Alternative Editorial: The Plurality Is Here
Audrey Tang and Jon Alexander at the Conduit Club this week. Photo: Pat Kane
For the past two weeks we’ve been calling upon ourselves to think of this significant shift in the make-up of the UK Parliament as signalling a moment of change.
Despite the fact that the Labour landslide was achieved through the lowest turnout in post-war years, ultimately won by only 20% of the electorate, we committed to the narrative.
Despite events in the USA, with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump conjuring up trauma memories of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Jo Cox, we held our nerve.
Despite football not coming home—again—our mantra has been change is possible. Our conviction is that change is here. Our practice is be the change.
So this past weekend our doggedness (faith?) was rewarded by a series of events in London we might describe as poietic. Meaning (for those not already in love with this word) manifestation as a work of art. The future we could all look forward to breaking surface. Carrying intelligence from the roots of our culture and the infinitely diverse world outside the room.
The main draw, initially, was a workshop at the Kairos Club at their new premises in the heart of the West End. Founded by the inimitable Zoe Blacker – journalist and climate activist – Kairos is a talk space drawing a metamodern crowd.
Following hot on the heels of the Realisation Festival (where Kairos was birthed in 2022) Pippa Evans (Co-director of Realisation) was developing the work we presented there on democracy and improvisation, with self-described anarchist Sophie Scott-Brown [see our post] and the notion of everyday democracy.
Given the oppositional structure of party politics, Scott-Brown’s inquiry was: can we move beyond reactions to conflict – with all the accompanying grief – to responses, that might lead to more constructive outcomes? In particular Sophie wanted to challenge the idea of consensus as the only conditions in which we can come together as a diverse citizenry.
This might sound like familiar territory in the field of war and conflict resolution, where hostilities cease when negotiations are completed. By necessity – the urgency of stopping the killing – these tend to be a zero-sum game in which both sides compromise to reach peace.
However too often settlements leave intact most of the conditions in which conflict broke out. Inequality, trauma and other networks of related issues mean that peace is often only ‘the absence of war’, rather than fresh new grounds to generate radical new outcomes. (see Johan Galtung on the structures of violence).
Given that we are not yet in a mainstream global commitment to get beyond war and violence, what role can individuals and communities play in setting a new agenda? Can we stop conflict escalating into destructive outcomes in our everyday lives – hatred, prejudice, anger - and, beyond that, prevent it becoming violent on a bigger scale?
Step up Improv Tsar (we wish) Pippa Evans. She takes participants into a series of exercises designed to rewire our capacities to respond playfully when confronted by others.
As touched on last week’s introduction to the improvisation work, this is not anger management or any form of self-control. Instead it’s removing the barriers to staying fluid: engagement, curiosity, having fun with difference.
The sessions start with a celebration of failure as inevitable – when challenged to be creative on the spot, each of us are bound to make fools of ourselves at some point in the afternoon. But we move into an experience of freedom as we get better and better at responding with openness to odd requests.
Pippa Evans, mid-improv, Realisation Festival
At the heart of Pippa’s improv proposition is the idea that each of us are deeply creative, often idiosyncratically. We each have something to contribute to meeting the challenges of our times - even if our culture and lifestyles have blinded us to our ability to respond, or robbed us of the confidence.
With a whole day at our disposal, Sophie and Pippa had time to improv some real life – but everyday – conflicts. The aim was to see if an improv mindset could lead to a different idea of democracy from the home. We took the example of a couple disagreeing about where to go on holiday and invited one party to have a ‘yes, but mindset’ and the other to have a ‘yes, and’ response.
During the conversation we noticed – just by listening carefully – how the politics of time, work/jobs, status, protest, privilege, and more, appear in our daily lives. It was striking how the more conciliatory party exposed herself as the more coercive. And how the difficult one was the more systemic and self-realised. And how our sympathies switched continually!
For the group it was a steep learning curve in understanding the dynamics of power and decision making. There was an excitement in noticing and then confronting one’s own reactivity. Imagine if we’d had more of these tools available in recent political conflicts.
Plurality and Audrey Tang
AS we came to the end of the day we ‘discovered’ that Audrey Tang was in London on a short visit. Anyone who has followed our coverage of Audrey’s work will know this was the equivalent of a genie suddenly coming out of the bottle you are swigging from. What? Where?
Audrey is travelling partly to promote her new book and documentary. But also partly in response to the multiple global networks now taking shape, looking for the kind of transformations in democracy that have been experienced in Taiwan since their shift to a digital deliberative politics.
Like Pippa, Sophie and ourselves, Audrey’s work is deeply focused on facilitating a deeper, everyday democracy. One that is radically more inclusive and generates ownership and agency for people working with others, cosmolocally.
For those who haven’t encountered the story of the Sunflower Revolution, it’s vital reading. Briefly, up until 2014, Taiwan was a heavily conflicted political space, with trust in the government at 20%.
Not only does the country have tens of different languages – making any kind of top-down authority difficult – but there are also multiple stances on the relationship with the superpower China on its doorstep. Young people were often in conflict with their elders and the USA is a constant presence, trying to capitalise on the diverse conflicts to weaken China.
Groups of young coders – including Audrey Tang – developed a parallel system by simply replacing the letter ‘o’ in .gov with a numeral ‘0’ (.g0v) and invited the public to join an experiment. This technology afforded far more than a poll or referendum on a named topic within a short time frame.
Its premise was that the parallel government wanted to be informed of how people were thinking and feeling: to know what might stop them benefiting from the government’s policies. Hence people could phone in with a worry, an idea, or a criticism – creating a constant sounding board which the real government then had access to.
At a point of tension with China, the coders occupied parliament and in a moment of political magic, were permitted to install a deliberative technology called pol.is, using the government’s electoral register. This gave every citizen the possibility of contributing to political decision making. (See our own in Wandsworth, plus further UK experiments with the tools). The equivalent here would be to invite everyone into a permanent Citizens Assembly.
With pol.is government can present an issue as a statement of 20 or so facts, followed by the invitation for people to share their opinion on them. People can either approve, disapprove, or offer another idea on the same topic. This small addition instantly shifts the action from reacting to responding – what would I do? Very improv!
Significantly there is no comment option: so people can not react to others’ views. Instead the public begins to co-create the proposal, re-shaping it through their contributions. What improv artists might describe as a ‘yes, and’ system.
Artificial intelligence embedded in the system can detect common ground between diverse views: even the most extreme opinions find elements in common with more mainstream ones. For example, people may use freedom in very different contexts, but the desire is to be less constricted is shared. Or (as we noticed on Facebook during Covid) both climate activists and Brexiteers wanted to grow their own food.
Eventually pol.is produces four groups of ‘feelings’ which then are presented to stakeholder groups in real time. Today, trust in the Taiwanese government has moved up to 80%. Amazing. But there are many questions too.
In a series of events organised by Jon Alexander of the Citizens Project, we began by encountering Audrey at the home of Hard Art – Brian Eno’s studio in West London. Here we were in the company of artists, musicians and political entrepreneurs like us. In a series of interviews with questions, Audrey described the wider mindset of a politics designed to bring people together and be in service to their good experience of society.
Through these a few points became clear:
· This initiative started outside of government. The autonomy of the .g0v initiative was crucial to the shift in the power relationship between the government and the people. Without a strong self-organised polity to dialogue with, there was nothing to prompt the government to develop democracy or hold them to account.
· Trust has to be a two-way street at every level. Before the government could win the trust of the people, they had to put trust in the people. This was also true of the civil society organisations who were used to being in charge at the community level. One might say it was also true of the people themselves – to begin to trust themselves.
· Trust is not a demand, it’s a demonstration. To generate it, you must do it.
· This revolution started at least 30 years ago: in Audrey’s words, the internet IS a new democracy. What the Taiwanese have contributed is the technology to self-organise.
· Facilitating plurality is the path to peace
· The constant refrain of ‘the singularity is coming’ does not contradict the fact that the plurality is here, now.
· The technology is a bridging tool that helps polarised opinions to find common ground in the plurality. It does not bring solutions: it sets up the conditions for stakeholder gatherings in real time. However, the technology builds trust, enabling a much better container for further co-creation.
At the Hard Art studio, the ‘news’ of a better government system becoming possible set off a flurry of creative innovations that might prepare our communities for future self-organising at multiple levels. From neighbourhood song writing to education systems designed by children. It was clear, in that room, that the hope which artists generate had moved into optimism.
For us, between the improvisation workshop and the news from Taiwan, there was a sense of human response-ability lifting off. On the one hand, in the field of human potential (thoughtful, privileged). On the other in technology, which may carry those broader cultural developments into radical connection with a much wider polity.
Of course, till now, digital technology can itself exclude many. But human technology – our biology, neurology, psychology – is all of ours, individually and collectively, by design. Our ongoing inquiry is how to integrate these two fields of development through personal and common ownership.
Watch this space for more information on Audrey Tang’s tour and the sparks that get ignited. Meantime, we will focus on inviting Audrey to Edinburgh next, in the full belief that—with a proportional political system and a polity already considering democratic renewal—there may be an appetite for experimenting further with pol.is.
We can’t end without quoting Audrey’s famous poetic job-description, when first appointed Digital Minister in Taiwan:
When we see “internet of things”, let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near”, let us remember: the plurality is here.