blogpost problems

I had wanted to post today – but blogpost formatting has made it imposible

Untl that's sorted, here's a foretaste of the next post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSIFzIeKQMo

Collective Intelligence – part II

Geoff Mulgan’s basic message can be reduced to bullet points – that we

• have become too pessimistic about the future

• have lost our sense of “agency” ie are not prepared to take up arms but have sunk into despair

• need to use our imagination to envisage different futures

• should act together to bring some of these about

His approach is perhaps best caught in a paper he delivered to the Progressive Governance Summit of 2021

I live in Luton, a fairly typical post-industrial town in southern England. It thrived in the past making hats, and then cars. Now the largest employer is the airport, and many work in the big Amazon logistics centres nearby. The town is relatively poor, very diverse (roughly a third Muslim), sneered at by wealthy Londoners, but quite content. It usually votes Labour but is also home to an extreme right party and to young jihadis who went to fight in Syria.

My neighbours have little interest in theoretical debates. Only a small minority now have a strong attachment to an ideological tradition in the way that trade unionists at the car plants here did back in the 1970s. Instead, they look at political parties with a sceptical eye and see if they might deliver some improvements to lives that are often hard.

They want to know whether there is a plausible route to good jobs – ideally higher paid and more secure. They want some care for old age. They want to be safe from crime. They are quite green though in a more amorphous way than in the big cities. They are patriotic. Although the town has many migrants – from Pakistan, Poland and the Middle East – they’re generally sceptical about the virtues of more migration. They voted for Brexit (unlike my metropolitan friends I was surprised the Brexit vote wasn’t higher). Most are fairly socially conservative but have also been swept up in the shifts of values of recent decades. They watch politics, if at all, partly as entertainment.

They are natural voters for progressive parties. But their allegiance is thin. Many like Boris Johnson even when they disagree with him. He seems authentic even in his dishonesties. And they appreciate his willingness to adopt a host of leftwing policies – regional equality, infrastructure spending, carbon neutrality. He has no real vision of the future. But neither do the other main parties.

The paper mentions the pride we take in the achievements of the Progressive Tradition and tries to identify the key elements of that tradition

• Belief in unrealised potential

• security as a precondition for the good life

• peace – whether bullies at work or avoidance of conflict with other countries

• being “part of nature” – which is one I would question and replace with a belief in progress which he elaborates thus -

…….a conviction that things can be better, that we have the power to shape our world and should not just accept the status quo as somehow natural. That means a belief that

• ahead of us lies the possibility of longer and happier lives, of an end to oppression, exploitation and inequality.

• we can, together, solve our most pressing problems. That we can unite divided and fractured societies and not take new divisions as inevitable.

That is the heart of the progressive promise, and often gets lost in compromise, everyday administration, the tyranny of the incremental. It’s vital to return to it and it provides the fuel for radicalism.

So, welfare policies have to address the new risks, not just the familiar ones of unemployment or physical ill-health: addressing needs for care in old age, mental as well as physical health, the needs of a precarious workforce for portable benefits. They need to offer practical answers to housing shortage and household debt, mobility and the governance of data. Many of these concern how we think about the economy. The traditional issues of economic policy – product markets, competition, macro policy, industrial policy – all matter, and it’s right to address the core DNA of capitalism, developing alternative ownership models (commons, mutuals, social enterprises and co-ops) and new accountability for firms.

But to be adequate to our times our economics has to be much broader, attentive to how the economy interacts with home life and family, ecosystems and communities. This was all squeezed out by the pragmatism of the 2000s and 2010s and left a gaping hole in our programmes, leaving parties as managers not mobilisers; curators of the status quo not transformers. Recent surveys show that half the population in many countries, including Germany, the US and UK, and 70% in France, believe the economic system needs “major changes” or “needs to be completely reformed”.

While on the subject of AI, I also liked the introduction to Algorithmic Reason – the new government of self and other; by C Aradau and T Blanke (2022)

This book has been a journey of several years, which has spanned multiple disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and computing. It took us several years to make sense of how disciplines and approaches diverge in their diagnoses of what is at stake with big data, algorithms, machine learning, or artificial intelligence. Tracing the sinuous contours of different debates across disciplines has been an arduous, at times disorienting, but also rewarding task. It has required getting to grips with varied concepts and methods and attending to how words carry not just different meanings but work differently across disciplinary and intradisciplinary practices. This journey was partly made possible by the fact that both of us had previously traversed disciplines and worked with the ambiguities and tensions between these: Claudia from English and French to political science and then international relations; Tobias from political philosophy to computer science and then digital humanities. Our rather eclectic trajectories can perhaps explain the theoretical and methodological eclecticism of the book. Yet, this is not an eclecticism of ‘anything goes’, but one that has been fostered by controversies and contestations we have followed and by the commitment to take seriously actors who enter these dissensual scenes, whether engineers or activists, scientists or workers.

Other Useful Papers

The Case for exploratory social sciences; Mulgan 2021

Imagination Unleashed – democratising the knowledge economy; Unger, Mulgan 2019

Compendium of Innovation Methods (Nesta 2019)

Social Innivation – what it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated

Mulgan et al 2007

How to run a city like Amazon and other fables ed M Graham et al (2019)

Have we lost our Collective Intelligence?

Once again a video has inspired a post – this time a conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his latest book “Another World is Possible - How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination” (2022). Geoff Mulgan is a professor of collective intelligence and a Knight of the realm; a former CEO of Nesta and DEMOS think tank; Director of the government’s Strategy Unit and Head of Policy in the Prime Minister’s office. He is also the author of many books, including “Big Mind – how collective intelligence can change our world” (2018) which I’ve just started to read and which argues that -

... the world has made great strides in improving health and has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about it, yet still has a long way to go in orchestrating that knowledge to best effect.

Similar patterns can be found in many fields, from politics and business to personal life: unprecedented access to data, information, and opinions, but less obvious progress in using this information to guide better decisions. We benefit from a cornucopia of goods unimaginable to past generations, yet still too often spend money we haven’t earned to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. P13

For institutions, the rising importance of conscious collective intelligence is no less challenging, and demands a different view of boundaries and roles. Every organization needs to become more aware of how it observes, analyses, remembers, and creates, and then how it learns from action: correcting errors, sometimes creating new categories when the old ones don’t work, and sometimes developing entirely new ways of thinking.

Every organization has to find the right position between the silence and the noise: the silence of the old hierarchies in which no one dared to challenge or warn, and the noisy cacophony of a world of networks flooded by an infinity of voices. That space in between becomes meaningful only when organizations learn how to select and cluster with the right levels of granularity— simple enough but not simplistic; clear but not crude; focused but not to the extent of myopia. Few of our dominant institutions are adept at thinking in these ways. Businesses have the biggest incentives to act more intelligently, and invest heavily in hardware and software of all kinds. But whole sectors repeatedly make big mistakes, misread their environments, and harvest only a fraction of the know- how that’s available in their employees and customers.

Mulgan had rehearsed some of his arguments in a 2020 paper called The Imaginary Crisis and in this great interview a couple of years ago

One of the reasons I became interested in imagination recently was because perhaps 

there was a missing piece in the theories of change. In the past, one of the things which 

allowed change was people thinking ahead to a better possible society or utopia. And my 

worry is that that kind of imagination has almost disappeared.

Why is that?
People can picture a much worse world, with climate change, ecological catastrophe, robots 

taking over the world, populous demagogues. But very few people can give an articulate account 

of how the world might be better socially. What might our health care look like? Our primary 

schools, our libraries, our parliaments. And part of the reason is that the institutions which 

should be working on this imagination have largely vacated that space - political parties, 

universities, think tanks all for slightly different reasons. This has become part of a pathology 

of our time.

You have a very mixed background, working in government with Tony Blair, founding and 

running big think tanks like Demos and Nesta, teaching at university. What is your personal 

ambition in all of this?
I spent half of my career as an activist, from the grassroots upwards, starting at the age of 

14. I used to organize marches and pickets and I remained involved in community organizing 

and social entrepreneurship trying to find solutions from the bottom up. And I have spent 

the other half of my life working from the top down, with governments around the world, 

the European Commission or UN now. To some extent, nearly all change has to involve some 

alliance of the top down and the bottom up, the powerless and the powerful. I sometimes 

call them the bees and the trees – the people with the ideas and the big institutions with 

power. And, uh, money.

Where do you get your energy and optimism from?
I get some optimism from having seen how often you can transform things completely. 

The great lesson I have learned or relearned, again and again, is that we overestimate 

how much can change short term. But equally, most people underestimate how much can 

change over one, two or three decades. There is nothing worse than an unrealistic fatalism 

because it undermines the energy, the capacity to do the practical changes – which of 

course won't solve climate change in 2022, but actually over 20, 30 years. W

e will completely transform our economy and society.
How much of your job is to try to design options for the future?

One of the institutions that you want to challenge and change is the university – for 

THE NEW INSTITUTE you wrote a fascinating paper on what you call “exploratory 

social sciences.” Can you explain your argument?
I mainly focus on social sciences, it is a very different story for engineering and the other 

sciences. But in the social sciences, the fundamental question for an academic is: how much 

of your job is to understand the present and the past, and how much of your job is to try 

to design options for the future? Now in the 19th century, in the early days of social science,

 it was assumed you did both. The London School of Economics for example was very much 

formed as a place for academics to work on designing future health systems, welfare states 

et cetera – not just to write books and analyze what had gone wrong. Over the last 50 or 

60 years, academics have become quite fearful of designing the future. It is almost career 

threatening.

Why is that?
Some of this has to do with the rise of positivism and quantification, the in many ways quite 

welcome rise of attention to data, to empirical analysis, to looking at the facts. In many ways,

 this has been good. It has made for a much more rigorous understanding of the present 

and the past – but it squeezed out creativity and visions for an alternative future.

A scepticism vis-à-vis utopia or world-building?
There certainly was a disappointment with the grand ideological projects of the last century, 

which led a whole wave of intellectuals to move into critique rather than creative construction. 

It's a much safer place to be critiquing all that is wrong with capitalism rather than trying 

to propose alternatives to it. I believe there is a need to recover a bit of that older tradition 

of social science but align it to the best tools we have now, data and models and experiments 

– and learn methods from design and the arts and other fields, which do creativity as a matter 

of course.

Economics has been in many ways the leading social science of the last decades, and it 

has often pretended to be more than that, more like a hard science. What is your take on that?
Weirdly, economics has taken almost no methods from any other fields, including from business,

 in terms of its own creativity. There is a real intellectual narrow-mindedness, a lack of curiosity, 

lack of hunger at a time when creativity methods are so widely used in everything from 

film and design for products and services. My hope is that we will see university centers of 

exploratory social science, which try to be as good at rigor as they are at imagination. 

We have this paradoxical situation where the people with the deepest knowledge are not 

doing the creativity and vice versa – and hopefully THE NEW INSTITUTE can be part of 

changing that.
We need some really bold, radical thinking in this century

What is the politics in all of this? Traditionally, the left was aligned with the future, 

the right with preserving the status quo. This has shifted, in surprising ways, hasn’t it?
Traditionally, the conservative right was skeptical of any designs for the future because 

by definition what exists has been tried through history. For a time, that changed, left and 

right swapped places. A lot of conservatives became almost more utopian than the left. 

They pictured a future run by markets, supported by technologies, with a slightly crazed 

enthusiasm. In the last 20 years, they have returned back to a much more traditional conservative 

position, with nostalgic pictures of race and community and manufacturing-based economies.

And the left?
The left is still in a rather fearful state – a political fear of being exposed by having 

genuinely novel, genuinely challenging ideas. You are much more likely to make it as a public 

intellectual by reviving old ideas rather than coming up with new ones. Which is pretty disappointing.

 Because we need some really bold, radical thinking in this century if we are going to cope 

with climate change, with AI, with the threats to democracy. And our intellectuals are not 

serving us that well.

You explore a few tools and methods in your paper to get to that point where the 

new can happen: experimentation, complexity thinking, design. How can we unleash 

our societal imagination?
Extension is an example, you can use it for almost any phenomenon – like re-imagining your 

local library or childcare. Then you go through a series of transformations. What would 

happen if you extended one aspect of it radically, the way that we have extended ideas of 

rights to cover everything from animals to transgender. There is also inversion: What happens 

if the farmers become bankers or patients become doctors? Or grafting: You take an idea 

from a very different field and try and apply it to your library or your childcare.

What is the next step?
That is just the starting point. Then the deep knowledge comes in. You have to think about 

building your world, your designs, and see how plausible they are, what might be an evolutionary 

route for them. The challenge is to find a balance between the willingness to leap ahead 

and jump beyond what is realistic now to what might be possible in 20 years. And not to 

fall prey to what I call unrealistic realism.

What does that mean?
It is striking that many academic disciplines are very good at explaining why change won't 

happen. And when it does come, they have no way of explaining why it did happen because 

they hold on to their unrealistic realism. And at the same time avoiding fantasy, illusion, 

ideas which have absolutely no plausible prospect of ever happening. I would like to see in 

universities cross-disciplinary teams becoming good at creating these alternative worlds, 

interrogating them, seeing what their implications are, what their economic base might be, 

the legitimacy of them.

Imagination as practice.
Every society needs some sense of where it might be headed in the future in order to be 

healthy, just as we do as individuals. We need some shared pictures of where we could be 

headed 30, 50, 70 years into the future, pictures which aren't only ecological disasters 

or technological determinist triumphs. That's the missing space in our collective imaginaries 

which we really need to address. Because the downside is that all sorts of other dark forces 

may fill that space instead.

After thirty Years, how fares the system in Romania?

I'm having format problems with the blog and had to take down a previous post - here it is again

They say a picture is worth a thousand words – and documentaries can have an even more profound effect. I’ve just come across this documentary marking 30 years of democracy in Romania – made apparently 3 years ago. It’s a great introduction – with Romanians explaining the key events from 1988 with subtitles. My best friend (who is Romanian) tells me that it did, however, fail to deal with the continuing power of the security services over the political system.

I lived in Bulgaria and Romania between 2007 and 2017 – since then exclusively in Romania. 

For a decade I enjoyed crossing the Danube, with the last 100 km stretch of the drive on 

the highway through the Balkans and the sight of the Vitosha mountain which dominates Sofia 

always bringing a particular thrill. I wintered in Sofia and summered in my summer house in 

the Carpathian mountains – a picture of which heads this post

In the 1990s there was an interesting body of literature known as “transitology” which was 

effectively a retraining scheme for those in redundant Soviet and Eastern European studies 

University Departments as they tried to adjust to the new reality of “liberal democracy” and 

“free-market capitalism”.
The integration of many of these countries into the European Union seemed to leave the others 

in a state of suspended animation – still “transiting”. Except that the “integration” had not 

gone as planned – some countries (such as Hungary and Poland) had clearly reneged on their 

commitments and were challenging the “rule of law” canons; and others (such as Bulgaria and 

Romania) had been unable to satisfy the monitors that they had even got to the required 

judicial standards. Indeed Philippe Schmitter, one of the doyens of the field, went so far in 

2012 as to talk of “ambidextrous democratisation”
Bulgaria's world-renowned political scientist Ivan Krastev has (with US Stephen Holmes) 

written one of the surprisingly few books which attempt to assess the fortunes since 1989 

of the eastern countries – although its primary concern seems more that of “the crisis of 

modern liberalism”. It’s entitled "The Light that Failed – a Reckoning”. The book starts with 

a chapter on the psychological effects on central European countries of the “imitation game” 

they were forced to play and the demographic shock as millions left the country for a better 

future elsewhere; followed by one on how Putin’s Russia moved on in 2007 from imitation to 

“mirroring” Western hypocrisy; a chapter on Trump’s America; and a final one which takes in China.

The authors argue that part of the nationalist reaction in Hungary and Poland was the shock 

of realising that the European "normality" they had hoped for had been transformed into an 

agenda which included homosexuality, gay weddings and rights for Romas. But their emphasis 

on the “psychology of imitation” totally ignores the brazen way west European countries and 

companies exploited the opening which the collapse of communism gave them to extend their 

markets in both goods and people - with the consequences brilliantly dissected by Alexander 

Clapp in a 2017 New Left Review article “Romania Redivivus”.

Talk of “transitology” disappeared more than a decade ago and was absorbed into the 

Anti-Corruption (or governance integrity) field which grew into a "name and shame" industry 

- complete with league tables and Manuals. But the world seems to have perhaps grown weary 

even of its talk…
Alina Mungiu-Pippid is a Romanian social psychologist - appointed, in 2007, as Professor of 

Democracy studies of the prestigious Hertie School of Governance in Berlin - with a unique 

understanding and knowledge of the issue. This was her blunt assessment in 2009 of the situation

 in Romania

Unfortunately, corruption in Romania is not only related to parties and businesses, but cuts 
 across the most important institutions of society. Romanian media has gradually been captured, 
 after having been largely free and fair at the end of the 1990s. After 2006, 
 concentration in media ownership continued to increase in Romania. Three owners 
 enjoy more than two-thirds of the TV political news market. As long as Romania was a 
supplicant for entry to the EU, it had to jump through the hoops of “conditionality” to 
satisfy Brussels it was behaving itself. When Poland, Hungary et al were let in in 2004, 
the pressures started to relax – but The European Union’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism 
(CVM) replaced that conditionality in 2007 and Bulgaria and Romania are still subject of an 
annual check of their legal and judicial health. Mungi-Pippidi therefore concluded her 2009 
assessment with a simple observation -

At the end of day, “democracy promotion” succeeds by helping the domestic drivers of change, 
 not by doing their job for them. Only Romanians themselves can do this.


Her latest book "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. Borders" (2020) is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why a quarter of a century of trying to build systems of government that people can trust has had so little effect in ex-communist countries. It starts with a sketch of Switzerland’s political development which reminds us that Napoleon was the catalyst for a 50-year period during which the Swiss embedded the basic structures we associate with that country. It is, however, Denmark to which most countries (according to Fukuyama) aspire to – although a study of its history suggests that, contrary to Dahrendorf’s optimism, that was more like a 100 year journey.
Her description of her own country, Romania, is quite damning –

• From 2010-17 there were 600 convictions for corruption EACH YEAR – including 18 

Ministers and one Prime Minister, Generals, half of the Presidents of County Councils

 and the Presidents of all the parliamentary parties

• The Prosecution system became thoroughly politicised through its connection with 

the powerful intelligence system – the infamous Securitate which was never disbanded

• The level of wiretapping used is 16 times the level of that used by the FBI

• Romania heads the league table of cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights 

dismissed for breaching the right to a fair trial – with a half of its cases so failing

• The annual CVM reports on the country are always positive and make no mention of 

any of this – on the basis that “questions about the intelligence services are outside our remit”!!

• TV stations run by those convicted of corruption have provided damning evidence 

of the prosecution service threatening judges and fixing evidence

One of Romania's most famous political analysts gave an extensive interview in 2018 which was important enough for me to summarise as follows –

• the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the sort – just a takeover by the 

old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the market economy and democracy

• which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie – with the “social” media dominating people’s minds

• “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and 

drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

• After 30 years, there is not a single part of the system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any real prospect of positive change

• Even Brussels seems to have written the country off

• The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion, distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie

• No one is calling for a new start – let alone demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances

Dorel Sandor has clearly given up on the politicians and confessed to a hopelessness for the prospect of any sort of change in his country

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political 

environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and 

eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. 

It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".
One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

But he was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania 

we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the "Future Search"

 method. But effective social change rarely comes from such an elitist approach; any such 

effort would have to demonstrate exactly how it would propose to deal with the astonishing 

level of distrust of others in the country.
In 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” 

(compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany).
The revelation of the collusion between the infamous Securitate and the Anti-Corruption 

Agency (DNA) has understandably fanned the flames of paranoia for which the Romanians 

can be forgiven - given the scale of the surveillance of the population the Securitate enjoyed

 under Ceausescu. Little wonder half of the population are Covid sceptics

Conclusion
In the 1980s it was Solidarity in Poland; Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; and reformers in Hungary who were challenging the power structure – I remember taking the opportunity of being in the country to visit the Party’s “White House” in Budapest in 1987 to talk with a spokesman for the latter.
Bulgaria and Romania, on the other hand, were monolithic and frozen societies – with 

the only sign of discord being the odd Romanian poet – and on the Danube where protestors 

against a chemical plant included a few establishment figures such as Svetlin Rusev.
But the street has become much more active in the past decade – even if it is the more 

educated and “entitled” who are prominent there. And it is “the Crowd” that the power 

elite has always feared – particularly in the last century eg the infamous “Revolt of the Masses”

 (1930). And who can ever forget the moment when the massed crowd turned against Ceausescu 

in December 1989 – within minutes, he had been hoisted from his balcony by helicopter and, 

within days, summarily tried and shot.
It’s noticeable that the figures whose words I’ve quoted – Dahrendorf, Canetti, Krastev, 

Mungiu-Pippidi and Sandor – all represent the intelligentsia. I was brought up to take their 

words seriously - but they are not activists!
The sadly-missed David Graeber was one of the very few such people prepared to get his 

hands dirty… to work across the barriers that normally divide people and to try to forge 

new coalitions…The Crowd needs people like Graeber who understand how to bridge such 

barriers…………..particularly between the “downtrodden masses” and the “entitled”
Where is Bulgaria’s Graeber? There are, actually, several eg Vanya Grigorova – the 

economic adviser of the labour union “Podkrepa” (Support) and leading left-wing public 

figure – who has been travelling the country to present her latest book on labour rights 

and how to claim them. A year ago she gave this interview to Jacobin, which positioned 

her on the side of social change in Bulgaria and the region.

Both Covid19 and the greater concern about global warming – as embodied, for example in 

the recent Extinction Rebellion – suggest that the “normality” being sought by the 

entitled is a will o’ the wisp.
The Sofia protestors would therefore be well advised to widen the scope of their agenda. 

After all, smaller countries generally seem better able to “do” change viz Switzerland, 

Iceland, Denmark, Singapore, Estonia, Slovenia – particularly when they have women at 

their helm who have a combination of trustworthiness and strategic vision!!
Especially for them I updated my list of essential reading for activists – adding my own 

“opportunistic” theory of change which emphasises the element of individual responsibility 

as well as the dynamic of the crowd viz

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity 

arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity 

– through proper analysis, mobilisation and integrity. It involves–

• speaking out about the need for change

• learning the lessons of previous change efforts

• creating and running networks of change

• which mobilise social forces

• understanding crowd dynamics

• reaching out to forge coalitions

• building credibility

I grant you that the time for preparation is over in Sofia; and appreciate that 

some of this may come across as rather elitist but the process it describes is still 

a crucial one – prepare, analyse, network, speak out, build coalitions, mobilise, 

no hidden games…..It’s a tough combination……