Alternative Editorial: Breaking Free
Happy New Year to all our readers and collaborators!
We hope you saw and enjoyed the video from Planet A welcoming in the New Year and linking it to a call for resources. We had some great feedback - and thank you to all those who donated! And we also had push-back: some people were unsure of what the message was and, in some cases, rejected such a futuristic orientation.
So in this first editorial of 2023 we're going share how it happened, expand on the vision and invite you to explore this new space with us more explicitly.
In the months leading up to the end of 2022 we experienced a growing sense of frustration and urgency in our work - the source of which was not immediately identifiable. We decided to sit with it during our annual break from publishing.
We realised that we were spending too much time in the question 'what's the Alternative?' in a way that traps us in the present. Some might say that the very word 'alternative' is framed by the norms we are trying to escape. It tends to take the form of identifying improvements on the present: better behaviour, better institutions, better narratives, richer wellbeing. Rather than reorientate itself around a new system of thinking altogether.
However, this collection of ideal scenarios has often done as much to alienate significant portions of our society as attract them. In our current whirlwind of a public sphere, we have witnessed more othering of those who do not share our values than ever. Sections of our population have become fair game (the rich, the colonisers, white men), occasionally to the point of dehumanisation. On another front, populism - the appeal to 'ordinary’ people - has become a dirty word. This is almost the opposite of what we - then known as the Alternative UK - committed to doing on the day Jo Cox was murdered.
This anomaly is not easily 'fixed'. The very technology that has given rise to our 30-year revolution has revealed almost unmanageable fragmentation. Everyone waking up to their own 'truth' about how the past restricted them, moving into a (previously) unimaginable diversity of new alternative identities and ways of acting. Inevitably, the sheer numbers and chaos of what is opening up invites polarisation within the wider public sphere on innumerable issues. Initiatives need to know who's with us, who's against us.
At the same time, over these three decades it has led to the formation of new tribes, often warring. Is there any order to be found that might help us, collectively, have purchase on the multiple crises we face?
As systems convenors, we at the Alternative saw that many people were investing in community action at a local level—so we paid attention. So much of the important relational work that any new system will depend upon can only happen on the ground, between humans. For example, the personal and social development available to us through the internet needs a physical petri dish - a real location in which the dynamics between people can be experienced and transformed in real time.
Staying safe?
Over a period we noticed that, in many cases, the tendency to stay safe with this work - only engaging with people who shared a world view among them - limited its potential on a number of levels. Quite often, these projects centre around civil society and care communities, in which those who give and receive care are in a hierarchical structure. The givers are rarely seen as needing development; the receivers are rarely seen as the solution to our problems.
This is not to question care work - it's vital to our flourishing. But that domain is long established and unable to flourish, to develop forward, within the wider context of our unequal society. The culture of inequality can appear even in places where the intention is deeply compassionate: where those with more resources are making a 'sacrifice' and those on the receiving end feel dependent.
However, once we did our deep hanging out in the communities we engaged with, we saw the huge diversity of forms of agency present there: different ways of bringing people together and different motivations for doing so. Each imperfect, all with something to contribute to the wider goal of system change. Families, football clubs, festivals, markets, schools, theatres. Our society is replete with social gatherings - and relational tissue - but little or no shared purpose or means of co-creating a future they might choose.
However, woven through these narratives are also plenty of similarities about what life is: what our essential structures are (temporal, spatial, emotional), what we do within those structures (work, play, care) and what the big problems of our time are. Added together, these constitute our social imaginary: our intrinsic beliefs about how we live and breathe together, warts and all.
Within - and beyond - these identifiable gatherings, are infinite numbers of diverse individuals with their own groups of shared interest. From techies to musos to fashionistas or religious travellers. The numbers of curated conversations to be counted in any given neighbourhood, town or city can only be guessed at, each with their own identity and rationale for existing. Each can call upon non-local groups or tribes globally, without moving anywhere.
The multi-dimensional effect is that, wherever we are, we can be on receive and standing alongside regenerative practitioners (socio-political-economic-personal) in Afghanistan, Iran and China. Sharing tools, practices, experiences, joy, grief and light bulb moments.
Cosmolocalism
This cosmolocalism (the cosmos on the ground) has changed the social imaginary significantly over the past 30 years and in many ways has made community life more febrile. Those who may have felt alienated by the world they live in, for much of their lives, might be finding new belonging outside of the shared life of their town or city—while still residing there. Well-integrated, this could lead to a richer community life; badly managed, or malevolently manipulated, it can lead to conflict. How can communities come together in the face of greater complexity and ever more extreme polarisation, in ways that make them more not less resilient?
At the Alternative, we understood quickly that it would be counter-productive to do that work on behalf of communities - each has such different histories and capacities. Even so, we have worked with a number of communities to develop collaboratories - three-step processes that re-imagine the future and pave the way for community agency networks, or CANs. Many others (eg Transition Towns, Moral Imaginations with Onion Collective and Camden Council), have developed imagination practices that, undertaken in groups, can open up new possibilities for communities in often very practical and sometimes systemic ways. See our blog this week for an overview by Cassie Robinson of the wonderful work currently funded in this arena.
Maybe what makes The Alternative (and our Planet A framing) distinctive among these re-imagineerings, is the attention we pay to individuals within the community - in relation to the collective. What are the needs but also the superpowers of each person: what new intelligence are they bringing into the room? As our colleagues at Persepctiva might ask, what knowledge context are they working within, what is their praxis, and hence, what kind of reality are they occupying from day to day? How do their imaginations make their mark in the wider world?
This bringing together of I, We and World helps everyone to integrate their own lives with the broader emergence - whether or not you feel part of civil society.
Such processes make a vision of the future both more difficult and more exciting to cohere overall. Our sense is that if each person is not able to take ownership of what they are experiencing while living in that shared space, it's more likely the community will fall apart. Like a family that has to both recognise each member as different, autonomous and equal while also recognisably part of a family. Without that it is overly reliant on a parent to hold it together.
Tools we have used within such processes include pol.is, sensemaking, antidebate, constellations, U-Lab, Open Space, Circling, Empathy Circles and more. We have experienced both wonderful moments of realisation about what a fully potentialised future could be like - and what is holding people back. Of the latter, it is the dominant social imaginary that is the main restraint, carried by the culture and structures of everyday life and heightened by all forms of the media. As Ivo Jurian Mensch describes in his Perspectiva Essay The Solipsistic Society (to be published this month) people find it very hard to get out from under that.
What is a social imaginary?
When we launched our Planet A framework on our 5th anniversary in March 2022, it was precisely to create a new location in which a future social imaginary could take shape. On the one hand, people experience it as virtual - an imagined time in the future when all the truly innovative practices capable of regenerating life become the dominant system. This allows us to escape the current social imaginary - it seems as if we are free to act here.
On the other hand, it is viscerally recognisable as a deeper, more coherent truth about human and social potential that we already know is possible - but find hard to realise. In that sense, it helps us believe in the future as something we are already standing on and living in our hearts.
The unapologetically technological aspects include the role of intentionally generated artificial intelligence to help us find healthy, regenerative patterns in the multiplicity of our activities. In the future we imagine that the coherence and integration of innovative activities will not be the labour of human imagineers alone. But 3D computers capable of helping us move into quantum social change (see here from Karen O’Brien).
There’s a more present element of Planet A: the emotional resonance of aliveness, boldness, creativity, joy - wrapped up in deep meaning and purpose. This is the force of attraction that brings a future into being.
Stepping into our AI-generated avatars helped us to leave our present selves behind and commit to this new social and sensual imaginary arising - as we are also evolving in relation to its emergence. At the same time, we want to point - journalistically - at all the evidence that the infrastructure for a developing ecocivilisation is already there, slowly becoming more visible day by day. When you help us fund that—support us here - you become part of a new economy taking shape.
Between now and March 17th, 2023 - our 6th birthday - we will be getting more specific about who we see on Planet A. What the immediate work is that could be done. And your relationship to that new regenerative economy.