Institute For The Future

On the Challenges of Government: Speakers from the ReConstitutional Convention

What are the biggest challenges facing governance in the Anthropocene Epoch?

A panel of brilliant speakers addressed this question from a diverse set of discplinary approaches at IFTF’s ReConstitutional Convention. Out of this diversity, two themes stood out: blurring boundaries and increased interdependence. These two themes  are not unique to 21^st century politics, but will have unique and unprecedented dynamics.

Boundaries have defined governance from its inception. From life and death decisions made by absolute sovereigns to the national and colonial boundaries that have epitomized the Westphalian era. But already today basic categories that we have taken for granted are being challenged. With a globally connected network, national boundaries are blurred. Medical science is blurring the lines between life and death. And even individual identity markers, from job titles to gender roles, are slippery to define.

This blurring of boundaries makes designing for inter-dependence even more imperative, all the while that it becomes more difficult to stabilize. Instead of thinking about discreet categories or roles that can be meshed together, like gears in a clock, we must learn how to coordinate activities and institutions in a more fluid and emergent manner, like starlings in flight. The world is more precarious than ever, with global climate threats, social unrest, food security issues, an energy transformation, and a systemically fragile economic system. And while their boundaries are being blurred, individuals have never yielded so much power to harm or help others at a large scale.

All 11 speakers touched on these issues in different ways, here are some highlights:

Given the personal and social costs of end of life care, Rachel Maguire provocatively advocated for a system of public dying, to go along with public health. We need, she says, to “improve not only the standard of living, but our standard of dying.”

Jordan Greenhall started the day with an overview of the problems with our “legacy toolkit” of government, and the need to push toward systems that are fluid, transparent, decentralized, and contain, in Jordan’s inimitable language, “immanent interlocutory feedback loops.” Mark Dixon addressed these themes as well, looking at the increasingly irrelevant lines we’ve drawn to separate political entities.

Chris McKay and Jim Keravala took us off Earth to think about the interdependencies of space colonies and energy systems, as indicative of challenges we face now when everyone is responsible for each other, where control of environmental and energy is by default a human design, and where humans are the main biological entity. If we can figure out how to govern  “life support” in space, we might fruitfully apply those lessons back on Earth.

Coming from the public sector, Shannon Spanhake  (City of San Francisco) and Aaron Maniam (Singapore), both provided visions of what civic architecture and civil service can be in the future. Spanhake asked us to “transform the places we live into places that represent our values. And Maniam espoused a poetics of civil service, where “empowered, entrepreneurial bureaucrats live out the glory of this contradiction and paradox.”

David Sasaki, Benjamin Bratton, and Camille Crittenden each tackled issues of governance related to networked society, where big data and social media are potentially transformative actors in the system. Drawing upon recent examples, such as the dust-ups between China and Google, Bratton’s Cloud Polis is a project to look at how “states become cloud platforms, and how cloud platforms begin to act as states. 

And Jamais Cascio took us into the space of climate desperation, where “no one actor can do enough, and we all have to work together.” But in the face of this challenge, consideration of planetary scale “geoengineering” becomes disturbingly appealing to certain groups.

As Jamais emphasized, desperate people do desperate things. So it is incumbent upon us to look ahead toward the challenges we face with clarity and honesty. Participants at ReConCon certainly embodied these qualities, and this group of speakers productively framed many of the theoretical and practical issues of governing in the Anthropocene.