A Political Rise Manifesto: A Vision For A Fair, Free and Thriving Civic Future

A Political Rise Manifesto

A Vision For A Fair, Free and Thriving Civic Future

Introduction

Context

This document emerges from the underlying sense that our systems of self-determination and sovereignty (economy and governance) are failing to generate sufficient confidence and quality of life for a majority of human and non-human life. Popular culture memes of “I can’t breath” and “Stop the steal” seem to represent a sense of disempowerment across the US political spectrum that reveals something in our culture and our institutions is not right, broken, and insufficient.

Violent insurrection in the US Capitol, centralized tech platforms effectively defining and policing the terms of civic dialogue, and the fomenting discontent with major entrenched US political / business interests (Force The Vote, /r/WallStreetBets $GME,$BTC HODL), all point to a crisis in which the very systems upon which our civilization is based (currency, sense-making, value creation, dialogue, choice-making) are displaying their lack of evolutionary fittedness to a planetary, connected, data-driven world.

As existing power elites scramble to bolster these cracking systems or “reset” global financial and political structures in their own interest, a new kind of ethos, emerging from the same source as America’s founding process of autopoetic nation-creation, is emerging in civil societies around the world. From the Yellow Vests in France to the Sunflower revolution in Taiwan, the spirit of participatory democracy, enabled by technology and a trauma-informed culture of inclusion, is sweeping through the hearts and minds of visionaries around the world. This document is a synthesis of that ethos and articulates a vision for a series of self-organizing cooperative civic commons initiatives that scaffold a context for local and global collaboration for the common good. The ultimate purpose of this charter is to serve as an initial blueprint and opening with which further dialogue and locally adapted standards, agreements, and principles might emerge. This charter calls for direct citizen participation in Citizen Assemblies across the United States and around the world to restore the rights of self-determination for all people and nature through the development of all-win culture, governance, and technology. Through the power of collective intelligence and collective action, a new kind of people’s movement is possible.

Building on a set of assumptions and definitions, this document is both prescriptive and prefigurative in the sense that it reflects a possible future. What exactly this future looks like will depend entirely on the integration of ideas, perspectives, and good faith contributions of individuals from all backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. A vast array of Citizens Assemblies worldwide will be necessary for all human beings to begin to heal, collaborate, and grow a life-affirming civilization together. As notable all-win philosopher and systems change agent Christopher Life so eloquently says, “Together we rise.”

Political Rise

The Political Rise is an integrated socio-political movement towards a holistic and all-win political paradigm. Drawing from the integral developmental theory of Ken Wilber, Robert Keagan, and Susanne Cook Greuter alongside the work of thinkers and activists ranging from Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Adrienne Marie Brown, Audrey Tang, Eleanor Ostrom, Joanna Macy, and Buckminster Fuller, the political rise is a domain of political thought that strives to provide mature and holistic leadership to all aspects of human civilization. The political rise paradigm integrates the systemic and institutional power of government, civil society, and the private sector within a cultural context that strives to support the mutual thriving and individual choice of all.

Re-Defining Politics

Politics comes from the Greek root word Polis, our city or the place that we call home, but in our globally connected civilization Polis could also be defined as a shared moral and ethical ground upon which we collaborate for the common good. All-win is a is an integral moral and ethical framework that perpetually optimizes for the expansion of choice and quality of life for all living beings. Thus, all-win politics emerges as stewardship and care for our families, neighborhoods, communities, cities, nations, societies, and planet. This simultaneously local and global definition of politics reinvigorates an aspect of human life that has come to represent corruption and the self-serving interests of the wealthy and powerful. Beyond the simple dualistic thinking of left/right or capitalism/socialism, this paradigm embraces both the best of open markets and a culture of care in which all are able to thrive. Through the dynamic synthesis and interplay between these seemingly polar positions, we arrive at a kind of political maturity that leverages data and empathy more than it relies upon dualistic straw-man argumentation, psychological manipulation, and political gamesmanship.

We are realizing through our collapsing biosphere, failing public discourse, and broken communities that the health of the commons, the space between, the connections between agents within a system, is essential for all agents within a system to thrive. In this sense, it is clearly within the rational self-interest of actors within that system to coordinate to uphold together the shared basis of our cultural, economic, and ecological systems. While our polis, our environment, our commons, even our local communal care for one another has been systematically captured by perverse profit incentives that may feel impossible to overcome, change is possible through the choices we make as individuals when we come together on a shared mission that spans cultural, historic, religious, and geographic contexts. The solution to our systemic meta-crisis is nothing less than a complete rebirth of our civic culture and our civic institutions to reflect and balance our individual desire for self-authorship and the mutual interdependence between people and nature.

To illustrate these principles more clearly, Nobel Economist Eleanor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons are provided as a map for thinking about the design criteria for civic institutions and Christopher Life’s 21 Principles of the Political Rise as a map for the civic culture that would be necessary to animate and steward those institutions.

Eleanor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing A Commons

1. Define clear group boundaries.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

Christopher Life’s 21 Principles of the Political Rise

QUALITY OF LIFE — Organizing society around improving the quality of the experience of being alive

ALL-WIN — Overcoming win/lose thinking, expanding choices, and improving quality of life for all

DIGNITY — Reinforcing the respect and compassion all being are inherently worthy of

HOLISM — Rigorously considering whole economic, social, societal and ecological systems.

HEALING — Fundamental healing for mind, body and community; of trauma, disease and chronic pain.

INTEGRATION — Combining, reconciling and synergizing diverse perspectives, disparate groups and unintegrated potentials

UNIFICATION — Always seeking to bring all people together, by sentiment and action.

THRIVING — Pursuing the best possible experience of vital, inspired and positive life for all

STEWARDSHIP — Taking full responsibility for caring for the people and nature with whom we share our home, city, nation.

INTEGRITY — Acting honorably in the best interest of the whole community.

CREATIVITY — Being inventive and generative to create new solutions and access new potentials.

MATURITY — Being secure enough within oneself to focus on ensuring others are safe and supported.

FUNCTIONALITY — Creating solutions that work well in achieving the outcome of improving quality of life for all.

SENSE-MAKING — Committing competency in understanding reality as holistically and accurately as possible.

INQUIRY — Perpetually expanding our field of awareness and understanding by earnestly investigating what we don’t yet know.

PROCESS — Establishing and refining effective processes able to generate reliable societal value in diverse situations.

SYSTEMIC CHANGE — Understanding the nature of complex systems of change, emergence, the systemic origin of key societal problems, and consciously designing systems that enable our collective potential.

REGENERATION — Replacing extractive, polluting societal systems with systems that inherently sustain, nourish and improve the whole.

TRANSFORMATION — Acting boldly to catalyze deep change and midwifing people and systems through the phase-change processes of dissolution, reconstitution and rebirth into something new and better.

EMBODIMENT — Practicing individually and collectively to live in alignment with a set of principles and values.

RESOLVE — Dauntless long-term commitment to ensure the best possible condition for future generations.

A Free, Fair and Thriving Future

Some of the most crucial concepts/memes of our democracy and our democratic heritage have been coopted, distorted, and abused to serve the interests and self-preservation of the military industrial complex, surveillance deep state, industrial economies, and a myriad of other anti-democratic interests. To understand the ultimate destiny of democracy itself, we must both look back in history to the original intent of these concepts while simultaneously looking forward to understand how they might be applied in our current and future contexts. Words like Freedom have become synonymous with consumption. Patriotism has been associated with the violation of civil liberties, perpetual war, and xenophobia. Democracy has been associated with CIA coups and foreign invasions. Independence has come to mean isolation and anti-social behaviors.

To accurately define a free and generative future, it is critical to reclaim the original intent of these words while reimagining them for the 21st Century. A more exhaustive list can be found in the definitions section, but the following (re)definitions are critical for the specific calls to action this document prescribes.

Freedom: the capacity to make choices

Fair: marked by impartiality and honesty : free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism

Independence: freedom from cognitive, emotional, psychological, economic, and cultural biases

Democracy: the process by which stakeholders participate in collaborative or deliberative choices that affect the commons

Patriotism: Love and devotion to one’s nation and fellow citizens, often expressed through service

Thriving: the regenerative process by which life creates more life, perpetually increasing quality of life for all

In this sense, a system that deprives economic and democratic choice (ie crony capitalism and a two-party duopoly) is not truly free or fair. A system that relies upon and deploys cognitive, emotional, psychological, economic and cultural biases to maintain power is not independent. A system that consolidates political choice and representation in favor of an economic elite minority is anti-democratic. A system that pits citizens against one another as “deplorables” and “thugs” is clearly anti-patriotic. A system in which people are chronically ill, addicted, and suicidal, and in which nature is experiencing a 6th mass extinction is not thriving.

So, what would a free, fair, and thriving democratic society look like? To answer that question, we examine several interlocking social functions that are necessary for democracies to flourish: belonging and accountability (civic responsibility and governance), information commons (sense-making), civic participation (dialogue and choice-making), and civic / economic empowerment (currency and value creation). The charter closes with a broader analysis of the design criteria for civic systems and the civic culture necessary to animate those systems.

Next Actions

Formation of an Independent Union distributed cooperative for civic efforts to produce a fair, free, and thriving democratic society with the following committees:

Fair (Love): Civic Participation Digital Democracy

Citizen Assemblies Conditional Funding Community Cooperatives Mediation

Free (Power): Economic & Civic Empowerment Distributed Cooperatives

Coaching and Education

Civic Technology

Thriving (Wisdom): Well-being

Health and Wellness

Addiction, Depression and Suicide Support Deep Ecology & Regeneration

Civic Oath: Belonging and Accountability

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…

This is the inter-related structure of reality.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

As members of the polis we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality…What affects one directly, affects all indirectly”. As such, civic stewardship requires a care for all fellow citizens. To codify this care, we propose a Civic Oath, undertaken by all civic stewards (which includes all citizens and elected officials) to create a shared identity and commitment to serve our entire polis over any interests that might hurt the many and only benefit a few. With such an identity and public commitment, citizens can hold elected officials accountable and engage in direct accountability processes when officials are perceived to be acting outside of this agreement. The intention of these agreements is not to elevate a form of exclusionary “cancel culture,” but rather to provide clear protocols for the redress of grievances from citizens towards those who serve them.

Transparency

In order to hold elected officials accountable to this oath, we need to have a complete awareness of all the government activities. It is no longer acceptable for public servants to hide unethical actions behind veils of secrecy, public relations spin, and insider cronyism. In exchange for the power of their office, civic oath bearers are compelled to provide as-of-yet unprecedented access to their financial and decision-making activities. A record of all financial transactions can easily be made public through incorruptible distributed ledgers (ie blockchain technology). All decisions can be made available via sense-making platforms like Society Library. Equipped with comprehensive maps of both financial donations and the entire logic and argumentation to support their decisions, conflicts of interest and unethical policies will be easy to identify and hold accountable.

Position Mapping

Prototyped through Society Library’s Great American Debate, Internet Government, and Policy Logic Services, there is ample evidence that argumentation, ideas, and evidence from every point of view can be mapped through large scale data scraping and individual contributions. By comprehensively mapping all possible logical positions on an issue, tracking the prevalence of each of those positions within constituencies across the internet, and comparing that map with the logical argumentation of our elected officials, we can easily flag logical fallacies, bad faith arguments, and ulterior motives. Citizens can volunteer to add argumentation documentation to the database and Citizen Assembly civic dialogues can be focused on specific logical arguments rather than abstract and complex conceptual debate.

Decision Making Protocol

While mapping of positions made by elected officials is a revolutionary act in and of itself, we can also begin to articulate a protocol by which all official decisions are made. Appreciative inquiry is a model embraced by the Well-being Economy Alliance as a key decision making protocol that moves beyond a fixed representative system to a living, breathing, inclusive process. Generating an open protocol for decision-making that includes data from position mapping, appreciative inquiry, and Citizen Assembly dialogues, will enable elected officials to truly represent their constituencies through data and dialogue.

Conditional Funding

Centralized platforms like Govrn and decentralized, community distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) like Giveth can provide targeted campaign finance with strict, transparent, outcomes-based conditions. Effectively forming “Citizen PACs” (Political Action Committees), conditional campaign financing levels the playing field between citizens and large corporate donors whose “speech” (campaign donations) lead to anti-democratic behaviors in our elected officials. Collecting large numbers of small donations which are democratically allocated to specific legislative and governance outcomes, coalitions of civic stewards can generate market incentives for elected officials to fulfill their representational responsibilities.

Accountability

Accountability mechanisms are escalating consequences for failure to abide by the civic oath, as determined through a self-governing democratic process. Citizen Assemblies could select any method they choose, but all forms of accountability must allow for the divergence of opinion while holding sacred the good faith intent of the civic steward. Citizen Assemblies that perceive a decision to have been in violation of the oath may make an official petition to the official, requiring them to publicly address the perceived violation and provide any supplementary context or further reasoning for their actions. If this does not redress the concerns of the citizen, Citizen Assemblies may make another petition with a counter proposal that would ameliorate their concerns. Based on the commitments contained within the civic oath, this would require the elected official to either 1) integrate that feedback to the satisfaction of their constituent or 2) provide sufficient reasoning as to why that alternative choice would create harm to the polis. If concerns are still not resolved, Citizen Assemblies may initiate a citizen impeachment in which all citizens are invited to share their perspective on the elected official’s accountability standing. Public servants with an oath accountability rating less than a determined minimum might be informally barred from running for their office in the future through a Citizen Assembly boycott. While this may seem harsh and perhaps overly populist, it is important that elected officials act with utmost integrity and there must be consequences for corruption and misaligned incentives that abuse public power for private gain. Rather than targeting officials for differences of opinion, citizen impeachment is an accountability system that enforces the good faith care for the polis embedded in the Civic Oath.

Next Actions

Transparency

• Develop civic office blockchain transparency standards and systems
• Invite elected officials and candidates to commit to blockchain financial transparency

Decision Mapping

• Contract Society Library or equivalent 501.c3 organization to provide comprehensive policy position mapping services for your jurisdiction
• Engage community members, elected officials, and candidates in a comprehensive position mapping process for issues relevant to your jurisdiction
• Develop inclusive decision-making protocol in partnership with WeAll and Society Library

Conditional funding

• Develop local partnerships with conditional funding platforms OR
• Form local Distributed Autonomous Organization campaign finance collectives
• Develop conditional funding / policy outcome priorities, verification mechanisms, and funds allocations

Accountability

• Formalize a Civic Oath for your jurisdiction
• Invite your elected officials, candidates, and fellow citizens to formally sign the oath
• Develop a Citizen’s Redress / Oath Accountability Framework for your jurisdiction

Making Sense: A Healthy Information Commons

Humans rely on information in order to make personal and political decisions (whether internal thoughts, instincts, and feelings or external data). However, being rational is difficult, not only because human thinking can be corrupted by cognitive biases and logical fallacies, but because of the state of our information ecosystem, including:

• Misinformation, Disinformation, Propaganda
• Unequal Access to Information (Echo Chambers)
• Too much information to process individually
• Overwhelming scientific and technical complexity
• Algorithmic Manipulation, Psychographic Targeting
• Censorship, De-platforming, Straw-Manning
• Loss of trust in media and educational institutions

With large technology and media monopolies controlling the information we see and what we are allowed to say, it is only natural that we would fall into the information tribal warfare that we see on Facebook, Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. To preserve government of, by, and for the people, we need a people’s information commons in which free speech is respected and contradicting information is examined transparently and with a good faith desire to uncover deeper truth. Sharing information freely requires social networks that are not captured by perverse incentives to manipulate our perspectives through psychographic targeting and content algorithms that drive polarizing content. The fourth estate, typically considered the free press media, has proven to have been similarly captured by incentives that don’t provide citizens with the analysis and synthesis of information required for a healthy democracy. Incentivizing a new class of media organizations that are free from the same profit incentives of centralized media organizations, the process of sense-making can be accessible, egalitarian, and nuanced.

A Civic Tech distributed cooperative could provide coordination and funding for collaborative, free, and open source information commons technology, yet content on those platforms would require a participatory sense-making interface capable of collaboratively synthesizing information. Projects like the Overweb and the Consilience Project provide viable solutions to information warfare by adding metadata tagging and context to all web content. Combining collaborative sense-making protocols on open and decentralized information commons platforms will provide Citizen Assemblies equitable access to truthful information, unmitigated by big tech and mainstream media censorship and manipulation.

Of course, none of these measures will achieve their intended impacts if the fundamental infrastructure upon which they rely, the internet, remains controlled by private institutions and the state. Internet shut offs in India during the farmers protests demonstrate the disastrous consequences and potential human rights violations that occur when governments and centralized authorities manipulate the information commons. Peer-to-peer information sharing protocols like Holochain are essential to prevent centralized tech monopolies from asserting the same anti-democratic influence. Establishing an internet bill of rights, adopted at local, national, and international levels, that enshrines universal internet access, data-ownership, and digital self-sovereign identity is essential to preserve the internet as a public utility and commons.

Next Actions

Form an “all-win” civic tech distributed cooperative for public benefit technology platform development

Civic Tech DAO would provide coordinated financing and collaboration for open social platforms that support Citizen Assembly dialogue, in which moderation is democratic, and in which information is shared peer to peer to avoid centralized failure points

Form a citizen independent media distributed cooperative to fund and distribute sense-making information and storytelling for the common good, governed and funded transparently with a clear mandate to objectively pursue stories within the public interest

Fund and partner with participatory sense-making organizations (like the Consilience project and Overweb) that evaluate multiple information streams through a trust layer for the web.

Develop and adopt an internet bill of rights for your jurisdiction

Collaborate with BrightID and VerusID to develop digital self-sovereign identity public policy

Civic Participation: Out Of Many, One

With access to a healthy information commons and an open-source sense-making ecosystem, we have a collective sense of “what is.” When we engage in civic dialogue about what matters most to our communities, we can begin to determine “what ought.” Upon arriving at consensus around what ought to be done, we can begin to coordinate our actions to create the world that we all envision. These steps in the process, integral dialectic, consensus building and coordinated action, are derived from citizen participation in a culture of sincere and mature dialogue, mediation / facilitation support, and a series of decentralized digital tools that facilitate group action.

Memetic Mediation

Citizens Assemblies provide an opportunity to engage in a new kind of dialogue as we explore together proposals for collective action. These proposals, even if derived from a common sense of “what is” and made in the good faith spirit of the political rise, may surface divergent opinions that emerge through lack of shared meaning or values, misunderstanding perspectives, and previous traumatic experiences or biases. Memetic mediators are trained in the art of facilitating dialogue that supports participants in becoming self-aware of their own biases, unconscious beliefs, and the potential pathways to resolution of difference through novel synthesis. Mediators work with participants as neutral observers to dive into the deeper sources of incoherence between groups of people to facilitate conversations with generative outcomes in which all feel included.

Community Cooperatives

Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCos) provide a technological and governance layer for Citizen Assemblies and any outcome-specific coalitions that may form through Citizen Assembly dialogues. Run on a blockchain through a democratic governance process, these organizations allow groups to manage shared resources, allocate funds for projects, and compensate participants for their financial, emotional, and organizational contributions to the cooperative. Community cooperatives are a framework for communities to make investment in local commons initiatives like park cleanups and community infrastructure like maker-spaces. Instead of relying upon government institutions which may be slowed by bureaucracy or budgeting constraints, communities can self-organize using DisCos to provide basic services and support community initiatives.

Gamified Civic Service

Platforms like Serve To Be Free can integrate with community cooperative organizations to provide gamified incentives for civic participation. Linking the private sector, individual citizens, government, and non-governmental organizations / non-profits, gamification can provide badges, rewards, and community certifications for roles and activities recognized within the community. These incentives can range from a simple badge acknowledgement to community-donated perks at local businesses to financial rewards.

Truth and Reconciliation

Inevitably as we come together to create a more beautiful world, we bump up against the historical traumas of our past. These real historical events in which ourselves or our ancestors experienced violence, discrimination, and disempowerment are still present in many of the underlying psychological and emotional dynamics of our interactions. To truly participate as one polis, it becomes essential to meet these ancestral and contemporary traumas in order to move forward into shared prosperity and mutual thriving. Truth and Reconciliation processes have been implemented in State of Maine, South Africa, and Rwanda as formal mechanisms to bear witness to these traumatic events and collectively heal the underlying dynamics that created them. Citizens Assemblies can provide an ongoing context for this work at the local level as an initial collaborative process in the formation of the assembly itself.

Next Actions

Memetic Mediation

• Develop memetic mediation facilitator training program with communities like The Stoa

Community Cooperatives

• Develop Citizen Assembly Community Cooperative DisCo template on a DAO platform like Aragon or DaoHaus

Gamified Civic Service

• Form local partnerships with Serve To Be Free or equivalent 501.c3 organization

Truth and Reconciliation

• Collaborate with First Nations and BIPOC coalitions like Four Winds International and Canticle Farm to develop a Truth and Reconciliation template and facilitator training program

Political Economy: Managing The People’s House

When government officials pursue interests that fundamentally undermine our national inheritance, they demonstrate their illegitimacy to serve the American people. For multiple generations, US economic policy has undermined all Americans’ ability to pursue individual prosperity through the development of ownership in their work. US fiscal and monetary policy through the US $27TdebtandtheFederalReserv{e}^{\prime }sfractionalreservelending,backedonlybythehegemonicpoweroftheUSmilitary,hasgambledthefutureofourchildrentotheexclusivebenefitCEOs,bankers,andgovernmentcontractors.DuetotheFederalReserv{e}^{\prime }sCOVID-19quantitativeeasing,the$USD, and all the Americans who depend on the value of that currency, are at risk of collapsing due to hyperinflation.

As such, it is critical that citizens all across the US divest from and boycott the financial and monetary systems that have sold out our future. By divesting from large banks and moving our savings to community cooperative banks or credit unions, we send a message to these institutions that, even without top-down regulation, we have the power to hold them accountable for their anti-Patriotic behaviors. By moving our currency from $USDto$BTC as we develop our own local currencies and other cryptographic stores of value, we are protecting the sacred wealth we have accrued from being tragically stripped away from us by the failure of the US dollar. Local currencies and banks that are governed by local communities will allow for small business development, higher velocity of currency within a community, and generally support economic empowerment for all Americans as they build wealth for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Distributed Cooperatives: Individual Prosperity For All

The same principles used to coordinate community cooperatives can also be applied to the private sector. Recognizing economic empowerment as essential for a healthy democracy and society, it becomes a civic imperative to provide tools for economic sovereignty and actualization. Providing easy on-boarding to crypto wallets and turnkey solutions for distributed cooperative formation and governance will allow groups of individuals within communities to form their own local enterprises that generate value within the community. Community cooperatives could provide peer lending mechanisms for the formation of private sector cooperatives, linking public and private life for the benefit of the entire community. Local cooperatives can federate within networks of cooperatives to gain economy of scale advantages while remaining accountable and connected to local needs. Democratic governance and direct ownership of value creation will allow for real generational wealth to grow naturally within communities of all scales. Focusing on the implementation of these grassroots economic empowerment initiatives in historically economically undermined areas and demographics, we can effectively redistribute wealth without relying upon taxation or other government intervention.

Next Actions

Call for USD boycott and crypto education/empowerment initiative

Develop on-boarding and training materials for the formation of Distributed Cooperatives

Develop Commons Stack for peer accounting, sovereign identity, and modular governance solutions

Civic Technology

Each of the above sections relies upon the development of decentralized, free and open source (FLOSS) technologies. These systems and structures must be developed through participation of diverse stakeholders and open collaborative processes.

Developing incentive structures and holistic financing mechanisms for this class of public utility technology will be essential to ensure the efficacy, longevity, and integrity of these systems. The collaborative frameworks for these projects currently exists and yet the lack of a coherent narrative situated within a larger social movement calling for these tools has undermined the formation of all-win partnerships and development. Through all-win technology design criteria and frameworks for global collaboration, a large scale civic technology distributed cooperative organization could eventually grow to out-compete Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to provide the essential digital utilities of the 21st Century.

Next Actions

Formation of all-win civic tech distributed cooperatives

Development of governance and funding mechanisms for civic tech distributed cooperatives

Development of all-win civic technology design criteria

Civic Culture

It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation. — Thich Nhat Hanh

None of these measures to restore the rights of self-creation and mutual thriving is possible without a planetary all-win cultural revolution. Culture is essentially the operating system of a civilization, and an operating system based on win-lose thinking, combined with exponential technology, is inherently self-terminating. To avoid the termination of human life on Planet Earth, taking with it a vast majority of the Earth’s bio-diversity, it is essential to develop culture(s) based in mutuality and individual thriving. Unlike cultural revolutions of the past, this cultural revolution is not itself an ideological framework that is imposed from the outside in. An all-win cultural revolution is an inner revolution of the heart that awakens the deepest of human capacities: empathy. Expanding the sense of belonging and empathic connection that we evolved to experience solely in a hyper-localized tribal context, is an essential cultural shift required to preserve life on Earth and ensure a thriving future for all living beings.

Paradigms like Circling, Western Core Tantra, Stoic Dialectic, metamodernism, and the gnostic or transcendent elements of all major religious and spiritual traditions provide maps for the individual and collective process of development towards unconditional love and insight into the interdependence of all phenomena. The Political Rise cultural revolution does not prescribe any particular form of self-development practice, rather it prescribes the notion of practice itself as essential for the collective and personal well-being of all people and nature.

Zen Master and global spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh invokes the concept of the next Buddha, partially mirroring the eschatological telos of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, as a call for groups of human-beings to self-organize into communities of practice that might meet the profound spiritual and cultural challenges of our time through shared devotion to our personal and collective transformation. These sanghas are units of civic cooperation that might begin to cluster and form what John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall describe as a “trans-paradigmatic civic culture.”

Conclusion

This document is presented in the immediate and historical context of massive planetary transformation and change. A “Great Reset” from large institutions that aspire to reset our civilization systems, consolidating power and reducing self-determination and collective well-being, is currently underway, driven by a comprehensive collaboration of powerful institutions like the World Economic Forum, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Brookings Institute, and the “build back better” deep state movement. To counter act this seemingly benign but fundamentally disempowering initiative, now is the critical time to organize a People’s Reset that restores individual, collective, and natural rights. Without a comprehensive, integrated, participatory and cooperative movement to build this new civil rights movement along with its corresponding civic technology and culture, we are likely to succumb to the same systemic failures as previous initiatives or, worse yet, become captured by even more draconian, anti-democratic, and oppressive global systems. We have the power to choose a future in which all citizens of all nations are able to participate in their economies and democracies with dignity, respect, and empowerment. Addressing our failing democracies is only one step in a long journey towards a vibrant and thriving future. Through the distributed cooperation of all of humanity, government of, by, and for people shall not perish from the Earth.

Next Actions Summary

Organizations

• CivilizationOS — All-Win Technology and Information Commons Cooperative
• Mediators DisCo — Mediator Cooperative
• Citizen Assembly DisCo

Partnerships

• Govrn & Giveth
• CommonsStack
• WeAll Alliance
• Society Library
• Consilience Project
• DisCo.coop
• Serve To Be Free

Policy Development

• Internet Bill of Rights
• Well-being Decision Making Protocol Programming

Information Commons Civic Tech

Citizen Assembly