Noel Hatch (NH): A lot of people talk about the civic economy. What are the core values that you would say embody it?

 

Indy Johar (IJ): For me, the core values are a transition from a kind of an idea of “business to business” or “business to customer” economy to a “citizen to citizen” economy. In a way, it’s not about the legal form, it’s about the relationship system that it’s operating in, and that’s the fundamental shift.

 

It’s really about going from corporate and representative engagement to relational engagement. That to me is a central part of pretty much any successful civic economic project.

 

Why we don’t use the word “society” is because I think we need to address the word “economy” and re-frame it, away from a discourse about finance and corporates, to a citizen economic perspective. That, to me, is a defining feature. It’s a behavioural feature as opposed to an organisational feature.

 

It’s interesting that you talked about moving to relational engagement and not wanting to use the word “society”. From an economic perspective, relations will be seen more as transactions. What are the ways we can protect the relational institutions, like families, neighbours or social networks, when they are confronted with the economy, which is guided by different interests and ways of doing things?

 

Maybe there’s a different way of framing that. How about we don’t pitch one against the other? How about we try and merge the economy and society?

 

I think the distinction between the two is a post-enlightenment feature, and its distinction is perhaps the cause of many of the issues we face.

 

All good businesses and systems operate as relational economies. We just weren’t able to capture the data. I think that’s where there is a revolution going on. There are much broader proxies of data than money. Once we move beyond money as the only true data set, as the only currency of analysis, we’ll get a much richer feel, blurring the boundary between society and economy to create a more ethical system. That’s one aspect. The second aspect, which is perhaps even more important, is how you utilise that.

 

The blurring of society and economy is instrumentalised by corporate and top-down systems as a system of abuse.

 

Slavery is an example of that, in an extreme sense. Currently, we have the idea of freedom at home, and instrumentalisation at work. You blur the two with a top-down system and that’s psychological enslavement.

 

So what you have to do, when you talk about the blurring, is to talk about the structural democratisation of the system itself, so the blurring is healthy, rather than destructive.

 

You talked about the “last mile” economy – the open, social, long economy. When we’re talking about relations, how do you support and stimulate people to use those spaces – whether it’s the corner shop or the urban farms – which are all around them and the closest form of economy they’ve got? How do you encourage people to spend their money and even get involved in those economies?

 

I think people are doing it naturally. Corporate systems control who tweets, while civic systems are built by people who are socially engaged. Corporates are controlled by nodes of behaviour, so they have templates of behaviour, whereas genuinely civic systems engage in different ways.

 

As we build global platforms to allow the relational economy to accelerate, I think those bases which were corporate will die. Corporates have had the power to control a diversity of supply chains.

 

Those advantages are being undermined as the relational economy gets stronger. That’s a natural cycle that we’re going through. What it requires is deep impact.

 

There’s a real challenge of reinventing something as simple as the corner shop. I think we have to start re-framing ourselves, away from this high-growth addiction narrative, towards real material value. That’s the reason that it’s not happening as much.

 

Is it because those examples aren’t being analysed, or is it that the motivations, particularly of young people, is that for the skills and expectations they’ve got, the corner shop isn’t perceived to meet their needs, whether in terms of money, status or fulfilment? In other words, they’d rather use their technical or social skills to help build the next Facebook?

 

The reality is Facebook is one in a 1,000 of ideas developed. We live in a “pop star economy”. It’s one of the last vestiges of the industrial system, because in an apex system, that’s where you have a pyramid and you have a floating possibility.

 

We’ve moved from the industrial pyramidal system where everything’s floating just out of reach of everyone. I think that’s the last vestiges of how reputation is accrued through media cycles.

 

As you democratise media and make it user-centric, these pop star dreams become less and less relevant, because your social networks validate you in a completely different way. And they’re user-defined, rather than broadcast-defined. You’ll see the death of the magical pop star economy, as a psychological entity.

 

As these different shifts are happening, what is it that can help people creep through the cracks of the current system without being hit by the collateral damage that comes with it? Some people may still believe some of those myths. What happens in those transitions and how do they build resilience to move through those shifts?

 

It’s difficult. In a macro-economic sense, you could argue that the state has been trying to do that. The state has been the buffer trying to stop the fundamental collapse of the economy and it’s trying to prop up the system, which has probably avoided disaster for many people at the bottom. So, in some sense, the state is trying to create a buffer zone.

 

I was more hopeful that state policies wouldn’t just create buffers but would create a transition zone. I believe this less now given that the financial economy – which is a layered economy – has so much power over that of the needs of the real economy. They’ve polluted each other.

 

I’m more nervous now. We’re trying to buffer the moment, in the hope that the system will continue, rather than bring about the more fundamental changes in the structural economy.

 

Tell me more about this transition zone. What would that look like? If the state can’t or won’t take on that role, what other actors might do so?

 

We need to democratise finance. We missed an opportunity with the banks. It was probably one of the biggest disasters we missed. No bank has been prosecuted, and in a sense, unless you build democratic finance, you can’t shift the game. There are really interesting examples around that.

 

We need to actually reorganise cooperatives and make them digitally useful. Currently they are archaic systems, nobody’s really reinventing the organisational form. Current organisational forms are archaic and they’re unable to change our daily behaviours, regenerate support and co-create conversations, provocations to your questions and so on.

 

We haven’t built the organisational form for this economic liquidity, for that kind of shift. We’ve not built the human capabilities of what this requires – a personal comprehension of generosity and abundance.

 

We’ve not built the institutional infrastructure. We haven’t built the fluid 21^st Century institutions and the systemic institutional reform that goes with it.

 

We’ve allowed the sharing economy to become a casual misappropriation of the term “fractional rent” and “sharing”. Sharing is fundamentally a citizen asset relationship, which means we retain the democracy of wealth, whereas fractional rent is not. So I think we’re just not being institutionally innovative about creating this transition economy.

 

There seems to be a compartmentalisation between different forms of globalisation. Globalisation of connections and technology seems to be perceived as benign and generally positive. Globalisation of trade however, is often pitched against the localisation of economies. The globalisation of different cultures creates diversity, but is also perceived as creating conflict. Because of these different compartmentalisations, there seems to be an ambiguous relationship between the civic economy and globalisation. How does the civic economy interact with globalisation?

 

I don’t agree with this idea of the local and the global. This is a false neo-medieval vision, which has been propagated by a 1970s view of the world. It’s one of those illusions.

 

What we’re moving towards is a proximity economy. Proximity is more than just a narrow view of localism. Proximity is about proximity-driven by platforms, which tells stories of shared purpose systems.

 

It’s a much broader field than the narrowness of “love thy neighbour”, which I think is a very parochial perspective. I think that when you look at a proximity-driven future, rather than a local or global future, you start to move away from a local versus global perspective, to a citizen to citizen relationship that can be built at a global level. Globalisation is a fourth generation scenario for me, it isn’t globalisation by the centre, but a globalisation at an associative level, whether that’s the Fab Labs or the Global Hub Network.

 

This is another form of globalisation where democracy of finance, democracy of ownership and democracy of design and production is fundamentally embedded in the system, rather than in the state or a multinational.

 

The polarity of global and local is a false paradigm. If you look at how systems are generating themselves, they’re starting to reconcile proximity and the global in a much more fundamental way. It’s absolutely consistent with the relational economy.

 

It’s interesting that you talk about proximity, because for many young people growing up, they can really relate to that in an instinctive way, whether they’re connecting with someone in China or India. Does that translate into economic and social behaviours?

 

They are first and foremost empathetic behaviours. Once you get four kids in four corners of the world playing Dungeons and Dragons, you create an empathy engine. It’s the ability to put the relational at the centre of the story.

 

In a sense, I hate the word “proximity”. It’s an ugly word, but it tells the story of where we are at a human level, rather than trying to fetishise a beautiful old English village and their local farm where everyone knows the farmer. We know all about the “tyranny of community”, and at the centre of that is the “tyranny of control”.

 

Nobody talks about why we really choose to live in London. It’s because we love the anonymity. We love the liquidity of systems, as well as the feeling of proximity. We mustn’t lose some of the real value that we’ve built in our world, and the freedom to reinvent. The freedom of anonymity is very powerful.

 

Politics likes to see things in terms of hierarchies, but also in terms of centres, that people might congregate around. There might be different sets of pyramidal structures that overlay each other, like the European Union. Then you’ve got a lot of people that are connecting across, and around, those pyramids.

 

Proximity to them isn’t positioning themselves within a particular pyramid, but to thread connections around and across them. Physically, the threads tied across the pyramids could loosen up and away from it, or they could pull all the pyramids down.

 

Is there a need to ignore the traditional system of liberal democracy and work more on democratising the tools of proximity?

 

We’ve been sold a pup. The vote is merely a totem of democracy. We believe it’s democracy, but it’s not. It is merely the cherry on the icing of the cake.

 

Democracy exists in many ways. In a sense, the democracy of economics is much more fundamental. If we look at the history of enfranchisement, the public libraries were built before we got the vote. If you look at it from a system-growing perspective, whether it was conscious or not, the democratisation of knowledge pre-dates the democratisation of the vote. Otherwise you’d have had the tyranny of the mob.

 

We’re at the same scale of enfranchisement now. We have to democratise consciousness. I don’t mean consciousness in the flowery hippy sense. I mean systems consciousness that can only happen if we build the feedback loops for people to be aware of the systems they operate in.

 

There is a groundswell already. These are all legitimate forms of democracy. We were sold a pup when we thought our tool of democracy was the vote. That’s also been the problem of everything we’ve tried to do with our current imperial behaviours in democracy: go and give people the vote.

 

Democracy was built by democratising finance and democratising participation. Building the middle classes is fundamentally correlated with democracy, because you have to create an inclusive middle before you can get systems to work. These are much more fundamental.

 

The demise of democracy is the complete destruction of the middle classes, of pathways to social equality, of the de-democratisation of finance. It’s a systematic destruction and the vote as the only tool of democracy is an illusion.

 

When politicians say people aren’t voting, that’s because people aren’t stupid. They realise it’s an irrelevant system. The vote is not the tool of democracy.

 

Through proximity, people can see that from other cultures they might currently be buying goods which have globalised supply chains. The power of proximity is that you can transnationalise that consciousness. Coming out of your own culture helps you look back at it in a better way, but also create new supply chains.

 

It’s an asymmetric relationship, what you are starting to see. Traditionally, it has been top-down rather than associative. No-one has really built an open project planning tool. What I mean by project planning is where you define purpose to allow people to associate to the activity that is taking place. Nobody has built that social organising infrastructure. That’s where we’re heading. That to me is really exciting.

 

We’re both involved in transnational forms of collaboration. What are the challenges we need to set ourselves in order to develop better infrastructure for working across borders?

 

My biggest problem is that we’ve not found the right tools for this yet. The Global Hub Network (www.impacthub.net) brings together around 60 Hubs which are functioning systems in their own right around the world. We haven’t found a means of governance that is truly cooperative. We haven’t found a means of cooperative strategy making.

 

I don’t believe in “open space”. I’ll be really straightforward, it’s a great kindergarten tool but it doesn’t deal with the complex realities, buried information and deep connections. Open space assumes the discreetness of things, but the reality is that there is no discrete thing in itself, there are interdependencies between them, whether it is capital, power or relationships.

 

Unless you can bring those complex systems together it’s very difficult. I don’t think we have the tools to do that. We’re fundamentally at the glass ceiling of participation. When you can’t do collaborative governance and you can’t do collaborative strategy, you create de facto bureaucracy, your power blocks. So that’s where the problem lies right now.

 

What might be the ways to tackle that?

 

You have to move towards a protocol-based system rather than governance. You have to move towards protocols. Effectively, writing a TCP/IP of units and having an “open hardware” and “open chapter” approach. Then, what you define is to only associate around the redefinition of protocols. You allow the core protocols to be additive and varied, to allow for an ecosystem of divergent systems, but with a shared central behaviour. Those are upgraded at a lower rate than the innovation.

 

That’s basically my intuition. Open hardware is about collective systems, not just technology (i.e. Open Desk, Civic Systems Lab, etc.) with a shared protocol system, which is about sharing what you declare to the public, and moving it away from a centralising system. You create a “platform architecture”.

 

I believe that’s the only way you can do it without creating a whole new pseudo-bureaucracy.

 

 

 

Indy Johar is an architect, co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. He is a Fellow of the RSA, Respublica Fellow, JRF Anti-Poverty Strategy Programme Advisory Group member, a member of the Mayor of London’s SME Working Group and most recently a member of the RSA Inclusive Growth Commission.

 

Noel Hatch develops and manages research and design programmes for public services, think tanks, youth and cultural organisations to better involve communities and transform services. He is a member of European Alternatives, for which he has run the programmes Making a Living, London Transeuropa Festival, and Mapping the Civic Economy.