Handle With Care: Post-Institutional Infrastructures in an Age of Collapse

INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE CRITICAL VANGUARD INSTITUTION
Crises precipitate change, and the moment of the early 2020s constitutes a critical window for the creation of new patterns and forms of research and practice which, in all likelihood, will be not only implemented for their own chosen purposes, but will also be freely borrowed by other fledgling institutions for their own projects, in return. Nothing in our time is of a piece: all is fragmented, yet instantly interconnected, at once. What we seek in our project is the pursuit of an “infrastructure of care”, one beyond the scale of the local community but also beyond that of the nation-state, and even, the planet itself.

Yet, how can we achieve such a grand scale, when the world is refragmenting into the old zero-sum game, mutually-exclusive modes of governance? The form of the research institution, one of our only hopes historically, is wholly in crisis. Whether in academic, para-academic, or think-tank form, today we see the same phenomenon. Largely embedded inside of the University-in-crisis, research as a project has increasingly faced obstacles to accessibility, inclusivity, awareness, and, above all, care. Outside of the university, its recent para-academic and progressively-oriented models are often beholden to small coteries of already like-minded people, while its think-tank model has functioned largely as a handmaiden of corporate-military interests.

An infrastructure of care in this domain would look quite different from all of this, as we see it. It would function neither in the
form of Melania Trump’s “I really don’t care, do u?”, nor would it in the form of neoliberal care, in which concern is expressed and focus groups and listening tours are assembled, only to then institute what had already been planned from the beginning. Rather, it would seek to create a culture of empathy and responsiveness, in which planning would be participatory and would resist attempts to capture within a subset of traditionalist, circumscribed, or corporate/military interests.

Those obstacles to such a development are by design, in each case. The contemporary University, for example, is predicated
upon a structure of stratification, rigidity, social reproduction, and irresponsiveness, priding itself on exclusivity above all else.
The para-academic and think-tank institutions depart from that in some ways but generally do so at the expense of either a
broader sense of public-mindedness or of political progress. Today, research institutions, in general, have been so “hollowed out” by the presiding logics, that their potential public-building function, their central role of the past, is being lost entirely.

We see, already today, a host of capitalist educational forms ready to swoop in to take over these public functions, ranging from MOOCs and online learning platforms to coding bootcamps, to a boom in extracurricular for-profit tutoring, all centered around creating better employees, rather than better participants in a democratic society. Whether these developing forms will be restrained to such roles or enabled to transcend them partially or entirely depends on the demands we place upon them now, and the degree to which we intervene with our own schematics. We are at an existential crossroads, we believe, for the reframing of tomorrow’s research institutions.

In order to counter the forces that might produce the rise of “audiences” rather than “participants”, we need to design and create platforms that begin from an ethos of radical care, that bring together a vast array of voices and human and nonhuman agents into new institutions that take the form of “mycorrhizal” networks, i.e., those that resist not only the traditional University and think tank logics of hoarding and exclusivity, but also resist that of the coterie boutique school — that function by creating interstitial spaces between them, sharing and combining resources in ways that foster true collectivity and adaptability.

Our hope is that, in proceeding from an ethos of care, a new infrastructural culture will be made possible in which research and education no longer sequester or rarify talent, but produce critical dialogue and research practices accessible to a broader public that will be created in the process. That can be translated into actionable forms in which no single institution is understood as naturally pitted against another, just as no single student is. Instead, we’d seek to foster a culture of horizontal mentorship on all levels, without disposing of with knowledge or expertise.

It is true, of course, that academic institutions often express the desire to increase their influence on the surrounding world, and we are not alone in that respect. Para-academic research institutions such as the European Graduate School, The Global Center For Advanced Studies (GCAS), The New Centre For Research & Practice (NCRP), Het Nieuwe Instituut, or Strelka Institute, can all quickly produce relevant contemporary work, but, due to their lack of network-centricity, it often remains within the confines of their smaller ecosystems of influence. The strengths of these para-academic institutions is what we wish to build upon: their future-facing critical, cultural, and political research practices, in particular. But from the perspective of care, we note that this very hyper-productivity, in its tendency to outpace commonly-received ideas, can create issues of accessibility for the general public, even in adjacent public intellectual or political spaces. The vision for a future left, as an assembly of critically-oriented institutions, is focused upon the question of how we can better interface and integrate with the wider public, particularly with respect to how these institutions can challenge political discourse through the accommodation of greater complexity and the interjection of heterodox ideas.

CASE STUDIES IN RADICAL EXPERIMENTS, ACTIONS, AND THE BEGINNING OF PARA-ACTIVISM

The Future Left is particularly unique as an institution insofar as it emerged from precisely the para-academic institutions we
have just been invoking. It was originally formed to integrate research from institutions that emphasized their practice as research, or research as practice. The critical theory exchanges Matthew Donovan and Jaden Adams engaged emerged through their common relationship with the New Centre For Research & Practice (NCRP). Adams is a co-founder for both the NCRP and the GCAS and was Donovan’s instructor and supervisor before they decided to work together to create The Future Left. Our focus has always been on bringing the work from these institutions into the public dialogue, civic engagement, political organizing, and direct action, using as a mandate the call to form new counter-hegemonic institutions.

For any such counter-hegemonic project to have any hope of success, according to Nick Srnicek’s INVENTING THE FUTURE, “it will require an injection of radical ideas into the mainstream and not just the building of increasingly fragmented audiences outside it.” The founding emerged largely from this book’s arguments in favor of the creation of a future-oriented leftist organization centered in a working-class politics, which we combined with an intersectional politics and accessible critical pedagogy, given that most research institutions were increasingly alienating themselves from public relevance or inclusion through a top-down, monocultural institutional logic. Our successes in cultural output, theory, and educational inclusion have been featured in such publications such as NPR, Vice, and The Washington Post, amongst others, which has helped us to forge ties between the radical and the mainstream public, alongside our increasing popularity within social media.

EDUCATION THROUGH VOTING GUIDES, READING GROUPS, AND PUBLIC TALKS

Our members have organized dozens of experimental municipal and inter-municipal study and action groups, engaging thousands locally, regionally, and globally. The principal organizers are Matthew Donovan and Jaden Adams, working alongside groups such as The New Centre For Research & Practice, Honey Power, Anon, and The Universal Research Group. Our earliest experiments were an international simulcast reading group between the Public School in Los Angeles and Wolfgang Tilmans in Berlin, that both critiqued contemporary activism and explored new visions of social change to come. Related to building a counter-hegemony, our discussion group came from critiques of building international movements at a scale that could deal with the most pressing issues such as climate change, considering that the left’s centering on horizontalism had greatly overlooked infrastructure and the institutional form.

As we continued to have reading and working groups, we started to form open public projects focus on a multitude of issues of feminism, post-capitalism, care and accountability, gender, technology, labor, and more, our voters guide influencing enough voters to swing elections reading 35,000 voters, multi-city avant-garde music protests against musicians known for sexual assault, which lead to a series of public talks, workshops, and lectures. For instance, Together We Plan! Community Organizing in 2018 with Women’s Center For Creative Work to rebalance the often juxtaposed goals of community change, personal and community care, and livable personal lives amidst joining the political struggle of a politically centered life. Bash Back! To the Future, a Seattle panel on queer community self-defense in the age of the Alt-Right; Collapse & Reconfiguration, a class taught at The New Centre For Research & Practice by the Anon collective; Promethean Democracy: Speculative Governance on a Planetary Scale, where Matthew Donovan taught a class alongside Jason Adams also at The New Centre For Research & Practice.

At the same time, such institutions are what we have believed to be the necessary center of left movement-building for a future left, countering the movements that are typically fleeting through protests, autonomous zones, and occupations, instead of schools, organizations, and research institutions. We seek to counter the movement of changemakers away from the spontaneous event and to move such movements into the lifetime institution.

We can no longer fixate exclusively on fleeting tactics for dismantling capitalism but must create durable networks of institutions. This new ‘instituting’ embodies heterodox logics, in contrast to the contemporary educational system which is built out of inherently racist, xenophobic, and classist norms. The Future Left has always imagined this counterhegemonic project as a combination of theory, in the form of a research institution, and accessibility, in the form of an activist organization. Our collective has served as a resource of information and tool for progressivism through projects such as an art show with a public discussion on ecological thought, voter guides
decrypting policies and political records, and a search tool providing palatable data on the money ties between police and elected officials.

PEOPLE’S CITY CHARTER CASE STUDY

We held reading and working groups to form new activist projects such as creating a People’s Charter, that brought together radical black scholars and futuristic city and urban planning theorists with lawyers, city planners, activists, educators, professors, and concerned citizens. The People’s Charter’s main aim was to advance black agency in the context of urbanism. We believed that integrating the praxis from the critical vanguard necessarily required a wide array of different professions and the creation of open space for wider involvement of the public. Also necessary was limiting the scope of the project to remain feasible and actionable for the timeframe and size of the working group. For this, we chose to focus on the aspect of the
charter dealing with the police department, which then led to researching recommendations to pass to activist organizations that were already established in the criminal justice reform space. We found our work to be the most instrumental if we allowed for the black-led organizations to proceed with their work, while we aided from the outside, hence our para-activist
work. One of the recommendations was later shown to appear on the 2019/2020 ballot, which was to reform the county police by bringing together a citizen-elected oversight committee. This ballot measure was passed by the funding and campaign of ReformLA who we helped spread awareness for and partner with during the process.

IMAGINING INSTITUTIONAL MODELS FOR ACTIVE CARBON DRAWDOWN

The distributed project of decarbonization will require an unprecedented level of organizational complexity. While there is an abundance of research and advocacy around decarbonization, there are few contemporary institutions capable of implementing an intervention. This is not necessarily a critical indictment, but the recognition that no one has had to form organizations that can tactfully approach the distributed issue of excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

The Future Left is invested in addressing the limitations of today’s institutional R&D frameworks for actively tackling decarbonization. As always, our methodology is to locate key issues, mine solutions from critical vanguard institutions, then assemble an array of experts, activists, and other outsiders to these institutions to foster an interdisciplinary framework to materialize projects. Our HNI research and social practice project will address the void of proven institutional models for Active Carbon Drawdown, taking the Strelka project ‘To Bury The Sky’ as a starting provocation. Leading scientists around the world, including those representing the IPCC and its Pathway Initiatives, have stated that contemporary models of passive carbon drawdown will not be sufficient to avoid the catastrophic social and ecological
outcomes that result from 2+ degrees C of warning. Passive decarbonization solutions include afforestation, regenerative agriculture, and emissions reduction, and are generally based on the notion of returning human society to a bygone equilibrium. As opposed to passive techniques, a growing body of research suggests that active decarbonization techniques will be essential.

These include emerging technologies and techniques that fall under the often stigmatized category of climate engineering, such as Direct Air Capture and Storage, Solar Reflectance, and Marine Engineering. While the progressive left champions its trust in science, especially in regards to the urgent warnings of climate change, it is plagued with ideological obstacles that prevent active decarbonization. It is therefore urgent that many of the discursive stigmas which surround environmental engineering are introduced into the discourse of the contemporary left. As stated, one of the most pressing components of this problem is a lack of serious political engagement with these techniques. Beginning to assemble new cultural institutions is arguably the most effective technique for creating the political will to achieve rapid
decarbonization.

Bearing this in mind, we would first focus on a research program by engaging experts on decarbonization who come from the fields of alternative energy, carbon economics, policy, and ecology. This would be followed by a tactical media design campaign that presents a detailed series of new institutional models that would be presented through HNI, The Future Left, and strategic
partner platforms. Our project at HNI would conclude with a multi-media package of educational assets for engaging communities with decarbonization discourse, as well as with a roadmap for growing the project into an established institution which fosters connection between actors in the field of decarbonization.

We know of few if any existing institutions or organizations that can effectively deal with global, complex, and large scale issues like carbon drawdown. In fact, many of these institutions are themselves deeply complicit in the perpetuation of our largest-scale problems, which is the reason for our urgency in creating new institutional forms, particularly those that can go
beyond neoliberal constraints to confront new issues of geopolitics and human survival. Our research and media campaigns will intentionally triangulate between actors embedded within national policy frameworks, international civil society networks, and progressive actors in carbon markets. This leads to mapping out the infrastructural requirements for an
organization that can handle such a project. This includes members of our own collective, researchers from ‘To Bury The Sky,’ global risk analysts, global policymakers, mixed with social engagement, and a global coalition of activist groups. As an organization, we operate through a diagonal system that allows for a hierarchy and horizontalism to exist simultaneously. Lastly, because climate change is a public health issue, we look upon the massive drawdown of carbon as a question of the “infrastructure of care,” a scaling-up of “affective care” in new urbanist and geopolitical forms.

STATEMENT OF VALUES

The Future Left facilitates education and promotes collaboration among like minded activists, theoreticians, and artists, knowing that solving the future is only possible through collectively rethinking our structural institutions.

● We encourage collaboration, coalition, collectivity, and replicating systems
● We value challenging participants and members with visions of new possible worlds.
● We create cultural equitable through inclusivity and and accessibility
● We work to make sure everyone is seen, heard, and met where they are
● We promote discussion and discourse, critical dialogue, questioning current paradigms, interpersonal development, and open critique through public forums.
● We make sure all acts of labor are received with expressed gratitude, suggestions of care practices are offered for participants in consideration of their well-being, and there is a strong focus on belonging even amidst differences in beliefs and backgrounds.

Covid-19 Mutual Aid Group
Our Covid-19 mutual aid work infrastructure of care was created at the scale of the hyperlocal through a neighborhood by neighborhood
focus. We help set up communication systems through a Facebook group to connect supplies with people in need. The system could easily be
replicated as a template for other cities and other disasters, continuing our emphasis on open source infrastructures of care. We plugged in
this mutual aid system in a national mutual aid activist coalition, leading to many groups around the US integrating these practices.

Police Contributions to Representatives Calculator (PCRC)
In support of BLM-LA and the global Black Lives Matter movement, The Future Left has created PCRC as an informational resource to help
citizens demand their elected officials stop taking police donations and redirect city funds away from the police department and towards the
needs of the people they represent, as laid out comprehensively by Black Lives Matter-LA at The People’s Budget LA.
See the tool here: thefutureleft-police.web.app

The People’s Charter
The Future Left’s working group was voted in for Navel’s Assemblies examining the systemic issues of Los Angeles solvable through the city’s
charter document. This document makes the rules for the city and we want to research how we can change its rules to further justice, equity,
and fairer representation. Our working group, The People’s City Charter, stands for pushing the institutional authority of Los Angeles to lead
the country in making local democracy accessible to the public. Our main aim is to hold politicians and police officers accountable through
drafting a new structure for the local city government.

“Living in the Age of Uncertainty” Talk and Public Discussion on Climate at Human Resources
Conversation with Kenric McDowell (Google AMI), Jaden Adams (The New Centre for Research & Practice, The Future Left), Christine
Meinders (Feminist.AI) and Matthew Donovan (The Future Left)discussing speculative forms of life that enable the acceleration of climate
change, how the political landscape is mediated by the climate crisis, and foundational anthropocentric assumptions built into both pro- and
anti-technology paradigms, expanding upon recent attempts to extend design thinking to include non-humans along with their implications
for culture at large. This discussion took place in conjunction with Ecology of the Edge at Human Resources, which was up from November
29th-December 8th, 2019. Our intention for these events is to fit into a larger mission of community building using education, oral history,
and counter-hegemonic thinking to turn our collective visions into future movements. Presented by The Future Left, The New Centre for
Research & Practice, and Human Resources.