omniharmonicIn ancient Rome, a crown of oak leaves was awarded to a citizen who saved the life of another in battle. The civic renaissance we need today calls us to reclaim this original spirit — to see citizenship not as a bureaucratic status but as the sacred act of preserving life, whether through tending a community garden, protecting a watershed, building mutual aid networks, or creating digital commons.
Gratitude to Ryan Rising and Danielle Bellavita for their comments on the themes of this essay which led to the inclusion of additional perspectives that strengthen the overall piece.
The Hollow Shell
The word “citizen” has become a husk. Once it carried the weight of the polis on its shoulders — the gravity of collective responsibility, the dignity of participation in something greater than oneself. Now it appears most prominently in the grotesque legal fiction of corporate personhood or inhuman immigration raids, marking citizenships’ rapid decline from ennobling self-identity to oppressive power hierarchy in which the rights of citizenship bear none of its responsibilities. The degradation is complete: we have corporate citizens that cannot vote, cannot die, cannot feel shame, yet can spend unlimited sums to influence those who can. Meanwhile, everyday people grow further and further away from the mechanisms of self-governance and mutual responsibility that citizenship once implied.
This linguistic decay mirrors a deeper rot. Since the Reagan administration initiated a four-decade project of privatization — enthusiastically continued through Clinton’s welfare reform, Bush’s military contractors, and Obamacare’s lack of any public option let alone single payer health insurance — the American state has steadily outsourced its functions to private actors. The result is a peculiar kind of statelessness within the state itself. We remain citizens in name, but what does this citizenship entail? We vote, perhaps, though even this fundamental act is increasingly hemmed in by algorithmic voter manipulation, bound by electoral college presidential electors, and rendered meaningless by gerrymandering. We pay taxes, certainly, though these funds increasingly flow to private contractors rather than public servants. We obey laws, though these are increasingly written by corporate lobbyists rather than elected representatives.
The administrative state that emerged in the twentieth century promised efficiency and expertise, but delivered alienation. Max Weber warned of the “iron cage” of bureaucracy; we now inhabit something worse — a cage whose bars we cannot even see, operated by algorithms we cannot interrogate, owned by corporations we cannot hold accountable. The administrative state is derisively called the “nanny state” because it makes choices on our behalf while denying us meaningful participation. The citizen has been reduced to a user, a consumer, a data point. We are subjects of systems we neither understand nor control, systems that process us rather than serve us.
The Contested Term
“But isn’t ‘citizen’ itself a problematic term?” This question deserves direct engagement. As Danielle Bellavita noted in a Facebook comment on a post related to this essay, “from a decolonial perspective, citizenship carries the scars of settler violence, exclusion from rights, and power imbalances.” It has been weaponized to deny humanity to those deemed outside its boundaries — slaves, indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees. Even today, the question “Are you a citizen?” often serves as a tool of exclusion rather than inclusion.
Yet abandoning the term cedes it to those who would restrict and weaponize it. Instead, we might reclaim and expand it, transforming citizenship from a status granted by the state to a practice claimed through participation, a designation determined by peers rather than an imperial authority. Returning to Danielle’s comment, commoning or ‘citizening’ “is the verb of citizenship, the active cultivation of shared responsibility — whether for a neighborhood, a watershed, or the planet.” This shifts legitimacy from state recognition to consent and contribution, from passive status to active practice.
Danielle continues, paraphrasing slightly, “classical civic humanism understood citizenship as an art of self-governance: deliberation, mutual responsibility, and stewardship of the commons. Reclaiming citizenship means shifting from being subjects of state authority to co-creators of public life — forming assemblies, neighborhood councils, participatory budgeting. But we must remain vigilant about not bringing the diseased roots along for the ride, especially where “democracy” itself has been weaponized or where “global citizenship” creates elitist barriers to access for most.”
Rights and responsibilities become co-emergent in this understanding — they arise together from the practice of collective stewardship rather than being handed down from above.
The Ancient Compact
To understand what we have lost, we must remember what citizenship once meant — and what a radical innovation it was in human history. For most of the history of the West, political power flowed from the ability to dominate: the strongest arm, the sharpest sword, the largest army. Kings ruled by divine right or simple might; subjects obeyed or faced consequences. This was considered the natural order, as immutable as the seasons.
The emergence of citizenship in ancient Athens represented a rupture in this logic as profound as the agricultural revolution. Here was a new proposition: that a group of people could govern themselves through deliberation rather than domination, that power could flow from collective agreement rather than individual force. The Athenian citizen was not merely subject to law but was its author. In the agora and the assembly, fishmongers debated with aristocrats, potters with philosophers. This was not perfect — women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded — but it established a principle that would echo through millennia: that legitimate governance requires the consent and participation of the governed.
But we need not romanticize Athens to learn from it. Indigenous models of governance offer equally profound insights, often predating and surpassing Greek democracy in their sophistication. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, potentially dating to 1142 CE, created a sophisticated federal democracy centuries before the United States. Its principle of seven-generation thinking — considering the impact of decisions on descendants seven generations hence — embodies a temporal depth that Western democracy has yet to achieve. Under the Great Law of Peace, it was the women and elders who bestowed authority on the “decision makers” or representatives of a given clan or nation. This early form of bicameral governance clearly demonstrates how power can flow from consent and holistic consideration across time, gendered experience, and relational intelligence.
The Maori concept of kaitiakitanga positions humans not as citizens who own land but as guardians who belong to it. Aboriginal Australian governance systems, tens of thousands of years old, demonstrate forms of collective decision-making that maintain both social cohesion and ecological balance. The Zapatista municipalities in Chiapas practice mandar obedeciendo — “leading by obeying.” The Rojava revolution implements democratic confederalism based on women’s liberation, ecological sustainability, and direct democracy. Traditional indigenous democracies all seem to rely upon extensive deliberation until collective decisions are self-evident rather than imposed. These are not primitive precursors to “real” democracy but sophisticated alternatives that Western academia is beginning to understand.
The American founders, steeped in classical learning, attempted to recreate this spirit on a continental scale. Their innovation was to combine the participatory ideal of Athens and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy with the representative mechanisms of Rome, creating what they hoped would be a sustainable republic. The early American citizen was expected to be actively engaged: attending town meetings, serving on juries, participating in militias, forming associations. Tocqueville, visiting in the 1830s, marveled at this culture of participation: “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite.”
The Bureaucratic Bargain
But even as Tocqueville wrote, the seeds of citizenship’s decline were being sown. The very success of American democracy created the conditions for its decay. As the country grew larger, more complex, more prosperous, the direct participation that had characterized its early years became first impractical, then impossible. The citizen gradually transformed from participant to spectator, from actor to audience.
The Progressive Era marked a turning point. Faced with the complexities of industrial capitalism, reformers sought to replace the messy, corrupt, participatory politics of the nineteenth century with clean, efficient, scientific administration. The citizen would no longer need to engage directly with governance; trained experts would handle such matters. This was the bureaucratic bargain: we would trade participation for efficiency, agency for expertise.
For a time, this bargain seemed to work. The New Deal state delivered unprecedented prosperity and security. Social Security, Medicare, the Interstate Highway System — these were achievements of the administrative state that no amount of town-meeting democracy could have accomplished. The citizen became a client, receiving services from a theoretically benevolent bureaucracy. The state would solve problems; citizens needed only to vote for the politicians who promised the best solutions.
But this arrangement contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. As government grew more complex and distant, citizens grew more alienated from it. The legitimacy that comes from participation cannot be replaced by the legitimacy that comes from results — especially when those results begin to falter. The crisis of the 1970s — stagflation, Vietnam, Watergate — shattered faith in expert administration. Into this breach stepped a new philosophy: neoliberalism.
The Great Privatization
Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” initiated a transformation as profound as the Progressive Era’s, but in reverse. If the Progressives sought to solve the problems of capitalism through state action, the neoliberals sought to solve the problems of the state through market mechanisms. Privatization became the universal solvent, applied to everything from prisons to schools to military operations.
This was not merely a change in policy but a transformation in the very meaning of citizenship. The citizen-client of the welfare state became the citizen-consumer of the market state. Instead of receiving services as a right of citizenship, we would purchase them as customers. Instead of participating in collective decision-making about public goods, we would express our preferences through individual choices in private markets.
The Clinton administration’s embrace of this logic — “the era of big government is over” — demonstrated its bipartisan appeal. The George W. Bush administration’s outsourcing of military functions to contractors like Blackwater took it to its logical conclusion: even the state’s monopoly on violence, Weber’s defining characteristic of modern government, could be privatized. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, while expanding access to healthcare, did so through private insurance markets rather than public provision.
The result is our current condition: a hollowed-out state that maintains the forms of democratic governance while evacuating its substance. We remain citizens in theory, but in practice, we are customers of Comcast, users of Facebook, workers for Amazon. The public sphere that citizenship presupposes has been colonized by private interests. Even our political participation is mediated by private platforms, our political opinions shaped by private algorithms, our political donations funneled through private organizations.
The Digital Petri Dish of Democracy
The internet initially promised to revitalize citizenship. Here was a new public sphere, unmediated by traditional gatekeepers, where citizens could directly engage with one another and wield new forms of power. The early internet embodied a kind of digital republicanism: decentralized, participatory, resistant to control. Email lists, forums, blogs — these seemed to herald a new era of civic engagement.
But this promise was quickly betrayed. The commercial internet that emerged in the 2000s reconstructed the citizen as user, replaced civic participation with engagement metrics, and reimagined “community” as networks for extraction. Facebook’s “community standards” replace public law; Twitter’s “terms of service” supersede the First Amendment; Amazon’s algorithms shape what we consume more than any Chamber of Commerce. We inhabit private spaces that feel public, engage in civic discourse on platforms designed to maximize ad revenue.
Yet paradoxically, this same digital space has become humanity’s laboratory for democratic experimentation. In cyberspace, we can test new forms of governance without the risk of territorial conflict or the inertia of existing institutions. If the laboratories of democracy that Louis Brandeis celebrated in American state governments have become sclerotic, we can establish new laboratories in cyberspace.
Consider Taiwan’s digital democracy movement, emerging from the 2014 Sunflower Movement when students occupied the legislature to protest a trade agreement with China. Rather than simply protesting, the movement created alternative democratic processes. Audrey Tang, a civic hacker who became Taiwan’s Digital Minister, helped develop platforms like vTaiwan and Join, which enable mass deliberation on policy issues. Using tools like pol.is for finding consensus among diverse viewpoints, Taiwan has involved millions in policy-making, from Uber regulation to COVID response.
Even more recently, the legitimacy of digital democracy was dramatically demonstrated in Nepal, where youth movements used Discord to elect new leadership — and the military recognized the results as legitimate. This wasn’t just an online poll but a demonstration that collective action in digital spaces can generate the authority of self-rule. The Sunflower Movement achieved something similar: asserting citizenship by creating democratic spaces that eventually transformed official institutions.
Glen Weyl’s RadicalxChange movement explores innovations like quadratic voting and quadratic funding that allow for more nuanced expression of preferences than simple majority rule. Nathan Schneider’s work with the Metagov project (now led by Liz Barry) demonstrates how digital tools can enhance rather than replace physical democracy. These aren’t just theoretical exercises — they’re being implemented in everything from Gitcoin’s funding of public goods to Colorado’s legislative processes.
Pluralism, Polycentricity, and Subsidiarity
The renewal of citizenship would require a civic renaissance that embraces three key principles that challenge the monopolistic tendencies of both state and market: pluralism, polycentricity, and subsidiarity.
Pluralism recognizes that we hold multiple civic identities simultaneously. I am a resident of my block, a member of my watershed, a participant in online communities, a stakeholder in global commons. These identities need not compete; they can complement and enrich each other. The key insight is that different scales and types of problems require different forms of governance. Managing a local community garden requires different mechanisms than governing a global cryptocurrency protocol.
Polycentricity, a concept developed by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, describes systems with multiple centers of power and decision-making rather than a single hierarchical authority. Instead of all power flowing up to the state or out to the market, polycentric systems recognize that authority can and should exist at multiple scales simultaneously. A neighborhood assembly, a bioregional council, a digital cooperative — each can be a legitimate center of collective agency, neither subordinate to nor in competition with the others.
Subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the smallest scale capable of addressing them effectively — decision-making nested at the scale of its impact. Global problems require global coordination, but my neighborhood’s traffic patterns should be decided by those who navigate them daily. This creates nested scales of decision-making, each with its own sphere of legitimate authority.
The Networked Possibility
Enter the provocative proposition of network nations and digital citizenship. Pioneered by thinkers like Primavera De Filippi and the late Toni Lane Casserly — whom admirers called the “Joan of Arc of blockchain” before her mysterious death at twenty-eight — this vision imagines citizenship as a choice rather than an accident of birth. Instead of being bound to the territory where we happened to be born, we could choose our citizenship based on which digital nation provides the best services, shares our values, and enables our flourishing.
This is not merely theoretical. Estonia’s e-residency program offers a glimpse of this future: digital citizenship that provides access to Estonian services regardless of physical location. Blockchain-based organizations (DAOs) demonstrate forms of governance that transcend traditional boundaries. These experiments remain small, limited, often fraught with problems, but they represent something genuinely new: the possibility of citizenship without territory.
Network nations aren’t meant to replace physical citizenship but to complement it. They allow for values-based organizing without geographic segregation, for ideological experimentation without territorial conflict, for exit without exile. They’re particularly powerful for diaspora communities, affinity groups, and collaborative networks that span continents.
The Bioregional Alternative
Yet even as we explore digital possibilities, we cannot escape physical reality. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, resource extraction — these challenges demand place-based responses that no digital nation can provide. This recognition has sparked interest in bioregionalism: the idea that political boundaries should align with ecological ones, that citizenship should be rooted in watershed rather than nation-state.
The bioregional vision inverts the logic of both traditional states and digital nations. Instead of arbitrary borders drawn by conquest or convenience, bioregions follow the natural boundaries of ecosystems. Instead of abstract membership in communities of ideological affinity, bioregional citizenship emerges from concrete and pluralistic relationships with specific places. You are a citizen of your watershed because you drink its water, breathe its air, and depend on its soil. Your responsibilities extend as far as your impacts.
This approach offers a different resolution to the crisis of citizenship: not escape into digital abstraction but deeper embedding in physical reality. The bioregional citizen is simultaneously local and global, recognizing that ecological systems nest within each other like Russian dolls. You belong to your neighborhood, your watershed, your bioregion, your continent, your planet — each membership bringing different responsibilities and possibilities.
Cosmo-Localism: The Both/And Solution
The supposed conflict between digital and place-based citizenship dissolves in the framework of cosmo-localism: the idea that we can be both rooted in place and connected globally, that local production can be informed by global knowledge, that we design globally but manufacture locally.
Network nations and bioregional governance aren’t opposites but complementary approaches to the crisis of the nation-state. A regenerative agriculture network might span continents digitally while implementing locally adapted practices. A cryptocurrency community might coordinate globally while creating local nodes of mutual support. The key is creating interfaces between different forms of citizenship — translation mechanisms that allow them to communicate and coordinate.
This is the both/and logic of our moment: both local and global, both digital and physical, both ancient and emergent. We need multiple, overlapping forms of citizenship operating at different scales. Local citizenship roots us in particular places and face-to-face relationships. Bioregional citizenship connects us to ecological systems. Network citizenship enables coordination with values-aligned peers across distance. Global citizenship recognizes our common humanity and shared challenges.
Civic Utilities and the Infrastructure of Participation
But reimagining citizenship requires more than good intentions. It requires infrastructure — what the OpenCivics framework calls “civic utilities.” These are the tools and mechanisms that make democratic participation possible, transforming more and more domains of society into actually democratic spaces.
Some utilities are technological. Blockchain platforms enable new forms of collective decision-making and resource allocation. Quadratic voting systems allow for more nuanced expression of preferences than simple yes-or-no ballots. Prediction markets aggregate distributed knowledge more effectively than traditional polling. These tools remain experimental, often complicated, sometimes captured by special interests, but they represent genuine innovations in the technology of democracy.
Other utilities are methodological. Sociocracy offers consent-based decision-making that seeks not agreement but the absence of paramount objection. The Prosocial framework, developed by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, provides practical tools for groups to develop cooperative capacity based on Ostrom’s design principles for managing commons. Art of Hosting practices enable collective wisdom to emerge from group processes.
Still other infrastructure is cultural. True civic participation requires education, engagement, and empathy — qualities that can and must be cultivated through practice. The skills of citizenship — how to deliberate across difference, how to find common ground, how to make collective decisions, how to implement shared projects — cannot be assumed; they must be developed through exercise. This is education through practice, learning citizenship by doing citizenship.
These civic utilities transform domains of life from administered to democratic. Instead of public housing managed by bureaucrats, we get community land trusts governed by residents. Instead of social media platforms ruled by algorithms, we get federated networks governed by users. Instead of representative democracy limited to periodic elections, we get liquid democracy enabling continuous delegation and participation.
The Parallel Path
The path forward is not through revolution but through parallel construction. Instead of trying to reform sclerotic institutions or overthrow entrenched powers, the civic renaissance creates alternatives alongside them. This is the strategy of “building the new society in the shell of the old,” as the Wobblies put it, or “creating the conditions that make the old system obsolete,” in Buckminster Fuller’s formulation.
This parallel construction is already underway. Mutual aid networks provide support outside traditional welfare systems. Community currencies circulate value outside traditional monetary systems. Open-source software creates digital infrastructure outside traditional property systems. These are not protests against the existing order but prototypes of a different one.
The power of this approach is that it does not require permission or consensus. Small groups can begin experimenting immediately, learning what works through practice rather than theory. Successful experiments can be replicated and adapted; failed ones can be abandoned without catastrophic consequences. This is democratic evolution rather than revolution, transformation through iteration rather than overthrow.
Moreover, this constructed power can influence, transform, and even consume legacy institutions. The Sunflower Movement didn’t just protest government policy; it created alternative policy-making processes that the government eventually adopted. Barcelona’s municipalist movement didn’t just criticize city governance; it won elections and implemented participatory democracy. These examples show that parallel power can become primary power through demonstration of superior outcomes.
The Sovereignty of Small Things
There is power in starting small. Every transformation begins with a single step, every movement with a single act. The civic renaissance does not require grand gestures or heroic measures. It requires ordinary people taking ordinary responsibility for the spaces they inhabit and the communities they belong to.
This might mean organizing a tool library in your neighborhood, where residents share equipment rather than each buying their own. It might mean starting a community-supported agriculture program, connecting local farmers with local eaters. It might mean contributing to an open-source project, sharing your expertise with a global community of peers. It might mean participating in a local watershed council, learning the streams and springs of your bioregion.
These acts seem small, even trivial, against the scale of our challenges. Climate change will not be solved by community gardens; inequality will not be ended by tool libraries; authoritarianism will not be defeated by online forums. But these small acts of citizenship accomplish something crucial: they rebuild the civic muscle that has atrophied through decades of disuse. They recreate the habits of participation that democracy requires. They demonstrate that collective action remains possible even in our atomized age.
Moreover, these small acts can cascade. The community garden leads to the farmers market leads to the food policy council leads to the transformation of the local food system. The tool library leads to the repair cafe leads to the maker space leads to the distributed manufacturing network. The online forum leads to the digital cooperative leads to the platform democracy leads to the reorganization of the digital economy. Small acts of citizenship create the conditions for larger ones.
Creating Legitimate Power
The most profound insight of recent democratic experiments is that we don’t need permission to create legitimate governance. When Discord-organized youth in Nepal elected leadership that the military recognized, when the Sunflower Movement’s deliberations shaped Taiwan’s policy, when Rojava’s assemblies governed territory — they demonstrated that legitimacy comes from practice, not proclamation.
This is the deep magic of democracy: collective action creates collective authority. When people organize themselves to solve problems, manage resources, and make decisions, they generate a form of power that even hostile institutions must acknowledge. We can assert our citizenship, renewing our democracy by creating new democratic spaces, online and in our own backyards. We can establish real power that can influence and transform and even consume legacy institutions.
Every participatory budget process builds financial democracy. Every community land trust builds economic democracy. Every platform cooperative builds digital democracy. These aren’t protests against existing power but constructions of alternative power — demonstrations that we are revitalizing and re-ennobling the notion of citizenship by creating democratic spaces in which people have real power.
The Sacred Responsibility
At its deepest level, the civic renaissance is about recovering the sacred dimension of citizenship. Not sacred in a religious sense but sacred in the sense of ultimate concern, of fundamental responsibility, of irreducible dignity. The citizen is not merely a legal status or an economic actor but a moral agent, responsible for the common world we share.
The very etymology of “civic” reveals what we have forgotten. In ancient Rome, the corona civica — a crown of oak leaves — was awarded to a citizen who saved the life of another in battle. This was considered the highest military decoration, more prestigious than gold or silver crowns, because it celebrated not conquest but care, not domination but devotion to one’s fellow citizens. The word “civic” literally springs from this act of life-preserving service.
Today, as we face civilizational threats that could extinguish not just individual lives but life itself, this ancient meaning takes on new urgency. The civic renaissance calls us to reclaim this original spirit — to see citizenship not as a bureaucratic status but as the sacred act of preserving life, whether through tending a community garden, protecting a watershed, building mutual aid networks, or creating digital commons. Each act of civic participation is, in its essence, an act of saving lives — our own and others’, present and future. The crown of oak leaves may no longer be bestowed, but the honor inherent in civic action remains: to be a citizen is to be one who sustains and safeguards the conditions for life to flourish.
This understanding transforms citizenship from burden to privilege, from obligation to opportunity. To be a citizen is to be trusted with the care of something precious: the communities we inhabit, the ecosystems we depend on, the institutions we inherit, the future we create. This is a daunting responsibility, but also an ennobling one. It means that our lives matter not just to ourselves but to the larger wholes of which we are part.
Rights and responsibilities become co-emergent in this understanding — they arise together from the practice of collective stewardship of digital and physical spaces. The sacred dimension of citizenship also provides a ground for solidarity across difference. However much we may disagree about policies or values, we share responsibility for the world we co-inhabit. This shared responsibility can become the basis for dialog across divides, for finding common ground despite disagreement, for maintaining relationship even in conflict.
The Practical Horizon
What does this mean in practice? How does one enact plural citizenship in our networked age? The answer will vary by context, but some principles emerge:
Start where you are. Citizenship begins in the immediate: your block, your building, your neighborhood. Before solving global problems, learn to solve local ones. Before transforming society, transform your street. The capacity for citizenship is built through practice, and practice begins at home.
Connect across scales. Local action is necessary but not sufficient. Look for ways to connect your local work to larger networks and movements. Share what you learn. Adopt what others have proven. Build bridges between different scales of action.
Embrace experimentation. We do not yet know what forms of citizenship will prove adequate to our challenges. This requires a spirit of experimentation, a willingness to try and fail and try again. Document your experiments so others can learn from them.
Build infrastructure. Citizenship requires more than good intentions; it requires systems that enable participation. Create the spaces, tools, and processes — the civic utilities — that allow others to engage. This might be as simple as a regular neighborhood meeting or as complex as a digital democracy platform.
Cultivate capacity. The skills of citizenship must be learned and practiced. Create opportunities for civic education through civic action. Teach deliberation by deliberating. Teach organizing by organizing. Teach democracy by doing democracy.
Maintain solidarity. The forces arrayed against civic renewal are powerful: concentrated wealth, entrenched interests, algorithmic manipulation, authoritarian movements. The only counter to concentrated power is distributed solidarity. Build relationships that transcend traditional divisions. Find common cause with unexpected allies. Remember that your citizenship is part of a larger movement.
Conclusion: The Permanent Revolution
Citizenship in the networked age is not a status to be achieved but a practice to be sustained. It is not a problem to be solved but a tension to be managed. It requires holding multiple identities simultaneously: local and global, physical and digital, particular and universal. It demands that we root ourselves in specific places while connecting across vast distances, that we honor indigenous tradition while embracing digital innovation, that we maintain stability while enabling transformation.
This is the permanent revolution of democracy: the never-ending process of becoming citizens worthy of self-governance. Each generation must rediscover democracy for itself, must reinvent citizenship for its context, must find new ways to enact the ancient proposition that people can rule themselves.
We are that generation. The forms of citizenship we create — or fail to create — will shape the next century. The experiments we conduct today will become the institutions of tomorrow. The civic muscles we build now will determine whether democracy survives its current crisis.
But the resources for this renewal lie within us. The human capacity for cooperation, creativity, and care that enabled our ancestors to build the first democracies remains available to us. The technologies that threaten to divide us can also connect us. The challenges that seem insurmountable can become the catalysts for transformation.
This is the deepest meaning of citizenship in our networked age: the recognition that we are all connected, that our fates are intertwined, that the world we inhabit is the one we create together through plural forms of collective stewardship. We are revitalizing and re-ennobling citizenship by creating democratic spaces where people have real power — not the hollow power of periodic voting but the substantial power of continuous participation, not the delegated power of representation but the direct power of collective action.
In the end, citizenship in the networked age is both simpler and more profound than its predecessors: it’s the active practice of collective stewardship, the cultivation of democratic spaces, the weaving of new forms of agency from digital possibility and ancestral wisdom. It’s the chance to be part of something larger than ourselves while remaining true to our particular places and peoples.
The civic renaissance is not a destination but a direction, not a solution but a practice, not a theory but an experiment we’re running together. Its success depends not on leaders or institutions but on ordinary people doing extraordinary things: taking responsibility for their communities, creating spaces for collective agency, building the democratic future one decision at a time.
As a writer, I was initially aghast at the idea of letting AI touch anything I published. Since then, I’ve walked the fine line between authorship and appropriation. I came to realize that AI is an accelerant for multi-polar traps, ie if you don’t use it, you will be outperformed by people who do. The careful art becomes how to leverage AI with integrity, utilizing the tool to amplify the voices of protopia as the voices of dystopia are equally accelerated.
In that exploration, I’ve discovered a workflow that preserves my authorship and intent while rapidly accelerating my ability to produce work and influence culture. My process utilizes extensive rounds of editorial feedback, review, and fine tuning. No word leaves my desk unless I can stand behind it entirely.
This is an arduous process of editing, made possible by the increased speed of drafting, to ensure no AI slop or misrepresentation of my core intent remains.
If that reduces your appreciation for the work, I completely understand. I will keep using AI to accelerate my work while remaining open to all forms of critique and feedback.