Planetary Thinking

Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

Copenhagen and the War for the Future

In Democracy, Futures on March 22, 2012 at 9:05 pm

(Another old piece, slightly edited, brought to mind by a recent discussion…)

That which is unsustainable cannot go on. Unsustainable things that are propped up too long snap and collapse suddenly. Our way of life is unsustainable. The sooner we transform our economy into one that can generate sustainable prosperity, the better off we’ll be, and with every passing day, the risks of catastrophe grow larger and more certain. We need change now.

These shouldn’t be radical statements; they’re all demonstrably true. Yet they cleave right down the middle of what is fast becoming the largest generation gap in at least 40 years, a growing split between people under 30 and people over 60.

When confronted with generational conflict, we naturally tend to see the elders as seasoned and realistic, and the youth as passionate and ethical, and to seek a middle ground of tempered realism. Middle ground is going to become increasingly hard to find in this debate, though. That’s because realism now means very different, incompatible things to the two generations.

And this is what most older observers seem to refuse to understand: The world looks dramatically different if the year 2050 is one you’re likely to be alive to see. To younger people, Copenhagen isn’t some do-gooder meeting; it’s the first major battle in a war for the future. Their future. I’m a Gen-Xer, in between the two groups (we have our own takes on all this), yet even I can see that this war is about to get a lot more heated—far more heated than anything we’ve seen in half a century. To younger people, this isn’t just policy, it’s personal.

To be young and aware today is to see your elders burning your civilization down around you. To hear scientists tell us we’re in the final countdown, with the risk of runaway climate change (along with the ecosystem collapses and horrific human suffering it will bring) mounting with every day we run business as usual. To hear a chorus of respected voices—from doctors and scientists to retired generals and former bankers— warning that to lose this fight is to lose everything that makes our world livable and gives the future hope… and be ignored.

To be young and aware is to see old people—from the U.S. Senate to Wall Street, from newspaper editorial desks to corporate boardrooms—stalling action on every front, spouting platitudes about “balance,” committing themselves wholeheartedly to actions to be undertaken long after they’ve retired and died. To be told that the world’s scientists are participating in a giant hoax; to be chided for not understanding how the real world works; to be warned that doing the right thing will bankrupt us; to be told that not wanting to risk melting the ice caps and circling the equator in deserts within your lifetime makes you too radical to take seriously.

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now. And, yet, to be told not doing any of these things is “realistic” position.

To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.

Myself, I worry: not that the young grow radical—hell, if I were 10 years younger, I’d be on the barricades myself—but that they grow despondent. Because what the world needs now, more than ever, is what the young have always given most: their optimism.

So if nothing else happens in Copenhagen, I pray that all of us who have years and a voice and a conscience will say at least this to the world’s youth: Your fight is ours, too. Don’t give up.

This piece was a part of
The GOOD Guide to COP-15

Systems Storytelling

In Democracy, Futures, Planetary Thinking on March 17, 2012 at 3:56 pm

The new urban culture of innovation is revealing to us again an old basic truth of cities: that cities are not the streets and buildings found within a set of legal boundaries, but the agglomeration of all the systems that make life in those cities possible, from food supply to financial markets, watersheds to warning systems to prevent pandemic disease outbreaks.

Because we’re so unused to thinking in systems, and because so many of those systems operate largely outside our view, few of us even know the shape of the systems upon which our lives depend, much less all the other more complicated, abstract systems that extend outward from our cities to cover the globe.

All of us depend on systems each of which are too large, intricate and complex for any one person to fully understand, much less manage: no one anywhere understands their interplay in its totality. We are forced, in order to think well about the world, to engage in collaborative thinking across disciplines, fields and places. We are forced to build models, construct working analogies, learn to debate systems functions and probable outcomes.

This need to grapple with complexity and interconnectedness as we remake our cities demands more and more facility with telling stories about systems. We require elegance in apprehending complex truths combined with skill in turning models into narratives.

This “systems storytelling” skill is absolutely critical in bright green cities in order to engage people to with their roles as citizens, creators and consumers in helping to evolve and support the kinds of systems that make possible more sustainably prosperous lives. Systems storytelling is an essential 21st century civic and journalistic skill.

But it’s not a skill we’re terribly good at yet. Systems storytelling is still in it infancy. I’d love to see a major, big-prize competition for the best, most insightful systems storytelling for a popular audience. Or even, for that matter, a good conference on the topic.

Futurism is a Thing of the Past

In Democracy, Futures, Planetary Thinking on February 7, 2012 at 9:47 am

Futures can lie.

Because portrayals of the future are usually full of science-y things, we are inclined to see them as objective — as the product of something like the scientific method — instead of the marketing or political persuasion efforts they often are.

Making compelling futures is a difficult art to master. It demands all sorts of horizon-scanning, systemization and storytelling skills. No one with these hard-won skills uses them to weave visions of the possible without an agenda.

Advertising in the film Minority Report

Often that agenda involves personal satisfaction: company X will pay me for this, government Y will change its policies in a way I support, whatever… Sometimes the agenda is explicitly agreed upon by participants (as is often the case with futures created by NGOs and advocacy groups). But all too often, the agendas being served by futures are unconscious: they’re carried in the very tropes, assumptions and conventions of futurism itself.

Anytime you’re presented with a future (or set of futures), it’s worth asking “What am I being asked to see, what am I being asked to un-see and who is being served here?”

My point is not that we ought to “politicize futurism.” It’s that futurism is inherently political, and has been from its first days. Futurism has always been used to push political and economic agendas. Only now, with a century of futurism behind us, many of those agendas are so taken for granted — so frequently woven into the visions of tomorrow that surround us — that they’re invisible to us.

And in democracies, hidden agendas are always the most pernicious. This is doubly the case when they’ve appropriated the mantle of scientific and technical authority.

More dangerous still is what the hidden agendas of futurism do to our societal ability to anticipate change. Headed into what is beyond doubt a period of tumultuous upheaval, we need good cultural and political understandings of the systems and processes at work. Yet our tools and institutions of foresight are almost all riddled with assumptions that are in many cases more than a century old and (despite their robot-chrome-radical-gloss) which serve the current political and economic structures. Out future, as I’ve said, is a thing of the past.

If it is, as Whitehead said, the business of the future to be dangerous, what does it say that so much futurism threatens the status quo so little?

[More to follow...]

Designing Engagement

In Community, Democracy, Design on May 30, 2011 at 10:04 am

Great TedX talk by Dave Meslin on apathy as a symptom of barriers to involvement.

Meslin systematically runs through a number of avenues of civic participation where participating is actually made more difficult (his hypothetical Nike ad, designed in the manner of a public notice, is particularly awesome).

This all reminded me of a set of points I made back in 2009:

What would it take to design a movement that actually changed what needs to be changed? How can we design a networked movement that aims to forestall and undo catastrophe, by building bright green regions and sharing innovation?

Here are a few of the larger design challenges involved:

  • Finding places where a system has been draped in complexity, and revealing it in clear, beautiful, interesting ways. How things work is of inherent interest to many people. How can we reveal the workings of the systems around them in ways that help them see the usefulness of change?

  • Making public life exciting where boredom has dampened people’s enthusiasm, if not simply driven them completely out of civic involvement. How can we simultaneously reject needless process in favor of quick, transparent and measured decisions and enliven participation? Being part of democracy ought to feel exciting, and invigorating: we should view every part of it that’s boring with deep mistrust.

  • Launching a counter-attack on pervasive cynicism and finding fresh ways to call it what it is: cynicism is obedience. The very origins of the word mean “like a dog.” Stripping cynicism of its rebelliousness, making it looks as entirely whipped an attitude as it is, is a huge step towards reclaiming the public realm. Indeed, I think we need to deploy our full battery of humorists, satirists and artists on looking at what part of us makes us so ready to accept the idea that all is sham and we’re beaten before we start.

  • Reaching out to people have been made afraid of participation, and spreading enthusiasm and a delight in civic life. How can we make civic participation more welcoming, and jam the manufactured reactionary anger that conservatives use to gum up our public processes (through tea-bagging and astroturfing)?

  • Reclaiming the media sphere by supporting local journalism that actually reveals, informs and educates. How can we develop means to support reporting, writing, filmmaking and public discussion that advances our understanding of what to do, leaving behind the tired debates of the last generation?

  • Reinventing or replacing the kinds of civic institutions — the university departments, think tanks, research labs, planning agencies — that democracies need to make informed decisions, in the wake of 40 years of work by the right wing to either destroy these institutions or overwhelm them with new, better-funded ideologically-conservative versions.

  • Diffusing innovation through our local businesses and industry groups. Unsustainable business is bad business, even in the fairly short run: sound economic strategy in times like ours is to get in the business of replacing the broken systems around us. How do we build local business cultures that support transformation as the opportunity it is?

  • Above all else, reimagining the future. Since we can’t build what we can’t imagine, and visions of the future dominate our ability to understand the present, how can we embrace future-making tools to redefine the possible in our communities? Because the powers that be have one gigantic weakness: they offer us no future, none at all, and every time we shift the debate to be about where we’re going, we win.

We don’t yet know how to do all this, but we can iterate our way into it through experimentation, exploration and innovation, consciously practicing ally etiquette to link efforts across a spectrum of systems into a collaborative whole. Indeed, since the whole thing starts with vision, simply sharing our visions for what this looks like is a huge step in the right direction.

We don’t need to wait for some mythical cultural awakening, either. There are more than enough of us, already. In most cities around the world, a fraction of one percent of the citizens getting energized and turning out — using new tools to learn together, coordinate strategy and exert public pressure — would feel like a tsunami of democracy and creative engagement.

And hidden allies can be found everywhere. Public life is full of people who want to see change, but need political cover. Change agents await activation in our government agencies, businesses, schools, political parties and media. If we can begin to engage the systems in which they’ve been quietly laboring at the systems level, we can expect unseen helpers in unexpected places.

It’s time to make ourselves into the people who can do what’s needed. To fight the powers that be, we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be, building the future we want.

The FInnish Innovation Agency SITRA talks about the importance of helping people see the “architecture of problems.” I think we need a lot more brilliant thinking about the design of engagement as well.

(Thanks, Yuri Artibase, for pointing this out!)

Looting as Counterinsurgency Strategy

In Democracy, Human Rights, Security on February 22, 2011 at 6:10 pm

John Robb, networked insurgency expert (and Worldchanging book contributor) has posted some really astute observations about Egypt, including this description of looting as counter-insurgency in service of regime survival:

* De-escalate. No confrontation in the streets. Withdraw police from the streets. Change the government (fire everyone) and appoint new people.
* Misdirect. Re-focus on looting (property crime). Initiate looting through the use of security forces in civilian garb (reports of this). Make the people feel unsafe/scared. Increase levels of chaos. Open the doors of the prisons (reports of this). Make it seem like the entire country is burning/falling apart.
* Militarize. Bring in the military to control key intersections and protect key buildings. Increasingly, focus the military on stoping property crime and violence. Realign government to increase ties to military.
* Wait. The protests will continue. However, with the fear of violence removed and people unable to take over key buildings, Mubarak and his cronies remain. The protests eventually diminish.
* Lock Down. The police return, with military backing. The secret police begin to ratchet up operations to re-establish a fear of the government.

Interestingly, Robb doesn’t think the strategy can now succeed: “The question is: will it work? A decade ago, certainly. Today? No way. Too much backchannel.”