Thought Shrapnel

This is a long-ish read, but worth it if you can spare the time beyond my summary. James Plunkett, author of End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken - and how we can fix it gives examples of how there are what he calls “pockets of vitality” in the UK, which are being overlooked with all of the focus on the rise of the Right.

I see some of this due to the cooperative networks I’m plugged into, but this post shows that there’s a lot more of which I’m unaware. I’m looking forward to following and reading more based on Plunkett’s extensive links.

The progressive Left leans professional, managerial, technocratic, and the Right leans energised, slapdash, insurgent. This seems to be at least partly because the Right, and Trumpism in particular, has mainlined energy from every weird corner of the internet, while elite progressivism is relatively detached from the wider ecosystem from which it drew energy historically.

Some people would say this is a function of progressive politics being at a low ebb in general. But I don’t think that’s quite right. It seems to me the vitality is out there, and is arguably at quite a high point, it’s just widely dispersed. And, for complicated reasons — maybe to unpack in a future post — this energy isn’t really flowing into, and reviving, the middle.

When I make this point, people sometimes ask me to point to the energy I have in mind, so I thought it might be interesting to name some examples. So, without trying to be comprehensive, here are ten dispersed pockets of impressive, hopeful, thoughtful work that I would call progressive.*

[* — I’m using the word ‘progressive’ here quite broadly, in its more literal and historical sense. I’m not saying that these are examples of ‘leftwing’ energy. I’m calling them progressive in the sense that they embody high hopes for what people can achieve by collaborating. i.e. these are all people working hard to improve governance, broadly defined. Or, even more broadly, they are people who are developing new and more effective cooperative practices — ways we can make our lives better together.]

The “ten pockets of vitality” he points to, giving examples for each one, are:

1. Contemporary civics — “rejuvenat[ing] a thicker, more active conception of citizenship and civic life
2. Community agency — “a… specific set of techniques, now mature in both theory and practice, to activate agency in communities”
3. Deliberative democracy — “about seeing democracy as a living process in which we debate, listen, and change our minds” with “democracy as residing in neighbourhoods, more than in elections”
4. Relational state capacity — “underpinned by deep theory but also embodied in a set of ready-to-use practices”
5. Internet-era ways of working — “an obvious one but it’s worth mentioning… because diffusion still has decades to run. We now have a whole generation of people who are native to internet-era operating models, moving up through the public and civic sectors, transforming institutions from within. These people are still in the minority, and the winds of inertia are still gale force, but they’re a powerful and widely dispersed source of energy — dotted across local government, charities, and in central departments
6. New delivery philosophy — “the basic idea is to transform the centre of government by working at pace at the edges, and seeing what stops you”
7. Novel institutional forms — “ways to organise human activity that differ from the predominant forms of the 20th century… broaden[ing] out into a more abstract but important debate about the right metaphors and mental models for future governance”
8. The climate movement — “different to the others in the list in that it’s a vertical rather than a horizontal”
9. Post-capitalist or non-extractive economic models “the essence of this work is to experiment with economic models that are regenerative and distributive by design”
10. Regulating a digital economy — “when I talk about pockets of energy here, I’m thinking partly of the more creative/rebellious thinkers working on these challenges within regulators, but also of the high calibre of debate that exists around regulators”

As ever, innovation is at the edges, helping move the Overton Window, and coming up with ideas to slot in when there’s a crisis:

In essence, I think what’s happening here is that the dominant logic of the old system — a blend of social democratic Fabianism, technocracy, and a narrow class institutional forms and managerial practices — has proven incapable of governing affordably, safely, and responsively in contemporary conditions (for example, in light of the complexity of accumulated ecological and human crises (loneliness, mental illness, etc), and the first and second order effects of digital technology).

[…]

The middle of a system… isn’t just insulated, but, worse, is subject to forces that inhibit change or distort the necessary signals and feedback loops. For one thing, the middle of a system is where those sociological forces are strongest. Deep inside systems, people get locked into a gamified world that has a tight internal coherence, but little link to outside conditions.

Source: James Plunkett

Image: Micah Hallahan