Alternative Editorial: Dare to dream up the 2020s
From Quartz Africa
If you are a regular reader of this editorial, our guess is that you are facing the end of the year and the turn of the decade with some ambivalence.
How can we make sense of all that we know about the multiple crises we face – environmental, social, mental - and the evidence that so many people are continuing to look away?
When the scientists continue to warn us about the rise in global temperatures, how do the vast majority of us continue to do all the things we know will make it worse?
When we know people, or may even ourselves be, the victims of punishing and politically motivated policies that destroy families and communities...then how can those who are worst treated vote for more of the same?
Why can’t we, as a national and global society, manage to care for the people we live amongst? Or for the planet we rely upon?
At the same time, we can’t ignore the constant background noise – carried by social media - that a decade of protests and global uprisings have established. We know that in cities around the world, often in significant numbers, people are rising in protest against a whole host of authorities.
To name only those that made it to our front pages, think first back to the anti-cuts protests across Europe in 2010 - one of many responses to the financial crisis and mega-bank bail-outs at the end of the previous decade.
After that, there was the Arab Spring – protesting against despotism and corruption - which began in Tunisia, but was covered mostly for the drama of Tahrir Square in Egypt. The protest spread to Yemen, Syria, Libya and Bahrain, as well as significant demonstrations in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan.
Soon after the protests began against the 1% elite on behalf of the 99%, first manifesting as Occupy Wall Street at the beginning of 2011 but spreading as encampments to over How Many? countries. Following on from Occupy, we saw the rapid growth and proliferation of Black Lives Matter, triggered by the murder of Michael Trayvon in 2013.
BLM fed into and amplified a prior and much broader movement against ‘white supremacy’ and ‘decolonisation’, which has been gradually embedding itself in universities and activist groups everywhere for a few decades.
In 2014 The Umbrella Revolution brought the creative activism of Hong Kong youth to our attention. What was instantly dubbed the Latin American Spring appeared as anti-government protests in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. In 2015, there was arguably the first of many riots-turned-uprisings in Baltimore after the death of Michael Brown: a protest against police brutality quickly morphed into a much wider complaint against austerity.
By 2016, protests have become such a familiar phenomenon that festivals - like Uprising – are started to celebrate the practice (see the Uprising documentary here). Regular protests against Donald Trump’s presidency are taking place across America and Essence produces a top 16 protest list.
On a very different note, feminism suddenly shifted into a protest against sexual harassment and abuse carried by the #metoo movement in 2017. And in 2019, the decades -long direct protests against environmental degradation (identified with the actions of Greenpeace), suddenly burst through the attention barrier.
On her spot in front of the Swedish Parliament, Greta Thunberg began her School Strike for Climate which drew 7.5 million people onto streets across the world.
In its wake, Extinction Rebellion shut down the centre of London with their three demands on climate emergency. Competing for media attention were the young people of Hong Kong, up in arms against China’s attempts to dictate policy around the treatment of dissidents.
While hundreds of millions of people in total have been rising up “with the whole world watching”, there has been very little in the way of change, as a direct governmental response. Although there was a hopeful moment when UK parties came together to call a ‘climate emergency’, goals continue to be set for 2050 rather than 2030, as recommended by the majority of climate scientists in the IPPC report of 2017. In other places – Egypt for example – the uprising has led to arguably worse conditions for the ordinary citizen.
We need to increase our "response abilities"
Some would say, fair enough” why should a relatively small group of opinionated people get to bypass otherwise democratic processes like elections? There is also the problem that many uprisings are spontaneous: their oxygen comes from long pent-up emotions against a system that disadvantages the majority. They don’t come with the solutions on tap, so it’s easy for a government to move past them with soothing promises, or better informed measures of control.
Yet what constantly shifts is the narrative – the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves: what it means to be human and social in the 21st Century, in different parts of the world. Whether we resist or welcome the protests, we now know more about the experience of minorities who are slowly finding a voice. Our collective anxiety is rising about the planet (opinion polls register a rise from 52% to 84% in London, since XR made its mark on the city).
So it’s quite head-spinning to be in the UK, at the end this decade of protest… Particularly when the country’s electorate has just given a massive majority to a government least likely to respond to those very issues the protests raised. Does that mean the protestors have been out of touch over these past ten years? That austerity, injustice for the marginalised, and environmental crisis don’t matter to the majority of voters? Possibly.
Or does it mean that our political system is so broken that even an election cannot hope to deliver the long-term needs and wants of the people? The brutal supremacy of first-past-the-post means a minority of voters get an overwhelming majority of seats. The two-party dynamic prevents anything but binary and oppositional policies. The top-down political structure still leaves every citizen without a role to play in the decisions affecting them directly.
As we are facing the dawn of a new decade, our goals are clear. Having initiated The Alternative UK in the middle of a decade of uprisings, we’re committed to giving a platform to all the real-time responses to the voices of the people.
Whether from new learning that allows individual development, or community projects that help people get their complex needs met. It could be technical innovations that help connect conversation or relieve people of ‘bullshit jobs’. Or national city networks that land new forms of democracy. And international networks of commons practice and methods that have the potential for building community belonging, meaning and purpose.
To add all those different levels of new practice and method together, we feel, is the best path towards to taking the kind of action we need to address the climate emergency. Only when the majority of citizens are becoming response-able, right at the heart of the communities where they act, will the many solutions already available find any purchase.
In the midst of all this good intention and hopefulness… lies the Elephant. As we began to describe in our last editorial this could describe a new socio-economic system that implies a new politics. Or it could also suggest a new way of being a system – a matrix of human relationships that changes the effectiveness of the wider and grander system. Either way, we start the new decade with a good spirit – and useful mechanisms – of inquiry.
But it’s not open-ended. Our next step will be to move with the findings of our inquiries, releasing what we’ve learned as an entity, in order to serve you better. This will be a cornucopia of practices, methods, constitutes, and mechanisms that you can have better access to. And in so doing, we will bring you into relationship with the other builders of a genuine Alternative.
Let’s not leave this decade without hope. But let’s not pretend that we know exactly how to turn our difficulties around either. Instead, as we head into the 2020s, we are simply calling upon ourselves - including you - to hold our nerves. We have to play the next few years, noticing every bit of human ingenuity, as if anything is possible: the building blocks are there.
Let’s commit to patient building and rapid, exponential replication of the best prototypes. To developing enough resilience to cope with the unexpected.
Above all we have to see the humanity in each other. Our vulnerability and our possibilities. If we are doing that, then don’t be surprised if, together, we establish something we’ve barely dared to dream of, before the 2020s are over.
From Quartz Africa