Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

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A couple years ago, I worked on a project to make Loomio more accessible for people who are blind. I learned that there’s a big difference between saying “people who are blind” and “blind people”. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference to you, but for some folks, “people who are blind” emphasises the person and names one of their attributes, whereas “blind people” sounds like you’re reducing a whole group of complex people down to one attribute. There are many examples like this, whether it’s about people’s abilities, gender, ethnicity, whatever: I try to say “women” instead of “ladies”, “y’all” instead of “guys”, the list goes on.

Unfortunately, being careful with your language can backfire in many different ways. From a political strategy perspective, it’s an easy quirk to exploit.

When we take care with the words that we use, I would call that “being considerate”, but people have gotten a lot of mileage by relabelling “being considerate” as “political correctness” (here’s a browser extension to switch it back). These days, “special snowflake” is an even more effective political insult, exploiting the same dynamic. Essentially, the claim is that we’re “overly sensitive” (whatever that means), and we pay too much attention to words when there are much more important things to focus on. Rationally, it’s a dumb argument, but it’s very effective, partly due to this thing called “shame”. (I can feel ashamed when someone asks me to be more considerate with my language, so it’s a lot easier for me to dismiss them with a veiled insult rather than confront how my behaviour might be causing harm.)

When you’re in a community that puts a high value on using the “right” words for everything, a kind of local dialect can emerge. This can make your group unwelcoming to newcomers, who will feel embarrassed about saying the wrong thing. Again, from a political strategy perspective, that’s counter-productive if you’re trying to recruit people who don’t already know the lingo. The dialect can create internal problems too, as people inside your group gain status simply by using the right words for things (virtue signalling).

So all of this is just a disclaimer: while I take care of the language I use, I don’t spend a lot of time policing other people. Peter Block says “all transformation is linguistic”, which is a phrase worth meditating on. I think word choice is incredibly important, and also I think it’s usually not useful for me to tell people what words they should or shouldn’t use. So with all that introduction, I’m going to tell you about a word that really bugs me: America.

Wherever I go, I meet people who say “America” when they mean “the United States of America”. How many articles have you read about “North America” where the author clearly forgot about Mexico? I do it too: here’s a story I wrote a couple months ago where I’m talking about “US Americans”, but the word I used was “Americans”. Now I’m reading The Open Veins of Latin America, it’s got me paying more attention, due to passages like this:

“Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”

Eduardo Galeano in The Open Veins of Latin America

It might take a little effort to train myself to stop saying “Americans” when I mean “US Americans”, but the lexical effort is symbolic of my intention to grow a different perspective.

The word choice is a little a reminder, a note to self: there’s no such place as America. I’m in the Americas. Plural.

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I have come to realize that language is an indispensable portal into the deeper mysteries of the commons. The words we use – to name aspects of nature, to evoke feelings associated with each other and shared wealth, to express ourselves in sly, subtle or playful ways – our words themselves are bridges to the natural world.  They mysteriously makes it more real or at least more socially legible.

What a gift that British nature writer Robert Macfarlane has given us in his book Landmarks!  The book is a series of essays about how words and literature help us to relate to our local landscapes and to the human condition. The book is also a glossary of scores of unusual words from various regions, occupations and poets, showing how language brings us into more intimate relations with nature. Macfarlane introduces us to entire collections of words for highly precise aspects of coastal land, mountain terrain, marshes, edgelands, water, “northlands,” and many other landscapes.

In the Shetlands, for example, skalva is a word for “clinging snow falling in large damp flakes.”  In Dorset, an icicle is often called a clinkerbell.  Hikers often call a jumble of boulders requiring careful negotiation a choke.  In Yorkshire, a gaping fissure or abyss is called a jaw-hole.  In Ireland, a party of men, usually neighboring farmers, helping each other out during harvests, is known as a boon.  The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called a profusion of hedge blossom in full spring a May-mess.

You get the idea.  There are thousands of such terms in circulation in the world, each testifying to a special type of human attention and relationship to the land.  There are words for types of moving water and rock ledges, words for certain tree branches and roots, words for wild game that hunters pursue.  There are even specialized words for water that collects in one’s shoe – lodan, in Gaelic – and for a hill that terminates a range – strone, in Scotland.

Such vocabularies bring to life our relationship with the outside world. They point to its buzzing aliveness. There is a reason that government bureaucracies that “manage” land as “resources” don’t use these types of words. Their priority is an institutional mastery of nature, not a human conversation or connection with it.

Macfarlane writes that the rationality of our technological era has eclipsed our once-bountiful engagements with nature – and along with it, our once-vivid lexicon for knowing nature. Our sense of nature has been reduced to a mechanical, instrumental relationship. Macfarlane writes:  “As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us.  We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework.  We have become experts in analyzing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.”

This is a huge loss to humanity reflected in our language. According to botanist Oliver Rackham, there are four ways that a landscape can be lost – through the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning.  The way that we talk about nature these days reflects our diminished relationship to it, our ignorance of our local landscapes, and our impoverished our understanding of who we are in the cosmos.

By re-introducing us to lost words and near-forgotten nature writers, Macfarlane’s book is an attempt to “re-wild our contemporary language for landscape.” He shows us how many manual occupations (farmers, colliers, fishermen), hikers, and others have invented rich, pulsating language-traditions to describe the intoxicating and special aspects of a place.  His goal is to bring us into a more convivial relationship with nature, in the Ivan Illich sense of “encouraging creative relations between people, and people and nature.”

Some of Macfarlane’s profiles of British nature writers made me want to immediately chase down their books and drink them in. For example, he profiles Nan Shepherd, a virtually unknown Scottish nature writer who tirelessly rambled through the Cairngorms mountain range in Scotland in the same way John Muir lived in the Sierra Nevadas.  “These mountains were “her inland-island, her personal parish, the area of territory that she loved, walked and studied over time,” writes Macfarlane, “such that concentration within its perimeters led to knowledge cubed rather than knowledge curbed.

Unlike male mountaineers who boast about conquering summits, Shepherd hiked the mountains “as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him. She regards the plateau “as the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops…no more than eddies on the plateau surface.”

Shepherd aspired to ‘irradiate the common’ in the Cairngorms as a way to ‘make something universal.’  “An irradiation of the ‘common’ into the ‘universal’ – through her writings about the Cairngorms – is what she achieved in The Living Mountain,” concludes Macfarlane.  He compares Shepherd’s late 1970s book The Living Mountain to other contemporaneous classics such as Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard.  The book was written in the mid-1940s but not published until 1977, and with little fanfare or notice.

“What Shepherd learns — and what her book taught me,” writes Macfarlane, “is that the true mark of long adquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge.”  Compelled by the “unmappable surplus” of the mountains, Shepherd writes, “The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.”

Robert Macfarlane also writes about Barry Lopez and other writers of northern landscapes, whose work discloses “a shared metaphysics of northerliness:  an exactness of sight; lyricism as a function of precision; an attraction to the crystalline image; shivers of longing; aurora-bursts of vision and elegies of twilight.”  Such writing makes the Arctic north come to life on the printed page!  As Macfarlane links the aesthetics of beautiful writing with the experiences of beautiful landscapes and the ethics of responsible stewardship, it becomes abundantly clear:  They are all connected in a love for the land.

But Macfarlane is no prig.  He concedes that “there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response.”  Still, it is also true that our words matter:  “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.”

Macfarlane’s gift is to use language to help us experience the joys of being rooted to a place – to see how the subtle rhythms and pulses of a landscape help us understand our own role in this larger drama.  Inspired by such epiphanies, we must learn to act with grace and love toward the landscapes we inhabit. I like to think that poetic insights of nature and vernacular local words inexorably lead us back to ourselves, which is to say, to the commons.

Photo by Amy V. Miller

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In an interview recently, Aftab Omer observed that I seem hesitant to describe Sacred Economics as a post-capitalist economic vision. I replied that I am not talking about the end of capitalism, bur rather a transformation in the nature of capital, so that capitalism no longer bears the social dynamics to which we are accustomed.

“If we define capitalism as the private ownership of the means of production, and post-capitalism as ending that private ownership, we are still reifying “ownership” or property as an absolute category. But in fact, ownership like money is nothing but a social agreement, a system by which society allocates certain exclusive rights to decide how capital is used.”

These might seem like technical reforms that leave the fact of ownership of the means of production unchanged, but actually they change what “ownership” means. When we understand that property is a fluid concept, a broad label we give to a complicated set of social agreements, then it becomes hard to say what is capitalism and what is not. 

At bottom, the blurriness of the concept of ownership implicates the blurriness of the concept of the owner. Who, or what, owns property? The 17th-century thinkers that developed the philosophical foundations of property law (and law in general), Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Hutcheson, etc., despite their differences, all pretty much took for granted a world of separate individuals giving consent, entering into contracts, and making free-willed moral choices. It is from this assumption that libertarian ideas about the sanctity of property and the sanctity of contract are born, along with the irreconcilable difficulties that arise in integrating these with the good of the body politic. Private property (its presence or absence as an absolute category) goes hand in hand with the separate self. A system grounded in the understanding of our inter-existence, in the fluid and fractal co-construction of self and society, no longer takes ownership as a well-defined category. The terms capitalist, socialist, post-capitalist, and so forth, because they draw on ownership as an elemental concept, are therefore a little bit obsolete.  

Originally posted in charleseisenstein.net

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