This is (not) a Manifesto

Hear ye, Hear ye,

I thought I was going to launch my Civility Manifesto last week, but then when I got to the point of delivering it, I realised that this was an act of self-delusion.

Instead I gave this speech which steps out my thinking over the past few years about what is at the heart of our current democratic malaise.

Listen on the latest Burning Platforms.

Transcript:

I’d like to pay my respects to any First Nations people in the room and acknowledge their custodianship of this land for many millennia. 

Thank you, John Cain lunch regulars – Emma was a bit worried you aren’t a "tech crowd" so I want to reassure you this is not a talk about technology, it is a talk about power and politics – and I know this is right in your hitting zone.

Thanks also to those who bought a ticket, even when I told you I was launching "my manifesto".

Thanks those who accepted a freebie in my desperation to fill the room. And a special shout-out to those joining virtually, I’ll try to make the event work for you as well.

Over the next hour I’m going to ask you all to earn your rubber chicken.

I want you to help me:

• step out my thinking around how we might re-imagine our public square,
• test drive some of the new approaches I’ve been developing,
• give me some honest feedback on my analysis,
• and work out if there’s somewhere interesting we can take this.

 Context

Like everyone in this room, I’m coming at this from my own personal perspective - which is actually a whole lot of different and sometimes contradictory perspectives:

• I’m a net migrant – a proud member of Generation X – the only place where I see the world from a minority perspective.
• I’m a social researcher, a political strategist, a spin doctor.
• I’m a writer, a podcaster, a bloviator.
• I’m a socialist who also happens to be a capitalist – or is it a capitalist socialist?
• I’m a father, a husband, a cook, a cricketer, a Swans fan.
• I’m passionate about First Nation justice, disability rights, worker power, the future of live music, the renewable energy transition, the power of Big Tech and social democracy.

But while I am all these things that are particular to me, there is something I share with all of you:

I’m a citizen.

I’ve decided to focus my activism around this part of my identity because I think this is the space where we face our biggest challenges and also where our greatest hope lies.

On democracy, media, and political debate we all agree we are not doing so great.

Maybe not yet the enfeebled but incendiary democracy the United States has become, but it would be naive to think we are immune from this trajectory.

Democracy, Parliament, political debate are aspects of the broader concept which I am calling "the public square".

Some definitions

I’ll spend a few minutes defining what I mean by this. 

Like all concepts worth their salt the public square has a German compound. Habermas coined it "offent-lich-keit": the bridge between state and people, anchored in their shared opinion. 

In the 1970’s, Benedict Anderson gave this a sharper edge describing an "imaginary community" of stories and song lines that bind people who have never met into a "deep, horizontal comradeship".

The public square is the spaces between us – the norms, the values, then mutual understanding that make us a society.

• It’s the campfire where our forebears sat looking at the stars and seeing gods on celestial quests. 
• It’s the Athenian’s Agora where citizens drew lots.
• It’s the cathedral at Worms where Luther posted his treatise.
• It’s the coffee shops of Paris where revolution was fomented.
• It’s the speaker’s corner where a citizen could stand on their soapbox and let rip.
• It’s the shared media experience of McCluhan’s Global Village – from wireless, TV, to the early iterations of the internet

It is anywhere citizens build a shared understanding of their world and have the means to shape their collective response.

I don’t want to idealise this space. It has always been defined by its exclusion of slaves, those without property, women, First Nations people, immigrants, the other.

It’s also been the host of excess when citizens lose their collective mind.

• It was where witches were tortured and the guillotine blade fell.
• Where books were burned and Communists banned.
• Where the White Australia Policy was hatched and "illegal Asylum seekers" weaponised.

The Public Square is a negotiated construct anchored around three core elements:

• How we make decisions based on the principle of collective will through voting.
• How we inform ourselves to make these decisions, separating fact from rumour, and giving context and nuance to the grey areas.
• And how we connect with each other, not just as individuals, but through our social connections. This is what JK Galbraith coined "countervailing power": clusters of citizens in unions, churches, chambers of commerce, progress associations that bought welcome friction into the parliamentary process.

What is the nature of the problem?

Our public square is in a structural crisis because it has become a site of constant conflict rather than the point of connection it was designed to provide.

This is the inevitable consequence of what Shoshana Zuboff dubbed "surveillance capitalism".

Our online lives are controlled by massive global digital advertising platforms that extract, repurpose and sell our attention to the higher bidder in real time micro-auctions.

We know that the largest of these, Meta, has knowingly built engagement algorithms that seek to maximise time on platform by prioritising content that:

• reinforces users’ existing views,
• excites and riles them up,
• and preferences emotion over reason.

When these tools are used to sell us sneakers it’s creepy and irritating. When they are used to trade in ideas and values it becomes corrosive.

Conflict is not bad

To be clear political division is neither new nor undesirable.

• Conflict is the energy that has driven social change from female suffrage to land rights to marriage equality.
• Union organising has always been based around the theory of anger-hope-action.
• Friction in any system is important as it draws out much-needed complexity.

Technologist Robert Elliott-Smith calls this the "edge of chaos". Evolution was never survival of the fittest, he argues, but survival of the those with the diversity and redundancy to deal with unforeseen events.

What has changed is our underlying civic infrastructure.

Think of it like a cricket pitch. Is the wicket true and fair to both sides? Or is it being doctored to elicit a certain outcome?

Our civic pitch feels like a Gabba green-top, destined to pepper the batter with unplayable balls which even the bowlers can’t control.

Corrosive hyper-conflict has become a feature not a bug, undermining any sense of common purpose, in politics, in media, in our social connections.

• When we start at the point of conflict, we fail to see the humanity in each other.
• We cast moral judgment on those with different views.
• We seek not just to win a debate but to humiliate our opponents. And they do the same to us.

The victories we do achieve become ephemeral because they rely on the outcome of the contest rather than a product of genuine consensus.

There is nothing novel in this prognosis it has gone from a fringe critique just a few years ago into mainstream:

• Murdoch attacks Meta, with no sense of irony, as a scourge to democracy.
• The Prime Minister calls for young people to be banned from social media.
• The e-Safety commissioner takes Elon Musk to court for refusing to take down content.

What surprises me most is that we think that passing a few laws and a bit of self-regulation will fix it all.

"Getting tough" on Big Tech by trying to limit its power, inevitably means ceding to it as well.

It misses the point that the fundamental problem is structural:

• The ownership of networks concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires.
• The business models to extract and exploit our attention.
• And the very assumption that large, centrally controlled global networks can ever act in the public interest.

The Public Square has become a private global mall. I believe the only rational response is to fundamentally re-imagine it.

Civility

Over the past few years I’ve been thinking through how our civic life might be conducted differently with a project I’ve called "Civility".

The Civility framework has three layers:

1.The Town Hall: live, virtual and hybrid events deploying interactive tools and deliberative methodologies to give people a genuine say.

2.The Town Square: an independent space of diverse, self-managing communities, to share ideas informed by high-quality information.

3.The Citizen Ship: a user-controlled civic platform where people exercise, engage and express themselves as citizens.

I’d like to take you through each concept briefly.

The Town Hall

Our current models of member meetings, stakeholder engagements, and community consultations, even events like this, have one thing in common: they tend to be a bit of a punish.

We’ve all been to them. The party meetings, the community consultation, the public forums, and bloody writers festivals.

They tend to be either technocratic or emotionally-charged so participants are either bored or agitated; sometimes both at the same time. Those on stage talk at the room and you are cast as a passive audience.

If there is time for questions they normally take the form of speeches from those who we least want to hear from. Everyone goes home not really knowing what anyone else thought or what to do next.

Civility is an alternate model:

• We start with a point of connection.
• We provide clear and concise information.
• We embrace friction.
• We try to make it fun!

We use the tools we're using today to design events around this real-time feedback.

But there’s nothing special about the tech. Menti is a just tool developed by a Swedish management consultant. To be clear: Civility isn’t an app – it’s a methodology.

I want to talk about a few ways we’ve been testing the approach.

First, we had the privilege of working with Yes 23 to design and roll-out their education and activation work for the referendum.

We designed a Town Hall-in-a-box – a show which toured the nation with a team of skilled MCs, expert panels and real time audience feedback.

To build the emotional connection a First Nations person would read the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the room would give their reflections. From there we’d explain the changes using easy to understand infographic. One of the best bits of comms in the Voice was the Easy Read version of the Statement which didn’t just work for people with intellectual disability; it worked for everyone.

We’d acknowledge the criticisms of the proposal up front and respond respectfully and clearly. Then we would chart a way forward for those who wanted to commit.     

I know. We lost the referendum and that is an ongoing shame for us all but we learnt a lot about creating a safe and rewarding discussion for those who were prepared to turn up.

A second piece of work has been the Disability Dialogue – a project to build a centre of collaborative power outside government.

Led by people with disability, working in partnership with advocacy organisations good-faith providers and the Melbourne Disability Institute here at Melbourne Uni.

 Using these tools we have ran a pilot to re-imagine disability housing:

• We started with getting the different groups into their own huddles.
• We gave each group specific design challenges and then bought the groups together to refine and endorse each others’ ideas. Not all of them got through and that was OK because people had faith in the process.
• Those that did were then taken forward to the NDIS Review, where one idea – rental navigators – was adopted as a recommendation.

What worked here was the shift in power. Rather than government "consulting at groups" about policies that had already been determined; the power was inverted and the recommendations came to government from a united community.

In this project we also learnt the importance of embracing real accessibility. Both in the way projects are paced and the way information is presented so that everyone can participate.

Renewable Regions. Social Licence.

Finally, I want to talk about work I’ve been doing around the energy transition in talking to regional communities over the past few months.

Some of you will be aware of the push-back to the roll-out of renewables – wind, solar and grid upgrade – particularly in coastal communities.

The instinct is to dismiss those who are opposed as denialist, cookers – who the fossil fuel industry is ruthlessly exploiting.

Then truth is that to the extent disinformation (offshore wind kills whales) is a thing. And it is has taken hold because it is latching onto real concerns.

• These are large scale projects, many of which have been terribly managed by developers.
• The first most communities hear about them is when the locals start protesting.
• There is a genuine concern for the impact of these big developments on nature, especially in coastal communities.

The second problem is those pushing the change are those least trusted: the energy companies.  

The only trusted source we are told are "friends and family". But if all we trust are friends and family, how do they get their information?

If we want the energy transition to work it’s pretty clear we need to upend the power dynamic: rather than imposing projects on community, community buy-in has to come first.

This takes work. Not a one-off procedural consult to comply with a technocratic framework but processes designed to give communities real agency in setting the ground rules for their future.

Each of these examples is a variation on a theme:

Re-imagining the Town Hall as a home for compelling engagements centered around the point of connection.

• Where events are designed with the citizen experience at its centre.
• Where participants are inspired and empowered to harness our collective wisdom and energy.
• And where, because we feel seen and heard, we want to keep coming back.

The Town Square

But it’s not enough to design better public engagements; these will only work with a citizenry acting on good information, open to new ideas and nuance. It is here that we move to the Town Square: the public forums where ideas are circulated.

Right now, the custodians of our square are struggling.

The news media that emerged from the Industrial Age of information scarcity served the critical role of gatekeeper of relevant, quality- assured information.

This model is in catastrophic – possibly terminal - decline.

Major media companies and public broadcasters alike face falling audiences, loss of trust and growing irrelevance.

Attempts to strike a grand bargain between media and the platforms via the News Media Bargaining Code may have given the a few years life support, but they have only increased reliance on these untenable partners.

And I must say, striking generative AI content deals with the same partners seems like making this mistake all over again.

Because after stripping media companies of their advertising income streams, the algorithmic distribution model distorts the very idea of a news "service".

• News is broken down into individual pieces of content.
• The key value is virality rather than veracity.
• Conflict and excitement trump fact and context.

Again, media has always been premised on conflict – if it bleeds it leads is core to any journalist’s DNA.

But there is something more intense about the ferocity and fervour of the constant cycle of outrage, controversy and noise that the media feeds and feeds off.

It creates a two-speed social discourse – a small active minority constantly angry, while the vast majority actively recoil and disengage.

The journalists in the room can relax. We still need you to filter fact from fiction. But we need new models for collating, presenting and distributing this information.

To stretch my Gabba metaphor, rather than gatekeepers we need you to become greenkeepers: professionals with the discipline to observe the world dispassionately and the skills to provide the context and nuance that tends the public square.

The Final Word

Ironically one of the best examples of the greenkeeper I’ve seen are the creators of the Final Word cricket podcast - Melbourne poet Geoff Lemon and former Gillard staffer Adam Collins.

• They travel the world following major matches: all formats, male and female, all nations.
• They report, they provide context, they champion diversity and challenge mindless nationalism.
• They study the game’s history, conduct in-depth interviews, hold live events and organise meet-ups and even cricket games.
• They make a living wage via a mix of Patreon subscribers, sponsors, lots of You Tube views in India.

They have built a highly engaged, self-sustaining audience. Subscribers are invited to a closed Discord group (a gamer's platform free of a surveillance business model) where they share their love for the game.

The audience is real people, not data sets. They have built a genuine and self-sustaining community of interest around their passion.

 There are other examples:

• Annabell Crab and Leigh Sales "Chats 10, Looks 3" have built a community of care off the back of their wry takes on culture and life.
• Dan Ilic’s Irrational fear – part-comedy, part-therapy, part mission to save the planet from itself.
• And the Crooked Media crew in the States, Democrat loyalists who are becoming an independent centre of gravity as the Biden presidency approaches end game.

The best of these are information-driven community building projects are where the connection points of shared interest and passions are tapped to become something more consequential than simple "eyeballs".

Event-based media

But while these podcasters have occasional "live shows" they are still primarily broadcasters – the content and the audience remain separate entities.

I think we can take this ‘greenkeeper’ model to the next level by building on some of the hacks we performed during the pandemic.

When we locked down, we started convening daily lunchtime Zoom talks, a series we dubbed "Australia at Home", in an attempt to keep people engaged and connected.

ZOOM seems old now, but at the time it was a revelation, 100s of people in the same online space, taking in the same information and sharing back through chat driving the discussion.

• Tuesday was Essential Report day where I’d geek out on politics.
• We ran virtual book clubs for Guardian Australia.
• And we started a discussion about technology – with what’s become the Burning Platforms podcast.

 These live interactive events had potential to become a new form of media.

 The model we use with Burning Platforms might provide a good framework.

• We have a regular panel of Digital Rights Watch’s Lizzie O’Shea and our tech-bro Dan Stinton.
• We each bring a provocation to put to each other.
• We do a bit of research and test each other’s assumptions.
• We deep dive with an expert who knows a lot more than us.
• We ask questions, test each other, look for the nuance.

With a modest audience, these can become live interactive events, delivered to engaged communities who know that their feedback will be seen and heard.

Imagine building these sorts of conversations across all the different identities, ideas and passions we all have as citizens?

• Local Town Squares - where neighbourhoods can distill and deliberate on community issues that affect them and plan better futures.
• Life-stage Town Squares – centred around different parts of the journey – designed to connect people parenting, in active retirement, aging, people with disability
• Life-style Town Squares - from book and music clubs to gardening and cooking forums to sports communities.
•  Specialist Town Squares – from professional networks to cultural identities to political causes.

Imagine if every night a range of Town Squares were available to be streamed live as an alternative to the Netflix algorithm, the audience invited to shape the direction of the discussion rather than be passive viewers.

Each community run by professional and committed community journalists, building their careers around their knowledge, their trust and their networks.

We could build a Marvel Universe of content communities, interacting together on common ground.

What was The Drum could become The Square, a rolling parade of community mavens aggregating their sharing their insights and providing context to citizens hungry for some real intelligence. God knows, we have a month of panelists in this room now.

 Who Runs the Square?

When I first started thinking about the Public Square a few years ago, I thought this was a natural role for an ABC founded on the Reithian principles of civic reciprocity.

But the blank stares I got when I raised this with Aunty and its on-going crisis in identity makes me think that’s a bridge too far.

• Maybe this is more like the community media model? The existing network of community-run radio and TV stations that exist to serve specific audiences.
• Maybe it’s an extension of the terrific work of Misha Ketchell’s team at The Conversation, dedicated to giving academics the skills to tell stories grounded in fact?
• Maybe it’s a network of titles supported by organisations with an interest in building their own communities of engaged members?
• Or maybe it’s a cooperative of community journalists like Adam and Geoff, with a shared back end to help repurpose and amplify their content?

And it doesn’t need to be just one model. It could be all of the above.

What I do know is the current models are failing and each new media play based on a fresh iteration of the obsolete Gatekeeper is likely to fail as well.

The Citizenship

Finally, let’s look at the way we connect with each other through the current platforms that purport to be "Public Squares":

• X is a bonfire.
• Meta is purging news.
• TikTok may or may not be a tool of state influence.
• Instagram promotes performative self-loathing.
• You Tube is riddled with wormholes.
• LinkedIn – despite my best efforts - is still cringe.

Cory Doctorow’s jarringly brutal phrase ‘en-shtification’ has become a law of network technology:

• First a network works for its users.
• Then it works for the businesses that advertise on the platform and exploits the users.
• Then it purely works for the platform and exploits the businesses.
• Then it dies.

Is there a world where the global corporate digital platforms will all turn to shit?

And if an Overton window opened, what would emerge next?

Could we begin to imagine a new digital home for our civic selves?

Where citizens get used to engaging with each other through fact-based discussion and deliberation, in forums that respect them and seek their feedback?

Where we could deploy a sort of digital Dunkirk and move to safer territory?

There was a moment when Twitter turned X but all there was Mastodon. Did anyone try it? Way too hard.

Can we ensure that next time a platform en-shitifies we are ready?

An interoperable network of local, interest and lifestyle-based communities could provide the common ground for the connections which the global platforms have already shown they cannot responsibly manage?

• Where users could choose the communities they joined, their levels of engagement, the amount of information they chose to share.
• Where they could collaborate to set the norms and rules for each community.
• Where there would be roles for community development workers to moderate content and direct discussion.
• Where members would be valued on terms defined by their communities and judged on effort and time invested in helping others, rather than their accumulation of followers and likes.

These community networks would produce the most valuable commodity on the internet: high-quality, permission-based insights to inform the design of policy, products and the network itself.

There are a range of initiatives that could be piloted to test the feasibility of a self-sustaining community of communities:

• They could become their own research panels where government, business and other organisations access members of the community to participate.
• They could become a base for civic research, where academics and policy makers test evolving models of deliberative democracy and other citizen-facing initiatives.
• They could become an avenue for the delivery of government services, with independent system navigators and advocates to help citizens interface with the complex systems.
• We could even imagine a digitally ‘organic marketplace’ of ethical products such as human-generated cultural content as a healthy alternative to AI slop.

A longer-term opportunity for these networks would be to work with technologists currently trying to build better models of data sovereignty:

• Internet founder Tim Berners Lee’s Solid Protocol, to define a user-centric model of storing and sharing data in data ‘PODS’.
• GIDE, a not-for-profit led by former ICANN chief Paul Twomey is advocating the development of a ‘data commons’ where communities of citizens can pool their data the way super funds pool our savings.
• And the work of former Taiwanese digital minister Audrey Tang who sees a more radical shift in digital power to communities, blockchain technology could give de-centralised communities the tools to develop their own rules, norms and incentive structures.

Our Citizen Ship could become a civic sandpit for a broader mission to civilise the internet.

Connectivity

Step back and we see a re-imagined Public Square.

What is most striking to me is the way the three constructs are mutually reinforcing.

Where our current model of democracy, media, and civic engagement is fractured, this seems unified.

• The information flows up and down.
• It is high quality.
• It is intermittent but deep.
• Data is controlled by the audience.
• Partnerships are built on reciprocity.

So where is the Manifesto?

This is where today’s drama takes a little twist.

You see, the dog’s eaten my homework.

I did bash out 10,000 words over summer which I dubbed a "Manifesto", but it was really a bunch of messages to self which I then I inflicted them on a bunch of kind souls for feedback.

You were all very polite.

But my friend Paul Schroder displayed some welcome civility when he gently remarked it was all a bit "condescending".

He’s right. Our challenge is beyond one document and plan. And to think a middle-aged white guy would come up with the solution is downright arrogant.

The truth is this is big and complex and requires our collective wisdom and action.

• There isn’t one solution but many projects that can build on each other.
• That are independent but interoperable.
• Based on the foundational principle of connection over conflict.

 There are far deeper thinkers than me who can help us work this through:

• Start with my partner on Burning Platforms Lizzie O’Shea and her book Future Histories, a great entry point to the political dimensions of technology.
• The Irish writer Maria Farrell – whose wonderful essay ‘Rewilding the Internet’ draws on ecological theory to make the case for digital devolution.
• There’s the mighty Brian Merchant’s – Blood on the Machine – the inspiring story of true industrial revolutionaries, the Luddites
• And finally, Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl’s ‘Plurality’ a truly collaborative book about breaking the binary and embracing the points of connection,

What is remarkable is all these people who think deeply about technology tend to arrive at the same conclusion: if we want to address the corrosive impact of Big Tech it is not enough to regulate it, we need to imagine alternatives.

 Out of this I do think there’s the beginning of a game plan:

• Do not cede power of the distribution of our connections to global media platforms and their anger machines.
• Resist the model by breaking binaries, building bridges and crossing them.
• Demand more of government to go beyond the performative regulation of the status quo– starting with privacy law reform – not upgraded in 40 years. Not good enough!
• Stop Business as Usual politics – we can’t micro-target ourselves to social change, we need to build consensus from the ground up.
• Experiment and embrace different ways of building community and partner with technologists who share our values.
• Turn up: citizenship is a team sport not one where we should just barrack for our team. We need to approach our civic life more like community sport.
• Tend the civic garden: Find new ways of expressing our humanity by singing songs, reading books and sharing time and ideas with others

Ok, that isn’t a Manifesto, but it is a seven-point plan. We all love seven-point plans.

So now it’s time for you to pass judgment. I am going to ask you the question I ask everyone who I talk about this conversation – only this time you can do it anonymously.

<Note to reader, the audience rated me somewhere between 'No. Let's Do It!' to 'Probably. Bt Let's Keep Talking' >

So What Next?

Like the manifesto, there is no master plan for the Centre of the Public Square – it’s basically ready to go where people want to take it.

I see a three-level mission for the Centre:

• Policy and advocacy – pushing government to create the conditions to allow these models to grow, scale scan thrive.
• Projects – running events like this that can build insights and test hypotheses and build up our civic muscle.
• Incubations – co- designing communities of interest that could be active participants in the Town Square.

 What can you do to help?

 For all those working for organisations trying to do something good:

• Most of you build lists either to raise money or on the false promise that social change is only a click away.
• Let’s come up with new ways to build networks of influence and countervailing power.
• Partner with us to think through the ways we might do this

Philanthropy

So is there any money in the house?

• We’d love you to embed our thinking into the work you already support or use the Centre as a resource to design new models that might deliver more bang for your buck.
• I have a confession: I’m a philanthropy repellent. I lack the skills, the will and, if I am honest, the faith that rich people should be funding our civil spaces. That said if you know anyone...

 For the rest of you:

• You are the most important people in this discussion.
• Because here’s the secret that the tech platforms and the media and politicians rarely share. They all rely on us: our vote, our eyeballs, our attention.
• While it’s easy to feel powerless we actually have the power

Gee, maybe this is a Manifesto after all!

I hope this gives you some ideas into the ways we could make public discussions more fun.

I would also note that without knowing it you have all shared high-quality information with me that will help me refine my approach:

• How you felt at the start of the event?
• Where you can see the most value?
• Whether you think I’m mad?
• And hopefully some thoughtful qualitative reflections at the end.

I know we didn’t get to many questions, but we have captured more than 100 responses and I’ll go over these and pull together a bit of an FAQ and share it back to you all over the next few weeks.

Finally, for those who want to continue on this journey. I’m really excited to announce that The Centre will be bringing Glen and Audrey to Australia next month; we are awaiting confirmation we will be at the National Press Club on August 16. So … road trip!

Final thoughts

Look, I actually think you all got it that last vote wrong. Of course, I’m crazy and should stick to my day job. But I want my day job to be working these things: imagining, experimenting, convening.

And yes, it’s crazy. But so is giving up on civic connection to these corporate surveillance edifices.

That’s what’s really crazy.

Thank you