliaments - but also of global finance, in the City of London. Plus the mainstream news buildings, from the BBC in White City to the Daily Mail in Northcliffe House, Kensington. We were watching the old, hard power system deconstruct itself as we re-imagined the future, presenting alternatives.
But now, almost seven years later, working as systems convenors and producers of The Daily Alternative, we have seen clear alternatives in every corner of the socio-economic-political system. Alternatives that could, with coherence and some integration, give rise to a genuinely new future. And that new system is cosmolocal: meaning, having multiple physical, place-based territories as well as a cosmic and cosmopolita possibility through technological connectedness with people across the globe.
Since March 2023, we have been exploring that emergence through four, distinct incubator projects which are really four different entry points into the one whole system shift. For those less familiar they are:
1. Future Being: a learning / developing practice capable of upgrading us all for the future
2. Ecological Civilisation: the daily activities of individuals living in cosmolocal community agency networks (CANs)
3. News from Planet A: a new media system that arises from the CANs with the advanced storytelling capacity of RegenA
4. A New Political System: the partnership between a parallel polis constituting the newly democratised CAN of CANs and the current (old) system.
In the first 9 months of these conversations the diversity of the contributions from our co-creators has delivered a surplus of energy but a deficit of traction: there's so much to capture from those participating. Those who are already working substantively in one of the four sectors inspire those that are working indirectly and vice versa, which in a Zoom room can be an invaluable practice.
The conversation itself proved to be a vital form of media that can be transformative for those taking part. Particularly when - as is generally the case - each incubator call seems to invoke the other three. For example, the News from Planet A regularly called for a new education and learning systems (incubator 1), new work culture (2) and new forms of citizen agency (4). At the same time, the Miro boards capturing participants' ideas looked very different within each incubator, because each were starting from a different perspective and set of priorities.
Yet, as hosts of all the incubators, we noticed from about four months in that there was an important element missing from the wholeness of the system being described - without which our vision was destined to remain a figment of our imagination. Very specifically, in the fourth incubator, A New Political System, there was no prototyping of a political party capable of representing the parallel polis. While we regular refer to this 'two legs one body' model, we were ignoring one of the legs vital for a new system becoming visible and manifest.
Those of you who have been with us since the beginning, will know that we always said that we are not a political party - like our parent Alternativet, in Denmark - but a political platform for fourth sector projects. This was largely because we were looking from the perspective of a first-past-the-post voting system (used in the UK, USA and others) which leaves new parties unable to make a mark (see the Green party of England and Wales, with its 4m+ votes and one Westminster seat. It was a harsh but welcome reality at the time: the obduracy of official politics afforded us the time and space to pay our attention to systemic innovation outside the party-political culture, structure and discourse.
What we hadn't considered properly, until recently, is that Scotland does have a proportional system in its devolved Hollyrood, Parliament and that it is increasingly keen on post-Brexit transformative activity. While the move towards Scottish Independence has already generated extensive political innovation, the Holyrood parliament’s proportional voting system means it is always ready for the next iteration, the next re-formation of a distinctly Scottish politics. By moving to Scotland, we feel we can be part of that re-generation first-hand, working with others to re-story and re-architect democracy. All the while, reflecting and co-creating with similar patterns of activity around the planet.
For the time being, to give our team time and space to re-settle, we won't hold any further incubator meetings until early in 2024, starting with A New Political System on Monday 15th January. Our question will be: what kind of party is capable of representing the people coming together in CANs, with a new story and expectation of the future across Scotland and the world? How can we optimise this new age of evolved, collective intelligence (ECI) to build original, complex, systems to capture deliberative processes? What might be the manifesto of such a party?
Working from Edinburgh, we will be in the territory of the fully cosmolocal, socio-economic-political system we are invoking. In this way, we will work side by side with others doing the same in Europe, within states in the USA, Taiwan and smaller political projects in the UK and South America. Our sense is that this systemic shift, will cause new conversations in each of the incubators – in a similar way as adding a raising agent to a cake causes it to rise!
Watch this space and see you in 2024.