Recent US elections, the reading of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, today's premier of Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, and yesterday's conversation with Ben Knight co-creator of Loomio, a tool for collaborative decision-making and democratic organizing, reminded me something I wrote some months ago for a class called Imagination and Change. But before I talk about it, here the context:
On the US elections, a coworker was explaining us what was at stake, the key players, etc etc... And while I understand the importance of having the right people with the decision-making power... My concern has always been the system itself. When I was a kid I loved to play Monopoly. For me, the climax was always at the point when everyone starts to have hotels in their properties and all was reduced to luck. We all know how fast the game ends after this point... Recently, I just learned to play Cards Agains Humanity. The game develops in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins at the end, because what we are all trying to achieve in the process is making everyone laugh and have a good time. The other is what matters. My conclusion was, you make me play monopoly, and I will only think of me and my victory. You make me play cards against humanity, and I will think of my friends and them having a good time. Can we translate this logic to the political world and the political institutions? The turnout of the US elections indicates we must. We are tired of politicians playing monopoly and us only invited to elect who's next... because the rules of the game, structurally, will always make them forget, why they are there in the first place.
I shared all these concerns with Ben who was visiting the office to showcase Lomio at Demos4Democracy, an ongoing series of demos featuring the latest tools that foster openness and collaboration to how we govern. The conversation quickly went from politics, to the self-alleged sharing economy models like Uber, to again trying to imagine how could these work differently. That reminded us of the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange model... so much knowledge is generated through these platforms, however, the success is not about the product itself (no one is storing and organizing it for further dissemination, etc) but on the interaction of the people who visit the communities. What matters is that there is always someone willing to teach and someone willing to learn, for the love of it. And they have achieved it. Clay Shirky puts it better in a conference of What the Internet can Teach Us about Love. Okok... going back to Uber and taking inspiration from the SO and the SE model, what if, the management responsibilities are organized with enough granularity that anyone could jump in and solve them, so the cost of the app maintenance is the minimum, the drivers and riders stay with almost the complete benefit and the everyday helpers can exchange their help for free rides? Something like collaborative distributed management systems for facilitating public services.
What gives me hope is that the internet is empowering us to learn. Because of the Internet, knowledge matters more than ever... because thanks to knowledge, the Internet will always be ours. Before, power and information belonged to the government and the wealthy. Now, it can also belong to us. Who can keep us from learning? Programmers and hackers around the world will always find a way to over-ride, re-create, re-build a space that will allow us to connect, engage, help each other out, teach each other, and find almost everything we need in our community.
Finally, going back to The Theory of Everything and what I wrote for my class:
When our guest speaker from “The young people’s project” spoke about “collective living to sustain our humanity…” he was speaking about commitment beyond organizational boundaries… human connection as our guiding principle. For him, working on TYPP was about replicating love, dream and imagination to move forward.
As it is said in the TED talk The danger of a single story, "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person." Industrialization and utilitarianism became our only lens to measure success in life. However, as stated in The Culture of Possibility right now we are being able to create a paradigm shift, were “it isn’t the world that changes, but how we see it and the story we construct to describe it.”
Arlene Goldbard identifies as “our most powerful survival traits: awareness, empathy, creativity, our capacity for beauty, for meaning, for moral grandeur.” From the organizational structure perspective these principles are guiding design-driven community planning and more participatory and place-based concepts of economy, citizenship and democracy. But together with these organizational shifts, minds and hearts need also to be inspired by them. It is not enough that the notion of success related to money or power changes, the belief in new values and principles needs to go together with allowing ourselves to make mistakes, stop the guilt we may sometimes feel by them and go through the experience of life as an experiment itself.
Community building needs that the notion of change transforms itself. Now, we need to accept that small is big; that our life, love and actions do matter. That the impact will not be measured in the traditional metrics we have developed… as a matter of fact, there’s the possibility that we will never find a technology with the ability to project the chain-of-events unleashed by our good will and hard work. Fortunately, as Grace Lee Boggs argues it in “The Next American Revolution” the new discoveries in physics can prove that even though we cannot measure the impact of our individual actions, they do contribute in a meaningful way to the better of our communities and to better the meaning of life itself:
“A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously… However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness.”
However. Community building is just one part of the challenge. We need to re-imagine everything.
In his book “The Grand Design”, Stephen Hawking cites Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He then explains that the universe is comprehensible “because it is governed by scientific laws”.
The interesting stuff for a lawyer and public policy amateur with only basic knowledge of science and physics, came when he explained that the known forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force) have opposing scientific laws. So, after explaining how our molecules obey very different rules (quantum physics rules) than what we, as a full object obey (the mechanical physics rules), etc… he manages to create (and unify all these alleged differences with his M-theory (were he claims that M can stand indistinctly for “master”, “miracle” or “mystery”), AKA The Theory of Everything, as follows:
“Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.”
So even though it is too soon to have a specific conclusion, this physic's theory gave me an idea of what we can strive for a new king of governance: instead of trying to have one big vision of how democracy should work, maybe we can take into consideration all of its branches (representative, participatory, deliberative, etc) and just focus on figuring out how to work them so when they overlap, they can both be applied. This way, I can rescue the idea of a world that has enough space for us to live in, at the same time that we acknowledge the different versions of reality that we as humans may have about life and how we must deal to live inside a community and a specific form of government.