Democracy for the 21st Century

You disrupt not to destroy, but to create.

There is fear in this word, some say.
There is hope in this word, we say.
Because sometimes disruption is necessary for the new to be seen.
Because sometimes the new is new and sometimes it is a recombination of different times and places.
Because sometimes only the step into the unknown can help to see the problems, the present, the answers more clearly.
This is why this is a process.
This is not a program.
The new is always a challenge.
Disruption is a technique to look at reality differently.

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We build a utopian space for thinking and action.
This space is digital, it is real, it is built by the people we know, we meet, we like, we invite.
There is a beauty in this, and chance and curiosity produce meaning.
Because who we meet and who we are is all coincidence.
There is freedom in this coincidence.
There is coincidence in friendship.
There is a necessity for respect.
And these are the only rules we have: freedom, friendship and a respect for the other.

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This is not a political party, but it could be one.
This is a movement not of people, but of thoughts and ideas.
This is an attempt to rethink, reconceive, reconstruct what has been lost.
Because democracy is in crisis, some 400 years after the making.
It needs inspection, and maybe it needs creative distruction.
We should let go a lot of things that we take for granted.
We should forget all of the things we know, just as a working premise.
We might remember them more correctly then.
We should start at the beginning.
We should rebuild democracy from the bottom up.
We should always ask: How would we want to live?

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This is the 21st century — but it does not feel like it.
Politics is still analogue, the world is not.
People move with different speed, ideas move with different speed.
Decisions, decisionmaking, institutions still work the same old way.
But this is a another age, there have to be other forms.
Also, certain developments have come to a halt.
There are more possibilities and less chances.
The environment, pollution, climate change, migration, hunger, the anthropocene.
Justice, equality and fairness have not evolved with time.
The strain on the system is the strain on the people.
We have to rediscover humanism and humanity.

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We don’t say that we know the answers.
We say that we are planning to look for them.
We are making a first move.
Our goal is enlightenment.
But maybe some of the answers will come out of different corners, pre- or post-enlightenment, the culture of ambivalence that was Islam maybe or the circuits of cybernetics.
The artist, the scientist, the musician sometimes sees more clearly by looking in the other direction.
The expert, on the other hand, is always in need.
We want to combine these insights.
We want a dialogue that grows.
We want movement, in all senses and directions.

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