Alternative Editorial: Soft Power Advances
In week 47 of The Shift, A/UK took part in two sessions of the wonderful – and ongoing - Transition Summit: Bounce Forward on Friday March 5th. The first was a session on ‘Where technology meets people to organise for change’ , the second The Alternative Take Over: Where does power lie? See next week’s newsletter for the videos becoming available.
While they drew quite different audiences, they also pointed at a common principle: soft power. Hosting the first, Phoebe Tickell posed the question “How can we work together and build relationships more effectively using digital tools now? And are all digital platforms equal? What if we could create digital spaces that were in the public interest, and put humans first?”
Springing from this were a well of urgent questions from the audience, captured in this doc, which also contains some of the responses.
Co-panellist Divya Siddarth, speaking from NYC, talked a bit about her experience in India working with Indian artisan cooperatives who thrived, owning their own enterprises and platforms. Her input helped make the bridge between tech for building relationships and tech for livelihood. While they seem to serve different purposes, they both embody the same values and require trust to develop.
As Divya describes in the video, becoming a community through enterprise helps participants prefigure how they want their societies to grow, in a broader sense. The tech is essential to their shift in productivity. Yet it’s the strong story of action which is equally empowering, pulling together all the elements of sovereignty and agency in the process. A story that can spread across the continent inspiring similar start-ups in a number of regions. This is soft power.
In the second event, A/UK started with asking people to describe where they felt the power lies today? Almost without exception, the chat box showed a description of power as lying outside of the grasp of citizens – in the hands of politicians, businesses or cultural elites.
Through a succession of speakers, Alana Bloom of Enrol Yourself, Aneira Roose-Mclew of Trust the People, Peter Macfadyen of Flatpack Democracy and Pat Kane, Co-initiator of The Alternative UK, we described a new power axis, connecting the three realms of personal, social and global, or “I-We-World”. Most readers here will be familiar with this idea – explained in depth here – yet it is still far off becoming a political alternative in the mainstream.
Probably the biggest jump the participants were asked to make was to connect the evidently effective new patterns of relationships that Alana, Aneira and Peter could demonstrate, with the make-or-break role of the media – again, regarded as an element that communities widely saw as operating extraneously, out of their control.
Pat described the current media landscape which aims to continuously divide the people and catastrophise the public space – which makes a successful business model for selling papers. In its place, he showed the work of smaller numbers of media outlets – including the Daily Alternative – that help create a different narrative about community power, an editorial approach still largely in its infancy (for the whole picture, see last week’s blog here).
This media is typically attuned to issues of innovation all over the world, connecting good ideas to a deeper understanding of and progress around the crises we face.
Those not yet subscribed to any one of these media outlets would find it hard to imagine the power they have to change the story people are telling about themselves, on a day-to-day basis. Not only – as Pat explained – because of the positive effect of reading about your own work in an appreciative way (otherwise ignored). But also because reading about others’ work gives you the instant possibility of wider relevance and impact. You sense a system taking shape around you.
When these reports also include experiences from all over the world – people telling their stories while also offering to share tools and methods – an alternative idea of the future begins to take shape in your own mind. And also more widely, in what has been called the social imaginary.
This whole process feeds into what we term cosmolocalism: a community experience which interconnects many kinds of locality. It’s not just practice that the community shares, but also emotional resonance, dreams and vision. When you read a cosmolocal media regularly, your internal world changes and you are empowered to act differently. That is also soft power.
It might seem a long way off for most communities to imagine their own ‘new media’ facility - one that regularly reflects back to them the best of what is being imagined and initiated on their own streets and neigbhourhoods. Yet some forms of social media are already playing that role. When you join a platform like WhatsApp, Facebook or Nudj, it can show and tell you who is who and what they are up to.
However, without that extra boost of ownership and decision making - where every contributor to a platform, also becomes an agent within that platform - it can easily seem like a directory of strangers, who are also nakedly competing for funds. Instead, there is something about a genuinely shared enterprise that fires people up and encourages them to go the extra mile.
Which may be why the government has invested £150 million in match funding for communities that want to embark on sharing ownership of a local community asset (typically a pub). This is not a new phenomenon: according the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) there are already 50 communities who recently ‘took back control’ of their local hostelry, generating much needed social capital.
If a group of people decide to do this on their own, they can – with hard work – save a much-loved gathering space. If they do it more deliberately as a whole community endeavour, a chance to bring together the network of networks operating there, it has the chance to generate enormous soft power.
Of course, the government itself is a master of this kind of soft power – associating itself with the energy of autonomous community activity (the local council cannot be involved in the bid). Of course that can also backfire if too many people apply and are turned down: £150 million is a drop in the water of a state’s flowing budget.
They’re trying to create good feeling at the community level (though there has to be a caution about how wealthier communities will more easily be able to raise the funds that UKGov is offering to match). But compare that with the reality of a budget that offered no money at all to the NHS and in which the nurses – fully acknowledged heroes of the pandemic – were rewarded with a one percent pay rise. Less than the price of a cup of coffee more each week.
How did our newspapers report these matters? By reminding us that that we have the highest number of Covid deaths per head of population in the whole of Europe and the US? That after ten years of the same government, we started the pandemic with the lowest number of hospital beds per capita available in Europe?
No, the story of this grave responsibility competed with headlines about Meghan Markle who is outraging newspaper editors everywhere (perhaps for completing the cycle that Princess Diana began, when she walked away from the monarchy, taking Harry with her). These soft power battles – a competition of narratives - may look trivial from a certain standpoint. Yet in reality they shape the mental life of a nation and have major consequences.
Transition Summit’s core drive is to fire up the collective imagination of those already working loosely together, in the hope of breaking through to another level of transformative action for the planet. Unless we have the media platform to tell that story well, constantly reiterating the I-We-World power axis, it will be hard to break through the old story of our collective powerlessness.
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