Is there any way out of the mess we're in?

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By Brian Eno on Citizens, jonalexander.net

You certainly wouldn't think so from reading the papers. The richest people in the world are already scrambling onto the lifeboats, be they called New Zealand or SpaceX. And the poorest are dying in increasing numbers as they flee their war-torn, climate-ravaged countries. Meanwhile official politics seems either impotent or positively malign, a well-oiled machine infallibly finding the worst and pushing them to the top of the heap. Most of the graphs seem to be pointing in the wrong directions: going up when they should be going down, or plummeting when they should be rising.

Yet there is hope. Because something is happening. There is a coalescence. A different story is rising and ripening. It is a story of who we are as humans, what we are capable of, and how we might work together to reimagine and rebuild our world.

This story doesn't show up on the media radar because that radar is resolutely pointed in the wrong direction. It's expecting the future to be produced by governments and billionaires and celebrities, so its gaze is riveted on them. But behind their backs, the new story is coming together. It is slower, more diffuse, and more chaotic, because it is a story of widely distributed power, not of traditional power centers. As Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad name it in this vitally important book, this story is the Citizen Story. When you see the world through the lens of this story, you see that there is a revolution in progress. The people are organising, not only in grassroots movements but also, crucially, inside the very institutions and organisations that are currently failing us. The people are starting to feel their power, and they're making for the engine rooms.