As I enter my forties, reflecting on my journey, I recognize the ever-present ‘care to grow’, in every context I found myself in. From childhood, when my parents allowed me to fall and fail, to pick myself up and choose my own path, this first context grounded me in agency and set the foundation for a fascination with learning and the possibility of personal and collective growth.
At the other end of the spectrum from an ecological sense of ‘care to grow’, we might imagine a more machinic, algorithmic understanding of ‘protocols to follow’. In more authoritarian regimes and cultures, one is much more likely to grow up being told what stories to learn, which rules to follow. Whether via our parents, or our countries of birth with their historic cultures and norms, or the jobs we engage in as part of a system of institutions designed as machinic parts in a larger engine; we find ourselves emerging, or positioned, at different parts of this spectrum from care to protocol.
From learning of history, and then law, and then the technology systems and platforms that draw us into their pseudo-machinic ways, I saw how systems of belief and behavior could structure or nurture these different aspects of collective growth: Growth could be blind, cancerous even, without regard to its externalities, extraction and imperial destruction; or it could be sensitive, regenerative, caring for and channeling our energies into creativity and human potential, those areas for growth which need know no bounds, nor ever threaten the balance of life on this one precious Earth we call home.
In Glasgow, the international machinery of climate negotiations ground slowly on behind the gates around the Blue Zone, a line of barriers, police, and security personnel keeping the body politic disconnected from its head; each individual representative of a country, or corporation, civic-sector organization, or academic think-tank, arguing their position, demanding and making commitments that never seem to be enough, and which nobody knows how we are going to enforce in any case.
Why wait for this centralized, institutional machinery to grind on, when we can choose to channel our energies towards an emerging movement of decentralised and inclusive ecosystems built on infrastructure:
- that means we can create spaces to gather, envision, coordinate and take action ourselves;
- that allows us to set and coordinate our own goals and commitments;
- that enables data interoperability essential to tracking any kind of commitments within a polycentric framework for nested accounting, for the transparency over who’s taking what actions, at the nation state, or the city, or at the individual level;
- that creates a way for all these actions to be seen and recognized, then enforced against or rewarded;
- that opens up a new recognition of care for the planet, involving new kinds of shareholder activism and stable income flows that would shift markets and the meaning of productive work and well-being;
- that provides greater agency and flows of awareness and resources for individuals and organizations that are taking actions to protect and nurture the contexts and environments in which we can all grow and flourish, together.
Our hyperstition need not be a libertarian future where the traditions, cultures, and protections of our nation states are all discarded. Yet there is an urgency and an awareness now of the challenges our planet faces, and our capacities to each be first movers, to build and find new creative ways for activism and consciousness change. The interplay of logic and participation, of institutions and extitutions, of emotion and inter-being with one other, with nature, and the planet – these can flow without waiting for nation states to unblock us. And when they are ready, they will come and they will join us.
My gratitude, as I say goodbye to my thirties, extends out to all those whom I have grown alongside, who have shaped contexts for me embedded with care to grow: To my parents, my brother; each of my teachers and mentors, especially my music teachers, Edmund and Carol Dry, my history teachers, Simon Hyde, John Fern, John Maddicott, my mentors in law, Sarah Samuel-Gibbon, Roland Vogl, Mark Lemley, Paul Goldstein, Barbara van Schewick; to my colleagues and cofounders, Pieter Gunst, Daniel Lo, Hannah Konitshek, Van Dang, Cameron Teitelman; my friends, from each period of my life, from England to California to Asia to France; to my Embassy Network bash‘mates, Feytopians, and the forest where symphonies of sights and sounds and silences wove their way into meaning; and to Susanne here beside me, nurturing, co-creating this openCOP and Forum for Earth, shared crucibles for the hyperstitions we call closer with every leaf, every branch, every root and rhizome connected by this Mother Tree.
And so here I am, now, entering my forties, hoping to find and co-found such contexts that might embed this care to grow; open-source, decentralized, co-created, co-owned spaces for our ongoing, collective, systems re-growth for the biosphere, and then, perhaps the stars.
Gradatim per aspera ad astra