Indy Johar: Brexit is an opportunity to think about a "Great Restructuring"

"Wavers", by BeesAndBombs

We're delighted to find Indy Johar (a long-term contributor here) setting out another big-picture societal vision (we occasionally need them!). He's looking at Brexit as a symptom of seven major transitions we are going through.

Please read the whole thing, but we're interested in a few of them in particular, as they echo our themes in The Alternative UK:

Rise of the Post Managerial Society

"We are witnessing massive technological, organisational disruption of our economy and workplace. Already we know a major European Bank looking to downsize from 50,000 to 800 employees, along with new organisations like Buurtzorg (a neighbourhood care organisation) being born – which have 10,000 nurses and only 50 people in HQ.

"These are early signals for how the rise of Platform, Automation and AI economies are driving the demise of the administrative HQ, and heralding the birth of the post managerial economy."

This echos our blog a few weeks ago on recent comments made by Mark Carney of the Bank of England - that societies need to find ways to move many "middle" strata workers from "head" to "hand and heart" jobs. Indeed, Indy goes on to amplify this point:

Deep Re-skilling [of] Society

"The technological disruption is challenging the fundamental skills of society, but what is being disrupted is not the plumber or craftsmen but the middle classes – the management, administrative and intermediary skills. “Uber did not disrupt the taxi driver – it started by disrupting the cab office”.

"This heralds a fundamental disruption in the human contribution to the future economy. It needs us to reimagine our human development institutions. To think again about the conditions for human development, from neighbourhoods and nurseries to adult education institutions.

"We must start to focus on AQ, on EQ, on our capacity to learn and unlearn, to craft behaviours, our creativity, care and complex collaborative skills, how we can integrate human with machine agency."

Thinking about "the conditions for human development" is a constant theme of A/UK - it's the concern of Indra Adnan's regular editorials, and populates our categories "individual" and "personal development". 

Molecular Violence & Future of Human Rights

'We are witnessing a shift in our understanding of being human and a new comprehension of violence. Where we understand the impact of air pollution as molecular violence with systemic effects on the health of humans. Where emotional violence and racism can be correlated with literally taking years off people’s lives through persistent raised levels of cortisone. And where poverty reduces IQ by 13 points and its effects transmit biologically across generations."

"How will cities deal with 21st Civic Rights movements who protest this violence, with a growing sense and realisation of how systemic this molecular injustice & inequality is? How will we advance a second generation of human rights and welfare to address these structural inequalities, focused on unleashing the full capacity of all citizens?"

We have a strong theme of the multi-factor, psycho-somatic dimensions of health running throughout the A/UK editorial over this last 18 months. In particular, note this blog on "The Political Self and the Inner Level".

Read more from Indy's piece here, and from his archive at Dark Matter Laboratories.