Atelier WeekNotes w/c 23 & 30 Sep 2024
INITIATIVES. 'Who assembles the assemblies?’ — Humanity Project Assembly Dialogues. 0/DETECTING. Digital wallets for gorillas (or the frontiers of AI and more-than-human governance are weird).
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
Quite a lot of my time at the moment is being taken up with some challenges around one of my children. While the specifics need to remain confidential, I hope to bring it in to the WeekNotes at some point, as there is a lot about the consequences of austerity and COVID, the rigidity/brittleness of the education system, all of which has a broader importance. But that is for another day.
The result is that this week I only had time to write about two meaty items. Next week I will have a cluster of things on investing for impact (including an event on family offices that I attended).
This week covers:
INITIATIVES
'Who assembles the assemblies?’ — Humanity Project Assembly Dialogues.
0/DETECTING
Digital wallets for gorillas (or the frontiers of AI and more-than-human governance are weird).
Big thanks to Josh Knowles, for letting me use one of his images below.
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INITIATIVES
'Who assembles the assemblies?’ — Humanity Project Assembly Dialogues.
Over the last few months I’ve been making some (small) contributions to a nexus of organisations which have a common core of people (including Clare Farrell, co-founder of XR; listen to her Powerful Times interview for background). One of those is The Humanity Project, a 'movement that crosses political polarisations and [focusses] on upgrading democracy itself’.
It has been organising "local Popular Assemblies (Pops) up and down the country, connected to a national Popular Assembly – a people’s powerhouse made up not by career party politicians, but by a jury of informed citizens, ready to make the decisions we need on issues like the cost of living and climate crises".
I’ve not been involved with those. But I did facilitate the first of a series of Assembly Dialogues, which aim to strengthen the practice of deliberative and participatory democracy more broadly, including in Humanity Project’s own efforts.
Each of these series is focused on a question that has surfaced as the Humanity Project has progressed. I was facilitating the first one on 'How can we make the relationship between bottom-up people’s assemblies and sortition assemblies work well, so that it’s an interesting, self-reinforcing, generative and productive relationship?’.
(Jargon side bar: sortition is selecting people at random so your attendees have a similar diversity to the wider population; popular assemblies are more like 'whoever comes are the right people'.)
Other sessions in the series cover the topics of: neutrality of an assembly or a facilitator; being inclusive to people with disabilities; who sets the agenda; the problem of implementing recommendations; and, making deliberative and participatory democracy more anti-racist.
Each of these events has a co-question holder, outside of the Humanity Project, who is an expert or practitioner with a particular relevance to the topic.
We had 15 or so experts and practitioners share their stories on challenges of ‘popular movement vs deliberate sortition’, and then gathered themes.
One significant process innovation was have 4 or so artists and creatives as observers. They are tasked with coming up creative outputs from the whole series. In addition, the Humanity Project team is also hoping to release video snippets, and maybe even a rough guidebook.
Here is an example Josh Knowles produced live on the night:
Beyond that, the content of the event, and specific themes, are not really mine to share. (I will share outputs in a future WeekNote when they come out.) My personal reflections:
Preparing for more failure of mainstream politics. My quick summary of why the UK voted for Brexit is that many people felt behind economically, left out culturally and, therefore, let down politically. The post-Brexit Tories continued that mainstream political failure with a 'strategy' of unmanaged decline. As Will Davies says in the London Review of Books (£), “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future.” Hence the neo-fuedal rentierism: live off today’s rents, and don’t invest for tomorrow’s success.
I had hoped that a Starmer government would be better than just move us to managed decline. FT’s Robert Shrimsley says that (£) Starmer will be centrism’s last chance, claiming that "UK mainstream parties will not fend off the populist right unless Labour moves fast and builds things”.
Still time, I guess. But the Treasury Brain decisions so far are not a good sign.
What to do, if you think mainstream, centrist politics is going to fail, and give a huge opportunity to the far right / hard? (It’s already happening in Europe, after all.)
Well, you could try to build up the capacity of individuals to take back control through galvanising their communities. The first part of the COVID lockdown saw a great deal of low-level but still vital mutual aid spring up. What if you could prepare the ground for more of that?
Hence, having local Popular Assemblies, and improving the practices of participative democracy more generally, is an important strategy in a time of mainstream failure. Though, that will have the same problem as Oscar Wilde supposed observation that “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”.
It is always horses for courses. The orientating question of the first session implies that there is conflict between bottom-up people’s assemblies vs sortition assemblies. Through the evening we heard how those two forms could be in relationship, for instance a well-funded sortition assembly which has spin-off popular assemblies; or a popular assembly setting the topic for a sortition assembly.
The two forms both have contexts where they well-suited (or ill-suited). Part of the skill is choosing the right form (or combination) for the situation you are in.
The problem of infinite regression (or 'who guards the guards?’). One of the design challenges of participative democracy is about who gets to decide on the design. (For instance, who to invite to the Assembly dialogues themselves.) If you’re not careful, you then start asking yourself ‘who decides who gets to decide on design?’. And before you know it, you are having infinite regression — and paralysis.
The old version of this challenge is ‘who guards the guards themselves?’. To which there is no definite answer which will satisfy everyone. Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. But I think you can make decisions, make the rationale behind those decisions transparent and available, and you can demonstrate you are open to changing those decisions.
Everyone is right (except when they claim exclusivity). I spent a lot of the evening trying to remember this Ken Wilber quote:
“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace…
"...I have only suggested that [particular viewpoints] are true but partial. My critical writings have never attacked the central beliefs of any discipline, only the claims that the particular discipline has the only truth—and on those grounds I have often been harsh. But every approach, I honestly believe, is essentially true but partial, true but partial, true but partial."
A lot of the apparent disagreement in the field comes from people making a true but partial claim (eg sortition has particular legitimacy; popular assemblies can get things to happen) and claiming it is the only truth (eg sortition is the only way to get legitimacy; popular assemblies are the only way to get things to happen).
More on this can be found in Josh Lerner's white paper over at People Powered (the global hub for participatory democracy) on 'From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation'.
WHAT NEXT
Promote the outputs of the Assembly Dialogue series, when they come out.
Support Humanity Project as it moves forward.
0/DETECTING
Digital wallets for gorillas (or the frontiers of AI and more-than-human governance are weird).
I had two conversations someone this week with people who are working on how to bringing species and ecosystems into the political decision-making. They are doing it in very different ways. One is through Indigenous wisdom. The other through AI.
Imagine you could have train an AI with all of the human knowledge of a species. Then imagine you make that AI a co-pilot, with a human, of a digital wallet with the instruction: act on behalf of a particular animal of an endangered species in a place where they are not currently well protected. Imagine that the digital wallet buys certain services, like local people clearing out hunting traps which accidentally harm this species.
Weird, right?
And…already happening.
This 15 minute podcast has an interview with Jonathan Ledgard, the co-founder and CEO of Tehanu, which is already piloting digital wallets for mountain gorillas in Rwanda, allowing them to pay for their own protection. He has big plans that this can be a way for protecting species and ecosystems that are not already in well-funded parks. He believes the AI co-pilot cuts across the silos of human knowledge and is making better decisions than a human alone would make.
Quite a few things come up for me about this:
What does 'better' mean here? Better for who? (To be a bit Leninist, ‘who, whom?’, or "The whole question is—who will overtake whom?".)
How would we know it is better for the gorillas? We might assume that the gorilla species continuing into the future would be something they value. Ledgard certainly says he values them continuing into the 22nd century. But how can we know that gorillas value that, or indeed value anything? Do they have a sense of being a collective species, beyond being a family group? Even if they value their continued existence as a species, what even is their sense of time, let alone a point in the future which is 4+ generations of gorillas away?
The dilemma of bringing ecosystems into formal market transactions. If we treat gorillas active participants in the market, then won't that put then at risk in lots of other ways? (Joining in markets didn't work out so well for many Indigenous peoples; see Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse.) If we treat gorillas as outside the market, do market forces treat them as have zero value (not an infinite value) and so there is no cost to using them up?
For as long as I have been in sustainability, people have argued trenchantly about this. A bit like growth vs degrowth, it is self-styled pragmatists ('if we don't, the default value is zero') versus ones who believe putting economic logic in charge leads to disaster. The trouble is, they both can be right.
There is an added edge with each gorilla having a digital proxy (and eventually, a digital twin) which acts as if it were them. This more than putting a value on a resource currently outside the market boundary; it is making new player in the market place.
Where does the money come from, now and for ever? Some money has to get into the digital wallet. You start with philanthropists. You get up and running. Then the local government allocates a portion of tax revenues to it (because some of the economic activity in the nation is enhanced, leading to more tax inflows). Then there is a change in government, a crisis, or a something. The money no longer goes into the digital wallets. But now, the local people are treating the gorillas as if they are economic actors. They are used to that income, and to that transactional relationship? Can that toothpaste just be put back into the tube?
“Any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous” — Dator's Second Law of the Future. Though, as Andrew Curry has pointed out to me, Dator does also emphasis that this is not a syllogism—there are plenty of ridiculous ideas about the future that are not useful.
Lots of things that happen look weird, or have serious objections. Some of those things that happen turn out better than feared. (Some...don't.)
What we can say for certain is two things. First, there is a rise in seeing AI as a technology which will solve many problems, perhaps all of them. (A perception to take with a pinch of salt.) Second, growing efforts on biodiversity loss, with those invovled increasingly worried about how they are going to succeed in a climate changing world.
We should expect to see people trying to use AI more to solve the biodiversity crisis.
WHAT NEXT
Watching brief.