Alternative Editorial: Let's Make Sure There's a "New Civic Normal", Too
By Pat Kane, A/UK co-initiator
So in the UK, we are creepingly advancing out of lockdown - with infections even higher than when we went into it; with “do as I say, not as I do” the perceived ethos of governing officials; and with a general suspicion that the invitations to come back outside are little more than economically motivated.
The easing of restrictions seems to founder, all too easily, on the rocks of common sense. When we gather, between six and eight of us, in our friends’ houses, are we really going to thoroughly wipe down their toilet after we use it?
When teachers return to school to prepare for their half-virtual, half-actual classes, will—can—everyone maintain the proper distancing, as they negotiate their familiar, cramped old spaces? How can attending a garden centre, or a car showroom, really be plausibly less infectious than a supermarket?
And on and on. The increasingly voluptuous spring weather seems to literally numb our brains to the prospect of a second wave of infection. How can Nature be at the same time so attractive, so lethal?
Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon tried to answer the growing general impatience, and incredulity, of the population in her most recent Covid briefing:
We’ve all waited a long time for this, and I hope you all really enjoy it. But please, please really respect the parameters we're setting out - respect each other’s space. Make sure things still feel different to normal, because they should still feel different to normal.
Will things now always feel different to normal? It depends, of course, on your definition of normal.
The Alternative UK (the clue’s in the title) was originated from the sense that our “normal” set of social, cultural, economic and technological conditions were far from adequate.
Drawing from the experimental politics of Alternativet in Denmark, we looked at the great “Leave” of Brexit (and the heartbreaking murder of Jo Cox just before it). We concluded that a huge journey had to be undertaken to understand the “people”, the “citizenry”, again. Anyone seeking to restore a political normality too quickly after Brexit would close down the frustrations (and the energies) it opened up far too quickly.
Our second resistance to any definition of normality was led by the IPCC report on climate change, Greta Thunberg, the young climate strikers and, of course, Extinction Rebellion. All of them, scientists and activists together, converged on the 2020s as our last collective chance to at least slow the impact of catastrophic climate change.
To emphasize the danger of this, daily normality of all kinds had to be challenged,. Schools and streets were disrupted; strange cultural apparitions and behaviours swirled through the centres of cities. An autistic young woman tearfully upbraided complacent power elites, at the very core of their operations and culture.
We could argue that the overall effect of this—its occupation and redefinition of public space, its powerful and viral symbolism—was beginning to shift normality in a different direction. When your city, region or country declares a “climate emergency”, what might that practically mean – for how we do business, build our homes, transport and feed and energise ourselves.
So a gathering crisis of normality, then. Yet already, many were frustrated at the lack of initial progress, at the excess of lip service. Then along came Covid-19—and at last, we had a profound experience of the abnormal that might genuinely shift our conventions.
The horror threatened at the height of the 2007-2008 Crash—imagine that our bank machines might be empty!—became effectively realised in these ten weeks of pandemic. Imagine that both producers and consumers were taken out of the economic game…cleared from their own commercial streets and shopfloors, via a zooetic virus.
Yet it wasn’t just economic value that was destroyed by the bug, but civic value also. Publicness, spectacle and mobility were the stages on which quite a few challenges to existing establishments had been performed (the Hong Kongers only the most recent examples).
As our right to free association in public slowly and variably returns, will we defend the return of the right to protest, assemble and deliberate, as much as we do the right to trade and take up our occupations and professions?
The current upheavals in America— part of a terrible and heartbreaking history, but their behaviour hardly constrained by distancing measures—show just how vital and necessary it is for feet to meet the streets, as an expression of people power.
Here and there, for any new politics—rooted in a hands-on citizens’ confidence building concrete initiatives that establish sustainable assets, trying to create new forms of value—being vigorously “out in the world” is vital.
This isn’t to say that the virtual communications we have been driven to, in this crisis, are in any way ersatz or fake. Over the last year at least, A/UK has been having a “Zoom” life in many of our engagements, both internally and with other partners, both on these islands and internationally. Much has been forged and even launched over these media (we’d point to our involvement in the XR Future Democracy hub, or CtrlShift, or Catalyst 2030, as examples).
Yet there has to be some kind of integration between the realms. Between intense dreaming and planning of a much more self-determined social and economic future, conducted across lively screens. And then how this realises materially – how it concretely shapes and reforms systems of food, housing, transport, energy, communications, education, etc.
How do you build better local futures together—while maintaining appropriate physical distance between those builders? How do you advance on the space, locales and services that (as much of the mutualism in the Covid crisis shows) could easily become part of a community’s self-provision and asset building—while also ensuring that interiors full of people don’t become contagious, re-infectable spaces?
Escaping the biospheric lockdown
It’s interesting to watch how a “new normal” – which we guess could be a normal whose differences settle into a new pattern – is both being pieced together by our establishments, and also emerging out of our everyday interactions.
There are some smart points being made – for example, that the facemask may be to the 2020s what the condom was to the HIV/AIDS-defined 1980s. “No one was especially thrilled about it, but as the dangers of unprotected sex [or contagion] became clear, people came to accept them”, writes the Atlantic.
We need to guarantee that whatever “new normal” settles in, it’s also a “new civic normal” (not just a “new commercial” or a “new surveillant normal”). Indeed, this would seem imperative—given how much the long-standing (and deepening) mistrust of top-down authority structures has been accelerated by the hapless performance of the UK government.
If we want communities to be much more empowered and self-managing, then that should almost certainly include power over and management of their testing and monitoring (or “track and trace”) regimes. There has been fury from “community power” advocates in the UK local government sector about how badly a centralised approach to handling the coronavirus has gone, ignoring community and local council expertise. It’s also been noted how well strongly federal nations (like Germany), with regions and localities very much in charge of their health services, have done by comparison (see this WSJ article).
We support the inventive work of local government in this crisis (here’s a long list of their innovations). Yet as ever, we’re looking for more direct connections between citizens seeking power, and the structures and technologies that could grant them it. Connections that don’t have to pass through the clogged filter of an often tribally party-political local government.
In recent years, A/UK has been looking at blockchain-driven democratic and currency systems, smart and sustainable energy microgrids, hyperlocal multimedia news, well-designed bioregions, and much more. All of these are “soft infrastructures” by which citizens could start to adapt and build with amongst themselves, to feel themselves connected to and responsible for their own assets.
But right under our noses, and only revealed by coronavirus, has been a most intimate yet pervasive system that obviously needs to be localised: the biodata whose processing and analyzing might keep us protected from infection, and more generally in good health.
How might we trust this processing and analysing of data we will be asked to willingly submit, through the apps and devices that will soon be pressed upon us? The answer could be: by knowing that we have, to some degree, built and/or consciously assented to the very infrastructures that manage it. All of that points to the localisation of systems—and just as naturally, to a globalisation of the knowledge and precedent that might inform their best practice. What we (and the P2P Foundation) means by cosmo-localism.
Coronavirus compels us to live experimentally. But as any theorist of play and creativity will tell you, when you compel experimentation, it never ends up well.
In a contagious and climate-extremist age, we’ll need to carefully re-craft the terms of our mobility and activity (indeed, our mobilisation and activism) in civic life. However, we suggest that it’s better that responsibility for that crafting is taken at the level and scale where it’s most believable and trustable. Respectfully, we’d suggest that’s far below most statutory and governmental levels.
Some might say—and we certainly do—that we should also reserve some energy to address the profound disordering of our biosphere, which has ultimately forced this bug, and its everyday estrangements, upon us. Let’s not forget the “worldly crisis” part of an I-We-World framework—not for one moment. That’s a coming planetary lockdown we desperately need to mitigate.