The Innovation Gone Missing
A case for Political Imagination and why we need to redesign democracy.
Text created in collaboration with Caio Almendra.
What a fantastic time to be alive — a simultaneous convulsion of blooms and disasters — ours is a golden age in crisis. Humans as a whole produce more wealth and knowledge then ever before. A 21st century teenager has more technology and information at their reach then entire nation states of a few decades ago.
And all this power while almost half of our industrial production is goes to waste and 50% of all nutritional calories produced go to the trash.
This is not caused by inefficiency. This is due to a paradox embedded in our productivity engine for the last 60 years. To drive production we’ve manufactured the needs that led to countless innovations at the root of our super powers. The price we pay for this is creating a sensation of scarcity in paradise. A race that allows for no feeling of security. We are incentivised to let individual desire trump collective accountability. This is the fuel that allows our agenda of never ending progress to go unquestioned. Politics and power are not the realm of the common citizen — leave it to the professionals. Think of your own individual dreams. You are special and you need more.
That might be why, even with so many reasons to remain positive, authoritarian populism is on the rise. And it is everywhere — even nations considered “stable”. This is the effectiveness of mechanisms of fear and scarcity, real or artificial. Those who wished to see a different society have failed to counter this in a way that proved productive. And those bold faced enough to promise that the cause of our woes is our generosity advance in power.
This is the Innovation Gone Missing: To have new political horizons that embrace instead of exclude. To establish mechanisms of felt and present hope and action. To practice gratitude as societies and specially: Not to allow the present abundance to wash from our memory the horrors of the 20th Century. In the lack of new political horizons, old dreams awaken in spite of all the very good reason we have to not dream them ever again. These are dangerous, dangerous dreams and they’re growing fast.
What actions can progressive sectors of society take? The traditional left resorts to the monthly protest, biannual electoral disputes and periodical strikes. But criticism and intellectual severity can’t even scratch the surface of a emotional issue. Forward thinkers have failed to put in place alternatives that would fit the public at large. How long can we hold snug in urban centres or eco villages while family, lovers and friends turn complacent, alienated or radical?
Ours is a crisis of political imagination.
We fight over values and principles and stand satisfied at feeling “right”. Encamped in our filter bubbles we cope well. We Dance around the informational overflow generated by our technical wonders. But we don’t dare to Redesign how we make decisions as humans. Yet it becomes clear that democracy is exploitable.
Everyday we wake up in utopia but walk the edge of authoritarian and environmental dystopias. How, from our new found individual powers, can we create collective victories? How can we create new social technologies that work better because of our differences? Billions will join the global conversation in the coming decade. How can we move forward with no need to erase differences and homogenise thought?
It’s time to Redesign Democracy. To create practical avenues for collective decision-making and co-creation. To found and support projects that can defuse a politics of fear and replace it with a politics of not only hope — but of imagination. That is the innovation gone missing. That’s what I am looking for.
I refuse to be afraid. I don’t believe that the solutions of the future lie only in the past. Anyone with me?
