Re: <nettime> Democracy Net Zero

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

On 2021-06-02 18:54, Ryan Griffis wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> This is maybe jumping the tracks of this thread started by David's
> essay, or maybe it’s actually bringing it back online… not sure. But,
> Patrick’s anecdote about verbalizing the urgency of the climate
> catastrophe is something many of us here, I’m sure, relate to.

Hi Ryan et al. Thanks for all the reflections and informative links..

For clarification around the text

Writing Net Zero Democracy was driven by a need to understand in broad 
terms, the big changes in the underlying political logic of today's 
liberal democracies. And most importantly how these changes affect our 
capacity to avert climate catastrophe. For what its worth, my own belief 
is that action and change can’t happen without experiments that break 
out of the rigidities of a limited view of what democracy can be.

The reference to Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ (apart from the intrinsic 
importance of her work) was to compare the way it was received and its 
impact in an era in which agreement between ideological opponents was 
sometimes possible to our own age. Today a relatively new political 
grammar that clusters around the structuring polarities of technocracy 
and populism appears to make agreement on anything between  opponents 
impossible.

The underlying argument of the piece is that whatever form our practice 
takes needs to take account of this new political grammar even as we 
seek to resist its logic. And that new democratic experiments operating 
within this logic must above all have a direct impact on  decision 
making in relationship to the climate emergency.

This is why I underscored the impact of the recent French Climate 
assembly and the resistance it has generated to the way Macron has 
broken his commitments and diluted the measures proposed by the assembly 
that he himself convened.

There is much to be learned by what is unfolding in France as part of 
the wider process of cognitive mobilisation. Whether in the numerous 
experiments in participatory deliberative democracy around the world or 
‘evidential realist’ investigative art movements that can be seen 
partnering important forms of on-line investigative activism (Bellingcat 
and Forensic Architecture). But a cognitively mobilised society also 
includes the toxic conspiracy narratives of the likes of QAnon.. whose 
followers also see themselves as independent thinkers and researchers. 
And like Wu Ming 1 recommended we must never simply dismiss or debunk 
these narratives but always look for the kernel of truth around which 
conspiracy fantasies invariably form..

Best

David Garcia


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