Possible, Plausible and Just Futures for Civil Society
Introduction | Future One | Future Two | Future Three | Observations & Conclusions
Future One: New infrastructure of belonging
Using practical action to establish belonging and solidarity across social divisions
Recurring concerns: isolation or exclusion coupled with emotions such as loneliness, denial, fear, blame and anger.
Recurring hopes: community and inter-community action and engagement
What is belonging?
Belonging concerns the cognitive and affective attachments of individuals in a group; to belong is to feel natural and unthreatened in a group.
ENCRYPTED MESSAGE
RE: Expanding CCVC patrol at the coast
We need to expand where we're patrolling. See attached map for latest option
Oneness and Anarchy
Oneness was defined by the participants as interdependence that builds hope and cohesion. It might manifest as global, unified actions such as movements for solidarity; its opposite forces were identified as fear and anarchy.
Fear and anarchy were defined as related to behaviours and emotions that seek comfort and/or express discontent — these include an increased propensity among some for conspiracy, apathy, and loneliness; in others this might inspire a search for meaning and explanation, expressed through spiritual practice or affinity with a belief system.
Although oneness and anarchy might seem unrelated, both represent a need for belonging and recognition, and demonstrate the importance of identity.
The participants recognised that, under duress, feelings of fear and anarchy can spark the splintering of larger societies into like-minded ideological groups, and conflict can arise between those groups, while oneness can also lead to stifling uniformity. The most preferred state was identified as a oneness that looked for relations and connections “within and between liberations” and across borders — a whole made up of small parts loosely joined.
Uncomfortable observations
The uncomfortable aspects of oneness were identified as:
The things we don’t know how to talk about, such as death, blame, anger
The things we don’t know how to do, such as forging connections between different liberatory movements
The things where systems are not in place to provide the necessary help
The participants also explored the notion of civil society as “alternative anarchists”, and interrogated the dilemma brought about by a desire for balance: should civil society be radical enough to create social change but not so radical as to tear society apart? What is the relationship of civil society to incumbent power, and should it exist to support failures within the status quo, or agitate for and create better alternatives?
Should civil society be radical enough to create social change, but not so radical as to tear society apart?
The intervention:
Civil Contingencies Volunteer Corps (CCVC)
The Civil Contingencies Volunteer Corps (CCVC) is an established national body for climate repair and social cohesion. Membership is mandatory for all citizens.
Widespread climate migration is now an accepted part of life and the CCVC takes responsibility for welcoming and embedding climate refugees in society. This has become possible because government policies are now directed by a Benevolent Artificial General Intelligence (BAGIC), which calculates and shares the benefits of an embedded system of care and welfare. This has been in place since the Great AGI Disaster of the early 2030s, when artificial intelligence brought about the collapse of shared public infrastructure and inspired different approaches to self-organisation and new forms of civil society.
VOICE MEMO
22 December 2043
From ████████@bagic.gov.uk
To ████████@ccvc.gov.uk
Subject: Centaur Crash
████ - so pleased to have you leading the charge now with the CCVC. ██ said you had some questions about BAGIC and how we got where we are. The roots go back all the way to before the AGI Disaster. We still haven’t recovered those records so bear with me - I’ll start at the beginning.
As you steward the CCVC through the next phase I cannot stress enough how vital it is that we carry on learning from what happened in 2029 and 2030.
The shift to benevolent goals was a huge change. It seems unimaginable now, but how we understood AGI in the 2020s was comparatively very clinical: the focus was all on efficiency and cost, and not on wellbeing or care. The consequences were devastating.
I’m sure you’re too young to remember this, but back in 2028 we had a new x-govt AI Commissioner, brought in by ████████ ████ to modernise government. She’d been working closely with researchers at ██ ███ ███████ and on their advice started hiring “Centaurs” into government departments. These were people who worked closely with algorithms to develop anticipatory policy positions – and it was incredible at first. The efficiency gains were almost miraculous in the first couple of months and the Commissioner got the go ahead to roll this out across government. It was probably too fast, to be honest, but we were recovering from the fires and all on the back foot. Any certainty felt like real progress.
Then in early 2029 the ██ ███ ███████ researchers told us we’d gathered enough data to trial the new GOD functionality we’d been working on. They’d done some positive trials with AGI and started to roll out integrations in the Centaur departments. The most effective interventions were like daisy chains - sprawling from one department to another. We started to see how Environment and Health and the Treasury and the Home Office could really work together. The fires had wiped out so much capacity, Border Force was running away and doing their own things, and it wasn’t clear otherwise how ████████ ████ could properly get a grip on government.
It started with automated interventions connected to extreme weather warnings. We could change hospital capacity, close transport systems, lockdown schools all at the touch of a button. We kept an eye on the first two or three deployments, but things were so efficient we made plans to start shuttering parts of the Civil Service. And certainly it gave ████████ ████ what they needed to be more hands off. During Storm Walter, ████████ ████ stayed at Chequers and everything moved so quickly we didn’t know the flood defences had been removed till we’d lost Lincolnshire. Suddenly it was gone. Firefighters were being deployed to the wrong places, hospitals emptied, and we couldn’t do anything. I remember watching the country close down and how helpless we were for hours and hours - being on the phone till the lines all went down, and then just waiting till we could take over again.
Prof. ██ led the investigation into what had happened. The report set out the following failings:
The GOD protocol took the decision prior to Storm Walter breaking that infrastructure protections would be insufficient in a number of likely scenarios. There was no human oversight of those decisions.
In two of those scenarios, GOD was limited by the absence of clear policy positions and the limitations of fragmented and incomplete public data sets.
GOD saw no logical way to salvage what looked like failing systems and instead intentionally engineered their collapse.
During the rebuild, we had to start almost from nothing and invent systems of government again. The destruction of everything meant we built what came next completely differently – and it’s so important you bear that in mind over the coming years. The success of shared habit of care we have now has been partly laid at the door of the new technologies we have built, but the driving force is the CCVC and the shared, communal responsibility for care for our people and our planet. Your job in the coming years is a critical part of that continuing success.
Good luck! I’m sure you won’t need it.
While on the face of it there is unity in society, there is also a thriving counter-culture, with different kinds of underground groups exploring different ways of living. As the CCVC’s remit grows to include social monitoring, some of the more politically active counter-culture groups are becoming agitated, and civil unrest seems possible.
Participants explored some potential unintended consequences, such as:
The CCVC would ground human relationships in real contributions (or actions) as opposed to polarised abstract conflicts. However, this also raises important questions related to power and participation such as who defines these contributions?
Loss of self-organisation: Initially, the Civil Contingencies Volunteer Corps would be sparked by people self-organising to support others in their communities, in ways similar to the self-organisation that took place on WhatsApp and social media platforms at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as the Volunteer Corps becomes a more established organisation, it might become a formal organisation that adopts a centrally organised structure. This risks removing the people power and organic, spontaneous self-organisation that led to its initial formation.
Common frictions in collective actions: After the initial interest
in the Civil Contingencies Volunteer Corps, new considerations about boundaries and expectations for participation would arise. These might include a lack of volunteers; people being penalised for lack of participation; and disagreement about priorities for the CCVC.Suspicion and group think: citizens might be penalised for prioritising the needs of their families and kinship groups over others.
New injustices: a misalignment of values with delivery could see the CCVC turn into a citizen-surveillance army.
Next: Future Two >
Possible, Plausible and Just Futures for Civil Society