Alternative Editorial: Now Building On Planet A
Lots of building energy on Planet A this week.
Not the bricks and mortar kind - increasingly unaffordable - but the energetic connecting-up of methods, protocols, spaces, stories. Giving rise to architecture for social change. All for free - given an internet connection, personal or shared.
It's almost as if the war in Ukraine, building on the ongoing Covid phenomenon, has unleashed a strong wave of alternative action. More and more people are seeking to birth societies that makes sense: able to transform conflict, able to hold people processing trauma, able to bring people together. Creating the spaces necessary for regeneration to occur.
In one corner of this field, groups of community actors are prototyping CANs using something called the U-Lab Process. In brief, this is - in the words of founder Otto Scharmer - a learning laboratory on how to sense and actualise the emerging future. While for some this may feel abstract, its effects are those that most of us want. And we want a programme designed for those with large or small or 'half-baked' ideas to make real change possible.
We won't try to capture this process in a paragraph because it requires serious engagement with its unfolding revelations, through co-sensing, presencing and prototyping. Although do join our fortnightly co-creators calls to get a flavour of how it is occurring in five locations - Wandsworth, Hackney, Knaersborough, Hull and Tijuana (Mexico) - right now. In these calls you'll get a more local, and more common language to describe what needs to happen, at each stage of the journey - to take a project out of its implied cognitive or spiritual realm.
For example, co-sensing might sound more like "what do we think is happening here?". Pariticipants doing 3D mapping are really just 'noticing' how the dynamics and relationships of a place look and feel. When they interview stakeholders, they are having a chat with people in the community that rarely get heard. Presencing appears as "let's just sit with this for a moment before rushing to conclusions". Prototyping is much less mysterious, if we render it as "let's test the ideas that immediately come to mind now".
In this regard, we should mention that varying sized groups like this are doing the U-lab work in 90 (ref) different locations around the world, with almost 900 people taking part over a three month programme. All have access to each others’ journeys, with a lot of commenting and sharing of information.
Many reading this will have been engaged with community transformation on a number of levels for decades and might feel this kind of work is familiar - at least on a local level. However, few have been able to translate the work of community organising into a new politics. To some extent, the two domains of action have remained steadfastly separate - often quite deliberately. Established CAN networks like Transition Towns and Ecovillages, Bioregions and Eco-districts have all eschewed party politics, preferring to focus on place-based challenges.
While this seems logical, ambitious even, it can result in ignoring the groups of people that politics brings into the frame - the excluded voices that show up in social justice movements for example. Those that might not have the bandwidth to think about U-lab's idea of 'moving from ego to eco', while their main task is remaining safe from poverty, violence or mental illness. And indeed, many long-standing CANs are fully aware of their lack of diversity but find it hard to shift their organising model sufficiently to embrace others' needs.
Some think of the challenge of widening community participation as a long and complex task, demanding patience and listening. And too often this is also one-sided, with an assumption about the values to be shared. Those with privilege often perform compassion and listening, but never really offer themselves up as vulnerable and needing to be heard. Their confidence is read as strength, whereas it is often a cover for something else, not properly explored.
Some of the ongoing effects of social trauma playing itself out is described in The Spirit Level as what happens when ineqality mentally and emotionally coarsens both sides of a class asymmetry. But there is also the personal story of every person, regardless of social position: we all had formative moments in our lives that are private to us and might cut accross the usual social barriers. A new politics therefor, would recommend listening and sharing from all sides.
So, in another corner of the field this week, we have participated in a number of virtual and in-person gatherings, which experimented with a bit of software called pol.is. Although it was invented in the US, this way of finding out what a community thinks about a given subject became famous through Audrey Tang's use of it, to build a digital democracy in Taiwan (covered regularly by the Daily Alternative).
Tang appeared on video at a conference - Stronger Things - this week led by New Local - an independent think tank and network of councils, with "a mission to transform public services and unlock community power". In the question and answer session, Audrey constantly addressed the top-down dynamic that the 'empowering local communities' message brings. Its underlying implication is that power is singularly in the gift of government and councils to gift citizens.
She reminded them that pol.is was a tool of 'the resistance' to government, of which she was herself initially a part. Even now, she maintains that the digital structure in Taiwan is "the outside game", not an internal tool for manipulating the public. "The most important quality any level of government has to nurture is 'openness'... It's not about us asking for trust, it's about us trusting citizens".
Pol.is works by offering a series of opening statements to a given public who can agree or disagree, but crucially, also offer a new statement that others can agree or disagree with. In this way, unlike Citizen Assemblies (which have their own huge benefits), those participating in pol.is begin to co-create the agenda itself. People are free to wrestle away the initial narrative and create an entirely new one: but no-one can entirely control it.
In a gathering at Newspeak House which brought together many pol.is developers, inventor Colin Megill acknowledged a number of important, well resourced studies in the UK. such as this one by Demos and another by Nesta. Both confirmed that it's common for pol.is exercises to reveal that communities have much more in common than the media, and political parties, would have us believe.
At the same time, Colin called for far more grassroots-led experiments that might go much further in revealing more about 'the people' than politicians - or even the long term community organisers themselves - have so far imagined. What have we not heard until now, from the thoughts, imaginations and desires of those outside the mainstream discourse?
Cue the pol.is experiments about to begin, in the CANs that are now prototyping through U-lab. This week in Wandsworth we had a first meeting with the local Transition Town about how to use pol.is to source a new mini-public for a CAN start-up. The open-ness of the experiment will start with a question that anyone would have a response to. Less 'how do you do climate change', more 'what matters most to you in life'.
We'll start with 20 statements sourced from regular community agents (those taking regular action in the community) and put them on-line for anyone to agree, disagree or make a new statement. The task will be how to make sure the most diverse - also previously excluded - groups take part. Suffice to say that will not start with an invitation, but through participating in events we ourselves have not organised and listening in to agendas other than our own. Finding common ground and then handing over the ability to invite others to participate. Eventually, the plan will be to show all these findings back at a Friendly event to all those who took part - so they also get to meet in person, over some food and drink.
While this is still in early stages, such an experiment is closer to what Audrey Tang described as 'the resistance' to the old socio-economic-political system (not to single issues). Not a new opposition, in thrall to the problem of the old, but something more autonomous and self-organising. Aiming to reveal itself - to itself and others - in public.
It also offers a vital alternative to what Nigel Farage and others are now engaged in - a seizing of the public space to challenge the local authorities, issue by issue. As One Wandsworth (ref) describes itself "This group aims to get residents across Wandsworth together to challenge the council and TfL on their approach to implement multiple LTNs and road closures." Coming soon is a campaign to challenge Net Zero by referendum.
Finally in this same week, we can report that the new media system that would connect the pol.is findings with the CANs looking for that information, is slowly coming into being. Offering a communications system for all those involved in regenerative practices. Arising from that would be a news platform capable of telling the emerging story in ways that appeal to everyone.
If this sounds more like a dream than a vision, take some time - yourself - to pay attention to all that is currently occurring. It's a process of realisation: firstly, to grasp that such a new system would - even theoretically - revolutionise the way we think about the future. Secondly, to help us imagine ourselves becoming part of that new system - that new story about human potential. And thirdly, to start to take action ourselves with this new mind-set.
It's when we begin to enact the change we wish to see, that we realise so many others are doing the same. At that moment, you are standing on Planet A.