The question of how we reshape democracy, walking the fine line between stagnation and populist rage - is the defining problem of our time - with a coherent strategy, we can shape anything. In its absence, we’re going to end up spinning in pointless circles, arguing about trivia while the world burns.
We set this podcast up months ago, thinking we’d talk about the example Scotland sets for the UK and the rest of the world as a way *maybe) to shape democracy. And then Nicola Sturgeon stepped down and Scotland fell into the kind of turmoil I thought only impacted England. And then the turmoil in England sparked a general election. So now we’re talking about how we can use this moment to affect the digital, distributed democracy that we need with two of the smartest people in our eco-system - people who give their entire lives to thinking about this question: Indra Adnan and Pat Kane of The Alternative.
This week's guests are Indra Adnan and Pat Kane. Indra is the author of The Politics of Waking up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age and Pat is a musician, writer, curator, consultant, activist and futurist and his substack is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the ideas in our eco-system. The reason we're here, they're, Co-Initiators of
The Alternative, which is a socio-political platform hosting
#PlanetA: new ground to stand on for a flourishing future - and a daily blog and a forum, or perhaps a melting pot - for new ideas and new ways being. Acknowledging that the systems we are embedded in - media, economic, political - take our power away. The Alternative and Planet A ask us how we achieve the world we know deep down is possible.
You have to experience The Alternative really to understand what it is to explore ideas at the leading edge of our emergent inter-becoming, to think through the lens of
cosmo-localism, to hold new truths of who and how we are and to frame radical new political options in this age of cardboard cut-out politicians spouting ever more stale lines that were out of date in the 80s and are certainly not fit for purpose in the third decade of the twenty first century.
So this conversation takes us deep into this territory. Recorded on the day after the EU elections, as France heads to the polls and the UK's general election descends ever further into infantile name-calling and political posturing that no longer even pretends to be the adults in the room, it was - and is - really refreshing to explore ideas of what's possible with people whose entire lives revolve around the concepts of emergent change.
The Alternative Indra's book Indra in episode #124Pat's musicPat on Substack and at The NationalPat's Blog - The Play Ethic
www.theplayethic.com
Ecological Civilisation Manda's novel Any Human Power