An Emerging Third Option - Reclaiming Democracy From Dark Money & Dark Tech
Also catalogued elsewhere
Democracy is facing serious challenges, including misinformation and social disconnection, which threaten its foundation. To create meaningful change, we need to shift from top-down approaches to collaborative, bottom-up efforts that engage citizens and foster collective action. By focusing on economic and societal transformation, we can cultivate a healthier social environment that supports democracy and innovation.
When you ask change makers in the growing group of (semi-)autocratic countries what they do when civil society is under attack, what do they say? They say that you turn your attention to business and to education as key vehicles for generating meaningful impact and work.
Business is the only place in society where the whole production function comes together. All other sectors — including NGOs and governments — just talk about it. But in business it actually happens
Tags: climate/business
economic transformation will be absolutely key for positive societal change in the years and decades to come.
What can we do to continue working for the change that we all want to see?
one important answer may be this: a shift of primary focus away from top-down — regulating the change that we want to see — toward bottom-up: co-generating the change that we want to see. Instead of government being the primary instigator of societal change, businesses, civil society, and leaders across institutions must choose to work together around shared intentions and concerns, in the form of a bottom-up ecosystem and movement. Obviously, the choice is not either-or. But the primary emphasis of change making will shift toward building collective capacity for bottom-up cross-sector innovation and transformation across places and regions.
Tags: sm/2024
When I went to vote last week, it seemed I had a choice between two options: “not” and “again”.
Tags: power/election
viable third option that would disrupt and transform the status quo by leaning into and operating from an awareness of the emerging future
Many movements for planetary healing and societal regeneration operate with the emerging future in mind — and it’s a movement that inherently is not left or right. Leaning into, sensing, and actualizing the emerging future is orthogonal to those 20th-century political categories — meaning that it is independent of these older sets of distinctions.
Tags: prac/futures, story/futures
we are now moving into a period that will see many institutions gutted or dismantled from within
we may also see the awakening of an awareness that cuts across old political lines, where leaders and citizens in communities begin to work together and spontaneously organize around common sense and common interests
spontaneously, without formal coordination but inspired by a shared civic responsibility
There are three main barriers that prevent them from growing and being replicated: the illusion of insignificance; lack of connection; and lack of courage.
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine to be quite helpful: When a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.
I believe that the smallest “island of coherence” is in realigning attention and intention. Our attention, if aligned with intention, can radiate clarity and begin to catalyze agency (that is, action that actualizes our best future potential).
- Islands of coherence can be connected to ecosystems of coherence
In order to generate change, islands of coherence need to be connected — with each other and with those that are not yet fully formed.
Those connections can be made with the help of generative holding spaces that weave the islands into an ecosystem of coherence and that realign attention, intention, and agency at the scale of the whole.
in the current context of polarization and absencing, it takes a lot more intentional effort and energy to hold the space for the activation of an entire ecosystem. But when you do, the results can be much faster and much more significant.
How can we stengthen the capacity to tap into our unconditional courage, into our true sources of “action confidence”?
• Our economies need to shift from running on ego-system to eco-system awareness • Our democracies and governance systems must break their gridlock to become more dialogic, data-driven, distributed, and direct • Our learning systems must change from teaching for testing toward education for human flourishing in ways that activate our deep capacities for co-sensing and co-creating the emerging future (which is a multi-country initiative that we at the Presencing Institute are just launching with the OECD and their high performing educational systems group).
we need more than just another app or policy. Our entire operating system needs to be regenerated and rebooted.
the social change maker and leaders need social leadership tools that cultivate the social soil. They entail: • Becoming aware: bending the beam of attention back onto ourselves • Generative listening: listening with your mind and heart wide open • Generative dialogue: making systems sense, see, and change themselves • Presencing: deep sensing by meeting the highest future in the moment, in the now • Co-imagining: clarifying the future that we want to create • Co-creating: exploring the future by doing • Ecosystem governance: organizing around common intention and shared attention
three scenarios and possible pathways that I have been discussing above:
- Status quoism: more of the same, capitalism & democracy as we know it
- Neo-feudalism: few platforms of Silicon Valley oligarchs rule the world
- Leaning into the Emerging Future: organizing around shared intention, planetary healing and societal regeneration
for social systems to truly change we need to upgrade their underlying operating systems, that is, we need to cultivate not only what is growing “above the ground”, but also the conditions of social soil
what I mean with social soil are the less visible inner conditions, what is beneath the surface, the quality of awareness (attention and intentions) and the quality of relationship that affect how we operate.
The social field, the sum total of our relationships, is a combination of these two elements: social systems and social soil.
People want to see real change. One candidate, Trump, ran on a platform that promised just that. The other one, Harris, fully associated herself with continuing the status quo, even though 66% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck and the US continues to support the genocidal war in Gaza
While dark money is contaminating the supply side of politics (agenda and political platform creation), dark tech has a similar impact on the demand side of the democratic process (citizens’ perceptions and preferences).
DINO, democracy in name only, because a democracy without a grounding in facts and public conversation is not a democracy.
It’s difficult to create a platform that represents the true priorities of the American citizens if your ability to raise a billion dollars depends on not listening to them, but on listening instead to Big Tech, Big Money, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and the billionaire class.
If you don’t listen deeply to the electorate, you won’t feel them, and when you don’t feel them, your campaign won’t resonate with anyone outside of your professional progressive orbit.