Citizen is a Verb
Back in September 2024, as the US election took an unexpected turn, we gathered at the Conduit Club in London with Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart — the powerhouse duo behind How To Citizen. Since launching their project in 2020, they’ve been telling the stories of the “next democracy,” spotlighting people who are already reimagining civic life. In this episode, we explore their radical, hopeful idea: that being a citizen is something we do, not something we are. It’s a call to action and a reminder that democracy is not a product, but a practice.
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Transcript
It might all be going to help. Right? Like, the structures are falling. We're not imagining it. Things we have known are less stable than they have been. Media institutions, government institutions, business institutions, civic and all kind of institutions. And part of this project, not the headline, but the subtext is to prepare us, right, to practice the moves and the muscles and the coordinated sets of movements we will need to create something new. It's quite possible that what we're up to is, a restoration. Right? It's it's fixing up the edifice. It's re firming up a a supporting column or beam. It's also quite possible that this whole building will fall down. And we're gonna need some builders. And we're gonna need people who understand people, who understand power, who understand relationships, who understand commitment to the collective to forge society, which we will always have. And what the other side has, which is not so much the left, right, other side, but it's a we, me, other side. The authoritarian side has a promise that we will meet you, The authoritarian side has a promise that we will meet your basic needs, that you don't need to worry yourself about power because I got you and screw them. That the real problem is actually them. And your sense of belonging only exists because there's a villain out there who looks a little different, appraised a little different, or talks a little different than you. And if I rile you up about them, I'm just distracting you. But the feeling is all that matters, so you'll rock with me. And when things all fall down, they'll be the ones to pick up the momentum to attract the people and promise a future that's never delivered. But the promise is so meaningful that many of us will follow. So we're trying to create an alternative path to that authoritarian overpromise under deliver to the idea of not just patching up an institution, but maybe we have to wholesale build a new one. We're not gonna be able to do that. We don't have practice building with each other. There you go. It's on the record.
Welcome to How to Save Democracy. I'm Omezine.
And I'm John.
And we love democracy, genuinely and wholeheartedly, but it's like a dysfunctional relationship. Democracy today is full of flaws. It's not by the people, for the people anymore. There are resentments and frustrations and anger, and we can't go on like this. We wanna make this relationship work, though. So it's a long term thing. It's valuable. And we need to work through this. And we need to have the tough conversations, and that's what we are doing.
Today, we'll be getting into a conversation I hosted in London back in September 2024 when it briefly looked like the US election might have a very different outcome. Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart are the life and creative team behind the How to Citizen project, which they began in 2020 with an ambition to tell the stories of the next democracy with the people already practicing it. As you'll hear, I've been getting more and more involved with these guys over the last couple of years, working with them more and more because we're very aligned. Their core proposition is that we need to think of the word citizen as a verb, not a noun, and democracy is something we do, not something we have. It's about how we all have a role to play in rebuilding this relationship we're talking about and about how so many of us already are.
What we were feeling back in 2020 was so much doom and gloom. We're divided. We're divided. We're divided narrative over and over and over. And so we came up with this idea of, you know, citizen as a verb and these four pillars, which we'll get to. But that it was trying to conceive of it more as a way of being in the world, almost like a value set that each of us could enact and live out, versus mechanics, right, of just how does the government function and my only way to interact with this thing is to vote, which is very important, but it's not the only thing. And what we're seeing play out, I think, is the shift from head and policy and logical arguments and fact based arguments to something that's a lot more heart. Right? This emphasis on joy, the vibe. What is the vibe? What do people wanna feel? And there's pros and cons. Right? Like, they it can be a dark underbelly to kinda play to just emotion. Right? We we so it's not just, like, rosy because that's happening. But I do think that it's important to recognize in this in the zeitgeist, especially, I think, with social media and things becoming less and less verbal and more and more image based, that emotions and what we're taking in without much many words or discussions. I mean, you know, having debates in salons and, you know, these things are really, sadly, kind of more and more a thing in the past in terms of people communicating a whole lot just through memes. And you feel something with the memes, and that's how you should feel about the news in your week. And so I think that the rise of that lends itself to this kind of politic. And unless I think the Democrats recognize that strategy, which is, in my opinion, at the most primal level of how we behave as humans, we won't be on an equal playing field, I think, with how, you you know, the Republicans have sort of been playing for a very long time. It's just the difference is they're playing on the primal fear kinda driver of emotion.
Yeah. I totally so unsurprisingly agree with that. And I think the additional note around latent love, it's it's something that we all share. We've kind of vibed with each other about the possibility of an invitation to contribute in more ways, that there is latent love, there is latent capacity to do more, to see oneself as a citizen and not just a consumer, to not just download, but to upload, and to peer to peer build something. What kind of country do we wanna live in? That's an invitation to dream and to imagine, and that it didn't start with, we must defend democracy. Like, what are you even talking? At first, defense is, like, aggressive, and I don't really know what this democracy you're talking about is. Look at voting rights. Look at the history. Look at the disenfranchisement. Look at the disenfranchisement. Look at the conspiracy theories. But what kind of country do we wanna live in is an invitation, it's a feeling and a vision that we can try to cast together. And so I I think there's some room there to grow and I certainly, after many catastrophes in the past, we've lamented not being asked to do more than, like, buy stuff or vote for somebody to do stuff for us. And both are very important forms of power, but they're we're capable of a lot more. Point, I think that the
ideal is to integrate head and heart. Right? Like, to me, that is the whole, and we have spaces that incentivize tend to incentivize one or the other. But I think, really, where we're heading in terms of, like, a healthy politic and a healthy way of interacting is this integration. And it's very I think it's a a rare model to find.
So it's really kind of looking for people and leaders that can really hold both both in a more integrated fashion. I'm gonna bridge us a little bit from here. I'd love you just to talk a little bit both of you maybe about how you see the role of storytelling, actually. Like, the the and the and the part that this work of telling these stories has
to play right now? We know the world because we know facts. We think we know the world, but what we actually know is a story of the world. And if we were to diagnose our knowing and really itemize it throughout a day or a year or a decade, overwhelmingly, our knowledge is mediated by someone else telling us a thing, someone showing us a thing, someone demonstrating, a parent choosing for us before we've ever made a choice for ourself, who to worship and how. Because they heard a story from their parents, who heard a story from their parents. And so we're really in the business, and the legacy of like inheriting stories, stories of money, a pound versus a euro. That's a choice you made to live a different story. Right? And so, but they're real enough that we make tangible decisions about our time and our energy and our resources based on figmentary, collectively delusional agreements that a story is a tangible, real thing. And so, when you recognize pretty much everything is actually some version of a story, it gives story a lot of power. And it's a power that must be wielded responsibly, distributed fairly, challenged regularly, because it may not be the underlying thing we have an issue with. It may be the story. It may not be us that we have a problem with. It may be the story of us that we have a problem with. It's the story of us is defeated and dysfunctional and unable to come together to solve problems that is causing us to be dysfunctional and unable to come together to solve problems. But innately, we are capable. And it's this catch 22 cat and mouse thing. Well, if I start to tell a different story, do I start to believe a different thing? Do I then become capable of different things merely because I've told myself a different story? There's a big old industry which agrees with us called advertising.
This idea of shifting the story and shifting the politics actually as a result of shifting the story, for me is really fundamental. Like, I began my career with ten years working in the advertising industry. And actually, what I came to believe is that that's about telling a story. That's about telling ourselves the story that we are consumers constantly. The idea embedded in it, embedded all in all of the thousands of commercial messages we see every day is that humans are consumers, that our agency is limited to choosing between a fix of options that we are inevitably guided by self interest in that. And that shows up then in our politics, in our democracy. So I would argue what we've got is consumer democracy, where we choose between a fixed set of options, where we're assumed to make that choice on the base of individual self interest. And that kind of democracy isn't commensurate. It's not possible to face the challenge of our times from within that. We're just voters. And so that democracy is failing. It's like with diners at the only restaurant in town, and there's only two or three dishes on the menu. And we've got to the point where we just don't think any of them are that inspiring.
I agree. I think though that it's very important to say that we can't dismiss voting. And a meaningful vote is still really the foundation. And coming from a dictatorship or being born and raised in a dictatorship, I always have this real perspective of what it is to live without the voting rights or with a masquerade of voting rights when you think you're going to choose, but actually even they there is a fraudulent vote. Right? They they choose for you. And so it's not actually a real vote at all. So we need to assert that this is a foundation and we want more. Most of the world population don't live in a democracy and they actually live in hybrid regimes or dictatorships. This was a rhetorical question a few years ago but now we're seeing more and more authoritarianism in places where it was safe to call it liberal democracy. And so, yeah, voting is a fundamental right. It's not enough but it's fundamental. And we need to preserve it and to have it as free as possible.
If we take that as the baseline and then we go, okay, what more do we want? And and I think this is where Barrington, Dane Elizabeth are starting to take us into this question of, like, what would it look like for there to be a politics that goes beyond that? What does a politics of the heart, not just the head, but positive politics of the heart, not just the head look like? What if we could be asking questions like what kind of country do we want to be? Then things might start to get really interesting.
I think this was very interesting to me as a former politician. For so long, we've been taught to think with our brains and value logic above all. And as a result, my first reaction to what Elizabeth was saying is resistance. Yet I can't deny that I feel more connected to an argument when there is a real story behind it and where I can connect or empathize with what is being told to me. I think emotions is is really important in this. And maybe there is another thing as well, not just the politics of the head and the heart of reason and emotion, but also a politics of the gut of intuition. It's like the holy trinity of wholesome decision making. Head, heart, gut. You need all three. At the moment in our politics and in many of our lives, we're in fear, in survival mode because of the system and because of the crisis. And so we're trapped in fight, flight, freeze or fawn. And I think people who are going into therapy can understand what I'm talking about. It's what the psychologists say. You react to this feeling of danger in those ways as an animal trapped and, you know, that's the only four ways to survive. You escape, you try to fight the enemy or you freeze to make him think that you're dead or you try to seduce. Right?
How can we apply this to Well, you start to see that. I think, like, fight is kind of, I don't know, getting angry, getting hating politics and politicians. Freeze maybe is is actually just not knowing what to do. Getting apathetic. Flight, I guess, is the in flight and freeze maybe in this context, they're kind of the same. You just just desert the field and don't engage at all. And fawn, I I think I can really see that. Like, that this idea of the strongman leader who who looks after his people at the expense of the other, that is a dynamic of Fawn. And I so I'm really yeah. This thing of the politics of intuition is really interesting that especially when you say maybe the politics of fear that we have in an awful lot of ways and places isn't just about emotions of fear. It's actually a whole thing that goes way beyond.
Yeah. It's our nervous system trying to survive the very toxic environment we're in. And I think we need to get into a different state completely. I think I've been learned in my life personally to distinguish between anxiety and intuition and trying to differentiate between what is what is the underlying thing, emotion that is making me react right now. So anxiety would be coming from past traumas, I guess, and would be triggered by an event that is likely to be similar to the trauma I've lived through. But intuition is something that says in a quiet, tranquil, serene way, no, maybe, or yes. It's not coming from a part of anxiety, it's coming from a part of me that has deep inner truth that this is not good for me. And so I think as a collective we need to get to a place where our politics isn't about fear and anxiety and politicians making us more scared of the competition than we are of them. Because while we do that it's not even the politics of head or heart, it's like the politics of anxiety. And I think that they are talking about what what they are talking about really is we need to be in a different relationship with our politics. And maybe to get there, we have to be in a different relationship with ourselves.
And maybe also, as we're about to hear, a different relationship with nature and the world around us.
In The States called America Outdoors, and I found a line in making that show where I said, we think of ourselves as people who, like, write our destiny or write our own story, but the truth is we are co authors of this world. Not just with our fellow humans, but with all life. Right? That river has a strong say in my reality. So does the wind, so does the precipitation, heavily here, for example, and so on and so forth. And so if we imagine that this is a collaborative storytelling process, then it it gives us some boundaries, like no one entity just dominates it. But I think mostly it gives me at least a sense of freedom and possibility to like edit the story or or write something different and not feel the burden that we have to do it all alone either, that we each can contribute to the story of us in ways that serve more of us. That's the goal. The common thread in the stories is interdependence and the reality, I'd say, even more than the idea that we need each other in the widest sense of other. Right? We need our fellow humans. We need our feather fellow life forms, our fellow atoms. We are just riding the wave of the big bang, and we're ultimately like energy scattering through the cosmos together. So we are part of the same thread. But to bring it back down, what unites these stories is, you know, a focus on relationship with nature, with fellow humans, and with technology. Because each of those areas feels so disrupted and in crisis and chaos, and each of those areas is full of renewal and rebirth and rejuvenation. And there is a balance required to shape a future that really taps into all three of those. We are nothing without this Earth. Literally, we don't exist. We are very little without each other. We are wired to need each other. We go technically insane in in isolation. Like, we need each other. And we have created and conjured these tools that are increasingly becoming colleagues and companions that are shaping our perception and the reality that we experience, and we need to have a right relationship with them that doesn't undermine our relationship with each other and this planet. So there is a a trilateral balancing act going on with the types of stories that we've chosen to focus on to ensure a future that is is worthy of all of us and fit for all of us.
Yeah. And I would just add that in all three domains, we're looking for stories that are tapping into, you know, a different way of being that is more hopeful, that, you know, shows possibility because if we can't see it, it's very hard to imagine and then to create if we, you know, don't don't have that spark of imagination in those three areas. So it's really an exploration of, you know, how do we want to live with nature? How can we tell a different story around being being truly connected and not separate from nature and Earth in this climate crisis? And I think same with each other, how to citizen, and then, machines.
I think I first heard that language from Adrienne Maree Brown in terms of the the technical terminology of being in right relationship. And it's it's a thing we feel when we're not, and it feels more right when we are. And there is, like, a justice involved in a right relationship. There is a balance involved in a right relationship, and we are so obviously out of that with the natural world. It's screaming at us, urging us urgently to shift course, and we are slowly shifting course, but we could move a lot faster. And I think similar things are happening in the fact that it's not just in The US version of democracy and self governance or The UK version, but although there's something unstable happening in our relationship with each other and how we figure out how to govern ourselves, you know, with ourselves. And the tech thing kinda speaks for itself. It's madness and chaos.
This is such a huge idea but also something so humble. Right? This is something all of us can play a part in. And what Baratunde and Elizabeth have done in their work as we're going to hear now is they've broken down this idea of citizening, of citizen as a verb, into four pillars. So we're gonna take them one at a time in the rest of this episode. The overview is this, invest in relationships, understand power, commit to the collective, and show up and participate. Here's Elizabeth.
They just felt sort of whole and solid, kind of out of the gate. And they but they were a hypothesis. We didn't know how people are gonna react to citizen as a verb is the first thing question mark, and then these four pillars. And what we found is is, you know, people really wanting to take a step back and get into something that just feels more first principles when we talk about democracy, when we talk about citizen. And so we've gotten a tremendous response. I mean, you can talk about some of the examples of schools and rabbis and, you know, a lot of people taking and building on these principles. And we intentionally made them pretty big and broad so that you could imagine There's imagination capacity to what does it mean to invest in relationships with yourself, with the planet, with others that can look like a million different things, and that's part of the point. The four are show up and participate,
commit to the collective, which was a nice edit with you, John. We had to value the collective, and in our own workshop. And that's part of the beauty of it's like this kind of open source thing that even we have edited our language in response to contribution and and and commitment, that commitment is stronger than value. So commit to the collective as opposed to just the individual self. Understand power and and invest in relationships. So so the full language of invest in relationships is to citizen is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. And and there's a lot woven in there. It's like we're not alone. That's a pretty obvious one. But the focus on investing in self, I remember early conversations about this. This was your insistence that it wasn't just between me and the world. It's between me and myself. And I have found strong resonance with that, especially with young people. We've been living through moments of feeling the need to react, to know everything, to be on the right side of everything, to have an opinion about everything, even if you just found out a second ago about some crisis that happened, some statement someone made that they shouldn't have, some act of violence or riot, and you literally don't know all the information, but you're expected to speak on it. What is your relationship with that moment? What is it your relationship with yourself around that? And a lot of us have been put into or put ourselves into positions of proselytizing about the world, including leaders and people with explicit forms of power without processing their inner world. And like, okay, well what do I believe? What are my values? How does this sit with me? Does this resonate with me? And if we take a beat to breathe and feel, we might say nothing. And that's quite all right, at least for a time. We might find something more intelligent or valuable to say if we say something at all. We might be surprised by where we come out because we've taken a moment to pause. So the the tricky part about this one for me is the relationship with self as a foundation and being in right relationship with self before you can be with the world outside of you. That's been my own journey as well because I'm a proselytizer. I love clearly speaking into amplification devices at people. And so to slow down enough to consider my own experience, my own feelings, my own values is work. But it is work worth doing and makes everything a bit more aligned and true or not worth saying at all, which is, again, also quite valuable. This one,
invest in relationships, is so fundamental for me because it it really takes me back to the idea of politics of intuition over the politics of anxiety. And I think what Baratunde said before interacting with the world, we need to have a healthy relationship with self or be in right relationship with self is not exactly accurate because when we start working with ourselves and try to heal and try to improve, we know when we start, but we don't know when it ends. It it's like a lifelong process. Right? So we can't really say, okay. I'm gonna stop and heal myself and then go back to the world. Right. Right? It's like something we do while we are also interacting with the world and investing in relationships with others, and I think that's what we need to be doing as a collective. And may maybe, actually,
it can't be sequential, but also it's never going to be. Maybe it's more like a Adrienne Maree Brown as this thing about fractals. Like, how we how you are in relation to yourself is how you will be in relation to your community, is how you will show up in wider society. Like, what happens at the smaller level, at the individual level, at the internal level, actually then replicates out. You invest in relationship with yourself and actually in so doing, you are investing in relationships with others and you just it follows.
I think that's totally that. It's behaving from a place of consciousness. It's or at least understanding how and why we are behaving in a way or another and not be led by some subconscious patterns that we are repeating. Does this show up in your life? I mean, I remember the inner struggle I had when I saw Tunisian young people coming out in the streets in back in 2010 and peacefully protesting against the dictatorship. And I had this inner struggle of being very scared and afraid. And this is one part of me that was the dominant part because we have been taught to be afraid of showing up publicly. But then the moment I decided, for many reasons, to get involved and support the peaceful protests, that was a part of me that I was unaware of, that was brave and took over and said, okay. It's not about my own safety. And even my concept of safety changed because before safety was about being quiet and and not getting noticed publicly because of the risks from, you know, the the The very precious to yourself. Yeah. From the dictatorship, myself and my family and everyone. And we saw people getting harmed because of their public statements against the dictatorship. But then the concept of safety change when I saw, okay, like, these young women and men are being killed by the police for protesting, and their work is liberating all of us. And I'm not safe watching them being killed. Right. Like, it I was ethically completely challenged. Like, my duty as a human being, as a Tunisian who was able to help in some way was to support what they're doing. So
It actually became unsafe for you
not to get involved. Yes. I couldn't live with myself anymore if I was just watching and keeping quiet and hidden while, you know, others will be in putting their lives at risk for all of us. And I was living in France at the time, so I was thinking, okay. The risk I'm taking is that I would live forever in exile, and the the risk they're taking is being shot at and killed or amputated or whatever. And so I guess I thought it's safe enough for me. I can take that risk if it means for them not being killed. And so I think spiritually, it was something very, very powerful because the moment I make that shift, not only I was able to live with myself and do the work that needed to be done, But I think many other people had that same awakening. So the revolution was inside of each of us before getting outside to the world and identifying other people and forming this sort of spontaneous collective that was doing whatever they could do to support the movement of the that became the revolution.
The revolution was inside each of us. Thank you for that. Let's turn to the second pillar, I think, understand power.
Power. This was heavily affected by our second guests, Eric Liu, and the idea is to understand power. And there you know, people power, that's like the etymological root of democracy from the Greek language of demos kratos. So at the most fundamental level, to do it well, you must be facile with, fluent in people, and fluent in an understanding of power. Otherwise, we're just pretending. And if we think of power as this thing that only a few people have or that if someone gets it, I can never have any myself, if there's a small percentage which is hoarding all the power forever, that is rhetorically powerful and can be a motivating tool for organizing. And it's ironically disempowering to think of them as the ones with power and us as the meager ones without it. Power's something we generate, and there are different forms of it. And some of it's financial, and that has a certain imbalance, but some of it is ideological and physical. Some of it is attentive, you know, which you give your attention to, you give power to. You're all engaged in an act of extraordinary power sharing right now by focusing on us, and we wanna honor and respect that and certainly not abuse it. But when we look at our phones all the time, we're we're being sapped of our power, especially if we're doing so unconsciously. And so just that extra layer of consciousness around power empowers. And then we can be more deliberate about choosing where and how to use it. So Eric Lou at Citizen University argued for this level of fluency. It was one of his words. We even added to his list, especially around the attention things. We're like, wait a minute. It really ties into the tech thing, and that's partly why we feel the way we do around technology. Is it's not just a tool, it's it's engaged in a power exchange with us, and often it's very one way. And so how do we reassert that? Friend of mine, a man called Simon Duffy, who we might meet on this podcast sometime,
he has this phrase. He says, the existing forms of democracy, all they really mean is that you choose who to give your power to rather than, like, how to use your power. It's like one step up from autocracy where you don't even choose as we've talked about, but it's not real power. Yeah. It's king a versus king b. And and king a versus king b is not a massive shift from just king. Right? But Baratunde, I think here, is reminding us that there are different forms of power. And many of them we do actually have and we can generate together. And I really wanna underline this thing about the idea that your attention is part of your power. There's this phrase, what you pay attention to grows. Like, what we choose to give our attention to, we actually feed.
I think the example of the phone is great. I mean, everyone has a phone. And what if instead of being unconsciously hooked up to our screens, we would consciously use it to connect and create more solidarity and noise around the calls? And this reminds me of Chili app that was created by Christian Vanizet and his team. And it's like, I love the concept of this app because it's not only activist who who can connect and rally behind a cause, but anyone who has access to the phone and wanna support and participate. They can be part of a mass movement, digital mobilization, from the comfort of their homes. And so sometimes, yeah, that's the only contribution someone can make, and it's good enough. It's like participating in a collective effort for change. Right?
Very good. On that note, let's turn to the third pillar, commit to the collective.
Yeah. I mean, I think that the commit to the collective is very important because if you're doing all these things, then you're not committed to the collective, then you're doing them for personal gain. Right? Understanding power for not the collective is not where we're trying to head in terms of this message. You know, the commit to the collective, to to us, felt like that is the whole idea. Right? Is that we're thinking, we're moving from me to we thinking. We're trying to be, you know, again, thinking at an order up in terms of how our actions impact others and how to build together, cocreate together. So the collective and that idea had to be in the mix to make it feel complete. And a little example,
thinking of our third season in the tech conversation with Esra Al Shafi, a Bahraini activist and technologist who built a social media platform. I I want you to stick with me on this. I'm going out on a limb here, but she built a social media platform that does not destroy the social fabric. It's quite possible. It didn't undermine democracy in any way, but there was a collective intent, and a lot of our platforms are built with individualism as the prize. Your likes, your feed, your wants, much less your needs, but your mere wants, and your right to do what you wanna do and say what you wanna say to whomever you want, regardless of the impact that that has on other members of the society. And so, they put some restrictions on how a new user could interact on the social platform. The classic ones say, from day one, you get to address the world. It's an extraordinary amount of power. You can direct message anyone that you find in your feed and start bullying and harassing them, an extraordinary amount of power. What they do is delay that gratification. You unlock those privileges over time after you've observed how the society works. In your first day at a new job, in your first day at a new school, you don't immediately take to the public address system and start mouthing off your opinions to everyone. You mostly stay quiet and listen. What's normal here? What's good behavior? What is not good behavior? Who's being punished for what? Oh, apparently that's an offense. And we have not built most of our social platforms with that collective well-being in mind. They did. And it was because it was targeted for LGBTQ plus youth in regimes where that is not encouraged. It's not even allowed. And so they were prizing a collective safety, and what they found happened is that the people who showed up with the intent to troll had to wait, Because trolling was impossible. And in order to unlock the ability to troll, they had to pretend to be good people. For like nine months, it was a gestation period involved, and by the time those who stuck with it long enough had actually been turned into good people. By the end, they it turns out they cared because they had built relationships with other people, and they had practiced this muscle and they built up this capacity and they weren't about to throw it all out the door to get dinged with a violation. And most of them I suspect bailed before that point. But you were able to weed out the people for whom the cost of trolling was so close to zero that why wouldn't you do it? You're basically creating a trolling platform in most of these, but with a collective well-being as a primary mindset rather than merely an individual well-being, you could sustain something that's better for the whole. And a lot of those individuals there are much, much happier with it because they're not being toxically assaulted or feeling like they have to police things because the norm is established. And that's a model that we've practiced
in the real world. It's the model from ecology. So we're not reinventing things, we're remembering things and reapplying them. So I really love that Bahraini story on the night and I wanted more stories. So I asked Baratunde to tell another one, one that I'd heard actually on the How to Citizen podcast before about a conservative right wing guy in a small town in America who they call Broadband Bruce.
We got a lot of states. It's The United States. There's a lot of states and one of them is called Idaho And it's very rural in most parts, which means it's very conservative, something we can all understand. There is not an equal distribution of Internet broadband access across Bruce wanted broadband for his people. He was in a small town in Idaho, and the the companies weren't providing it. They didn't find it in their economic interest, and they ran the numbers and said no. So he lobbied, he petitioned, he cajoled, and they weren't doing it, so he decided to organize a municipal broadband effort and contract directly with a physical provider to build a network that would be owned by the people. Bruce is not a socialist. Bruce is a very conservative man, but he so believes in rights and freedom that he wanted it for all his people, which is socialism. But don't call Bruce a socialist, alright? But what he did was organize his community. He needed neighbors to sign on to this, and so he went door to door making a case. And, the more people who signed on, the less it would cost per person. Socialism. And so, he found himself into a community organizer. He was just trying to deliver a quality service to his community. He made a business case, he made an educational case, he made a work from home COVID case, whatever case it could be, and he had relationships. So he had these principles in play very organically for himself, and they built it. And the more businesses are signing up, other towns want to do it the same, and it was very shameful for the corporate providers who said it couldn't be done, in an economically viable way. This is not a money losing venture. It's a different model than what they were willing to explore.
But Bruce stood up, and he didn't stand up alone. He stood up with his community, and he had to convince them. I find this way of talking about the idea of the collective so interesting because it's very different to what you get in the usual political conversation, the the the philosophy conversation. You know? In that context, the freedom of the individual is usually assumed to be in contrast with the interests of the collective. And so there is the harm principle, for example, John Stuart Mill, the idea that people should be free to act as they wish as long as their actions do not cause harm to others. And it reminds me, ironically, one of these things that was taught in school still under Tunisian dictatorship in educational system, but they still gave us this principle where my freedom stops when yours start. And I guess it's all the challenges, you know, of democracies. What is the concept of freedom? Freedom comes with responsibility, but who determines what this responsibility is? Right? What what does respecting other mean?
I think that's true. And I also think, like, in a way here what's going on is is almost just a totally different question. It's like they're coming at the idea of the collective from a different start point. They're not really saying, like, what can you do before you harm the collective? They're almost actually asking the question, what can we do together that none of us could do alone? It's almost like a a positive question, not a negative question. In my work, the phrase I use a lot is all of us are smarter than any of us. And it's this idea of maybe it's like collective agency rather than individual freedom. Like, you're focusing in a different place. So it's less about asking how can we not limit each other, how can we avoid harming one another, and more about asking how can we multiply each other. And I think that's what Broadband Bruce and the story from Bahrain are both about.
So with Bruce, he can do it on his own, and the government won't do it. So we organize the collective to do it. It's not ideological or philosophical. Really, it's just pragmatic common sense as simple as that. And I think the people that Bruce involved, they all need this broadband, and no one is trying to take profit from this thing or to take advantage of it. It's the idea that we are all in this together. And I guess when you have someone who's genuinely initiating this thing for that matter, not because behind the scene he's spotting some other stuff, people can feel it. People get involved and they see the benefit and participate in this initiative.
Which takes us nicely to the last pillar, show up and participate.
Yeah. You could do the first three, which is good. It's, like, good, you know, but really to see change, we need to show up and participate. And we added publicly participate. Right? So it's really joining with others, putting yourself kind of publicly out there to contribute in some way with other people was sort of the idea. And we really you know, it is a circle, but we did put that, I believe, at the end. It used to be at the beginning. It used to be at the beginning. Oh, and then John came along. Yeah. John is our editor. He makes things better. He he helped to make a case for why it should come at the end. Yeah. And and it does make sense. I mean, given that a lot of folks get, you know, passionate about something, they show up, and then they stumble because they didn't take the time to invest and learn and, you know, understand the space that they newly find themselves in and build relationships and whatnot. So I think that coming through the first three really equips you to be able to more effectively show up and participate
with others. Sometimes it's only when you've shown up to participate that you feel called to invest in a relationship. And you're like, you you responded to a flyer or a text or an advertisement or a friend or a dinner, and you didn't know what you were getting into. That's part of the fun of it. It's part of the thrill, part of the risk. But once you're there, you're like, oh, I I think this is my team. This is the collective I'm gonna commit to. I like how they move. Let me develop some relationships and get and express that commitment more deeply. Let me understand the power, not just in this organization, but how this organization relates to the world outside. So they they can be very interchangeable. The the on ramp that you choose doesn't matter. Just get on the get on the circuit.
So those are the four principles. Invest in relationships, understand power, commit to the collective, and show up and participate. That's the model that Barrington and Elizabeth are offering for what it means to citizens of Earth. So after we'd set out the model on the night, we decided to invite some questions. We sometimes do that at the events of the Conduit. And and on this occasion,
I think the questions were really profound and took us even deeper into this. And I love how Elizabeth brings capitalism and the economic model into the conversation. And how Baratunde opens up the idea that actually this might not be about saving democracy at all. It might all be about preparing for things to fall apart.
On the way here, I was just rereading a, economist article on on democracy, and and it said that only 8% of the world live in a truly fair democracy. And they have a global index on democracy, which has been declining for every year for the last ten years. So how do you see that?
So, you know, something that I've thought about is is the statistic quite a bit, but just, you know, as I'm in the garden or as I'm having tea. So, you know, this is just anecdotal thoughts. But what strikes me is people are saying no to late stage capitalism. And I don't think we're having enough honest discussions about in the pro democracy movement of how intertwined these two things really are. And people are feeling the effects, and yet they're linking it to democracy because in some ways, rightfully so, they are so interconnected. And that's the part that I think people are reacting to more than the idea of people power, of free and fair elections, like, these sorts of things. I think they're reacting to this fact that we're in a a moment of late state capitalism, and most of our democracies are upholding that versus trying to address it. Just talking about Nigel Farage, and
it's so much I agree with what you're saying. And it's a little bit sometimes it smacks a little bit of motherhood and apple pie. Like, who would disagree? And yet there are so many who are totally disenfranchised, totally fed up. And I so I'm just wondering what you say about that kind of darker part of our psyche that almost will tear it all down rather than
play ball. Here's some of what's happening. So we gotta figure out how to live together. Yes. We want some basic needs met, and that's not seeming to happen under a democracy for a lot of people. One of the most basic needs is belonging, which actually rises often above meeting of material needs. If I have a team that I feel has my back, if I have a purpose that's shared with other people, the specific ideology of the team is less important than the existence of the team. Whether that team feeds and clothes me, or just talks a lot about food and clothing, that distinction matters not so much as the feeling of belonging. And part of what we've been up to, and I I really haven't said this much on on recording, but fuck it. It might all be going to help. Right? Like, the structures are falling. We're not imagining it. Things we have known are less stable than they have been. Media institutions, government institutions, business institutions, civic, all kind of institutions. And part of this project, not the headline, but the subtext, is to prepare us. Right? To practice the moves and the muscles and the coordinated sets of movements we will need to create something new. It's quite possible that what we're up to is a restoration. Right, it's fixing up the edifice, it's re firming up a supporting column or beam, it's also quite possible that this whole building will fucking fall down. And we're gonna need some builders, and we're gonna need people who understand people, who understand power, who understand relationships, who understand commitment to the collective, to forge society which we will always have. And, what the other side has, which is not so much a left right other side, but it's a we me other side. The authoritarian side has a promise that we will meet your basic needs, that you don't need to worry yourself about power, because I got you and screw them. That the real problem is actually them. And your sense of belonging only exists because there's a villain out there who looks a little different, appraises a little different, talks a little different than you, and if I rile you up about them, I'm just distracting you. But the feeling is all that matters, So you'll rock with me. And when things all fall down, they'll be the ones to pick up the momentum to attract the people and promise a future that's never delivered. But the promise is so meaningful that many of us will follow it. So, we're trying to create an alternative path to that authoritarian
over promise, under deliver, to the idea of not just patching up an institution, but maybe we have to wholesale build a new one. We're not gonna be able to do that if we don't have practice building with each other. I am an activist myself and I think the hardest thing is to keep pushing. And especially people who put themselves on the front line and have been pushing for a while and that's great that we have to work on relationships and we have to bring more people on board to keep pushing, but how do you keep the hope and how do you just it's it's a really, really tough job. And when you keep pushing, pushing and you don't see the result,
that's the most motivating thing. So how can I bring others on board if I cannot show? You know, one thing that comes to mind that I also think is the elephant in the room, I'm an introvert. I don't always like people. I don't always like to be around people. And I think when we talk about invest in relationships and everything that we're saying here, relationships are really hard. Really hard. And I think that we're we're also not we're not being brought up, at least my generation, with a lot of emotional intelligence and focus on how do you have rupture and repair. How do you take a step back and resource yourself, and how do you sell do self referencing, which is another tool of, you know, really checking in with, do I have the capacity to keep giving? Right? What is where is my mental health in this moment? What do I need to do to to refuel when I'm on the front lines? Right? And so in instead, we keep pushing and pushing and pushing. So there's just a whole host of tools around relationships that I think is a big piece of this puzzle that, again, at least the rooms that I've been in, thinking about civic engagement, thinking about pro democracy, that we're we're just not bringing into the equation as much as we need to be because, fundamentally, it is about us knowing how to interact and live together with other humans, which is not always the easiest thing as all of us in this room know, which I think is also reason why people go the super isolated route or turn to just, like, you know, the robots, and and there's the desire for that. So I think we just we need to have more of an honest conversation in some of these spaces about how hard it is and more tools and training to do it better because, yeah, I think just being an activist without those tools is a really exhausting and can be very lonely path. You know? And I I think the other thing I would just say that I've always hoped more for is the idea of what Audrey Tang was saying around, you know, protesting versus the demonstration of the new thing and wanting that to be seen more as a spectrum where we're honoring the folks that feel called to be on the front lines, but we're linking those actions directly back to folks that feel like they're called to be the builder of the new thing. Right? And if we had more solidarity and more connectivity, I think, across that and saw it as a whole, I think those on the front lines pushing so hard wouldn't feel quite so alone and so exhausted all the time because I think it really takes both.
I saw an episode of a television program over maybe twenty years ago now called Doomsday Preppers, and it left a mark on me because it showed all the terrible ways we might die, but it showed two ways we might respond. And predominantly these shows celebrate the rugged individualist with a ton of guns and a lot of canned food. That's a terrible quality of life. You're technically alive, but you might as well be dead, because you're afraid of everything and you're eating shit. Not good living. But they had the presence to feature a different kind of response, and they focused on this hippie New England community where people are like, we'll never have enough guns, we'll never individually be able to meet all of our needs, we're investing in each other. We're trying to create a resilient framework to catch all of us when things start falling apart. And so we know who knows how to sew, we know who knows how to cook, we know who understands animal husbandry, we know who understands structural engineering, we know who's good with kids, we know who's good with elders. And regardless of the specific form of calamity that comes, they didn't need to know that, they knew each other. And they could respond together as opposed to, I'm going to build an entire society in my backyard, secure my own private border, make for the individual welfare, feed and nurse and teach and cook all that's that's truly insane. But that's what we've been oriented to and that's what capitalism does, is we can buy our way through. We can just have enough provisions to outlast the thing versus knowing how to provide with each other.
If we peel it all back, the question remains, how might we live together? Period. End of like, if that is the question where we're not gonna go find our individual islands and, you know, sail off, but we will have to, in some form, figure out how to make decisions together, how to share resources, how to share power, how to develop consensus. So There's a skill set or a set of behaviors or practices that no matter where you find yourself, whether you call it democracy or not, we're going to have to figure out.
What I found so empowering that night, because when you when you look back at that or or if someone reads the transcript of this last bit, it feels like it would have been really dark and heavy and, like, things are gonna blow apart. But actually, in the room, it felt it felt like a huge energy. It felt really up. And it was like someone was kind of finally naming, but it might not be alright. And that honesty in itself was actually really generative. And it was like, we all know at some level that we're living in this very hard time to be human. Right? We're living in this moment when we we kinda know we're living with systems and structures and processes and jobs that don't really work. And yet we also know that we sort of have to work from within them. And so naming this thing, naming that it might not hold is almost an acknowledgment of how hard it is. It's a way of saying actually and the power then by by seeing that, by naming that, you allow yourself to then go cool. And the work is still the same. Like, whether we are firming things up to use Baratunde's language, in which case we need to invest in relationships, understand power, commit to the collective, participate, Or whether it is gonna fall down and we need to do those things in order to be ready to rebuild. Like, it's still the same work. And I think naming that, as I say, just felt like it allowed people to be free actually in a really actually in a really interesting way. It was such a thing to witness.
So that means if we practice the citizen story, citizen as a verb, it can help us save democracy. It's us taking accountability for ourselves, for our part in this relationship. And it's also what is going to help us survive in the apocalypse. And this is who we are because it's what has always been. Like, it's what always happened in crisis.
This is who we are. Citizens, not just consumers. This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy, but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by Omezine Khalifa and me, John Alexander, and produced by Joe Barrett.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Or if you wanna get closer, find us online and sign up to the mailing list. How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with The Conduit and wouldn't be possible without the kind support of Open Society Foundations and you, our listeners. We've got big plans, so if you can ship in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.